The US FDA “will act” on a petition by its former chief, which would see the GRAS status of some ultra-processed foods revoked, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has said. But he stopped short of promising regulation on these products.
If there were any doubts that ultra-processed food (UPF) is part of the national conversation on health, CBS has laid those to rest.
The news broadcaster’s 60 Minutes programme last night centred on the government’s approach to UPFs and its regulation of new ingredients. It was based on a citizen petition by former FDA commissioner David Kessler, which asks the agency to revoke the food safety status of certain UPFs.
US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the country’s most outspoken critics of UPFs, has now asserted that the FDA will fulfil its legal responsibility to respond to the petition.
“We will act on David Kessler’s petition,” he told CBS’s Bill Whitaker. “And the questions that he’s asking are questions that FDA should’ve been asking a long, long time ago.”
How the government’s response will materialise, and when, is unclear – but so is RFK Jr’s commitment to actually regulating UPFs.
Asked why he believes his efforts against Big Food will prevail, Kennedy said it was “because we have the president [Donald Trump] behind us”. But, Whitaker pointed out, Trump has shown himself to be “pretty much against regulations”. So would he really support regulatory action on UPFs?
“Well, I’m not saying that we’re going to regulate ultra-processed food,” responded Kennedy. “Our job is to make sure that everybody understands what they’re getting, to have an informed public.”
It highlights the volatility of the current administration and its decision-making. On the one hand, UPF is very much public enemy number one, and the FDA wants to do something about it. On the flip side, though, it’s unclear if it actually will.
Petition asks FDA to revoke GRAS status for UPFs
UPFs were first classed under the Nova system developed by researchers in Brazil in 2009, who described them as products made with industrial formulations and techniques or containing cosmetic additives thought to be of little culinary use. Put simply, they’re thought of as foods you can’t make in your home kitchen.
Americans now get 55% of their calories from UPFs, which many experts have linked to a multitude of health ailments (and even premature death). Children eat more of these products than adults, leading states like California, Arizona and Louisiana to ban their use in schools.
However, UPFs don’t have a standardised definition, and many health experts have criticised the term’s use to describe an overly broad range of products, from Coke and Oreos to whole-grain bread and soy milk. They warn against conflating processing with nutrition.
Still, 72% of Americans are trying to avoid UPFs in their diets, and 79% feel they’re a “significant threat” to public health. Among them is Kessler, who headed the FDA under Bill Clinton and George W Bush and served as Covid-19 advisor to Joe Biden.
Kessler’s petition lays out a legal pathway for the FDA to fight UPFs, challenging the Trump administration to use regulation to force change. It targets “processed refined carbohydrates”, which include refined sweeteners, flours, starches and additives like corn syrups, tapioca starch, and methylcellulose.
The former FDA commissioner argues that the agency has the authority and scientific evidence to declare that these ingredients are no longer Generally Recognised As Safe (GRAS). This is a rule that allows companies to bring new ingredients to the market without formal FDA review, instead relying on scientific evaluations from internal and external experts to self-determine the ingredients as safe.
This provision is set to be scrapped this year, with RFK Jr calling it a “loophole” that was “hijacked” by the food industry. “It was used to add thousands upon thousands of new ingredients into our food supply. In Europe, there’s only 400 legal ingredients. This agency does not know how many ingredients there are in American food,” he told 60 Minutes.
“The estimates are between 4,000 and 10,000. We have no idea what they are,” he continued. “There is no way for any American to know if a product is safe if it is ultra-processed.”
RFK Jr’s ‘gold-standard science’ pledge belies vaccine stance and dietary guidelines
Kessler, who led anti-tobacco campaigns in the 1990s, argues that processed refined carbohydrates were allowed in the food system because they were found to be GRAS half a century ago, but “the science no longer supports that determination”.
His petition urges the FDA to declare that these ingredients are no longer GRAS since they cause metabolic harm, mandate their removal from the market, and work with the food industry to reduce their use rapidly. Moreover, the FDA should legally classify these substances as additives that are illegal without proof that they’re safe to use.
“We changed how this country views tobacco. We need to change how this country views these ultraprocessed foods,” Kessler told CBS.
According to the broadcaster, RFK Jr stressed that the government will use “gold-standard science” to review GRAS ingredients, although his credibility has been widely questioned as a result of his anti-vaccine stance.
“Gold-standard science” is also not what underpins the new dietary guidelines his department released last month, which endorse the consumption of beef, pork, and other red meats, and put whole milk back into the spotlight, despite advising Americans to keep saturated fat intake under 10% of their total calorie intake.
The guidance, which ignores two years of evidence-based advice and was hastily assembled by a panel full of conflicts of interest, puts the blame for America’s health epidemic on highly processed foods.
The MAHA-fuelled approach doubled down on this link with a Super Bowl ad featuring Mike Tyson and directed by Brett Ratner – the former has served a three-year prison term for a rape conviction and has a history of domestic violence, while the latter has been sidelined in Hollywood since 2017 following sexual assault and harassment allegations and appears in the Epstein files.
The dietary guidelines have been widely criticised by health experts across the US, who have called on the government to withdraw and reissue the recommendations with a science-based approach instead.
UPFs remain a contentious food category, as does the government’s way of handling it. For now, it is working on developing a definition for these products, just as Congress considers a bill that would ban UPFs from being marketed to children and require them to carry front-of-pack warning labels.
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