A month into his new job as health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained his view of America’s health woes to the Fox News host Sean Hannity: “We are poisoning ourselves, and it’s coming from principally these ultraprocessed foods.”
Mr. Hannity nodded eagerly, boasted about following a keto diet and rattled off statistics about obesity rates in the United States that he said “really scare me.”
Watching this was disorienting. I had written about Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign to tackle childhood obesity, and documented how much Republicans hated it and fought virtually every policy she pursued, from healthier school meals to banning trans fats.
In 2010, Mr. Hannity railed against the effort: “Your America is turning into a nanny state thanks to the Obama administration’s efforts to rein in the junk food industry!” he shouted on his show. “I don’t want to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal.”
Back then, food was an easy partisan wedge. But recently, Democrats and Republicans have been converging on the need for more government intervention in the food supply. According to a recent poll, about two-thirds of Democrats and Republicans now support banning processed foods from public school lunches.
This attitude gives the Trump administration a rare political opportunity to make once infeasible policy changes to improve our diets. It’s not just that Mr. Kennedy has the backing of the president. He also has an energized grass-roots “Make America Healthy Again” army that could be unleashed to defend his boldest policies. Does the administration realize the power it has, and is it prepared to use it on real reforms?
In its first six months, the Trump administration has taken steps to weaken the federal government’s ability to improve public health — measures that run counter to MAHA’s goals. Progressives are worried MAHA will mainly serve to distract Americans from the administration’s deeper goal of dismantling government agencies.
A reckoning of sorts is coming in August, when the MAHA Commission, led by Mr. Kennedy, is expected to release its strategy for ending childhood chronic disease. “It’s a truth-telling moment,” said Michael Pollan, the best-selling author whose critiques of the American food system are now mainstream. “How real are you?” If the Trump administration wants to tackle the unhealthy food supply, then it has the most momentum to achieve success I’ve ever seen.
The seeds for this political shift on food were sown years before Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy joined forces, by authors such as Mr. Pollan, the journalist Eric Schlosser and the scholar Marion Nestle and in documentaries like “Food, Inc.” and “Supersize Me.” In recent years, more conservative voices, such as the activist Charlie Kirk and the wellness influencer Alex Clark, have joined the fray.
To a certain extent, horseshoe theory has always applied to food and agriculture reformers — the far left and far right have long supported local food systems and agreed on the problems posed by corporate consolidation and farm subsidies. But the alignment has grown stronger with opposition to ultraprocessed food.
Some of the very talking heads who once shredded Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign are now fully on Team MAHA. Glenn Beck, the conservative radio and TV commentator, once ruthlessly mocked the first lady’s efforts to get restaurant chains to voluntarily offer healthier kids’ menus, saying, “If I want to be a fat, fat fatty and shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice.” Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Beck ran an hourlong special on chronic disease and food chemicals, arguing, “You don’t have to be a ‘crunchy granola’ liberal to notice American health is in major decline.”
His fellow Fox News alums Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson are among the biggest supporters of MAHA, often hosting key figures in the movement on their podcasts. Even Newt Gingrich, the conservative former House speaker, has jumped on the MAHA train, in part because tackling chronic diseases would help with spiraling government health care costs.
“It’s been dramatic,” the activist Vani Hari, known as Food Babe, told me of the shift in rhetoric on the right. Ms. Hari was an Obama ally and delegate at the Democratic National Convention in 2012, but is now supporting the Trump administration because of the MAHA commitment to crack down on food additives. The right’s embrace of these issues has “been so good for the food movement,” she said.
Ms. Hari’s biggest hope is that the administration will force food companies to remove many additives from processed foods — particularly ones that are restricted in Europe. “It’s the moms that said this is the issue that’s most important to me and I’m going to vote on this issue,” she said. “MAHA is going to outlast MAGA.”
In the public health community, many leaders feel conflicted about all this: They are furious about the administration’s cuts to science and public health programs as well as Mr. Kennedy’s constant criticism of vaccines and dismissal of experts from a key vaccine advisory committee. But they acknowledge that the administration could achieve beneficial changes to the food system.
“I think there is an opportunity, and as a pediatrician I feel that we’re ethically bound to try to avail ourselves of the opportunity,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, an expert in children’s exposure to toxins at Boston College. His work was cited in the administration’s May report on what’s driving childhood chronic disease. The real problem, as Dr. Landrigan sees it, is that we have weak laws regulating food and environmental chemicals. Any action short of changing those laws is, he said, “performative.”
