2025-06-04
I just read a really funny article in the New York Times about an app that lets users scan the bar code of packaged foods and assigns each product a health score out of 100. Apparently it's really popular with the "Make America Healthy Again" crowd online. The idea is that it's designed to help you make healthier choices at the grocery store. Apparently RFK Jr. says it's "invaluable" to him.
The Times obviously asked their own expert to weigh in, and the expert had mixed feedback. But their ultimate verdict was overcomplicated and mealy-mouthed. Reading the article made me so annoyed that I felt compelled to write something in response.
In short, I think the real health crisis is this: everyone is exhibiting learned helplessness when it comes to managing their own diets and making healthy choices. I think our food industry and the big media companies that breathlessly report bad diet science are largely to blame. And I think this app, and MAHA, are not gonna fix that.
Lately I've been talking a lot about ordering beef on the computer, and I think a lot of people get the impression that this choice is motivated by a MAHA-type ethic. I get why; I like to say goofy, inflammatory stuff sometimes. From the outside, I'll admit that it's super believable that I might've watched too many internet videos, gotten convinced that canola oil is the devil, and started eating BEEF and EGGS instead of WOKE KALE or something.
I hate to say it, but I just feel way better when I eat a meat-heavy diet. I've tried a bunch of different dietary approaches, and fully committed to each in its turn, including veganism and vegetarianism. I really wanted those to work out and feel good. I know they work for some people, and it's possible I could make it work for me if I tried harder. But the truth is that meat is convenient, nutrient-dense, and healthy if you get the right stuff.
The MAHA people are basically right about meat, but wrong about pretty much everything else. In the end, I think MAHA is almost as dumb as the movement it's reacting to. MAHA content online is largely focused on restaurant food and snacks, and specifically, on on finding or creating restaurants and processed food products free of a select group of additives. It was a huge victory to them when Steak and Shake started frying their french fries in beef tallow instead of vegetable oil. I won't reproduce someone else's argument about the food industry's ever-changing relationship with fats; just know that I've read them all and I don't think any kind of french fry should be a building block of your diet.
In essence, MAHA is asserting the idea that we as Americans are entitled to an industrial food system that produces food that's tasty, healthy, convenient/ready-to-eat AND cheap, ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Maybe I could engineer that if they let me be King of America and use the Perlmutter supercomputer to program the economy, but I think achieving this through market mechanisms is a fantasy.
Focusing on processed foods suggests that eating healthy really isn't that much of a priority for these people. By and large, processed food is cheap and tasty because it's cut with cheap, shitty additives. Using higher quality ingredients increases cost. As does processing food in the first place. The box of pre-cut cubes of squash is more expensive than a squash. If you want cheap, healthy, tasty food, you need to buy minimally processed stuff and cook it yourself. This definitely takes some time and effort (though not as much as people think).
But the fact that the MAHA people would rather use their political capital shaming McDonald's into switching the type of fry oil they use than on a campaign encouraging Americans to cook more, or on encouraging grocery stores to stock more fresh, high-quality, unprocessed ingredients, is a really bad sign. It says that they are fundamentally faithless about people's ability to choose health for themselves if it involves any amount of sacrifice. And it always will.
I think it's what guarantees that their cultural reforms will fail.
Nutrition advice has become way too complicated and it's a big driver behind the learned helpless I was talking about earlier. In truth for 99% of people eating healthy is really simple. Mostly whole foods. Every meal should have some lean protein, and half your plate should be fruits and veggies.
What's more: if you think you need processed foods because you're too busy, no you don't. I completely reject the idea that most people are too busy to cook for half an hour. All these supposedly beleaguered people are finding the time to watch hours of videos on social media or TV on streaming apps.
It's perfectly possible that you don't want to do this. That's totally fine. I try as hard as I can to avoid being judgy about healthy eating choices. What frustrates me is the inconsistency: it's the MAHA people morally hectoring fast-food companies for cutting corners while being unwilling to get off their own asses and make a salad; it's the Times pretending that simple matters of health are PhD-level topics in order to reify their position as the forum for experts, then acting confused when regular people reject their worldview and turn to a stupid little app to tell them which chips to buy.
If nothing else, the MAHA people and I can agree that we're sick of miso butter gochujang harissa spaghetti.