American healthcare is defined by politics and economics—and cancer care is no exception. Although comprehensive cancer prevention is the ideal ‘cure’, our best defense in this complex and fraught landscape remains self-advocacy armed with knowledge.
Why it Matters
MAHA and its HHS benefactor are making noise—and moves. Some good, some bad, some yet-to-be-known. However, the cumulative impact for those hosting cancer, and those wishing to prevent it, does not bode well—at least not over the short term.
One ground truth has not budged: Taking personal agency and leveraging gained knowledge remain the most powerful approaches toward preventing cancer or managing a malignancy.
The Good
- Food Safety: Challenging—and more recently suing—major marketers of ultra-processed foodstuffs, resulting in some corporations voluntarily removing harmful food dyes, several of which are known carcinogens.
- Nutrition: The one aspect of the new “upside down” food pyramid that emphasizes whole foods.
- Regulation: Potential openness for added regulation in the supplementation market to help weed out bad actors.
- Chemical Safety: Potential changes to elevate the bar by which GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status is satisfied before new ingredients or chemicals are introduced into foods.
- Research: Changes to the cannabis schedule to allow for meaningful U.S.-based investigations, and new studies to investigate cell phone electromagnetic radiation.
- Cost: Reduction in costs for select anticancer drugs.
The Bad and Unknown
- Personnel: Ongoing NIH, FDA and CDC personnel purges and exoduses.
- Toxins: Scores of chemicals, known to be carcinogenic and banned in Europe and elsewhere, that remain part of the toxic U.S. chemical stew.
- Environment: Relaxation of critical EPA measures to protect our water and air, and the recent discontinuation of the cost-benefit analysis valuing human life.
- Climate: Denial and reforms of climate change measures that will hasten disease with a warming earth.
- Green Tech: Loss of incentives to promote the adoption of electric vehicles and clean alternative power sources.
- Research Funding: Significant reductions in funding for investigating various mRNA cancer vaccines.
The Political Reality Check
We are seeing a mixed bag of aspirations and policy priorities. Getting rid of food dyes known to be carcinogenic is important; Europe did away with these many years ago. However, the U.S. is still enveloped by a veritable toxic stew of scores of other carcinogenic chemicals. This insults the human condition by weakening immune function, making our population more vulnerable for malignancy to take root.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s opportunity to improve the lives of those hosting cancer—and critically, those wishing to avoid it altogether—is limited to the choices he champions.
It will be interesting to learn what his priorities will be with the newly appointed National Cancer Institute (NCI) chief, Anthony Letai. Before joining NCI, Dr. Letai ran a lab at Harvard focused on testing panels of drugs on live cancer tissue. This is called functional drug testing. I am a strong advocate of this approach as it fits within the n-of-1 personalized oncology paradigm—and I will write about this in detail soon.
Related content: U.S. Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution
The Limits of Power
Real change is wholly dependent on the politics that either support or constrain RFK Jr.’s ability to execute his priorities. When the food chain is broken—distorted by subsidies that incentivize the production of ultra-processed slop—how do you force the Department of Agriculture to change course without real power?
RFK Jr. simply doesn’t have the “juice.” Lacking support from both the Administration and Congress, he cannot enact substantive changes that would hurt the bottom line of Big Ag, even in service of reducing the cancer burden. Consequently, he has retreated to safer ground: advocating for the voluntary removal of dyes and calling for more studies. He’s not attacking the root cause; he’s working the edges.
The Toxic Stew
Meanwhile, we are awash in hundreds of chemicals and PFAS that European countries outlawed years ago. Many are known to be carcinogenic, and many have not been adequately studied. RFK Jr. has no influence over the EPA to develop a process to reexamine all of these chemicals and purge the ones known to influence cancer growth.
The same goes for our water sources and delivery systems. Ditto for cancer-causing air pollution, which is at an all-time high.
The regulatory apparatus and guardrails for all of this have been severely compromised. The EPA has recently stopped estimating the dollar value of lives saved in cost-benefit analyses for new pollution rules. This effectively puts the value of a human life at zero dollars.
Related content: Taking Precautions Against Cancer-Causing Toxins
This toxic stew that fuels malignant disease is impossible to meaningfully address without the political capital to drive comprehensive legislation. Our political cycles run in two-, four-, and eight-year increments. The controlling parties bounce back and forth, and neither the capital—political and economic—nor the will exists to solve the problem.
The “AHA” Moment
Prevention remains the only true cure for ~80 percent of malignant disease. Prevention is not mutually exclusive to quality, innovative cancer care. Progress is moving apace; folks are living longer, even with some advanced cancers. Our diagnostics and drugs are improving, and AI will ultimately prove exceptional at detecting disease and informing n-of-1, often combinatorial, therapeutic options.
No downstream innovation can rival the economic and human impact of upstream prevention.
This is the “AHA” of MAHA, and why you must create your own environment to become a horrible host to cancer.
