INDIANAPOLIS—“It’s not food. It’s food-like substances.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the many manufactured food products offered that are high in calories but low in nutritional value.
“So, strawberry flavoring in food, but there’s no nutrients. It’s sugar.” Kennedy said. “Your body is craving that, but it doesn’t get filled up. It doesn’t give you nutrition, but you want to eat more.”
Kennedy has urged states to prohibit the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds to purchase certain foods with high sugar content but little nutritional value.
SNAP, colloquially known as food stamps, is a federal program administered by the states that helps nearly 42 million low-income Americans pay for food.
To change the list of foods eligible for purchase with SNAP funds, states must request a waiver from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A handful of states, including Indiana, are doing that.
Advocates call this a commonsense way to promote better food choices.
Some critics say the initiative amounts to virtue signaling, a symbolic action unlikely to produce any positive effect.
Junk Food Origins
Kennedy and others have blamed the glut of tasty but vacuous foods on big tobacco companies, which entered the food industry more than 60 years ago.In the 1960s, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris, then the largest tobacco brands, began developing children’s beverages including Hawaiian Punch, Kool-Aid, Capri Sun, and Tang, according to a report from The BMJ, formerly the British Medical Journal.
In May 1962, R.J. Reynolds’ director of research reported the status of product development in an internal memo.
R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris eventually went deeper into the food business, owning major brands Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco for several years starting in the 1980s. There, they applied some of the same strategies to manufacturing other foods people find irresistible.
Hyper-palatable foods contain more of the things that make food taste good, such as fat, sugar, sodium, or carbohydrates, according to Tera Fazzino, an author of the Kansas study and associate director of the university’s Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment.
These foods also have fewer of the nutrients that make us feel satisfied, Fazzino said in a 2023 interview. “As a result, hyper-palatable foods can be difficult to stop eating, even when we physically feel full.”
The researchers concluded, “Tobacco companies appear to have selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the U.S. food system between 1988 and 2001.”
That triggered an industry wide shift, the researchers said. By 2018, foods high in fat, sodium, and carbohydrates had long been widely marketed regardless of whether or not the producers were previously owned by a tobacco company.
The result, according to Kennedy, is an obesity crisis that threatens the health and safety of all Americans.
“We have people who are obese who are at the same time malnourished, because the food that we’re eating is not nutrient-dense anymore,” Kennedy said. “It is threatening our national security: 74 percent of our kids cannot qualify for military service.”
States Respond
Indiana and Arkansas became the first states to submit waiver requests to the USDA, asking to exclude soda and candy from SNAP purchases. Both sent their requests on April 15.Several other states have announced their intention to seek a waiver, and some are considering legislation to that effect.
Other states have failed to pass or have rejected legislation that mandates a waiver request.
Support, Skepticism
Advocates of a SNAP ban on soda and candy, including some health professionals, see the policy as reasonable, even obvious.“I think it just makes wise nutritional sense, business sense, common sense,” Christy Hope, an Indiana social worker, told The Epoch Times. Hope has worked in an outpatient pediatric clinic as well as in a Medicaid office conducting eligibility screening.
“The benefits are intended to cover nutritional items,” she said.
Nutrition and policy experts broadly agree that limiting consumption of high-calorie, low-nutrition foods is a worthy goal.
“I can see the hope to shift [people] away from foods that are ... ultra-processed, empty calories toward healthier options,” Bisakha Sen, a professor of health policy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told The Epoch Times. “I think there’s actually some unity on both sides of the political aisle on this.”
Richard Kahn, an adjunct professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina Medical School, says the SNAP exclusions amount to a “cheap, easy way to blame the other guy.”
According to Kahn, the idea that taxpayers will no longer subsidize the purchase of sugary foods is mistaken. “They’re [still] paying for sugar-sweetened beverages because we subsidize the agriculture industry,” he said.
Alternatives
Many nutrition and policy experts favor a holistic, all-of-society approach rather than one that targets behavior in just one group of people.Some have suggested a tax on soda to discourage consumption. Others mentioned improving the nutritional value of school lunches. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has suggested banning television ads for unhealthful foods targeting children.
Nana Gletsu Miller, an associate professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health, favors education over behavioral mandates.
“Based on the evidence for the effectiveness of nutrition education and the lack of evidence for the effectiveness of restriction of food choice, I suggest the former would be a better approach,” Gletsu Miller told The Epoch Times.
A deeper problem is the lack of affordable, nutritious food, according to Dr. Tamara S. Hannon, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and director of its clinical diabetes program.
“It is the sale of health-harming products at a very low price without affordable and convenient options that is problematic. This policy does not address this issue,” Hannon told The Epoch Times.
Kennedy acknowledges that the broader health care landscape can work against healthy outcomes, yet he believes that can change.
“We can realign medical choices, both individual and institutional medical choices, with public health,” Kennedy told The Epoch Times at the Indianapolis press conference, adding that right now, “it’s totally misaligned.”
Achieving that will require a concerted effort at the federal, state, and local levels, Kennedy said.
“We can’t do this alone, but we’re getting tremendous help from the governors, from the grassroots,” Kennedy said.
“What’s happening here [in Indiana] is driving this movement, and it’s going to drive cultural change.”
