The real reason so many people in the US have unhealthy diets

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk about Americans’ diets. He obsesses over things like the dyes in Froot Loops, and cheerfully took part in an August announcement that six states had been given waivers to bar use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called Food Stamps) benefits to buy soda, candy and other junk foods.

Newsflash: While there is a legitimate conversation to be had about food additives, changing the dyes in Froot Loops will never turn them into a health food. It’s a distraction, and no doubt deliberate. Kennedy and the administration ignore the big issues—he real obstacles to Americans eating a healthier diet—because they involve subjects the Trump administration wants to ignore.

We know why millions of Americans eat a diet that’s far less healthy than they should, and we know what to do about it. But the things that help—programs that deserve to be expanded—either get ignored by Trump and RFK Jr. or actively attacked.

In my adopted home state of Hawaii, we have a program called Da Bux, under which SNAP recipients who use their benefits to buy Hawaii-grown fresh fruits and vegetables get double value: Spend $5 at participating grocers and get $10 worth of fresh, local produce. The grocery store where I do much of my shopping has a produce section dotted with signs pointing out Da Bux-eligible items—tomatoes, papayas, all sorts of good, healthy stuff.

Da Bux, which gets some federal funding (from the little-known Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentives Program or GusNIP) supplemented with state funds, is a classic win-win, simultaneously helping low-income families eat better while boosting local farmers in a state where small, family farms still predominate. It’s simple to use and accepted at a variety of food retailers.

Quite a few other states have programs along similar lines. California, for example, has Market Match, which doubles SNAP benefits when used at participating farmers’ markets and certain other farm-direct food outlets. Like Da Bux, it’s good for both SNAP beneficiaries and local farmers.

But some states don’t have anything like this, and that’s a shame. If we’re serious about improving Americans’ diets, that needs to change. As my colleagues in Defend Public Health highlighted in a recent report, for millions the biggest obstacle to a healthy diet is lack of access, either because they live in a “food desert” where literally the only choices available are fast food and convenience stores, or because of cost. Junk food is cheaper than fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats.

If you live in a place like San Francisco, it’s easy to forget that millions of Americans live in food deserts, with the highest concentrations in southern states. Surprisingly, many are in rural locations, and most are in low-income neighborhoods, where grocery chains see less profit potential and choose not to locate. They’re more common in areas with a high percentage of people of color. (There are food deserts in San Francisco, too, in places like the Bayview and the Western Addition, where Safeway just closed its store.)

Each year 47 million US residents, including 13 million children, face food insecurity—not having enough to eat and not knowing where their next meal is coming from. They are overwhelmingly low-income, even though many are employed at jobs paying minimum wage or slightly more.

Food insecure US residents are disproportionately nonwhite. Stats published in 2024 by the Department of Agriculture (which may well disappear from federal websites as soon as the administration reads this) show that Americans who are Black, Latino, Indigenous or multiracial are between two and three times more likely than whites to be food insecure.

That may explain why Trump and RFK Jr. won’t talk about food insecurity. The administration is zealously cleansing the federal government of anything remotely having to do with racial inequity in its manic crusade against alleged “DEI.”  And an administration relentlessly pursuing policies that help the very rich at the expense of the rest of us doesn’t want to talk about poverty.

We should be shocked that tens of millions of Americans either can’t afford healthy food or can’t access it on a regular basis. This isn’t hard to fix: Expand SNAP rather than cutting it and other food programs back, as the recent Republican budget bill did. Expand GusNIP, which funds Da Bux, Market Match and similar efforts, and make sure that it reaches all states. While it survived Elon Musk’s budget chainsaw, GusNIP’s 2026 appropriations remain in doubt. And, as I reported in March, early in the year the administration abruptly ended two programs that provided schools and food banks over $1 billion a year to buy food from local farmers and interrupted assistance to local food banks.

And let’s raise the minimum wage so that people working full-time can afford healthy food. That wouldn’t just help low-wage workers pay for a better diet. If you’re a single parent working two minimum-wage jobs just to make ends barely meet, you may not have time to shop for or cook healthy meals. Better wages can give such parents the luxury of time—the time needed to pass on the fast food or frozen pizza and cook something fresh.

And we need to do something about food deserts. One way to start might be something like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal for publicly-owned grocery stores—a concept that has some conservatives clutching their pearls. It’s not a radical idea: The US military already has them; they’re known as the PX. That model could expand to not only fill food deserts but help improve the affordability of healthy foods elsewhere.

Congress and the president could act on these ideas tomorrow, but they don’t want to. Instead, they lean on punitive, restrictive measures that don’t address the underlying problems. If you’re talking about the dyes in Froot Loops—which will never be a health food no matter what dyes are used—and not about food insecurity, you aren’t serious about either food or health.