RFK Jr. recruits Mike Tyson for MAHA Super Bowl ad

Former boxing champion Mike Tyson will appear on TV screens Sunday as he promotes Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign in a Super Bowl ad.

The ad, paid for by the nonprofit MAHA Center Inc., a group aligned with Mr. Kennedy’s goals, showcases the new Health and Human Services’ Dietary Guidelines on RealFood.gov.

“Something has to be done about processed food in this country,” Mr. Tyson, 59, says in the commercial, which shows him taking a bite out of an apple.

Iron Mike, who was the heavyweight champion from 1987 to 1990, shares his experience with an unhealthy diet in the 30-second ad, saying he wanted to kill himself earlier in his life when he was overeating: “I was so fat and nasty. I would eat anything.”

He adds that his sister, who died of a heart attack at age 25, was killed by obesity.

The ad pushes the slogans “Processed food kills” and “Eat real food,” both targets of the new MAHA health directives, which recommend both medically mainstream and trendy dietary guidelines.

In a post endorsing the ad, Mr. Tyson said the most important fight of his life was not in the ring, but on the dinner table.

“I’m not fighting for a belt. I’m fighting for our health,” he said. “Processed foods are killing us. We have been lied to, and we need to eat real food again.”

Mr. Kennedy thanked the former boxer for “delivering the most important message in Super Bowl history.”

“We don’t have to be the sickest country in the developed world. The answer is simple: EAT REAL FOOD,” he said in a post promoting the ad.

The Super Bowl ad kicks off a nationwide campaign that includes Mr. Tyson’s face plastered on taxi cabs in more than a dozen major U.S. cities.

But the food industry reeled at the ad.

The Consumer Brands Association — whose board includes executives from General Mills, PepsiCo and Kraft Heinz — criticized the message.

“We are disappointed to see this kind of rhetoric on such an important topic,” Melissa Hockstad, the group’s CEO, told Bloomberg.

She said the food industry is working to ensure that “Americans have access to a wide variety of nutritious and affordable foods and enhancing product transparency, which we believe is a much more productive avenue to drive change than seeding fear and misinformation that is in no way based in science.”