By SHERRY BUNTING  /  Special for Farmshine

WASHINGTON — The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released its highly-anticipated report on May 22 about “the root causes of the childhood chronic disease crisis.”

The report’s unveiling was held at the White House, where President Trump was joined by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and other commission members, including EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

The MAHA Report is garnering mixed reviews in agriculture circles, with positive responses on the nutrition side and cautionary responses on the crop inputs side.

It is important to note that a stated aim of simplifying and reforming the anti-fat, anti-whole-milk Dietary Guidelines — under which the shift to ultra-processed foods has proliferated, especially for children served by government programs such as school lunch — is a big part of the Commission’s findings.

Secretary Kennedy described the report as “the beginning of a conversation, a national conversation that we are going to have with maturity, with nuance, for the first time in history.”

There is much to parse through, as the next phase is launched — the development of a national strategy within the next 80 days. This strategy is expected to contain a mix of more immediate reforms, along with calls for gold-standard scientific research on a number of fronts.

The MAHA Report covers four key areas:

1. The shift to ultra-processed foods,

2. The cumulative load of chemicals in the environment,

3. The crisis of childhood behavior in the digital age, and

4. The overmedicalization of kids.

From these four areas, the commission will develop a national strategy per the Trump executive order that set the commission in motion.

1. Shift to ultra-processed foods

The first and longest section of the MAHA Report takes aim at “the shift to ultra-processed foods.” It drives home a focus on encouraging childhood access to “more whole foods.”

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) are in the crosshairs. The DGAs underpin everything from USDA school lunches and other feeding programs to FDA labeling regulations, like the Healthy Labeling rule and front-of-package display that discriminate against milk, dairy foods, and meat products — unless they are non-fat. In most cases, even low-fat dairy and meat do not qualify.

In fact, the recent FDA Healthy Labeling rule that was finalized in the last days of the Biden Administration makes exceptions for some foods and not others. The rule excludes naturally inherent saturated fat calculations for nuts, seeds, soy, and seafood while not making this exception for nutrient-dense whole milk and dairy foods as well as meat.

These FDA rules do not permit any natural meat products to make healthy claims, except seafood and wild game meat.

These FDA rules are up for extended public comment through July 15. Reform of the DGAs as early as August could change the dynamic for dairy and other animal-derived foods.

One piece of this first lengthy section within the MAHA Commission Report aims to shift positive dietary focus onto nutrient-dense whole foods, which would include milk, dairy foods, and meat.

“What you’re going to see is a whole new day on Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), where federal nutrition advice will be sound. It will be simple, and it will be clear,” said Secretary Rollins at the MAHA Commission Report unveiling, where she indicated new DGAs could be released before fall.

“We are reducing the Dietary Guidelines from a 453-page document that we inherited from the Biden Administration,” said Secretary Kennedy, referring to the 2025-30 DGA Committee’s Scientific Report released Dec. 2024 and all of the DGAs leading up to it.

“We’re going to deliver instead a 4 or 5 page document that tells people how to give healthy food to their children, and those Dietary Guidelines will then drive change in the school lunch programs all over this country,” he said.

In fact, two of the 10 items in the MAHA Report’s “next steps” deal directly with threats that have plagued real whole milk, dairy foods and meats for some time now — and will increasingly pose threats in the future as several lab-created replicas of meat and dairy received GRAS status from FDA in the prior administration.

These self-affirmed ‘safe’ designations by companies and biotech startups were allowed by FDA over the past four years, even though some of these bioengineered analogs have been shown to lack essential amino acids or have added chemical, hormone, and antibiotic interventions to grow genetically-altered cells in bioreactors or harvest excrement from bioengineered fungi in fermentation vats without the God-given immune systems and growth signals that are naturally part of the whole animal.

One of these key next steps is reform of the Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) determinations FDA has allowed to proliferate with no testing. Specifically, this point would fund independent studies evaluating the health impact of self-affirmed GRAS food ingredients, prioritizing risks to children and informing transparent FDA rulemaking.

The other item on the to-do list in regard to nutrition asks NIH to fund long-term trials comparing whole-food, reduced-carb, and low-ultra-processed foods diets in children to assess effects on obesity and insulin resistance.

2. Cumulative chemical load

The second chapter on “cumulative chemical load” has ag organizations paying cautious attention. This section of the report looks at potential toxins in the environment. The Trump Administration is reportedly “treading lightly” where pesticides and herbicides are concerned.

Even so, several ag organizations, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, have come out with statements of concern about the report’s references to agriculture production tools and practices that “sows seeds of doubt and fear about our food system and farming practices.”

It is important to note that the MAHA Report states: “American farmers rely on these products. Actions that further regulate or restrict crop protection tools beyond risk-based and scientific processes set forth by Congress must involve thoughtful consideration of what is necessary for adequate protection, alternatives, and cost of production.”

This section of the report also describes the need for more research on chemical exposure and chronic disease, saying this is not a regulatory move that stifles growth, but rather it is a call for “more gold standard independent scientific research” to “unleash private sector innovation.”

The MAHA Report also takes aim at corporate influence in federal regulations and scientific funding from food, pharmaceutical, tech and chemical companies.

Among the next steps in the area of cumulative chemical load are to reform the real world data platform to look at environmental inputs in the study of childhood chronic diseases and to create a task force to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to federal health and nutrition datasets for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood disease trends.

In essence, there are four separate areas of the report, but some connection in terms of data platforms to be studied.

 Speaking to all four areas where strategy will be developed, Ag Secretary Rollins said: “This is a call to evaluate the many reasons American families, particularly children, face high rates of chronic health issues, and it encourages additional research and education on diet, environmental exposures, lack of physical activity, and overmedicalization.

“We must do more to improve the health outcomes of our kids and families, and President Trump knows agriculture is at the heart of the solution. America’s farmers and ranchers dedicate their lives to the noble cause of feeding their country and the world, and in doing so have created the safest and most abundant and affordable food supply in the world. We are working to make sure our kids and families are consuming the healthiest food we produce,” she explained.

A news release from HHS notes these statistics as the reason for the MAHA Report:

• More than 1 in 5 children over 6 years old are obese, a more than 270% increase vs. the 1970s. (The Dietary Guidelines began to ratchet down on animal-derived foods with fat in the 1980s.)

• Prevalence of pre-diabetes in teens is more than 1 in 4, having more than doubled over the last 2 decades (despite children and teens receiving two meals a day, five days a week, three-quarters of the year that became increasingly fat-controlled since 2005, with whole and 2% milk banned since 2010).

• Childhood cancer incidence has risen nearly 40% since 1975, especially in children aged 0 to 19.

• Autism spectrum disorder impacts 1 in 31 children by age 8.

• Teenage depression rates nearly doubled from 2009 to 2019, and with more than 1 in 4 teenage girls in 2022 reporting a major depressive episode in the past year.

• Three million high school students seriously considered suicide in 2023.

• Between 1997 and 2018, childhood food-allergy prevalence rose 88%.

Stay tuned as Farmshine digs into the MAHA Report and follows the development of the national strategy over the next 80 days.