“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, a longtime health advocate, has championed President Donald Trump’s call for “fresh thinking on nutrition” as part of the Make America Healthy Again initiative. The secretary spoke in Indianapolis on April 15 in support of Gov. Mike Braun’s announcement of nine health-related executive orders.
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.
Kennedy hopes it will fuel a movement toward healthier food consumption that will reverse the growing prevalence of obesity among Americans.
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.
“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.
Vuse e-cigarette packages are displayed at Cigar N Vape in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 13, 2021. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the sale of R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse Solo e-cigarette and its tobacco-flavored cartridges the prior day, saying data show the product may reduce smokers’ exposure to harmful chemicals found in traditional cigarettes. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
In May 1962, R.J. Reynolds’ director of research reported the status of product development in an internal memo.
The director described the result of taste tests for flavored drinks conducted with children in the same report detailing the addition of artificial flavoring to chewing tobacco and cane sugar to cigarettes.
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.
Researchers at the University of Kansas found that food companies owned by tobacco companies were much more likely than others to market “hyper-palatable” food products.
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.
Boxes of sugary cereal fill a store’s shelves in Miami on April 16, 2025. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that many manufactured food products are high in calories but low in nutritional value. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
“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.”
Nearly 70 percent of American adults are either overweight or obese, according to a 2023 report by the federal government. Obesity rates have tripled over the last 60 years, while severe obesity has increased by a factor of 10.
Americans are not alone in this. More than 60 percent of Europeans are either obese or overweight, according to data reported by the National Institutes of Health. Worldwide, the prevalence of obesity has risen for decades.
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