MAHA affecting policy, not behavior for sugar

VAIL, COLO. — Nearly two years after the make America healthy again (MAHA) movement evolved from a campaign slogan to an official driver influencing federal policy and food manufacturing decisions, sugar industry leaders are assessing its broader impact on consumer perceptions of sugar and purchasing behavior, even as policymakers continue to pursue measures aimed at changing both.

“If you follow it closely, like I do, it feels like a disaster,” Courtney Gaine, president and chief executive officer of The Sugar Association, told attendees at the 41st annual International Sweetener Symposium in Vail. “You’ve got somebody with a very loud microphone and an echo chamber, and it feels like it’s been a nonstop barrage of attacks on sugar, whether it’s that sugar is as addictive as crack or sugar is poison. Then in January, the United States was launching a war on sugar. It’s hard to fight back against this narrative, so you kind of take it and hope that the damage isn’t too extreme.”

Gaine, a registered dietitian who also has a PhD in nutritional sciences and biochemistry, said the MAHA rhetoric, especially from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears at odds with reality.

“We did a survey last March and it turns out that MAHA supporters are genuinely OK with sugar, so even though this movement is powerful and it’s loud and it’s chaotic, we felt like sugar might fare OK,” Gaine said, adding that another survey conducted in March of this year showed similar results. “About 90% of MAHA supporters still, a year and a half into the MAHA movement, feel that sugar is an important part of the diet and are okay with it.”

Brandon Lipps, a principal at Caprock Strategies who presented alongside Gaine at the Sweetener Symposium, said that while consumer demand for sugar has not collapsed, the emotional rhetoric behind the MAHA movement continues to drive policy change that has the potential to impact sugar usage.

“When you talk to parents whose kids have health issues, and when you talk to families who are dealing with health issues, and when Secretary Kennedy quotes all these statistics and tells them that they have a solution, they’re going to buy it,” Lipps told the Symposium attendees. “Emotion moves. It gains momentum. The only defense that sugar has is that the facts are actually on your side.”

“Emotion moves. It gains momentum. The only defense that sugar has is that the facts are actually on your side,” said Brandon Lipps (left), principal at Caprock Strategies.

| Source: Sosland Publishing Co.

Both Lipps and Gaine pointed to a chart showing obesity rates among adults and children climbed sharply even as added sugar consumption steadily declined.

“There are folks that have a lot of problems in this country, but sugar is not the single cause,” Lipps said. “It’s maybe not even a major cause of the health epidemic in this country.”

Still, recent policies that have either passed or are currently under legislative consideration may directly influence the decisions of consumers and food manufacturers when it comes to buying or making products with sugar. These include front-of-label packaging, reformulating school meals to align with the sugar consumption limits recommended in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and restrictions on using federal-assisted food program dollars to purchase foods made with sugar.

Lipps said that despite evidence pointing toward consumers’ acceptance of sugar and the data that shows an incongruent correlation between obesity and sugar consumption, the Trump administration is targeting sugar usage as an easy win for political gains.

“We acknowledge we have a health crisis in this country, but we don’t know what the solution is,” he said. “But if I go on the campaign trail and cite all these statistics to you and I tell you that I’ve got the solution, you’d perk up and listen. And America is doing that. The thing that Secretary Kennedy did is he didn’t create the MAHA movement, he created the MAHA political narrative out of a movement that was out in the countryside.”

Gaine shared a similar perspective.

“Asking the MAHA supporters specifically about the rhetoric that had come out from RFK Jr. about the war on sugar and about sugar being as addictive as crack and about sugar being poison, about 60% of MAHA supporters feel that rhetoric goes too far,” she said. “There’s a lot still to come with what’s on the table for the MAHA movement, not to mention that the MAHA movement doesn’t necessarily end when the Trump administration ends. It actually might get stronger.”