The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes toxic chemicals in food are behind the U.S. explosion in rates of obesity and a range of other chronic illnesses. “A facade of normalcy has masked this meteoric rise in chronic disease, and we can no longer ignore it,” he said recently. He intends to rid the U.S. food supply of nine chemicals — all petroleum-based, synthetic food dyes — in as soon as 18 months.
Mr. Kennedy has deservedly earned a reputation for embracing pseudoscience and making hyperbolic claims about public health — autism, vaccines, fluoride. But when it comes to the chemicals in our food, the situation may be even worse than he describes. It’s certainly more mysterious than many of us appreciate when we sit down to dinner.
In the United States, an estimated 10,000 additives are allowed in the food we eat — including flavors, emulsifiers, pesticides, preservatives, ingredients in packaging and, yes, dyes. These chemicals are used in many of the ultraprocessed foods that now comprise most of the calories Americans consume.
In Europe, new food additives are generally presumed unsafe until proved otherwise through scientific review. But the United States allows food companies to self-certify the safety of many chemicals without prior Food and Drug Administration approval. This is because of a regulatory pathway known as GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe.” Under GRAS, companies are expected, but not required, to notify the F.D.A. when they introduce a new chemical that experts they’ve hired deemed OK to use. As a result, the food industry is often vetting the safety of the ingredients in our food, not federal regulators. Researchers estimate that there are roughly 1,000 chemicals in the food supply whose identities are unknown to regulators. (Mr. Kennedy announced that he’s working to close the GRAS loophole.)
Research on chemicals that have been vetted by the F.D.A. tends to be extremely narrow in focus, looking mostly for cancer, genetic mutations or organ damage in animal or laboratory studies. This means the ingredients in our coffee creamer, cereal, ketchup and frozen pizza aren’t tested for more subtle effects on long-term health, or whether they may increase the risk of the other common chronic diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. What’s more, most safety studies examine single chemicals in isolation, not how the hundreds or thousands of chemicals we consume might interact with one another or affect our long-term health.
Regulators also don’t routinely re-examine chemicals already on the market — checking if new science has emerged suggesting they might be dangerous — something European regulators do. “F.D.A. is stuck on decades-old science and making decisions based on scientific principles that in many cases are irrelevant,” said Maricel Maffini, a researcher who has studied GRAS for over a decade.
In short, the rules that are supposed to protect Americans from food hazards don’t reflect the reality of how people eat — or how they get sick — today. There are a couple of reasons for this. The F.D.A. was established in the early 1900s, as America was urbanizing and industrial food processing was taking off. Back then, food made people sick mainly through poisoning. Now our diets make us chronically ill, causing diseases that develop over decades.
Mr. Kennedy may be sloppy on the details, but his diagnosis of the broader problem is spot on. Americans have the shortest life span among our industrialized peers, in part because of chronic diseases such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes. The increases in these diseases are not driven by changes in our genes but caused by changes in our environments — in this case, our food. Scientists believe food additives play a role, though it’s unclear which ones and how.
Two biologists at Rockefeller University, Amy Shyer and Alan Rodrigues, are working to close the knowledge gap. They’re studying how common food additives that are considered safe according to regulators, such as aspartame, affect how cells organize on their way to becoming tissues and organs. When added to a cell culture, for example, they found that aspartame altered the way cells collectively formed structures. What that means for human health is worth exploring. It suggests there may be multiple ways chemicals harm us that regulators aren’t currently looking at, Mr. Rodrigues told me.
It’s also possible that additives like food dyes damage people’s health indirectly, said Jerold Mande, a former senior official at the F.D.A. and the Department of Agriculture. Rather than altering cells, the color additives may lead to overeating by making food appear more appealing, contributing to obesity, which then raises the risk of several cancers and Type 2 diabetes.
Mr. Kennedy admitted in a recent press briefing that he only has an “understanding” with the food industry that the food dyes he’s focused on will be phased out. Further reporting suggested that few companies have committed to doing this yet.
He’s also imploring companies to replace synthetic dyes with natural alternatives. Last week, he announced that the F.D.A. approved three new color additives from natural sources to use in food. But according to Ms. Maffini, scientists also don’t know enough about the health effects of natural dyes in ultraprocessed foods to know if they’re a better option. That they’re safer is an assumption, based on the appeal to nature fallacy.
Any administration that cares about rising chronic disease should invest in research to understand the root causes. The government could better fund the F.D.A. to address not just immediate food safety threats but also the chronic disease risks posed by our diet. It could invest much more in research funding for nutrition, which since 2015 has been flat at roughly five percent of the National Institutes of Health’s budget. Regulators and research funders must also look harder at the food environment, as science is only beginning to uncover how recent changes, including but not limited to the rise of food additives, may be harming our health and diminishing our life span.
Without such careful science, Mr. Kennedy and others are left hand-waving about hunches. In this toxic soup of unknowns, it’s easy to get mixed up about what the real health threats are and to invest political capital and public money on so-called solutions that will ultimately fail. What’s already clear: A handshake deal with the food industry will never be enough.
Ms. Belluz is a contributing Opinion writer. She is a co-author of a forthcoming book about nutrition and health.
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