White House plan to Make America Healthy Again will start with children

© Roman - stock.adobe.com

America’s national diet needs improvement, especially to prevent disease in children, according to President Donald J. Trump’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission.

On May 22, the MAHA Commission published its draft “MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again (Assessment),” a 68-page indictment of conditions contributing to illness and poor health, particularly in children.

There is a generation of Americans at risk of a chronic disease crisis, largely driven by the factors that make up the titles of the four sections of the report:

• The shift to ultra-processed foods
• The cumulative load of chemicals in our environment
• The crisis of childhood behavior in the digital age
• The overmedicalization of children

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
_{© U.S. Department of Health and Human Services}

The authors, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote the report “is a call to action.”

“It presents the stark reality of American children's declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends,” the report said in its purpose statement. “More importantly, it seeks to unpack the potential dietary, behavioral, medical, and environmental drivers behind this crisis. By examining the root causes of deteriorating child health, this assessment establishes a clear, evidence-based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms, and societal shifts needed to reverse course.”

Now is the time for decisive action and the Trump administration will reverse the crisis by confronting root causes, not just the symptoms, the report said.

“Today's children are tomorrow's workforce, caregivers, and leaders — we can no longer afford to ignore this crisis,” the report said.

“After a century of costly and ineffective approaches, the federal government will lead a coordinated transformation of our food, health, and scientific systems,” it said. “This strategic realignment will ensure that all Americans — today and in the future-live longer, healthier lives, supported by systems that prioritize prevention, well-being, and resilience.”

Some actions have started and others will soon, with a strategy for making children healthy again due in August.

From farm to table to harm?

The report was not without its critics.

CBS News cited “multiple current and former federal health officials” who claimed the report misstated some facts and omitted well-documented drivers that cause disease in children. That report did not name the critics.

Agricultural groups openly took issue with some of the claims about foods, which come from farmers. This week, the American Soybean Association, the National Corn Growers Association, the National Association of Wheat Growers and the International Fresh Produce Association published a joint statement acknowledging a strong relationship with Trump based on his commitment to farmers, growers and ranchers.

But they “heard disturbing accounts that the commission report may suggest U.S. farmers are harming Americans through their production practices.”

On May 22, the soybean growers strongly rebuked the MAHA Commission report “for being brazenly unscientific and damaging to consumer confidence in America’s safe, reliable food system.”

“Both farmers and members of Congress tried to warn the administration that activist groups were trying to hijack the MAHA Commission to advance their longstanding goal of harming U.S. farmers. Reading this report, it appears that is exactly what has happened,” ASA Director Alan Meadows, a soybean farmer, said in a statement.

“MAHA’s misleading report suggests glyphosate, atrazine and other pesticides essential to farmers are potential contributors to health ailments,” the ASA statement said. Meanwhile, a March 2025 study from JAMA followed more than 220,000 people for more than 30 years and found frequent consumption of plant-based oils led to a 16% reduction in cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments, compared with alternatives high in saturated fat.

The American Farm Bureau Federation also issued a statement condemning the report’s condemnation of the nation’s food supply.

“Farmers are identified as ‘critical partners,’ yet were excluded from development of the report, despite many requests for a seat at the table,” said the statement from Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall. “The report also expresses a desire to ensure farmers continue to thrive, but undermining confidence in our food system directly contradicts that noble goal. The report spotlights outlier studies and presents unproven theories that feed a false narrative and only then does it acknowledge a mountain of evidence about the safety of our food system.

“We suspect USDA had a prominent role in the report’s recognition that farmers are the critical first step in the food system, but as a whole, the report falls short,” Duvall said. “The American people were promised transparency yet presented with a report developed in secret.”

Key findings

As for the MAHA Commission report, some of the key findings include:

• More than one in five U.S. children is obese, a 270% jump since the 1970s. A full three-quarters of 17- to 24-year-olds are now medically ineligible for military service because of chronic conditions.
• Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) supply nearly 70% of the calories eaten by American children and over half of all U.S. dietary calories overall.
• UPF dominance displaces nutrient-dense whole foods and drives excess energy intake, insulin resistance and weight gain; every 10% rise in UPF intake raises all-cause mortality risk by 14%, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
• Children face a cumulative chemical load from thousands of pesticides, food additives, PFAS, microplastics and other contaminants whose combined effects remain poorly studied.
• Physical-activity deficit: More than 70% of youths fall short of daily activity guidelines, while screen time, loneliness and sleep loss fuel a growing mental-health crisis.
• Over-medicalization: U.S. children receive psychostimulants 2.5 times more often than British peers and antipsychotics 19 times more than Japanese youth, with limited long-term benefit data and documented harms.

‘Next steps’

The report included a 10-point plan for “Next Steps — Supporting Gold-Standard Scientific Research and Developing a Comprehensive Strategy.” It will involve the National Institutes of Health (NIIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

The plan stated:

1. Addressing the replication crisis: NIH should launch a coordinated initiative to confront the replication crisis, investing in reproducibility efforts to improve trust and reliability in basic science and interventions for childhood chronic disease.

2. Post-marketing surveillance: NIH and FDA should build systems for real-world safety monitoring of pediatric drugs and create programs to independently replicate findings from industry-funded studies.

3. Real-world data platform: Expand the NIH-CMS autism data initiative into a broader, secure system linking claims, EHRs, and environmental inputs to study childhood chronic diseases.

4. Artificial intelligence-powered surveillance: Create a task force to apply Al and machine learning to federal health and nutrition datasets for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood chronic disease trends.

5. GRAS oversight reform: Fund independent studies evaluating the health impact of self-affirmed generally recognized as safe, or GRAS, food ingredients, prioritizing risks to children and informing transparent FDA rulemaking.

6. Nutrition trials: NIH should fund long-term trials comparing whole-food, reduced-carb, and low-UPF diets in children to assess effects on obesity and insulin resistance.

7. Large-scale Lifestyle Interventions: Launch a coordinated national lifestyle-medicine initiative that embeds real-world randomized trials-covering integrated interventions in movement, diet, light exposure, and sleep timing-within existing cohorts and electronic health record networks.

8. Drug safety research: Support studies on long-term neurodevelopmental and metabolic outcomes of commonly prescribed pediatric drugs, emphasizing real-world settings and meaningful endpoints.

9. Alternative testing models: Invest in new approach methodologies (NAMs), such as organ-on-a-chip, microphysiological systems, and computational biology, to complement animal testing with more predictive human-relevant models.

10. Precision Toxicology: Launch a national initiative to map gene-environment interactions affecting childhood disease risk, especially for pollutants, endocrine disruptors, and pharmaceuticals.