The MAHA Commission's September 2025 Strategy Report laid out four pillars for tackling childhood chronic disease. Today Jamie and Melissa Anne are digging into Pillar 2: "Realigning Incentives" — a sprawling grab-bag of food labeling, sunscreen modernization, dietary guidelines, synthetic dye phase-outs, and the still-undefined "ultra-processed food."

What's actually been accomplished? We unpack why U.S. sunscreen regulation lags behind Europe and Asia, why the new upside-down food pyramid is a confusing step backward, who really profits from the petroleum-based dye phase-out (hint: not the oil industry), and why a federal definition of "ultra-processed food" keeps slipping its deadline. Underneath it all: a movement skilled at capitalizing on parental fear while ignoring the structural drivers of children's health: hunger, poverty, healthcare access, pollution, and gun violence.

You can take red dye out of Swedish Fish, but it won't help a kid who comes home to an empty fridge.

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SINCE TAPING: The FDA announced June 9, 2026 that they have approved an additional sunscreen ingredient.

Season 2 is here, and we're opening with a topic that has been a frequent flyer: the MAHA Strategy Report. If you followed our MOCHA series in Season 1, you already know the diagnosis — poor diet, chemical exposures, physical inactivity, and overmedicalization. Now the MAHA Commission is back with their so-called playbook. Today we're putting Pillar One — Advancing Research — under the nursing microscope.

Spoiler: "gold standard science" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a document with little meat and zero citations.

We break down the 14 research priorities the Commission laid out, explain why several of them function as dog whistles for the health freedom crowd, and track what has actually happened since the Strategy dropped. From the reinstatement of a long-disbanded vaccine safety task force to the quiet dismantling of the very agencies designed to protect us from chemical exposures, the gap between the promise and the reality is… wide.

We also introduce you to Andrew Downing — and no, he is not from Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill.

This is Part 1 of a multi-part series. Subscribe to our show so you don't miss what comes next.

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The Department of Education just finalized the RISE Rule — and graduate nursing still isn't a "professional degree." What does that mean? It means nursing students starting after July 1, 2026 can borrow less than half of what med students, law students, and even chiropractic students can access in federal loans. The Department says it's just a classification issue. Jamie says it's misogyny in a bureaucratic hat.

Jamie breaks down what the RISE Rule actually does, why the CIP code defense doesn't hold up, why "just get a private loan" is not the answer anyone thinks it is, and what this means for a nursing workforce that's already short 264,000 nurses — with 40% of current nurses planning to leave within five years. Plus: what you can do about it, and why your legislators need to hear from you yesterday.

Stay tuned after the Soapbox for our conversation with Dr. Victoria Soltis-Jarrett of UNC on what "professional" status really means for the nurses doing this work every day.

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