The bankrupting of America's health
There's a reason MAHA is just one letter away from MAGA
On Wednesday, the White House held a press conference to overturn part of The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required the USDA to update school meal nutrition standards.
Starting in 2012, the USDA required schools participating in federal lunch programs to offer only fat-free or low-fat milk; full-fat and 2% milk were banned for the following reasons:
Saturated Fat Intake: Full-fat milk contains more saturated fat, which guidelines recommend limiting for children
Rising childhood obesity rates prompted focus on reducing calorie density in school meals
As The Atlantic notes, switching from low-fat to full-fat milk likely isn’t going to to make a huge difference in a child’s overall health profile. As with everything MAHA, however, saturated fat is just another nutrient that’s been weaponized, politicized, and (the reality of what’s really going on here), monetized. (This post unpacks the racial element of milk very well. I’m sticking to health.)
Trump’s milk circus didn’t just happen out of nowhere. Backtracking to 2012: flavored milk was allowed in schools using federal lunch programs, but it had to be fat-free. In 2017, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue snuck 1% flavored milk back into school cafeterias. Perdue was a bit of an Kennedy prototype: very meat and dairy friendly, coming himself from a family that owned a grain and fertilizer business. He founded Perdue Inc, an agribusiness trading company that deals in agricultural commodities. Then he was installed at the USDA. Unsurprisingly, major dairy industry organizations strongly supported Perdue’s move which, at the time, mostly went unnoticed.
Little about food goes unnoticed in Kennedy’s HHS. Despite his constant claims of using gold-standard science conducted by uncompromised experts, his inverted food pyramid is very loose on science and heavy on compromise—including with the dairy industry.
As a recent NY Times investigation found:
Three of the nine members have received grants or done consulting work for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; one of those also received a research grant from and serves as an adviser to the National Pork Board. At least three members — including two of the same ones who have done work for red meat groups — have financial ties to dairy industry organizations, such as the National Dairy Council. Another is a co-creator of a high-protein meal replacement product. The experts did not write the guidelines, but produced reviews of scientific evidence on which the guidelines were based.
That’s how we arrive at an inverted pyramid with beef and full-fat milk featured prominently in the upper left quadrant, where everyone’s eyes first land.
During the milk press conference, Kennedy cited nutrients unavailable in low- and no-fat milk as the reason kids need all the fat, which is mostly nonsense. Yes, nutrients are removed, but in America, skim and low-fat milk are required to be fortified with vitamins A and D, which restores or exceeds the original content.
Wellness influencers love to claim that fortifying products isn’t as good as the “natural” version. That’s predominantly bullshit. The idea that “natural” vitamins A and D are more bioavailable has not been shown to be clinically significant in human trials.
So major nutrients aren’t missing from low- or no-fat options. What’s missing isn’t consequential for health. Plus, if you’re eating a meal with other fats from meat, butter, nuts, and so on, the difference in bioavailability problem is negligible despite what Kennedy claims:
Conjugated Linoleic Acid only accounts for less than 5 mg per cup of whole milk; potential benefits in humans is limited and inconsistent in clinical trials
Omega-3 fatty acids are also limited in milk regardless of fat content
Dr Jessica Knurick recently wrote about the flipped pyramid. The messaging about the guidelines are at times wildly different from what’s actually in them. Knurick writes,
Interestingly, despite all of the noise, many of the core recommendations in the new guidelines are not a dramatic departure from previous dietary guidance. They still promote nutrient-dense foods, appropriate calorie intake and portion sizes. They still recommend prioritizing fruits and vegetables. They still recommend whole grains. They still recommend a variety of protein sources from both animals and plants. They still recommend limiting added sugars and sodium. And they still recommend keeping saturated fat below 10% of total calories.
Which raises the obvious question. If the substance is not radically different, why has the messaging been so extreme and misleading?
I published a video pointing out MAHA needs a ghost to fight. That’s why, for the past year, MAHA influencers repeatedly talked about the food pyramid, which hasn’t been recommended since 2011. Dietary guidelines are updated every 5 years; Kennedy and crew are effectively battling a 34-year-old skeleton (and it’s a rip-off of Sweden’s version, dating back to the seventies).
The reason they would rather fight a memory is because what they’re actually saying is not radically different from what’s been recommended for years now, especially the 2020 guidelines, which features an entire section about how diet affects chronic disease:
Kennedy relies on the fact that most people don’t pay attention to federal recommendations so they won’t realize he’s mostly regurgitating sound dietary advice.
But he also gets a lot wrong.
First, the mischaracterization of the evidence for consuming more saturated fat. The guidelines claim randomized controlled trials (RCTs) don’t support saturated fat reduction, which is completely false. As with his anti-vax activism, the team cherry picks trials while excluding or dismissing major trials. They also include trials with methodological flaws, something Kennedy’s organization, Children’s Health Defense, does all the time.
