Implications of MAHA report on cattle and sheep

The recently released MAHA report was the work product of the commission established by President Donald Trump’s executive order to “Make America Healthy Again.”

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the chair of the commission, and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins is among the Cabinet members who serve on the commission.

In that role, Rollins coauthored the report that assessed the challenges our nation faces to “Make Our Children Healthy Again.”

The “Make Our Children Healthy Again” assessment report was an eye-opener. It provided statistics and long-term trends documenting the declining health of America’s children.

It then identified what the commission believes are the drivers of what it calls America’s childhood chronic disease crisis.

Among the likely drivers of this childhood chronic disease crisis are poor diet, aggregation of environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity, chronic stress and overmedicalization.

The first two of these potential drivers — poor diet and aggregation of environmental chemicals — are categories in which our domestic cattle and sheep industries are uniquely positioned to improve.

The report states this directly, at least for beef, but sheep, of course, share closely the healthful protein that our children need.

The report states this about beef in particular: “Beef contains protein that maintains skeletal muscle, which plays a key role in regulating metabolic health.” And we know this to be true about lamb and mutton, as well.

But there’s another direct reference to the importance of our livestock industries in making our children healthy again.

It’s a reference to the broader farming and ranching industries, within which the cattle and sheep industries are both major and critically important subsets.

The report states: “Farmers are the backbone of America— and the most innovative and productive in the world. … The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of health care.”

Now here’s the backstory behind this reference to “whole foods,” which is emboldened in the report.

The report explains that there has been a shift in food production after World War II that included the development of ultra-processed foods, which is defined as a “category of industrially manufactured food products that undergo multiple physical and chemical processing steps and contain ingredients not commonly found in home kitchens.”

It is this shift to ultra-processed foods that the report considers a major contributor to the childhood chronic disease crisis and why the report intimates that a shift back to “whole foods” is essential if we are to indeed “Make Our Children Healthy Again.”

As an example of the report’s further finding of a link between ultra-processed foods and animal agriculture, it states: “U.S. dietary fats shifted from minimally processed animal-based sources like butter and lard — rich in fat-soluble vitamins A, D and E, supporting brain and immune health — to industrial fats from refined seed oils, such as soybean, corn, safflower, sunflower, cottonseed and canola.”

The report also highlights a serious problem that we’ve been highlighting for decades. It states that the rise in ultra-processed foods corresponds with the consolidation of our food system: “Many of the core products of ‘Big Food’ companies are ultra-processed foods” and “four companies control 80% of the meat market” in the United States.

To our knowledge, this is a first. It appears to be the first time a multiagency report has held our livestock industries up as a solution to some of the ills America faces — this specific ill being a childhood chronic health crisis.

Clearly, with the cattle industry being the largest segment of American agriculture, and together with the sheep industry as a crucial source of nutritious protein, we need to take a leadership role in helping the administration develop a strategy to ensure that our two industries continue to produce an abundant and affordable supply of whole food — in our case, meat — for all Americans.

To that end, we need to restore competition, which will require the government to address the severe concentration in our cattle and sheep markets.

And we’ll need to rebuild and then protect our domestic supply chains from price-depressing imports that have caused our two livestock industries to shrink and which impedes our ability to attract new entrants and to achieve self-sufficiency in beef and lamb production.

Our next step will be to recommend to the secretary of agriculture a strategy for accomplishing the reforms needed in our industry to ensure her goals related to making our children healthy again can be achieved.

We hope you’ll join us in this important endeavor.