A political movement championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump's health secretary. MAHA fuses rightist populism and leftist whole-Earthism around healthy eating, exercise, suspicion of food additives, and distrust of government undertakings such as putting fluoride in drinking water and vaccines in children.
In 2025 lawmakers introduced 150 food bills in 41 states, according to the Consumer Brands Association. In state capitals MAHA has created bipartisan coalitions, bonding longtime wholegrain hippies with corporation-sceptic conservatives. Kennedy tours states encouraging legislatures to pass MAHA food bills.
From 2027 Texas will require labels warning that in other countries certain ingredients are "not recommended for human consumption". West Virginia has banned seven food dyes from school meals. California has defined ultra-processed food in statute and will ban it from school meals by 2035. Fully 30 states have committed to excluding some junk food from SNAP purchases. The administration has tied some health funding to enacting such policies.
Food regulation used to be a left-wing concern. Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group, a long-standing opponent of food additives, says of Kennedy: "He's made it cool. He's made it Trumpy."
By early 2026 both the White House and Congress appeared to be tiring of the MAHA agenda. The CDC is without a director or acting director; Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford health economist, oversees the agency while simultaneously running the National Institutes of Health—managing about 27,000 employees on sites 640 miles apart. Casey Means, Trump's nominee for surgeon general, has not received a vote despite her confirmation hearing more than a month earlier. In February 2026 Trump put out an executive order bolstering production of glyphosate, a weedkiller that Kennedy had called "one of the likely culprits in America's chronic disease epidemic" in 2024, infuriating MAHA activists. Fabrizio Ward, one of Trump's preferred pollsters, has warned that "scepticism toward vaccine requirements is politically risky" and recommends focusing on MAHA's more popular dietary elements. Nearly three-quarters of Americans believe vaccines are "somewhat" or "very" safe, according to an Economist/YouGov poll. In March 2026 a federal court paused new vaccine policies, including reducing the number of recommended childhood jabs, and reconstituted a vaccines advisory committee.
Big Food is fighting back. Trade groups have filed lawsuits in West Virginia and Texas, arguing that labelling requirements violate freedom of speech and that additives are regulated at the federal level. Scholars at Harvard have found that states are on solid legal ground. Food manufacturers have banded together to create Americans for Ingredient Transparency and the Consumer Brands Association is pushing for a single national labelling standard to avoid a patchwork of state laws. Target announced in late February 2026 that it would require all breakfast cereals to stop using certified synthetic colours by the end of May.
Some changes are so slow, you don't notice them. Others are so fast, they don't notice you.