I read the MAHA report on making children healthy again so you don't have to

Spoiler alert: none of their proposed strategies will actually make children healthier

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i think this is what MAHA envisions when they imagine "healthy kids" but health is so much more than what we eat

I was once a crunchy mom. I lived in a very hippie town where I shopped at the local food coop and taught yoga as my full time job. When I was pregnant with my first child, I watched the Business of Being Born and decided to have a home birth. After she was born, I was determined to breastfeed and did for 2 years, despite serious challenges early on. I was vaguely worried about the childhood vaccine schedule and considered doing them at a slower pace, in part because I knew so many moms in my local community who did that and their concerns felt rational to me at the time.

One of my strongest beliefs was that I was entirely responsible for my children’s health. This was something not only communicated to me in the various circles I moved through, but also by several pediatricians over the course of my early years as a mom.

While it didn’t ultimately result in me not vaccinating my kids, it did mean that I thought that if I fed them “the right things” and bought the right products and avoided all of the toxins that I could keep them healthy.

It took me years to realize this isn’t entirely true.

Genetics, environmental conditions, financial stability, access to affordable health care, quality education, and so many other factors, known as social determinants of health, will often play a significant role in whether kids are healthy or not. Often more so than whether a child eats non-organic blueberries or consumes food with seed oils.

On September 9th, RFK Jr released his plan to “make our children healthy again.” In a 73 page report that gave me a mild headache to read through, the document makes bold assertions about the state of health in this country. The 20 page strategy report offers various plans for “ending Federal practices that exacerbate the health crisis or unsuccessfully attempt to address it, and adding powerful new solutions that will end childhood chronic disease”, as well as the goal of promoting healthy outcomes for children and families.

There is no mention of these social determinants of health and no clear strategy to help kids who have less privilege, access, or resources.

Both documents contain a wide array of issues facing kids these days – everything from screentime to chemical exposure to poor nutrition to farming practices to lack of physical activity.

The report insists that kids are sicker these days than ever before, with over 40% of children (0-17), having at least one chronic health condition including asthma, allergies, obesity, autoimmune diseases, or behavioral disorders. The real issue that the authors of this report have is that children with these conditions are “posing a threat to our nation’s health, economy, and military readiness.“ Apparently, only 23% of American youth, ages 17-24, are eligible for military service.

What they’re telling you at the start of this report is not that they care about children being healthy because they have a right to good health, but that sick people drag down the economy and can’t sacrifice themselves for their country.

Nice.

But what really stands out for me are 4 things:

First, the idea of good nutrition vs poor nutrition takes center stage, which indicates the level of importance the authors place on food as medicine – as opposed to actual medicine as medicine.

Second, RFK Jr’s values in regard to the environment don’t line up with the corporate interests of this administration.

Third, tackling chronic illness, without addressing the social determinants of health, will only help a small subset of the American population and will leave most of the rest behind.

Fourth, while the report and the strategy mentions the impact of stress on chronic illness, their implied reasons for what creates stress in kids are divorced from the reality of what actually creates stress in kids.

*****

The featured player in the report and the strategy is the idea that poor nutrition is at the heart of chronic illness. Kids are eating too much processed food and it’s making them fat, sick, and anxious. Among the strategies to improve this problem are removing petroleum based dyes, restricting the purchase of junk food for those who use SNAP, “MAHA boxes” which would deliver fresh food to people who use SNAP, implementing “food as health” programs as well as studying the impact of food/lifestyle interventions on overall health outcomes, updating dietary guidelines for children, and more clearly defining the term “ultraprocessed food.”

Some of it sounds fine, but if you look a little more closely, none of it addresses the real issue around nutrition for kids, which is food insecurity. 13 million children face food insecurity or inconsistent access to food of any kind (not just “the right kind”). Feeding America refers to several causes of food insecurity including low wage jobs, high cost of living, community factors (like lack of access to transportation or under-resourced schools), dealing with disability or chronic illness combined with limited access to health care, and systemic barriers to opportunity based on race and poverty or both.

There is no mention of any of this in the report and no strategies offered to help implement more funding for programs that would help kids access any food, much less “nutritional food.”

In fact, here are some of the things this administration has already done to make it harder for people who are poor to access food:

200 billion cut from SNAP

Eliminated the USDA’s farm to school and food bank programs, which provided fresh local food to communities AND supported local small farms

Closed the food assistance hotline which provided support and meals to over 200k people

Defunded SNAP-ed which offered nutrition information and education to low income families

They’ve also proposed cutting 1.3 billion from WIC, which provides fruit and vegetable benefits to children and pregnant women — in the report they even mention how important WIC is for children and pregnant women, without also mentioning they’d like to cut it’s budget.

Additionally, the administration refuses to create a nationwide free lunch program, which would help feed millions of kids, poor and wealthy alike. My own kids benefit from free school lunch programs in their schools. And while we could afford to send them to school with homemade lunches, it makes my life easier to know that there is one meal every day that I don’t have to worry about.

