{"id":103284,"date":"2025-08-30T14:37:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/103284\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T14:37:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T14:37:06","slug":"how-maha-is-trickling-down-to-gen-alpha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/103284\/","title":{"rendered":"How MAHA is trickling down to Gen Alpha"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared in Kids Today<\/a>, Vox\u2019s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Are American kids eating the wrong foods?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question parents and policymakers have worried over for generations, but it\u2019s become especially fraught in recent months as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make American Healthy Again movement have focused national attention on rising rates of childhood chronic illness, which they say are linked to kids\u2019 diets.<\/p>\n

Some MAHA dietary claims \u2014 about the dangers of seed oils<\/a>, for example \u2014 aren\u2019t backed up by science. At the same time, researchers and experts are worried, to varying degrees, about ultra-processed foods<\/a> in kids\u2019 diets, and about rising rates of childhood obesity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long been persuaded by research showing that diets don\u2019t work<\/a> and that restricting kids\u2019 food isn\u2019t healthy<\/a> for them. At the same time, I\u2019m often unsure how to talk about kids and food in a time of both growing concern and growing misinformation about children\u2019s health. How can parents and policymakers today do right by kids in a way that goes beyond obsessively checking food labels?<\/p>\n

For help with this question, I turned to Virginia Sole-Smith, whose work I\u2019ve followed ever since she chronicled her baby\u2019s struggle to eat<\/a> in the New York Times. Sole-Smith has a hard-won understanding of the fact that every kid\u2019s needs are different, and that what may seem like harmless advice for feeding children can be unhelpful or even shaming. The author of the book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture<\/a> as well as the newsletter Burnt Toast<\/a>, she\u2019s one of the most vocal advocates of an anti-diet approach to feeding kids in a time when it seems we\u2019re all supposed to be very panicked about what our children are eating.<\/p>\n

In a phone conversation, which has been condensed and edited, we talked about why food matters so much to kids, how MAHA messaging trickles down to young people, and what parents should actually be worrying about when it comes to children\u2019s diets.<\/p>\n

Childhood is this time when you\u2019re building your relationship to the world, you\u2019re making memories, you\u2019re exploring. Can you talk about what role food can play in that?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s sort of two things to say there. One is, we as parents really want our kids to have a lot of joyful connections to food, and having food traditions and food rituals can really help kids feel grounded and connected to their family. For example, my mother makes these really great birthday cakes for my kids, and it\u2019s just a great core memory of their childhood. Similarly, when I grow tomatoes in the backyard, my younger kiddo loves to go and just eat the Sungold tomatoes by the handful. And I\u2019m like, What a great childhood memory she\u2019s making there. <\/p>\n

On the flip side of that is the fact that kids have very little control over their lives, how they spend their days, where they go, who they\u2019re with. School in particular throws a ton of newness at them all the time, and they\u2019re expected to go along with a lot of rules, and food is one of the very few things they can control. So it makes a lot of sense that kids are cautious around food, that they have extremely strong preferences around food, because this is one of the only ways they get to say no in their day.<\/p>\n

This is a time in American culture when adults are so, so anxious about what kids are eating. We have all these messages about ultra-processed foods, about food dyes. Are kids hearing that anxiety? Are these messages making it to them?<\/p>\n

I can remember my now-12-year-old when she was \u2014 I think this was her fourth birthday party; I was cutting up the birthday cake, and one of the kids said to me something like, We shouldn\u2019t eat too much of that. Sugar is not good for you. And I was like, Birthday cake is really good for you because it makes us so happy. And she was like, Okay, but not too much. And it was just like this little preschooler, clearly parroting her mom or her dad or whatever grown-up in the house was constantly worrying about their sugar intake, and it was really impacting her ability to just enjoy a birthday party.<\/p>\n

I hear thousands of examples like that from my readers, like kids come home from school and say, Mom, we can\u2019t eat orange foods. Or, you know, getting worried about being a Goldfish cracker addict is one I\u2019ve heard recently. Because they hear the way grown-ups talk about processed food.<\/p>\n

