For parents, especially of young children, the question “What’s for dinner?” has high stakes. The answer can determine whether you’ll 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 getting food on the table, but whether that food is good for their kids. That’s partly why Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 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.
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.
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’s guidance overlaps with many of these principles, but it carries more weight because it comes from the health secretary himself. “What MAHA did was turn that mom-powered movement into a message that could not be ignored,” Michelle Magno, a Texas-based mother of three, told me.
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 “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen,” 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—which are published by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit that has drawn criticism from scientists—grapes and strawberries are dirtier than pineapples and avocados.) “It takes multiple places to get what I want,” Scolaro told me. Zen Honeycutt, the North Carolina–based 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’s criteria. But organic foods are not necessarily seed-oil-free, and only certain brands tick both boxes.
Organic and MAHA-coded foods, as I’ve written previously, can be more expensive. Plus, because organic products aren’t 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. “It’s not just the cooking—it’s the planning, the shopping, the prepping, and then hoping they’ll actually eat what’s on the plate. Some days it feels like a full-time job in itself,” Scolaro, who is a Pilates instructor and the founder of a lifestyle brand, told me.
[Read: The MAHA trend in groceries will backfire]
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’ highest priority. MAHA hems and haws over this point. The Trump administration’s “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” 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’s life, but many parents can’t, for a range of medical, economic, and personal reasons—not 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.)
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. “When 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,” 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, “you really have to support the mothers,” Kathryn Schubert, the CEO of the Society for Women’s Health Research, an advocacy nonprofit, told me.
So far, though, the federal government has offered little to help parents fulfill MAHA ideals. The new report includes a plan to send “MAHA boxes” 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’s 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.
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’s most significant policy changes include banning the food dye red 3 and getting companies to voluntarily phase out synthetic dyes—changes that some MAHA moms say don’t go far enough to support children’s health.
[Read: RFK Jr. is repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes]
I’ve criticized many of Kennedy’s 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–based chiropractor who co-hosts a podcast called MAHA Moms, asked me: “I think we put a lot of stress on ourselves to be the perfect mom. Do you think that?” I couldn’t help but agree.