"Food is medicine" makes for a great bumper sticker. However, as health policy, things start to fall apart. The MAHA model, born from a blend of good intentions and Instagram-friendly catchphrases, skips the messy parts: the collision of biology and policy in creating the chronic disease crisis it claims to cure.
The Commission on Making American Health Again (MAHA) recently held its first closed-door meeting, racing toward an August deadline set by President Trump's executive order. Its mission? To slash chronic disease rates and overhaul America's approach to nutrition, lifestyle, and medication. But for most of us, MAHA is more of a vibe than a coherent policy framework. The publicly obvious MAHA model is simple: food is medicine. But this is more of a deconstruction of chicken soup, emphasizing the salt rather than the comfort. What are the underlying principles of the MAHA mom's approach? According to President Trump's executive order, MAHA is to refocus "toward understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease. This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety." Like other public health measures, the Commission's recommendations will become mandates and regulations. For those desiring "medical freedom," it is unclear how MAHA's mandates will be less abusive of autonomy than concerns over masking, vaccines, or abortions. The MAHA model's strengths and weaknesses lie in its simplicity. However, simplicity is not particularly good at representing reality. Food is medicine makes the same reductive mistake as focusing on nutrients over foods. A less reductive, more holistic model of our food environment may provide better policy guidance. Evolutionary Imperatives Human biology evolved under conditions of scarcity, not abundance. Our bodies are hardwired to crave calorie-dense foods and avoid unnecessary exertion. Functional traits in a hunter-gatherer world are problematic when movement is optional and food is everywhere. We need water to control our body temperature, flush waste products, and deliver nutrients. We can survive roughly 3 to 5…