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Are American kids eating the wrong foods?
It’s a question parents and policymakers have worried over for generations, but it’s become especially fraught in recent months as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Make American Healthy Again movement have focused national attention on rising rates of childhood chronic illness, which they say are linked to kids’ diets.
Some MAHA dietary claims — about the dangers of seed oils, for example — aren’t backed up by science. At the same time, researchers and experts are worried, to varying degrees, about ultra-processed foods in kids’ diets, and about rising rates of childhood obesity.
I’ve long been persuaded by research showing that diets don’t work and that restricting kids’ food isn’t healthy for them. At the same time, I’m often unsure how to talk about kids and food in a time of both growing concern and growing misinformation about children’s health. How can parents and policymakers today do right by kids in a way that goes beyond obsessively checking food labels?
For help with this question, I turned to Virginia Sole-Smith, whose work I’ve followed ever since she chronicled her baby’s struggle to eat in the New York Times. Sole-Smith has a hard-won understanding of the fact that every kid’s needs are different, and that what may seem like harmless advice for feeding children can be unhelpful or even shaming. The author of the book Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture as well as the newsletter Burnt Toast, she’s one of the most vocal advocates of an anti-diet approach to feeding kids in a time when it seems we’re all supposed to be very panicked about what our children are eating.
In a phone conversation, which has been condensed and edited, we talked about why food matters so much to kids, how MAHA messaging trickles down to young people, and what parents should actually be worrying about when it comes to children’s diets.
Childhood is this time when you’re building your relationship to the world, you’re making memories, you’re exploring. Can you talk about what role food can play in that?
There’s sort of two things to say there. One is, we as parents really want our kids to have a lot of joyful connections to food, and having food traditions and food rituals can really help kids feel grounded and connected to their family. For example, my mother makes these really great birthday cakes for my kids, and it’s just a great core memory of their childhood. Similarly, when I grow tomatoes in the backyard, my younger kiddo loves to go and just eat the Sungold tomatoes by the handful. And I’m like, What a great childhood memory she’s making there.
On the flip side of that is the fact that kids have very little control over their lives, how they spend their days, where they go, who they’re with. School in particular throws a ton of newness at them all the time, and they’re expected to go along with a lot of rules, and food is one of the very few things they can control. So it makes a lot of sense that kids are cautious around food, that they have extremely strong preferences around food, because this is one of the only ways they get to say no in their day.
This is a time in American culture when adults are so, so anxious about what kids are eating. We have all these messages about ultra-processed foods, about food dyes. Are kids hearing that anxiety? Are these messages making it to them?
I can remember my now-12-year-old when she was — I think this was her fourth birthday party; I was cutting up the birthday cake, and one of the kids said to me something like, We shouldn’t eat too much of that. Sugar is not good for you. And I was like, Birthday cake is really good for you because it makes us so happy. And she was like, Okay, but not too much. And it was just like this little preschooler, clearly parroting her mom or her dad or whatever grown-up in the house was constantly worrying about their sugar intake, and it was really impacting her ability to just enjoy a birthday party.
I hear thousands of examples like that from my readers, like kids come home from school and say, Mom, we can’t eat orange foods. Or, you know, getting worried about being a Goldfish cracker addict is one I’ve heard recently. Because they hear the way grown-ups talk about processed food.
For adults at least, it feels like we’re in a really weird spot with body image and body positivity. There’s an awareness of what diet culture is, and a sense that it’s bad, but there’s still a lot of panic around what kind of foods we should eat. And now there’s a lot of emphasis on being strong, but we haven’t necessarily jettisoned the idea that our bodies should look or be a certain way. How are kids thinking about body image? How are they thinking about the concept of diet culture?
I think there’s a lot of polarization happening. On the one hand, I’m really encouraged by the way I see Gen Z on TikTok talking about bodies. There’s often a lot of pushing back against fatphobia. There’s normalization of body hair, like a lot of Gen Zs not shaving their legs or their armpits.
“When you try to solve for body size, you create a really toxic set of ripple effects around people’s relationships with food and their bodies.”
On the other hand, I think there are a lot of kids who, if they’re being raised in a MAHA household, a diet-culture-intensive household, are experiencing all of those expectations. You might want to check out the piece I ran on the newsletter about an influencer named Breanna Cox, who posted a reel where she was weighing her protein and explaining to her 11-year-old daughter why she meal preps that way, and the video ends with her daughter being like, Can you make me one? And she’s so excited that her daughter wants to meal prep with her. She really framed it as like, This is me helping her have a healthy relationship with her body, because I’m helping her make healthy choices. But she was really teaching her daughter restriction tools; it was diet behavior.
