The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released their highly anticipated report acknowledging the importance of farmers while also raising concerns about the safety of farming practices.
The report seems to insinuate some of the decline in America’s children’s health is due to exposure to agricultural tools such as pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides and easy access to over-processed food manufacturing sources.
The MAHA Commission was created by President Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy. Per President Trump’s request, the report does include language which seeks to ensure the prosperity of American farms. The Commission is expected to continue developing strategies to increase American children’s health due in August of this year.
Leaders in Agriculture Comment on MAHA Initial Report
Shortly after the release of the MAHA Report titled “Making Our Children Healthy Again,” leaders in American Agriculture were quick to release comments. Statements from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, American Farm Bureau President Zippy Duvall, and Leadership from the House and Senate Ag Committee are below.
MAHA Commission Next Steps
As detailed on the last page of the MAHA Report linked above, the Commission will now work to close “critical research gaps and guide efforts to better combat childhood chronic disease in America.” As such, the following research initiatives are recommended:
1. Addressing the Replication Crisis: NIH should launch a coordinated initiative to confront the replication crisis, investing in reproducibility efforts to improve trust and reliability in basic science and interventions for childhood chronic disease.
2. Post-Marketing Surveillance: NIH and FDA should build systems for real-world safety monitoring of pediatric drugs and create programs to independently replicate findings from industry-funded studies.
3. Real-World Data Platform: Expand the NIH-CMS autism data initiative into a broader, secure system linking claims, EHRs, and environmental inputs to study childhood chronic diseases.
4. AI-Powered Surveillance: Create a task force to apply AI and machine learning to federal health and nutrition datasets for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood chronic disease trends.
5. GRAD Oversight Reform: Fund independent studies evaluating the health impact of self-affirmed GRAS food ingredients, prioritizing risks to children and informing transparent FDA rulemaking.
6. Nutrition Trials: NIH should fund long-term trial comparing whole-food, reduced-carb, and low-UPF diets in children to assess effects on obesity and insulin resistance.
7. Large-scale Lifestyle Interventions: Launch a coordinated national lifestyle-medicine initiative that embeds real-world randomized trials – covering integrated interventions in movement, diet, light exposure, and sleep timing – within existing cohorts and EHR networks.
8. Drug Safety Research: Support studies on long-term neurodevelopmental and metabolic outcomes of commonly prescribed pediatric drugs, emphasizing real-world settings and meaningful endpoints.
9. Alternative Testing Models: Invest in New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), such as organ-on-a-chip, microphysiological systems, and computational biology, to complement animal testing with more predictive human-relevant models.
10. Precision Toxicology: Launch a national initiative to map gene-environment interactions affecting childhood disease risk, especially for pollutants, endocrine disruptors, and pharmaceuticals.
Some of the steps to implement these research initiatives are already underway, according to the report, and others will begin in the near future. The MAHA Commission plans to immediately begin working on developing the strategy to “make our children healthy again” due in August 2025. The Commission invites all of America, especially the private sector and academia, to be a part of the solution.
