No more chemtrails. MAHA-KY will focus on healing power of nutritious food | Opinion
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- MAHA-KY task force debates nutrition reforms amid strong industry opposition.
- Federal program cuts strain local food access and limit support for healthy diets.
- Lawmakers weigh SNAP restrictions while avoiding bureaucracy and job backlash.
Here’s the first complication for Kentucky’s Make America Healthy Again task force: for every policy push, there’s a pull.
So while health and nutrition experts gathered at the second MAHA-KY meeting in Frankfort on July 10, there was an even larger group of clearly concerned soft drink and grocery employees and lobbyists.
As the nutrition experts detailed why Kentuckians have so much trouble accessing the healthy food that could promote better health, the soft drink companies detailed exactly how many jobs — 4,000 — and how much annual economic impact —$552 million in wages and benefits — they bring to the commonwealth. In other words, they implied, don’t try to limit soft drink consumption in service of better health.
Even if Kentucky does rank 46th in the country for health.
Here’s the second complication: at the same time the committee, chaired by Sen. Shelly Funke Frommeyer, R-Alexandria, and Rep. Matt Lockett, R-Nicholasville, tries to explore ways to make Kentucky’s health better, President Donald Trump’s administration is unraveling the programs that could aid them.
For example, the DOGE cuts to the U.S. Department of Agriculture have killed two programs that buy fresh meat and vegetables from Kentucky farmers for schools and food banks. The Local Food Purchase Assistance Program will lose $11 million by August. More than 130 local farmers also make money from the Local Food for Schools program.
Funke Frommeyer said she had not talked to anyone in Washington D.C. about those cuts. And she had scheduled Thursday’s meeting on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program long before the “Big, Beautiful Bill” passed with huge cuts to both SNAP and Medicaid, two programs that have real influence on Kentucky’s health.
SNAP was on the agenda because she and Lockett had filed legislation this year to restrict soda and junk food from SNAP benefits, which states can do with a waiver. However, waivers create a lot more work for states and for the retailers who have to block the purchases of soda and junk food so the bill didn’t go anywhere.
“In the process of filing that we recognized the friction it was creating with the beverage companies and some of our wonderful organizations,” she said after the meeting. “So as we did for the research, we also recognized that creating that waiver would also bloat our government, and we’re not interested in bloating the government.”
That’s where the impasse stands.
It’s hard to make big changes in the health of a state, especially when federal forces are making larger changes. Funke Frommeyer rightly believes education is the key to better health, but the “Big, Beautiful Bill” just cut all funding for the SNAP Ed program, which teaches people about nutrition and how to cook healthy food.
Unlike the first MAHA-KY meeting, this one was light on fun topics like chemtrails and whether we should put fluoride in our water.
It was heavy on topics like food deserts and the healing power of food that is not heavily processed. Kentucky is chock-full of health problems related to diet, like nearly 14% of the population with diabetes, and 15% suffering from three or more chronic conditions.
But Funke Frommeyer said the task force will stick to nutrition, which she believes is crucial to solving our health woes.
Someone else can take up the measles outbreak currently happening in the state.
At the next meeting in August, Agriculture Commissioner Jonathan Shell will discuss local food and farming, and then she hopes to hear from health care providers about how they are recognizing food’s place in medical care.
By December, she said, the task force should have some policy ideas that can be presented as legislation in the 2026 session.
“Kentucky has a whole lot of dollars being spent on chronic illnesses,” she said. “We’ve double-dipped into the taxpayer dollars because some of our SNAP dollars are being spent on things that are also causing health issues,” she said.
Those problems then get paid for with Medicaid dollars.
“So then we have spent double the money,” she said. “So we do need to more carefully embrace what nutrition is being consumed.”
That’s hard to argue with. But turning these admirable goals into laws, well, it’s like trying to make the proverbial political sausage amid arguments from the pork lobbyists, pork farmers, pig sanctuaries, low-fat evangelists and vegan nutritionists.
That’s when the complications begin.
