A new federal report issued by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission portrays children’s health as in alarming decline due to poor diet, chemical exposures, over-medicalization, a lack of physical activity, and much more. Certain industry groups, the American health care system, and parental choices are largely blamed—while socioeconomic factors that research has shown affects many of these issues are barely mentioned.
President Donald Trump requested the report in a February executive order establishing the MAHA Commission, whose primary mission is to address childhood chronic diseases. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chairs the commission.
The group’s report presents four main drivers of chronic childhood illness, laying particular blame on the food children eat and their daily habits. It takes aim at ultra-processed foods, citing a 2021 study that found that nearly 70% of an American’s child’s calories come from this category, and argues that those foods drive weight gain.
The report also says that children are over-exposed to chemicals, take too many medications, spend too little time doing physical activity, and are too focused on technology. While the report rests some responsibility on the food and pharmaceutical industries—which it says have undue influence on dietary guidelines and drug studies—it also criticizes certain parental decisions.
The report says, for instance, that a rise in chronic childhood diseases is directly tied to children’s diets, and that the reliance on ultraprocessed foods “is a dramatic change since the 1960s when most food was cooked at home using whole ingredients”—a nod to demographic changes in which more women are in the workforce rather than staying at home with children.
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It says that more than one third of parents leave electronic devices powered on in their children’s bedrooms at night, disrupting their sleep.
It adds that children are over-medicated, in part, because of “well-intended physicians and parents attempting to help a child.”
It also says that pregnant mothers eat too much ultraprocessed food; that pesticides, microplastics, and pollutants are commonly found in the blood and urine of children and of pregnant women; and that virtually every breast milk sample tested in America “contains some level of persistent organic pollutants.”
The authors of the report claim that teens in single-parent families tend to have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and ADHD than those in two-parent households, citing studies from 2017 and 2015. “Gentle parenting,” a popular parenting style emphasizing empathy and respect, also attracts their critique; the authors cite one report finding that it and trauma-informed care “potentially pathologize normal emotions, undermine resilience, and contribute to rising anxiety and depression rates among children and teenagers.”
Some praised the report’s wide-ranging nature and the fact that it calls attention to the many impediments families face in raising healthy children. “Parents are being set up to fail,” says Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, a national nonprofit that focuses on food, farming, and the environment. “There are simply too few good choices and too many bad choices.”
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The report exemplifies the Make America Healthy Again platform, which focuses on how food and chemicals are making people less healthy. The movement has supporters in Surgeon General nominee Dr. Casey Means and in a vocal contingent of moms across the country. Like many policies in the Trump Administration, it looks to return to a time decades ago when, the movement’s leaders believe, things were better in America—a claim that is in a large part untrue when it comes to health.
“In this report, there are these ideas that we need to get back to some nostalgic, pre-existing state where children didn’t have cellphones, slept more, and went camping,” says Peter Lurie, the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit focusing on food safety, nutrition and health. “It doesn’t seem to really live in the real world.”
This is not the first time a presidential administration has looked into worsening child health in America and blamed lifestyle choices. The Biden Administration released a report about diet-related diseases, and the Obama Administration had a Task Force on Childhood Obesity that submitted a report to the president. However, the MAHA Commission’s report differs in that it barely mentions the socioeconomic factors that worsen obesity and childhood disease, like a lack of access to healthy food or green space.
People may know what is healthy but may not be able to easily access nutritious food because of a lack of grocery stores where they live; they may want their children to spend more time outside but are worried about crime or a lack of green space. “One approach is to invest in these communities so that people have access to the resources they need,” says Nour Makarem, co-leader of the chronic disease unit at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
The commission now has 80 days to come up with a strategy for improving the health of American children based on the report. But some critics point out that efforts to find solutions to some of the problems outlined by the report have been cut by the current Administration.
The report comes amid drastic cuts to or eliminations of many government programs working to solve some of these issues. Layoffs decimated the chronic disease prevention center at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Trump Administration cut a program that brought food to schools from local farms. Shortly before the MAHA report was released, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would severely cut funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps low-income families buy food.
Clinical trials and studies looking at chronic disease prevention and ways to help people access healthy foods have been cut in the Administration’s slashing of grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and other sources, adds Makarem.
“I don’t know that we’ve identified the most innovative approaches to knowing what’s healthy and having people engage in healthy behaviors,” she says. “None of that can be accomplished without research and clinical trials.”
