Day: May 22, 2025

A new federal report issued by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission portrays children’s health as in alarming decline due to poor diet, chemical exposures, over-medicalization, a lack of physical activity, and much more. Certain industry groups, the American health care system, and parental choices are largely blamed—while socioeconomic factors that research has shown affects many of these issues are barely mentioned.

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President Donald Trump requested the report in a February executive order establishing the MAHA Commission, whose primary mission is to address childhood chronic diseases. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chairs the commission. 

The group’s report presents four main drivers of chronic childhood illness, laying particular blame on the food children eat and their daily habits. It takes aim at ultra-processed foods, citing a 2021 study that found that nearly 70% of an American’s child’s calories come from this category, and argues that those foods drive weight gain. 

The report also says that children are over-exposed to chemicals, take too many medications, spend too little time doing physical activity, and are too focused on technology. While the report rests some responsibility on the food and pharmaceutical industries—which it says have undue influence on dietary guidelines and drug studies—it also criticizes certain parental decisions. 

The report says, for instance, that a rise in chronic childhood diseases is directly tied to children’s diets, and that the reliance on ultraprocessed foods “is a dramatic change since the 1960s when most food was cooked at home using whole ingredients”—a nod to demographic changes in which more women are in the workforce rather than staying at home with children.

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It says that more than one third of parents leave electronic devices powered on in their children’s bedrooms at night, disrupting their sleep.  

It adds that children are over-medicated, in part, because of “well-intended physicians and parents attempting to help a child.” 

It also says that pregnant mothers eat too much ultraprocessed food; that pesticides, microplastics, and pollutants are commonly found in the blood and urine of children and of pregnant women; and that virtually every breast milk sample tested in America “contains some level of persistent organic pollutants.” 

The authors of the report claim that teens in single-parent families tend to have higher rates of anxiety, depression, and ADHD than those in two-parent households, citing studies from 2017 and 2015. “Gentle parenting,” a popular parenting style emphasizing empathy and respect, also attracts their critique; the authors cite one report finding that it and trauma-informed care “potentially pathologize normal emotions, undermine resilience, and contribute to rising anxiety and depression rates among children and teenagers.” 

Some praised the report’s wide-ranging nature and the fact that it calls attention to the many impediments families face in raising healthy children. “Parents are being set up to fail,” says Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, a national nonprofit that focuses on food, farming, and the environment. “There are simply too few good choices and too many bad choices.”

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The report exemplifies the Make America Healthy Again platform, which focuses on how food and chemicals are making people less healthy. The movement has supporters in Surgeon General nominee Dr. Casey Means and in a vocal contingent of moms across the country. Like many policies in the Trump Administration, it looks to return to a time decades ago when, the movement’s leaders believe, things were better in America—a claim that is in a large part untrue when it comes to health. 

“In this report, there are these ideas that we need to get back to some nostalgic, pre-existing state where children didn’t have cellphones, slept more, and went camping,” says Peter Lurie, the president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit focusing on food safety, nutrition and health. “It doesn’t seem to really live in the real world.” 

This is not the first time a presidential administration has looked into worsening child health in America and blamed lifestyle choices. The Biden Administration released a report about diet-related diseases, and the Obama Administration had a Task Force on Childhood Obesity that submitted a report to the president. However, the MAHA Commission’s report differs in that it barely mentions the socioeconomic factors that worsen obesity and childhood disease, like a lack of access to healthy food or green space.

People may know what is healthy but may not be able to easily access nutritious food because of a lack of grocery stores where they live; they may want their children to spend more time outside but are worried about crime or a lack of green space. “One approach is to invest in these communities so that people have access to the resources they need,” says Nour Makarem, co-leader of the chronic disease unit at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

The commission now has 80 days to come up with a strategy for improving the health of American children based on the report. But some critics point out that efforts to find solutions to some of the problems outlined by the report have been cut by the current Administration.

The report comes amid drastic cuts to or eliminations of many government programs working to solve some of these issues. Layoffs decimated the chronic disease prevention center at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Trump Administration cut a program that brought food to schools from local farms. Shortly before the MAHA report was released, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would severely cut funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps low-income families buy food.

