As foodborne illness outbreaks have grabbed headlines, confidence in the federal government’s stewardship of the food system has faltered. The Administration has sought to redirect public attention towards the nation’s obesity epidemic, and its promise of getting us all to eat “real food.” But progress on reducing the nation’s chronic diet-related disease epidemic faces the same fundamental problem today in the United States as efforts to prevent acute foodborne illness: rampant corruption.
Nutrition and food safety are not the same, but they overlap significantly. A growing body of evidence suggests that harmful additives in food are a key driver of chronic disease. At the same time, microbiological pathogens like E.coli in romaine lettuce or, more recently, Cyclospora in salad greens, can scare off consumers from more nutritious foods, pushing them to eat more sterile, typically ultra-processed, foods.
So a strategy to improve Americans’ diets that that neglects microbiological food safety does not make a lot of sense. Even so, policies to rid the food supply of sketchy ingredients and improve consumers’ access to “real food” could do a lot to improve public health. This is not a new problem. As the graph below from the National Institutes of Health shows, child obesity has been soaring for decades:
Trends in Obesity Among Children and Adolescents Ages 2–19 years, by Age: United States, 1963–1965 through 2017–2018
Why has our public health system allowed this to happen?
In a word, corruption. Food is complicated, and throughout history, well-intentioned people and innovations have gone awry. Trans-fat, for example, was long thought to be healthier than the saturated fats it replaced. But corruption explains a lot of why one in five kids today can expect to suffer from obesity before they reach adulthood. All too often, long after the science has revealed an unacceptable health risk associated with a food product (e.g. trans-fat), vested interests have delayed or stymied corrective action. It took 25 years of advocacy by groups like CFA member Center for Science in the Public Interest to get trans-fat out of the food supply. The carcinogenic pig feed additive carbadox offers a contemporary, and galling, example of industry rent-seeking behavior at work. And the same stall tactics have preserved obviously inadequate regulatory processes (e.g. allowing chemical companies to secretly self-determine novel food ingredient safety).
Campaigning as disruptive reformers, the Administration has portrayed its Make America Healthy Again movement as an antidote to Big Food’s corrupting influence. At the recent Republican “mid-term convention,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slammed the Democratic Party for having “cultivated deep ties” with “Big Food.” There is some truth in this. The food and beverage industry reportedly gave $8.08 million to the Democratic Party in the 2024 election cycle. But the same reporting shows the industry gave $9.95 million to the Republican Party. Likewise, the Administration’s “MAHA Report” criticized the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) as “being unduly influenced by corporate interests.” Yet when the Administration assembled a group of experts to issue new guidelines, they disclosed financial ties to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Dairy Council, and General Mills, among others. Not exactly “pure as the wind driven snow,” as the irascible consumer advocate Tony Corbo used to say.
Not all corruption is the same. A scientist that accepts grant funding from a trade group is not necessarily corrupt, nor is a member of Congress who accepts a campaign donation from a food company. Formally defined, corruption is “dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people (such as government officials or police officers),” or “inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (such as bribery).” Money influences people in insidious ways. As Upton Sinclair said, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depend