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Apparently this is where #RFKJr got his idiotic idea that “mitochondria” are causing visible damage to children that he can see when they walk past him—a book. www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

aug 29, 2025, 10:36 pm • 2 2

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The book is written by Casey Means, who’s close to Junior But she’s far from knowing what she writes about, and is engaging in “scienceplotation.”

This is where scienceploitation rears its head to predate on a public hungry for easy health solutions. Scienceploitation is the abuse of preliminary findings in science to sell a product or intervention that has not been shown to work, moving beyond mere hype to create misunderstandings. It takes research findings in cultured cells and in laboratory animals, and it concludes that what we have here is a paradigm shift in our understanding of health. Everything we knew about disease is wrong; this new thing is what we should focus on now. And of course, non-experts jump on the bandwagon to sell you dietary supplements to fix this one true cause of all diseases. Like with fad diets, we will never run out of fad boogeymen. When people get sick of trying to fix their microbiome, they will turn their attention to mitochondria. The shell game at the heart of MAHA is that RFK Jr is meant to care about metabolic diseases, like diabetes and cardiovascular issues, and to use the Means' book, Good Energy, as a road map for how to get Americans healthy again. But the focus on mitochondrial dysfunction is a mirage; given RFK Jr's decades-long crusade against vaccines, his obsession is not with the mitochondrion but with one of public health's resounding successes. The platter of scienceploitation he offers Americans-stem cells, peptides, and nutraceuticals, as he highlighted in a famous post on X-is a distraction. He wants vaccines gone. If you want to keep your mitochondria from getting gummed up, I'm afraid that the best advice remains as unsexy and dull as ever: eat well, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly. Your mitochondria will thank you later.

aug 29, 2025, 10:40 pm • 2 0 • view