I want to talk about the concept of childhood obesity. It’s something RFK Jr. and his team talk about in the MAHA report, but it’s also something experts are worried about: It’s mentioned in a study of children’s chronic illness published in JAMA recently. How do you think about “childhood obesity” — should it be put in the same category as conditions like diabetes or asthma?
I don’t think we should be pathologizing body size. It’s clear from the data that body sizes have trended upwards in the last 40 years. That trend has happened while we have been fighting a war on childhood obesity. So I think it’s clear that obsessing over body size has not made us healthier or smaller.
I also think the data doesn’t really support the idea that body size, per se, is a health condition. Body size might be a symptom of other health conditions; often, when people have Type 2 diabetes, weight drops dramatically or increases dramatically.
It might also be that kids today are bigger as a generation because of changes in the food supply. But that isn’t the problem I think we need to be solving. Because when you try to solve for body size, you create a really toxic set of ripple effects around people’s relationships with food and their bodies. Weight-cycling takes a tremendous toll on our bodies. So that doesn’t feel like the solution.
We could be making school lunch and breakfast universally free and nutritious. We could be increasing food-stamp benefits to low-income families. We could be universalizing health care. There’s a lot of really obvious things we could do to make people healthier that really are all about fighting poverty and discrimination and social inequity. But when we make it all about weight, we’re really not dealing with any of those underlying issues. It’s a way of putting the blame on parents, putting the blame on kids themselves, and then stoking this whole other epidemic of disordered eating and eating disorders.
Something you talk about a lot in your newsletter is how diet culture affects other aspects of life. Can you explain that a little bit?
Diet culture has taught us not to trust ourselves. It’s taught us to seek an external set of rules to tell us the best way to do something, the best way to be, and it’s telling us that following these external rules is going to ensure our health and happiness. It’s about selling people a problem so you can sell them a solution.
Because I write about kids and screens a lot, I’m curious if screen time fits into this. Is screen time a diet?
That’s a really interesting one. I think a lot of our parental attitudes towards screen time are really diet-culture-based. And I put myself firmly in that camp. I struggle with being too restrictive around screens and seeing it backfire.
I really like the work of Ash Brandin, who has a book called Power On. When we demonize screens, we make them forbidden fruit, and we set kids up and ourselves up to feel like failures. Instead, we should think about: How are screens meeting our needs? And I think there’s a really good parallel there with processed foods. Maybe processed foods are not the platonic ideal of nutrition at all times, but how are they meeting your needs? Are they helping an anxious eater eat lunch in a busy cafeteria because his lunch is really predictable and comforting because the cheeses always taste exactly the same? That’s a valuable way to make sure that kid has lunch today.
Are they helping a parent who works all day get dinner on the table faster because a jar of pasta sauce is easier to use than making your own from scratch every night? That’s a win, because you have dinner on the table. There’s all these ways that processes are not the enemy of nutrition. They’re not the enemy of a good relationship with food. They’re actually serving critical needs. And if we don’t want them to be the answer, we don’t want screens to be the answer, we really need to look at all these, you know, systemic care gaps that leave families needing to rely on these tools, and not make the families feel bad that these are our answers.
What is your message to parents who are seeing — not just from MAHA but from academics and researchers as well — worries about ultra-processed foods, about childhood obesity, and who are getting the message that they need to be really careful and vigilant about what their kids eat?
What I found when I dived into the research was that the science pretty clearly shows that if kids have enough food to eat, then the minutia of nutrition works itself out. I see with my own kid; there’ll be a day where she eats nothing but cheese, and then the next day she’s living on tomatoes or cucumbers. Their eating patterns don’t look like my plate, they don’t look like what we’ve been told is the “ideal” way to feed a kid. But that doesn’t mean they’re not meeting their nutritional needs. Bodies are just really idiosyncratic.
What we really need to be worrying about is people having enough access to food, and kind of stripping away a lot of the other stress. Because anytime you start to make food into a power struggle with kids, you’re coming up against their need for control. You’re really telling them, I should be the one to say what goes in your body, which is, I think, a really troubling message. I want my kids to be able to say no to broccoli, because I want them to know that their no really matters. I have daughters, and I’m thinking about future sexual situations, but across the board, we want kids to know that at their core, they have a right to body autonomy. They have a right to getting enough food to help them grow, and they have a right to some control around what that looks like. And if you do that, the nutrition piece sorts itself out.
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