News and Analysis

Donald Trump is enamored with Coca-Cola. In January, he smiled from ear to ear in a photo with the company’s CEO, who gifted him a special Coke bottle commemorating his inauguration. When Trump officially returned to the Oval Office as president a few days later, his desk was already set up as it had been in his first term: with a button to summon a bottle of Diet Coke. Between sips of the fizzy drink (at one point, he reportedly drank up to 12 cans a day), the president has apparently been working the company behind the scenes. Yesterday, he announced on Truth Social that Coke has agreed to start making its signature soda with “REAL Cane Sugar” rather than high-fructose corn syrup. “I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola,” he wrote.So far, little else is known about the supposed deal. I asked Coke for more information but did not hear back. The company has yet to even confirm that it has agreed to anything at all. (“More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca-Cola product range will be shared soon,” a company spokesman told The New York Times earlier today.) Although the move may seem random, it follows a pattern of Trump trying to score easy political points—especially during a moment when his base is at war with itself over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The clearest argument for cane sugar over corn syrup is taste. “You’ll see. It’s just better!” Trump said on Truth Social. Coke is made with cane sugar in Mexico and many other countries, and “Mexican Coke” has long had a cult following in the United States. Trump may also be doing the “Make America healthy again” movement a solid. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has focused on high-fructose corn syrup as a major contributor to diabetes and obesity. “Thank you, @POTUS!,” Kennedy wrote on X following the announcement.The taste argument is fair enough. But if Trump does think Americans’ health is at stake in a switch from high-fructose corn syrup to cane sugar, he’s relying on some very confused reasoning. Like many MAHA priorities, the change is better on paper than in practice. Kennedy may oppose high-fructose corn syrup, but he has also called sugar “poison.” He’s right to be wary of both, because sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are, by and large, the same thing. Multiple independent meta-analyses have found that there is little difference between the two when it comes to health metrics such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. The two products “have nearly identical metabolic effects,” Dariush Mozaffarian, the director of Tuft University’s Food Is Medicine Institute, told me. Trump is essentially claiming that he got Coke to agree to switch its sugar … for sugar.If Trump wanted to use Coke as a lever to improve Americans’ health, he would need to focus on making sure as few people drink the stuff as possible. In the world of public health, soda is a scourge. Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has been tied to increased body weight, diabetes, and heart disease. These drinks are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet. The Trump administration, to its credit, has spent the past several months trying to temper the United States’ insatiable soda habit. At the urging of RFK Jr. and other top officials, six states—Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and Utah—have experimented with bans on the purchase of soda using SNAP benefits.But at times, RFK Jr. has seemed to lose the plot on sugar. It’s among the biggest problems with the American diet, but it hasn’t been Kennedy’s primary focus as health secretary. He has spent more time and effort attempting to crack down on synthetic food dyes. For the past several months, Kennedy has been pressuring food companies to voluntarily remove such dyes from their products—a move that, like Trump’s purported deal with Coke, makes for grabby headlines. Food giants such as Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Nestlé have all agreed to phase out artificial dyes from their products. But Lucky Charms made with natural food dyes and still loaded with sugar is hardly a win for American health.It’s a tumultuous time to be a food company; the MAHA army might suddenly come after an ingredient in your product that people previously agreed was safe. (Yesterday, after Trump’s announcement, Coke defended on X the safety of high-fructose corn syrup.) Agreeing to remove a controversial ingredient is a way to get in the administration’s good graces and can be a good business move—even if your foods are largely still unhealthy.In fact, food companies have started to find that they don’t actually need to sell healthy food in order to be MAHA approved; they just need to remove the few ingredients Kennedy objects to. No company quite embodies this strategy like Steak ’n Shake. The burger chain has become a MAHA darling: Steak ’n Shake announced earlier this year that it would begin frying french fries in beef tallow instead of seed oils. To celebrate the change, Kennedy had a meal at a Steak ’n Shake for a photo opp with Sean Hannity that was broadcast on Fox News. (He thanked the restaurant for “RFK-ing the french fries.”) What this moment didn’t capture was that, at Steak ’n Shake, you can still order a double cheeseburger with 1,120 milligrams of sodium—half the recommended daily amount for adults. Wash it down with a vanilla milkshake, and you’ll have just consumed 92 grams of sugar, equivalent to gorging on three Snickers bars. Or how about a Coke with your beef-tallow fries? Today, Steak ’n Shake announced the next step in its “MAHA journey”: In a few weeks, it will begin selling “Coca-Cola with real cane sugar in glass bottles.”