In an exclusive interview with The MAHA Report, Arvin Singh, West Virginia’s Secretary of Health, talked about why the state believes it can become a national model for rural health transformation and what it will take to get there.

Singh has built a career that spans healthcare operations, executive leadership and federal policy. Today, as West Virginia’s Secretary of Health, he leads one of the country’s largest state-run rural health transformation initiatives.

With roughly $200 million in federal Rural Health Transformation funding from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for 2026, to be spent over five years, West Virginia has big plans. It will invest in prevention of chronic disease, workforce development, technology, value-based care and rural access. But the most significant part of the plan may be what West Virginia is choosing not to do: pour money into the same healthcare model that has too often failed to reach rural communities.

“An Ultimate Stress Test”

Singh explained that his varied career, including training at John Hopkins and stints at the Department of Health & Human Services and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has allowed him to see both the extraordinary power of American medicine and the consequences of waiting until disease is already advanced. His experience across academic health systems, federal policy, community-based care and rural healthcare shaped his belief that prevention must become as central to the system as treatment.

“Our system is exceptional at treating illness, but historically, we’ve underinvested in preventing it,” he said during our interview. “We spend an enormous amount of resources after someone develops diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, but comparatively little helping them avoid those conditions in the first place.”

For Singh, prevention is not a rejection of modern medicine. It is a way to reduce the need for intensive, costly care, improve quality of life, strengthen the workforce and help public dollars go further.

“It’s not about replacing treatment,” he said. “It’s about reducing that need for treatment.”

That philosophy is especially consequential in West Virginia, which Singh describes as an “ultimate stress test for the American healthcare system.”

Added Singh, “If healthcare can succeed here with our mountains, with our dispersed population, our older residents, workforce shortages, high chronic disease burden and rural hospital challenges, I really think it can succeed anywhere.”

The scale of those challenges is difficult to overstate. West Virginia ranks 49th in overall health. Rural residents live about 2.5 years less than the national average, while life expectancy in McDowell County is approximately 11 years shorter. Nearly half of the state’s counties are maternity-care deserts, and every rural county was designated a Health Professional Shortage Area as of June 2025. The state also ranks last nationally in internet availability, complicating efforts to expand telehealth and remote monitoring.

West Virginia’s response is not limited to recruiting more physicians or building larger hospitals. Instead, the state is developing a broader model that brings care closer to residents through telehealth, artificial intelligence, emergency medical services, community-based interventions and value-based care.

A proposed Connected Care Grid would combine telehealth, remote patient monitoring and local care coordination, potentially extending access through schools, libraries, pharmacies, faith communities and community centers. Other initiatives would link medical and community transportation, expand community paramedicine and use rural EMS providers for chronic-disease follow-up and nonemergency care.

Together, these efforts challenge the assumption that meaningful healthcare must always begin inside a hospital or physician’s office. The larger goal is to prove that prevention-focused, community-based care can improve health outcomes.

“If your healthcare model only works where there are plenty of physicians, hospitals and resources, it’s not a rural healthcare model,” Singh said.

A New Core Competency

West Virginia is putting nutrition into the clinical standard of care, requiring continuing education for doctors that treats food, sleep, movement and behavior change as core tools for preventing and managing disease.

“Nutrition, physical activity, sleep, behavior change – those should become core competencies, not electives,” Singh said. “Healthcare professionals should feel just as comfortable prescribing a healthy lifestyle as they are prescribing medications, when appropriate.”

Making Healthier Choices Possible

The prevention-first philosophy extends across West Virginia’s health agenda, from healthier school meals and restrictions on synthetic food dyes to nutrition education for physicians, physical-activity initiatives and an effort to limit soda purchases through SNAP. But the state’s experience also illustrates how difficult it can be to turn ambitious public-health goals into lasting policy. Two of its most closely watched initiatives are now entangled in separate federal court challenges.

West Virginia’s food-dye law began changing school meals in August 2025, when public school nutrition programs were directed to remove seven synthetic colors: Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2 and Green 3. A broader provision scheduled for 2028 would prohibit the manufacture or sale of foods containing those dyes, along with the preservatives butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA, and propylparaben, throughout the state. The International Association of Color Manufacturers sued West Virginia officials, arguing in part that the law conflicts with federal regulation of FDA-approved additives and is unconstitutionally vague. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the broader statewide restrictions while the case proceeds, although the school-meal requirements remain in effect.

The state’s attempt to restrict soda purchases through SNAP encountered a separate legal obstacle. West Virginia was part of a broader USDA initiative allowing states to test food-purchasing restrictions through federally approved SNAP demonstration waivers. The details varied by state: West Virginia targeted soda, while other participating states proposed restrictions on products such as candy, energy drinks, prepared desserts, and other sweetened beverages. By 2026, the USDA had approved such waivers in more than 20 states as part of the federal MAHA agenda, although only five state approvals – Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia – were directly at issue in the lawsuit.

