I was fortunate to be present yesterday at the White House as the Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released its first report: "Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment." President Trump gave brief comments, along with several Commission members, led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.

Our growing team of eighteen at Baszucki Group and Metabolic Mind are actively working to expand and accelerate our initiatives in nutrition science, metabolic and mental health education, and regenerative agriculture to drive positive change. This thread shares our perspectives on five topics covered in the new report that are related to our work.

This landmark report represents a unique opportunity. For the first time in modern American history, the deep connection between nutrition and chronic disease in children and adults is being discussed at the highest levels of government. Now is the moment to update our nation’s dietary guidance to align with existing evidence, to transform methods for producing and processing food, and to emphasize common sense lifestyle strategies to promote health.

1. Revising the Dietary Guidelines Is a Vital First Step

For too long, national health strategies have overlooked the metabolic root causes of illness in both adults and children, and the ways in which dietary guidelines and food policy can either protect health or promote disease. We are supportive of the new federal focus on the impact of ultra processed foods (UPFs) on health trajectories. Equally important is an understanding of how macronutrient composition influences basic metabolic function. Over-reliance on refined grains and sugars, instead of healthy proteins and fats, has wreaked havoc on insulin signaling over a period of fifty years and led to an epidemic of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and other metabolic and even mental disorders. The MAHA Commission’s call to re-evaluate the USDA Dietary Guidelines is a vital first step toward aligning national policy with both scientific evidence and common sense. I’m hopeful that forthcoming revisions will recommend whole, unprocessed, organic fats and proteins over ultra-processed oils, fake meat, and refined sugars and grains. Additionally, the introduction of a new food pyramid and dietary pattern that incorporates therapeutic carbohydrate reduction and nutritional ketosis is critical to reversing already existing metabolic and mental disorders that are affecting millions of American children and adults.

2. New NIH Research Initiatives are Critical

We strongly support the report’s emphasis on adjusting federal research priorities to include funding of “long-term trials comparing whole-food, reduced-carb, and low-UPF diets in children to assess effects on obesity and insulin resistance,” and “a coordinated national lifestyle medicine initiative that embeds real-world randomized trials-covering integrated interventions in movement, diet, light exposure, and sleep timing-within existing cohorts and EHR networks.”

The report’s recommended dietary research proposals for children are closely aligned with recently initiated pilot projects on ketogenic therapy, funded by Baszucki Group, that are already underway. The forthcoming pilot data from these funded trials can serve as a foundation for the design and implementation of NIH sponsored dietary intervention research trials for youth.

Baszucki Group’s metabolic psychiatry model places therapeutic nutrition, movement and circadian biology at the foundation of mental health treatment. Our new THINK+SMART framework from Metabolic Mind provides a blueprint for lifestyle strategies that improve metabolic and mental health. We look forward to opportunities to collaborate with the NIH under the leadership of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to accelerate lifestyle research initiatives and to encourage the inclusion of mental health outcome measures.

3. We Must Advance Alternatives to the Overprescribing and Medicalization of Youth

The MAHA commission report calls attention to an overprescribing trend in youth healthcare:

“The overmedicalization of American children, characterized by escalating prescription rates, unwarranted interventions, and declining health outcomes, signals a critical policy failure where corporate profitability supersedes the health of children.”

This disturbing treatment trend is true for both the physical and mental health of our youth, and is unfortunately representative of our family’s experience navigating America’s mental health care system.

After being diagnosed with a serious mental illness at age 19, our son was prescribed 29 different medications over a period of five years by well-intentioned physicians. Although these interventions were very helpful during short-term psychiatric crises, none addressed the root cause of our son’s condition. It was only when a Harvard psychiatrist prescribed a dietary intervention–ketogenic metabolic therapy–that his illness was put into remission.

Families in crisis need answers and without alternatives, they have embraced the available medical interventions. These typically consist of powerful psychotropic medications that can be life saving in acute situations, but often inadequately address symptoms, come with debilitating side effects, fail to treat root causes, and do not lead to long-term healing. But if we are to challenge prescription pharmaceuticals as the foundation of mental healthcare for our children, we must be able to turn to evidence-based alternatives.

A growing body of scientific literature links depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and even neurodegenerative diseases to underlying metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance. Accumulating clinical research and experience, along with thousands of personal stories, demonstrate that the emerging field of Metabolic Psychiatry offers the promise of an adjunctive or even alternative approach to current mental healthcare practices. Addressing the mental health crisis requires a paradigm shift—one that integrates ketogenic and metabolic therapies as a core pillar of care. Americans deserve treatment models that not only target reduction of symptoms, but also long-term healing and recovery.

4. Medical Education Must Be Freed from Conflicts of Interest

The new MAHA report underscores the importance of ensuring that medical education represents the full spectrum of health interventions, not just those supported by industry:

“In prior studies, 80% of clinical departments at U.S. medical schools and teaching hospitals are funded directly by the pharmaceutical industry…Industry sponsorship of education for medical students and physicians typically promotes drugs, encourages off-label prescribing, and contributes to polypharmacy in kids…Half of Continuing Medical Education courses in the U.S. are funded by the pharmaceutical industry…Studies find sponsored courses profoundly impact physician behavior, increasing prescribing of the sponsor's drug.”

As a non-profit advancing non-pharmaceutical approaches to mental and metabolic health, we believe strongly that increasingly, medical education must be independent of industry influences. We partner with our collaborators in science and medicine to offer free continuing medical education in metabolic psychiatry and more general metabolic health topics. To date, we have trained more than 3,000 learners with these free online courses via a premiere CME portal (MyCME), and our offerings are growing rapidly. It is critical that other nonprofits and private and government entities step up to create free medical education provided without financial incentives for featured therapies.

5. Regenerative Agriculture Is a Health, Climate, and Food Systems Solution

We applaud the MAHA Commission for beginning to interrogate the health impacts of industrial agricultural practices, including the use of glyphosate and other chemical inputs. This inquiry opens the opportunity for a bold, science-backed pivot toward regenerative agriculture, which not only restores soil health and biodiversity but also produces more nutrient-dense foods essential to reversing chronic disease.

As outlined in the documentary film Common Ground–that I was lucky enough to executive produce and that is now available on Amazon Prime–regenerative farming and ranching can sequester carbon emissions while maintaining yields and supporting farmer livelihoods. U.S. dietary and farm policy must align to support this transition—carefully shifting subsidies away from high-input monocultures and toward systems that nourish both people and the planet.

Watch for landmark research on regenerative agriculture from the 1,000 Farm Initiative in the coming months.

Those of us who have been advocating for mental and physical health in American adults and children are thrilled that the federal government is addressing the chronic disease crisis head on. We look forward to doing our part to continue to advance evidence-based therapeutic nutrition and regenerative agricultural practices that can improve our soil, our food, and our children’s futures.