One person not following the tenets of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s MAHA dogma: the president who made him Secretary of Health and Human Services. During a podcast promoting the White House’s updated, MAHA-minded dietary guidelines, Kennedy bemoaned President Donald Trump‘s diet of “really bad food” of McDonald’s and “Diet Coke at all times.”
“I don’t know how he’s alive,” said a disgusted Kennedy. “He’s just pumping himself full of poison all day long.”
The MAHA philosophy of nutrition has been best summed up by Mark Hyman, an alternative medicine doctor and MAHA influencer, who wrote in a victory lap celebrating the new HHS food pyramid that “what we eat matters more than how many calories we eat.” But Trump is a living testament that the conventional wisdom may not be so wrong.
Trump, who is visibly 20 pounds lighter than he was during his more rotund first term as president, turns 80 years old this June but still possesses the vigor of a younger man. Outside of a diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency and easy bruising caused by a larger-than-recommended daily dose of aspirin to prevent heart disease, Trump remains as relentless, combative (some would say cantankerous), and insomniac as ever.
Part of this is pure genetics: Trump’s father lived to 93 years old, and his mother to 88. And unlike Kennedy, who admitted to a heroin addiction for over a decade and has not denied reports of more recent illegal drug use, Trump has never abused drugs or alcohol.
But the real secret sauce for Trump is probably that how many calories he eats does, in fact, matter more than what he eats.
Trump indeed feasts on fast food for dinner, often finishing multiple Big Macs with a Filet-o-Fish followed by a hearty dessert. When he does eat lunch, it’s often something similarly substantive, like meatloaf. Trump is indeed drinking Diet Coke throughout the day and occasionally snacking on some sort of sweet. But Trump rarely eats breakfast and often skips lunch. Corey Lewandowski wrote in his 2017 book that the president will “usually go 14 to 16 hours without eating.”
A man as large as Trump likely burns a baseline of some 2,300 a day, and that’s not including his weekend golf excursions at Mar-A-Lago. Even if Trump does eat, as Lewandowski once divulged, two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malt every single day, if that’s regularly his only meal of the day, he could easily still be at a calorie deficit.
Obviously, the moral of this story is not that the federal government should use its nutrition guidance, which is most pertinent for public programs such as in school cafeterias, to encourage elementary school children to eat McDonald’s every day. Unlike Kennedy’s unconscionable demonization of decades-old vaccines, the new dietary guidelines are mostly innocuous. With its overwhelming focus on fruits, vegetables, and protein, the new inverted food pyramid is laughably similar to the “MyPlate” nutrition guidance that Michelle Obama spearheaded in 2011, only to be met with sweeping Republican scorn. The HHS’s emphasis on red meat may be a bit of an overcorrection, but it’s indeed an overcorrection to a very real disinformation campaign of the past. Most useful is the HHS’s frankly overdue guidance that added sugars — the real x-factor of excess calories that cause childhood obesity — be eliminated from children’s diets entirely.
The guidance is good not because 100 calories of red food dye will make you fat but 100 calories of beef tallow won’t, but rather because 1,400 calories of steak, rice, salad, and fruit will probably fill you up as well as 2,000 calories of full-sugar soda, Froot Loops, Go-Gurt, candy, cookies, and chips.
But at the end of the day, the math matters more than the minutiae of the diet. If you really must indulge in that Quarter Pounder, just skip breakfast first. Kennedy may consider Trump’s favorite foods “poison,” but as the saying goes, the dose — not the ingredients — ultimately makes the poison.