In June 2026, a federal judge agreed that USDA had used the wrong legal authority and had not followed required procedures, vacating the approvals for the five states. The ruling did not conclude that improving nutrition through SNAP was an illegitimate goal; rather, it found that USDA could not pursue that goal through the waiver process it had chosen. West Virginia has since paused enforcement while officials consider their next legal and administrative steps.

These legal battles have intensified a larger debate over how government should promote healthier choices. Opponents of SNAP restrictions warn that they can stigmatize low-income families, create confusion at checkout and substitute government judgment for individual choice. Critics of school fitness assessments have similarly raised concerns that testing could embarrass children or reward athletic performance rather than health.

Singh said the aim is not to judge families or dictate every decision, but to create conditions in which healthier choices are genuinely possible.

“People shouldn’t have to overcome a million obstacles just to make one healthy decision,” he said. “The role of government is not to make every decision for people, but we can help foster environments where healthy choices become realistic and sustainable.”

That distinction is central to his approach. Singh argues that personal responsibility matters, but choices are shaped by the conditions in which people live. In some West Virginia communities, healthy food may be 45 minutes away, while sidewalks, transportation, childcare, reliable broadband and nearby medical providers may all be limited.

“What people outside Appalachia sometimes miss is that rural health isn’t simply medicine,” Singh said. “It’s infrastructure, it’s workforce, it’s transportation, it’s economic opportunity.”

He applied the same philosophy to school fitness assessments. Singh said the goal is not to rank children against one another, but to help each student measure progress from an individual starting point.

“We want every child, including those who have disabilities or different abilities, to experience success relative to where they start,” he said. “Progress, to me, matters more than ranking.”

He compared measuring fitness to tracking progress in reading or math: a way for schools to recognize growth, celebrate achievement and give children the skills and confidence to carry healthier habits into adulthood.

West Virginia will judge its rural-health investments by three broad standards: healthier people, improved access, and sustainability. Companies applying to take part in the WV Rural Health Transformation projects must present detailed sustainability plans, and funding may be reallocated if programs cannot demonstrate progress and a credible return for taxpayers.

Singh’s long-term vision is not a temporary campaign, but a cultural reset: healthier children entering adulthood, more providers reaching rural communities, employers investing in workforce wellness, grocery stores offering healthier options, and healthcare systems rewarded for keeping people well.

Even before the first dollars were awarded, he said, change had begun.

“The conversation has changed,” Singh said. “More importantly, I want people to say that West Virginia helped change the conversation.”

If the state succeeds, he believes its lessons will extend far beyond Appalachia.

“They will shape the future of healthcare across America.”

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“We’ve been advocating for raw milk for 25 years,” she tells The MAHA Report.

What’s so great about raw milk? It has more nutrients. And more butterfat.

Butterfat, Morell says, is the stuff of life. It was only taken out of milk and skim milk popularized, she explains, because butterfat was worth more if it could be sold separately, to put in ice cream.

“If you give skim milk to calves, they die,” she says.

Morell is the author of the best-selling book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, which she wrote along with co-author Mary Enig, a biochemist. They originally self-published the book in 1996 because no other publisher was interested. It’s since sold more than 800,000 copies and is now represented by publishing giant Simon & Schuster.

Nourishing Traditions is a cookbook, but it’s also about how to eat so as to nourish the body and the mind. It doesn’t follow a low-fat or a low-carb diet.

“We think they’re very dangerous,” Morell says of both of these. “We do need carbs. But mostly we need a lot of fat in our diets.”

Sally Fallon was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1948 and grew up in a family that cared about eating right.

“My father railed against fake food, and my mother was a wonderful cook,” she says.

She married and raised her own children the way she was raised: eating real, homemade food. But by the 70s, the American diet was starting to change. Low-fat diets were creeping in.

“I just knew that this was wrong, and it was about that time I found Weston Price’s book,” says Morell.

Weston A. Price was a dentist who had traveled the world and studied what indigenous people ate. He took along a camera and photographed the faces of people he met. What he found, and what he reported in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, was fascinating, and somewhat controversial.

He wrote that native cultures that ate the same traditional foods that their ancestors had eaten for centuries had wide faces and healthy teeth, but that the people who had changed their diets and begun to eat things like white flour and sugar and other foods that were not traditionally eaten by their people tended to have longer, thinner faces, and crooked teeth.

The preference for animal fat among native diets was something Weston took particular note of.

“They would not eat lean meat,” says Morell. “They would throw an animal out if it was too lean.”

To share this research, and to share with more people the principles of eating food that is deeply nourishing, Morell and Enig founded the Weston A. Price Foundation in 1999 and in the year 2000, organized the first national conference.

