While it is rarely a top campaign issue, Americans care deeply about our health and well-being, the food we put in our bodies and what corporations put into our food — especially when it comes to our children. We all want to know our food is safe and free of dangerous chemicals and additives that can cause serious health problems.

This electoral season, many Americans are asking: Who will make America healthier, Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump?

The difference is stark: Widespread evidence shows that Trump’s presidency rolled back many regulations governing toxic chemicals, while the Biden-Harris administration acted to reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals.

In July 2017, a few months after taking office, Trump reversed a pending ban on the insecticide chlorpyrifos — a brain-damaging chemical linked to ADHD and autism. Chlorpyrifos is so toxic there are no determined safe consumption levels for infants and children. The reversal came after Trump met with the CEO of Dow Chemical, chlorypifos’s biggest manufacturer — and after the company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration ceremony.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of this pesticide are up to 140 times the limits deemed safe for adults in foods kids regularly eat.

On taking office, Biden-Harris restored that ban to protect our health.

Trump’s EPA approved more than 100 new pesticide products, many containing ingredients so toxic that they have been banned in other countries. Half a dozen new products, for example, contained the chemical paraquat, a substance so deadly that ingesting a spoonful can be fatal. Seventeen of these products contained the potent hormone disruptor atrazine, and several other Trump-approved products included the dangerous airborne fumigant methyl bromide.

Trump’s EPA also failed to act on PFAS, known as “forever chemicals,” found in our food, air, water and even breast milk. These substances are linked to cancer, birth defects, thyroid disease, weakened immunity and reproductive harm.

In contrast, Biden-Harris issued the first-ever drinking water standard for PFAS, investing more than $1 billion to protect Americans from these deadly chemicals.

The Trump administration appointed a former chemical industry lobbyist to head the EPA’s division on chemical oversight. Under Trump, the agency rolled back a whopping 112 environmental protections, including regulations protecting our air and water and controlling many toxic substances. The Biden-Harris administration has revived and strengthened many of these critical protections.

Trump further endangered our food and health by abolishing stronger organic animal welfare rules aimed at making our meat supply healthier for both people and animals. The Biden-Harris administration restored these protections. Trump caused additional harm when he reversed limits on bee-killing and neurotoxic neonicotinoid (or “neonic”) pesticides in national wildlife refuges and signed an executive order scaling back regulations on GMOs.

Now, as if to magically erase these truths, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has launched a “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) campaign on Trump’s behalf. Kennedy insists Trump would end Big Food’s influence over federal health policies, “ban the hundreds of food additives and chemicals that other countries have already prohibited,” change policies and regulations to reduce processed foods and “clean up toxic chemicals from our air, water and soil.”

While Kennedy raises important points about the corporate capture over food and health policy, the facts show these claims have no basis in reality. Kennedy’s MAHA bid is completely contradicted by Trump’s track record and the interests of his biggest corporate backers, including Big Agriculture and the chemical industry.

And Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term authored in large part by Trump’s former staffers, is a repudiation of Kennedy’s “MAHA” goals — calling for massive deregulation that will only exacerbate the problems Kennedy rightly identifies. This includes removing GMO labeling and federal inspection requirements for meat and poultry processing; weakening the Endangered Species Act; reducing the influence of EPA science on pesticide approvals; and undermining or even eliminating the science-backed Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

That’s not a recipe for a healthier, less toxic America. For all Americans, especially parents, who are rightly concerned about toxic chemicals in our food and environment, Kamala Harris is by far the better choice.

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Kari Hamerschlag is deputy director of food and agriculture for Friends of the Earth Action. Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning journalist and author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis. This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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