BRUSSELS — The Make America Healthy Again crusade against Big Food is crossing the Atlantic.

Donald Trump’s health secretary has made packaged, mass-produced munchies one of the targets of his health agenda. And while Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s broadsides against vaccines have alarmed Brussels he has found an ally in the European Commission on this pillar of the MAHA mission.

Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi — former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s man in Brussels — has backed Kennedy’s push, saying Europe and the U.S. share an ambition to tackle unhealthy diets. 

“I welcome the US – including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – putting a stronger spotlight on this agenda including the #eatrealfood campaign,” Várhelyi wrote on LinkedIn after his appearance at the USA-EU Transatlantic Business Summit in Brussels earlier this year.

But sharing an ambition is the easy part. Deciding what ultra-processed food is — and whether or how it should be regulated: not so much.

At the heart of the debate is a growing body of research linking UPFs to conditions such as obesity and diabetes, risks everyone says they want to reduce. But the challenge is translating that evidence into public health policy without dictating what people eat. 

For industry, the priority is protecting personal choice. For public health advocates, the problem is systemic. What appears to be an individual choice is often the result of inequality, they argue — influenced by income, education and a food environment that can make healthier options harder to access.

The issue has been pitting health advocates against Big Food companies on multiple continents for years now — but global momentum is moving toward regulation as the World Health Organization prepares to unveil new tools to help policymakers this week. 

The “million dollar question,” as health activist Liz Arnanz put it, is how to define ultra-processed foods. 

The term might bring to mind salty chips, preservative-filled pastries and sugary drinks, but that category can also include whole-grain bread or fortified yogurt.

“We are seeing a huge increase of deaths linked to unhealthy diets,” said Arnanz, of the NCD Alliance, an NGO fighting against noncommunicable diseases. Not only are UPFs usually “high in fats and sugar and sodium,” she argued, but there is also “an independent unhealthiness layer of the processing of food.”

Her last point is a controversial one, directly disputed by industry and up for debate among scientists. Where health advocates see cheap junk food that’s chemically engineered to be addictive, the industry can point to innovations that make products more nutritious, less expensive and safer to eat, for longer.

Echoes of the tobacco debate

For all the increasingly tough talk around UPFs from both Kennedy and Várhelyi, concrete regulation remains scarce in both Washington and Brussels. 

Latin America has arguably been the trailblazer, with Brazil a leading example. It became one of the first countries to explicitly tell its population to avoid UPFs, and backed this up with rules to limit them in schools. On the international level, the WHO is developing its own global guidance, with plans to present a food profiling tool intended to help governments decide on UPF regulations on Monday at an event in Nuremberg, Germany.

The global health body has come down hard on the UPF industry. It accused it in a 2024 report of using the same playbook as alcohol and tobacco industries “to influence entire systems,” from “political lobbying and spreading misinformation and disinformation in the media, to harmful financial practices, and targeted marketing strategies directed at children and young people.”

Connecting the consumption of processed foods with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries is “irresponsible and outrageously misleading,” said Rafael Sampson, a senior manager for public affairs at the trade association FoodDrinkEurope. The WHO report, he added, “ignores” that the science around UPFs remains contested.

Carrots or taxes

European health advocates are convinced that Brussels should act, but they’re divided over which tools to use — and how far to take the tobacco comparison. 

Suzy Sumner, who heads the Brussels office of the Foodwatch advocacy group, takes a page from the playbook against cigarettes and alcohol, backing taxes on junk food, marketing restrictions to children and front-of-pack labels. 

Marleen Kestens, manager for cardiovascular disease prevention policies at the European Heart Network, backs more positive incentives, adding that food should not be treated like tobacco.

“We would be much more in favor of subsidizing those products that people should consume more of, rather than having taxes on products that people should eat less,” Kestens said.

The Commission, meanwhile, is waiting for the results of a study on the potential health risks of UPFs, set to land in March 2027. Until then, it is reluctant to “prejudge the outcomes,” the Commission said in a statement to POLITICO. 