For adults at least, it feels like we\u2019re in a really weird spot with body image and body positivity. There\u2019s an awareness of what diet culture is, and a sense that it\u2019s bad, but there\u2019s still a lot of panic around what kind of foods<\/a> we should eat. And now there\u2019s a lot of emphasis on being strong<\/a>, but we haven\u2019t necessarily jettisoned the idea that our bodies should look or be a certain way<\/a>. How are kids thinking about body image? How are they thinking about the concept of diet culture?<\/p>\n

I think there\u2019s a lot of polarization happening. On the one hand, I\u2019m really encouraged by the way I see Gen Z on TikTok talking about bodies. There\u2019s often a lot of pushing back against fatphobia. There\u2019s normalization of body hair, like a lot of Gen Zs not shaving their legs or their armpits.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you try to solve for body size, you create a really toxic set of ripple effects around people\u2019s relationships with food and their bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the other hand, I think there are a lot of kids who, if they\u2019re being raised in a MAHA household, a diet-culture-intensive household, are experiencing all of those expectations. You might want to check out the piece I ran on the newsletter<\/a> about an influencer named Breanna Cox, who posted a reel where she was weighing her protein and explaining to her 11-year-old daughter why she meal preps that way, and the video ends with her daughter being like, Can you make me one? And she\u2019s so excited that her daughter wants to meal prep with her. She really framed it as like, This is me helping her have a healthy relationship with her body, because I\u2019m helping her make healthy choices. But she was really teaching her daughter restriction tools; it was diet behavior.<\/p>\n

I want to talk about the concept of childhood obesity. It\u2019s something RFK Jr. and his team talk about in the MAHA report, but it\u2019s also something experts are worried about: It\u2019s mentioned in a study of children\u2019s chronic illness published in JAMA recently. How do you think about \u201cchildhood obesity\u201d \u2014 should it be put in the same category as conditions like diabetes or asthma?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think we should be pathologizing body size. It\u2019s clear from the data that body sizes have trended upwards in the last 40 years. That trend has happened while we have been fighting a war on childhood obesity. So I think it\u2019s clear that obsessing over body size has not made us healthier or smaller.<\/p>\n

I also think the data doesn\u2019t really support the idea that body size, per se, is a health condition. Body size might be a symptom of other health conditions; often, when people have Type 2 diabetes, weight drops dramatically or increases dramatically.<\/p>\n

It might also be that kids today are bigger as a generation because of changes in the food supply. But that isn\u2019t the problem I think we need to be solving. Because when you try to solve for body size, you create a really toxic set of ripple effects around people\u2019s relationships with food and their bodies. Weight-cycling takes a tremendous toll on our bodies. So that doesn\u2019t feel like the solution.<\/p>\n

We could be making school lunch and breakfast universally free and nutritious. We could be increasing food-stamp benefits to low-income families. We could be universalizing health care. There\u2019s a lot of really obvious things we could do to make people healthier that really are all about fighting poverty and discrimination and social inequity. But when we make it all about weight, we\u2019re really not dealing with any of those underlying issues. It\u2019s a way of putting the blame on parents, putting the blame on kids themselves, and then stoking this whole other epidemic of disordered eating and eating disorders.<\/p>\n

Something you talk about a lot in your newsletter is how diet culture affects other aspects of life. Can you explain that a little bit? <\/p>\n

Diet culture has taught us not to trust ourselves. It\u2019s taught us to seek an external set of rules to tell us the best way to do something, the best way to be, and it\u2019s telling us that following these external rules is going to ensure our health and happiness. It\u2019s about selling people a problem so you can sell them a solution.<\/p>\n

Because I write about kids and screens a lot, I\u2019m curious if screen time fits into this. Is screen time a diet?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a really interesting one. I think a lot of our parental attitudes towards screen time are really diet-culture-based. And I put myself firmly in that camp. I struggle with being too restrictive around screens and seeing it backfire.<\/p>\n

