Donald Trump's former doctor has claimed that the President might have lived to be 200 if he had abandoned his junk food-heavy diet and switched over to a healthier one that he and his team had tried to introduce after he took office.

Physician Dr Ronny Jackson, who is running in a heavily-crowded Republican primary hoping to be elected a Congressman, revealed in a New York Times interview that, in desperation, he had even tried to sneak in cauliflower into Trump's mashed potatoes and made the ice cream "less accessible."

"The exercise stuff never took off as much as I wanted it to," Jackson said. "But we were working on his diet. We were making the ice cream less accessible, we were putting cauliflower into the mashed potatoes."

Jackson, 52, said he hoped that these subtle changes would eventually help Trump lose up to 15 pounds, but that the president never felt like following it because he felt a round of golf was all it would take to counter his diet, which is said to include up to 12 cans of diet coke every day.

There are several pictures of the president indulging in junk food from KFC and McDonald's — he famously laid out an "all American" feast of burgers, fries, and pizzas when a college football team visited the White House in 2019 — though they don't seem to have impacted his physical health.

Speaking after Trump's first medical exam following the mogul's victory over Hillary Clinton in 2017, Jackson had said he did not expect him to face any health problems despite the President's height and weight -- 6'3'' and 239lbs -- meaning his BMI put him dangerously close to being obese.

"I feel very confident that he has a very strong and a very probable possibility of making it completely through his presidency with no medical issues," he said.

Asked about the same this week, Jackson said it had to do with genetics. "It's called genetics," he said. "Some people have great genes."

The physician served under three presidents but came into the spotlight in January 2018 when he had similarly told the media that Trump, then 71, had "incredibly good genes" and that "if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200-years-old."

He said his failure to get Trump on board with his new diet and implement a lasting regime was one of his biggest regrets after leaving the White House this past December and kicking off a run for Congress in Texas.

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