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Helena
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‘Make America Healthy Again’ hits Capitol Hill
Last week’s newsletter about how former President Donald Trump has recently started adopting “Make America Healthy Again” as part of his platform in an apparent bid to appeal to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters inspired a lot of emails. Some of you were fascinated by this brewing alliance, others were mad at me for covering RFK at all, and, of course, plenty were skeptical that Trump actually cares about any of this.
It’s too soon to tell how this is all going to play out, but Washington insiders in this space, whether they work for public health, industry or anti-hunger advocacy, are watching the RFK factor closely. It’s not just that the Republican presidential candidate has a new tagline – referred to as MAHA or #MAHA on social media – some Republicans on Capitol Hill are all of the sudden being more vocal about the urgent need for Americans to be healthier. This is new.
The House Ways and Means Committee’s health subcommittee this week held a hearing titled “Investing in a Healthier America: Chronic Disease Prevention and Treatment,” which raised alarm bells about diet-related diseases and was very critical of the food industry and ultra-processed foods. That the hearing happened at all was notable: Ways and Means is a powerful committee that oversees tax policy and I can’t think of another time the panel has taken an interest in diet-related diseases. That said, it makes sense that there would be an interest because the committee also has jurisdiction over Medicare, which is becoming more expensive with the rise of preventable chronic diseases.
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), who serves as vice chairman of Ways and Means, and chairman of the health subcommittee, said he has a personal interest in the issue after having reformed his own diet. Buchanan and Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) launched a bipartisan Congressional Preventive Health and Wellness Caucus earlier this year to focus on these issues.
“For the sake of ourselves, our children and our communities, we must do better,” Buchanan said during his opening remarks, noting that more than 40 percent of American adults and 20 percent of American children now have obesity. Buchanan argued diet-related diseases have not only driven up health care spending but also now threaten military readiness and national security. The experts testifying at the hearing agreed.
“This is a national emergency, and it demands a national, bold response,” said Mark Hyman, a physician and best-selling diet-book author, who founded the Food Fix Campaign (no relation to this publication), promoting food as medicine and regenerative agriculture.
Also testifying: Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician; Anne Peters, a physician and senior scholar at the USC Schaeffer Institute; Francesca Rinaldo, a physician and chief clinical innovation officer at the Senior Care Action Network (SCAN) Health Plan; and Ashley Gearhardt, professor of psychology specializing in food addiction at the University of Michigan.
It was one of those rare hearings where you could not tell – at all – whether someone was a Democrat or Republican based on their comments. Lawmakers who attended expressed serious concerns about diet quality, spiraling rates of diabetes and obesity, asked what needed to be done, and seemed pretty free of any food industry talking points.
“I felt like we were all in lockstep, which felt like kind of an out-of-body experience,” Gearhardt told me this week. Gearhardt was the Democratic witness for the hearing, but the panel was in such agreement it was impossible to figure out which expert had been invited by Republicans vs. Democrats. Usually when I cover congressional hearings, I can tell which side invited each witness, I can guess which industry group submitted questions read by a lawmaker – it’s all predictable political theater. This hearing was different.
Food industry response: The Consumer Brands Association (CBA), which represents many of the nation’s largest food makers, responded to the subcommittee hearing: “Keeping consumers and their families safe is the number one priority for the consumer packaged goods industry,” said Sarah Gallo, senior vice president of product policy and federal affairs at CBA, in a statement. “We make the products consumers choose and the brands they trust — which is why we do not look to politicians pushing ideologies for guidance on the health and safety of the food supply.”
Gallo noted that U.S. federal regulatory agencies “operate under a science and risk-based mandate.”
“Attempting to classify foods as unhealthy simply because they are processed, or demonizing food by ignoring its full nutrient content, misleads consumers and exacerbates health disparities,” Gallo added.
More MAHA next week: On Monday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is hosting a roundtable discussion in the Senate on health and nutrition about the state of affairs. The lineup for the gathering includes RFK, Jr. as well as many prominent food and wellness influencers, including Calley Means, who has played a key role in connecting the Trump and RFK worlds on these issues, fitness celebrity Jillian Michaels, Vani Hari (better known as Food Babe), best selling author Max Lugavere, Chris Palmer of Harvard, and Jason Karp, founder and CEO of HumanCo.
