(LifeSiteNews) — The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Education Secretary Linda McMahon will be directed by President Donald Trump to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department” based on “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
This order comes from an administration that simultaneously has been redirecting misused funds in healthcare research. The links between health and education and the national well-being stand to be seen with even greater clarity as both are meaningfully reshaped.
While the Department of Education is being closed, the Department of Health and Human Services has declared a shift towards focusing on lifestyle and nutrition-based prevention of chronic degenerative disease, versus avoidable later medical interventions, some of which draw on immoral research programs such as drug development from aborted baby tissues. HHS approval ratings show that Americans support these shifts, and ethics analyses find that the changes are morally right.
Therefore, knowledgeable practitioners will be essential to implementing these popular preventive healthcare shifts. Education will play a key role.
Public and private resources for academics largely follow economic trends. An industrial sector’s size tends to be proportional to contributions granted to curricula, instruction, and research in its field. With the healthcare-related education and research status quo predominated by pharmaceutical interests, substantial adjustments are called for.
Healthcare accounts for 17% to 20% of the United States’ gross domestic product (GDP). Correspondingly, when the healthcare industry throws its weight around in education, schooling is shaped around the intellectual premises of health that built the existing industry. The sculpting of thought occurs through school endowments, gifts to departments, research grants, consultations to textbook publishers, specifications for laboratory design, conference sponsorship, recruitment channels, and other forms of support
The premises of the country’s healthcare system show visible signs of failures. In U.S. healthcare, medical spending in 2024 was at least $2.4 trillion (statistics range up to $4.4 trillion), and 90% of this–well over $2 trillion–was for chronic disease. Administration costs have soared for chronic health treatment and insurance. In 2024, $281 billion was spent on pharmaceutical medications alone for degenerative diseases (including the most common, type 2 diabetes). Another $900 billion was spent on chronic disease-related ambulatory and hospitalization costs. Despite the expense, U.S. diabetes rates far exceed Europe’s.
In comparison, spending on nutritional products was $112 billion, excluding grocery food. Lifestyle and nutritional industries, for their part, are charting growth of 4.9% to 6.6% per year, even before the 2024 election.
If one third more people who are experiencing chronic degenerative disease in America join the sweeping change in preference towards lifestyle-based healing and eschew most drug-based approaches, nearly $94 billion would swing towards lifestyle factors and nutritionals annually.
If just 10% of hospitalization and ambulance medical care was able to switch towards lifestyle change, an additional $90 billion annually would flow into lifestyle and nutrition-based industries.
These plausibly realizable shifts would represent upwards of $184 billion (in today’s dollars) in potential commercial upside for lifestyle and nutrition products. A total of $296 billion or more in today’s dollars may soon be found in the nutritionals industry, equivalent to the Navy and Marines budgets combined. These economic factors indicate ample demand for education and careers in lifestyle-based health and nutrition.
Fundamentally the same scientific laws of energy, matter, life, logic, and mathematics undergird the professions of pharmaceutical medicine and lifestyle and nutrition. However, after learning basic biology, physiology, and physics, their application to instructional objectives, practice methods, products, and overall educational orientations can differ profoundly.
The lifestyle and nutritional track distinctly includes an intent to understand the root causes at work in a person’s health and to support the body’s and mind’s self-healing capabilities. Although this track acknowledges that medications may sometimes be necessary, a life of independence from prescribed product consumption is a valued possibility or ideal.
Seldom emphasized in the pharmacy and institutional medicine track is weaning from prescriptions; effects from one drug are even addressed with additional drugs. Root causes underneath the appearance of symptoms may at times be of concern, but most training in the profession focuses on symptom treatment through prescription.
Trump’s HHS has initiated an unbiased look at the overall causes of chronic degenerative diseases. The reallocations of the vast pipeline of government health funding provides an historic opportunity to reassess the research and educational recipient pool in ways that reflect popular ethical realizations and consumer preferences.
Even prior to the closure order of the Department of Education, Secretary Linda McMahon had stated objectives:
Fund education freedom, not government-run systems. Listen to parents, not politicians. Build up careers, not college debt. Empower states, not special interests. Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats.
These intents comport specifically with the needed changes to healthcare education. Families and local schools focused on students, rather than on dated public bureaucracies, provide liberty and flexibility to students and teachers.
Educational freedom enables scholars and pupils to delve deeper into root causes and solutions in biology and healthcare science. Trump, Kennedy, and McMahon’s policy changes will make more fluid what has been a rigid cash flow to a pharmaceutical-dominated system of academic and applied healthcare, delivering economic choice of healthcare forms available, as is consistent with voter preferences.
A population possessing a rich understanding of their human bodies for well-being on a planet of living solutions is the wisest goal in education and healthcare. Quality reasons exist for healthcare professional-track students to learn thoroughly of nutrition and lifestyle.
A place for emergency and acute disease medical advancements will continue to exist. Indeed, more lives could be saved as emergency and hyperspecialized medicine become more reliable by refocusing training on treatment and medications for rare diseases and acute injuries seen in the ER and ICU.
At the same time, general and family practice will continue its turn towards lifestyle and nutrition medicine. One market force in this, for example, is being established by John Mackey, author of The Whole Story and Conscious Capitalism and the founder of Whole Foods Market, now owned by Amazon, Inc. Mackey is opening dozens of healing centers for well-trained nutritional and lifestyle-based health providers. Such centers serve a rapidly rising demand for leading-edge therapies.
Americans increasingly appreciate their household decision-making ability to seek the range of educational options at their own discretion, power that is being reclaimed from institutions that have lost credibility. Publicly available scientific knowledge has revealed the benefits of lifestyle, food, and nutrition-based preventive health, and many Americans desire to learn how to wield them to the fullest.
The nation’s education and career tracks are thus called to rise and meet the occasion. Markets are poised to generate more resources for lifestyle-based health contributions to fund college science departments, research grants, curriculum and textbook input, design of labs and learning spaces, test content, career recruitment, and more.
Educational paths can expand to subtler understanding of living bodily systems, deeper studies of how nature interacts with human health, and yes, why even old age animals don’t tend to get heart attacks. American ingenuity can mainstream knowledge and practice at the frontiers of nutritional, lifestyle, and effective science-based natural therapies. As many tracts and enrollment openings as may exist for isolate synthesis, so too should there be for herb walks.
A drug-dependent, sick, or hospitalized nation is not one that is going to stand up for, or stand up to, very much. It is crucial that Americans be educated to understand modern health and lifestyle-based disease prevention.