Clinical trials and studies looking at chronic disease prevention and ways to help people access healthy foods have been cut in the Administration’s slashing of grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and other sources, adds Makarem. 

“I don’t know that we’ve identified the most innovative approaches to knowing what’s healthy and having people engage in healthy behaviors,” she says. “None of that can be accomplished without research and clinical trials.” 

President Donald Trump is set to attend an exclusive dinner Thursday night with the top investors in his personalized meme coin—a gathering that Democrats are calling a blatant conflict of interest and a troubling example of how Trump is leveraging his presidency for private financial gain.

More than 200 crypto investors are expected to be at Trump’s private golf club in northern Virginia for the event, which Trump and business partners have described as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION” in the world. The venture was framed as a contest, with the top 220 buyers of Trump’s meme coin scoring a seat at a private dinner with the President at the Trump National Golf Club. The top 25 buyers were promised additional perks, including a separate a cocktail reception.

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On average, guests spent over $1.7 million a seat to attend the dinner, according to an analysis by the blockchain analytics company Nansen, per NBC News. The top seven winners each spent more than $10 million.

Investors could track via a leaderboard how much of Trump’s meme coin, called $TRUMP, they needed to purchase to move up the rankings. Ethics watchdogs have said that Trump was effectively offering access to himself in exchange for an investment in his cryptocurrency, which he started selling just days before his inauguration in January. Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress have pointed to the event as the clearest example yet of how the Trump family’s crypto empire is blurring the lines between public office, private enrichment, and untraceable foreign money.

“Donald Trump’s dinner is an orgy of corruption,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts told reporters at a press conference hosted by Democrats ahead of the dinner. “Donald Trump is using the presidency of the United States to make himself richer through crypto and he’s doing it right out there in plain sight.”

Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican and longtime advocate for digital assets, separately expressed reservations of the event: “This is my President we’re talking about, but I am willing to say that this gives me pause.”

While meme coins are often treated as jokes, with no real utility, Trump’s meme coins have become a way for wealthy individuals to gain access to Trump and funnel money to his family. So far, Trump’s coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, according to Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm.

Most of the guests attending the private dinner are not publicly known, and the White House has not said whether it will publicly disclose the guest list. When asked about the dinner on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “The president is attending it in his personal time. It is not a White House dinner.”

She rejected the ethical concerns about how the guests to the dinner were selected, reiterating that his assets are held in a blind trust and managed by his children. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this President is profiting off of the presidency,” Leavitt said. “This President was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly. Not only has he lost wealth, but he also almost lost his life. He has sacrificed a lot to be here.”

Trump and his family have embraced cryptocurrencies in his second term. He’s said he wants to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet and bitcoin superpower of the world,” promising favorable regulation of the industry. In March, he held a crypto summit at the White House with prominent figures in the industry and signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and Digital Asset Stockpile. 

The Trump family also holds about a 60% stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture that has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue since January. The venture got a boost earlier this month when World Liberty announced it was being used by an investment firm in the United Arab Emirates for its $2 billion investment in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Trump’s involvement in the crypto industry comes just as Congress prepares to vote on stablecoin legislation.

Warren on Thursday called on Congress to amend that legislation, called the GENIUS Act, to bar any President from profiting off stablecoin ventures. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has also introduced legislation that would ban sitting Presidents from profiting off meme coins while in office.

“Just because the corruption is playing out in public where everybody can see, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t rampant, rapacious corruption,” Murphy said at the Democrats’ press conference hours before the dinner, which he described as “maybe the most corrupt, of all of the corruption.”

Those who have publicly shared that they plan to attend the dinner include crypto billionaire Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain, who says he is the top holder of Trump’s memecoin. Sun was charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023, but regulators paused his fraud case not long after Trump took power.

On Thursday morning, Rep. Maxine Waters of California and other senior Democrats introduced a bill titled the “Stop The Rug Pulls by Unethical Members and Presidents Act,” aiming to bar all elected officials from launching or endorsing crypto products. “Through his crypto businesses, Trump has turned the office of the presidency into a personal money-making machine,” Waters said at a recent House hearing.