No seed oils, no dyes, no problem? Snacks are getting a MAHA makeover.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to “Make America Healthy Again” by declaring war on artificial food dyes, ultraprocessed foods, seed oils and sodas. He’s also taken up the cause of what he sees as maligned ingredients, including butter and red meat — both of which are now featured prominently in the new and upside-down food pyramid — and as a result is attracting legions of MAHA moms and men alike.

These changes are starting to show up in the snack aisle, too. Since MAHA arrived on the scene, rows of neon orange Takis and Doritos and taste-the-rainbow Skittles have been facing competition from new and reportedly healthier snacks. They now share grocery store aisles with artificial-coloring-free Veggie Straws, “certified gluten-free, Paleo and no preservatives” beef sticks, and a plethora of new versions of old snacks, now made with avocado oil.

This is the MAHA-ization of snacks.

They’ve caught on with some consumers, but are these snacks really better for you? I put the question to health experts to find out.

The rise of the ‘healthy’ snack

These so-called “better-for-you” snacks didn’t begin with MAHA. In 1980, U.S. dietary guidelines first advised Americans to avoid eating “too much” sugar, fat, cholesterol and saturated fat, according to Northwell Health; this started to put pressure on the food industry to adapt. By the mid-1980s, the U.S. was well into its snack era, with Americans consuming more salty treats than the rest of the world combined. By 1986, Pepsico called the U.S. a “nation of snackers,” according to the New York Times.

Snack companies started concocting new versions of their customers’ favorite snacks that complied with the dietary guidelines. Nabisco’s efforts were particularly successful: Its fat-free Snackwells line of cookies, introduced in 1992, promised snacking pleasure without the guilt and became enormously popular. But these so-called healthy snacks did nothing to slow consumers’ weight gain because they were still loaded with sugar and refined carbs, and the fat-free label gave consumers the illusion of a “free pass” to eat as much as they wanted.

Ultraprocessed snacks in general are easy to get hooked on because their sweet or salty flavors light up our brains’ reward systems, but they typically contain little nutritional value and don’t keep us full for long. As new health trends have cropped up, so have new generations of “better for you” snacks, from chips that are baked instead of fried to granola sweetened with honey amid the organic movement — and now, the MAHA snacks.

The snack business gets into MAHA

Health Secretary Kennedy has claimed that ultraprocessed foods, including snacks, are “poison.” At first, New York University professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health Marion Nestle was tentatively hopeful that the MAHA movement would finally crack down on ultraprocessed foods, which are linked to obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But Kennedy’s MAHA reports have focused on narrower targets such as artificial food dyes and seed oils. With each new report, Nestle says she noticed that ultraprocessed foods were mentioned less and less.

In July 2025, President Donald Trump claimed that Coca-Cola had agreed to swap corn syrup sweetening for cane sugar in its beverages (initially, the company didn’t confirm this, but later that year started rolling out a cane sugar-sweetened drink). In response to the new ban on certain food dyes, companies are scrambling to remove them by 2027. These have been proclaimed major MAHA wins, but do they make food any healthier? “No,” Nestle told me. “Because they still have calories. Is a little less fructose going to make any difference? I don’t think so, because the big problem with sugar-sweetened beverages is that people are ingesting large amounts of sugar quickly,” she explains. For example, Froot Loops, rid of their bright colors from artificial dyes, will be just as sugary as the vibrant ones. “It’s still an ultraprocessed cereal, so this all seems cosmetic to me,” says Nestle.

That hasn’t stopped an already booming business of better-for-you snacks from riding the MAHA tide. Frito-Lay, the maker of Doritos and Cheetos, recently launched Simply NKD products, which are free from artificial dyes and flavors. Walmart introduced a “Better for You” section after one of its executives saw U.S. Surgeon General nominee Casey Means talking about food making people ill on Fox in 2024. The healthier snacks market is now valued at an estimated $40.9 billion and is expected to grow to $54.4 billion over the next decade. That’s a considerable share of the broader snacking industry, which one estimate valued at $172.54 billion in 2024. And at least one business has cropped up to certify products as “seed oil-free.”

