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Helena
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Trump administration signals ‘Eat real food’ policy blitz ahead
The Trump administration is planning a flurry of events and regulations over the coming weeks and months in line with its new mantra: “Eat real food.”
We got a taste of this on Wednesday, as reporters, MAHA backers and plenty of lobbyists gathered in the main hall at HHS headquarters in Washington for another campaign-style rally. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins were joined by Mike Tyson to promote the recent MAHA Center-funded Super Bowl ad featuring the boxing icon.
“We didn’t make a commercial for the Super Bowl,” said Peter Arnell, a prominent designer and branding expert who helped direct the ad. “We started a movement.”
Arnell, whose past clients have included PepsiCo and Unilever, said he had struggled with obesity for decades and personally believes in the message. “The truth is simple: Real food changes lives for the better,” he said.
The HHS event was heavy on messaging: Kennedy and Rollins were flanked by posters of themselves sporting Tyson’s famous face tattoo. Joe Gebbia, the billionaire co-founder of Airbnb who now serves as chief design officer for the Trump administration, said he was hoping to help re-set Americans’ relationship to food with the new dietary guidelines revamp and design refresh.
On that note, HHS is planning to roll out a new rule in the coming weeks directing schools to adopt the new dietary guidelines materials into nutrition education across U.S. public schools.
Kennedy this morning posted a new PSA on X featuring Tyson slapping a donut out of a man’s hand: “Processed food kills! Remember that!”
Policy pipeline: Government messaging matters, of course, but it was the numerous references to policy coming down the pike that caught my attention this week. Over the past several months, I’ve repeatedly noted that there’s been a huge gap between the administration’s rhetoric on food and its policy actions.
As just one example: Kennedy has repeatedly argued that consumers are being poisoned by ultra-processed foods, yet his FDA has banned nothing in the past year. The agency did announce this week that it’s re-assessing the safety of BHA, a common food preservative – but health advocates were quick to point out that the agency could have been more aggressive by instead approving a petition to ban BHA that’s been pending for more than 35 years. (Yes, you read that right: 35 years.)
Kennedy has encouraged states to ban synthetic food dyes and more – and some have – but the food industry is increasingly fighting back in the courts. Industry groups scored a major win on Thursday when a judge blocked Texas’ new law to mandate warning labels for foods containing a long list of additives, ruling that the law was likely unconstitutional. West Virginia’s 2028 ban on synthetic food dyes is also hitting hurdles in court.
Calley Means, a White House advisor and key Kennedy ally, told reporters after the event on Wednesday that the Trump administration is planning a suite of regulatory changes to go alongside its “Eat real food” messaging blitz.
“There’s going to be a flurry of regulations this year and we’re very excited about it,” Means said, noting that the new dietary guidelines were going to be implemented across schools, the military and prisons.
Lunch money: The USDA is working to update school nutrition standards so they align with the new dietary guidelines. Secretary Rollins said Wednesday a proposed rule would be out by mid-Spring – a remarkably quick turnaround for the federal government.
This could be a massive change. The guidelines say to avoid highly processed foods, which currently make up the majority of what’s served in federal school meal programs.
We currently spend nearly $25 billion per year on school nutrition programs that serve some 30 million children.
In a scrum with reporters after the event, Means contended that spending billions of taxpayer dollars to buy ultra-processed foods made little sense, whether for schools, SNAP households or the military.
Means argued that the current setup has “shifted worldwide agriculture markets against farmers and [in favor of] junk food companies.”
“The lobbyists come into the White House and they argue school lunch money and military money is their entitlement, and they argue that it’s going to hurt jobs for the junk food industry if we do not subsidize their products, like Doritos, with school lunch money,” Means said. “We do not have an obligation, as the federal government, to subsidize Doritos or soda for kids and that is a very profound, important, market-moving point that we’re making.”
(Note: PepsiCo makes a special version of reduced fat Doritos without synthetic dyes to sell into schools. Full sugar sodas were pulled from schools long ago over concerns about childhood obesity, but I think Means was referring to soda’s inclusion in SNAP benefits.)
FDA agenda: The FDA is also expected to move forward with increasing oversight of food additives by reforming the generally recognized as safe (GRAS) system. As I reported earlier this week, Kennedy is slated to appear on 60 Minutes on Sunday to discuss GRAS. We still don’t know if this appearance is to announce a proposed rule to bolster GRAS oversight or to respond to a petition by former FDA Commissioner David Kessler seeking to ban “processed refined carbohydrates” – a proposal that presents an existential threat to most ultra-processed foods on the market.
The fact that any of this is on the table in a GOP administration, which typically frowns on regulation, is notable. But MAHA is adopting a much more populist, anti-corporate strain here. Kennedy and others are arguing that the government has been incentivizing the wrong things: They tend to skip over farm subsidies (too politically toxic) but instead focus on what foods are purchased directly with taxpayer dollars.
The politics on all of this has radically shifted. Now, we’re about to see the extent to which policy change can follow.
