In February 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swept into the Department of Health and Human Services promising to clean up the United States’ food supply, eliminate toxic additives, and break the grip of food and farming industries he accused of poisoning the nation’s children.
On the same day Kennedy was sworn in as secretary of HHS, the White House established the Make America Healthy Again Commission; its acronym, MAHA, has come to mean the populist, anti-establishment movement over which Kennedy symbolically presides.
Laudably, MAHA aims to tackle Americans’ epidemic of diet-related chronic illnesses, especially in children. But nearly two years into Kennedy’s tenure, MAHA has stalled, hampered by a fundamental paradox: It demands the outcomes of robust food oversight while simultaneously dismantling the bureaucratic machinery required to deliver them.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom has been quietly doing exactly what MAHA promised.
The gap between the UK’s policy progress and MAHA’s empty promises is not primarily a gap in ambition or sincerity. It reflects a set of structural contradictions embedded in the political coalition that gave rise to MAHA.
Nearly a year after Kennedy took office, advertisements for foods high in sugar, salt, and fat disappeared from UK television before 9 p.m. and from the internet altogether. The measure capped nearly a decade of patient, unglamorous work to change how food is sold to the UK’s 67 million people, from the sodas stacked at checkouts to the commercials children watch after school.
The stakes for improving the population’s health are neither uniquely British nor American. Diet-related chronic disease has become a leading driver of preventable death across wealthy nations, and a growing body of research locates its causes less in personal willpower than in what’s known as the commercial determinants of health. These determinants include the ways industries formulate, price, place, and market their products.
As such, public health research consistently identifies four instruments as the core of effective food environment regulation: advertising restrictions, placement and promotion rules, taxation, and front-of-package labeling.
The UK has deployed all four. The U.S., at the federal level, has implemented almost none. And MAHA, for all its noise, has advanced none of them in binding form.
This piece is not about partisan failure. It is a story about what food reform actually requires, and why a movement built on dismantling institutions is structurally unable to deliver it. What follows traces how the UK built its food policy, why MAHA has struggled to keep its promises, and what a genuinely U.S. agenda would demand, as well as reasons the British mode cannot simply be copied.
Keep Calm and Curb the Food Industry
The UK’s regulation of foods high in fat, salt, and sugar (HFSS) did not happen overnight. It germinated from nearly two decades of policy experimentation, sustained by statutory authority, technocratic persistence, and a theory of change that targeted industry conduct rather than individual consumer behavior.
The UK laid the foundation with its 2021 Food (Promotion and Placement) Regulations, which came into force in October 2022. These rules banned HFSS products from prominent retail positions including aisle ends, checkout zones, store entrances, and their online equivalents, in any business with more than 50 employees and 2,000 square feet of floor space. Research cited in the regulatory process found that end-of-aisle promotions alone increase sugary drink sales by over 50%.
Once junk food could no longer ambush shoppers at every high-traffic touchpoint in the store, eliminating volume promotions followed. From October 2025, HFSS products were prohibited from “buy one get one free,” “3 for 2,” and multi-buy formats by qualifying businesses across the UK.
The most visible layer arrived in January 2026, when the ban came into force restricting HFSS advertising on television before 9 p.m. and online at all times. The restrictions were enacted through the Health and Care Act 2022, which amended the Communications Act 2003. They carried the force of parliamentary statute, enforced by Ofcom and the Advertising Standards Authority. The government projected the advertising restriction policy alone could reduce the number of children living with obesity by 20,000.
Many of the changes the UK enacted are underpinned by a fiscal instrument that predates the HFSS regulations by a few years. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy, introduced in 2018, taxed manufacturers on the sugar content of their drinks rather than taxing consumers at the till. The design was deliberate: It incentivized reformulation.
By 2024, a government review found the levy had driven a 46% average reduction in sugar added to soft drinks, with the largest health gains concentrated among the most deprived. The UK is now strengthening the levy by proposing to lower the sugar threshold and extend its scope.
Arguably, institutionalization, not party politics, enabled effective policy design.
The UK is part of a global trend of using taxes to encourage consumers to make healthier choices. By 2023, 117 countries had passed national similar sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) taxes, covering 57% of the world’s population.
Moreover, the World Health Organization (WHO) has encouraged countries to extend taxes to other unhealthy food items. Recent research from Australia, India, and the Philippines has demonstrated the potential of broader food taxes to save lives and reduce inequalities.
Notably, the suite of food policies the UK has pursued were noticeably incremental and stable. These were not voluntary pledges. They were not guidance documents. They were legally binding constraints on industry conduct, backed by enforcement mechanisms and financial penalties, developed through years of consultation and statutory requirements.
The process of putting the policies in place was messy. There were delays, lobbying skirmishes, and legal disputes over brand advertising exemptions. But the direction of travel never reversed.
