Skyrocketing rates of chronic disease connected to unhealthy food production? Conflicts of interest between business and government? “This is an old story—for me, anyway,” Nestle—who is a member of Civil Eats’ advisory board—explained. But she added that it’s not one that typically gets much airtime in Washington, D.C., and the people communicating the message were not the same experts typically tapped by lawmakers.

Participants at the roundtable included physician Marty Makary, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who talked about a lack of research on why pancreatic cancer rates have spiked; activist Vani Hari, who railed against food companies using ingredients banned in other countries in ultra-processed products like Froot Loops; and podcaster Mikhaila Fuller, who told a personal story of an all-meat diet curing her chronic illness.

Nestle disagreed with many of the finer points and thought the opinions at times came across as anti-nutrition science. Even so, she said she understood the frustrations and broader concerns. What irked her is the fact that her fellow nutritionists, who have plenty of scientific know-how, are not doing more to push the government to do something about chronic disease.

“I’d rather see mainstream nutritionists screaming bloody murder that we’ve created a food supply that’s making people sick,” she said. “Seventy-four percent of Americans are overweight. There is something seriously wrong.”

It was not the only D.C. gathering tackling connections between food, environmental exposures, and health last month. A formal Senate subcommittee hearing on chronic disease prevention and treatment featured three physicians and a food and addiction psychologist. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle there expressed a surprising amount of bipartisan concern and collaboration, according to reporting from Food Fix. And last week, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf acknowledged ultra-processed foods’ potential harms with new, stronger language, which Food Fix also reported on.

But Sen. Johnson, who has been advocating for “healthcare freedom” since he became a loud opponent of vaccine mandates during the pandemic, hosted a different kind of event. With none of the bipartisan questioning that would happen in an official hearing—and with recent presidential candidate Kennedy sharing the spotlight—it came across as a campaign event for Kennedy’s super PAC and its larger movement, Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Less than two months ago, Kennedy—who runs a controversial nonprofit that works on reducing children’s chemical exposures and has been a primary disseminator of vaccine misinformation—dropped out of the race and launched MAHA to help elect Trump.

It’s unclear how many of the panelists have formally signed onto that effort (most have not publicly endorsed Trump), but many have become regular guests on conservative media. Hari also spoke at a MAHA rally organized by Kennedy’s super PAC later in the week. And last night, two of the panelists, Makary and physician Casey Means, were scheduled to appear at a virtual MAHA town hall alongside Kennedy and Trump. (The town hall was postponed due to Hurricane Milton’s approach; Means said by email to Civil Eats that Vice President Kamala Harris was also invited to participate.)

Regardless of the panelists’ stated allegiances and while many are quick to dismiss MAHA as a fringe coalition, these advocates are tapping into dissatisfaction with the food-system status quo and are feeding into a new energy around food and health as an issue the right is ready to take on. As the election quickly approaches, many voters who care about healthier food are paying attention, and Instagram and X comments on the Johnson–RFK, Jr. roundtable were filled with MAHA enthusiasm.

While presenting themselves as silenced by mainstream media, they are reaching tens of millions of people daily through podcasts, best-selling books, and social media. “They all feel like they’re unheard, when they have some of the largest health and wellness platforms in the country,” said Melisse Gelula, who co-founded the publication Well+Good in 2008 and was one the foremost chroniclers of and experts on the growing culture around “wellness” in America. (She is no longer affiliated with the publication.)

Johnson’s opening statements invoked COVID-era fears about vaccines, and that made sense to Gelula: At the height of the pandemic, she saw many popular food and wellness gurus move rightward as misinformation around COVID vaccines and treatments spread. It confounded her because, in her mind, many of the bigger issues the Democrats focused on—like healthcare and climate change—could impact American well-being in even deeper ways. “Can we have abortion rights? Can we have LGBTQ rights? The protection of humanity locked down? Those are really under threat, too,” she said.

But the thing that both Gelula and Nestle emphasized is that while the Biden administration may not have done enough to advance research on how processed foods are impacting Americans’ health or reducing very real chemical exposures, there is ample evidence that a second Trump presidency would turn back the clock further on these issues.

“Why would anybody think anything else?” Nestle said. As to whether a Trump administration might tackle conflicts of interests between business and government, “They’re absolutely not going to do that. We know, because it didn’t happen during the first Trump administration. The opposite happened.”

To sort fact from rhetoric, here are a few key examples of how the Trump administration’s track record is in opposition to the MAHA movement’s goals.

Industry Influence on Government Agencies

Industry has long held significant influence in the government agencies that are responsible for regulating them—a phenomenon often referred to as corporate capture, and one that Civil Eats has covered at length. Kennedy’s MAHA materials reference it constantly, but this trend accelerated during the Trump administration.

For instance, pesticide industry operators have always had an inside line to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials, but their influence ballooned under Trump. Rebeckah Adcock moved from CropLife America, the industry’s powerful trade association, to a position as senior advisor to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and continued to meet with her industry peers. Trump also gutted the Economic Research Service, a subagency tasked with publishing objective research on farming, food consumption, and the environment that is often understood to be one of the only independent arms of the USDA.

At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Trump appointed Alexandra Dunn as assistant administrator of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention. Dunn is now the president and CEO of CropLife America. In his first few months leading the agency, Scott Pruitt met with dozens of industry groups—including CropLife America—but just five environmental groups.

At the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the administration installed Mindy Brashears, a Texas Tech University professor who had a number of research projects funded by the cattle and pork industries, as the top food safety official.

