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.

A Crunchwrap Supreme and a bag of supermarket salad generally appeal to rather different notions of a good lunch. One offers the architectural pleasure of a crunchy tostada tucked inside a warm tortilla; the other, the satisfaction of having arranged to eat vegetables without chopping any. This summer, however, both came with a less welcome consideration: iceberg lettuce.

A massive cyclospora outbreak linked to shredded iceberg from Taylor Farms de Mexico prompted recalls extending from Taco Bell kitchens to supermarket produce aisles. Shoppers began trying to determine which seemingly unrelated groceries shared a supplier; someone even made a barcode-scanning app for precisely this purpose. (Such was the broader atmosphere of suspicion that an entirely unsupported rumor about the Trump administration’s promised bargain beef being horse meat eventually inspired online guides for distinguishing one animal from the other.)

It was, in short, Bad Lettuce Summer.

And according to a Gallup poll published October 8, Americans emerged from it considerably more cautious about what they eat. Nearly three-quarters now say they have avoided buying certain foods because of recalls or government advisories, up from 53% in 2024. This newfound vigilance crosses party lines: 81% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans report having taken such precautions.

What it did not produce was much agreement about the people responsible for keeping the lettuce safe.

In 2024, when Joe Biden occupied the White House, 74% of Democrats and 50% of Republicans expressed confidence in federal food-safety oversight. Two years and one change of administration later, those figures stand at 30% and 70%, respectively. 

A 24-point Democratic advantage has become a 40-point Republican one, a remarkable 64-point reversal.

Ahead of the midterms, the findings illustrate a curious feature of American political life: People can encounter the same dangers, take similar precautions and nevertheless arrive at radically different conclusions about the institutions responsible for protecting them. And if there were ever a summer when one might have expected a little consensus about the importance of competent food-safety oversight, surely it was this one.

The outbreak, the largest recorded cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, sickened nearly 13,000 people across 21 states, hospitalizing 570 and killing two. The recall included lettuce served at Taco Bell and Marketside iceberg salad sold at Walmart. Taylor Farms maintained that its own branded salad kits were unaffected, a distinction that mattered scientifically, if not necessarily psychologically, to shoppers eyeing the refrigerated wall of greens.

The trouble with becoming an amateur food-safety inspector is that the job is never quite finished. You can establish that the blueberries in your refrigerator haven’t been recalled, but this tells you remarkably little about the blueberries you’ll purchase next Thursday. You can discover who owns the company that packaged your broccoli, though what to do with that information is another matter. Every new discovery yields a little more knowledge, if not necessarily a corresponding increase in certainty.

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There was a policy dimension to this uncertainty, too. In March 2025, the FDA announced plans to delay compliance with its Food Traceability Rule, which requires businesses handling higher-risk foods, including leafy greens, to maintain records that help investigators identify and remove contaminated products more quickly. Originally scheduled for January 2026, the compliance deadline was proposed to be extended to July 2028; Congress subsequently directed the FDA not to enforce the rule before then. The agency said businesses needed additional time to coordinate their systems.

The delay did not cause the summer’s outbreak. Still, there is something peculiar about postponing industry-wide traceability requirements while ordinary shoppers are left scanning their broccoli with smartphones, hoping to learn something useful about where it came from.

During Bad Lettuce Summer, even the official answers required some translation.

In July, the FDA announced that a lettuce sample had tested positive for cyclospora, then corrected the finding as a false positive. Taylor Farms emphasized the correction; federal investigators maintained that their broader epidemiological and traceback evidence still implicated the company’s shredded iceberg. Subsequent environmental testing strengthened that evidence, without conclusively establishing how the contamination occurred.

One could read the competing statements carefully and emerge with some more information, but not much more confidence about dinner.

Then came the political subplot. As the investigation intensified, Taylor Farms representatives met privately with White House officials. The company and its leadership had donated substantial sums to Republican-aligned political groups, including $1 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, subsequently sought answers about whether the company had attempted to influence the investigation. The White House denied compromising public safety, and no evidence established that political access changed the FDA’s findings.

Still, it is an extraordinary distance to travel from wondering whether the lettuce in your taco is safe to wondering who has the ear of the White House.

The Gallup numbers do not establish why Americans’ confidence has diverged so dramatically. Someone may distrust the industrial food system while enthusiastically supporting an administration promising to reform it. Someone else may have specific objections to that administration’s regulatory decisions. But the speed of the partisan reversal suggests that who runs Washington matters enormously to how Americans evaluate its institutions — though there is a certain irony to this in the age of Make America Healthy Again, which has elevated suspicion of the conventional food system into something approaching a civic virtue.

Its influence has extended all the way to the fast-food fryer: Steak ‘n Shake announced that it had “RFK’d” its French fries by replacing vegetable oil with beef tallow, a development Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. celebrated over burgers and fries during a televised appearance with Sean Hannity. The nation’s health secretary had become a verb, and the French fry a political statement.

It is, admittedly, easier to stage a photo opportunity around a basket of fries than a database of food-traceability records. Both involve questions about what Americans eat, but investigating foodborne illness requires a rather different kind of governmental attention.

Of course, Americans did not suddenly begin losing confidence in food-safety oversight under Trump. 

Gallup found that overall confidence has fallen from 85% in 2004 to just 47% today. And recalls themselves contain an uncomfortable ambiguity: They reveal that something dangerous entered the food supply, but also that someone detected a problem and warned the public. The same event can look like evidence of a system working or a system failing, depending on which part of the story one chooses to emphasize.

With the midterms approaching, that distinction matters. The lawmakers elected in November will have a say in how federal food-safety agencies are funded, scrutinized and held accountable when the next outbreak arrives. Yet Americans are approaching that election with increasingly different assessments of the institutions charged with protecting them, even as their own precautions suggest a broadly shared sense of vulnerability.

The next outbreak, unfortunately, will not wait for everyone to agree on whom to trust.

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