RFK Jr.'s Big Chance to MAHA the American Diet

The Atlantic

6 days ago

Every five years, America's top nutrition experts jockey to be part of a rite of passage in the field. The federal government chooses a small group of researchers to serve on a committee that spends months poring over scientific literature to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between sweetened beverages and risk of type 2 diabetes? And how does eating saturated fat influence a person's chance of heart disease? The end result is something called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. In other words, the government's official nutrition recommendations. The whole process might seem a bit excessive, if not pointless. Presumably, few Americans even know about this document, and even fewer intentionally use it to guide what they eat. But the recommendations touch the diets of tens of millions of Americans, affecting what food is served in schools and in the military. They also influence the food industry. After the dietary guidelines began more explicitly warning about the risks of added sugar, several major food companies committed to reducing added sugar in their products.
Those guidelines are now on the brink of getting MAHA-ed. It just so happens that 2025 marks five years since the last version, so they're now due for an update. Much of the work has already been completed. In December, the Biden administration released the scientific report that is supposed to undergird the guidelines. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since promised to start from scratch and remake the recommendations to match his convictions about how Americans should be eating. Last month, he told Congress that the new dietary guidelines could be released 'before August,' teasing big changes. The current version of the document is 149 pages. The forthcoming update, he said, will stand at just four pages that tell people to 'eat whole food; eat the food that's good for you.'
Beyond that, RFK Jr. hasn't given any more specifics on what his dietary guidelines will include. (An HHS spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.) It's a reasonable bet that RFK Jr. will come after his least-favorite foods, such as seed oils, ultra-processed snacks, and synthetic food dyes. If so, he will pave the way for the MAHA diet to become part of many more people's lives. Kennedy's dietary guidelines could have a much larger impact on what Americans eat than anything else he has done to date.
For all of his big talk about how Americans are eating unhealthy food that's making us sick, RFK Jr. has had only middling success so far at enacting change in his short tenure as health secretary. Take food dyes: Kennedy has tried to rid the food supply of most dyes through a handshake agreement with the food industry. The agreement allows food-company executives to decide for themselves whether and when to phase out these products. But by formally discouraging food dyes in the dietary guidelines, Kennedy could effectively block their use in millions of school lunches. Although the lunch program does not need to follow the guidelines word for word, it must be 'consistent with the goals' of the government's official recommendations.
Even if Kennedy doesn't outright use the dietary guidelines to come for synthetic dyes, or any other MAHA villain, his promise to keep the guidelines to just four pages—essentially a leaflet—would mean trashing much of the existing nutritional advice. Nonetheless, RFK Jr. might be onto something, at least directionally. Consider the 2020 version of the dietary guidelines. I read all 149 pages, and at times, they left me utterly perplexed about what a healthy meal actually looks like. The word guidelines implies simple instructions that a person can actually follow. 'Don't eat Oreos' would be a useful nutrition guideline—one that I, myself, should observe more often. 'Customize and Enjoy Food and Beverage Choices to Reflect Personal Preferences, Cultural Traditions, and Budgetary Considerations' is not. The report advocates, for example, that people meet their 'food group needs with nutrient-dense foods and beverages,' but it struggles to explain exactly what makes a food nutrient-dense. If the concept seems self-explanatory, consider that the guidelines claim that both vegetable oil and sparkling water are nutrient-dense. (They also state that a nutrient-dense burrito bowl would have sliced avocado, but a 'typical burrito bowl' would have guacamole.)
Look, nutrition can be complicated. And this is not to say that the guidelines are entirely useless. They do, for example, outline the amount of vegetables that the average person should eat in a day: Two and a half cups. But clear directives like these are the exception. Part of the issue is that the dietary guidelines are not written for regular people with questions about their diet. In the early 2000s, the guidelines changed from a document explicitly focused on providing everyday people actionable advice to a report whose stated goal, according to the heads of the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services at the time, was 'to be a primary source of dietary health information for policymakers, nutrition educators, and health providers.' But the fact that the document is meant for experts doesn't obviate the need for its overarching message to at least be decipherable to the public.
In Kennedy's telling, the guidelines' increasing complexity over time is the nefarious work of the food industry. Before even being nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy posted a video decrying that 'corporate interests have hijacked' the guidelines. When he promised lawmakers last month to cut the document down to four pages, he also alleged that the guidelines were 'clearly written by industry.' It's true that a sizeable portion of the experts who have served on the advisory panel developing the guidelines have had ties to the food industry. One study found that 19 of the 20 experts on the advisory committee for the 2020 guidelines had conflicts of interest. (It's common for nutrition experts to receive funding from food companies for their research.)
But there's another potential explanation for the bloat plaguing the guidelines. 'I don't think a conspiracy theory is needed here,' Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition at NYU who served on the dietary-guidelines advisory committee in 1995, told me via email. She added that every committee 'thought it had to improve on what was done previously.' Consider the 1980 guidelines, a mere 18 pages in total. By 2000, the size of the document had more than doubled, to 39 pages. By 2010, 95 pages. The growing complexity of the guidelines is all the more perplexing because the government's overarching advice on how to eat healthier hasn't changed that much over the past 35 years. 'They all say the same thing no matter how many pages they use: eat more plant foods; restrict salt, sugar, saturated fat; balance calories,' Nestle said.
One of Kennedy's particular skills is finding messages that get through to people. So many of his views on nutrition seem to have resonated precisely because they are not full of mealy-mouthed verbiage and caveats. It's easier to grasp that seed oils are poisonous than it is to understand the nuances of how the fatty acids in these oils are digested in the body. For Kennedy to actually benefit Americans' health, however, his guidelines still have to reflect reality. (You shouldn't freak out about seed oils.) Going too far in simplifying dietary messages could further degrade the credibility of the guidelines all the same, warned Michael Pollan, the writer who's perhaps the most famous concise food messenger. 'The challenge always is how do you simplify science without distorting it,' he told me.
Kennedy's views of individual ingredients oscillate between commonsense dietary maxims and conspiratorial musings. His views about the risks of added sugar, for example, are far more scientifically founded than his love of beef tallow. That is one of the most troubling elements of Kennedy's tenure as HHS secretary: Especially when it comes to food, he mixes mainstream views with conspiracy theories. No one can predict exactly which of these views he will glom on to from one day to the next—or which will appear in four pages of dietary guidelines.