If Mr. Kennedy wants to press Congress to do just that, he has more wind at his back than any of his predecessors: Many rank-and-file Republicans seem to now be more afraid of crossing him and the so-called MAHA moms than they are of the industry groups they used to defend.
Nowhere is this clearer than in state legislatures. West Virginia made waves this year by passing a sweeping statewide ban on seven common synthetic food dyes. In May, Texas lawmakers, with the support of Mr. Kennedy, passed a bill that mandates warning labels on food packages for dozens of commonly used additives and ingredients.
A similar labeling bill was just signed into law in Louisiana. That measure also bans certain additives and dyes from school meals and requires restaurants to post a disclaimer alerting customers to the use of seed oils, which Mr. Kennedy has suggested are poisonous. (Nutrition experts say that seed oils are healthier than animal fats, such as the beef tallow Mr. Kennedy has promoted.) Six states have now been granted waivers from the Department of Agriculture to restrict purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages their food stamp programs; some are also restricting candy.
In each case, powerful industry groups lobbied against these bills, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle voted for them anyway. With MAHA on a roll at the state level, Mr. Kennedy could rally that base to mandate similar bans or labeling at the federal level — which would clear up the growing state-by-state patchwork of rules creating chaos for the food industry.
So far, the Trump administration hasn’t pushed many policies along these lines. But it has announced some significant intentions, such as tightening up food additive regulation. (A proposal is expected later this year.)
In April, Mr. Kennedy and other top Trump officials announced that the F.D.A. would phase out synthetic food dyes by the end of 2026, though it made it voluntary. The F.D.A. also said it would begin the process for banning two dyes that the industry has already moved away from.
Mr. Kennedy and his MAHA allies have celebrated as several major food companies have pledged to stop using these dyes in the coming years. But many of the advocates who have long tried to rid processed foods of synthetic dyes acknowledge that doing so likely won’t move the needle on chronic disease. (Froot Loops would still have three teaspoons of sugar per serving, even if the colors may be more muted.) And they’re now asking for more substantive changes to the food supply.
One opportunity for action is the Dietary Guidelines for Americans; the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture are working on an update that is expected to recommend consuming fewer ultraprocessed foods, something many nutrition experts support.
But the truly big swings the administration could take include mandating front-of-pack warning labels, as many other countries have done, or targeting ultraprocessed foods: The F.D.A. could crack down on marketing claims for these foods, start pulling food chemicals already on the market or investigate the food industry more broadly. The Federal Trade Commission could try to restrict junk food marketing to children. The U.S.D.A. could crack down on ultraprocessed foods in school meals and help schools buy more fresh food.
In the past, it would be a safe bet that Republicans in Congress would throw up resistance to these types of policies, often at the behest of the food industry. Now, many Republicans would also have to weigh going up against both the Trump administration and the MAHA moms.
The Trump White House has signaled a deregulatory approach across the board. The F.D.A. commissioner, Marty Makary, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, Mehmet Oz, recently argued in The Wall Street Journal that they can accomplish more through direct negotiations with the food industry, adding that they reserve the right and “remain committed” to using regulatory authority where needed.
What undermines the administration’s credibility on these issues is the damage it has already done to many of the government’s efforts to improve the food system. The U.S.D.A. has slashed more than $1 billion in funding for sourcing healthy, locally grown foods for schools and food banks. The White House proposed deep cuts to fruit and vegetable benefits from WIC, a program that serves low-income pregnant women and young children, which the MAHA commission report flagged as a way to increase produce consumption. The Environmental Protection Agency has moved to relax or delay regulations aimed at keeping contaminants out of our air, water and food.
And Mr. Trump has cut thousands of jobs at the very agencies that work on chronic disease prevention and response. The top nutrition researcher at the National Institutes of Health, who focused on understanding ultraprocessed foods, left the agency, citing censorship. Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, just passed in the reconciliation mega bill roughly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps 42 million Americans buy groceries each month. The bill also eliminated funding for SNAP nutrition education, which includes cooking classes and other programs aimed at promoting healthier eating in low-income communities.
If Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Trump now want to demonstrate they are serious about making Americans healthy, they must lay out a policy agenda that would accomplish that goal — and then use their grass-roots army to get it done.
Helena Bottemiller Evich is the founder and editor in chief of Food Fix, a newsletter about food policy. She has covered food politics in Washington for 15 years. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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