The Weston A. Price Foundation now has over 400 chapters across the country, with local chapters focused on helping people find good, healthy food in their communities – and raw milk. The foundation actually has its own website to promote raw milk: realmilk.com with a map showing people where, in every state, they can buy raw milk – that is, milk that has not been pasteurized or homogenized.

Three years ago, in 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the keynote speaker at the annual conference, called Wise Traditions.

At his appearance there, on the stage with Morell, he said that after attending the conference the year before, he’d begun to drink raw milk and only raw milk.

Morell says they were “thrilled” when Kennedy was nominated to serve as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration – putting him essentially in charge of all federal public health policy.

Like Kennedy, the Weston A. Price Foundation has also been critical of vaccines.

“They are poisonous,” says Morell. “The best way to protect your children is with nutrition.”

Members of the foundation have also gone to war against soy, which was pushed as a meat alternative in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s – and even made its way into infant formula.

“We’ve been largely successful,” says Morell. “These soy foods have disappeared from the supermarket.”

Notably, Morell has published a recipe for infant formula made with raw milk and cod liver oil – a recipe that she says three of her five grandsons were fed as infants.

Morell, now 78, has not slowed down. She runs a farm in Southern Maryland, making cheese from the milk produced by her Jersey cows. And during the Covid pandemic she wrote a book called The Contagion Myth, with co-author Thomas S. Cowan, M.D, examining the connection between the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and 5G wireless, which had just been deployed in Wuhan in 2019. They had to change the title to The Truth About Contagion as Amazon wouldn’t carry it under the original title. It was published by Skyhorse in 2021.

Morell is now preoccupied with organizing the 26^th annual “Wise Traditions” conference – the annual gathering of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The conference will be held October 16-18 in Washington, D.C., at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. The list of speakers includes Catherine Austin Fitts, Rep. Thomas Massie, Joel Salatin, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Del Bigtree, Leigh Merinoff, Laura Delano, Toby Rogers and many others.

The conference will focus on food: Not just talking about it, but enjoying it as a group, with meals thoughtfully prepared by a top chef from grassfed beef and also cheese and speciality items like sauerkraut from a local supplier.

This year’s event takes place at maybe the high point in the natural food movement, with practices once considered fringe – like drinking raw milk and saying no to vaccines – now being taken up by millions of Americans looking to lead healthier lives.

Many people deserve credit for the change. But Sally Fallon Morell is certainly among the most notable, given the popularity of her books and her continual advocacy through the Weston A. Price Foundation over more than a quarter of a century.

“I did feel that I was guided to do this,” she told The MAHA Report this month. “This kind of just took hold of me – and here I am.”

[To learn more about the conference, and to register, go to WiseTraditions.org.]

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Related

Interview with Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger” – August 2023

https://www.brighteon.com/50ad823d-dca3-4f77-bf09-58756b8c8e3c

GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) is a regulatory exemption that allows certain substances to be added to food without going through the FDA’s standard premarket approval process.

For HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the announcement represents the latest steps in the “Eat Real Food” initiative, an 18-month effort to put prevention and nutrition at the center of federal health policy.

“Parents should not need a chemistry degree to understand what their children are eating,” Kennedy said. “Americans deserve real transparency. They deserve real food.”

What the Policies Would Do

Under the proposed GRAS rule, companies introducing a new GRAS substance would be required to notify the FDA about how that substance is safe – moving the system from voluntary to mandatory notification.

Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantis said the change would “close a decades-old information gap” and give the agency greater visibility into substances entering the food supply.

The proposal would also create a public database showing which substances companies have determined are safe for use in food, while giving companies an expedited path to bringing ingredients already on the market into the new system.

The second proposal would establish a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, giving researchers, consumers and government institutions a common framework for identifying them [stay-tuned for the approved definition.]

Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a longtime food and chronic disease researcher, called the two actions among the FDA’s most consequential food and nutrition policies in the last 50 years. The new definition of ‘ultra-processed foods’ could have far-reaching implications, from changing what is purchased and served in schools, hospitals and military facilities, to pressuring food manufacturers to reformulate their products.

Why HHS Says It’s Necessary

By introducing these changes, the government is determined to provide Americans greater transparency into what is entering the food supply and how those substances are being deemed safe.

Kennedy said the FDA previously could not tell him exactly how many ingredients were in the food supply, estimating the number to range from 4,000 to 12,000.

HHS senior advisor, Calley Means, who has been working on the administration’s food policy initiatives, told The MAHA Report that “GRAS reform is one of the biggest initiatives that food advocates have been fighting for 20 years.”

The administration also celebrated broader changes over the past 18 months, including:

• Updated Dietary Guidelines

• Removing petroleum-based artificial dyes from the food supply

• Bringing nutrition education into medical schools

• Putting real food on the plates of military personnel

• Promoting regenerative agriculture

Generally Recognized as Safe

Congress created the GRAS exemption in 1958 alongside the Food Additives Amendments. The exemption was meant for substances with a long history of safe use, with examples including salt, vinegar and flour.

