Kennedy Report Won’t Solve America’s Food Issues, Experts Say

Food policy experts were cautiously optimistic that the new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., might finally improve the nation’s diet and reduce its reliance on ultraprocessed foods.

But many of them were left disappointed by Tuesday’s White House report laying out the ways Mr. Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again commission he leads planned to tackle childhood chronic disease.

The report is full of promising ideas, like serving healthier foods in schools and supporting breastfeeding, they said.

But it is vague on details about how those ideas would be implemented or funded. And it emphasizes education programs and personal responsibility over compelling the food industry to make their products healthier and to stop marketing junk foods to children, said Kelly Brownell, a professor emeritus at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

Even if all of the initiatives in the report were put into action, “the industry will not be required to change how it manipulates and markets foods that drive poor health in children,” Dr. Brownell said.

Tuesday’s document sits in striking contrast to the first “MAHA” report, published in May, said Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former federal food policymaker who has served under Republican and Democratic administrations. Mr. Mande saw the initial report, which focused on identifying the drivers of poor health in American children, as “revolutionary in its focus” on the role of ultraprocessed foods and the companies that make them in the chronic disease epidemic.