Updated June 9, 2025 at 10:00 AM EDT
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. often says that Americans were healthier when he was a kid in the '50s and '60s. People weren't so overweight or taking so many medications. Diabetes and autism in children were unheard of. Food was fresh and wholesome.
Life expectancy researcher Dr. Steven Woolf is Kennedy's age, and he remembers some other features of that time. "We were driven around in cars that had no seatbelts. There were no infant car seats; there were no airbags," he says. "People smoked on airplanes; they smoked in restaurants."
Woolf, who is a professor emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, says some concerns that Kennedy talks about when he discusses America's health are spot on, but that he misses key context, gets facts wrong and often embraces policies that undermine his own stated priorities.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to NPR's detailed request to comment for this story.
Setting the scene
The mid-20th century is the era that Kennedy and President Trump nod to with the "again" of the Make America Great (and Healthy) Again slogans.
"There is some basis to the fact that America was healthier then," acknowledges Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a history professor at the New School in New York. "Americans today have much more chronic illness than they did when he was a kid, and there's much more processed food today; rates of obesity are very high."
But, she says, "there's also some countervailing evidence that really punctures the fantasy that this was an era of much more widespread health."
To begin with, American life expectancy in 1960 was almost ten years shorter than it is today: 69.7 years. And the leading causes of death were, in fact, chronic diseases.
In 1963, for example, "two out of three deaths in the United States were caused by three chronic diseases: heart disease, cancer and stroke," Woolf says. "So it's hardly the case that chronic disease was a non-issue when he was a child."
Other key context: 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. For Black Americans, life expectancy was significantly shorter in 1960 at just 63.6 years.
Space-age food
Then, there's food. Although processed foods were not nearly as prevalent as they are today, Petrzela says frozen and shelf-stable foods were also imbued with the romance of science and technology.
"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 foods," she says. Jell-O went mainstream, and the orange drink mix Tang and early energy bars came into being in this era. "Those all came from the fact that like, 'Oh, this is what they eat in space.' Right? 'This is made in a lab.'"
Working it out
The strongest basis for Kennedy's nostalgia is the country's push around physical education programs in that period, says Petrzela, who wrote the book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession.
Even before John F. Kennedy was sworn in, he wrote a Sports Illustrated cover story as president-elect in 1960 calling for Americans to toughen up.
"Our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security," he wrote. "The physical fitness of our citizens is a vital prerequisite to America's realization of its full potential as a nation, and to the opportunity of each individual citizen to make full and fruitful use of his capacities."
As president, he helped advance a sensibility that "exercise is virtuous and good and makes you a good American," says Petrzela.
It's worth pointing out, though, that Secretary Kennedy's strategies are at odds with other major priorities of his uncle as president. "JFK loved P.E. and push ups and sit ups and all that — he also loved vaccines," she says. "Remember, these are the presidencies of JFK and Lyndon Johnson — this is the Great Society," which was all about new, big government policy programs that hoped to address poverty, advance civil rights and more.
What's happened since then?
Today, American life expectancy is 77.5 years. That's improved significantly since the 1960s, but not as much or as quickly as it has in other similar wealthy countries.
First, let's consider the reasons for the improvements. The lack of seat belts and smoking indoors that Woolf remembers from his childhood? Public health efforts and new laws helped make significant progress there — people who would have died of lung cancer or in car crashes were saved because of those changes.
Black Americans have also made gains in life expectancy, although racial gaps remain — the current life expectancy for this group is 72.8 years. "The place where we have made maybe the most obvious progress in health since 1960 has been that the conditions of Black Americans were radically improved by the health reforms that came out of the civil rights movement," says Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a mortality demographer at the University of Minnesota.
There have also been major medical innovations, especially with cancer. "We have new drugs and medical technologies that have been very, very effective and successful," Wrigley-Field explains, adding, "you would hope that that would be true in 60 years of medical progress."
While chronic diseases are a bigger problem now, that's a trend that has been underway for more than a century, before and after Secretary Kennedy's uncle was president, Woolf says. "Earlier in the 1900s, the leading causes of death were infectious diseases, but as we developed antibiotics and vaccines, infectious diseases became less of a threat, and chronic diseases rose in importance," he explains.
RFK Jr.'s approach to these problems
Many people who study America's relatively short life expectancy compared to other developed nations are baffled by Kennedy's policy approach to the problem.
"Sometimes, he says sentences that make sense, like, 'We have a rise in chronic diseases,'" says Wrigley-Field. But the "funhouse mirror aspect," she says, is that "all the things that you should do because of that are the exact opposite of what his administration is doing to public health."
For instance, Kennedy's biggest move as secretary so far has been to reduce the federal health workforce by about 25%, through firings and buyouts. In a social media video announcing his plans to restructure the agency, he implied America's poor health and life expectancy could be attributed to the very staff he oversees: "The rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has grown — our lifespan has dropped."
Woolf says that connection doesn't make sense, especially when you consider some of the expertise Kennedy is letting walk out the door. "The main office in our federal government for dealing with smoking and health is being closed by Kennedy," Woolf says, noting that smoking is still the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S.
He adds that at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "major centers on chronic disease itself are being closed." And at the National Institutes for Health, "a large portion of the research portfolio aiming to address how to reduce the burden of chronic disease — the funding for that is being slashed." HHS did not respond to NPR's request for comment about cuts to teams that seem relevant to Kennedy's priorities.
It's hard to square those cuts with "a policy agenda that's really aiming to make America healthier," Woolf adds. "Fixing the problem with ultra processed foods and food dyes is going to have marginal benefit. Is it worth doing? Sure. But that's not going to move the needle on improving chronic disease or extending our life expectancy."
Wrigley-Field adds that really understanding and addressing the reasons for the U.S.'s lagging life expectancy is a lively scientific conversation. "Some of the debates are about: How much of this is really a story about external causes of death — drug overdoses, homicides, car collisions? Those things all have a really disproportionate impact on life expectancy 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."
Increasingly, she says, there's an understanding that another contributing factor is slowed scientific progress in reducing deaths from heart attacks and heart disease "that are such major killers in the United States."
That debate is somewhat moot when both funding for scientific research and for preventing deaths from injuries and overdoses are being cut by Secretary Kennedy in his overhaul of HHS. That's why his discussion about returning to the good health of the 1960s and improving life expectancy are unconvincing to many experts in the field.
For Wrigley-Field, "there's just this mismatch between the words and the actions."
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