\n<\/p>\n
For parents, especially of young children, the question \u201cWhat\u2019s for dinner?\u201d has high stakes. The answer can determine whether you\u2019ll get to bed early or spend the night struggling to feed a shrieking toddler. It can stoke anxiety about budgeting and dread for the next appointment with the pediatrician.<\/p>\n
Parents are worried not just about getting food on the table, but whether that food is good for their kids. That\u2019s partly why Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s Make America Healthy Again campaign resonates with so many people: If the American food supply can be purged of its unhealthiest elements, surely it will be easier for parents to feel good about feeding their children. But instead, MAHA may be piling on the stress.<\/p>\n
Kennedy and other MAHA figures consider a long list of foods unhealthy, and only some of their reasoning is supported by science. They condemn seed oils, which Kennedy believes are toxic but are widely shown to be safe. They also decry ultra-processed foods, which health researchers have serious concerns about. The MAHA movement has raised concerns about other ingredients with unknown health effects: synthetic additives, pesticides, and chemicals in the environment.<\/p>\n
Even before MAHA, many parents faced enormous pressure to feed their kids in a healthy way. Online parenting communities are rife with guidance: avoid added sugars, buy organic, limit processed foods, and so on. MAHA\u2019s guidance overlaps with many of these principles, but it carries more weight because it comes from the health secretary himself. \u201cWhat MAHA did was turn that mom-powered movement into a message that could not be ignored,\u201d Michelle Magno, a Texas-based mother of three, told me.<\/p>\n
Those who choose to take that message seriously should brace for extra work. Seeking out MAHA-aligned foods is a scavenger hunt that parents have little time to play. When shopping, Summer Scolaro, a Texas-based mom of two toddlers, aims to buy organic produce, minimally processed foods, and foods with low sugar, no seed oils, and no artificial dyes or flavors. Her purchases are informed by the \u201cDirty Dozen\u201d and \u201cClean Fifteen,\u201d lists that have long been popular on social media and that rank foods that are most and least contaminated with pesticides, respectively. (According to these lists\u2014which are published by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that has drawn criticism from scientists\u2014grapes and strawberries are dirtier than pineapples and avocados.) \u201cIt takes multiple places to get what I want,\u201d Scolaro told me. Zen Honeycutt, the North Carolina\u2013based founder of Moms Across America, a nonprofit that advocates for removing GMOs and pesticides from the food system, told me that buying only organic foods simplifies her shopping because the label encompasses many of MAHA\u2019s criteria. But organic foods are not necessarily seed-oil-free, and only certain brands tick both boxes.<\/p>\n
Organic and MAHA-coded foods, as I\u2019ve written previously, can be more expensive. Plus, because organic products aren\u2019t made with artificial preservatives or irradiated (to kill microbes and insects), they tend to spoil faster, which can mean more frequent trips to the grocery store or more money wasted on food that goes bad. Many of the MAHA moms I spoke with told me that they shop at a mix of big-box stores and specialty groceries to balance their health standards with their budgets; some said they eschewed vacations and new clothes to save money for healthy food. \u201cIt\u2019s not just the cooking\u2014it\u2019s the planning, the shopping, the prepping, and then hoping they\u2019ll actually eat what\u2019s on the plate. Some days it feels like a full-time job in itself,\u201d Scolaro, who is a Pilates instructor and the founder of a lifestyle brand, told me.<\/p>\n
Feeding infants according to MAHA principles gives parents an even narrower road to walk. In recent years, as American moms have been enthusiastically encouraged to breastfeed, many experts have emphasized that making sure infants are fed, period, should be parents\u2019 highest priority. MAHA hems and haws over this point. The Trump administration\u2019s \u201cMake Our Children Healthy Again Strategy\u201d report, released this week, says that the health and agriculture departments will work to increase breastfeeding rates (and the supply of milk from human donors), but offers few specifics. Pediatricians widely recommend exclusively breastfeeding for the first six months of an infant\u2019s life, but many parents can\u2019t, for a range of medical, economic, and personal reasons\u2014not least that feeding and pumping are incredibly time-consuming. Baby formula is the recommended alternative, but it relies on seed oils to mimic the fatty acids in breast milk. (Earlier this year, the Trump administration launched Operation Stork Speed to scrutinize infant formula, but seed-oil-free formula alternatives are hard to come by.) Before he became health secretary, Kennedy raised the alarm about trace amounts of heavy metals that are found in some American baby formulas; after his nomination, as part of Operation Stork Speed, he directed the FDA to increase testing. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n
American moms have long taken on the responsibilities of primary caregiver, health-care administrator, household manager, and cook on top of their paid work. MAHA strains them further by creating more labor, more costs, and more questions about what is actually healthy for kids. \u201cWhen parents are stressed and angry and irritable, the kids get stressed. It can affect their appetite and their eating behavior, and then that makes the parent even more stressed,\u201d Eugene Beresin, a psychiatry professor at Harvard, told me. Stressed parents are also more likely to feed their kids fast food, and their kids are more likely to be picky eaters, he said. In order for families as a whole to be healthy, \u201cyou really have to support the mothers,\u201d Kathryn Schubert, the CEO of the Society for Women\u2019s Health Research, an advocacy nonprofit, told me.<\/p>\n
So far, though, the federal government has offered little to help parents fulfill MAHA ideals. The new report includes a plan to send \u201cMAHA boxes\u201d full of fresh food to poor American families, but it depends on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, from which the Trump administration has slashed funding; in fact, one in five children is expected to lose food assistance because of the cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. Nor do any of MAHA\u2019s plans meaningfully address systemic factors, such as poverty and historical discrimination, that can prevent children from accessing healthy food in the first place. Nearly 14 percent of households across the country experienced food insecurity in 2023. In these homes, the conflict between budgeting and feeding kids well creates huge psychological stress for parents, which can lead to anxiety and depression, fueling the vicious cycle of stress and unhealthy eating, Beresin said.<\/p>\n
Certainly, the new strategy report gestures toward making fresh produce cheaper and more accessible. Its proposals to support grocery stores in stocking more produce, introduce markets to food deserts, serve healthy meals to students and veterans, and limit junk-food ads targeted at children all sound promising, but the report offers few specifics on implementation. To date, MAHA\u2019s most significant policy changes include banning the food dye red 3 and getting companies to voluntarily phase out synthetic dyes\u2014changes that some MAHA moms say don\u2019t go far enough to support children\u2019s health.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve criticized many of Kennedy\u2019s MAHA initiatives, including his promotion of raw milk and beef tallow, his misplaced focus on food additives, and his baseless campaign against vaccines. But I felt empathy for the MAHA moms I spoke with. We want the same thing: to keep our kids nourished and safe. I, too, try to cook at home when I can; I fret about feeding junk to my toddler. Near the end of our conversation about the organic, home-cooked meals she made for her kids when they were younger, Lisa Sulsenti, a New Jersey\u2013based chiropractor who co-hosts a podcast called MAHA Moms<\/em>, asked me: \u201cI think we put a lot of stress on ourselves to be the perfect mom. Do you think that?\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For parents, especially of young children, the question \u201cWhat\u2019s for dinner?\u201d has high stakes. The answer can determine whether you\u2019ll get to bed early or spend the night struggling to feed a shrieking toddler. It can stoke anxiety about budgeting and dread for the next appointment with the pediatrician. Parents are worried not just about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[13036,13037,2002,2318,2847],"class_list":{"0":"post-21242","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-complicating","9":"tag-hardest","10":"tag-maha","11":"tag-parenting","12":"tag-parts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}