I really like the work of Ash Brandin, who has a book called Power On<\/a>. When we demonize screens, we make them forbidden fruit, and we set kids up and ourselves up to feel like failures. Instead, we should think about: How are screens meeting our needs? And I think there\u2019s a really good parallel there with processed foods. Maybe processed foods are not the platonic ideal of nutrition at all times, but how are they meeting your needs? Are they helping an anxious eater eat lunch in a busy cafeteria because his lunch is really predictable and comforting because the cheeses always taste exactly the same? That\u2019s a valuable way to make sure that kid has lunch today.<\/p>\n

Are they helping a parent who works all day get dinner on the table faster because a jar of pasta sauce is easier to use than making your own from scratch every night? That\u2019s a win, because you have dinner on the table. There\u2019s all these ways that processes are not the enemy of nutrition. They\u2019re not the enemy of a good relationship with food. They\u2019re actually serving critical needs. And if we don\u2019t want them to be the answer, we don\u2019t want screens to be the answer, we really need to look at all these, you know, systemic care gaps that leave families needing to rely on these tools, and not make the families feel bad that these are our answers.<\/p>\n

What is your message to parents who are seeing \u2014 not just from MAHA but from academics and researchers as well \u2014 worries about ultra-processed foods, about childhood obesity, and who are getting the message that they need to be really careful and vigilant about what their kids eat? <\/p>\n

What I found when I dived into the research was that the science pretty clearly shows that if kids have enough food to eat, then the minutia of nutrition works itself out. I see with my own kid; there\u2019ll be a day where she eats nothing but cheese, and then the next day she\u2019s living on tomatoes or cucumbers. Their eating patterns don\u2019t look like my plate, they don\u2019t look like what we\u2019ve been told is the \u201cideal\u201d way to feed a kid. But that doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re not meeting their nutritional needs. Bodies are just really idiosyncratic.<\/p>\n

What we really need to be worrying about is people having enough access to food, and kind of stripping away a lot of the other stress. Because anytime you start to make food into a power struggle with kids, you\u2019re coming up against their need for control. You\u2019re really telling them, I should be the one to say what goes in your body, which is, I think, a really troubling message. I want my kids to be able to say no to broccoli, because I want them to know that their no really matters. I have daughters, and I\u2019m thinking about future sexual situations, but across the board, we want kids to know that at their core, they have a right to body autonomy. They have a right to getting enough food to help them grow, and they have a right to some control around what that looks like. And if you do that, the nutrition piece sorts itself out.<\/p>\n

As severe weather events like hurricanes and wildfires<\/a> become more common, they\u2019re disrupting kids\u2019 education<\/a>. Every school day lost to weather disaster resulted in an average of 3.6 days of learning loss, a new report found<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tutoring programs meant to make up for pandemic-related learning losses<\/a> didn\u2019t help much, according to new research<\/a>, perhaps because students just didn\u2019t get enough hours of tutoring.<\/p>\n

Kids are saying \u201c6-7<\/a>\u201d now, apparently. It means\u2026sort of nothing, and is used in part to annoy adults.<\/p>\n

My little kid has been enjoying Stuck<\/a>, in which a kite gets lodged in a tree and the situation really spirals from there.<\/p>\n

Last week, I wrote about Gen Alpha popular culture<\/a>, which can feel very fragmented and ever-shifting. One reader, however, noted that kids\u2019 taste in books might actually be more monolithic. \u201cI say this anecdotally from working with elementary school students, but also from articles like this roundup of top 2024 library books<\/a>, which reported that \u201cVarious titles from the Dog Man and Cat Kid Comic Club series, both by Dav Pilkey, took up all 10 spots for juvenile print books.\u201d<\/p>\n

My older kid is a Dog Man hater, but I\u2019ve definitely observed the cultural dominance of the franchise. Now I\u2019m curious what the kids in your lives are reading. Is there still a monoculture when it comes to children\u2019s books, or are their reading tastes all over the map? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox\u2019s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[5343,1991,102,6648,6636,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-103284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-food","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-life","12":"tag-nutrition","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}