Food-borne illnesses, funding cuts and layoffs: Maha movement’s glaring limitations are now showing
Policies enacted by RFK Jr have not delivered the expected results, but have instead hindered people’s ability to eat healthy food
Cyclospora in leafy greens, E coli in frozen blueberries, salmonella in jalapeños – multiple food-borne illness outbreaks in the US, alongside massive cuts to food assistance programs and to the federal agencies charged with food safety, are showing the limitations of the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement, experts say.
“The policies that we’re enacting are the exact opposite policies one might look to to help people eat healthier,” said Jessica Knurick, a science communicator and registered dietitian with a PhD in nutrition science.
When Maha took power, Marion Nestle was hopeful. Perhaps the most prominent voice in food policy, Nestle has written several books and once served as a senior nutrition policy adviser at HHS. She hoped Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), 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.”
At the same time, the Trump administration has gutted health, environmental and agricultural agencies with mass layoffs, terminations and early retirements, including those who inspect food. In 2025, for instance, the head of the food division at US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) resigned because, he said, he was unable to do his job with so many cuts to his staff.
The administration also cut almost $200bn from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), instituting new requirements for Snap that have led to about 5 million people losing their benefits “because they can’t navigate an increasingly complicated system”, Knurick 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.”
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”, Nestle said.
Maha adherents were frequently drawn in from social media with the promise of enacting change: fighting for cleaner water and air, healthier food systems, better healthcare. “But the people at the top of that movement very much used it as a political movement,” Knurick said.
That’s how the movement that prioritizes cleaning up environmental toxins is partnered with an administration that’s 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.”
When asked if 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”. That was in mid-July; over the next several weeks, thousands more cases, hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths would be reported.
Outbreaks like these illustrate the difficulty of guaranteeing health at an individual level, because work such as enforcing regulations and preventing outbreaks happens at the systemic level, experts said. Making the individual healthy choice – to eat salad, for example – isn’t possible anymore when the salad is contaminated and food inspections have fallen.
Leafy greens have become a major be a bigger problem, but laws and regulations passed in the 1990s forced the meat industry to fix these issues. “One of the things that they did was they declared E coli an adulterant. That took care of it, just like that,” Nestle said
The produce industry “absolutely, unquestionably” needs similar regulations, Nestle said. Current laws and guidance only start at the packing plants – but they don’t talk about what happens in the fields. And, while the FDA did release guidance on reducing contaminants in foods like these, it’s voluntary, Nestle said, before adding that safe practices like these should be mandatory.
Flipping the food pyramid – even though the food pyramid was discontinued years ago – is treated as “revolutionary” even though more than 90% of Americans have never followed the dietary guidelines at all, Knurick said. “It’s just laughable, to be honest, and it’s frustrating,” she said.
Knurick continued: “Instead of actually talking about the genuine problems and the genuine causes of the problems, 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. 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’s little evidence that dyes are harmful, but there’s plenty of evidence that the foods they appear in, such as candy, soda and other low-nutrient processed foods, are the real issue, Knurick said.
“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,” she said.
As Nestle put it: “How serious a problem is this? Not nearly as serious as fast foods and marketing to kids and bad school food.”
Maha is driven by the idea that an individual’s personal experience is what really matters, even if there’s no scientific evidence to back up their 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?’”
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.”
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