MAHA could break the logjam holding back badly needed change, but the challenges are significant
The first Make America Healthy Again Commission report came out May 22. It focuses on four drivers undermining children’s health: poor food quality, chemical exposures, lack of exercise and novel stressors (especially screen time), and excessive reliance on medications, including vaccines.
The report is hard hitting. Disturbing statistics abound: 90 percent of healthcare costs are driven by chronic diseases with roots in food quality and dietary choices; 70 percent of the calories consumed by kids come from ultraprocessed food; 80 percent of obese teens will remain obese through adulthood; teens average almost nine hours on non-school screen time per day; and 75 percent of American youth are unfit for military service.
But in the report’s discussion of pesticides, it pulls as many punches as it lands. The degree of waffling over the adverse impacts of pesticides on farmer and public health stands out in stark contrast to other sections in the report.
“The American food system is safe but could be healthier.” Really? The science supporting the need to reduce a range of chemical and pathogen food-safety risks is as strong, or indeed stronger, than the science supporting the near-universal condemnation of ultraprocessed foods. Plus, people are free to choose and can avoid ultraprocessed foods, but not hidden pesticides, pathogens, food additives and heavy metals in food.
In discussing children’s exposures to chemicals, including pesticides, the report states that exposure “…may affect children’s health…”, undercutting the findings of hundreds of published studies.
The report meekly acknowledges that “Some studies have raised concerns about possible risks…”, rather than saying what sound science shows — that many studies have reported clear and compelling linkages between chemical exposures, reproductive problems, and adverse birth and developmental outcomes.
A chorus of aggies “furiously” lobbied the MAHA Commission to lay off pesticides, according to Politico’s Morning Agriculture (May 27), and urged the Commission to “tone down rhetoric that targets the use of pesticides.” And “that pressure paid off to some extent…”, Politico reports. And why on earth is paraquat’s clearly established role in triggering Parkinson’s disease not even mentioned?
Was this omission a trade-deal peace offering to the Chinese Communist party, a major shareholder in ChemChina? This Chinese government-controlled enterprise owns Syngenta, the major manufacturer of paraquat that is on the hook for billions in paraquat-Parkinson’s disease liability risk.
The Real Test Is Coming in August
The commission owes the president a detailed plan in August on how it is going to implement MAHA, with special focus on children. Conventional ag anxiety will no doubt persist and will lead to several preemptive strikes. Come judgment day for the commission, it remains to be seen whether Trump II will take meaningful steps to enhance food nutritional quality and reduce farmer reliance on chemicals undermining children’s health.
There are many concrete actions the administration could take if it is serious about addressing the deeply troubling decline in children’s and teenager health. Items on this “low-hanging fruit” list can be done largely by executive orders and agency actions. Most are not just legal but are arguably called for under existing law. None will cost much taxpayer money, especially compared to the likely significant, long-term reductions in healthcare costs.
Plus, these policy changes can be implemented in ways that won’t impose an unfair burden on anyone, including farmers. But the impacted companies, and their many surrogates in farm groups and academia, will flood the zone with mountains of mythology about the lack of sound science, farm profits, and feeding the world.
Defining and Quantifying Food Nutritional Quality
To MAHA, the single most important challenge is development and adoption of a science-heavy, data-driven method to differentiate between healthy, less healthy, and not healthy food products. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must crack this nut.
Such a metric was proposed to the FDA in comments solicited in 2022 by the FDA as part of the agency’s still-ongoing “healthy” food rulemaking. Comments from the Heartland Health Research Alliance (HHRA) were among thousands submitted to the FDA. HHRA described the type of nutrient-density metric the FDA needs to adopt in order to motivate food companies to make ultraprocessed foods healthier. The metric is part of a novel food-labeling system called NuCal. Applications and advantages of a system like NuCal are further explained in a 2025 paper in the journal Foods.
The NuCal metric is easy to understand. It is calculated for a single serving of specific foods and can be applied to foods with multiple ingredients. It is a ratio: the percent of a person’s essential daily nutrient needs satisfied by a serving of food, relative to (i.e., divided by) the percent of caloric space taken up by the serving of food in a person’s daily diet.
Highly nutritious foods like leafy greens and berries deliver four times or more the percent of daily nutrient needs compared to the caloric space they take up, leading to a NuCal score of 4 or more. Servings of many ultraprocessed foods take up 10 times or more caloric space compared to the percent of nutrient needs satisfied. Indeed, a significant share of ultraprocessed foods deliver very meager or no essential nutrients, despite prodigious calories per serving, and have NuCal values less than 0.1.
Many details have to be worked out to calculate NuCal values across the ~50,000 items in most grocery stores, but how such details are addressed will not turn a sugary soda, candy bar, or Starbucks caramel macchiota into a nutritious food. Whatever metric the FDA ultimately adopts, what is essential is that it does not obscure just how nutritious whole or lightly processed fruits, vegetables and grains are, especially compared to junk food containing high levels of added sugar, salt and/or fat.
