One Year After RFK Jr’s Confirmation, MAHA Looks to the Future of the Health Movement

Public health and public policy experts convened at The Heritage Foundation on Monday to celebrate “One Year of MAHA.”

The leaders discussed how President Donald Trump has enacted policies to improve the health and well-being of Americans and what the administration could do over the next three years.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined The Heritage Foundation event to share the accomplishments of the Make America Healthy Again movement about a year into his tenure.

Introducing the secretary, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts praised the administration because “they’ve begun the process of reversing childhood chronic disease, releasing new dietary guidelines that are going to get Americans eating real food again.”

The event explained how Kennedy and Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins collaborated with the top nutritionists in the nation and initiated research to uncover the root causes of America’s health epidemic.

Kennedy is proud that the administration’s findings are “written in plain English, and you can summarize it with three words: ‘eat real food.’”

“The primary culprits is ultra-processed foods, refined carbohydrates,” Kennedy said of their findings. “Seventy percent of the foods that our kids eat are ultra-processed foods, and it’s killing them, and it’s a spiritual warfare.”

Children’s Health Defense General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg also spoke at the Monday event. Though America is wealthy, Mack Rosenberg claimed, “We have the sickest kids with the poorest health outcomes in well-developed countries.”

The MAHA movement is not only focused on physical health but mental health. Artificial ingredients and processed foods have a negative impact on our well-being “because we’re mass poisoning [ourselves] and we now have the worst health outcomes.” The result is not only physical illness but mental illness, Kennedy argued.

MAHA Action President Tony Lyons said that children are “going to school and eating donuts, eating sugary cereals, eating sodas or drinking sodas,” which is why mental illnesses have disproportionately affected America’s youth.

“We should have the healthiest babies, the healthiest children, and we need to put aside the broken system, figure out what’s wrong and fix it,” Mack Rosenberg added.