What Is Making So Many of Us Sick?
My own health journey led me from the doctor’s office to a larger question about the food, water, air, stress, and incentives shaping American life.
This article is personal for me and maybe the most important one I’ve ever written…
Several years ago, my health began to change in ways I could feel but could not easily explain.
I started experiencing seizures. I dealt with fatigue, poor sleep, strange neurological symptoms, shortness of breath, inflammation, and the unsettling sense that my body was struggling to regulate itself. Some days were manageable. Others left me wondering how a person could feel so unwell while still appearing relatively normal to everyone around him.
I did what millions of people do when their health begins slipping away. I went looking for answers.
I read. I took tests. I spoke with practitioners. I changed my diet. I experimented with supplements and routines. I tried to understand whether the problem involved my nervous system, immune system, hormones, digestion, mineral status, an old infection, an environmental exposure, or some combination that no single specialist was trained to see.
Every symptom seemed to belong to a different department.
The numbness belonged to neurology. The exhaustion belonged to sleep medicine or endocrinology. The digestive symptoms belonged to gastroenterology. The difficulty breathing belonged to pulmonology. Anxiety belonged to psychiatry. Inflammation belonged almost everywhere and nowhere.
Modern medicine is exceptionally good at dividing the human body into parts. Chronic illness often refuses to cooperate with those divisions.
My background in venture capital had trained me to search for underlying systems. When several problems appear at once, there is usually a structure connecting them. The body, unfortunately, does not present its problems in a clean pitch deck. It offers clues, contradictions, changing symptoms, and test results that can be both technically normal and profoundly unsatisfying.
My search eventually led me toward a larger question.
What if many of us are spending years chasing individual symptoms while overlooking the environment in which those symptoms developed?
I use the word “environment” broadly. It includes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the chemicals we encounter, the buildings where we live and work, the medications we take, the amount of sunlight we receive, the stress we carry, the sleep we lose, the movement our bodies require, and the social conditions that shape all of those things.
Scientists increasingly use the word “exposome” to describe the totality of exposures a person experiences throughout life and the biological response to those exposures. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences includes chemicals, diet, physical activity, psychosocial stress, and other influences within that concept.
It is a more realistic way of thinking about human health.
We do not live in laboratories where one variable changes at a time. We live inside overlapping systems. A person may be exposed to polluted air, chronic stress, highly processed food, inadequate sleep, financial insecurity, artificial light, pesticide residue, and a sedentary workday during the same twenty-four hours. Each factor may carry a modest effect on its own. Their combined influence is much harder to measure.
That complexity has become an excuse for political inaction.
The chronic illness nation
America’s chronic disease burden is staggering.
A CDC analysis of 2023 survey data found that 76.4 percent of American adults reported at least one of twelve chronic conditions tracked by the researchers. More than half reported at least two. Among adults between 18 and 34, nearly six in ten reported at least one chronic condition, with rates rising meaningfully over the previous decade.
Those numbers include conditions such as asthma, arthritis, cancer, chronic kidney disease, depression, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They do not prove that environmental toxicity caused each condition, but they do reveal a population in remarkably poor health.
The United States now spends approximately $5.3 trillion a year on healthcare, according to the CDC. Chronic diseases are among the leading sources of death, disability, medical spending, and lost quality of life.
We talk about this constantly, though usually through the language of healthcare rather than health.
Democrats argue that people need affordable insurance, accessible doctors, lower prescription prices, and protection from financial ruin. They are right.
Republicans argue that bureaucracy is expensive, markets are distorted, patients need more choice, and personal behavior affects health. They are also right.
Then the argument returns to insurance premiums, Medicaid, Medicare, deductibles, pharmaceutical prices, hospital consolidation, and who should pay the bill.
These questions matter enormously to anyone who is sick. A society has a moral obligation to care for people once illness arrives. Treatment saves lives. Medication relieves suffering. Surgery restores function. Insurance can protect a family from bankruptcy.
The deeper question waits beneath the financing debate.
Why are so many people getting sick?
A country can develop the most sophisticated system ever created for financing illness and still become progressively less healthy. America is proving that contradiction now. We possess extraordinary medical technology, brilliant doctors, advanced pharmaceuticals, and world-class research institutions. We also have millions of people moving through middle age with multiple chronic conditions, cabinets full of prescriptions, and little understanding of how they reached that point.
Our economy has learned how to generate revenue from nearly every stage of sickness. Prevention remains harder to patent, bill, advertise, and monetize.
The water, the air, the packaging, the food
Environmental toxicity can become an emotionally loaded phrase. Some people hear it and imagine every chemical as poison. Others hear it and dismiss the entire subject as pseudoscience.
