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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........

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