Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at his Los Angeles home in June. Kennedy’s food consumption habits came under scrutiny during his independent run for president. Photo / Ruth Fremson, The New York Times
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, could wield considerable influence over the nation’s food supply. Here’s what we know about his own habits.
What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eat?
It is not a question one would typically ask of prospective Cabinet members, even those whose broad remit as Secretary of Health and Human Services – the post for which Kennedy was put forward, on Thursday, by President-elect Donald Trump – would include oversight of the nation’s food safety and the promotion of public health.
But a central component of Kennedy’s pitch, as a presidential candidate and later as Trump’s prospective public-health czar, is his personal emphasis on nutrition and exercise. He likes to talk about vitamins and has been known to post videos of himself lifting weights, shirtless. He has also been linked to a lot of dead animals, so the question seems like fair game, so to speak.
A review of Kennedy’s recent interviews, and conversations with people familiar with his eating habits, turned up general themes about what he consumes and how, but few specifics. The answer appears to be: almost anything you can find in nature. And only between noon and 7pm.
In a 2023 interview with Lex Fridman, a computer scientist who hosts a popular podcast, Kennedy said he engaged in “intermittent fasting” – a dietary protocol that calls for eating food only in a specific, brief window during the day.
Adherents say time-restricted eating helps with weight loss and other metabolic functions, such as reduced inflammation and improved heart and brain health. People love it, although recent studies have not substantiated major health benefits beyond more typical diet plans.
In his interview with Fridman, Kennedy said he ate his first meal around noon and tried not to eat after 6 or 7pm. He said he started every morning with a 12-step meeting, a 5km hike with his dogs, meditation and about a half-hour at the gym – a routine that does not leave much time for breakfast. He eats very healthfully, friends say, and he has been known to throw scraps of leftover meat to a pair of ravens he is trying to befriend in his backyard.
Kennedy also told Fridman that he took a lot of vitamins – “I can’t even list them to you here, ’cause I couldn’t even remember them all” – and that he was on an “anti-ageing protocol” from his doctor that includes testosterone replacement.
Kennedy, 70, has pushed for relaxing regulations on the sale of raw, or unpasteurised, milk, which he said at one point this year that he drank exclusively. Such milk is more likely to cause disease, although its advocates have said it carries health benefits. Kennedy did not respond to detailed requests for comment on his diet.
(He does not drink alcohol – he has been sober for years, after struggling with drug addiction in his youth.)
Kennedy has described himself as a “very adventurous eater,” which has come in handy but also gotten him in trouble, in his world travels as an environmental lawyer and adventure-seeking celebrity.
Case in point: Kennedy has a dead worm in his brain. The parasite was discovered when he sought medical treatment in 2010 after experiencing what he described as significant memory loss.
Initially, doctors thought he had a tumour, but further testing showed the spot on his brain was a parasite. It is not known how a worm made its way into Kennedy’s brain, but he has speculated that it may have come from eating undercooked pork, perhaps in India.
When he was struggling with the memory loss, Kennedy was subsisting on a diet heavy on predatory fish, notably tuna and perch, both known for their elevated mercury levels. Kennedy, of all people, should have known better – for years, he railed against the dangers of mercury contamination in fish from coal-fired power plants.
Another test he underwent in this time period, for mercury poisoning, showed that his mercury levels were 10 times above what the Environmental Protection Agency considers safe. Kennedy said he was certain that the mercury poisoning, not the worm, had caused his memory loss. “I loved tuna-fish sandwiches. I ate them all the time. I caught fish all the time and freshwater fish. I would fish and eat a lot of perch at very, very high levels,” he told The New York Times in 2023.
Kennedy has also described what he does not eat. For one thing, he says he never eats processed food.
It is not clear what, if anything, he ate while travelling on Trump’s plane in the final months of the campaign. In a recent podcast interview, he described the food options on the campaign plane as “just poison,” adding that what Trump eats “is really, like, bad”.
It is nearly impossible to avoid processed food, a category that is most broadly defined as any food altered from its original state, including chopped vegetables. Some of his podcast interviews suggest that he is using “processed” as shorthand for “ultra-processed,” a term that more narrowly refers to industrially made foods containing hard-to-pronounce additives and ingredients.
In a January interview with Mark Hyman, a doctor and podcast host, Kennedy noted that “processed foods” had existed since he was young.
“We were eating Hostess Twinkies, by the way,” he said. “I wish I had a dollar for every one of those that I ate. I’d still eat ’em if I could.”
He also used to drink eight or nine Cokes a day, he said. He showed Hyman an app on his phone where he tracked how long he had gone without drinking soda: 3057 days, at the time – more than eight years. He then showed Hyman a beverage at his side: iced tea, he said, without sugar.
At the time of the podcast, Kennedy was still running for President as an independent candidate. He explained how he would approach nutrition if he were to run the Government: “My inclination is to give people good information and at the same time maximise freedom,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell people what to eat and what not to eat.”
About an hour into the interview, Kennedy vented a little bit, with the palpable frustration of a septuagenarian who can no longer afford the reckless consumption of his youth. “I don’t like eating healthy food,” he said. “If you don’t have a live-in cook,” he added, trailing off for a moment. “Why does the stuff that tastes the best, why is it so bad? Why are Twinkies so bad for you? How did evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald’s french fries and Big Macs, when they are so bad for you?”
Another thing he says he won’t eat: dogs.
This came up in the wake of a Vanity Fair article published in July about Kennedy, which featured a photograph of him posing with a splayed, spit-roasted animal that the article said was most likely a dog, eaten in Korea.
After the article came out, Kennedy said in an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation that it was not a dog in Korea but a goat in Patagonia. “I am a very adventurous eater, Chris,” he said. “I’ll eat virtually anything.”
He added: “There’s two things I wouldn’t eat. Well, three. I wouldn’t eat a human, I wouldn’t eat a monkey and I wouldn’t eat a dog.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Rebecca Davis O’Brien
Photographs by: Ruth Fremson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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