According to Diamantis, however, the exemption eventually became a primary pathway for food ingredients, allowing manufacturers to make their own GRAS determinations without notifying the FDA.

Food activist and author, Vani Hari, told The MAHA Report that food reform needs to be approached from multiple angles. She argued that getting Americans to eat more real food could also reduce consumption of GMO corn and soy, while adding that “we have to tackle it from every angle.”

Hilda Labrada Gore, a certified integrative health coach, similarly emphasized that removing harmful substances is only part of the solution: “It’s equally important to get the right foods in,” Gore said.

What’s Next?

The proposed GRAS rule is now open for public comment, giving the public an opportunity to weigh in before a final rule is issued.

Kyle Warner, vice president of MAHA Action, called the public-comment period an important opportunity for “all the MAHA moms and the MAHA advocates around the country” to make their voices heard.

The administration has also acknowledged that further congressional action may be necessary to give the FDA additional authority.

For Bethany Hall-Long, the stakes extend beyond food policy itself: “We know that a healthy community provides for a healthy economy,” she told The MAHA Report.

Chris Klomp, director of Medicare and a senior advisor to Kennedy, closed the event by returning to the broader MAHA mission: moving a health system focused on masking side effects toward one that helps Americans understand why they become sick in the first place.

“For the last fifteen years, I have stood beside millions of Americans who have simply wanted food that wouldn’t harm their families,” Hari added. “Today is a turning point. From this day forward, the rules for the food industry are changing, and everyone will finally know what’s hidden in ultra-processed food.”

[Electronic comments may be submitted to Regulations.gov, using docket number FDA-2025-N-3262.]

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Whole milk is officially back as an option in America’s school nutrition programs, signaling a MAHA-style shift away from outdated low-fat dogma and back toward real, nutrient-dense food for children.

On May 8, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that USDA has issued the final rule implementing the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, restoring whole and 2% milk options in federal Child Nutrition Programs for children and adults ages 2 and older.

“President Trump promised to Make America Healthy Again, and restoring whole milk to schools is a major step toward delivering on that promise,” Rollins said.

She continued, “For years, outdated federal rules kept nutritious whole milk off school menus, despite growing evidence showing the importance of healthy fats and nutrient-dense foods for child development. USDA is proud to implement the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act and give schools the flexibility to serve real, wholesome milk options that help children grow, learn, and thrive.”

President Trump signed the act into law on January 14, 2026. Now, USDA’s final rule puts that policy into practice across school and child nutrition programs nationwide.

The rule does not require every school to carry whole milk. Instead, it allows schools and child nutrition providers to offer whole and 2% milk again as part of federal Child Nutrition Programs.

“This bipartisan solution to school meals alongside the newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans reinforces what families already know: nutrient dense foods like whole milk are an important part of a healthy diet,” said Rollins.

A New Direction for School Nutrition

For decades, federal school lunch rules limited children to low-fat milk options, based on outdated research and medical dogma that treated dairy fat as a threat. At the same time, school cafeterias continued serving refined grains, added sugars, seed oils, and ultra-processed foods — the same dietary offerings that have fueled America’s childhood chronic disease crisis.

The whole milk rule begins to correct that imbalance. It is also one of the first practical signs of a broader nutrition reset taking shape under HHS Secretary Kennedy and Rollins. Earlier this year, the administration released the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which reintroduced full-fat dairy as part of a healthy diet. Now, with USDA’s final rule, that shift will begin to reach children in the school cafeteria.

Why This Matters for Children

Children are growing, learning, moving, and developing at a rapid pace. Their brains, bones, muscles, hormones, and immune systems all require real nourishment, including protein, minerals, fat-soluble vitamins, and healthy fats.

Whole milk dairy products provide protein, calcium, potassium, phosphorus, riboflavin, niacin, and vitamins A, D, and B12. They also provide zinc, selenium, iodine, niacin, and pantothenic acid, all essential nutrients for growing children’s bodies and brains. Whole milk is especially important for young children ages 1 to 10 because of its role in supporting energy needs, brain, and nerve development.

For years, American families were told that the naturally occurring saturated fat in foods like milk increased disease risk. But as low-fat and fat-free products became standard in schools, children’s health worsened. Childhood obesity, diabetes, fatty liver disease, ADHD, and other chronic conditions continued to rise. Whole milk’s return will not solve the childhood health crisis by itself, but it does represent a meaningful step in the right direction.

A Win for Farmers and Families

The rule also matters for America’s dairy farmers, who have long argued that school milk restrictions reduced demand for foundational farm products and weakened the connection between children, schools, and agricultural food.

Dairy farms remain an important part of rural America, and school milk programs have historically served as a bridge between local food production and children’s nutrition. By restoring whole and 2% milk options, USDA is supporting both children and the farmers who produce one of America’s most familiar traditional foods.

