MAHA Picked a Fight With the Wrong 89-Year-Old

Marion Nestle "bankrolled" by Big Sugar? Think again.

Credit: Getty Images

Last week, a video of a panel discussion at the Aspen Institute began making its way around the internet. These are usually staid affairs. And there was no reason to believe this one, a discussion between nutritionist and food politics expert Marion Nestle and Calley Means, a senior adviser to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would be much different.

But the conversation was fiery. In it, Means followed his usual playbook. He bullied and insulted Nestle, attacking her for even daring to question the wisdom––or scientific evidence supporting––the Trump administration’s food policies. It was painful to watch. But Nestle, who literally wrote the book on food politics, is a pro. If anyone could take the heat, I figured, it was she.

But Means didn’t let up. On July 6, in a talk at the Great American State Fair, part of the ongoing celebrations of America’s 250^th anniversary here in Washington, Means attacked Nestle again, accusing her of taking money from the sugar and tobacco industries, which he said, “funded her to say that basically the base of our diets should be carbs.” (Tim Carman of the Washington Post, had the scoop.) In classic fashion, Nestle then published a line-by-line refutation of Means’ accusations.

To anyone familiar with Nestle, these allegations are patently absurd. After all, she has spent her 50-year career unearthing and raising awareness about conflicts of interest in nutrition. Nestle has written 17 books, including her seminal 2002 book, Food Politics. Her lively Food Politics blog highlights a study tainted by conflict-of-interest each week. (This week’s entry, a study funded by the Pork Checkoff and the American Egg Board that showed that animal-based protein foods supplied “more bioavailable essential amino acids” than plant-based ones.)

As Liz wrote in her excellent New York Times profile, at 89, Nestle is “one of the most influential framers of the modern food movement,” and rightly credited with “shifting the conversation away from personal responsibility and toward corporate power.”

Nestle has been a source for both me and Liz for years. She has a stunning command of the facts, suffers no fools, and always offers a nuanced and sometimes surprising take on things: For my recent episode of Planet Money, she told me that though there’s little evidence that supplements work, she doesn’t condemn them because “life is hard and they make people feel better.” (She also always answers our questions, no matter how small or how tight the deadline.)

But not everyone—and certainly not many of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) faithful—know of Nestle’s unimpeachable credentials. And that’s what Means appears to be counting on.

Happily, the nutrition world is rushing to Nestle’s defense. Jessica Knurick, who has emerged as a leading critic of the MAHA movement (and who joined me for a Substack Live last year) wrote that “rather than engaging in a good-faith disagreement about nutrition policy, Calley made false claims that completely misrepresented Marion’s career.” Robyn O’Brien, a vocal advocate for food reform, published a smart analysis of Means’ takedown on Substack called The Tobacco Industry Playbook is Being Run on the Woman Who Wrote the Book on It.

It was, in fact, O’Brien’s piece that (belatedly) alerted me to this whole hullabaloo. Last night, I posted it on LinkedIn, commenting “This is 100 percent right. I only wish I’d written it.”

And then I thought, it’s not too late to write something. Even as we become sadly inured to the Trump administration’s attacks on science, its lies and slurs, its transparent, cynical rewriting of history, we must speak out and speak up for the people who find themselves unjustly under attack. And so, in this small way, I am doing my part to set the record straight on Nestle’s work and relentless efforts to speak truth to power.

You can join me by sharing this post or by letting Nestle know directly by commenting on her Food Politics blog here.