MAHA food agenda shows limits as outbreaks, cuts mount

About five million lose SNAP benefits under new Trump requirements

Multiple U.S. food-borne illness outbreaks — cyclospora in leafy greens, E. coli in frozen blueberries and salmonella in jalapeños — have unfolded alongside cuts to food assistance and staff reductions at federal food-safety agencies, showing the limitations of the Make America Healthy Again movement, according to nutrition and food-policy experts interviewed by The Guardian.

The administration cut nearly $200 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and imposed new requirements that have caused about 5 million people to lose benefits “because they can’t navigate an increasingly complicated system,” registered dietitian and science communicator Jessica Knurick told The Guardian. “The policies that we’re enacting are the exact opposite policies one might look to to help people eat healthier,” she said. As a result, “people are struggling,” she said. “It does make it difficult to preach healthy eating when those foods are just inaccessible to a big portion of this country.”

Food-safety staffing has also been reduced. In 2025, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division resigned because, he said, he was unable to do his job with so many cuts to his staff. The administration has carried out mass layoffs, terminations and early retirements at health, environmental and agricultural agencies, including employees who inspect food.

When MAHA took power, Marion Nestle — a former senior nutrition policy adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services and author of several books on food policy — was hopeful. She hoped Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the HHS secretary, and his supporters would take on the food industry as promised. “They’ve got the power. They’ve taken over health and human services. Run with it,” she remembers thinking. “They didn’t.”

The only MAHA food achievement to date, she said, is the recommendation to replace nine synthetic food dyes. “And color additives are voluntary,” Nestle said. “It’s just bizarre and it’s so disappointing because they had a chance to make real progress. The food industry was terrified. I don’t think they are anymore.”

Nestle said decision makers frequently don’t understand what it is like to be low-income in America, which means their policies are “extraordinarily elitist, which is unfortunate because I’m totally in favor of the ‘eat real food’ message — but you have to have the facilities to cook.”

Knurick said that flipping the food pyramid — even though it was discontinued years ago — is treated as “revolutionary” even though more than 90% of Americans have never followed the dietary guidelines at all. “It’s just laughable, to be honest, and it’s frustrating,” she said.

Instead of talking about genuine problems and their genuine causes, Knurick said, “we have to be distracted by red dyes and seed oils and this idea that all of our public health institutions are corrupt — because the goal of this administration was to defund our public health institutions and other federal agencies.” She added: “So if you have a movement that can erode trust even further in those public health institutions, which we see Kennedy doing, that really helps the administration to then be able to defund the public health institutions.”

MAHA influencers understood early on how to use social media strategically, including galvanizing people around easy-to-understand and fear-based topics, Knurick said. Sometimes that meant scaremongering about single ingredients, such as synthetic food dyes. There is little evidence that dyes are harmful, she said, but there is plenty of evidence that the foods they appear in — candy, soda and other low-nutrient processed foods — are the real issue. “When you come in and say ‘we’re going to make America healthy again by swapping out red dye 40 and putting a natural red dye in Skittles,’ it just defies any real understanding of nutrition science,” Knurick said.

Nestle said the dye issue is “not nearly as serious as fast foods and marketing to kids and bad school food.”

The Guardian reported that MAHA is driven by the idea that an individual’s personal experience is what really matters, even if there is no scientific evidence to back up observations — or even, frequently, despite a large volume of research showing the opposite, as with the disproven link between vaccination and autism. “The level of ignorance is really shocking, but that’s part of it. It’s not what we know or what the facts are. It’s what we see,” Nestle said. But, she added, “that’s why we have science — to look at things like that and say: ‘could this have happened by chance, or do you get a statistical significance that’s great enough to make you take it seriously?’”

When asked in mid-July whether the cyclospora outbreak was making people avoid some of the healthy foods MAHA recommends, Kennedy responded that “now that we know the probable risk is, I think it’s going to be much easier for people to make healthy choices.” Over the following weeks, thousands more cases, hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths were reported, according to The Guardian.

The outbreaks illustrate the difficulty of guaranteeing health at an individual level because enforcing regulations and preventing outbreaks happens at the systemic level, the experts said. Making the individual healthy choice — to eat salad, for example — is not possible when the salad is contaminated and food inspections have fallen.

Nestle drew a parallel to the meat industry, which used to be the leading source of food-borne illness until laws and regulations passed in the 1990s forced the industry to overhaul its practices. “One of the things that they did was they declared E. coli an adulterant. That took care of it, just like that,” she said. The produce industry “absolutely, unquestionably” needs similar regulation, Nestle said, noting that current FDA guidance on reducing contaminants in fresh produce is voluntary.

MAHA adherents were drawn to the movement with the promise of fighting for cleaner water and air, healthier food systems and better healthcare, Knurick said. But the people at the top of the movement “very much used it as a political movement,” she said. That is how a movement prioritizing cleaning up environmental toxins is partnered with an administration ignoring environmental regulations, Knurick said. “Those things don’t align, and I can go down the list where most of what the Maha movement says they want is not aligned with the actual policies we’re seeing come out of this administration.”

Some MAHA activists appear to be growing disillusioned with the direction of the movement, Knurick said. “It’s been almost two years, so it’s hard to say, ‘well, we haven’t had enough time to do anything yet,’” she said. “If they’re actually following the policies, it’s pretty impossible to say that anything’s actually gone in a positive way.”