USDA says it is also continuing the multi-year process of updating school meal standards based on the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans. In the meantime, the department says it is taking immediate action to increase access to real, nutrient-rich foods in schools and child nutrition settings, including local beef and locally grown foods.

For MAHA, the significance is real. The school cafeteria is where federal nutrition policy becomes part of a child’s daily life, and restoring whole milk as an option is one step toward bringing real food back to the center of that daily routine.

While the return of whole milk may not transform school nutrition overnight, but it marks a clear shift in federal food policy for children. After years of restricting healthy fats in school meals, USDA is now giving schools more flexibility to serve more nutrient dense food options that support children’s growth and strengthen the connection between families, schools, and American farmers.

The final rule does not force schools to serve whole milk, but it reopens the door after years of federal restrictions. For MAHA, that is the point: giving schools the freedom to put real food back within reach of children.

As Secretary Rollins stated, whole milk is “the right move for kids, for parents, and for America’s dairy farmers.”

Related Reading:

This directive comes from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and can be considered a major win for MAHA – and for the FDA, which for years has been trying to rein in widespread SNAP fraud.

Retailers who accept SNAP benefits have until November 4 to comply with the new stocking standards. The change will be most noticeable at small stores.

“No more bare-minimum stocking or loopholes that let junk snacks count as ‘staple foods,’” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a post on X on Thursday, May 7, adding that the change more than doubles the requirements to stock fresh food for stores accepting SNAP, also called food stamps.

“Under the old rule, the 240,000 retailers who accepted the food stamp, they had to stock 12 or more, quote, nutritious food [items] – real food. Well, today, we’re more than doubling that to 28,” Rollins said on “Mornings with Maria” on Fox Business. “But we’re also closing the loophole. So, Maria, before today you could stock jelly as a fruit and jerky as a real protein. All that changes today.”

Jelly is not fruit

Everyone who’s been in a Dollar General store or a Dollar Tree has probably seen that they accept SNAP benefits, allowing people who have EBT cards to use them to pay for any food they choose. But they may also have also noticed that the majority of such stores do not have fresh produce – only canned and boxed foods; and in coolers, milk and some packaged meat and cheese. Jelly was their “fruit” to qualify as a SNAP retailer.

Now retailers most likely have to stock real fruit and vegetables as the new USDA regulation requires perishable items in three of the four staple food categories.

SNAP, also referred to as the Food Stamp program, doled out a stunning $95 billion last year to reimburse stores for SNAP purchases – more than $260 million a day, on average. The retailers include Wal-Mart and other superstores, grocery stores, many convenience stores and dollar stores – and, in larger cities, bodegas.

As of January, almost 21 million American households were using SNAP benefits, down from almost 23 million in January 2025.

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that in some grocery stores in America, half of all shoppers are using SNAP benefits to buy their food, via an EBT card.

The list of things that can’t be purchased with SNAP benefits is relatively short: beer, wine and liquor; cigarettes and tobacco; vitamins and supplements; any hot food; and live animals, with the exception of shellfish that have been removed from the water.

What can be purchased with SNAP is about everything else that can be consumed, including: soda (in most states), candy (in most states), cookies, donuts, potato chips, filet mignon, oysters, crab legs, custom-made bakery cakes, ice cream, and party packs of snacks.

A total of 22 states have now been granted waivers by the USDA to prohibit purchases of soda and candy using SNAP benefits. But even these prohibitions are relatively soft. Florida, for example, just banned SNAP use for soda, energy drinks, candy and “ultra-processed prepared desserts” like Twinkies and Oreos. But SNAP can still be used to buy Gatorade, Pop Tarts, and Marshmallows.

The new SNAP regulation requiring the stocking of more fresh food comes in the wake of the defeat of an amendment to the U.S. Farm Bill that would have banned all purchases of soda using SNAP, nationwide. The amendment was introduced by Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) but was defeated by a vote of 238-186, with 55 Republicans joining 183 Democrats in opposition, demonstrating the power of lobbying groups like the National Beverage Association, which represents both Coca-Cola and Pepsico.

In 2025, at a Cabinet meeting at the White House, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the story of soda industry lobbyists pressuring USDA Secretary Rollins to allow SNAP to continue to be used to buy soda.

“She pointed out to them that there is no nutrition in a soda,” Kennedy told President Trump. “And they said, ‘Well, it’s not supposed to be about nutrition.’ And she said to them, ‘The name of the program is the Supplemental NUTRITION Assistance Program.’”

That got a big laugh from other Cabinet members and even members of the media who were attending the event (Allowing SNAP benefits to be used to buy soda seems silly to most Americans as it’s at odds with the stated reason for the program: to provide Americans with nutritional foods).

