Alliance Alert: The White House’s Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, released yesterday by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) commission, is positioned as a foundational document addressing the rise in childhood chronic illness. While the report touches on multiple issues that intersect with mental health, it offers little in the way of direct solutions or investment in actual mental health support for children and youth.
What the Report Covers (and What It Doesn’t)
Although the MAHA report does not contain a dedicated mental health section, it outlines several factors contributing to children’s mental health challenges:
- Overmedicalization: The report criticizes the high rate of psychotropic prescriptions for children, blaming both well-meaning parents and physicians for relying too quickly on medication without exploring alternatives.
- Critique of Trauma-Informed Care & SEL: The report pushes back on trauma-informed practices and social-emotional learning (SEL), claiming these approaches “pathologize normal emotions,” undermine resilience, and may contribute to higher rates of anxiety and depression.
- Blame on Social Media: The report squarely places much of the blame for rising youth mental health issues on excessive screen time and technology use, without addressing deeper systemic or social determinants.
- Environmental and Lifestyle Stressors: It acknowledges chronic stress, inactivity, poor diet, sleep deprivation, and chemical exposure as key contributors to both physical and mental health decline.
Yet, while the report names these drivers, it largely sidesteps structural causes like poverty, housing insecurity, lack of access to mental health services, and systemic racism.
What’s Missing
- No concrete mental health solutions: There are no new proposals to expand access to care, support school-based services, or bolster the mental health workforce.
- No funding commitments or programmatic expansions.
- No focus on equity or socioeconomic drivers, such as access to healthy food, green space, or safe communities—all of which deeply influence mental health.
Instead, the report focuses overwhelmingly on dietary reform, food policy, and chemical exposures, positioning these as the root of nearly all chronic illness—including mental health challenges—without a full picture of today’s mental health crisis.
What’s Next
The MAHA Commission, led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., plans to release a follow-up strategy document in September 2025, based on the findings of this assessment. That report is expected to outline concrete policy proposals.
Given the glaring gaps in mental health strategy and the dismissive framing of trauma-informed and emotional learning practices, the next phase must be met with strong advocacy to ensure real solutions are prioritized.
Context Matters
The report was released amidst significant cuts to public health infrastructure:
- The CDC’s chronic disease prevention center has faced layoffs.
- Programs supporting local food in schools and SNAP access were slashed in the proposed federal budget passed by the House this week.
- NIH research on chronic disease prevention has been deprioritized.
While the MAHA report claims to care about child health, many of the programs proven to improve it are being actively dismantled by the current administration.
Bottom Line:
The MAHA report offers a selective diagnosis of children’s health decline, heavily focused on diet and environmental toxins. It rightly critiques overmedication and chronic stress, but fails to offer serious or comprehensive mental health solutions. This is a crucial moment to demand that the forthcoming strategy report in September includes evidence-based, equitable, and fully resourced mental health supports for children and families.
What the New ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Report Says About Children’s Health
By Alana Semuels | Time Magazine | 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.
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.
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.”
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.”
What a New Federal Report Says About Children’s Health | TIME
4 Key Takeaways From a New White House Report on Children’s Health
By Dani Blum, Apoorva Mandavilli, Roni Caryn Rabin and Alice Callahan | New York Times | May 23, 2025
In a sweeping new report, the White House outlined what it sees as the drivers of disease in American children.
“To turn the tide and better protect our children, the United States must act decisively,” reads the report, which was produced by a presidential commission tasked with combating childhood disease. “During this administration, we will begin reversing the childhood chronic disease crisis by confronting its root causes — not just its symptoms.”
The document echoes talking points Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed for decades: the idea that our modern environment is making people sick, and that corporations exert too much influence on research and medicine.
The report provides little in the way of specific solutions to address these issues, though the commission is also expected to release recommendations later this year. What the document does offer is the clearest articulation yet of Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, and what the broad coalition hopes to accomplish in the coming months and years. Here’s what the new report tells us.
The report paints a bleak picture of American childhood.
The report presents today’s children as stressed, sleep-deprived and addicted to their screens. It describes rising rates of conditions like obesity, diabetes and mental illness as a crisis that threatens the nation’s health, economy and military readiness. “Today’s children are the sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease,” the report says.
And it lashes out against technology companies and social media platforms that it says have helped create a “technology-driven lifestyle.” It cites Jonathan Haidt, whose best-selling book “The Anxious Generation” links the rise of smartphones and social media to worsening mental health among children — a theory that some researchers have criticized for relying on inconclusive research. The report also notes that rates of loneliness among children have risen over the past several decades, a concern that researchers and public health experts have also raised for years.
It takes aim at vaccines.
The report reiterates many of Mr. Kennedy’s frequent talking points about vaccines — with one notable exception. It does not suggest, as he has for decades, that childhood vaccines may be responsible for the rise in autism diagnoses among American children.
