In the world of nutrition, few words are more controversial than healthy. Experts and influencers are perpetually fighting over whether fats are bad for your heart, whether carbs are good or bad for your waistline, and how much protein a person actually needs. But while identifying a healthy food isn’t always easy, eating it is an even more monumental feat.
As a journalist covering food and nutrition, I know to limit my salt and sugar intake. But I still have trouble doing it. It’s hard to give up the short-term euphoria brought on by snacking on Double Stuf Oreos for the long-term benefit of losing a few pounds. Surveys show that the Americans I want to eat healthierbut the fact that more than 70 percent of American adults are overweight highlights how many of us are failing.
The challenge of improving the nation’s diet was highlighted late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines on what foods can be labeled as healthy. The roughly 300-page rule — the government’s first update to its definition of health in three decades — lays out in detail what is considered healthy and what is not. This action could make it much easier to walk through the aisles of a grocery store and choose products that are good for your health based solely on the label: a cup of yogurt containing a lot of sugar can no longer be called of “healthy”. Still, the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines will use the new definition “to make meaningful and sustainable food purchasing decisions.” In other words, hardly anyone.
All of this bodes poorly for Donald Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services. As part of his agenda to “Make America Healthy Again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to improve the nation’s eating habits by overturning a public health establishment he considers ineffective . He has promised massive layoffs to the FDA, specifically calling out its food regulators. Indeed, for decades, the agency’s efforts to encourage better eating habits have largely focused on providing consumers with more information about the foods they eat. It didn’t work. If confirmed, Kennedy could face the same problem as many of his predecessors: Getting Americans to eat healthier is extremely difficult.
Giving consumers more information about what they eat may seem like a no-brainer, but when these policies are tested in the real world, they often don’t lead to healthier eating habits. Since 2018, restaurant chains must add calorie counts to their menus; However, researchers consistently found that it did not have a dramatic effect on the foods people ate. Even stricter policies, such as a Chilean law that requires food companies to include warnings about unhealthy products, have had only a modest effect on improving a country’s health.
The estimate that up to 0.4 percent of people will change their habits following the new guidelines was calculated based on previous academic research quantifying the impacts of food labeling, an FDA spokesperson told me. Yet despite these disappointing predictions, the FDA does not expect the new rule to be in vain. Even a tiny fraction of Americans adds up over time: The agency predicts that enough people will eat healthier to generate societal benefits worth $686 million over the next 20 years.
These modest effects highlight that health concerns are not the only priority consumers consider when deciding whether to purchase food. “When people make food choices,” Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told me, “price, taste and convenience weigh much more heavily than health.” When I asked experts about the best ways to get Americans to eat healthier, some of them vaguely talked about targeting agribusiness and the subsidies it receives from the government, and others have discussed the idea of taxing unhealthy foods, like soda. But almost everyone I spoke with had difficulty articulating anything resembling a silver bullet to solve America’s food problems.
RFK Jr. appears to be caught in the same fight. Most of his ideas for “making America healthy again” revolve around small subsets of foods that he claims are, often without evidence, at the root of America’s obesity problems. United. For example, he warned of the unproven risks of seed oils and claimed that if certain food colorings were removed from the food supply, “we would lose weight.” Kennedy also called for eliminating subsidies for corn farmers, who grow the crops that produce the high-fructose corn syrup found in many unhealthy foods, and advocated for processed foods to be removed from school meals.
There is a reason why previous health secretaries have not opted for the type of draconian measures Kennedy is advocating. Some of them would be completely beyond his control. As head of HHS, he could not cut crop subsidies; Congress decides how much money goes to farmers. Nor could he ban ultra-processed foods in school meals; that would be up to the Secretary of Agriculture. And while he could, hypothetically, work with the FDA to ban seed oils, he’s unlikely to be able to generate enough legitimate scientific evidence about their harms to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge.
The biggest flaw in Kennedy’s plan is the assumption that he can change people’s eating habits by telling them what’s healthy and what’s not, and banning a few controversial ingredients. Changing these habits will require the government to address the underlying reasons why Americans are so bad at following a healthy diet. Not everyone suffers from an inability to resist Double Stuf Oreos: A Cleveland Clinic survey found that 46% of Americans view the cost of healthy eating as the biggest barrier to improving their diet , and 23% said they lacked time to cook healthily. meal.
If Kennedy can get people like me to care enough about healthy eating to resist indulgent foods that give them pleasure, or if he finds a way to get cash-strapped families who benefit from public assistance in refusing cheap, ready-made foods. eat food, he will have made significant progress in making America healthy again. But getting there will take a lot more than a catchy slogan and a few sound bites.