So I’m reading this article last month in The Wall Street Journal with the heading: “Everyone in Trump’s cabinet is eating sauerkraut.”

It starts: “A new diet is sweeping through President Trump’s cabinet—and it involves heaping portions of sauerkraut. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Vice President JD Vance have all embraced the diet, drawn by the promise of slimmer waistlines and glowing skin…..“Within 30 days I lost 20 pounds,” Kennedy said at an event in Michigan this week. “JD Vance is also on the diet and you can see how different he looks.”

 And I’m thinking, this is so nice. This is what MAHA (make America healthy again) should be all about—top government officials setting dietary examples to all of us out there among the masses. What a great followup to the shift last year in federal dietary guidelines to encourage consumption of  fermented foods to improve gut health.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of this blog, when readers would point out overweight and out-of-shape public health investigators shutting down farms and stores selling raw dairy products.

But then I read further in the WSJ article, to discover that these cabinet officials learned about the fermented foods from  “Dr. Sean O’Mara, who advises his high-profile patients to eat fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kimchi, alongside grass-fed steak—and to abstain from alcohol and sugary food.” The cost of O’Mara’s advice? According to the WSJ: “’Optimization plans’ at O’Mara’s practice start at $8,000, according to his website. A direct consultation with O’Mara will cost you $18,000.”

Warning: I get a little political here. This WSJ article came out just as news was breaking about some unhealthy decisions from the administration and financial windfalls being realized by Trump and his cabinet members. Trump issued an executive order mandating  “production of glyphosate-based herbicides, which are the most widely used crop-protection tools in U.S. agriculture — enabling efficient food and livestock feed production that protects food supply chains and ensures the availability of healthy, affordable food options within reach for American families.” I’m sorry, but everything I’ve read about glysophate, including negative court decisions, suggests it may be a dangerous carcinogen.

And then there was news that the families of Trump and his Commerce secretary Lutnick are sharing tens or possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and stock associated with deals for rare earth minerals around the world. And Trump himself earned in excess of $2 billion over the last year on crypto and other deals, various media reported.

So now I have an idea about how these guys access such pricey dietary advice: although you have to wonder if they are even paying for stuff like this when they are such great marketing and promotional outlets, such as via the WSJ article I quoted from. The diet doc should be paying them for signing on to his pitch.

Maybe the best news is that you don’t need the advice of Dr. O’Mara to benefit from fermented foods. They’ve been around for thousands of years, helping improve health, and they’ll continue to be around for a long time, long after naive pols have learned about the easily available benefits of healthy food.