The Biden administrations war on Big Food has produced an unusual alliance between a veteran regulator who once battled Big Tobacco and a controversial health secretary whose views on vaccines have alarmed much of the medical establishment.
According to Mediaite, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. David Kessler told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker that he is prepared to work with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on curbing harmful food additives, even as he sharply rejects Kennedys vaccine positions.
Kessler, who made his name confronting cigarette companies in the 1990s, warned that the highly processed products many Americans dismiss as junk are doing serious internal damage. The foods commonly dismissed as empty calories, he cautioned, are not just empty. Theyre ending up in your liver, and that fat in your liver is gonna migrate into other organs. And its the cause of cardiometabolic disease.
Kessler has now petitioned the FDA to strip Generally Recognized as Safe status from a range of processed refined carbohydrates, including corn syrup, maltodextrin, xylose, and high-fructose corn syrup. He argued that these ingredients, once heavily altered by modern manufacturing, no longer resemble the foods our bodies were designed to handle. And then these ingredients were subjected to industrial processing so that our system cant handle it, Kessler said. His push highlights a growing concern among physicians and nutrition experts that federal regulators have been too deferential to corporate food interests at the expense of public health.
Whitaker pressed Kennedy on whether his pledge to apply gold standard science to GRAS ingredients could be trusted, given the radical changes he has advanced to childhood vaccine schedules. He asked Kennedy if he worried that his stance on vaccines might make people reluctant to support his campaign against ultra-processed foods. Kennedy insisted his position has been consistent and rooted in individual liberty. My stance on vaccines is the same, Kennedy said. People should have good science and they should have choice. People who wanna get [childhood] vaccines can get them and they can get them fully insured.
Kessler did not hide his profound disagreement with Kennedy on immunization policy, but he separated that dispute from the urgent need to confront diet-related disease. The secretary and I, you know, we disagree on a number of issues, Kessler said. I mean, in the strongest possible terms, when it comes to vaccines, I disagree. But if hes willing to take action on these ultra-processed foods, I will be the first to applaud that.
When Whitaker challenged him If you dont trust him on vaccines, why trust him when it comes to ultra-processed foods? Kessler framed his cooperation as a matter of duty, not politics. I dont think its a question of trust, he replied. I mean, this country is ill. Im a doc. I care about the public health of this country, and if we can make progress on that, lets do that.
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