But it implies that the increase in routine immunizations given to children may be harmful to them, which many scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology. The shots administered to children today are more efficient, and they contain far fewer stimulants to the immune system — by orders of magnitude — than they did decades ago, experts say.
Vaccines are also largely responsible for the sharp drop in deaths among children under 5.
“The growth of the vaccination schedule does reflect the fact that we can prevent a lot more suffering and death in children than we could generations ago,” said Jason Schwartz, an associate professor of health policy at the Yale School of Public Health.
“Rather than celebrating that, it’s often seen as a reason for skepticism or concern,” he said.
The report also repeats Mr. Kennedy’s assertion that childhood vaccines have not been tested in clinical trials involving placebos. In fact, new vaccines are tested against placebos whenever it is necessary, feasible and ethical to do so.
Some European countries, including Britain, do not mandate vaccinations as most American states do, the report notes. While that’s true, misinformation and mistrust have led to record numbers of measles cases in Europe, and have cost Britain its measles elimination status.
The report notes correctly that surveillance systems in the United States for detecting side effects related to vaccines have serious shortcomings. But detection of rare side effects requires huge amounts of data, which is difficult to collect from the nation’s fragmented health care system.
The report urges federal agencies to “build systems for real-world safety monitoring of pediatric drugs” — which presumably include vaccines — but it is unclear how those initiatives would differ from the systems already in use.
It puts a major emphasis on ultraprocessed foods.
The report says that “the food American children are eating” is causing their health to decline.
“It’s terrific to see such a clear, direct admission from the government that we are failing our children’s health — and that our food is one dominant driver,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
Nearly 70 percent of the calories consumed by children and adolescents in the United States come from ultraprocessed foods. These industrially manufactured foods and drinks, like sodas, chicken nuggets, instant soups and packaged snacks, have been linked with a greater risk of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other conditions.
The report appropriately calls out an excess of ultraprocessed foods and not enough fruits and vegetables as problems with children’s diets, Dr. Mozaffarian said, but it “misses the massive problem of high salt,” which can cause high blood pressure in children. He also said he wished it had focused more on the “many other severe deficiencies in the American diet,” like a lack of legumes, nuts, minimally processed whole grains, fish, yogurt and healthy plant oils.
Marion Nestle, an emerita professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said that overall, the report “did a phenomenal job” describing how ultraprocessed foods are harming children’s health.
The question, she said, is how the administration will fix the problems that are articulated in the report. “In order for them to do anything about this, they’re going to have to take on corporate industry,” including agriculture, food and chemical industries, she said.
Food manufacturers, for example, could make healthier foods and stop marketing “junk food” to children, she said. Such changes would most likely require federal regulations, she said, because historically, companies have resisted making them voluntarily.
The report highlights a lack of government funding for nutrition research as part of the problem — a point scientists have been making for years. The situation has worsened during President Trump’s second term, however, as many diet researchers have had federal grants abruptly terminated. Kevin Hall, whose research on ultraprocessed foods is prominently cited in the new report, left his post at the National Institutes of Health in April, citing censorship.
The report points a finger at synthetic chemicals but pulls some punches.
The commission’s report accurately describes worsening health among American children, said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist who directs the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.
And it notes a number of synthetic chemicals, like pesticides and microplastics, that may play a role. “The first 18 pages of the report are brilliant,” Dr. Landrigan said.
But he said it understated the known risks of many chemicals.
For example, he argued that the report’s authors downplay the hazards of phthalates, used to make plastics, and of certain pesticides that have been deemed dangerous to children’s health but remain widely used.
“They mentioned correctly that phthalates can trigger hormone dysregulation, but they could have also said that phthalates produce birth defects of the male reproductive organs and can lead to infertility,” Dr. Landrigan said.
While the report mentions concerns about crop-protection tools such as pesticides, “that’s really an understatement,” Dr. Landrigan said. He noted that studies of the widely used insecticide chlorpyrifos show “clearly that it causes brain damage in kids and reduces children’s I.Q. and causes behavioral problems.”
The pesticide was banned from household use 25 years ago because of the risks to children, and banned from use on all crops three years ago. But the Environmental Protection Agency recently permitted its use on fruits like apples and oranges because of lawsuits brought by the manufacturer and growers’ associations.
The report also stopped short of calling two common pesticides used on many food crops, glyphosate and atrazine, unsafe after pushback from farmers, industry lobbyists and Republican lawmakers.
Dr. Landrigan and colleagues from the Consortium for Children’s Environmental Health recently advocated in The New England Journal of Medicine for a national approval process for all existing and new chemicals. Independent scientific assessments would be required to show the chemicals were not toxic to anyone, especially children, and post-marketing surveillance would be required.
Yet the federal agencies that could regulate chemical exposures have been gutted in recent layoffs.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, pointed out that the report called for “gold-standard research,” even as the administration had drastically cut funding for science and halted payments to universities like Harvard and Columbia.
“They’re not walking the walk,” he said. “They’re just talking.”
Takeaways From the White House’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Report – The New York Times