The first Food Stamp program in America began in 1939, during the Great Depression, as a way to use farm surpluses to feed hungry people. While it still does serve as a lifeline for the elderly and the disabled, and many other Americans who don’t earn enough to be able to cover the cost of basic groceries, it’s also being used by people who could pay, but would rather not pay, for their own food – preferring to buy a lot of things that do not qualify as nutrition.

About 10 percent of SNAP benefits are spent on purchases of soda, according to a 2016 government study, making soda the No. 1 most popular item purchased with SNAP benefits.

“We have 38 percent of our kids [who] are diabetic or pre-diabetic,” Kennedy said at that Cabinet meeting in the summer of 2025, “And we are paying on both ends. We are paying for the food – the food-like substances that make them diabetic – and then we’re spending a trillion dollars a year on metabolic dysfunction. It’s existential and it’s not sustainable.”

Dollar General is now one of the largest retailers in America with more than 20,800 stores as of March. Eighty percent of these stores serve communities with populations of 20,000 or under – many of them lacking a real grocery store. All of them accept SNAP. About 7,000 of the stores now have fresh produce, twice as many as five years ago. But the remaining 13,000 sell no fruits or vegetables, consigning regular shoppers to finding a way to make dinner using only canned and boxed foods, or choose from among the limited items in coolers and freezers.

The new stocking standards for SNAP retailers are meant to ensure a broader variety of nutritious food is available to Americans who use SNAP benefits to buy their groceries.

“To turn the tide on our nation’s health crisis, we need to ensure our nutrition assistance programs emphasize real food first, and that’s exactly what these updates to retailer requirements will do,” Rollins said in the USDA press release announcing the change.

Turn over almost any package of ultra-processed food, and you will find a long list of ingredients that are difficult to pronounce and definitely not something our great-grandparents would recognize. Yet the assumption remains: if it is in the food supply, it must have been reviewed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for safety…right?

In many cases, this is simply not true.

For decades, thousands of chemical substances have entered the American food supply through a regulatory loophole known as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. They entered without formal review or mandatory disclosure to the FDA – and, in some cases, without any publicly available safety data.

Even more striking is what is unknown. Because companies are not required to notify the government of self-affirmed GRAS determinations, there is no complete accounting of how many such substances are currently in the U.S. food supply.

“The GRAS loophole has allowed food companies to decide for themselves whether a chemical is safe, without notifying the FDA,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “That is a clear conflict of interest, and it undermines public trust.”

Kennedy added, “We are going to fix the GRAS system so that chemicals cannot be added to food without oversight. The American people deserve to know what is in their food and that it has been independently evaluated for safety.”

Watching GRAS Grow

The modern GRAS framework began with the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, when Congress created a premarket approval system for new food additives while deliberately exempting substances already widely recognized as safe. At the time, this category was relatively small and logical, covering ingredients like salt, vinegar, spices, and oils with long histories of human use in cooking.

Early efforts by the FDA in the 1960s and 1970s sought to formalize GRAS ingredients by publishing lists and a comprehensive review program that evaluated hundreds of substances already in the food supply. However, regulators acknowledged a fundamental limitation: it was impracticable to identify and evaluate every substance and every use as the food system rapidly industrialized.

By the 1970s and 1980s, the scale of the problem had grown. The FDA began issuing formal “GRAS affirmation” regulations, but the process was slow, resource-intensive, and unable to keep pace with the expanding number of ingredients and novel uses. During this time, roughly 700 to 1,000 substances had been formally recognized or reviewed as GRAS, but this represented only a portion of those actually in use. In practice, companies increasingly relied on independent scientific experts to make safety determinations, as FDA oversight struggled to keep pace.

The most consequential shift came in 1997, when the FDA proposed replacing the GRAS process with a voluntary notification system. This change did not come from a single political directive but from a convergence of regulatory pressure, industry influence, and administrative reality. The FDA faced significant backlog and resource constraints, while the food and ingredient industries were pushing for a more efficient pathway to bring products to market. Trade associations representing food manufacturers, chemical suppliers, and ingredient producers had long advocated for reducing their burden of bringing new products to market, arguing that existing scientific expertise within industry could support safety determinations more efficiently than waiting for the FDA.

.Over time, this contributed to a model in which safety assessments became increasingly privatized, with companies convening their own “expert” panels and generating their own data that was not required to be shared with the FDA.

Under the 1997 proposal, companies could self-determine that a substance was GRAS and were encouraged, but not required, to notify the FDA. This shift was framed as a modernization effort, but it fundamentally altered the structure of oversight. From that point forward, GRAS became a system in which new substances could enter the food supply without mandatory FDA review or ANY disclosure of safety data.

Since the late 1990s, this decentralized model has defined the modern GRAS landscape. The FDA has received and reviewed over 1,000 voluntary GRAS notices, creating a partial public record of substances evaluated through the notification pathway. However, independent analyses and policy reviews suggest that thousands more self-affirmed GRAS determinations exist outside of FDA oversight, meaning the total number of substances in use is not fully known.

