Eating For Health And Eating For Pleasure Are Not Mutually Exclusive... Take It From A Former Chef

When I first learned and then began teaching macrobiotics, food choices felt refreshingly simple— rational, systematic… even ideological. The principles were rooted in an elegant philosophy of balance, drawn from ancient Japanese traditions, yet adaptable to different environments. For us in Northern Europe, that meant minor adjustments to suit the local climate and available produce, but the core principles remained steadfast.

The diet centered around whole grains— short-grained brown rice reigning supreme— complemented by an abundance of vegetables, beans and seaweed. Meat, sugar, dairy and processed foods were eschewed altogether, rightly considered overly yang or yin, disrupting the harmony the macrobiotic diet sought to cultivate. Everything was chosen not only for its nutritional value but also for how it aligned with the principles of yin and yang, fostering a sense of equilibrium in both the body and mind. The meals were extremly inexpensive to serve.

This wasn’t just about health; it was a lifestyle, a form of meditation through food and its preparation. Cooking became an intentional act, a way of connecting with nature and respecting its cycles. And the results? The food was not only nourishing but genuinely delicious— simple, yet layered with flavors that celebrated the natural essence of each ingredient. I had never been healthier— physically, emotionally and mentally— in my life.

When I moved back to the U.S. from Holland, I was horrified and even nauseated by what— and how much— people were eating. Eventually though I loosened my macrobiotic regime and started packing on the pounds… and illnesses. On Thursday, The Atlantic ran a piece by Nicholas Florko about the failures of public health in the area of nutrition, referencing RFK, Jr’s well-meaning but naive plans to Make America Healthy Again with mindful nutrition. Healthy eating has never worked for large populations in the U.S. even though “surveys show that Americans want to eat healthier, but the fact that more than 70 percent of U.S. adults are overweight underscores just how many of us fail.” The FDA guidelines to healthy foods are followed by between “zero and 0.4% of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines.”

As part of RFK’s agenda to “make America healthy again,” he  “has pledged to improve the country’s eating habits by overthrowing a public-health establishment that he sees as ineffective. He has promised mass firings at the FDA, specifically calling out its food regulators. Indeed, for decades, the agency’s efforts to encourage better eating habits have largely focused on giving consumers more information about the foods they are eating. It hasn’t worked. If confirmed, Kennedy may face the same problem as many of his predecessors: It’s maddeningly hard to get Americans to eat healthier. Giving consumers more information about what they’re eating might seem like a no-brainer, but when these policies are tested in the real world, they often do not lead to healthier eating habits. Since 2018, chain restaurants have had to add calorie counts to their menus; however, researchers have consistently found that doing so doesn’t have a dramatic effect on what foods people eat. Even more stringent policies, such as a law in Chile that requires food companies to include warnings on unhealthy products, have had only a modest effect on improving a country’s health.”

[H]ealth concerns aren’t the only priority consumers are weighing when they decide whether to purchase foods. “When people are making food choices,” Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, told me, “price and taste and convenience weigh much heavier than health.” When I asked experts about better ways to get Americans to eat healthier, some of them talked vaguely about targeting agribusiness and the subsidies it receives from the government, and others mentioned the idea of taxing unhealthy foods, such as soda. But nearly everyone I spoke with struggled to articulate anything close to a silver bullet for fixing America’s diet issues.

RFK Jr. seems to be caught in the same struggle. Most of his ideas for “making America healthy again” revolve around small subsets of foods that he believes, often without evidence, are causing America’s obesity problems. He has warned, for example, about the unproven risks of seed oils and has claimed that if certain food dyes were removed from the food supply, “we’d lose weight.” Kennedy has also called for cutting the subsidies doled out to corn farmers, who grow the crops that make the high-fructose corn syrup that’s laden in many unhealthy foods, and has advocated for getting processed foods out of school meals.

There’s a reason previous health secretaries haven’t opted for the kinds of dramatic measures that Kennedy is advocating for. Some of them would be entirely out of his control. As the head of the HHS, he couldn’t cut crop subsidies; Congress decides how much money goes to farmers. He also couldn’t ban ultra-processed foods in school lunches; that would fall to the secretary of agriculture. And although he could, hypothetically, work with the FDA to ban seed oils, it’s unlikely that he would be able to generate enough legitimate scientific evidence about their harms to prevail in an inevitable legal challenge.

The biggest flaw in Kennedy’s plan is the assumption that he can change people’s eating habits by telling them what is and isn’t healthy, and banning a select few controversial ingredients. Changing those habits will require the government to tackle the underlying reasons Americans are so awful at keeping up with healthy eating. Not everyone suffers from an inability to resist Double Stuf Oreos: A survey from the Cleveland Clinic found that 46 percent of Americans see the cost of healthy food as the biggest barrier to improving their diet, and 23 percent said they lack the time to cook healthy meals.

If Kennedy figures out how to actually get people like me to care enough about healthy eating to resist the indulgent foods that give them pleasure, or if he figures out a way to get cash-strapped families on public assistance to turn down cheap, ready-to-eat foods, he will have made significant inroads into actually making America healthy again. But getting there is going to require a lot more than a catchy slogan and some sound bites.

I think many of my friends in Amsterdam who worked at the Kosmos with me would agree that ultimately, the pursuit of balance— whether through macrobiotic eating or public health initiatives— is as much about systemic change as it is about personal choices. RFK Jr.’s ambitions to "make America healthy again" face the same obstacles that have plagued decades of well-intentioned efforts: a food industry driven by profit, politicians beholden to corporate subsidies, and a culture that prioritizes convenience and indulgence over sustainability and health. As much as I long for the simplicity and clarity of my macrobiotic days, I also know that individual action can only go so far without systemic reform. It’s not enough to tell people what’s healthy; we have to make healthy choices accessible, affordable, and desirable. Until we tackle the root causes of America’s dietary dysfunction— economic inequality, corporate greed, and political inertia— any effort to transform our collective eating habits will remain, at best, an elegant but unfulfilled philosophy. Balance, after all, isn’t just for the dinner plate; it’s the foundation of a just and equitable society. And that’s something we all have a role in cultivating.