By AMANDA SEITZ and LINLEY SANDERS
WASHINGTON (AP) — The kids seen by Dolores Mejia around suburban Phoenix have been growing heavier in recent years. Their parents, too, she says.
Mejia, a 75-year-old retiree, says she’s also had her own weight struggles on the scale.
That’s why Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as he campaigned alongside Donald Trump caught her attention. She liked the questions Kennedy raised about the role of processed foods in America’s obesity epidemic.
“I’m a junk food person,” said Mejia, an ardent Trump supporter. “I started wondering where those extra pounds came from.”
After hearing Kennedy out, she concluded: “We cannot trust the health organizations we’ve trusted for years to tell us that our foods are safe.”
Republicans such as Mejia have embraced Kennedy, whose alliance with the president-elect could make the prominent environmentalist and vaccine skeptic the nation’s top health official next year. Republicans hold an overwhelmingly positive view of Kennedy, with most approving of Trump’s decision to put him in his administration, according to recent polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters in the 2024 presidential election.
But Americans overall are less positive about Kennedy, and there isn’t broad support for some of his views, which include closer scrutiny of vaccines.
If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy will be charged with leading the Department of Health and Human Services, a $1.7 trillion agency that researches cancer, approves prescription drugs and provides health insurance for roughly half the country.
What Americans think about RFK Jr. as nation’s top health official
About 6 in 10 Republicans approve of Kennedy’s appointment to Trump’s Cabinet and only about 1 in 10 disapprove, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in December, while the
rest aren’t familiar…
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