The 2017 American Heart Association Presidential Advisory concludes that lowering saturated fat intake and replacing it with polyunsaturated vegetable oil reduced cardiovascular disease (CVD) by approximately 30%, similar to statin treatment effects
A 2020 Cochrane systematic review analyzed 15 randomized controlled trials involving 56,675 participants and found that reducing saturated fat decreased combined cardiovascular events
A 2025 Annals of Internal Medicine systematic review of 17 trials (66,337 participants) found that for people at high cardiovascular risk, reducing saturated fat produced important absolute reductions in mortality and major cardiovascular events
Kennedy’s guidelines also include inflammatory rhetoric against linoleic acid. The old “seed oils suck” argument. His team portrays linoleic acid as potentially harmful through oxidation even though RCTs don’t show adverse clinical outcomes from dietary linoleic acid. In fact, lower plasma linoleic acid is associated with higher CVD risk in observational studies, yet the guidelines dismiss this as confounding without bothering to justify their position.
The most recent and comprehensive evidence supporting seed oils comes from a 2025 JAMA Internal Medicine study analyzing three large cohorts with 24 years of follow-up. This study found that higher intakes of specific plant-based oils (canola, soybean, and olive oil) were associated with lower total mortality. Every 10 g/day increment in total plant-based oil intake was associated with 11% lower cancer mortality and 6% lower CVD mortality.
Then we get to MAHA’s processed food fetish. According to Kennedy, every previous dietary guidelines just loved them. Dr Knurick addresses this as well, writing:
The 1992 pyramid did not promote ultra-processed foods. It recommended grains, fruits, vegetables, animal and plant proteins, and dairy. It emphasized variety and moderation. And it explicitly placed fats and added sugars at the top with a clear “use sparingly” label.
Just like Kennedy regularly conflates obesity and overweight statistics, he regularly confuses processed foods with ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Processing food means everything from cutting vegetables and drying beans to baking bread and canning vegetables. Fermentation is definitionally a process. Pressing olives into oil creates a processed food.
MAHA’s fetish with the idea that all food should just be pulled from soil or shot really clouds the issue of how most people get most food.
Ultra-processing means combining extracted ingredients and adding cosmetic additives. No guidelines have ever advocated for UPFs. They generally don’t mention them at all.
The new guidelines’ ultra-processed food evidence is entirely observational with severe confounding risks. Some more heavily processed foods, like fortified cereals, actually improve nutrient intake. Since Kennedy and crew refuse to actually grapple with the social determinants of health in any meaningful way, they never discuss the reasons why people might need to use their limited food budget on fortified foods.
The guidelines also minimize the benefits of grains (which I unpack in this video). Kennedy’s repeatedly cites Japan’s wonderful health profile and low obesity rate, when in reality the Japanese eat 50-66% of calories from grains and only 15% from protein.
Which brings us to the last absolutely bonkers claim: the so-called war on protein. The White House posted a photo of Kennedy claiming he’s ending this imaginary war. In America. Which consumes more protein than almost every other nation and consumes more animal protein per capita than every other country except Iceland.
Besides the fact that around 99% of Americans meet or exceed the RDA already, high protein intakes require increased animal product consumption. MAHA also has a fetish for REAL MEAT. Kennedy, the supposed environmental steward, never mentions the environmental tradeoffs such a diet entails.
Yet this mindset fits with the individualistic focus of health that wellness influencers are so good at portraying. They repeat “natural” at every turn even as their prescribed actions are destroying nature at such a rapid pace.
The fundamental problem with these guidelines (and MAHA overall) is their selective skepticism. They apply rigorous standards to evidence contradicting their preferred conclusions while accepting weaker evidence that supports them. Their recommendations appear science-based but reflect Kennedy’s predetermined viewpoints.
These guidelines are written for wannabe biohackers who eat like children, not functional adults actually concerned about their health.
No matter how many times Kennedy repeats “gold standard science,” a truly evidence-based approach would:
Acknowledge uncertainty honestly
Apply consistent evidentiary standards
Prioritize RCTs with clinical endpoints
Avoid inflammatory language about specific nutrients
Consider implementation barriers / SDOH
Recognize limitations of ALL evidence, not just evidence against preferred positions
All the things actual experts already do.
Kennedy has never been concerned about evidence. He’s trained as an activist lawyer and is applying the same standards to nutrition as he has throughout his career. Just like his boss.
Growing up in Jersey in the eighties, we all knew Trump was morally bankrupt, which led to him bankrupting most every business he touched. Somehow, through the forces of modern-day America, Trump saw Kennedy and thought, game recognize game.
Tragically, the game Kennedy is playing is going to bankrupt the health of this nation.