Brussels – The Trump administration has taken bold and effective action to tackle obesity, one of the most pressing health and economic challenges of our time. While the United Nations was preparing the Fourth High-Level Meeting (HLM4) on non-communicable diseases, pushing increasingly ideological and prescriptive measures such as global taxes, marketing restrictions, and warning labels, Trump was taking concrete and pragmatic steps at home.
He rejected the tired path of sugar and saturated fat taxes, alarmist front-of-pack labels like Nutri-Score, advertising bans, and consumption restrictions. Nor did he adopt the ideological framework promoted by the World Healt Organization (WHO) and several European countries, an approach with dubious results and often harmful unintended consequences for society and the economy.
Trump has shown an understanding of what is too often ignored: obesity is a complex, multifactorial issue that cannot be solved by targeting a single food item. It requires action on lifestyle as a whole.
The news is clear: the Presidential Fitness Test will return to American public schools after more than a decade. The president has signed an executive order to restore the program first launched in 1956 and discontinued in 2012, reintroducing physical challenges such as the one-mile run, pull-ups, push-ups, and the sit-and-reach test.
The newly appointed President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition, made up of athletes and public figures, will promote a culture of movement, performance, and personal responsibility, starting with the younger generations.
This is both a concrete and symbolic decision. Instead of imposing punitive rules or stigmatizing those who eat “poorly” (without providing the cultural and economic conditions to access quality food), the focus is on empowering citizens, actively involving them in building their own well-being.
Taxes, bans, and Nutri-Score have already proven ineffective: in many countries where such measures have been applied, obesity continues to rise. Worse, they often produce negative side effects: they penalize the most vulnerable, distort markets, erode trust in institutions, and fail to foster real behavioral change.
The reintroduction of the fitness test signals a return to a holistic view of health, not just telling people what they shouldn’t eat, but promoting what they can do to feel better.
In this case, Trump has grasped the core of the issue better than many technocrats: individual responsibility, movement, physical education, and awareness, not top-down restrictions or fear-based campaigns.
Is this the solution to obesity? Of course not. Especially in the United States, where 75% of the population is overweight or obese. The initiative focuses solely on physical activity and does not introduce the concept of balance, which is at the heart of the Mediterranean dietary culture.
But it is a disruptive, concrete gesture, breaking with years of failed health ideology. It shifts the focus from what we eat to what we no longer burn. In a society of abundance, the obesity problem is not just about excessive calories available, but also about the dramatic decline in energy expenditure.
Bringing physical activity back into schools is a step in the right direction, and far more valuable than any ideological proclamation.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
