By Ed Gaskin
The strength of a nation’s military is built not only on advanced weaponry and strategic intelligence but also on the health and resilience of its personnel. In the United States, that foundation is under siege — not from foreign adversaries, but from within. The American diet, high in ultra-processed foods, added sugars, and saturated fats, is undermining our armed forces at every phase of service: before recruitment, during active duty, and after discharge. From shrinking the recruitment pool to inflating the Department of Defense’s (DOD) healthcare costs and burdening the VA with preventable chronic disease, the consequences are both profound and largely avoidable.
The crisis begins long before the first boot camp push-up. A majority of America’s youth are now ineligible for military service, with poor health — largely driven by diet and lifestyle — among the top barriers. In 2020, the Department of Defense reported that 77% of Americans aged 17–24 were not eligible. While disqualifiers include academic and criminal records, medical and weight issues dominate.
Obesity is a growing barrier to enlistment, with rising rates among young adults. The Qualified Military Available Study found many recruits fail to meet physical readiness standards due to weight or chronic conditions like prediabetes and hypertension. The military’s once-reliable pipeline of healthy young Americans is increasingly compromised.
Compounding the issue is the surge in prediabetes. From 2020 to 2022, the number of Americans with prediabetes rose from 88 million to 98 million — including many young adults. Yet, only 6% of eligible Active Duty Service Members (ADSMs) were screened, despite half of them meeting the screening criteria. Left unaddressed, metabolic dysfunction will further reduce recruitment potential and future health outcomes.
Those who do enlist are not immune. Military personnel face the same poor dietary patterns as civilians — often worsened by institutional constraints. Despite assumptions of elite fitness, chronic disease is rising among active-duty members.
According to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), over 40% of ADSMs have at least one chronic preventable condition, including high blood pressure, back pain, diabetes, asthma, or heart disease. Many are diet-related and could be mitigated with a whole-food, plant-predominant diet. However, military food environments —dominated by processed and shelf-stable options — are ill-suited to health or performance.
Obesity affects 22% of active-duty members, up from 15% in 2015. Among those under 25, it stands at 12%. These rates reflect higher risks of injury, slower recovery, reduced readiness, and long-term disability.
Cardiovascular health is also deteriorating. A Journal of the American Heart Association study found 70% of Army personnel had suboptimal blood pressure, and half of Navy members had detectable heart disease. Stress, poor diet, and limited screening further impair performance and safety.
Financially, the toll is immense. The DOD spends over $1.5 billion annually on obesity-related care, $234 million on high blood pressure, and $5.7 billion on depression. As chronic illness grows, so do costs for treatment, discharge processing, and morale loss.
The burden doesn’t end at discharge — it shifts to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Many veterans leave service with lasting health issues rooted in poor nutrition: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, chronic pain, and mental health conditions.
Veterans experience elevated rates of chronic disease, and the VA is overwhelmed by diet-related illness. Diabetes is more prevalent among veterans than the general population. Many also suffer from cardiovascular conditions, arthritis, and gastrointestinal disorders — reducing quality of life and raising long-term costs.
This cycle of illness and expense could be broken. Instead, many veterans face years of medical appointments, complex medications, and preventable suffering. The military’s food system directly contributes to this post-service health crisis.
These challenges are solvable. The institutions that shaped military food policy can now lead its reform. Nutrition must be viewed not just as a wellness solution, but as a strategic defense asset.
Lifestyle medicine — centered on diet, activity, sleep, stress management, connectedness and avoidance of risky substances — offers a practical, evidence-based solution. Shifting toward minimally processed, plant-predominant eating can prevent or reverse many chronic conditions undermining readiness.
The standard American diet is a national security threat. From recruitment to veteran care, our military bears the weight of a food system that promotes disease over performance. But we can change course.
To preserve force strength, nutrition must become a strategic priority. Food must be treated not as a budgetary afterthought, but as essential to readiness and recovery.
As ACLM and others have emphasized, treatment and prevention are key. The DOD and VA can lead a transformation grounded in lifestyle medicine. This includes:
Training military and civilian healthcare teams to make evidence-based lifestyle interventions in areas such as in nutrition, movement, and stress management;
Embedding lifestyle principles in mess halls, training, and education;
Scaling lifestyle medicine pilot programs like those in the Air and Space Forces;
Reforming VA care to include nutrition support and plant-predominant options;
Redesigning food environments so the healthiest choice is the easiest.
Investing in our troops’ health is not a soft strategy, it’s a hard imperative. Just as we fund advanced weapons, we must fund precision nutrition. To feed the force is to fortify the nation. It’s time to align our food systems with the mission: to keep our service members fit to serve, fit to fight, and fit to thrive long after their final salute.
Ed Gaskin is Executive Director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations