Paragon, I founded it about three and a half years ago, and we are a health policy research institute that is dedicated to evaluating how government programs are working and developing sets of reforms that empower patients and really reform government programs by changing incentives so that people are oriented and sort of all the actors oriented at getting as much value out of the system as possible.
We're a nonprofit, so we're funded by individuals, and Found Day Paragon takes no corporate or industry funding.
It doesn't matter what you come here and say that isn't true, that's not reflective of what you really believe, that you haven't said over decade after decade after decade, because unlike other jobs we're confirming around this place,
this is a job where it is life and death for the kids that I used to work for in the Denver public schools and for families all over this country that are suffering from living in the richest country of the world that can't deliver basic health care and basic mental health care to them.
unidentified
It's too important for the games that you're playing, Mr. Kennedy.
And I hope my colleagues will say to the president, I have no influence over him.
So I think, first of all, it's diagnosing the state of American health.
And if you look at many measures of American health, one of the principal ones being life expectancy, we've been in decline.
So starting in 2014 for three straight years, life expectancy in the U.S. declined.
And then, of course, we had the pandemic and the tragedy around the pandemic.
So life expectancy is lower now than it was a decade ago.
And I think you've got an increase in many chronic diseases, diabetes, obesity.
I think during the hearing yesterday, about two out of three Americans struggle with obesity or overweight.
And there are sort of problems with children too, both in terms of I think a third of kids overweight or obese, as well as a lot of mental health challenges that were severely exacerbated during the lockdowns in the pandemic.
So you think you have a lot of, I mean, American health has stagnated over the last 15 years, and I think public policy has failed to recognize that.
It's been focused on very different things in health policy.
And I think he's going to reorient the conversation back to what matters for American health.
Yeah, I think one of the main problems in what the government has put out in terms of nutrition advice is the food pyramid.
If you go back to when the food pyramid was created several decades ago, right, it really emphasized the heavy carbohydrate diet.
And it really overplayed problems with fat.
And what we've learned now from nutrition science is that that was the exact wrong guidance to be giving to American families.
We didn't need to have high sugar, high carbohydrate diets.
The excess sugar is really what's problematic.
So I think, you know, if I'm looking at it from a sort of what should they do first, I think you should look at what is the government initially doing, what information are they putting out so that they're providing Americans with better information about what they put into their body.
unidentified
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