4/11/25: How Dangerous ARE Seed Oils?; Havoc at HHS; RFK Jr. & Anti-vax; Why Viruses Love MAHA; Future Roles for RDs?
Nutrition (& Health) News You Can Use
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Answers:
Amy H. “GI nutrition, we should be front and center here. Every GI practice should have at minimum 1 RD on staff but sadly most do not.”
Shabnam R. “Geriatric nutrition.”
Chelsea T. “Remote nutrition counseling.”
Fatimah D. “Food service.”
Emily P. “GLP-1’s baby. Soon, the whole country will be on one.”
Nina R. “I am in transplant currently and I see so much potential here as long as the physicians see the value in having nutrition as part of the team! We have to keep advocating.”
Meredith S. “Oncology”
Abigail P. “Diabetes education”
💀The Dangers of Seed Oils
(are greatly exaggerated) 😉
Dietitian Megan Maisano - What is the Deal with Seed Oils? – Wellness by Megan
TL; DR: “There are concerns over seed oils due to correlation with poor health, omega-6 content, processing techniques and contradictory studies. However, most evidence does not link seed oils, specifically, or their processing method to adverse health effects.”
🌪️Havoc at HHS
Just in case you still have hopes that there really is a direction or desire for “MAHA”.
FDA floats chaotic reorganization as staff purges continue | Center for Science in the Public Interest
“The 10K mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services, including 3.5K positions at the FDA, have plunged all federal health agencies into a spiral of chaos and disarray. The cuts are arbitrary, sweeping, and devastating to the FDA’s food and medical product programs, leaving the agency teams who communicate about and prevent foodborne outbreaks, review food chemicals, and ensure the safety and effectiveness of medical products scrambling to operate.
Unfortunately, the chaos at the agency is poised to get much worse. A plan to reorganize the FDA, leaked to Inside Health Policy, would recklessly rip apart the specialized centers within the agency and create new offices based on function, presumably reporting to the commissioner. According to the report, one of these will contain all the agency’s review functions, undermining the current system designed to protect reviewers from the kinds of political interference that can damage public health…”
🗣️Comment from a Fan 😉
🙅🏻There is NO Autism Epidemic
The "Autism Epidemic" Is A Myth - Gideon M-K: Health Nerd
(Despite what RFK Jr. says….)
“There is no autism epidemic. There is just a better recognition of a condition that we are even now working towards understanding better.”
This is also the opinion of many other groups including: Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Autism Speaks, Autism Self Advocacy Network.
📖Substack: Open Letters by Mersault
A Love Letter from a Deadly Virus to MAGA Devotees, Trump Loyalists, and RFK Jr. Enthusiasts
“You put a conspiracy theorist—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your actual Secretary of HHS—in charge of the nation’s immune system. And with that one delirious appointment, you began dismantling your own biological defense network from the top down.
The CDC—once the envy of the world—is now a ghost town of demoralized scientists and empty desks…
The NIH, the crown jewel of American medical research, had its legs cut out. You slashed grants for vaccine development, cancer therapies, and anything involving the phrase “public good.” Instead, you funneled resources toward “alternative medicine,” which is a polite way of saying placebo politics.
The FDA? You broke it. Thousands of inspectors and analysts—gone.
Drug approvals are now rushed, politicized, and sloppy. And food safety oversight is so lax, I wouldn't eat your romaine without a hazmat suit.And BARDA—the agency that helped you survive COVID—is now hanging by a fiscal thread. You’re starving the very team that saved your breathless bodies in 2020 because RFK Jr. thinks mRNA vaccines give you psychic parasites…”
If MAHA and all the bloviating about the (false) link between vaccines and autism were coming from Democrats or anyone else, I'd still call them out. Health and nutrition misinformation is about credible evidence, which should remove it from partisan politics. What is surprising is when politicians of either party placing ideology/philosophy before credible evidence. It's unfortunate that they are not bound to the same code of professional ethics as RDNs. Credible evidence should be driving health policy, full stop.