At first glance, the Make America Healthy Again movement has seemed like an awkward addition to the American Right. A movement focused on food safety, chemical additives, microplastics, and the health risks of industrial agriculture sounds like something progressive — the latest big government attempt to protect people from themselves.
But there’s more — or rather less — to MAHA than meets the eye. At its best, MAHA is not a regulatory movement that stumbled into a largely skeptical government, pro-freedom coalition. It is a market-driven, individual-responsibility movement that is winning precisely because it is conservative.
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The confusion is understandable. The head of the MAHA movement, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., spent a lifetime in the Democratic Party and has a complicated political history. Likewise, states such as California have imposed bans on artificial dyes in school food. And MAHA organizers have urged the government to regulate products such as pesticides and food dyes more aggressively.
But when looking at what MAHA has actually accomplished at the federal level, a very different picture emerges.
Take food dyes. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration asked food companies to phase out eight petroleum-based synthetic dyes voluntarily from the American food supply by the end of 2026. The keyword is “voluntarily,” and it worked. Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Smucker’s, and many other major food brands moved to reformulate products. Walmart announced it would remove synthetic dyes from thousands of its private-label items, along with 30 other ingredients. Target now requires all cereals sold in its stores to be free of certified synthetic colors.
Sure, a government request carries a bit more weight than that of some other entity. But these businesses didn’t put up a fight for a simple reason: they are meeting consumers where they are. There are already millions of parents reading labels, switching brands, and refusing to buy products that don’t meet their standards. Major players in the food sector aren’t following the government’s lead as much as they are responding to public demand — demand driven by years of under-the-radar public education conducted by health-conscious experts and influencers long before MAHA had a name.
Compare this to the top-down model of government-imposed health and safety standards that progressives prefer, which must overcome years of political and legal uncertainty and delays before coming into effect, and often generates as much resistance as compliance.
For example, take trans fats. It took decades for the FDA to ban trans fats — including administrative petitions, consumer litigation, multiple studies, and a patchwork of state and local regulations — before a rule was issued in 2015 with a compliance deadline of 2018. Yet the whole time, the private sector was already resolving the issue; food companies voluntarily eliminated 86% of trans fats from the food supply before the regulations were even finalized.
Top-down imposition can also spur unintended consequences. Following the 1980 dietary guidelines that pushed Americans to eat less fat, the food industry responded by engineering “low-fat” products filled with sugar. As a result, obesity and diabetes exploded, leading to a public backlash culminating in the massive popularity of the keto, paleo, and carnivore diets, along with deep skepticism of federal nutritional guidance.
To be sure, regulation does have a place in ensuring consumer safety, punishing deception, and guaranteeing that people have the information they need to make informed choices. But there is a difference between government as a referee and government as a nanny. MAHA is succeeding because it made the winning bet that, given good information, Americans will make better choices for themselves and their families than regulators will make for them. The real power of the MAHA movement is not its ability to write rules, but to move markets and create new ones.
History supports this strategy. Two decades ago, organic produce was a niche product, expensive and hard to find. No federal mandate required Americans to buy it, and no regulation forced grocery chains to stock it. Consumers decided they wanted it; they paid a premium for it; producers responded; competition drove prices down; and today, organic options line the shelves of every mainstream grocery store in the country.
The same logic is reshaping the energy sector. It isn’t the Green New Deal or electric vehicle mandates that are transforming the energy economy. Rather, as demand for energy rose, solar and wind became more attractive. The market responded by producing more, creating efficiencies that led to solar costs dropping by 90% and onshore wind by 70% in a single decade. Texas became a national leader in utility-scale clean energy — outpacing California — precisely because it deregulated the market and prioritized cost competitiveness, with wind and solar winning out with the lowest levelized costs.
That is the market working exactly as it should — driven by informed individual choice, not government prescription. MAHA is the same dynamic applied to processed food and chemical additives.
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Kennedy is most effective not when he threatens regulation, but when he praises a company that reformulates a product that harms our children’s health. With each change, he’s winning a victory that can’t be overturned by a future administration because it isn’t rooted in the power of the government, but in the power of personal choice.
MAHA and MAGA may appear like odd bedfellows. But appearances are deceptive. At its best, MAHA is as conservative as it gets: the free-market movement applied to health.
The Rev. Dr. Jessica Moerman is the president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network.