WASHINGTON, DC, US —Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made it clear in his first US Senate confirmation hearing that his quest to reduce chronic disease would entail a closer look at the food industry, namely manufacturers of packaged foods.  

RFK Jr., tapped by President Donald Trump in mid-November to serve as HHS secretary, was grilled mainly about his stances on vaccines, abortion, Medicaid, and the cost and coverage of health care and prescription drugs. But in his Senate Finance Committee hearing on Jan. 29, Kennedy — the leader of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative — also said the rising incidence of chronic health conditions like diabetes, heart disease and others warrants more scrutiny of the US food supply.

“We’re having epidemics of all these chronic illnesses, autoimmune diseases, neurological diseases, allergic diseases, obesity,” Kennedy told Finance Committee members. “When my uncle was president, 3% of Americans were obese. Today, 74% of Americans are obese or overweight. No other country has anything like this. In Japan, the obesity rate is still 3%. Epidemics are not caused by genes. Genes may provide the vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin, or something is poisoning the American people. And we know that the primary culprits are our changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical-intensive processed foods.”

Claiming the United States has “10,000 ingredients in our foods” while Europe and Canada accept far fewer, he cited McDonald’s french fries in the United States as containing too many ingredients and Kellogg’s Froot Loops cereal in the United States as being “loaded with food dyes — yellow dye, red dye, blue dye and many other ingredients.”

“We don’t have good science on all these things,” Kennedy said. “That’s a deliberate choice not to study the things that are truly making us sick, that are not only contributing to chronic disease but to mortality from infectious disease. We need to get a handle on this because, if we don’t, it’s an existential threat.

“We need to fix our food supply, and that’s the No. 1.”

In his opening statement to the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy said that if confirmed as HHS secretary the agency would “make sure our tax dollars support healthy foods” and “scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply” to “reverse the chronic disease epidemic and put the nation back on the road to good health.”

Kennedy refuted widespread claims that he opposes vaccinations and stressed that he’s “not anti-vaccine, nor am I the enemy of food producers.”

“American farms are the bedrock of our culture, our politics, our national security,” he said. “I want to work with our farmers and food producers to remove burdensome regulations and unleash American ingenuity. MAHA simply cannot succeed without a full partnership with American farmers.”

Still, Kennedy voiced some unease about US farming when Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas — who said he shares the nominee’s “concern with ultra-processed foods” — asked how he feels about farmers and ranchers in relation to the food supply.

“We can now not export American food to Europe because the Europeans won’t take our food,” Kennedy explained. “That’s not good for farmers. We’re also destroying our soil because some of the chemicals that farmers use destroy the microbiome and cause erosion. You can’t get water infiltration. Water pulls up, and it washes the soil off. Agronomists now estimate that we only have, if we continue doing these processes, 60 harvests left before our soil is gone. Farmers are using seeds and chemicals that, over the long term, are costing them and us. What we need to do is support the farmers.”

Kennedy said he would work with the US Department of Agriculture to “offer and incentivize” farmers to transition to regenerative agriculture, no-till farming and “less chemically intensive” methods.

“I’ve also met with the chemical industry and the fertilizer and herbicide companies, and they want to do the same thing,” he added.

Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana asked Kennedy whether he would work with farmers and ranchers in his state, as well as with the USDA and other relevant agencies, before implementing any policy that might impact the food supply.

“I absolutely will make that commitment,” Kennedy said. “I have a personal commitment and a long career working with farmers. I understand the very, very narrow margins that American farmers and ranchers are dealing with, and I don’t want under my watch a single farmer to have to leave his farm for economic reasons or for regulatory or bureaucratic reasons if I’m privileged to be confirmed as HHS secretary. Even more important, President Trump has a very, very strong commitment to farmers.”

Kennedy called Trump “probably the best farm president in our history.”

“Farm income spiked for the first time in decades under his last administration,” he said. “Farmers across the country supported him during this election. He has specifically instructed me that he wants farmers involved in every policy and that he wants me to work with (agriculture secretary nominee) Brooke Rollins at USDA to make sure that we preserve American farmers and all of our policies support them.”

In comments on federal funding, Kennedy indicated support for winnowing out purchases of processed foods in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and school lunch programs.

“Federal funding of the SNAP program, for example, and of school lunch programs could be a driver for helping kids,” he said. “We shouldn’t be giving 60% of the kids in school processed food that is making them sick. We shouldn’t be spending 10% of the SNAP program on sugary drinks, so we have a direct ability to change things there. Also, in Medicaid and Medicare, we need to focus more on outcome-based medicine and on putting people in charge of their own health care, making them accountable for their own health care so they understand the relationship between eating and getting sick. Most importantly, we need to deploy NIH and FDA to doing the research to understand the relationship between these different food additives and chronic disease.”

Kennedy is scheduled for a second confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Jan. 30.

“I don’t want to take food away from anybody,” Kennedy added. “If you like a cheeseburger, a McDonald’s cheeseburger or a Diet Coke, which my boss loves, you should be able to get them. If you want to eat Hostess Twinkies, you should be able to do that, but you should know what the impacts are on your family and on your health.”