Chemical Exposures From the Food Supply

That influence contributed to significant deregulation of food and agriculture chemicals, a concern that is central to supporters of MAHA.

In response to direct pressure from the agriculture industry, Trump’s EPA chief rejected his own scientists’ recommendation to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide Kennedy has called attention to for its ability to cause brain damage and reduce IQs in children. Trump’s EPA also weakened safeguards for atrazine, an herbicide that is banned in Europe and is linked to birth defects and cancer, and for pyrethroids—a class of insecticides used in bug sprays, pet shampoos, and on fruits and vegetables—that are linked to learning deficiencies in children.

Under Trump, the EPA also proposed weakening safety protections for farmers and workers that apply pesticides, and a recent whistleblower report detailed a culture of rushing through chemical approvals. Scientists who spoke up about safety concerns were “encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including cancer, miscarriage, and neurological problems, from their reports—and in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves,” according to ProPublica.

Trump’s FDA denied a petition filed by environmental groups to ban perchlorate, a chemical that can be dangerous for children and developing fetuses, in food packaging, and it dismissed concerns from outside scientists about levels of toxic chemicals known as PFAS in food.

Trump signed an executive order directing the USDA, FDA, and EPA to make it easier for companies to get genetically engineered crops approved and cut cost-share payments for organic certification.

During a 2020 interview with pro GMO advocate Jon Entine, Sonny Perdue dismissed Americans who worry about the effects of pesticides as having an irrational fear of technology and agreed with Entine as he equated organic farmers’ techniques to “sprinkling organic fairy dust over crops.”

Ultra-Processed Foods and Metabolic Health and Nutrition

Growing concern over the health impacts of ultra-processed foods is also fueling the MAHA movement.

Like all presidents to date, Trump didn’t do anything of note to address ultra-processed foods or metabolic health. His USDA did try to roll back school meal standards to cut whole grain requirements in half and reintroduce flavored, sweetened milks and tried to weaken rules meant to keep junk food out of schools.

In the end, Trump’s 2024 platform does not mention any of these issues, but it does promise to “reinstate President Trump’s Deregulation Policies,” which would most certainly result in fewer safeguards against chemical exposure and more unhealthy foods entering the U.S. food supply.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group summed it up this way in 2017: “Thanks to Trump, it may soon be harder for Americans to feed their families, build healthy diets, and eat food free of dangerous pathogens and pesticides.”

In response to an emailed question about why, given his past actions, she is supporting Trump, physician Casey Means said, “We need to be discussing the critical issues of chronic disease, the toxic food system, and misaligned incentives in our healthcare, food, and agriculture systems. These are fully bipartisan issues.”

But while the issues cross party lines, MAHA is an extension of MAGA, and that conversation is now happening in the middle of a politically charged and consequential moment. “It will get worse,” Marion Nestle said, if Trump gets into office. “We already know that, because we just had four years of that.”

Read More:
How Four Years of Trump Reshaped Food and Farming
Trump’s EPA Chief is Reshaping Food and Farming: What You Need to Know
Op-Ed: We Need to Get Food Industry Dollars Out of Our Politics

(Disclosure: Held worked at Well+Good as a reporter and editor from 2010 – 2016, where Gelula was her boss.)

No-Spray Zone. Relatedly, on October 2, the EPA announced it had finalized regulations intended to prevent farmers and farmworkers from being exposed to pesticides during and after they’re sprayed. After the Trump administration attempted to weaken the rule, the agency revisited the text and reinstated some of the original, stronger protections, such as establishing a protective zone of 100 feet for some chemicals. Farmworkers, especially, lack critical protections from pesticides and are often harmed in the fields due to breathing in and having their skin exposed to the chemicals.

Read More:
Change to Federal Rule Could Expose More Farmworkers to Pesticides
Why Aren’t Federal Agencies Enforcing Pesticide Rules That Protect Farmworkers?

Climate-Friendly Farms. USDA officials announced nearly $8 billion will be available to farmers in fiscal year 2025 through conservation programs that pay for a range of practices with environmental benefits. It’s a record amount of funding for popular programs that always have many more applicants than recipients. Because it comes from Inflation Reduction Act funding, $5.7 billion from that pot is earmarked specifically for practices that have climate benefits, and the agency recently updated the list of practices that qualify. In addition to planting cover crops and establishing pollinator habitats, some of the new practices include prescribed burning, wetland restoration, and silvopasture—or farming with trees—which has been gaining traction in recent years. Separately, the agency also announced it funded 300 clean energy projects to the tune of $104 million, many of which touch the food system, including building solar arrays on oyster farms and poultry houses, new refrigeration for small meat processors, and digesters on dairy lagoons.

Read More:
Can Farming With Trees Save the Food System?
As California Gets Drier, Solar Panels Could Help Farms Save Water

So Goes the West Coast . . . Because of California’s outsized population and massive agricultural industry, its food and agriculture policies often have effects far beyond the state’s borders. And last week, a flurry of bills with national implications for the food system landed on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. Newsom signed bills that ban six controversial chemicals from being used in public school food, standardize food packaging expiration dates to reduce waste, and review the use of paraquat, an herbicide linked to Parkinson’s disease. He vetoed bills that would have put health warnings on new gas stoves and made it easier for farmworkers to file heat-related worker’s compensation claims.

Read more: 
The Heat Wave Crushing the West Is a Preview of Farmworkers’ Hot Future
A New Book Dives Deep Into the Climate and Health Impacts of Gas Stoves