During the Environmental Working Group’s Aug. 11 webinar on the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) report, celebrity chef and food advocate Andrew Zimmern issued a sharp critique of the U.S. food system and urged the Trump administration to take bold, structural action when it releases its food and health recommendations.
Zimmern says the problem starts with “corporate capture” — when “the industries that a government agency is supposed to regulate end up holding the pen that writes the rules. It makes no sense whatsoever when it comes to food and nutrition policy.”
He argued that current dietary guidelines often reflect profit motives rather than public health, leading to decades of recommendations that downplay the dangers of sugar, salt and ultraprocessed foods (UPFs).
The problem, Zimmern says, is when dietary guidelines and public health recommendations serve profit margins more than public health.
“Here are three reasons [why] we should worry,” he says. “It erodes trust in science and government agencies; it hardwires public crises like obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease into the population; and it locks our food system, the U.S. food system, into status quo industrial agriculture and crowds out sustainable and regional alternatives.”
Calling the current state of nutrition guidance “the fox … writing the poultry manual,” Zimmern laid out steps to counter industry influence, including stronger conflict-of-interest rules, more public-interest research funding and improved consumer literacy.
“And I think the last thing I would add is that corporate capture of our dietary guidelines is not some abstract policy concern. It’s the reason the public gets nutrition advice written with a food lobbyist pen. It couldn’t be more obviously wrong. So, until we firewall government agencies from industry money, we’re not going to be getting dietary guidance. We’re going to be getting marketing copy in a lab coat,” he says.
Zimmern also called for universal access to real food, permanent fixes to school lunches, labeling reform and even the creation of a Cabinet-level secretary of food position to unify fragmented food policy.
He emphasized that the American diet’s overreliance on UPFs is fueling a national health crisis, pointing to the “big four” processed-food-related diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers. The lack of front-of-package warnings, he says, prevents parents from making informed choices.
For Zimmern, the real change will come from reshaping the food environment itself.
“Kids don’t need another lecture on balance … What we need is a food environment where the healthy choice is the default choice, the easy choice,” he says.
Zimmern closed by framing healthy eating as a basic right.
“If the goal of the administration’s MAHA plan is to build healthier diets at a national scale, strengthen our food system and provide true food equity, then a strong report should combine actual policy levers, food industry accountability, education and access,” he says. “The plan shouldn’t shame people for what they eat. It should empower them to make better choices by making those choices easier, cheaper and more delicious.
“I believe a healthy diet is a human right, not a luxury item,” he adds. “And I think that there is a bipartisan recipe for fixing the food system without giving up flavor.”
Whether the MAHA recommendations will reflect that urgency remains to be seen, but Zimmern made it clear he thinks that without decisive policy, America will continue to pay the price for a broken food system.
