When it Comes to Nutrition, MAHA Misses the Mark
As a longtime nutrition scholar, researcher, and advocate for healthy diets, I was initially pleased to hear that the new leadership of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is prioritizing the issue of nutrition. Poor diet is a major cause of chronic disease. Over half of Americans consume sugary drinks daily, approximately two-thirds of daily calories come from ultra-processed foods, and two-thirds of American have chronic diseases.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of HHS, and his “Make America Healthy Again Movement” (MAHA) have emphasized the importance of nutrition and its contribution to the USA’s twin epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Over the last year, media and policy makers have paid unprecedented attention to topics once relegated to nutrition scientists, including food marketing, food labelling, school nutrition, and ultra-processed foods more generally.
While I agree that major changes are needed to improve nutrition and health in the US, I am struck by the disconnect between what MAHA says and what MAHA does. RFK Jr. and his colleagues have failed to discuss, let alone address, the root causes of our nutritional challenges or to propose evidence-based changes to our food system that might lead to improved health. He has no teeth in his major policy thrusts. They are all words, as if big food, agribusiness, and pharmaceuticals have gotten to the Trump administration. This does not mean that he has no effect; on the contrary, he is destroying public health and medical research and infrastructure.
Rather than implementing policies and regulations that could improve the quality of school lunches, limit the availability of ultra-processed food, regulate corporate food marketing, reduce misleading labeling and advertising, and expand access to healthier foods, the administration has prioritized unproven strategies such as:
- Persuading manufacturers to remove some harmless food dyes and colors from ultra-processed foods such as breakfast cereals. There is minimal scientific basis for removing some artificial dyes, but this intervention does not address the underlying problem, which is the overconsumption of ultra-processed foods.
- Suggesting that individuals replace plant-based oils (g., canola, corn, grapeseed, safflower, soybean, sunflower, and other “seed oils”) with lard, butter and beef tallow. There is no scientific evidence to suggest these swaps would be good for health – in fact, replacing healthier oils with highly saturated fats will lead to increased cardiovascular disease in the US population.
- Celebrating the decision to use cane sugar rather than corn syrup in Coca-Cola. Another evidence-free swap. The problem is that Americans consume far too many sugary drinks, not whether those drinks have sugar or corn syrup in them.
MAHA is using the “bully pulpit” of HSS to highlight their nutritional priorities but has proposed none of the changes to laws, regulations and funding that would actually improve nutrition. In fact, the Trump administration has cancelled policies and regulations related to ultra-processed foods and cut funding for healthy school nutrition programs, nutrition research, and SNAP/food stamp programs. In addition, despite stated concerns about children’s health, the administration has spread dangerous misinformation about vaccines and weakened protections against lead poisoning, air pollution, water pollution, and gun violence.
The result is that MAHA is only pushing unscientific and bad policies at a time when a growing focus on nutrition and chronic diseases is long overdue.
Barry Popkin is the W. R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the Gillings School of Public Health, Department of Nutrition, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