Despite a “growing body of evidence,” the statement said, “certain impacts (such as environmental and social) are less well explored at present.”

One thing that’s off the table: The Commission “of course has no intention to decide what citizens should eat or not,” the statement stressed. 

In fact, the Commission did flirt with using taxes to discourage people from buying unhealthy UPFs, in a leaked draft of its plan to tackle cardiovascular disease. But that dropped out of the final version. 

Instead, Várhelyi told MEPs early this year, the idea is to “use financial incentives to push the industry to reformulate the products” while trying to inform consumers about UPF health risks. 

Those types of policies are more likely to get buy-in from manufacturers. After all, the sector has already been working on both tasks “for decades,” said Sara Lamonaca, FoodDrinkEurope’s director of consumer information, nutrition and health.

The Commission’s caution on moving forward sits awkwardly with Europe’s deep-rooted resistance to food industrialization. Both at national and EU level, regulators have hardly shied away from limiting what ends up on citizens’ plates, from restrictions on genetically modified vegetables to a ban on selling plant-based meat substitutes under names like “veggie bacon.” 

“Regulating ultra-processed food and the food environments more broadly is something where the European region is lagging behind,” NCD Alliance’s Arnanz said.

America first

Even Washington has gone further than Brussels in turning words into action. The U.S. is currently moving toward a first definition of ultra-processed food. Back in January, Kennedy announced new dietary guidelines, warning Americans against highly processed foods and calling for a reduction in sugar intake.

“It’s beyond Europe now,” said Foodwatch’s Sumner. “It’s out of the box in a way now, and I think it’s going to be very difficult to try to pull back and say, ‘Oh, actually, no, there is no problem with these products at all.’”

The industry is adamant that the focus shouldn’t be on the P-word: “There is not enough evidence to use the level of processing as a basis for issuing dietary recommendations or public health policy,” Lamonaca said.

As the U.S. midterms and Brussels’ UPF study deadline draw closer, expect the lobbying to intensify on both sides of the Atlantic.

“The fight will be huge as usual,” said Kestens.

The U.S. and Canada are flirting again.

Washington and Ottawa have increased the tempo of their trade talks over the past week, after President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke by phone on Oct. 21.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who helped torpedo a previous round of negotiations over the summer, and Canadian Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc have been speaking regularly since then, according to two people with knowledge of the talks, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. They have primarily discussed Trump’s tariffs on sectors like autos and steel that have been a sticking point for Canada all along.

A senior Canadian government official told POLITICO that talks remain informal as of Tuesday.

The uptick in engagement — what Carney called “un petit intensification” speaking in French to reporters in Ottawa Monday — has triggered a flurry of headlines on both sides of the border as well as White House boasts that a deal is near. The North American trade spat will be “settled pretty soon,” Trump predicted at a rally Sunday in Michigan.

But unlike Trump, Carney has little political incentive to make concessions at the moment — or bail out Trump right before congressional elections heavily focused on affordability, including tariffs’ impact on prices. The Canadian prime minister is riding high in domestic polls after standing up to the American president and walking away from trade negotiations in August. And he is days away from welcoming European Union leaders to Montreal for a landmark summit aimed at deepening their alliance — and building an implicit counterweight to the U.S.

Neither side, moreover, has dropped its original demands, according to half a dozen current and former government officials, industry representatives and others with knowledge of the talks. Those outstanding sticking points include Carney’s ask for lower auto tariffs and Trump’s push for increased access to the Canadian alcohol and dairy markets.

The lack of new concessions or tangible breakthroughs is a sign that the recent flurry of outreach may be more of a White House effort to soothe Republicans’ midterm worries — particularly in border states whose economies are tightly connected to Canada’s — than to secure an immediate deal. The people say any denouement between the two countries is likely weeks if not months off, even as they expect the two North American neighbors to ultimately hammer out an agreement to lower tariffs and stabilize one of the world’s largest trading relationships.

