Open Letter to HHS Secretary RFK Jr.: A Policy Agenda

March 2026

The Honorable Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 200 Independence Avenue, S.W. Washington, D.C. 20201

Dear Secretary Kennedy,

We are writing to you as members of the American fitness and wellness community — coaches, trainers, gym owners, competitive athletes, weekend warriors, and everyday citizens who have dedicated our lives to the proposition that the human body, properly challenged and properly fed, is capable of extraordinary things.

We write because we believe this moment is different.

For decades, those of us working in fitness, nutrition, and ancestral health have operated in a strange cultural position: we know the answers, we see the evidence, and we watch federal health policy consistently point Americans in the wrong direction. The people doing the hard work — the ones coaching pull-ups and teaching clients to cook real food and arguing against the mainstream when the mainstream was wrong — have never had a seat at the table.

Secretary Kennedy, you have explicitly invited us there.

Your Make America Healthy Again agenda is the closest thing the fitness community has had to genuine federal representation in living memory. We don't want to squander the moment. So here, plainly stated, are the policy priorities of the people who have been fighting this fight at the grassroots level for years.

On the Dietary Guidelines

We ask you to fundamentally reform the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee process.

The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans still recommend that Americans consume grains as their primary caloric foundation and continue to treat vegetable oils as preferable to traditional animal fats. Both of these positions are increasingly at odds with independent metabolic research.

Specifically, we ask:

1. Require full financial disclosure from advisory committee members, going back ten years. Current disclosure requirements are inadequate. A committee member who received funding from the grain industry three years ago and now serves on the panel influencing grain recommendations is a conflict of interest, regardless of the timeline.

2. Mandate that a meaningful percentage of cited research in the next Guidelines revision be independently funded. Industry-funded research has a systematic bias that is well-documented in peer-reviewed literature. The guidelines cannot serve public health if they're built on a research base that consistently favors the industries that fund it.

3. Explicitly re-evaluate the fat hypothesis. The evidence that dietary saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease has been significantly revised over the past two decades. The 2020 guidelines still reflect a version of the fat hypothesis that the scientific literature has largely moved on from. Americans deserve guidance based on current evidence, not institutional inertia.

4. Differentiate between whole foods and ultra-processed foods within categories. A can of kidney beans and a box of corn-based breakfast cereal are both in the "grains and legumes" universe. They are not the same. The next guidelines should make this distinction explicit — ultra-processed food is a category with its own distinct health profile, and that profile is negative.

📖 Related: The regulatory context expands with What Is HHS? A Complete Guide to the Department of Health, HHS Chronic Disease Initiative: What It Means for Americans, and The Gut-Brain-Fitness Connection: Why Gut Health Drives Performance.

On the FDA and Food Safety

We ask for meaningful action on food additives, dyes, and preservatives that have been grandfathered into the American food supply without adequate independent safety review.

The GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) designation has become a loophole that allows food manufacturers to add substances to the food supply without independent FDA review. The FDA itself has acknowledged this problem. Action has not followed acknowledgment.

The European Union has banned or restricted dozens of food additives that remain legal in the United States. We are not asking for a ban on everything in question — we are asking for genuine, independent safety review, with a burden of proof on industry rather than on regulators.

Specifically:

• Artificial food dyes (particularly Red 3, now banned from ingestion but previously approved for cosmetics — a regulatory inconsistency that is hard to defend)
• BHA and BHT in food packaging and products
• Brominated vegetable oil in beverages (now being phased out, but too slowly)
• The broader GRAS classification process, which should require independent substantiation

The fitness community — people who care deeply about what goes into their bodies — is a natural political base for food safety reform. We are ready to advocate loudly for it.

On Physical Fitness in Schools and the Military

We ask you to revive meaningful federal support for physical education and lead on military fitness readiness as a public health priority.

The physical fitness statistics for American children are alarming. Youth obesity rates have tripled since 1980. The percentage of American youth who cannot perform basic functional movements — a pull-up, a running mile, a bodyweight squat — has increased dramatically. This is not a genetics problem. It is an environment and policy problem.