What began in 1958 as a narrow, common-sense exemption for household ingredients used in cooking has grown into a way for industry to skirt the FDA and introduce thousands of new chemicals into the food supply for use in ultra-processed foods.

The Dose Makes the Poison — or Does It?

One of the clearest ways to understand the limitations of the GRAS framework is to look at how these substances actually appear in our food supply. Some of the least transparent categories include flavoring agents, such as natural and artificial flavors, as well as processing aids used during manufacturing, such as hexane, ammonium hydroxide, and dimethylpolysiloxane, which often do not even appear on labels.

While terms such as “natural flavor” may sound familiar and safe, they often refer to complex mixtures of dozens or even hundreds of chemical compounds. Much of the underlying safety data is proprietary and not publicly available, yet these substances are allowed in the food supply under GRAS.

A second layer of complexity lies in how GRAS is applied.

Carboxymethylcellulose (CMC), a synthetic thickener derived from plant fiber, may be considered safe when used in small amounts in a single product. But in reality, it is consumed across many ultra-processed foods, often multiple times per day, and in combination with other emulsifiers such as lecithin, polysorbate 60, and polysorbate 80. It is important to note that GRAS applies to a specific use in a specific food, but not to chronic and potentially cumulative exposure across a person’s life.

Emerging research suggests that some emulsifiers, including CMC, may alter the gut microbiome and intestinal lining with chronic exposure, effects not captured in traditional GRAS evaluations focused on acute toxicity. The result is a system that evaluates ingredients in isolation, whereas in reality, Americans who consume ultra-processed foods, now accounting for 60%-70% of calories in the “Standard American Diet,” are exposed to complex mixtures daily.

Why Reform Is Now on the Table

Secretary Kennedy has made reforming the GRAS loophole a priority, with recent statements and policy signals from the HHS and FDA indicating that efforts are underway to reevaluate and strengthen oversight of the GRAS pathway.

While formal rule changes have not yet been implemented, the agencies have outlined plans to increase transparency, modernize safety standards, and consider reforms to the current self-affirmation process that underpins the GRAS loophole.

At the same time, industry pushback has been significant. Trade groups argue that mandatory notification could exceed FDA authority, create regulatory bottlenecks, and disrupt supply chains. Others raise concerns about whether reforms will require retroactive review of ingredients used for decades.

These tensions highlight what is at stake. Not just regulatory efficiency, but the fundamental question of who determines what is safe.

A Defining MAHA Priority

Closing the GRAS loophole is about restoring a fundamental standard: that safety determinations in the American food supply are transparent, independently evaluated, and grounded in modern, gold-standard science.

For clinicians and government leaders alike, this represents a rare opportunity to move upstream and acknowledge that the ingredients in our food supply are foundational drivers of health across a lifespan. It is an opportunity to realign the system itself with that reality, prioritizing long-term health over short-term convenience.

For families, this moment invites a more critical question: what does “safe” truly mean? And until that standard is strengthened, it reinforces the importance of choosing whole, minimally processed foods whenever possible.

The HHS and the FDA are now beginning the important work of restoring accountability in the American food system and rebuilding trust in the institutions responsible for protecting public health. This moment demands more than incremental change. It requires a clear commitment to closing long-standing loopholes and ensuring that industry interests do not stall reform or rely on anything other than transparent, gold-standard science.

Secretary Kennedy and team are seizing the opportunity to finally close the gap between what is assumed to be safe and what is proven to be safe, and to put public health where it belongs: first.

Ultra-processed food was the focus of the April 1, 2026 MAHA Media Hub, which featured a clutch of experts, including food activist and author, Vani Hari; Senior Advisor in the Office of HHS Secretary, Calley Means; “The Knowledge Doc,” Dr. Eric Berg; and family medicine doctor and bestselling author, Dr. Cate Shanahan – among others.

MAHA Action President, Tony Lyons, kicked things off by defining “ultra-processed” food as food that has been so heavily processed that it is almost devoid of nutrients. During his brief report, Means noted that HHS is now working on a comprehensive definition of “ultra-processed” that will help Americans make better decisions about what food to buy, and what foods to avoid.

A lot of the food that counts as “ultra-processed” contains seed oils, which have been identified by many nutrition experts as particularly harmful given their wide use in snack foods consumed by millions of Americans, and the evidence that they cause inflammation that often leads to chronic disease.

Dr. Shanahan spoke passionately about the dangers of what she has identified as the worst seed oils – “The Hateful Eight.” She’s the author, most recently, of Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back.

As you’ll read in the transcription below, Dr. Shanahan’s calls out these harmful oils: corn oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil, soy, sunflower oil, safflower oil, rice bran oil and grape seed oil.