EPA island: Amid all this activity on the nutrition side, a more traditional deregulatory stance has taken hold over at the EPA, which just re-approved controversial herbicide Dicamba. That decision has grassroots MAHA leaders furious.
“Not a single thing has been done to reduce our children’s exposure to pesticides,” said Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America and a key leader within the MAHA movement, in a Facebook live post after the Dicamba decision. “Not a single ban. Not a single restriction… We’re pissed.”
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What I’m reading
RFK Jr. shakes up leadership team (Politico). “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is remaking his leadership team, putting Director of Medicare Chris Klomp in charge of overseeing all HHS operations, he announced in an email to staff Thursday,” report Shawn Zeller and Tim Röhn. “Kennedy said he was also making Kyle Diamantas, deputy commissioner for human foods at the Food and Drug Administration, a senior FDA counselor, along with Grace Graham, the agency’s deputy commissioner for policy, legislation and international affairs.”
RFK Jr. ally says GOP risks losing his supporters (Politico). “Tony Lyons, a top ally of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and principle architect of his Make America Healthy Again coalition, has a message for Republicans ahead of the midterms: Don’t take Kennedy’s followers for granted,” Cheyenne Haslett writes. “In a new memo obtained by POLITICO, Lyons described the Republican Party as ‘renting MAHA voters’ but not fully committed to ‘purchase.’ Lyons told the officials running the party’s national, Senate and House campaign arms, as well as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson, that needed to change. ‘We need to convince every Republican to buy into the MAHA movement, just like Trump has,’ he wrote in a late Wednesday memo.”
I joined a MAHA roundtable. What I heard surprised me. (Washington Post). “In recent years, I have grown increasingly concerned that public health has become too siloed, too dogmatic and too uncomfortable communicating uncertainty,” writes Chethan Sathya, a pediatric surgeon and public health researcher. “It was with that in mind that I took part last month in a Make America Healthy Again Institute roundtable on rebuilding public trust and the future of the National Institutes of Health. … I want to be clear about my posture going in: I am not ideologically aligned with many who were in that room. As an immigrant physician and scientist, I worry that national funding cuts and policies that make this country less welcoming will deter the next generation of lifesaving talent and leadership from coming to the United States. I understand why many of my colleagues feel frustrated or concerned. But rather than avoiding the conversation, I decided to lean in. … What I heard at the event was more complex and constructive than much public discourse would suggest. There was a clear appetite for action, for questioning the status quo and for improving systems without dismissing what’s working.”
We tested the government’s official new AI nutrition tool: Grok (STAT). “How trustworthy is the new U.S. food pyramid? It’s a mixed bag, according to the government website devoted to that pyramid,” Sarah Todd writes. “Kyle Diamantas, head of the Human Foods Program at the Food and Drug Administration, alerted the public this week to a generative artificial intelligence tool added to the government’s ‘transformational’ realfood.gov site. … It turns out that the click of a button leads users to Grok – the generative chatbot that’s part of the X social media platform owned by former Trump administration adviser Elon Musk. Asked if the new food pyramid is backed by high-quality research, Grok responds: ‘Many nutrition scientists and organizations have raised concerns about the evidence quality and process for the final version.’ … That’s a pretty accurate summary of the nutrition community’s response to the new guidelines and pyramid, which features a prominent rib-eye steak and stick of butter along with less controversial items like broccoli, salmon, and olive oil. But in general, researchers are wary of the risks of turning to AI for nutrition advice.”
Over 70% of baby food found in grocery stores contains ‘highly processed ingredients and additives, new study finds (People). “A majority of baby food products sold in the U.S. are ‘ultra-processed,’ according to a new study,” reports Kimberlee Speakman. “The study, published on Wednesday, Feb. 11, in the scientific journal Nutrients, revealed that 71% of grocery store baby food products in the top grocery stores in the U.S. were made from ‘highly processed ingredients and additives,’ according to a news release from The George Institute for Global Health. ‘Infancy is a critical time for shaping lifelong eating habits – introducing babies to foods that are overly sweet, salty and packed with additives can set the stage for unhealthy preferences that last beyond childhood,’ said study author Elizabeth Dunford in a statement.”
Colostrum supplement sales are booming, but the science is thin (Bloomberg). “Celebrities are known to take questionable measures to maintain their exceptional hotness. … The latest celebrity-backed beauty secret, though, is a product anyone can buy off the web or at a Target: powderized cow colostrum from the brand Armra,” writes Deena Shanker. “If you’ve ever breastfed a child, you probably just did a double take: They’re drinking what?! Colostrum is the first milk from a breastfeeding mammal, also known by human mothers as the first important thing to deliver to your newborn infant. … Armra’s website says more than 5,000 studies show colostrum’s benefits, and it lists about 60. But many of them are small or rely on trials done with animals rather than humans; some are funded by colostrum manufacturers or the dairy industry; and at least 10 don’t even mention colostrum and instead are more broadly about the gut.”
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