Although public health scholars increasingly recognize the importance of the social determinants of health (SDOH), political discourse on health tends to emphasize downstream lifestyle factors instead. We use a text mining approach to analyse a decade of health debate in the Dutch house of representatives, testing three specific causes of the lack of attention for SDOH: political ideology, by which members of parliament (MPs) from some political orientations may prioritize lifestyle factors over SDOH; lifestyle drift, by which early attention for SDOH during problem analysis is replaced by a lifestyle focus in the development of solutions as the challenges in addressing SDOH become clear; and focusing events, by which one-off political or societal events bolster the lifestyle perspective on health. Our analysis shows that political ideology predicted the topics referred to by members of parliament, with left-leaning members referring more to SDOH and right-leaning members more to lifestyle. However, while some parliamentary periods start with an SDOH focus followed by a focus on lifestyle, the pattern is reversed in other parliamentary periods, yielding inconsistent evidence for and against lifestyle drift. Finally, while the ten-year peak in lifestyle-related language coincided with an important political moment around lifestyle (an anti-smoking initiative), the same was true for the SDOH peak (which coincided with a broader prevention program), and both these peaks were rendered relatively insignificant by the larger and more consistent attention for the health care system. This paper provides a first step toward automated analysis of policy debates at scale, opening up new avenues for the empirical study of health political discourse.