Suggesting that pasta and pizza in Europe are lower in calories than in the United States, Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt claimed that people “don’t gain any weight” when eating those items overseas because they don’t contain “pesticides” like their American counterparts.
During a lengthy and free-wheeling press conference on Monday, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated his support for vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his health and human services secretary. He also lent credence to Kennedy’s debunked claims that childhood vaccines lead to autism.
At the same time, the incoming president tried to dispel fears that Kennedy supported taking the polio vaccine out of circulation. “You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said, adding he was a “big fan” of the vaccinations. Still, the president-elect signaled that he could make the vaccines and other immunization shots a matter of parental choice.
“I don’t like mandates. I’m not a big mandate person,” he said when asked about schools requiring children to be vaccinated.
With the incoming president doubling down on Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which would eliminate pesticides in agriculture and promote organic foods in school lunches, Earhardt was exhilarated over the prospect of Kennedy in the new Trump administration, even thought she may have been confused about pasta.
“It’s obvious who we like! We’re all excited about him,” she said on Monday’s broadcast of Outnumbered, referencing a recent Fox News poll that found a plurality of American voters approved of Kennedy’s nomination.
“How wonderful is it that we might not have to worry about our children with autism or our kids developing cancer,” Earhardt continued, apparently parroting Kennedy’s claim on the root causes of autism. “It’s wonderful that he wants to clean up our food!” (Notably, when former First Lady Michelle Obama launched an initiative to make school lunches healthier in 2010, conservatives and Fox News decried it as “communism.”)
In a bid to make her case, the Fox & Friends co-anchor then compared the quality of food in Europe to that in America. In doing so, though, she made a curious assertion – especially considering her carb-heavy choices.
“When we go to Europe, we can eat pasta, we can eat pizza, we don’t gain any weight,” she declared. “I know you walk a lot, but you don’t gain weight. You feel fresh. You feel clean.”
Earhardt added that once a person returns to America and “starts eating pasta” again, they “gain weight immediately.” According to the Fox News morning host, there was a simple reason why spaghetti across the pond was supposedly less fattening than in the States.
“There’s something wrong with our foods. It’s the pesticides, it’s the chemicals. We want all of that out,” she concluded.
The Fox News star’s suggestion that people can eat all the pasta and pizza they want in Europe without packing on the pounds, based on the assumption that the food was pesticide-free, prompted some mockery on social media.
“We’re one step away from ‘Brawndo’s got what plants crave,’” Washington Monthly’s political editor Bill Scher snarked, referencing the 2006 satire Idiocracy. He wasn’t the only one who linked her remarks to the comedic film about a dystopian future in which civilization has devolved.
Others made light of Earhardt tying insect-killing chemicals to less fatty foods. “They have lower calorie pesticides in Italy,” Gizmodo tech reporter Matt Novak goofed on Bluesky.
Meanwhile, other critics said that while Earhardt’s comments were ripe for ridicule, it would be good if the United States followed other countries’ lead and pushed for more regulations of produce and livestock.
“We should be making fun of this, of course, but it would be a fantastic thing for all of us if our agricultural laws were even a *little* bit as stringent as Europe’s,” former Ilhan Omar spokesperson Isi Baehr-Breen stated.
