Earlier this year, the Trump administration’s updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans included an eye-popping recommendation: Children under age 11 should consume no added sugar at all. That would mean no Halloween candy or birthday cake—and probably no ketchup or jarred pasta sauce or sandwich bread, either. Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist who’s the director of policy and programs at George Washington University’s Global Food Institute, understood that the government was recommending something impossible. Americans live in a food environment where the cheapest and most plentiful foods are full of added sugars and relentlessly marketed to children, so she does not believe that limiting a child’s sugar consumption can or should fall to parents alone.
That’s why the Global Food Institute produced a brief, released in June, that lays out policy proposals for how to reduce children’s intake of added sugars. Recommendations include cutting sugar out of school lunches and daycare meals, restricting Big Tobacco–style food marketing to children, and mandating front-of-package sugar labeling to help consumers make healthier choices. I called Fielding-Singh in July to talk about sugar, and also to try to make sense of why the Trump administration has made steep cuts to federal food assistance while insisting that American families should eat better.
How did you get interested in food and the inequities of American eating?
When I was growing up, my family was a foster family, so we took in kids from pretty impoverished backgrounds. I followed my foster siblings over the years, seeing where they ended up, and I became interested in the structural forces that were setting me on one path and my foster siblings on another. It seemed to me that food was a really important part of that, that what we put into our bodies every single day has a tremendous impact on our life chances—our abilities to do things like go to school, get a job, and have a family. So I became interested in food as this mechanism of inequality.
What did you notice about how your foster siblings related to food?
Two of my foster siblings came to us after years of abuse and poverty. We were the first family that they came to after Child Protective Services brought them in, and it was really clear to me that they had been through an extreme experience of food scarcity. One way that manifested was stockpiling and hiding food. My mom would buy these cans of Chef Boyardee, because they were my foster sister’s favorite. My mom would fill the cupboards with them—tons and tons of cans—because she knew that the feeling of security was really important to my foster sister, and even still, my foster sister would hide them under the bed.
It was so clear to me that going through food insecurity was a haunting experience that she would never really outrun. She spent a lot of her time preoccupied about where her next meal was coming from and making sure that we had the foods that she liked. I think with that amount of preoccupation, it’s hard to focus on other things. Satiety and having enough becomes the orienting goal of your day and your life, and so it’s really a privilege to not have that.
In your 2021 book, How the Other Half Eats, you explain how junk food can have different emotional resonance to families at different income levels.
I think this is one of the least discussed parts of nutritional inequality. Food takes on this tremendous symbolic meaning for parents who are raising their kids within a context of scarcity or deprivation. Raising a kid in poverty means having to say no all the time—to the big things like vacation, but also to the medium and small things, like a new sweatshirt or a replacement for a shattered phone screen. So one thing that I saw firsthand in my research was how, within a context of having to say no over and over and over again—which was really emotionally distressing for parents—food, and in particular junk food, was one of the few things that parents could say yes to on a pretty much daily basis. It was something that they could almost always afford. I found that lower-income parents were saying yes to these foods not because they were trying to harm their kids’ health but as a way to emotionally nourish their kids within an extremely challenging context.
To me, as a sociologist, this is such an important point because we always evaluate these food choices strictly from a nutritional standpoint: How healthy is a bag of Cheetos? What about a Snickers? But my research suggests that we should also be understanding these choices from the perspective of: What are parents giving their kids with these foods? It’s not just the food—it’s also symbolic.
For those families, the main nutritional concern is often simply getting enough calories, not whether those are “good” calories. But that’s gotten harder, given last year’s cuts to SNAP. Is cutting out sugar the right priority if kids aren’t getting enough to eat?
This is top of mind for me right now. So many of the families that I spent time with relied on federal food assistance simply to get enough calories for their kids. That’s why I tend to think about policy levers that would actually change institutional settings where kids are eating—like reducing how much sugar is in the meals kids get at school—rather than asking parents to take individual steps. I believe that in this country, we put the burden of a healthy diet too squarely on parents’ shoulders and that we would benefit from institutions taking on more of that responsibility.
