Can MAHA Beat the Junk Food Lobby?

The vibe shift is powerful. But is it powerful enough to beat Big Soda and Big Grocery?

Obesity and its evil twin—diabetes—are corroding America’s health. These chronic ailments also disproportionately afflict the poor. Yet for years, the federal government has been paying for soda, cookies, candy, and other nutritionally empty, obesity-engendering foods, via its main source of anti-hunger aid for low-income people: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), previously known as food stamps.

Reformers who take the word nutrition seriously have repeatedly tried to limit or ban the use of SNAP benefits for junk food. And they have just as repeatedly been thwarted by the beverage and grocery lobbies, whose influence extends from Congress, to the Department of Agriculture, to nonprofit policy shops and think tanks.

Now, though, the lobbies’ hammerlock may be breakable, thanks to a convergence of interests between GOP spending hawks, both state and federal, and the MAHA movement, led by the new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RFK Jr., America’s stopped clock, is wrong much of the time—witness his disparagement of the measles vaccine, a position that looks even worse amid an outbreak of the disease in Texas and New Mexico. One thing he’s not wrong about, though, is that federal subsidies support the production and consumption of unhealthful foods.

On using SNAP benefits for sugary food, candy, and drinks, RFK Jr.’s position is hyperbolically stated but correct: “We shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison,” he said last month.

There’s a lot of money in play. Based on the best available data, roughly one-fifth of the $93.8 billion that 42 million low-income SNAP beneficiaries spent in 2024—$18.8 billion—went toward sugary drinks, snack foods, and the like. A quarter of that was spent at Walmart, based on a study of SNAP beneficiaries’ shopping patterns by Numerator, a market research firm.

Defenders of the status quo would have you believe that banning candy and soda purchases with SNAP “shames the poor” or violates their “freedom of choice.”

“This is just another way to cut benefits,” Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director of the D.C. nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, told Fortune recently. “It’s like, how do we restrict people more? How do we stigmatize them more?”

Footnote: The chair of FRAC’s board doubles as the chief lobbyist for Kraft Heinz; its funders include Walmart Foundation, General Mills, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. During the Biden administration, the Department of Agriculture funded FRAC too: In 2023 it received a $2 million grant “to conduct and support research on expanding equitable access to the federally funded child nutrition programs,” other than SNAP.

Yet there’s nothing new about “restrictions” on SNAP. It already bars the purchase of alcohol, or restaurant meals—even prepared meals from grocery store food bars.

A slightly more plausible objection is that changing the rules would impose an expensive retooling on retailers, in return for little real benefit. SNAP clients buy a lot of junk food, but so do other shoppers. And even if you cut off the in-kind support that low-income people get from SNAP, they could still use their cash income to buy junk food.

However, a 2018 study found that SNAP clients treat benefits as part of a separate mental account from cash, meaning they might not spend as much on junk food when required to use their own money to do so.

As Angela Rachidi of the American Enterprise Institute, one of Washington’s few think-tankers willing to take on the lobbies, has written, the study “leaves open the possibility that SNAP actually increases the consumption of unhealthy foods in low-income households.”

The ferocious opposition of the grocery and soda lobbies certainly suggests that they think junk food sales would go down without SNAP to support them.

Newly introduced Republican-sponsored bills in both the House and Senate would exclude soft drinks, candy, ice cream, and prepared desserts from SNAP. “Food Babe” Vani Hari and RFK Jr. ally Calley Means have endorsed them.

Legislation is required to change national SNAP policy. The only way executive action could affect it is for the Department of Agriculture to grant states waivers of the SNAP rules, so that they can try junk food bans on their own. (The USDA, not HHS, has authority over SNAP, which is why RFK Jr. can’t act.) Fortunately the new Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, is urging the states to do just that.

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is one of several red-state governors who’s interested, as she recently told The Wall Street Journal. So are legislators in several other states.

This is a change from the recent past, when it was governments in Blue America—New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Minnesota, and Maine (albeit under a Republican governor)—that pursued waivers, only to be denied by the USDA.

The first Trump administration, in fact, shot down Maine’s request, saying, “We don’t want to be in the business of picking winners and losers among food products in the marketplace, or in passing judgment about the relative benefits of individual food products.”

But now there’s real traction behind the idea that, far from showing paternalism toward poor people, ending SNAP for junk food sends a much-needed message about how choices at the grocery store affect health—and incentivizes beneficiaries to act on it.

As it happens, the new head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-authored a 2014 study arguing that excluding junk food from SNAP would reduce obesity and type 2 diabetes rates.

Reform respects the interests of taxpayers, who have a right to expect truth in labeling from this “nutrition” program. They also have a right to worry about the additional burden that the obesity epidemic—which affects 42 percent of adults and 20 percent of children—places on our publicly supported healthcare system, via higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and other illnesses.

Far from delegitimizing the program and paving the way for broader cuts, a de-junked SNAP—one that actually nourishes low-income people—could enjoy more public support, and deserves it.

To find out how toxic chemicals got into our food and personal care products, read Joshua Lachter’s piece, “It’s Not Just Red Dye No. 3. It’s All Our Stuff.”