That leads to another point about these nutrition initiatives, which is the expectation that someone will be able to use the fresh ingredients in the MAHA food boxes to prepare home cooked meals every night. Think for a moment about the families who rely on SNAP. Are these likely to be people who have lots of free time and the ability to easily make a home cooked meal every night for dinner? The expectation is that a good mom will always make time to make delicious home cooked meals but the ability to actually cook those meals is a privilege not everyone has. And yet, the expectation remains.

MAHA would likely say that moms shouldn’t be working but staying home to care for their kids to which my response is, “Really? In this economy?”

Here’s a quick story about feeding kids: When my 2 older children were 10 and 7, they were diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency. Their bodies don’t naturally produce enough hormones required to help their bodies grow. They now take weekly injections to help stimulate growth and help ensure that they not only grow taller but that their bones and organs grow appropriately.

Getting their diagnoses was a relief after years of thinking that I had somehow failed them by not getting them to eat enough food or the right food — even though I worked really hard to make meals from scratch using the type of fresh ingredients this report would want me to use.

In truth, there was no amount of organic yogurt or fresh vegetables that would have improved their growth.

Sometimes food isn’t medicine.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that kids can survive on a steady diet of skittles and chicken nuggets. Nutrition is important. And, feeding kids store bought mac n cheese isn’t going to give them asthma and letting kids have soda isn’t going to automatically give them diabetes.

While I recognize that there is a huge difference between growth hormone deficiency and a chronic illness like diabetes or asthma, one of the things that remains the same in the MAHA movement is the idea that what we feed our kids can help prevent these conditions. That’s simply not the case.

To say otherwise is irresponsible.

*****

The report also highlights the idea that kids are exposed to toxic chemicals which cause chronic illness, primarily from pollutants in the air, water, and soil, as well as in some of the foods they eat.

Poor air quality and unsafe drinking water are things that really do impact kids when it comes to health and they are elements that are frequently out of their parents control (aka social determinants of health).

These issues are ones that RFK Jr is known for and long celebrated by MAHA moms for championing. These are issues I personally care about, even though I am not a MAHA mom. I very much want to believe that these concerns will be addressed.

Spoiler alert: they won’t.

Brooke Rollins, head of the US Department of Agriculture, has said that she won’t promote anything that will compromise farmers ability to produce food and that pesticides are safe, citing scientific studies proving her claim while also suggesting that eliminating pesticides would cause large scale starvation. “We can’t produce the food we need to and feed the people we need to with a wholesale 180-degree turn” she said recently in an interview with Breitbart (I read the article on the Daily Caller and yes I feel gross about it). In that same interview, she adds that RFK Jr is meeting with farmers and learning about the importance of pesticides, which is sure to make his crunchy mom base super happy.

In regard to air, soil, and water pollution, the strategy report simply suggests they’ll keep monitoring the situation by testing the air, soil, and water. So….basically they’re doing nothing.

Here’s what they’ve done instead so far:

Rolled back PFAS protections, which will make drinking water potentially less safe.

Ended research into PFAS farmland contamination.

Reduced protections for cleaner air by making it easier for corporations to bypass Clean Air Act rules regarding toxic emissions for mercury and arsenic, as well as other airborne pollutants.

They closed the Division of Environmental Health which monitored lead, water safety, and childhood asthma.

According to an article in the Guardian, Trump rolled back 145 environmental protections in the first 100 days of his second term alone.

“Through executive orders, agency memos and other policy moves, the Trump administration has deleted a swath of Joe Biden-era green policies, frozen climate spending, removed the US from the Paris climate accords and set about rewriting pollution standards for cars, trucks and power plants.

Sprawling tracts of land, including in the Arctic, have been earmarked for new oil and gas drilling, commercial fishing will be ushered into ocean sanctuaries and half of the US’s vast expanse of national forests can now be cut down for timber. Laws to prevent harm to endangered species are set to be drastically pared back, while protected national monuments are on course to be shrunk.”

Asthma, one of the chronic illnesses the MAHA report indicates is plaguing children, is directly linked to pollution. But this administration has no plans to decrease pollutants in the air and instead are caving to corporations that don’t want to change their practices.

If this administration cared about chronic health, addressing pollutants and pesticides would be high on their list.

*****

I keep talking about social determinants of health because ignoring them is a classic MAHA move. According to MAHA moms and their fearless leader, RFK Jr, individuals are responsible for their health. Family history of illness and genetics can be overcome by a good diet. Chronic illness can be tackled with probiotics and healing your gut microbiome. Things like systemic oppression and generational poverty are woke propaganda and no excuse for poor health.

One MAHA food influencer actually blamed the existence of food deserts on an over reliance on ultra processed foods, which is both tone deaf and uneducated. It’s also proof that she’s never lived in one.