The evidence calls for a more serious response.
Certain exposures have clear and well-established health consequences. Lead harms neurological development. Asbestos causes cancer. Tobacco smoke damages nearly every organ. Fine particulate air pollution contributes to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Other exposures remain under active study, with risk depending on the chemical, dose, timing, duration, route of exposure, and susceptibility of the person.
PFAS illustrate the difficulty. Thousands of these persistent chemicals have been used in consumer and industrial products. The Environmental Protection Agency says research suggests that exposure to certain PFAS may contribute to adverse health outcomes, while significant questions remain about the effects of different compounds and long-term exposure levels.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals create another challenge. Hormones operate at extremely low concentrations and help regulate growth, metabolism, reproduction, mood, and development. Some chemicals can mimic, block, or interfere with hormonal signaling. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences identifies possible endocrine disruptors in plastics, cosmetics, food packaging, toys, carpets, pesticides, and flame retardants.
Pesticides require similar nuance. They protect crops, support yields, reduce certain natural toxins, and help farmers remain economically viable. They are also biologically active compounds designed to kill or disrupt living organisms. Their benefits, risks, application methods, cumulative effects, and alternatives deserve rigorous evaluation.
Microplastics have now been detected in human tissues, although scientists are still working to determine which particles cause harm, at what levels, and through which mechanisms. In April 2026, the federal government launched a $144 million ARPA-H research program to improve measurement, investigate biological effects, and explore possible methods of removal.
That investment is significant partly because it acknowledges how much remains unknown.
Our regulatory system has traditionally evaluated chemicals one at a time. Human beings encounter mixtures. A pregnant woman, an infant, a farmworker, and a healthy forty-year-old man may respond differently to the same exposure. A dose considered tolerable in isolation may exist alongside dozens of other exposures affecting the same hormonal, metabolic, neurological, or immune pathways.
Science struggles with these questions because they are genuinely difficult. Industry can use that uncertainty to delay action. Activists can use it to make claims that exceed the evidence. A responsible government has to navigate between those pressures.
The proper response to uncertainty is better research, stronger monitoring, transparent data, prudent regulation, and honest communication about what we know.
Toxicity is larger than chemicals
The environment shaping chronic illness extends far beyond industrial chemicals.
An ultra-processed diet can be toxic to health without containing a single mysterious ingredient. In a tightly controlled National Institutes of Health study, participants eating ultra-processed meals consumed about 500 more calories per day and gained weight compared with periods when they ate minimally processed meals.
The study was small, and it did not settle every question about processed food. It demonstrated that the structure of food can influence behavior and metabolism even when researchers attempt to match nutrients.
Our food environment has been engineered for convenience, shelf life, low cost, speed, and repeat consumption. Those qualities helped make calories widely available. They also produced a landscape in which the easiest food to buy is often the hardest food to stop eating.
Stress belongs in this conversation too.
A body living under constant financial strain, digital stimulation, social isolation, political outrage, and workplace insecurity occupies a different biological environment from a body that experiences safety, belonging, rest, and regular movement.
Sleep belongs here. So does light. So does loneliness. So does the disappearance of walking from daily life. So does the loss of time to cook. So does the way children spend their afternoons. So does whether a neighborhood has trees, safe sidewalks, clean water, grocery stores, and places where people can gather.
Calling all of this personal responsibility places an impossible burden on individuals.
People make choices inside environments built by policy and commerce. A parent working two jobs chooses dinner from the options that time and money allow. A child eats what the school, household, neighborhood, and advertising system place within reach. A worker sitting for ten hours a day is responding to the structure of employment. A family living near a highway breathes the air available at its address.
Personal choices still matter. Public choices shape the menu.
MAHA and the political opening
The Make America Healthy Again movement recognized a political truth that had been waiting for someone to articulate: Americans are tired of managing decline.
President Trump created the MAHA Commission in February 2025 with an initial focus on childhood chronic disease. The administration’s subsequent strategy included research into nutrition, metabolic health, environmental exposure, food quality, mental health, the microbiome, and chronic disease prevention. It also called for defining ultra-processed foods, improving labels, reviewing food chemicals, reforming the “generally recognized as safe” process, and changing public health metrics.
Some tangible steps have followed. The FDA began working with industry to remove several petroleum-based food dyes. In May 2026, it released a scientific evaluation of phthalates used in food-contact materials and requested additional information about other additives. A June 2026 executive order called for greater federal investment in regenerative agriculture, soil health, and practices that could reduce chemical use.
These efforts deserve a fair hearing.