The United States military has explicitly cited physical fitness decline as a national security concern. Roughly 77% of military-age Americans do not qualify for service, with weight and fitness failures accounting for a significant portion of rejections. This is not an abstraction. This is a readiness crisis.

We ask for:

• Federal funding for quality physical education programs that emphasize functional movement, not just aerobic exercise
• Support for reinstating President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition initiatives with teeth — not just a logo on a website
• Partnership between HHS and the Department of Defense on a public fitness initiative, using military readiness metrics to reframe fitness as a national security issue rather than a personal wellness choice
• Incentives for workplaces to provide or subsidize fitness programming

On Supplements and Natural Medicine

We ask for a regulatory environment that protects consumers without treating natural health choices as presumptively dangerous.

Millions of Americans use dietary supplements — protein powders, creatine, magnesium, vitamin D, fish oil, adaptogenic herbs — as part of a genuine, evidence-based health practice. The current regulatory environment, in which supplement quality standards are inconsistent and enforcement is reactive rather than preventive, fails both consumers and responsible manufacturers.

We are not asking for deregulation. We are asking for better regulation — specifically:

• Mandatory good manufacturing practice (GMP) compliance with meaningful enforcement
• Third-party testing requirements for products making specific health claims
• Clear regulatory guidance that distinguishes between evidence-based supplements and genuinely dangerous products, rather than treating all non-pharmaceutical health products as suspect

The fitness community broadly supports supplement quality standards. We want clean, tested products. We need a regulatory framework that can actually deliver them.

📖 Related: The food policy failures have direct dietary consequences — explored in HHS Chronic Disease Initiative: What It Means for Americans and The Gut-Brain-Fitness Connection: Why Gut Health Drives Performance.

On Healthcare and Preventive Medicine

We ask HHS to shift the dominant healthcare paradigm from disease management to disease prevention — and to recognize that lifestyle intervention is medicine.

The American healthcare system spends more per capita than any other developed nation and produces worse health outcomes for a significant portion of the population. This is not a mystery. A system structured around treating chronic disease rather than preventing it will generate more chronic disease — because chronic disease is where the revenue is.

The fitness and nutrition community has been providing genuine preventive medicine for decades, largely outside the formal healthcare system. A client who works with a certified trainer three times a week, learns to cook whole foods, and gets adequate sleep is dramatically less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or metabolic syndrome. None of that shows up in healthcare revenue — which is part of why it's never been adequately incentivized.

We ask for:

• Recognition of lifestyle medicine as a legitimate medical specialty with appropriate Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement pathways
• Coverage of evidence-based fitness and nutrition interventions through federal health programs
• Incentive structures that reward healthcare providers for patient health outcomes, not for the volume of procedures and prescriptions

Why We're Writing Now

Secretary Kennedy, you said in your confirmation testimony that you want to Make America Healthy Again — not just treat sick Americans more efficiently. That language resonated with every person in this community who has spent years arguing exactly that.

We are not adversaries of medicine. We are allies of health. The distinction matters.

The fitness community represents millions of Americans who have made their own journey toward ancestral eating, functional movement, and honest engagement with the science of human performance. We know what works because we've watched it work — in gym floors, in clients' lives, in our own bodies.

We are ready to work with your department to translate that experience into policy. We are ready to advocate publicly, to organize politically, and to build the coalition that this agenda needs.

What we are asking for in return is simple: a seat at the table, and policies that reflect the evidence we've been living for years.

With respect and shared purpose,

The MAHA Fit Community Coaches, trainers, athletes, and health-conscious Americans mahafit.com

Editor's note: This letter represents the editorial position of MAHA Fit and the broader fitness and ancestral health community. We invite readers to share it, comment on it, and add their own voice to the conversation at mahafit.com/community.

→ [MAHA Fit's full policy wishlist → /maha-fitness-policy] → [Why federal fitness should be a priority again → /federal-fitness-priority] → [Health sovereignty and the right to make your own health decisions → /health-sovereignty]