Back in May the Trump administration’s MAHA Commission under HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy released its Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, which tried to outline the challenge for beating back chronic disease and obesity in children. It identified several areas where the commission should become active: poor diet, environmental toxins, lack of physical activity, chronic stress, and overmedicalization. The Commission is supposed to come back in August with an action plan.

There is some real left-right convergence, as well as expert-populist convergence on the idea that there are problematic food additives, or chemicals, or processes in our industrial food supply chain. Red states such as West Virginia and Texas have been passing legislation regulating certain additives. Not all are in agreement. Experts tend to still promote seed oils, populists and disciples of fitness influencers (including Robert F. Kennedy himself) prefer animal fats, butter, avocado oil, etc. I’m curious what they will come up with.

I tend to favor some of the regulatory moves that simply rule whether an additive is safe for consumption, or can be marketed in consumable products at all. I’m less interested in liberal efforts to ban advertising junk food to children.

But one thing that surprises me about these efforts is how little they are connected to commercial interests. This is speculative on my part, and anyone with industry expertise should feel free to correct me. It’s perfectly understandable why BigAg would oppose regulations that make their production more costly. But, what if there were some regulatory convergence with other nations, particularly in the EU? Many of what are today “trade barriers” for American produce and food in the EU turn out to be just higher (and I would argue more sensible) standards. At a certain point, raising the standard in American food supply should expand the market for American food. Why couldn’t this be a way of helping the incumbents in the industry accept higher standards?