What is striking about the UK story, then, is not that the policy advanced smoothly. It is that it advanced at all, given how often it could have sputtered and come to a halt. The sugar levy was announced in 2016 under a Conservative chancellor. The advertising restrictions were legislated in 2022, then delayed twice, slipping from a planned 2023 start to 2025 and finally to 2026.
Each delay was a moment when policy could have been quietly abandoned. Each time, the food and advertising industries lobbied hard for exactly that outcome. What kept the agenda alive was not the enthusiasm of any single politician but the fact that it had been written into statute and handed to standing regulators.
A delayed law is still a law. When the government changed hands from Conservative to Labour in 2024, the incoming administration did not have to rebuild food policy from scratch. It simply had to let the existing machinery run.
Arguably, institutionalization, not party politics, enabled effective policy design.
MAHA Report: All Promises and No Teeth
Back in the U.S., Kennedy’s diagnosis of U.S. food was, in many respects, accurate. He pointed to the catastrophic burden of diet-related chronic disease, the permissive Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) system that allows food manufacturers to self-certify the safety of new additives without the federal government’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, and the glaring double standard between U.S. and European formulations of the same products.
The MAHA Commission generated significant political heat. Kennedy rallied supporters, named brands, and placed seed oils and synthetic dyes on the national agenda. In April 2025, he pledged to eliminate six synthetic food dyes by year’s end. The FDA moved to phase out Red Dye No. 3 and announced intentions to address additional petroleum-based colorants.
At the state level, there was genuine momentum. Thirty-seven states introduced roughly 75 bills aimed at food dyes in 2025. West Virginia, California, and Texas all passed or advanced food additive restrictions of varying scope. It was a rare moment of cross-partisan alignment on a health issue.
Each of these changes requires legislation or hard rulemaking. None can be delivered by press release, and none survives the gutting of the agencies meant to carry them out.
But when the MAHA Commission’s long-anticipated report arrived in September 2025, leading nutrition scientists found its language non-committal. For example, the report claimed that the government would “continue efforts” to define ultraprocessed foods. Several critics noted that the document outlined specific food deregulation actions and avoided stepping on the toes of the food and beverage industry.
According to Distinguished Professor Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina, “Unfortunately, the final MAHA report is all promises and has no teeth. In my opinion, it shows the food, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries got to the White House and won the day.”
The gap between the UK’s policy progress and MAHA’s empty promises is not primarily a gap in ambition or sincerity. It reflects a set of structural contradictions embedded in the political coalition that gave rise to MAHA. The reasons for the contradictions are threefold.
1. The regulatory state MAHA needs is the one its coalition is destroying.
Effective food regulation requires institutional capacity: scientists, inspectors, analysts, and the bureaucratic infrastructure to develop, enforce, and defend rules against industry challenge.
Yet in March 2025, HHS announced a workforce reduction of approximately 3,500 FDA employees and 2,400 Centers for Disease Control staffers as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency-driven restructuring. The terminated staff included chemical safety experts specifically hired to review potentially unsafe food ingredients, precisely the people a serious MAHA agenda would require.
The FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods, Jim Jones, resigned in protest. He warned the “indiscriminate firing” of food safety staff would be “one more roadblock to achieving the secretary’s stated objectives of making America healthy again.” Jones was right.
The research infrastructure is faring no better. In May 2025, the FDA and National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a joint Nutrition Regulatory Science Program to study ultraprocessed foods and food additives. It was a genuinely promising initiative. But it was announced against a backdrop of proposed 40% cuts to NIH’s overall budget and consolidation of its 27 centers into eight.
Congress pushed back against the proposed reductions and restructuring, but NIH still unexpectedly terminated 2,291 active research grants, totaling $2.45 billion. Even before these cuts, the total NIH nutrition and obesity spending across all institutes was roughly only $2 billion to $3 billion annually, which accounts for a mere 5% of the agency’s $48 billion budget.
In contrast, NIH spent $187 billion over a decade (2010-2019) supporting pharmaceutical approvals, averaging $1.44 billion in taxpayer funding for every new drug brought to market.
These numbers suggest that, in a given year, often NIH spends about as much public money helping to discover one single blockbuster drug as it spends on the nation’s entire nutrition research portfolio.
2. MAHA’s theory of harm targets the wrong unit.
The UK’s HFSS regulations were built around what public health researchers call the commercial determinants of health. This term refers to the corporate practices, and not merely individual choices, that shape population health.
The premise is that the food environment, including the placement, promotion, pricing, and advertising of products, shape what people eat more powerfully than innate individual preferences do. Restricting where junk food appears in stores, how it is promoted, and how it is advertised to children constrains the commercial mechanisms that drive overconsumption.
This premise is not a fringe view. A growing body of evidence shows that marketing exposure directly increases children’s consumption of advertised products. The food environment is engineered to exploit well-documented behavioral biases, limiting the effectiveness of education or exhortation.
As a result, regulating the environment works precisely because it does not depend on millions of individuals each making better decisions against a system designed to defeat them.
