Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will take up a petition seeking to revoke the safety status of certain ingredients in ultraprocessed foods amid concerns over their role in America’s obesity crisis.
In a Feb. 15 interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Kennedy told host Bill Whitaker that the FDA would “act on” a petition filed in 2025 by former FDA Commissioner David Kessler seeking to revoke “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) designations for certain refined carbohydrates, such as corn syrup and maltodextrin. The ingredients are widely used in packaged snacks, sodas, and other processed foods, and critics argue they are linked to rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.
“The questions that he’s asking are questions that the FDA should’ve been asking a long, long time ago,” Kennedy said.
Under current law, companies can self-certify ingredients as GRAS without prior FDA approval if “experts qualified by scientific training and experience” agree. Congress enacted the GRAS exemption in 1958 to cover common ingredients like salt and vinegar.
“That loophole was hijacked by the industry, and it was used to add thousands upon thousands of new ingredients into our food supply. In Europe, there's only 400 legal ingredients. This agency does not know how many ingredients there are in American food,” Kennedy said on CBS, estimating the U.S. figure ranges between 4,000 and 10,000.
Kessler, who worked for the FDA in the 1990s, argued in the petition that the GRAS designation has allowed major food companies to use ingredients without a full government safety review and flood the market with ultraprocessed foods that now make up 50% of Americans’ calories and 60% of children’s diets.
Kessler told CBS that refined carbohydrates “trigger overeating,” “deprive us of any sense of fullness,” and contribute to fat accumulation in the liver, which then “migrate[s] into other organs” and causes cardiometabolic disease.
Kennedy said that FDA action may focus on transparency and public education rather than outright regulation because “our job is to make sure that everybody understands what they’re getting, to have an informed public.”
The health secretary has previously signaled skepticism of the current GRAS framework. In March 2025, he directed the FDA to “take steps to explore potential rulemaking to revise” GRAS guidance, the HHS said in a press release.
Legal consequences are also mounting. CBS reported that in December 2025, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu filed a lawsuit against 10 manufacturers of ultraprocessed foods, alleging they engineered and marketed addictive, dangerous products while hiding health risks.
On Jan. 7, Kennedy unveiled new White House dietary guidelines and a new food pyramid that instructs Americans to “eat real food” by prioritizing protein at every meal and excluding highly processed products. At a press conference the following day, he argued that federal subsidies and guidance had, for years, favored highly processed foods to “protect corporate profit,” thereby contributing to a surge in chronic disease.