STAT+: 5 food experts making sense of MAHA’s vision for a new way of eating

Here are a few things we know about how Robert F. Kennedy eats. He likes raw milk, full-fat dairy, and intermittent fasting. He’s suspicious of artificial food dyes and seed oils, and says “sugar is poison.” He doesn’t drink alcohol. If he spots roadkill, he may try to eat it, though not right away.

The health secretary’s personal nutrition views and habits matter because they have direct bearing on the policies of his Make America Healthy Again movement, which aims to fix the problem of chronic disease in the U.S. with a big focus on overhauling the food system and Americans’ diets.

In the first months of Kennedy’s tenure, he’s championed state efforts to make soda ineligible for food benefits, ban artificial dyes and additives, and get ultra-processed foods out of school lunches. Last week, he made an announcement that caused a fair bit of confusion about whether the government had persuaded food and beverage manufacturers to voluntarily stop using eight petroleum-based dyes, potentially changing Froot Loops and M&Ms forever. (The “understanding” between the health department and industry turns out to be pretty fuzzy, though Pepsi Co said two days after the announcement that it’s “accelerating” the phase-out of artificial dyes, with plans to eliminate them from Lay’s and Tostitos by the end of this year.) Kennedy also recently criticized a report meant to inform the next update of U.S. dietary guidelines, leaving outsiders to wonder if the new version will get a MAHA twist. 

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