Fat Moms Don't Cause Autism

Spotting the anti-fatness in RFK Jr's recent public health lies.

When the Senate voted to confirm an actual Huberman husband controlled by brain worm as Secretary of Health and Human Services, we knew things were gonna get dark.

This is the man who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park because he was…running late for a steak dinner. The same man who only eats between noon and 7pm (so obvs he couldn’t be late for that dinner!) but also promised to protect our God-given right as Americans to eat Twinkies.

With global measles cases up 20 percent in the past year, why wouldn’t we want this famed anti-vaxxer and his army of MAHA moms in charge of our nations’s health?

Well. Last week, RFK gave a press conference and managed to weave together a tapestry of ableism, misinformation, and bold-faced lies that is exceeding all expectations for how just bad he could be at this job. And I thought he was going to be very, very bad! Underpinning it all is RFK’s staggering fatphobia. Which is rarely named — probably because even the media outlets otherwise doing a decent job of fact-checking and critiquing Kennedy have their own high levels of institutional anti-fatness.

So let’s connect a few dots for them, shall we?

MAHA Mommies lining up for RFK (Andrew Harnik / Staff for Getty)

RFK Lie #1: Autism is caused by “parental ob*sity.”

You might have missed this one, because it was one of a trillion stupid and wrong things Kennedy said about autism in just one half hour press conference. But yes, he’s planning to study whether fat parents cause autism, along with “mold and food additives” in his quest to “reverse the autism epidemic.” Unclear if getting American moms to join Weight Watchers post-birth will “cure” our children’s neurodivergencies, but maybe Trump can throw in six months of Ozempic with that $5K we’re all getting for having more babies?

Real talk: Fat parents already face stigma and judgment for how we feed our kids, at the pediatrician’s office, and in the foster care system. So it’s no surprise that RFK wants to pin this one on us too but alas—the ob*sity epidemic did not beget RFK’s so-called autism epidemic. For starters, neither of these things are infectious diseases. Body size and neuropsychology are not contagious. And while all of our bodies and brains have needs and require care, as Jessica Slice put it on the podcast last week, being fat or autistic is not a problem to solve. .

RFK Lie #2: “Sugar is poison.”

It feels important to start here with the fact that Kennedy once strapped a severed whale head to the roof of his minivan, causing his children to inhale dead “whale juice” for a five hour drive, so he is perhaps not our nation’s most reliable source on what is and isn’t toxic to our health. But sure, okay, let’s go after donuts! In last week’s news conference, RFK claimed that the “huge amount” of sugar kids eat is “hurting them, and it’s addicting them, and it’s changing their taste buds.”

Sugar is not addictive. Sugar is not addictive. Sugar is not addictive. The only reason we fear sugar so much is because we link it to fatness. But if you want to make kids act like “sugar addicts?” Definitely start by telling them it’s poison and forgetting to pack any good snacks on your five hour whale carcass odyssey.

The Burnt Toast Guide to Kids & Sugar

RFK Lie #3: The food industry is quitting food dyes!

In the same conference where he ranted about sugar, Kennedy announced that he had come to “an understanding” with major food manufacturers to remove petroleum-based food colorings from their products by 2026. It’s giving “my boyfriend goes to another school” though because nobody from the food industry showed up at to the event and only a few companies have publicly said they’re on board. LOL, okay sure, we’ll get carrot-dyed Cheez-Its this century.

Actual government regulation of the food industry would be kind of nice, frankly —but if Michelle Obama couldn’t hold corporations accountable, what makes anyone think that a far right administration owned by billionaires is going to start? And going after food dyes is for sure anti-fat coded, because it’s a way of further shaming and othering the processed foods that so many of us rely on to feed our families and ourselves.

Michelle Obama Is Not Coming To Save Us

The Problem Isn't Flaming Hot Cheetos, Part 1.

RFK Lie #4: All these sick, fat people didn’t used to exist.

Reports Vanity Fair:

Next came Kennedy’s whopper during an interview on Fox News, where he claimed that when his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, the rate of chronic disease in America was just 3%, compared to 60% today. In reality, according to fact-checkers at The Washington Post who awarded that claim “four Pinnocchios,” that number was 44.5%. In fact, the rate was likely higher, since people were less likely to be diagnosed with things like hypertension at the time.

This builds nicely on one of RFK’s favorite themes, which is that nobody ever got sick or fat when he was a kid or even further back in history. Remember this campaign speech from last fall, where he said: “120 years ago, when somebody was ob*se, they were sent to the circus.”

Body sizes have increased on a population level for a variety of complicated reasons, but some of us have always been fat. And even though RFK somehow never met an autistic person when he was a child, they have also always existed.

Why does RFK keep wanting to pretend that nobody had autism, high blood pressure, or cellulite “back in the day,” especially when said day occurred before American women had birth control or the right to vote? Because men love to harken back to that simpler time when men were men, children got measles, and women were thin and stuck in the kitchen, or dying in childbirth.

America wasn’t healthier then, no matter how much the MAHA Moms believe it. But I guess a rich white guy could dump his animal carcasses, without everybody making such a stink about it.