“I think that we’re going to make a deal with Canada. I mean, first of all, we made a deal with Canada. They reneged on the deal,” Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said in an interview. Asked if the deal will come before the election, Moreno said, “I don’t know.”

Canada has also been cautious about promising that a deal is near. Carney said last week Ottawa doesn’t care about “the timing” of an agreement to roll back tariffs on each other’s imports. And both Mark Wiseman, the Canadian Ambassador to the U.S., and Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, suggested at an event in Ottawa Monday that there will be a deal, even if it takes time.

“We have to take a longer timeline into account. And at the end of the day, we have to remember neither of us is moving out of the neighborhood, and we’re going to make it work,” Wiseman said. “The state of the relationship is pretty damn good.”

Trump, however, has been lobbing attacks on Ottawa since he returned to the White House, calling Canada the 51st state and threatening tariffs since shortly after his reelection win. Canada, along with Mexico and China, was one of the first countries he targeted with new duties in 2025 — despite an existing North American free trade deal and deeply entwined economies, particularly in the auto industry.

The tensions hit a crescendo this summer, when Trump announced a preliminary deal with Carney to lower U.S. duties, among other measures, before talks collapsed at the 11th hour. Washington and Ottawa then traded 50% duties on about $20 billion worth of goods, with Trump imposing a ban on certain products, like alcohol, and threatening even more punitive duties come January if their differences have not been resolved.

The forces that caused the deal to unravel in August are still in place. Canada has continued to seek lower tariff rates for key sectors, including autos, trucks, steel and aluminum — policies that are under Lutnick’s purview at the Commerce Department. The previous talks hit a snag over whether the U.S. would lower tariffs on heavy duty trucks, some of which are built in Ontario.

“Any potential Canada deal is going to have the same issue,” said an industry official granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “And that is Lutnick’s strong reluctance to negotiate on the [sector-specific tariffs], particularly now that he is much heavier involved.”

Lutnick “has signed off on auto [tariff] reductions,” in previous trade agreements the White House reached with partners like the European Union and Japan, “but those often come with promises of large investment.”

A White House official confirmed Lutnick and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer have held discussions with their Canadian counterparts in recent days.

“USTR and the Commerce Department continue to work together on the cross-cutting issues involving trade with Canada,” added the official, who was granted anonymity to share details about the negotiations.

The Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not respond to requests for comment.

Industry groups that are in favor of keeping the existing duties on Canadian steel, aluminum and autos insist that Lutnick remains in their corner, even as talks intensify. Representatives for domestic manufacturing met with senior officials at the Commerce Department and USTR over the past week to lobby in favor of sticking with the status quo, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the private discussions.

“”The programs are effective as they are, and they should stay as they are,” said Century Aluminum President and CEO Jesse Gary, adding that Lutnick shows a “clear understanding of what makes these types of industries work.”

The Canada tariffs are unpopular among U.S. voters, however, and have been a headache for Republican candidates running in U.S. border states. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers of Michigan and Republican Senate hopeful John Sununu of New Hampshire have all come out against the deal. The topic has even trickled into competitive races in Texas and Kansas.

Adam Hamilton, the Democrat challenging Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, is making tariffs part of his closing argument in a state where the agriculture industry has been pummeled by the trade war.

Trump and his National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett have sought to play down Republicans’ concerns about the duties by suggesting a deal is close.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Hassett said that the two sides are “very close” to a deal and emphasized Lutnick’s involvement in talks.

“I expect this is supposed to send some sort of signal to … Iowa and Kansas and other states,” said a person close to the administration who was granted anonymity to share details of private conversations with officials. But “no one expects a deal,” the person said.

“Carney would have to have some reason to want to get a deal before the midterms,” the person added. “But I can’t imagine why he would at this point.”

Megan Messerly, Sue Allan, Zi-Ann Lum and Nick Taylor-Vaisey contributed reporting.