The former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is testing the Trump administration’s commitment to “make America healthy again” with the challenge of cracking down on some key ingredients in ultra-highly processed foods.
In a petition filed Wednesday, former FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler argued that he has the authority to declare certain sweeteners, refined flour and other additives “are not generally recognized as safe.” Removing that designation known as GRAS forces the manufacturer of ultra-highly processed foods to remove the product from the market and reformulate the recipe. Or try to prove that those ingredients are not harmful.
It would be a drastic change into the food industry and a major change in the Trump administration’s Maha strategy. So far, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has relied on popular food brands to volunteer to remove artificial dyes and other additives from their products.
“Kessler gave the FDA a way to define most of the ultra-highly processed foods, so he gave RFK Jr a great gift on the path to regulating these products. That’s just what Maha asked for.”
Kessler suggested that companies have 12 months to file petitions to maintain those food additives in their products And we continue to prove that they are safe.
“It’s a very appropriate and valuable step to change the burden on the industry to where it belongs, or to meet that burden or stop using a substance,” Michael Taylor, a former FDA food regulator and current co-chair of the nonprofit, said he has stopped foodborne diseases. “We’re using the GRAS tool to actually drive serious safety conversations.”
HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Last month, federal health officials announced they were looking for opinions on how to define ultra-high process foods. Kessler’s petition could ultimately put pressure on the long timeline. The agent must respond to the request within 180 days.
Kessler served as an FDA committee member under Presidents Bill Clinton and George HW Bush, advising President Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic and overseeing agency when he needed food nutrition labels.
He also sees the FDA led the efforts to regulate cigarettes in the 1990s, similar to that fight.
“The key to smoking was to find the regulation hook,” Kessler told CNN. “It was asking the right legal questions to frame the problem.”
That was a difficult part of setting regulatory standards for sweet and starchy foods, he said.
The term Ultra Processed Foods resonated with the public, but he said, “it would be difficult to define what is legally.”
But he argues there is an urgent need to do that. The FDA allowed these ingredients under GRAS regulations 40 years ago, and the proportion of obesity, diabetes and heart disease has risen for years, he wrote in the petition. This argument reflects Kennedy’s own lawsuit of Maha reforms against food policy.
The petition focuses on refined flour and starch (the body breaks down into sugar). It undergoes food extrusion techniques such as wheat, corn, tapioca, oats and potato flour. It also refers to refined sugars such as corn syrup, corn solids, dextrose, xylose, maltose, and high fructose corn syrup. Finally, the petition covers produced sugar, flour and starch containing additives It is commonly used in today’s ultra-processed foods.
Tackling the issue of too much sugar is key to health, CNN agreed, but they say that the real genius of Kessler’s petition focuses on additives.
“The food industry uses emulsifiers, stabilizers, gels and more to produce cheap, large quantities of industrially processed foods,” says Christopher Gardner, director of nutritional research at the Stanford Center for Prevention and Research.
“If you take these tools out of the industry, it’s not that food is bad and munching,” Gardner said. “They are non-addictive, flavorful, and not as tasty as they are. The industry is making these foods as manipulatively flavorful and manipulatively tasty. That’s the problem.”
Several food and nutrition experts have announced Kessler’s petition as a bold move. This restructured the food industry if it was enacted by the FDA.
“This is an important proposal based on the true meaning of GRAS to eliminate the majority of food on the grocery shelf,” said Dr. Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
Created in 1958, the GRAS standard was originally intended to narrowly apply to ingredients commonly used in food supplies across the country, such as oils, vinegar and baking soda. Manufacturers using these products can rely on existing research to demonstrate safety, but are expected to submit GRAS petitions to new ingredients such as refined sugars.
The FDA updated the system in the late 1990s. This allowed the agency to voluntarily notify its organization that it had determined that the ingredients were generally safe in the backlog of new additive petitions.
A 2022 analysis conducted by the Environmental Working Group found that almost 99% of new chemicals used in food or food packaging since 2000 are lit in green for use by the food chemical industry rather than by the FDA.
During that time, food manufacturers sought permission to introduce only 10 new FDA substances, according to the analysis.
Barry Popkin, WR Kennan Jr. of the Faculty of Global Public Health in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, called Kessler’s petition a “great move.”
“I know the FDA knows like he does — he’s really tied the industry,” Popkin said. “They need to show without a reasonable doubt that carbohydrates, along with additives, are healthy and not harming their health, which is impossible.
“This is the strongest play that citizens can do to influence food supplies I’ve ever seen.”
However, Kessler’s proposed changes could meet a major pushback from major food brands.
Michael Taylor was the FDA’s Deputy Food Commissioner in 2015 when an agency revoked GRAS status in partially hydrogenated oil or trans fats, citing extensive research into its association with risk of heart disease and stroke. The agent gave those oils to the companies for three years to comply and remove them from the products.
But at the time, “handwriting was on the wall” for the industry, many companies had already stopped using those trans fats, Taylor said. “Obviously, the substances (Kessler) describe are many… highly processed fine carbohydrates and many products.”
The petition lands as officials from the Trump administration, led by Kennedy, prepare to release a second Maha report. The first dispatch of the MAHA committee in June picked out potential drivers of chronic disease in children, including ultra-highly processed food ingredients, but that second installment is expected to lay out the proposed policy changes. The report is scheduled for Tuesday.
