The primary girl’s “Let’s Move!” initiative to enhance college diet and train drew some criticism from the proper—which has been far more muted because the Trump administration promotes MAHA messaging.
By Barbara Rodriguez for The nineteenth
At an elementary college in Washington, D.C., the speaker on the podium needed to speak about kids’s well being and the affect of childhood weight problems.
“Our generation is facing so many devastating health problems because of how we live and how we eat — illnesses like diabetes and heart disease and cancer — that cause so much suffering and cost our economy billions,” the speaker mentioned. “And today, we need to ask ourselves: Are we going to hand down these problems to our next generation? Or are we going to do what we’ve always done in this country and leave something better for our children and our grandchildren?”
Somebody may mistake these phrases as being spoken in 2025 by a Trump administration official advocating to “Make America Healthy Again” — the catch-all agenda that has zeroed in on youngsters’ well being and specifically, power illness and childhood weight problems.
Michelle Obama runs a 40-yard dash in Sept. 2010 to advertise train and combat childhood weight problems in New Orleans.
However the remarks had been from then-first girl Michelle Obama, and the 12 months was 2013.
Obama was selling “Let’s Move!,” her initiative geared toward enhancing kids’s diet at residence and college and inspiring them to train extra. The initiative is credited with bettering college lunch requirements, creating extra transparency in meals labeling and bringing extra consciousness to childhood weight problems.
However the first girl drew widespread partisan backlash for her efforts, as right-wing media personalities and Republicans vehemently criticized associated regulation as authorities overreach. They’ve been extra muted because the Trump administration, led partially by Well being and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now adopts related messaging about kids’s well being.
“I do think that there’s a double standard going on, especially with RFK Jr.,” mentioned Sydney Carr-Glenn, a political science professor on the School of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts who research the intersectionality of race and gender for Black girls in politics, together with within the media. “People seem to be a little bit more accepting or a little bit more on board with this whole ‘Make America Healthy Again’ initiative.”
Final month, President Donald Trump introduced he would revive the presidential health check, a as soon as ubiquitous staple of faculty health club class. Only a few years in the past, Let’s Transfer! supplied programming to educators to encourage bodily exercise in school for at the very least 60 minutes every day.
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In some methods, Michelle Obama’s well being coverage efforts walked so MAHA may run. However you received’t discover many Republicans acknowledging that.
“We live in such polarized times now that you would think the Trump administration would look at the things that Michelle Obama achieved and maybe try to build upon that,” mentioned Sharon Wright Austin, a political science professor on the College of Florida. “But there is no collaboration. There are no coalitions. I’m sure if you were to say to Trump, ‘You’re doing the same thing that Michelle Obama originally started doing when Barack Obama was president,’ he would probably not only deny it, but he probably would be pretty offended.”
Obama’s motivation to launch Let’s Transfer!, the primary girl defined, was rooted in her expertise as a working mom attempting to feed her youngsters nutritious meals. The self-described “mom-in-chief” acknowledged that if she struggled with what to feed her kids, different households with fewer assets may, too.
Inside months of shifting into the White Home, the primary girl began a vegetable backyard to assist train kids about domestically grown meals and to begin a dialog about their well being. She launched “Let’s Move” in early 2010, and her husband issued a directive to ascertain a process pressure on childhood weight problems. Michelle Obama was current months later when the duty pressure launched a report assessing how one can scale back childhood weight problems inside a era. It included roughly 70 voluntary suggestions.
Zinga A. Fraser research African American historical past and gender politics as an affiliate professor at Brooklyn School of the Metropolis College of New York. She famous that whereas Obama’s diet plans labored inside a domesticated and gendered framework, her backyard and well being initiative was additionally a part of a protracted historical past of Black girls taking good care of their communities by meals sustainability.
“She understood what being a Black woman in that space looked like,” Fraser mentioned of Obama’s function as first girl. “How she had to navigate and what it would be perceived as.”
Let’s Transfer! had a number of areas of focus: offering data to households about wholesome meals, enhancing the standard of meals in colleges, increasing entry and affordability of wholesome meals in communities, and growing bodily exercise for kids.
The primary girl sought buy-in from key stakeholders early on. The American Beverage Affiliation, a authorities lobbying group representing soft-drink makers, dedicated instantly to member corporations voluntarily placing front-of-pack calorie labels on cans, bottles and merchandising machines inside two years. Meals service corporations that operated in colleges pledged to cut back the quantity of fats, sugar and salt they put in youngsters’ meals over the following 5 years.
It’s the sort of voluntary trade motion that Kennedy is touting 15 years later as he seeks voluntary commitments to take away sure dyes from the meals provide and to swap the sort of oil that quick meals chains use for cooking.
