Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans to make school lunches healthier has been compared to former first lady Michelle Obama‘s initiative to combat childhood obesity.

The newly confirmed Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement was likened to the former first lady’s “Let’s Move” initiative, which drew criticism from some conservatives at the time, with “Michelle Obama” trending on X on Friday.

Newsweek has contacted the U.S. Department of Health via email for comment.

Why It Matters

Despite pushback from critics, RFK Jr. has been confirmed by the Senate and will lead the newly established Make America Healthy Again Commission.

Its focus will be on reversing chronic disease, which will include working with farmers and expanding health care and treatment options “for beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.”

What To Know

RFK Jr. spoke to Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday about his priorities as health secretary when he said: “We want to do a number of things but not take away choice from people. The one place that I would say that we need to really change policies is the snap program and food stamps and in school lunches – because there the federal government is, in many cases, paying for it and we shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.”

This snippet of the interview has been shared multiple times on X, formerly Twitter, with some people, often supporters of the Democratic Party, referencing Obama’s campaign and the criticism it attracted.

These people include CNN‘s chief media correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who said Thursday that the MAHA movement “frankly had a lot of echoes of what we’ve heard in the past from the Let’s Move campaign, from Michelle Obama, for example, but that had broad support – trying to make people healthier.”

“We spend a lot of money on healthcare, we don’t see enough in return for those dollars,” he added.

Progressive writer and commentator Matthew Sheffield wrote on X on Friday: “Republicans hated Michelle Obama for improving school lunches as the ‘nanny state.'”

Former Minnesota GOP Representative Michele Bachmann accused Obama of trying to implement a “nanny state” in 2011, after a push to get mothers to breastfeed their babies as part of her campaign. Bachmann told The Laura Ingraham Show at the time: “For them, government is the answer to every problem.”

In 2010, the year that the “Let’s Move” campaign was launched, conservative media personality Glenn Beck responded to Obama’s appeal to the National Restaurant Association to “create healthier versions of the foods that we all love” and offer “healthy sides” so that fries are “something customers have to request.”

“Get your damn hands off my fries, lady. If I want to be a fat, fat, fatty and shovel French fries all day long, that is my choice…,” he said.

Ingraham put this issue to RFK Jr. this week when he spoke about reducing the number of legal additives in the U.S., asking: “Is that not a nanny state? I’m saying what the critics are going to say—that RFK Jr. is just a new Bloomberg nanny state…President Trump likes Big Macs—we’re not going to take those away are we?”

“That’s what I’m saying. If you wanna eat a Big Mac, you ought to, but McDonald’s ought to be incentivized to use beef tallow fat when it’s cooking its Big Macs so that they’re good for people, rather than using seed oils or some other cooking oils that are actually gonna probably make you sicker,” the HHS secretary responded.

Meanwhile, Democratic strategist and former senior adviser to Kamala Harris, Mike Nellis, shared an X post from former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which said: “Bring back the presidential fitness test in schools. Serve healthier food in the cafeteria & start physical education earlier in school. The best way to save on health costs in the long run is to create a healthier population in the first place.”

Nellis captioned the post: “Yeah, no s***—Michelle Obama tried to do this and Republicans called her a radical communist.”

RFK Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaks after being sworn in as Health and Human Services Secretary in the Oval Office at the White House on February 13 in Washington, D.C. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaks after being sworn in as Health and Human Services Secretary in the Oval Office at the White House on February 13 in Washington, D.C. AP

What People Are Saying

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News on Thursday: “I believe in freedom of choice. If you wanna eat Twinkies, you ought to be able to eat ’em, but you ought to know what’s in them. So, a lot of what I’m gonna do is about radical transparency.

He added: “About making people understand – allowing people to understand and empower them with understanding that if you eat that, it may seem cheap, but it’s gonna cost you in the long run.”

What Happens Next

After President Donald Trump used an executive order to set up the Make America Healthy Again Commission on February 13, RFK Jr. will now be tasked with trying to prolong the life expectancy of Americans.

One of the areas of focus will be children, with a portion of the order saying that “an estimated 30 million children (40.7 percent) had at least one health condition, such as allergies, asthma, or an autoimmune disease.”

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