Yet Kennedy’s framework has focused on a seemingly arbitrary set of specific ingredients, including Red Dye No. 3, seed oils, and synthetic food coloring. Not only do these targets shift the focus away from the most harmful and flavorful nutrients (sugar, salt, fat), they largely avoid the structural question of how the food and beverage industry markets and sells its products.
What makes Kennedy’s ingredient framing so ineffective is that the enemy is replaceable: consumers can skip it, and manufacturers can substitute it. But it leaves the underlying commercial model untouched. Removing one dye from Froot Loops does not change the fact that sugary, colorful Froot Loops is being advertised to six-year-olds during Saturday morning cartoons.
3. The coalition is shot through with industry capture it refuses to name.
Within months of MAHA gaining momentum, major food and beverage companies — including Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Nestlé — formed a lobbying alliance to block state-level food additive regulations.
The front group, Americans for Ingredient Transparency, states as its goal a single national standard, but its practical aim is federal preemption: using Washington lawmakers to override tougher food laws moving through the states. This strategy is the precise inverse of what health advocates want, and it works best where MAHA is weakest.
What the industry grasped, and MAHA did not, is that the movement’s own politics were the most effective weapon against it.
The snack and beverage industry recently ran a coordinated campaign to turn President Donald Trump’s base against Kennedy, recasting restrictions on soda and dyes as an elitist betrayal of working-class voters rather than a defense of their children. The three largest soda makers had already flagged the MAHA agenda as a material risk to investors, so the counterattack was rational.
It also exposed the central irony of the whole enterprise. Kennedy’s agenda stalled at the federal level, where he presides, while a dozen states won waivers to restrict soda purchases and others passed dye bans on their own.
According to a Republican legislator from Utah, “It’s easier for the big food industries to control the federal government than it is for them to control a whole bunch of different states.”
In other words, the concentrated national authority a real food agenda requires is exactly the authority industry has learned to buy.
The Missing Ingredient Is Governance
The UK’s food regulation did not come about because of ideological consensus. It survived elections and industry pressure because it was anchored in statutory authority rather than agreement or personality. When a minister changed, the regulations stayed. When food companies complained, the enforcement mechanisms remained. The policy was institutionalized.
In contrast, MAHA depends entirely on the attention and influence of a single figure operating through the executive branch, without a legislative vehicle, without durable statutory authority, and without the regulatory workforce needed to implement anything ambitious.
When Kennedy eventually leaves HHS or loses influence, it’s quite possible the dyes phased out will drift back into our food supply. States will continue fighting a fragmented battle against industry preemption. Nothing will be locked in.
Serious U.S. food reform agenda would mean a federal excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, designed with nutrient thresholds to reward reformulation.
For the many advocates who genuinely want to change what Americans eat, the lesson is uncomfortable but important: Food reform requires the regulatory state. It requires statutory authority, not executive guidance. It requires enforceable constraints on industry conduct, not voluntary pledges. It requires institutional capacity and a funded research base, not charisma.
A fair comparison must also admit its limits. The UK is not the U.S., and several features of the British model would not survive the migration across the Atlantic. The most immediate is constitutional. Strong First Amendment protection for commercial speech has repeatedly sunk government attempts to restrict truthful product marketing. A federal ban on junk-food advertising of the kind now operating in the UK would face years of litigation and uncertainty in U.S. courts.
Structural differences compound the problem. Parliamentary sovereignty lets a governing party legislate and hand enforcement to standing regulators with less friction, while divided powers, the Senate filibuster, and aggressive judicial review make durable statutory change far harder to win (and far easier to unwind).
The UK also runs a single-payer health service that absorbs the cost of diet-related disease, giving the state a direct financial stake in prevention that Americans’ fragmented, privatized health system blunts.
None of this makes the British experience irrelevant. It makes it instructive in a different way.
The UK example teaches us that a serious U.S. agenda would have to be built for U.S. political conditions. Such an agenda includes leaning harder on states as laboratories, designing marketing rules that can survive constitutional change, using taxation and public procurement where advertising limits fall short, and above all investing in, rather than dismantling, the federal capacity that makes any of it enforceable.
Serious U.S. food reform agenda would mean a federal excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, designed with nutrient thresholds to reward reformulation.
It would mean statutory restrictions on the marketing of unhealthy food to children, written into law and handed to the Federal Trade Commission to enforce.
It would mean closing the GRAS loophole so manufacturers can no longer certify the safety of their own additives.
And it would mean a mandatory front-of-package labeling standard rather than a perpetually pending proposal.
Each of these changes requires legislation or hard rulemaking. None can be delivered by press release, and none survives the gutting of the agencies meant to carry them out.
The UK is not improving its food environment by finding a compelling figure to shame seed oils on television. It’s making the country healthier through the slow, unglamorous accumulation of rules with teeth, built on a theory that industry conduct is the central problem to be solved.
The UK is taking junk food off the shelf. MAHA is still squinting at the label.