However the first girl was additionally politically savvy in broadening her initiative’s attraction to most of the people. She danced on “The Ellen Degeneres Show” and did “mom dancing” on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. She launched a “focus group” video with youngsters that featured comic Will Ferrell. She shared a health video of herself understanding. She appeared with members of the Miami Warmth, together with dunking a ball with LeBron James.
Michelle Obama dances with Washington, D.C., center college college students in Might 2011 throughout a shock go to for the college’s Let’s Transfer! occasion.
“She was strategic,” mentioned Fraser, who can also be director of the Shirley Chisholm Challenge on Brooklyn Ladies’s Activism. “She strategically used her positionality in many ways to move a needle, whether people saw it as influential or important at the time or not.”
It didn’t appear that Michelle Obama was coming into controversial politics at first. She had settled on an space of public curiosity — kids’s wellness — that was politically viable for a primary girl, mentioned Laurel Elder, a political science professor at Hartwick School in New York who has researched public opinion about presidential candidates and their spouses. There had already been a historical past of first girls with tasks like an anti-drug marketing campaign and increasing literacy.
Elder famous that Obama was selling a type of “new traditionalism” within the function of first girl.
“[The public] wants them to be traditional, but also the ‘new’ part is they really do have an expectation that the first lady should be out there and visible and should be leading campaigns in appropriate areas,” she mentioned.
However as regulation coverage emerged, so did the criticism. A baby diet legislation handed on the finish of 2010 included a phase-in of latest federal college diet requirements for milk, complete grains and sodium. The narrative that emerged was that the federal government was telling folks what well being selections to make.
“You’re going to have to tax, you’re going to have to make it more and more difficult. But when those options don’t work, how do you get people to stop eating french fries, because french fries still beat carrots. What’s left? Well, now you have to start thinking about punishments — maybe a fine, maybe even jail. But it always starts with a nudge,” he mentioned.
Even some Democrats criticized the Obama administration, arguing it didn’t go far sufficient to carry the meals trade accountable to proposed modifications.
In 2013, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin sipped a big soda throughout an look on the Conservative Political Motion Convention, often known as CPAC. She was responding to a proposed ban of enormous sodas by then New York Metropolis Mayor Michael Bloomberg, however the stunt grew to become half of a bigger commentary on the federal government’s function in folks’s well being selections.
In 2014, Republicans in Congress sought exemptions to the 2010 college lunches legislation amid backing from a highly effective college lunch trade group that expressed concern over implementation and prices. Michelle Obama pushed again in a New York Occasions op-ed. (In 2018 beneath the primary Trump administration, the agriculture division sought to revert the brand new requirements. It was challenged in court docket.)
Michelle Obama vegetation greens with youngsters within the White Home backyard in April 2016.
A MAHA fee launched a report this spring for addressing “the childhood chronic disease crisis.” Amongst its future coverage focus might be poor weight loss plan, the “aggregation of environmental chemicals,” a scarcity of bodily exercise and power stress, and “overmedicalization.”
“We shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison,” mentioned Kennedy, who has individually began selling that individuals ought to monitor their well being metrics through “wearable” expertise.
Kennedy’s MAHA initiative comes because the Trump administration cuts federal meals help, key monetary help for Medicaid and reduces environmental protections.
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“You can’t cut benefits — Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP benefits, all of those things — to children and families and then still have an initiative where people are saying that they are about creating healthy environments for Americans,” Fraser mentioned.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historical past professor at The New Faculty in New York Metropolis, famous that when Beyoncé shot a associated music video for the Let’s Transfer! initiative in 2011, she surrounded herself with younger kids dancing in a faculty cafeteria. It was frequent imagery for the primary girl as effectively, as Michelle Obama swayed with youngsters to get them enthusiastic about diet and well being. Trump’s latest announcement in regards to the presidential health check featured former WWE wrestler and present Chief Content material Officer Triple H doing a signature water spit on the White Home.
“To me, that arc kind of says a lot about what’s changed in our wellness and fitness environment,” mentioned Petrzela, who’s writer of “Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession.” “That now there’s this highly individualistic, ‘strong man’ approach to things, and I think, even more interestingly, it’s tied to that anti-institutional critique, which used to be coded as really left, and in the intervening years, has become, almost completely seen as right wing.”
Austin on the College of Florida mentioned that whereas Michelle Obama has by no means been an elected official, she held immense energy in her function as first girl and left the White Home with excessive polling. Austin believes the primary girl balanced the political challenges of intersectional identities, and her mission to assist kids continues to resonate 15 years later — regardless that the messengers have modified.
“It just goes to show that as a Black woman, you’re never going to get the respect that you deserve,” she mentioned.
