03/01/2025
Thoughts for Consideration by the President’s
“Make American Healthy Again Commission”
Jeffrey Bland, Ph.D., FACN, FACB
Creator, Functional Medicine
President, Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute
With the signing on February 14, 2025, of the Presidential Executive Order establishing the “Make America Healthy Again Commission,” the whole of the healthcare community has been put on notice as to the priority that is going to be placed on reducing the burden of unnecessary chronic illnesses in the United States.
According to this Executive Order, the commission is charged with four main policy directives to reverse chronic disease:
Empower Americans through transparency and open-source data and avoid conflicts of interest in all federally funded health research.
Prioritize gold-standard research on why Americans are getting sick in all health-related research funded by the federal government.
Work with farmers to ensure that U.S. food is healthy, abundant, and affordable.
Ensure expanded treatment options and health coverage flexibility for beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.
To accomplish these goals, the Commission aims to “restore trust in medical and scientific institutions and hold public hearings, meetings, roundtables, and similar events to receive expert input from leaders in public health.”
What is the definition of “health”?
How could anyone interested in health not be in support of these goals? The question I raise, however, is, “What is the definition of health?”. Is it solely the absence of disease or something beyond that? In my last forty-five years as a health scientist dealing with thousands of people in clinical studies and an educator of tens of thousands of health professionals throughout the world, I have come to recognize that when people think of their own health, it is more often related to their ability to function than the absence of disease. Function is related to their physical, metabolic, cognitive, and behavioral capabilities. I believe it is important to reduce the burden of unnecessary chronic disease, but it starts with examining what is reducing an individual's functional health status. This is termed “root cause medicine” in that it focuses on identifying the factors that reduce an individual’s functional capacity and compromise their health. To accomplish this a new paradigm is needed that focuses on assessing function with the same clarity we diagnose a disease. This personalized lifestyle medicine model connects an individual’s unique genetic characteristics to their lifestyle, environment, diet, and stress factors. This approach leverages the breakthrough science and technology that allows an individual’s functional health status to be analyzed and a plan designed for their needs and objectives to be implemented.
Why is the functional health approach important?
Without a dramatic change in focus from a disease-treatment-centric system to a scientific wellness-based system, we will lose the opportunity to create a system that delivers improved health outcomes consistent with an individual’s definition of health. People want to feel better, think clearly, have more energy and enhance endurance and resilience to illness, have less chronic pain, have improved mood, sleep better, and be active. They are not diseases but are symptomatic of functional problems that can be addressed by looking for “root causes.” These conditions represent health issues that place a significant financial burden on our present health system and are often marginalized as “syndromes” for which symptom-suppressing medications are used without treating their cause. They do represent, however, early warning signs of later-stage diseases. The answers to these problems that rob people of their quality of life and productivity require a different approach than would be used to diagnose and treat a disease. This approach requires an understanding of our food and its origin, how it affects an individual's health, and how the environment and lifestyle alter how our genes are expressed and translate into how we look, function, and feel. Today's new tools provide the opportunity to understand the origin of a person’s functional health issues that result from their diet, lifestyle, and environmental exposures. This defines a new way of approaching health that moves from a disease prevention focus to a scientific wellness model.
My recommendations for consideration by the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission
I encourage the following recommendations to be considered in charting a path forward in creating a healthy America:
In defining objectives for improving health outcomes, move beyond disease prevention metrics to include functional health metrics and their association with wellness
Set clear objectives for collaboration among principles representing a unified health system that includes agriculture, food production, pharmaceutical development, marketing and sales, health and environmental science, health educators, and health care financing
Reform the Food and Drug Administration to be consistent with the contemporary science on the bioactive compounds in food and their impact on the regulatory framework for the “Food as Medicine” initiative
Address the inequities in reimbursement for healthcare professionals engaged in the delivery of scientifically sound functional health and wellness-focused services
Increase National Institute of Health financial support for interdisciplinary research and development focused on functional health interventions that are targeted at improving whole-person health outcomes
Incorporate nutrition education in the curriculum of all health professional education and include questions related to nutrition competencies on licensure and certification examinations
Provide financial support for farmers producing nutrient-dense crops and animal husbandry methods that are consistent with sustainable and self-reinforcing systems
Accelerate the adoption of new assessment and informatic technologies that make personalized healthcare scalable and allow for the early recognition of changes in functional health status
The Future is Ours to Imagine and Materialize
The objectives of the Make America Healthy Again Commission are to identify and implement solutions for the chronic health issues that the nation is now confronted with. The “devil is in the details” is how these objectives will be translated into improved health outcomes. I suggest considering approaches that go beyond disease risk reduction to truly innovative approaches to improving functional health and wellness. We have a remarkable disease-care system that we certainly want to continue to support, but now is the time of need to develop an equally impressive system that promotes individual health through the application of the new science and technology that is driving the development of the functional health and scientific wellness movements and their connection to food, nutrients, lifestyle, and environmental factors.
