MAHA's Unhealthy Truth

Saying the quiet parts out loud really matters

I want to talk about something that a lot of people are talking about and that nobody in Washington wants to say out loud.

When MAHA launched, my inbox and phone lit up. Parents who’d been fighting for cleaner food for years finally felt like someone powerful was saying what they’d known all along: that the food system is broken, that the chemical companies have too much power, and that our kids are paying the price.

I understood that feeling. I’ve lived that feeling.

In 2006, one of my children had an allergic reaction at breakfast. I was a food industry analyst at the time. I knew the business side of food better than most. What I didn’t know, and what I had to go find out the hard way, was how deliberately the health risks in our food supply had been buried, minimized, and regulatory-processed into invisibility.

So I get why MAHA felt like a door opening.

But I’ve also spent enough time watching this industry operate to recognize when a door is painted on a wall. And I’ve spent enough time in brand building and strategy to know exactly what happened here and who got left out in the process.

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Who MAHA Was Actually Talking To

Let’s start with something that doesn’t get said enough: the face of the MAHA movement, the imagery, the messaging, the influencer partnerships, the wellness-brand adjacency, the private equity firms, the Series A raises, looked like a very specific kind of American.

It looked like someone who could afford to care.

Organic produce. Regenerative meat. Protein powders. Supplement stacks. These are not fringe concerns. The science behind many of them is real, and the questions they raise about our food system are legitimate. They are the concerns of people for whom food is a choice, not just a budget.

And while MAHA was building that brand, while it was selling the vision of a cleaner, healthier America to people who listen to wellness podcasts and the investors who bet on it, the same administration was making decisions that told a very different story about who deserves healthy food in this country.

The SNAP program, which feeds more than 42 million Americans, faced proposed cuts that would have removed benefits from millions of low-income families. WIC, the program that provides nutrition support to pregnant women, new mothers, and children under five, saw funding threatened and benefit packages scrutinized for cuts. School meal programs that feed children who would otherwise go hungry were put on the table in budget negotiations.

Let that land for a moment.

A movement calling itself “Make America Healthy Again” was operating inside an administration actively working to reduce food access for the Americans who need it most - the ones who cannot choose between organic and conventional, because the choice they face is between eating and not eating.

This is not a peripheral contradiction. It is the central one.

You cannot claim to care about what’s in America’s food while gutting the programs that determine whether millions of Americans eat at all. You cannot build a health movement on the premise that ultra-processed food is harming our children while simultaneously cutting the nutrition benefits that stand between low-income children and those exact same ultra-processed foods , often the only thing available at the corner store in their neighborhood, because the grocery store left years ago.

Food insecurity and food quality are not separate problems. They are the same problem, wearing different faces depending on your zip code.

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When Your Brand Becomes a Cage

MAHA was always, at its core, a brand exercise. And it was a brilliant one. It took a genuine, bipartisan public health concern, the kind that cuts across every zip code, every income level, every political identity, and it attached that concern to a political tribe.

That attachment had two victims.

The first victim was political reach. The moment MAHA became MAGA-adjacent, the moment the hats started looking similar and the rallies started overlapping and the messaging became inseparable from a partisan identity, it lost roughly half its potential constituency before a single policy was written. The parents in blue districts who are just as worried about glyphosate in their kids’ meals stepped back. The suburban independents pulling seed oils from their pantries went quiet. The food entrepreneurs building better-for-you brands in cities that don’t vote red stayed silent.

A movement that needed to be as large as the food supply voluntarily became small.

The second victim was the people the movement never even tried to reach: low-income families, communities of color, rural communities without grocery store access, mothers on WIC trying to navigate a benefit system being dismantled around them. These are the Americans most exposed to the worst of what our food system produces ,the most pesticide-adjacent agricultural workers, the most food desert-affected urban families, the children most dependent on school meals and SNAP benefits to eat anything at all.

MAHA didn’t speak to them. Its aesthetic didn’t include them. Its policy agenda, to the extent one existed, didn’t protect them. And the administration it aligned with was actively making their situation worse.

In brand terms: MAHA positioned itself as a premium product. Premium products, by definition, are not for everyone. But the food system’s failures are.