What exactly happened last year with the SNAP cuts?
The passage of H.R. 1, which you will know as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, actually set in motion the most consequential changes to the federal food safety net since its inception. H.R. 1 reduces federal SNAP funding by an estimated $187 billion over the next decade, which is roughly a 20-percent reduction. Roughly 37 million Americans count on SNAP to meet their basic food needs, and millions of them would lose eligibility.
But what is the policy priority here? It’s really important to the MAHA movement to promote healthy, nutritious eating—but the administration is cutting the benefits that allow families to afford those kinds of meals.
Essentially, what we’ve seen is that the Trump administration has these two food agendas that are in tension with each other. The first agenda is an economic one that’s focused on reducing federal spending on food assistance. It’s working to shift costs to states and tightening eligibility so that fewer people can access the program. Then there’s the second agenda, which is more of a nutrition and public-health one, that’s focused on reducing chronic disease and promoting healthy whole foods—but there’s a tension between these two goals.
SNAP supports a lot of the outcomes that MAHA cares about. It’s linked to lower food insecurity and better diet quality, so cutting off that food assistance for millions of families actually cuts against MAHA’s stated goals of improving diet quality and preventing disease. It’s really important for people to understand that food security and public health go hand in hand, and it’s difficult to achieve one without the other. You can’t move the needle on nutrition outcomes if families are hungry.
The Trump administration recommending no added sugar before age 11 is really stark. Is there evidence that this is necessary?
So this was a really big jump. Prior guidelines recommended that children under the age of two completely avoid added sugar, and there’s really strong evidence to support that guidance. The American Heart Association recommends zero added sugar under the age of two, and then no more than 25 grams per day—or roughly six teaspoons—for kids age two to 18. The average kid consumes nearly three times that amount, so I think that shows you how far we have to go on added sugar.
But there’s a question of whether zero before age 11 is appropriate, and I would say that the evidence base is not there, although directionally, I think it’s correct. It accurately reflects that kids are eating way too much added sugar and that we should take steps to reduce that consumption.
What’s so bad about kids eating sugar?
The evidence is really striking. Excessive added sugar intake contributes to childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes, as well as increased risks later in life: cardiovascular disease, liver-fat accumulation, diabetes, and hypertension.
American kids are exceeding recommended levels on all three of the main ingredients that public-health experts consistently flag as issues, which are added sugar, sodium, and saturated fat. What I think distinguishes added sugar is the breadth of its effects. Sodium and saturated fat are best known for their effects on cardiovascular health. Added sugar is linked to a broader range of health concerns, across obesity, diabetes, and liver health. And kids and adults are consuming way more added sugar than they even are aware of. It’s just so pervasive across all different food types and categories. It’s invisibly woven into so many packaged staples that families, schools, daycares, and sports teams rely on to feed kids.
Cutting out candy or birthday cake to avoid sugar sounds pretty joyless. Do you think that’s really necessary?
My perspective is that treats are important. It’s really meaningful to be able to give your kid an ice-cream cone in the summer and sit with them and eat it. I do not think that we should try to eliminate treats from kids’ lives. But as a parent, I want to get to choose when I treat my kid. What I find frustrating about the current food environment is that my kid is getting filled up with added sugar just eating the normal things that I might not perceive as sugary, so that she’s essentially meeting her sugar quota before I’ve even had a chance to treat her.
To me, this is not about stripping the joy and fun out of raising kids. We’re not advocating for getting rid of Halloween, for instance. What I think is important is that the foods you feed your kid that you think are healthy—and that are advertised to you as healthy and low-sugar—should actually be low-sugar foods, so that after you’ve given your kids some pasta with tomato sauce, you haven’t accidentally fed them 11 grams of added sugar. That’s why I’m trying to change the food supply and the food environment, rather than demonizing parents who rightfully want to be able to share a piece of cake with their kid.
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of Washingtonian.
