We return now to our video podcast, Settle In.

Jeffrey Bennett recently spoke to Gideon Meyerwitz Katz.

He's an epidemiologist and writes the health nerd blog.

He has spent years helping people understand the data behind the news they see about their health.

They spoke about bad science, misconceptions around what we eat,

and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy

Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again campaign. Here's a little bit of that conversation.

When we talk about the health secretary, RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., what do you make of his

personal crusade to reveal to unearth the cause of autism?

So when we talk about autism, what we're discussing isn't necessarily the sole cause of

autism.

What, certainly what, RFK Jr., when he speaks, he's mostly discussing the increase in the rates of autism.

So if you look at the number of people who are autistic,

if you look at the earliest studies of that,

they were conducted in the 60s in the United States and also in the UK,

and they estimated that around 1 in 2,000 children had autism,

somewhere around 5 and 10,000 kids, give or take.

If you look at the most recent estimates, the number is now closer to 1 in 30,

so somewhere it's just under 3% of children would be diagnosed as autistic today. So that's about a 60 times increase between the 60s and 2025.

But if you look at the history of autism, it quickly becomes clear the main thing that's happened there. So in the

60s, when we talk about autism, it was a term used to describe severely disabled or children

with very significant developmental delay, who were mostly nonverbal, who required a great deal of assistance in their lives.

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