“It’s not food. It’s food-like substances.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the comment describing the many manufactured food products offered to consumers that are high in calories but low in nutritional value.
“So [they put] 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. And 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), colloquially known as food stamps, funds to purchase certain foods having high sugar content but little nutritional value.
Kennedy hopes it will begin a movement toward healthier food consumption that will reverse the growing prevalence of obesity among Americans.
Junk Food Origin Story
Kennedy and others blame the glut of tasty but vacuous foods on big tobacco companies, which entered the food industry more than 60 years ago.“Tobacco executives transferred their knowledge of marketing to young people and expanded product lines using colours, flavours, and marketing strategies originally designed to market cigarettes,” a team of researchers reported in The BMJ, formerly British Medical Journal.
In May 1962, R.J. Reynolds’ director of research circulated an internal memo describing taste tests for flavored drinks conducted with children. The same report detailed the addition of artificial flavoring to chewing tobacco and cane sugar to cigarettes.
Researchers at the University of Kansas found that the food companies owned by tobacco companies were much more likely to market foods that contain more of the things that make food taste good, like fat, sugar, sodium, or carbohydrates.
These foods also have less of the nutrients that make us feel satisfied, which makes it hard to stop eating even when the stomach is full.
Big tobacco left the food industry in the early 2000s, but their innovations precipitated an industry-wide shift, the researchers said.
The result is an obesity crisis, according to Kennedy.
Nearly 70 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese, according to a 2023 report by the federal government.
States Respond
Indiana and Arkansas became the first states to submit waiver requests to the Department of Agriculture, asking to exclude soda and candy from SNAP purchases.Idaho passed a law requiring the director of the Department of Health and Welfare to request a waiver on soda and candy.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen sent a letter to the Department of Agriculture stating his intention to seek a waiver.
Tennessee and Iowa passed similar bills, but neither has been taken up by their respective Senates. Bills in West Virginia and Montana stalled.
Missouri failed to pass a waiver mandate, and Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed one passed in her state.
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. “The benefits are intended to cover nutritional items,” she added.
SNAP benefits already exclude restaurant meals, alcoholic beverages, vitamins, food supplements, cleaning supplies, or personal hygiene products.
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.
Yet she and others doubt that the ban will work.
“If we start making a list of [foods] which are good for people and which are not, it will be a huge list,” Nikhil V. Dhurandhar, chair of Nutritional Sciences at Texas Tech University, told The Epoch Times. “It is not practical.”
People will just eat other sugary foods, he added.
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.
“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 the problems but thinks change is possible.
“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.”
