One of the papers cited in the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission’s report was rejected by a judge as “junk science,” NOTUS found.
In a review of the MAHA report’s coverage of crop protection and dietary guidelines, NOTUS found citations that misinterpreted findings and misattributed information, including crediting an outside paper to the United States Department of Agriculture and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s own department.
Although the MAHA report was updated after NOTUS first reported inconsistencies on Thursday, these issues remain. HHS did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Kennedy “campaigned on a promise of removing pesticides from the food supply” and called for revisiting American pesticide standards, including in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year in which he mentioned glyphosate by name. The MAHA report doesn’t go quite as far as some agriculture groups had feared following an intense lobbying push.
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But the report’s discussion on pesticides has still received industry ire; it in part states “a selection of research studies on a herbicide (glyphosate) have noted a range of possible health effects, ranging from reproductive and developmental disorders as well as cancers, liver inflammation and metabolic disturbances.”
This claim in the report has four citations. The final one was for a paper that concluded “the rise of [Glyphosate-based herbicides] as the most widely used herbicide raises serious health concerns.”
That paper was called into question in recent court proceedings in a personal injury case against the agriculture company Monsanto, a subsidiary of Bayer. The company successfully motioned to exclude the testimony of the paper’s lead author, Luoping Zhang, as an expert witness due to concerns about her research.
“Zhang’s meta-analysis is junk science. It has deep methodological problems,” reads the order by Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California. Chhabria’s issues with Zhang’s expertise “are exacerbated by the fact that Zhang struggled to answer basic questions about her own paper, and the studies discussed in that paper.”
More on the MAHA Report
• The MAHA Report Has Been Updated With Fresh Errors
• The MAHA Report Has Been Updated to Replace Citations That Didn’t Exist
• Democrats Say MAHA Report Inconsistencies Show Kennedy Isn’t Fit to Lead HHS
• The White House Blames ‘Formatting Issues’ for the MAHA Report’s Citation Problems
Zhang did not respond to a request for comment.
Glyphosate-based herbicides are the most-used pesticide not only in the U.S., but globally. These pesticides have received some scrutiny and should be very familiar to Kennedy specifically: He was one of the attorneys in a case for a man who in 2018 won $289 million from Monsanto after alleging its weed killer Roundup caused his illness.
At the time, Roundup contained glyphosate. Bayer has spent “approximately $11 billion to settle lawsuits alleging that glyphosate exposure caused cancer,” and in 2023, ended U.S. lawn and garden sales of glyphosate-based herbicides.
There is some debate over whether glyphosate is a carcinogen. The Environmental Protection Agency has for years said the herbicide is not a carcinogen, and regulators globally have approved its use. But the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015.
The MAHA report’s line on glyphosate also appears to misinterpret another study it cites. The citation suggests the study demonstrates “serious health concerns” surrounding glyphosate. In fact, the study concluded that concentrations of glyphosate in mothers’ urine “were not significantly associated with children’s cognitive, social or behavioural functioning, and there was no evidence of effect modification.”
The EPA told NOTUS in a statement its findings on glyphosate are currently unchanged.
“The Trump Administration is working to solve big problems and having robust conversations across government about how to drive economic growth while protecting human health and the environment as part of the Make America Healthy Again Commission,” the EPA said in a statement to NOTUS.
But “EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same. EPA’s cancer classification is consistent with most other international expert panels and regulatory authorities,” the statement continues.
The MAHA report’s section on dietary guidelines has citation issues as well. One line cites the USDA and HHS even though the link goes to a fact sheet from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an outside watchdog organization.
Center for Science in the Public Interest spokesperson Jeff Cronin called the mix-up “bizarre” in an email to NOTUS.
The MAHA report’s section on food additives states that “Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT), found in common snacks and cereals, is a preservative that may be associated with tumor growth in rodent studies.”
The first citation links to a report on butylated hydroxyanisole, a related but different synthetic antioxidant.
And on food dyes, the MAHA report states, “Preliminary evidence suggests a possible association between the consumption of food colorings and autism, although further long-term research is necessary to establish a definitive link.”
The singular cited paper’s abstract reads, “The research does not prove that food coloring actually causes autism spectrum disorder, but there seems to be a link.” The paper is a meta-analysis, or a broad overview of some research in the field. The research it covers, despite its title of “Food Color and Autism: A Meta-Analysis,” focuses more generally on the links between food dyes and hyperactivity, and has a section on the link between zinc deficiency and autism, and then food dyes and zinc deficiency.
Alexa Combelic, executive director of government affairs for the American Soybean Association, said the MAHA report sections on pesticides and food additives were troubling.
“Regulators around the world have gone through thousands and thousands of studies, and have all come to the same conclusion that glyphosate is safe,” she said, referring to the pesticide. “And so, looking at a few studies, one of which has been thrown out in court, these are concerning things to us.”
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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