For one lawmaker, the path to making Americans healthier starts in the dirt.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., has styled himself as an early adopter of the Make America Healthy Again movement, a political slogan born on the 2024 campaign trail that has since seen major companies tweak their products to nix artificial additives.
But Marshall sees the initiative, commonly known as MAHA, as one that can start sooner than switching the oil in deep friers or swapping out high-fructose corn syrup for cane sugar in soda.
He has his own four pillars of MAHA, which include dialing up efficiency in agriculture; healthier, more nutrient-rich food; affordable access to primary care healthcare; and addressing mental health challenges among young people.
But it all starts below the surface with soil health.
‘Soil is a dirty topic, you know, pun intended,’ Marshall told Fox News Digital in an interview.
MAHA diehards and farmers are, at a surface level, at odds with one another, he said. For example, returning to an entirely organic food production process devoid of fertilizers would create healthier food, but also crank up the costs on consumers and strain farmland.
Earlier in the week, Marshall held a roundtable with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to try and bridge that gap.
‘Soil health seems to be the common ground,’ he said. ‘So healthy soil meets healthy food meets healthy people. Rather than MAHA telling these farmers what you can and can’t do, we wanted to say, ‘What’s our goal here?’ If we have the same goals, then we’re going to figure this out. Well, the goal is healthy soil.’
Getting those two in a room together, along with experts on regenerative agriculture, which is a more holistic approach to farming that targets soil health by restoring and enhancing ecosystems, is just a part of his plan.
He also intends to drop a massive package of bills that is divided up into categories that echo his four pillars, including legislation geared toward health care, mental health, nutrition and agriculture.
Among the nearly 30 bills and amendments in the package is one Marshall is particularly keen to see codified. The Plant Biostimulant Act would spur usage of organisms that can be placed into the soil and that latch onto the roots of plants that absorb nitrates and more water, he said.
The bill ties in directly with his passion for regenerative agriculture, which uses fewer fertilizers, water and other status-quo farming techniques to produce healthier foods on more sustainable farmland, which, in turn, would yield a cheaper, more nutritious diet for Americans.
‘It’s growing more with less,’ he said.
Among the various, bipartisan pieces of legislation from both chambers are bills that would push mobile cancer screenings with grant funding, add mental health warnings for kids scrolling through social media, require more transparency in food ingredients, expansion of employer healthcare coverage for chronic diseases, and measures that would allow bleeding edge soil health technology and processes to be considered conservation practices and eligible for Farm Bill funding, among others.
Most bills need to get 60 votes to pass in the Senate, Marshall noted, and that led to a desire to incorporate as many bipartisan measures in the package as possible. It’s also a topic that, in spite of the political polarization in Washington, ‘unites us, rather than divides us.’
Still, with President Donald Trump in office, he sees the chance for the measures to pass as a kind of now or never moment.
‘We’re seeing a time in our lives where the incidence of cancer, the age of cancer, is growing younger and younger, the age of Alzheimer’s onset is growing younger and younger, and we believe it’s an inflammatory reaction to the food that we’re eating that leads to all that,’ he said.
‘We think heart disease, hypertension, is really an inflammatory reaction… to the food we’re eating and the constantly high sugar levels in our blood system,’ he continued. ‘So absolutely, I think, seize the moment. This is it.’