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One of the central claims that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and de facto leader of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is that American kids are getting sicker.

According to experts, that claim happens to be largely correct.

A study published earlier this month in JAMA found that an American child was 15 to 20 percent more likely to have a chronic health condition in 2023 than in 2011. Americans are now more likely to die in childhood than Europeans, and their lives are increasingly marked by illness: rates of asthma, diabetes, sleep apnea, and even eye problems and hearing loss, are all on the rise.

Kids are also living with more distress than in years past. They’re experiencing more depression, anxiety, and loneliness, as well as more physical pain and fatigue, Christopher Forrest, a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and one of the authors of the study, told me.

“There’s a major crisis in children’s health in this country that has been under-recognized and not addressed for decades,” Forrest said.

Some experts have applauded Kennedy for at least talking about children’s health in the MAHA report, released in May with a follow-up reportedly planned for later this year. However, the crisis identified by researchers with decades of experience in epidemiology and pediatrics is very different from the one that the MAHA commission — led by Kennedy and staffed by Trump administration appointees — describes.

The MAHA report “serves a critical purpose: exposing a disturbing reality unfolding across the nation—the scale of the chronic disease epidemic and the institutional failures that allowed it to grow unchecked for decades,” an HHS spokesperson told me in an email.

But the report breaks from scientific consensus in its discussion of the causes of kids’ illness, the solutions, and even what a childhood disease is. The result, experts say, is a document that highlights the very real problem of kids’ health while also pushing misleading ideas that could hurt or kill American kids. (The initial version of the report was criticized for citing studies that did not exist, possibly the result of using AI to compile it.)

“They get some things right, but then they embed those correct assertions in a toxic stew of misinformation,” said Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and the director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.

Meanwhile, rather than tackling major drivers of kids’ illness like pollution and poverty, Kennedy has so far focused on smaller issues like

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