In February 2010, Michelle Obama launched “Let’s Move!” with a wide-ranging plan to curb childhood obesity. The campaign took aim at processed foods, flagged concerns about sugary drinks, and called for children to spend more time playing outside and less time staring at screens. The campaign was roundly skewered by conservatives. Fox News pundits such as Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity portrayed Let’s Move as a nanny-state plot to control the American diet, a slippery slope to the criminalization of french fries.
Those ideas might sound familiar. Today, conservatives have embraced the same goals as Let’s Move as part of the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is essentially rerunning Obama’s playbook—and, in one key way, has taken it a step further. “They did something we were hesitant to do, which is to identify the food industry as the root cause of the problem,” Jerold Mande, a health official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Obama administration, told me. But the strategy that Kennedy’s HHS is using to address the problem so far—pressuring food companies to alter their products instead of introducing new regulations—is the same one that Obama relied on, and will likely fall short for the same reason hers did a decade ago.
The problem that Let’s Move meant to solve—approximately one in three children was overweight or obese—was serious, but the vibe was cool-mom fun. In a video that launched the campaign, the first lady admitted that, along with lots of other busy parents, she sometimes defaulted to less-healthy options such as pizza when feeding her two daughters. Her mission was twofold: encourage Americans to think a little more about their diets while pushing the food industry to make the task somewhat less onerous. To that end, Obama leaned on the power of celebrity. She slow danced with Big Bird in a grocery store, ate an apple with LeBron James at the White House, and enlisted Beyoncé to lead a cafeteria full of kids in the Dougie.
Her approach to food companies was friendly, and they promised to do their part. In 2011, Walmart, the nation’s largest grocer, committed to removing 10 percent of sugar and 25 percent of sodium from its store brands—and to working with other brands they carried to reach those levels—by 2015. Darden Restaurants, which owns Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse, among other chains, pledged to reduce calories and sodium in its restaurants by 20 percent over the following decade. The first lady showed up at an Olive Garden to praise Darden, and the company put out a press release touting its “comprehensive health and wellness commitment.” The announcements seemed to signal that, thanks to Let’s Move, major companies were taking seriously the role they play in public health rather than merely engineering their offerings to be ever more irresistible. Maybe a gentle nudge was all America needed to shift its food environment for the better.
But as the architects of Let’s Move learned, handshake deals don’t carry the same weight as regulatory oversight. Today, for example, Olive Garden’s signature “Tour of Italy” dish has 3,200 milligrams of sodium—more than double what the American Heart Association considers an optimal daily amount for adults. When I got in touch with Darden Restaurants recently and asked about the 20 percent pledge, a spokesperson couldn’t locate any details about whether progress had been made and said in an email that the officials who were involved with the pledge are no longer with the company. (Michelle Obama didn’t respond to interview requests made via the Obama Foundation.)
Other commitments were at least partially met. A spokesperson for Walmart told me in an email that, according to its most recent analysis, done in 2017, the company had reduced sugar by more than 10 percent and sodium by 18 percent—though only in its store brands. A consortium of 16 food companies including ConAgra, Coca-Cola, and Unilever fulfilled a pledge to remove 1.5 trillion calories from the food they sell, according to a 2014 post from the Let’s Move executive director.
Even these relative successes did not make much difference. For one, total-calorie sales can be a misleading metric; when ConAgra and its peers made their pledge, the industry’s total-calorie sales were trending down anyway, likely due in part to the Great Recession and shrinkflation. The companies also treated all calories as if they were equal, whether they came from Pringles or peas. The consortium’s pledge “provided the appearance of progress when there wasn’t any,” Kelly Brownell, a director emeritus of the World Food Policy Center at Duke University, told me. As for Let’s Move, he said it “didn’t address the heart of what is driving the poor diet in America, which is food-industry actions.” Today, Americans consume roughly the same amount of sodium as they did in 2013. Debra Eschmeyer, the former executive director of Let’s Move, maintains that the campaign made progress, such as successfully prompting McDonald’s to include apple slices in every Happy Meal. But she also acknowledges that the marketplace tends to determine what’s on shelves and menus. “What’s going to change corporations the most is what consumers are buying,” she told me.
