AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The America that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remembers from when he was a kid in the '50s and '60s was healthier.
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ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: When my uncle was president, 3% of Americans had chronic disease. Today, it's 60%.
RASCOE: That's from April on Fox News. Kennedy says people weren't so overweight or on so many medications. Diabetes and autism in children were unheard of. Food was fresh and wholesome. Now that he's health secretary and has the power to shape America's health in many ways, NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin set out to understand what Kennedy's narrative about American health gets right and what it leaves out.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Let's time travel back to the 1960s.
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SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Health insurance was a relatively new invention, women were just starting to become a major part of the workforce, and racial segregation was still a reality in much of the country. The way Kennedy tells it, Americans were also just healthier. They weren't so sick. They exercised a lot. They knew about the benefits of eating your vegetables.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: They're important for good health, for lots of energy and pep, for clear skin and bright eyes.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: That rosy vision of health in the '50s and '60s is not the full picture, says Dr. Steven Woolf, a life expectancy researcher and professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University.
STEVEN WOOLF: It's hardly the case that chronic disease was a nonissue when he was a child.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Kennedy's statistic that 3% of people had chronic diseases when he was a kid is incorrect. In fact, the main things that killed people in that era were chronic diseases.
WOOLF: Two out of three deaths in the United States were caused by three chronic diseases - heart disease, cancer and stroke.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: HHS did not respond to NPR's detailed request to comment for this story, including about the prevalence of chronic disease in the 1960s. Then there's life expectancy, as in the age someone born then could hope to reach. Back in 1960, American life expectancy was 69.7 years, much lower than it is today. Woolf is actually about the same age as Kennedy and remembers a few other things about American health back then.
WOOLF: We were driven around in cars that had no seat belts. There were no infant car seats. There were no airbags. People smoked on airplanes. They smoked in restaurants.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: When it comes to food, it's true that processed foods weren't nearly as prevalent as they are today. But frozen and shelf-stable foods were also new and exciting and imbued with the romance of science, says Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a history professor at The New School.
NATALIA MEHLMAN PETRZELA: This is a time when everybody had freezers and refrigerators for the first time, so it was almost a flex to be able to serve those frozen foods.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Think TV dinners - there were also new shelf-stable foods like early energy bars. Jell-O went mainstream.
MEHLMAN PETRZELA: And those all came from the fact that, like, ooh, this is like what they eat in space, right? This is made in a lab.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Another one, the powdered orange drink mix, Tang.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: In space, they drank Tang. They mixed it like this in a zero-G pouch because with no gravity, it would fly all over.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: In other words, Petrzela says...
MEHLMAN PETRZELA: I wouldn't be too sanguine about romanticizing the 1960s as a time when everybody was, you know, eating grass-fed beef and, like, living by the land - not at all.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Today, American life expectancy is 77.5 years. That's nearly 10 years longer than it was in 1960. But life expectancy hasn't improved as much or as quickly here as it has in similar wealthy countries. That is concerning, and there's a lively scientific conversation about the reasons for it. Elizabeth Wrigley-Field is a mortality demographer at the University of Minnesota.
ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD: Some of the debates are about how much of this is really a story about external causes of death - drug overdoses, homicides, car collisions.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Those causes have a disproportionate impact on a country's overall life expectancy, she explains.
WRIGLEY-FIELD: Because they tend to kill people when they're pretty young, where if they hadn't died, they would have had a lot of decades of life left.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Another theory for the U.S.'s lagging life expectancy is that scientific progress in reducing cardiovascular deaths has slowed.
WRIGLEY-FIELD: That slowing progress actually matters at least as much because heart attacks and heart disease and things like that are such major killers in the United States.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: This debate is kind of moot because for all his talk about returning Americans to the good health of the 1960s, Health Secretary Kennedy is cutting both scientific research and teams that study deaths from injuries and drug overdoses.
WRIGLEY-FIELD: What I feel when I hear him talk about life expectancy, it's like looking through a funhouse mirror onto what a real conversation would look like.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She says there's a mismatch between his words and actions. Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News.
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