Meanwhile, MAHA influencers roam grocery store aisles and suggest “nontoxic” product swaps, “helping girls ditch fake food and reclaim their health.”

MAHA snacks, analyzed

At Target, Walmart and many national grocers, you can now find snacks that use avocado oil instead of seed oils, are free from food dyes or are sweetened with honey to make them more “natural.” But whether you’re eating chips made with avocado oil or cereal free of artificial dyes, “it breaks down just like sugar,” says Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. “That’s the thing [MAHA proponents] don’t want to accept.”

Cooking foods with avocado or olive oil might actually be better for you, notes Popkin, because they contain more of the healthy fatty acids that help increase “good” cholesterol. But the cooking oil used is only part of the story. “It depends on what else is in there — one oil doesn’t make food healthy, but it may give the aura of being healthier,” he says.

I gave Popkin several MAHA-friendly products to review, and the results were mixed.

First up: Sensible Portions Garden Veggie Straws, made with avocado oil and free from artificial flavoring. At first, Popkin was optimistic. The sodium content (270mg per 1 oz. serving) is “medium,” compared to people’s daily needs, and fairly low compared to what most of Americans consume, he says. “Everything else about this is very good — except there’s no fiber,” he says. “If there’s no fiber, that’s a sign that there’s not a whole lot of vegetables in that, or they’ve emulsified the vegetables down so there is [basically] none,” he says. “My concern would be that that’s all fluff.”

This is common practice with many ultraprocessed foods — regardless of which oils or dyes they’re made with — and why they’re often problematic. They can contain lots of calories, very few of the nutrients found in whole foods, a not-so-healthy dose of sugar or salt that makes them taste great and not enough (or any) fiber to make them filling and keep blood sugar levels steady.

The next MAHA snack was a small bag of Simply Tostitos tortilla chips with avocado oil and sea salt. Although sea salt sounds more natural, salt from the sea is still sodium. Although there’s only 105mg of sodium per serving, that can add up quickly. “If the serving size is six chips, that’s a lot of sodium,” Popkin says. “And the fiber is trivial. That again tells you [the ingredients are] all being ground up and put back together again.”

Kettle avocado oil sea salt potato chips fared a little better on the sodium front (160mg per 1 oz. serving, which is about 13 chips), but then Popkin saw the fat content: 8 grams per 1 oz. serving. “Boy, that’s just full of fat,” he says. “It’s not saturated, so yes, it’s a healthier fat, but that’s a whole lot of calories for nothing!” Kennedy may disagree, however — he’s calling for an end to the so-called “war on saturated fats” found in red meat, butter and cheese. Our bodies need fat, but while the unsaturated fats found in avocado and olive oils help improve “good” cholesterol and reduce “bad” cholesterol levels, saturated fat does the opposite.

Finally, meat sticks, which have gained popularity as Americans have become fixated on protein amid the rise of GLP-1s. I shared Archer’s beef sticks with Popkin, which are sugar-free, Paleo, gluten-free and made with grass-fed beef and no preservatives. But they’re not free of salt, with a full-size meat stick containing 390mg of sodium. “This is a huge amount of sodium,” a problem across all kinds of ultraprocessed meat products, “which for anybody with hypertension or anything close to it is a no-no,” says Popkin.

The real way to snack healthier

There was a common theme across Popkin’s assessment of MAHA snacks: “They have some good in them, but they have a lot of bad,” he says. “These are the ‘better-for-you foods’ and they claim that because they don’t have sugar, or they’re natural or sustainable, but in reality, they’re unhealthy.”

That said, you can still choose items made with avocado oil, skip food dyes or avoid seed oils if that works for you. But if there’s one tenet from the new MAHA dietary guidelines you should really try to follow, it’s this one: Avoid (ultra)processed foods. And Popkin and Nestle have an easy rule to help you do just that: Look at your next snack’s ingredients list. If it includes items you don’t have in your kitchen, it’s probably ultraprocessed. Instead, stick to real food.