Agriculture secretary suggests banning junk food from food stamp purchases
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Friday suggested that Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr should prohibit SNAP recipients from being able to use food stamps to purchase junk food.
“I look forward to working with Bobby Kennedy as we figure out, do we have the healthiest choices?” Rollins said to reporters at the White House. “So when a taxpayer is putting money into SNAP, are they okay with us using their tax dollars to feed really bad food and sugary drinks to children who perhaps need something more nutritious?”
Ultra-processed food (UPF), such as snacks and sodas—commonly referred to as junk food—contains chemical additives like artificial coloring and flavoring. Kennedy has been spreading awareness of the major health risks associated with UPF based on scientific evidence. The newly confirmed HHS secretary has voiced plans to mandate warning labels on UPF products like the labels on cigarette packs.
Health research strongly supports Kennedy’s approach. Findings show many UPF products contain a combination of fat, sugar, and sodium called a “bliss point” that triggers a dopamine response similar to narcotics, causing cravings for more. This results in serious food addictions, particularly among children, which is why researchers like University of Michigan Associate Psychology Professor Ashley Gearhardt advocate for classifying UPF as a chemical substance.
“It’s not just really about the calories,” said Gearhardt, as quoted by Epoch Times. “It starts to be about the hedonics, the pleasure, the emotion regulation from a very, very young age. We do see that children who are showing these signs of addiction in their eating, they have higher body mass index, higher emotional overeating. They’re less sensitive to their satiety signals. They have greater body fat percentages.”
Food addiction is just one of the reasons UPF is driving America’s obesity epidemic. Junk food also contains empty calories that are low in nutritional value, keeping consumers hungry and noshing more.
Big Tobacco + food = Big Food
Kennedy’s proposal to treat UPF like cigarettes is also sensible considering that Big Tobacco played a large role in engineering the addictive properties of UPF and flooding America’s food supply with UPF products. According to the Washington Post, in the 1980s tobacco giants like Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds bought food companies like Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco and raked in billions from products like Oreos, Lunchables, and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Studies later found that the products sold by Big Tobacco-owned companies were more addictive than similar products sold by other food makers because they were designed with bliss points. By the time tobacco companies exited the food industry in the early 2000s, UPF products were fueling mass food addictions in America.