Eschmeyer said that she’s been heartened by MAHA’s momentum. In fact, Kennedy has arguably already had more success than Obama in shifting consumer demand. As my colleague Yasmin Tayag has written, corporations have been MAHA-washing their products to highlight those free of artificial dyes, high-fructose corn syrup, and seed oils. General Mills and Kraft Heinz have said they will remove synthetic dyes from all of their products, and Mars Wrigley announced it will offer some dye-free alternatives. The companies’ press releases point to “evolving consumer needs” and continuing an “innovation journey” as motivation for the changes, but these moves were clearly a win for Kennedy, who considers the dyes “poisonous.”
If Let’s Move was defined by the gentle nudges of a cool mom, the MAHA approach, on its surface, takes the stance of a stern dad. Kennedy has portrayed the food industry as callous and predatory, saying that companies “mass poison American children” and “could care less about the health of the American people.” He’s condemned the “attack on whole milk and cheese and yogurt” and insisted that ultra-processed food is a “genocide on the American Indian.” Compared with Let’s Move’s easygoing recommendations—children should get at least one hour of physical activity each day, and everyone should drink one more glass of water—MAHA is also considerably more macho. The Obama administration replaced the Presidential Fitness Test with the less competitive Presidential Youth Fitness Program; today, the White House is bringing the fitness test back, and Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently rolled out the “Pete and Bobby Challenge,” in which you try to do 100 push-ups and 50 pull-ups in less than 10 minutes. The 71-year-old Kennedy—who takes testosterone as part of what he calls an “anti-aging protocol” and has been known to peel off his shirt while working out in public—noted in an interview that he was able to reach that mark in fewer than six minutes.
This display exposes the campaign’s braggadocio. Finishing the Pete and Bobby Challenge would be next to impossible for all but the most dedicated gym rats, whereas the health department’s own physical-activity guidelines suggest that everyday tasks, such as carrying groceries upstairs and shoveling snow, can qualify as vigorous exercise, and they don’t require a timer or a gym membership. Asking ordinary Americans to perform grueling feats of strength is unlikely to make a dent in the obesity rate, no matter how tough the talk.
Similarly, most of MAHA’s flashiest food initiatives aren’t supported by good science, and would do little to improve health. Kennedy and his allies have demonized seed oils and fluoride (despite a dearth of evidence of their harms), insisted that cane sugar is healthier than high-fructose corn syrup (a claim that nutrition experts generally reject), and promoted raw milk (which the FDA has long warned can contain disease-causing bacteria). The evidence connecting excess salt and sugar to poor health is much stronger than that regarding food dyes. Kennedy, Eschmeyer told me, would do well to “stay evidence-based and not to get distracted by an overly simplistic focus on individual ingredients.”
Ezekiel Emanuel, who was a health-care adviser to Barack Obama, has been critical of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views and worries that the movement’s fondness for supplements of dubious merit could be a distraction. Still, Emanuel believes MAHA’s focus on chronic illness that’s caused by obesity is “100 percent right” and that, so far, “we haven’t approached the problem as if it were a major national threat.” Both Emanuel and Mande, the former USDA official, told me that they’re withholding judgment until MAHA manages to secure more significant concessions from the food industry. Rhetoric, as they’ve learned from experience, doesn’t necessarily translate into meaningful reform.
Despite that rhetoric, Kennedy, like Michelle Obama was, can be friendly with food companies that please him. He has treated handshake promises as genuine advances and firms that make gestures toward his preferences as real allies. After Steak ’n Shake switched to cooking with beef tallow, announcing on X that the company’s fries would now be “RFK’d,” the secretary nibbled on fries with Hannity at one of its Florida locations. Perhaps Kennedy’s fondness for fries will allay worries that they’ll be banned this time around.
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