And while I’m not opposed to the idea of people having more access to fresh fruits and veggies or eliminating food deserts, neither of those things will make a dent in creating healthier outcomes for children because most of these changes require parents to do the heavy lifting and for children to comply.

That’s why it’s easier to blame parents for feeding their children “bad food” instead of suggesting that the government has bad policies that do harm to children. I wrote why this is the case in a previous piece about RFK Jr:

“When the person who is in charge of Health and Human Services suggests that your greatest defense against an infectious and deadly illness is how you feed your children, they set a standard indicating that if something terrible happens and your child gets very sick, you can’t blame the government. You only have yourself to blame.
That doesn’t benefit moms. That doesn’t benefit families. That certainly doesn’t benefit children.
The only entity that benefits is the federal government.”

This is especially the case when it comes to stress and the factors that cause stress in children. No child is worried about the amount of red dye they are consuming. But most kids are worried about fitting in, making friends, feeling welcome and safe at school, getting good grades, getting bullied, and trying not to get in trouble.

In fairness, these are pretty normal kid things to worry about. They’re things I worried about when I was in school.

But some of the things my kids have to contend with are not normal but have become normalized, like the frequency of school shootings and regular lockdown drills to practice staying safe if someone enters their school with a loaded weapon.

My kids have grown up in a time when school shootings are expected. As a parent, it is a terrifying thing to send your kids to school and hope that today is not the day someone will unleash violence.

This fear impacts teachers, who are required to lock classroom doors during a drill or real event, even if a child is out in the bathroom, stranding them alone and unprotected.

This fear impacts students, who have witnessed year after year how the government refuses to protect them by enacting even the most basic, common sense, and life saving gun control laws.

And yet, no mention in the report of how this trauma of repeated school shootings might impact kids' stress levels. Weird.

There is commentary on the rise of depression, particularly among young girls. No mention of how social media and AI might be influencing those things. How girls (and women) on social media are frequently trolled for how their faces or bodies look. How influencers use filters to change the way their body appears visually, creating an unrealistic ideal for what female bodies should look like. How none of these things are regulated and how the people who harass girls online are rarely, if ever, punished for it.

The report does note that “Teens using social media over 3 hours daily face double the risk of anxiety and depression, with a 2022 meta-analysis showing each additional hour increases depression risk by 13%, and girls face nearly four times the risk of boys.” But in the strategy report there are no actual suggestions for making social media safer for girls, just a vague idea to create more awareness around screen use and to get schools to use screens less — neither of which will help girls who are being harassed and bullied, or are simply feeling inadequate based on the images they are consuming online and elsewhere.

What feels important to note is that kids aren’t depressed because they’re on social media. They’re depressed because of how social media functions and what they’re served by the algorithm.

Kids are also anxious because the world is on fire and they’re not idiots. They’re afraid for their future. For the planet they are inheriting. They’re frustrated because adults don’t always listen to them and frequently dismiss their concerns.

*****

Here’s what I understood after reading through the 73 pages of the report and the 20 pages of the strategy report:

The Trump administration is unwilling to take responsibility for the many ways their policies and actions are the very things hurting children.

The strategies they suggest are inadequate for solving the very real health-related issues that currently face kids and their families.

Are there topics the report addresses that I am concerned about? Absolutely! I’d love for the government to implement more measures to protect and clean the air, water, and soil. But they’re not going to do that. It conflicts with their corporate interests.

I’d love for the government to help postpartum moms breastfeed, if they want to and are able, but that requires paid postpartum leave for at least 6 months if not an entire year, and I am certain this administration wouldn’t even consider that. They’d rather moms just stay home and raise their kids instead of working.

I’d love for small farms to work with local schools to provide fresh ingredients for school lunches, but that program was killed by this administration and they have no plan to create something similar.

I’d love for them to address the issue of microplastics and hope they do, but my expectations are low.

The problem is that the entire report is about deregulation. As a simple example, they want to make it easier for small dairy farms to sell their own milk (they mean raw milk, by the way). But all of the deregulation simply paves the way for large corporations to bypass environmental laws and AI platforms to continue to offer dangerous, potentially fatal advice to kids.

The report and the people who wrote it are focused on the wrong things — fluoride and ultra processed foods and vaccine injuries and getting full fat milk in schools and re-establishing the Presidential Fitness Test — as methods for improving health, when what kids really need are basic safety in their schools, clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, health care that doesn’t bankrupt their parents, and safe spaces online.

If the government actually cared about healthy kids and reducing chronic illness in children, they’d focus on eliminating some of the barriers that kids and their families have little control over — those pesky social determinants of health — like addressing inflation and the minimum wage, ensuring that all Americans have access to high quality, highly affordable health care, access to clean water and less polluted air, and access to food without restriction.

They’d be more interested in ensuring that kids get free lunch than punishing kids for eating pop tarts.

And they’d stop putting all of the stress of feeding children and keeping kids safe, as well as healthy, on their parents who tend to need more support, not more pressure.

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