MAHA has also become entangled in the political identity of the Trump administration and in fierce arguments over vaccines, fluoride, agricultural chemicals, food assistance, scientific institutions, and federal authority. Some supporters view any criticism as proof of corruption. Some opponents dismiss reasonable questions because they dislike the people asking them.
Health cannot survive as another loyalty test.
The movement’s credibility will depend on its willingness to follow evidence when the findings upset supporters, donors, corporations, activists, and political allies. A serious chronic-disease agenda must value scientific institutions while demanding greater transparency from them. It must protect farmers while studying agricultural chemicals honestly. It must question pharmaceutical incentives while preserving access to effective medicine. It must examine individual behavior while recognizing how strongly corporate and public policy shape that behavior.
The current Republican coalition deserves credit for placing chronic disease and food quality near the center of national politics. Its traditional enthusiasm for deregulation may collide with the oversight required to limit harmful exposures. Freedom has little meaning when families cannot determine what is present in their water, food, air, or household products.
Progressives bring a long history of supporting clean air, clean water, workplace safety, environmental justice, consumer protection, and broader access to care. Their weakness appears when legitimate concerns about food, chemicals, regulatory capture, or medical incentives are treated as cultural signals from the opposing tribe.
Each side holds part of the answer.
Conservatives understand that health involves family habits, local food systems, physical activity, community, and personal agency. Progressives understand that corporations can externalize health costs and that ZIP codes, income, pollution, and power affect disease.
America needs both insights at the same table.
What a health policy would look like
A serious national response would begin by measuring the right things.
We should know far more about the exposures Americans carry in their bodies and how those exposures vary by age, occupation, geography, income, and life stage. Biomonitoring and exposome research should become major national priorities. Data should be accessible to independent scientists and the public.
Chemical regulation should account for cumulative exposure and vulnerable populations. Food additives and food-contact substances should undergo timely review as new evidence emerges. Companies should disclose enough information for regulators and researchers to evaluate safety.
Clean air and clean water should be treated as health infrastructure. School meals should be designed around nourishment. Farm policy should reward practices that build soil, reduce unnecessary chemical dependence, improve nutrient density, and keep family farms financially alive.
Doctors should receive more training in nutrition, environmental health, sleep, stress, and prevention. Medical care should remain grounded in evidence while becoming more curious about the whole environment surrounding a patient.
Insurance and public programs should reward improved health outcomes. Communities should be designed for movement, contact with nature, and human connection. Parents should have clear information that helps them reduce meaningful risks without turning ordinary life into a source of constant fear.
Most importantly, the government should establish measurable goals for reducing chronic disease and publish the results regularly.
A health agenda needs a scoreboard.
How many children are developing metabolic disease? How many young adults have multiple chronic conditions? How many communities have contaminated drinking water? How much exposure comes from food, air, housing, and workplaces? Which interventions produce healthier people over five, ten, and twenty years?
These questions are harder than counting appointments, prescriptions, procedures, and dollars spent. They are also closer to what people actually want.
The lesson of the farm
Moving from venture capital to a farm changed the way I thought about health.
A farm teaches you to pay attention to systems. When a plant struggles, you can stare at the leaf or study the soil, water, sunlight, temperature, insects, disease pressure, and history of the field. The leaf is where the problem becomes visible. The surrounding environment often holds the explanation.
Human beings are far more complicated than blueberry bushes. The underlying principle still feels important.
Symptoms deserve care. They may also be messages from a larger system.
My own health journey has given me humility about cause and effect. I cannot trace every symptom to a particular exposure. Most people with chronic illness will never receive a single explanation that ties everything together. Genetics, infections, injuries, aging, chance, behavior, environment, and social conditions interact in ways science is only beginning to understand.
That uncertainty should deepen our curiosity.
Environmental toxicity and chronic illness may become one of the defining issues of our time because they quietly connect so many other crises. They touch healthcare spending, food policy, agriculture, corporate power, poverty, childhood development, labor, housing, energy, trust in government, and the widening divide between the lives Americans are promised and the way many actually feel.
A society reveals its priorities through the conditions it accepts as normal.
We have accepted a country where chronic illness begins earlier, medication lists grow longer, exhaustion feels ordinary, and an enormous share of national wealth flows toward managing disease after it appears.
A healthier future will require excellent medicine and a sustained commitment to prevention. It will require cleaner environments, better food, safer products, stronger communities, honest science, responsible industry, and a political culture capable of following evidence across partisan boundaries.
The defining measure of our healthcare system should become the health of the people living inside it.
Americans deserve longer lives. They also deserve years filled with energy, function, clarity, dignity, and the ability to participate fully in the world around them.
We should begin building the country that makes those lives possible.