Make way for RFK: While we’re here, Kennedy, who has been named to Trump’s transition team, an entity with a lot of power over personnel and policy in a new administration, suggested this week he expects to help choose who is appointed across key public health agencies if Trump wins in November.
“President Trump has asked me specifically to do two things,” Kennedy told Tucker Carlson during a live event Wednesday. “One, to help unravel the capture of the agencies by corrupt influence. In other words, to drain the swamp…And he’s asked me to help him end the childhood disease, chronic disease epidemic – and make Americans healthy again,” Kennedy said, to loud applause.
Carlson then asked him to explain how he would do that. “That’s unclear,” Kennedy said, noting he didn’t “have a post for myself that’s picked out,” but added: “I know that I’m going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run FDA and NIH and CDC in a way that restores public health.”
“I’ll bring in people to run those agencies like Calley Means, like Casey Means,” Kennedy said, referring to siblings who are the co-founders of Truemed and Levels, respectively, and co-authors of “Good Energy,” a New York Times best-selling book about metabolic health.
Carlson laughed: “They have nightmares about that!” Kennedy replied: “And they should.”
In other health news: The Washington Post has a story out this week about how the tobacco industry has thrown a lot of money behind Trump.
“Big Tobacco’s bet on Trump shows how corporate interests believe the former president can be swayed by campaign donations — and brought into line even on issues where he has shown some independence from GOP orthodoxy, said former U.S. officials and industry lobbyists,” write Isaac Stanley-Becker, Dan Diamond and Josh Dawsey.
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What I’m reading
Fetterman praises free school meals, but action unlikely this year (The Hagstrom Report). “Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the chairman of the Senate Agriculture Food and Nutrition, Specialty Crops, Organics and Research Subcommittee, gave a strong endorsement to universal free school meals on Wednesday, but acknowledged that it’s unlikely that Congress will act this year to make school meals free nationwide,” reports Jerry Hagstrom. “Fetterman focused the hearing on universal free school meals, saying, ‘It should be simple. School lunch should always be free — and definitely free from judgment. Honestly this shouldn’t even be a conversation. It’d be like asking kids to pay for the school bus every morning.’ Fetterman also pointed out that the universal free school meals eliminates the problem of school lunch debt, which occurs when students do not pay for lunch, but the school system allows them to eat.” (Catch the hearing here.)
Lawmakers demand an end to ‘sham’ transaction fees that are adding to the cost of school lunches (NBC News). “A group of senators has demanded that U.S. officials prohibit transaction fees on school meal accounts, arguing that the companies that process students’ lunch payments are unnecessarily raising costs for families,” reports Elizabeth Chuck. “In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sent Wednesday evening, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and seven other senators urged immediate action from the Agriculture Department, which administers the program that serves billions of meals to students nationally each year. While the meals are low-cost (or free in some cases), families are often hit with “exorbitant” fees from private payment processors when they deposit money into their children’s accounts, the letter said.”
The hidden environmental costs of food (New York Times). “As pricey as a run to the grocery store has become, our grocery bills would be considerably more expensive if environmental costs were included, researchers say. The loss of species as cropland takes over habitat. Groundwater depletion. Greenhouse gases from manure and farm equipment,” write Lydia DePillis, Manuela Andreoni and Catrin Einhorn. “For years, economists have been developing a system of ‘true cost accounting’ based on a growing body of evidence about the environmental damage caused by different types of agriculture. Now, emerging research aims to translate this damage to the planet into dollar figures.”
Booker introduces bill to eliminate toxics from school lunches and expand support for regenerative farmers (Senate). Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced the Safe School Meals Act, which aims to “protect children from harmful toxics in school meals. The bill would place limits on heavy metals, ban certain pesticide residues, trigger the safety reassessment of food additives including artificial food dyes that have been linked with health harms, and ban the use of PFAS, phthalates, and bisphenols in school meal food packaging. The bill would increase the funding available for schools to purchase safe school meals.”
Ultra-processed foods: Five policy ideas that could protect health (Harvard). “Jerold Mande, adjunct professor of nutrition, offered his thoughts on policies around ultra-processed foods, which now make up about 70% of the items in grocery stores, from hot dogs to breakfast cereals to snacks to packaged bread. Consumption of ultra-processed foods has been linked to a number of physical and mental health issues and early death.”
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