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The Political Math That Makes Reform Impossible

Real food safety reform, the kind that would actually restrict glyphosate, close the FDA revolving door, break up seed monopolies, or get petroleum-derived dyes out of children’s food, requires a supermajority of public pressure. Pressure so broad and so loud that it becomes politically costly for legislators on both sides to ignore it.

You cannot generate that pressure from inside one party’s tent. You especially cannot generate it when that party’s agricultural donors are the corporations you’re trying to regulate.

Here are the facts worth sitting with:

● Bayer AG, which acquired Monsanto and the Roundup glyphosate franchise in 2018, spent nearly $92 million on federal lobbying between 2017 and 2024. They have faced more than 160,000 cancer-related lawsuits in the United States. The EPA’s formal safety review of glyphosate has been “pending” since 2015. It is still pending. Thirty-eight countries have restricted or banned glyphosate products. The United States has not moved.

● Petroleum-derived food dyes, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, require warning labels in the European Union. They remain unlabeled in American children’s products, including the ultra-processed foods that low-income families disproportionately rely on because they are cheap, shelf-stable, and available.

● Four corporations now control more than 60% of the global seed supply. No meaningful antitrust action has followed.

● Not one major MAHA-promised reform has been signed into law.

This is not a failure of effort. It is the structural consequence of a movement that locked itself into a political identity that made the necessary coalition, one that includes the families on SNAP, the mothers on WIC, the farmworkers most directly exposed to the chemicals in question, mathematically impossible to build.

The people most harmed by our broken food system were never in the room. A movement serious about fixing that system has to start by asking why and by making the room bigger.

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Stepping Away Is Not Giving Up. It’s Growing Up.

I want to speak directly to the people who are quietly stepping back from MAHA right now, the ones who still believe everything they believed about food safety and corporate accountability, but who are starting to feel the ceiling.

Leaving the MAGA-MAHA alignment is not a betrayal of the cause. It is the cause’s only real path forward.

The issue of what is in our food does not have a party. Childhood allergy rates have skyrocketed. Autoimmune disease is rising across every demographic. Obesity and metabolic illness do not check voter registration before they show up. The parents who are scared about what’s in their kids’ cereal are in every district, every state, every political household in this country. So are the parents who are scared there won’t be enough food in the house at the end of the month.

A movement that holds both of those fears, that says the quality of food and the access to food are inseparable concerns, and that the same corporate power is responsible for both, is a movement large enough to actually win.

That means progressive parents in Portland and conservative farmers in Iowa at the same hearing. It means WIC mothers and Whole Foods shoppers demanding the same regulatory accountability. It means farmworkers and food entrepreneurs and pediatricians who didn’t vote the same way last November standing next to each other and pointing at the same problem.

That is what power looks like. That is what makes Bayer’s lobbyists nervous. Right now, they are not nervous. They know exactly how big the tent is, and they know it’s not big enough.

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I started asking uncomfortable questions about our food supply because of breakfast. Because of one morning when my child’s body told me something was wrong that the industry had told me was fine.

That question never had a party affiliation. It never had a price tag. It never had a demographic.

The work of building a food system that actually protects all of our kids, not just the ones whose parents can afford the organic aisle, is longer than any election cycle and harder than any brand. It requires taking our convictions somewhere bigger. Somewhere that includes the mother on WIC who is just as worried about what’s in the formula as the mother at the farmers’ market. Somewhere that names corporate power as the problem whether it’s making food unclean or making food inaccessible.

The food system was not broken by accident. It was shaped, decision by decision, appointment by appointment, timeline extension by timeline extension, by people who were paid to shape it. Reshaping it requires the same deliberate accumulation of pressure, applied not to a brand, not to a party, but to the specific mechanisms by which corporate money has been allowed to substitute for scientific judgment and public will.

That is harder than voting. It is harder than a hashtag. It is harder than anything the wellness industry has ever asked of its audience. But it is the only thing that has ever actually worked and the Americans who came to this fight because they believed their children deserved better are exactly the people positioned to do it, if they are willing to name the whole system and bring everyone it has harmed into the coalition that takes it on.

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If this resonates, share it with someone who came to this issue through their family, not their politics — and with someone who came to it through necessity, not choice. Both of them belong in this conversation.

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