The best answer to the Coke crisis is to shrink government — and for people to drink it less.

I t has been a long time since Coca-Cola contained cocaine. Yet the removal of any trace of the drug has not affected the drink’s popularity. The company brags that nearly 2 billion servings of its drinks are consumed daily. That’s pretty close to buying the world a Coke. In the American South, “Coke,” invented and headquartered in Atlanta, has become the preferred term for any soft drink.

That appeal has not escaped the attention of two men, one with an affinity for the drink and the other, who, like Coke, has a history with drugs. Last month, Donald Trump said that he had been speaking with Coca-Cola “about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been campaigning to get food and beverage companies to drop artificial ingredients from their products, counted it as another win for the Make America Healthy Again movement when Coca-Cola announced that it would begin selling Coke with cane sugar this fall, in addition to its high-fructose-corn-syrup variety.

Corn syrup, ubiquitous though it may be, isn’t really in anyone’s definition of a well-balanced diet. It would be salutary for Americans to have less of it sloshing around inside them. But this latest move nonetheless reveals certain shortcomings in the Trump/Kennedy/MAHA policy agenda that compromise its efficacy — and could leave Americans no healthier than we were before.

Kennedy (with Trump’s implicit or explicit backing) has thus far mostly eschewed direct and concrete government intervention to convince companies to decrease their use of artificial ingredients. It may be novel for a health secretary to go about meeting with industry bigwigs to this end, and might well activate the nanny state concerns of some. But for now, there are steps Kennedy could be taking that he is declining to take. This is for the best.

Perhaps owing to his left-wing background, Kennedy has thus far been less conscious of how previous government action contributed to the situation he is now trying to address. Before 1984, Coca-Cola did use cane sugar in its products. Protectionist programs motivated its move to other sweeteners, like corn syrup. It is official U.S. policy to subsidize the price of sugar by restricting both the amount imported and the amount produced domestically. The Big Beautiful Bill kept this in place.

This policy has been successful, by its bizarre metric: Americans pay twice as much for sugar as does the rest of the world. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a byproduct of heavily subsidized corn, becomes attractive by comparison. Kennedy, to his credit, has called for cutting subsidies to corn and other crops. But neither he, nor Trump, nor congressional Republicans have devoted much political capital to unraveling the policy distortions that encouraged Coke to make its switch in the first place.

In this case, as in others, shrinking our own waistlines requires shrinking the government. It may be easier to have meetings with CEOs and hold high-profile press conferences for the sake of smaller changes. But a Kennedy ought to remember why it’s important to do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

The focus on carbonated beverages reveals a more serious inadequacy of the Trump-Kennedy pop agenda: It is insufficiently radical. Again, it would be a boon to Americans’ health to have less HFCS in our diets. And maybe sugar-sweetened Coke does taste better. (Having sworn off all soft drinks many years ago, I wouldn’t know.) But it is unclear, at best, whether there is a significant health advantage to substituting cane sugar for HFCS. They are chemically similar. Kennedy may not be keen on medical journals, but those who have studied the dietary effects of the two have found they affect the body in comparable (negative) ways. Kennedy has encouraged consumers to buy Mexico’s cane-sugar-based version of the drink and to avoid the kind currently available in the U.S. Yet there is little evidence Mexicans are much healthier from their Coke — and, in fact, quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. Obesity is about as bad there as it is here.

Even if there were marginally fewer health detriments to sugar-based Coke, directing considerable attention to the switch as a boon risks sending an unhelpful message. Many artificial and processed ingredients are bad for us. But ensuring that something is made of “natural” ingredients is not a guaranteed way to ensure it is healthy. Such a notion can only be supported by an overly sentimental, Disneyfied view of nature as perpetually benevolent.

An accurate assessment of health must incorporate additional considerations. If not, we could face the ultimate downside risk: that people who ought to be drinking less Coke, period, come to believe they don’t have to change their habits at all — or, even worse, that they can double down on them, out of a belief that cane sugar is the cure for whatever the man who drinks five Diet Cokes a day is getting.

Policy reforms would help address the distortion that Trump and Kennedy now lament. But the most transformational step would be for people to consume less Coke. This is not only a more direct challenge to beverage companies, who can currently offer fig leaves (or sugar cubes) to placate MAHA concerns. It’s also a more difficult charge for people to follow, and it’s beyond the scope of the federal government to make them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t, or shouldn’t. Even if it’s not a drug anymore.