(Mises)—Two weeks ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suspended his campaign for president. In his nearly hour-long speech explaining the decision, Kennedy highlighted what he sees as the three biggest issues facing the United States. The first two—the threat to free speech and the danger of the war in Ukraine—are familiar to anyone following the daily political fights happening online and in the traditional media.
But when Kennedy got to his third concern, it was striking how absent any discussion of it has been from our hyper-active national discourse. The issue was the scale of chronic disease affecting the American population and, especially, American children. Kennedy explicitly called this “the most important issue” and, as he laid out the scale of the problem, it’s easy to see why he feels that way.
As Kennedy said in the speech, two-thirds—or around 222 million Americans—suffer from chronic health issues. In the 1970s, the rate was lower than one percent. On top of that, nearly three out of every four Americans are now overweight or obese, and the childhood obesity rate stands at 50%.
There has been an explosion in diabetes in both kids and adults, as well as neurological illnesses and disorders like Alzheimer’s and autism. Kennedy also highlighted the sharp increase we’re seeing in food allergies, ADHD, and cancer, among others. His point is that, at the same time Americans are paying more for healthcare than the populations of nearly every other country, we are also quickly becoming the sickest.
What’s astonishing about all of this is that almost nobody denies the health emergency Kennedy lays out. Some argue that he is exaggerating a few of his numbers slightly or is misleading people with some rates of increase that are inflated by changes in how chronic diseases are defined and screened—something Kennedy and those he cites claim to have corrected for. But most of Kennedy’s critics in the media simply ignore what he says about this topic.
So, if the scale of the problem is this extreme and its existence is not controversial, why is this not the central issue in every national election? Simply put, because the chronic disease epidemic is making the political class absurdly rich.
In many ways, the problem has its roots in the Progressive Era at the end of the 1800s. At the time, there were several competing approaches to treating sick and ailing patients, each with its own network of doctors and professional associations. One such group was what their rivals called allopathic physicians. Their approach was to treat patients with painkillers and other drugs aimed specifically at reducing patient suffering.
Of course, for certain ailments, that is a perfectly reasonable approach. And, as one of many available in the early healthcare market, it provided many Americans who required such an approach the care they needed. But in the early 1900s, the allopathic doctors’ professional group—the American Medical Association (AMA)—decided to get with the times and lobby the government for special privileges.
As Patrick Newman explained in a lecture based on a chapter from his upcoming book, the AMA maneuvered its way into setting the official accreditation standards for the nation’s medical schools. With that newfound power, the association was able to both greatly restrict the supply of doctors—by forcing half of the country’s medical schools to close—and to certify their allopathic approach as the preeminent, legitimate, government-recognized form of medical care.
And the AMA was not alone. In most industries, powerful corporations and professional associations realized they could make a lot more money if they lobbied the government for monopoly privileges, lucrative subsidies, and cartel-preserving supply quotas. Similar efforts in the food industry resulted in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and many so-called nutrition programs at universities with deep ties to the biggest food companies.
On the agricultural side, farming and meatpacking groups successfully lobbied for the creation of what would become the recurring five-year farm bill. This law contains a multitude of handouts and privileges for agricultural giants, such as supply restrictions that artificially raise the prices of some kinds of produce and subsidies that over-saturate the market with other crops and products.
Finally, drug manufacturers were able to get the government to criminalize competition in the pharmaceutical industry and to protect companies from liability for the side effects of many drugs. The government even mandates the purchase of some drugs with its immunization schedule—much of which is required to attend school.
Together, all these companies and interest groups use their government privileges to fill their pockets.
Big agricultural companies flood the market with highly subsidized crops which have alternative uses, like corn syrup and seed oils, that crowd out healthier options that consumers actually prefer. Food companies can then use these artificially cheap ingredients to produce highly addictive ultra-processed foods that their friends in the government and university nutrition programs then say are part of a healthy diet.
Americans, who are taught from a young age to trust the government and university-trained, state-licensed medical professionals, are easily hooked on these ultra-processed foods. That’s great for the food companies but terrible for our bodies. Many of the chronic diseases plaguing Americans can be drawn back to our consumption (or our parents’ consumption) of these addicting food-like substances.
But it doesn’t stop there. The flood of chronic illnesses caused by ultra-processed food is lucrative for the medical industry, whose allopathic approach ensures the root cause is never discussed, much less addressed, but is instead treated with a barrage of prescription drugs that solely attack the resulting symptoms. After all, addressing the root cause would be bad for the pharmaceutical industry’s bottom line. And doctors who don’t play along are systemically denied official, government-recognized credentials.
The extensive drug cocktail that most Americans are swallowing and injecting each day allows them to stay hooked on toxic foods that their bodies are trying to tell them are hurting them and, thanks to side effects, can even aggravate or cause other chronic diseases. The deadly cycle keeps accelerating and the large, politically-connected businesses in the agricultural, meatpacking, food processing, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries grow absurdly rich.
But they’re not the only ones benefiting. Government bureaucrats enjoy an ever-increasing level of power and resources as companies lobby for them to intervene even more in their respective industries. Universities are gifted millions by food and drug companies to run friendly academic programs. And politicians get to appear heroic to both sides as they exploit how obviously awful the healthcare system is to fight distracting, meaningless battles over whether to cap the prices of a couple drugs—usually while pushing to send even more taxpayer money into the healthcare industry.
Government officials, industry insiders, and state-credentialed experts have nothing to gain and everything to lose by actually addressing our country’s health issue. That’s why there is no urgency, even in theatrical political fights, to talk about how sick Americans have gotten. As the problem worsens, however, it will be harder and harder to ignore.
Still, the path forward must start with rolling back the government policies and privileges that this massive, deadly racket is built upon. Because it is a grave mistake to rely on those benefiting from a problem to solve it.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