Using such a metric, the FDA can classify foods based on their nutritional quality per serving relative to caloric content. Such a system is needed ASAP because key changes in policy cannot move forward until there is a data-driven, accepted way to accurately and fairly characterize the nutritional quality of different foods. Then, federal funding allocated through SNAP, WIC, the school lunch program, and other programs can be targeted toward healthy foods and can cut off, or strictly limit, unhealthy foods. Likewise, the government can and should also encourage consumption of whole organic milk and dairy products among American youth, preferably from grassfed cows, because of vastly improved nutrient density and fatty acid profiles compared to sugar-laden, flavored skim and 2 percent milk beverages.
The same food classification system will also advance the effectiveness of evolving food-as-medicine programs that utilize fruit, vegetable and whole-food prescriptions as part of reimbursable healthcare programs.
Done right, this system will almost certainly move market share and motivate food companies to alter recipes and processing methods to improve the nutritional quality scores of their brand-name products — benefiting everyone and the nation.
But yes, there are many reasons to question whether this administration, or any administration, will be willing and able to buck the backlash from the food industry, commodity groups, and their surrogates in government and academia. Long-term success will depend on a sea change — healthy food must become the most profitable food for farmers to grow and manufacturers to sell. Absent such a transformation, the American people will remain the biggest losers.
Five Recommendations for MAHA
Given the focus on children’s health, the first priority should be a no-brainer — the government should do everything possible to shift 100 percent of baby food to organic raw ingredients in order to drive pesticide dietary risks to nearly zero.
A second priority is also clear: the EPA should take the steps needed to assure crop year 2025 is the last one during which wheat, oats, barley, edible beans and other important, nutritious human food crops are sprayed soon before harvest with a glyphosate-based herbicide or paraquat — and, even better, sprayed preharvest with any pesticide.
Preharvest crop-desiccation applications lessen the chance fall rains will delay harvest, leading to reduced yields and/or impaired crop quality. Such applications account for a very small share of overall glyphosate-based herbicide and paraquat use, yet they produce most of the residues that wind up in the food supply and in our bodies. Plus, most such applications are typically unprofitable for farmers.
These applications are, in short, another form of crop insurance, but one that comes at a high cost to public health. More than eight out of every 10 of us these days are urinating out glyphosate on a daily basis, and a small portion of any paraquat in food will wind up in a consumer’s brain and wreak havoc for years, increasing the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Hence, the EPA should revoke the much-higher tolerances needed to cover residues in crops treated days to a week or so before harvest. The USDA can assure no significant economic impact on farmers by making clear that weather-driven yield and/or crop quality impairment is routinely covered via crop insurance, as is already often the case.
The third priority I would recommend is virtually cost-free and long overdue. The administration should end “Confidential Business Information” status for the so-called “inert ingredients” in pesticide formulations so that scientists trying to trace pesticide chemicals in the environment and food supply, and in human bodies, know what chemicals they are looking for and working to understand.
Fourth, the president should direct the EPA to assure that the core toxicology and metabolism studies supporting pesticide public-health risk assessments are done by government-funded, independent scientists, and paid for via fees on pesticide manufacturers. The results can then be compared to the almost-always negative studies done by registrants. Such a step is, unfortunately, essential to restore confidence in our pesticide regulatory process.
Lastly, the mismanagement of glyphosate-based herbicides for 40-plus years is the contemporary poster-child example of what has gone wrong with pesticide use and regulation in the U.S. It has taken a lot to turn glyphosate — arguably one of the safest and most effective herbicides ever discovered — into one plagued by serious efficacy issues as a result of dozens of now-glyphosate-resistant weeds, coupled with a long and still growing list of likely adverse health outcomes. The public health impacts of glyphosate-based herbicides range from human reproduction and children’s development to metabolic syndrome and cancer among adults. But this is exactly what has happened, with help from an eager-to-please Office of Pesticide Programs in EPA.
If MAHA is more than just talk, the administration needs to act now and decisively to enhance the future safety of glyphosate-based herbicides. It should end high-risk applications, especially preharvest crop desiccation uses. It should force registrants to reformulate GBHs to make them safer, as European regulators did in 2015-17.
The “fix” for Roundup is not to ban it, thereby forcing conventional farmers and landscapers to use more toxic herbicides. The fix entails making all glyphosate-based herbicides safer through reformulation, adding long-overdue warnings on labels and commonsense requirements to reduce exposures, like “wear gloves when handling or applying this product.”
Hopefully those in the administration in favor of taking concrete MAHA action will be able to overcome the inevitable pushback from those who are willing to accept the status quo as the best “modern” ag, and the U.S. food industry, can do. Time will tell.
Commentary on the Second MAHA Report
Watch for Charles Benbrook’s commentary on the second MAHA report, due to be released in August. We’ll post it shortly after the report’s release — at https://members.acresusa.com.