From the MAHA Media Hub, April 1, 2026 [edited lightly for clarity]

Tony Lyons: Next up, we have Dr. Cate Shanahan. She’s a board certified family medicine doctor, a former nutrition consultant for the LA Lakers and a New York Times bestselling author whose work has brought ancestral eating principles to millions and millions of people. Her research and her clinical insights have helped catalyze a growing movement towards seed-oil-free, real food nutrition. She’s currently launching an online course designed to help busy people master all the habits and the strategies of eating real food, unprocessed food, making it easy and affordable, and something that people can really manage day to day. So thanks so much, Cate, for all the work that you’re doing.

Cate Shanahan: Thank you so much for having me on. And it’s an honor to be on here with everybody else.

I’m here because as a child, as a young woman, as an athlete, I was suffering every day from the effects of processed food but I didn’t know it. My parents didn’t know it, my doctors didn’t. Nobody could help me. Nobody could explain why I kept getting injured. And it wasn’t until I got so seriously injured, after I’d gone to medical school, that I did something that was really hard that almost no doctors ever have to do. And that is to question the narrative. And I discovered that I’ve been lied to about saturated fat.

Now, why does this matter? Because we are talking about processed food. We are eating processed foods because of this lie about saturated fats. Well, you have to, if you think about it, when you take away saturated fat, you take away butter, you take away animal fats, you take away most animal products. These are fresh foods. When you take away easy, delicious, fresh foods that probably have some kind of a super high accelerator index, but they never test like fresh meat or hamburgers, I don’t think, against processed food. These foods are delicious. But, we were told, doctors learned that saturated fat is bad. Therefore, these delicious foods, we can’t eat them.

This chases us towards processed foods. And this process began, this process of scaring people away from real foods and chasing us towards processed foods, began so many generations ago that almost nobody is alive anymore who remembers that there was a time when doctors told people to drink whole milk and to eat butter. And I want everybody on this call to understand…if you take away nothing else, one thing from what I have to say, that is the worst of the worst of the processed food ingredients, are the seed oils.

I call them the hateful eight, because there’s eight of them. Corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, rice bran, and grape seed. These are refined and they are unstable and they develop toxins in the bottles after they leave the factory that doctors and dieticians know nothing about. These toxins are so potent that they’re including things like aldehyde – so when people work with these toxins, they have to wear hazmat suits.

Seed oils are the worst thing in the food supply, partly because they are so ubiquitous. I work with people every day who also are suffering from the effects of processed food and don’t know it. And I have to tell them that they’ve been eating more seed oils than they realize, even if they don’t cook with them at home, because they are in 80% of the foods that we eat in the grocery store. Most people who aren’t consciously avoiding them are getting 20 to 30% of their total daily calories from seed oils. And they are not just in obvious processed foods or things that we know are unhealthy, right? We all know fried food is unhealthy. We all know sacks of chips are not healthy. Well, I’m here to tell you that the reason that they are so unhealthy is the seed oils. It’s not the salt. It’s not the potatoes and chips. It’s the seed oils and what they do to our bodies.

I’ve made understanding exactly what they do to our bodies the focus of my professional career. So far, I’ve filled up five books with how these oils and the other two main ingredients in processed foods – refined carbs and refined proteins were already called out. I write about how these things lead to specific diseases.

Just to give you an example: I recently broke a leg. And I have some help here now that I didn’t need before. And the young lady who was helping me, she is a go-getter. She is amazing. She is overqualified to do what she’s doing to help me. But she is being held back in her life and her career because she has a son who she loves that is autistic. And he needs so much of her care and so much of her time that she can’t work more than 24 hours a week.

This is preventable. I know the administration is looking for the cause [of autism]. Well, I’m here to tell you that an overlooked factor has been the seed oils. Seed oils have components, foods cooked in seed oils have components that are known neurotoxins. They are known genotoxins, they are known to cause birth defects. They are known to cause mutations and cancers. And because dieticians, physicians, and healthcare researchers believe that they’re the healthy alternative to animal fats, our entire, almost our entire nutrition research regimen so far has overlooked these oils as potential agents of disease.

And, in fact, the structural blind spots and biases around saturated fat have prevented seed oils from even being evaluated properly so that dieticians and doctors think that they have been evaluated and they think that medical science has tested them. But the fact is they have never been tested as independent variables.

In the past 30 years of medical research, which is most of what anybody in healthcare will be able to access and go back to. So the corn, canola, cotton seed, soy, sunflower, safflower, memorize those. Those are ingredients in your stores. That’s the first six. The last two – rice bran, grape seed. If you can get these out of your life, that is the most important step you can take to improving your health. You will notice a difference. And it’s not just because you’re cutting out processed food, it’s because these are toxins and it’s a shameful legacy of American medicine that we have not only not pointed these out, but that we’ve promoted them as heart healthy for generations.

Thank you very much.

For more on seed oils read, “The ‘Hateful Eight’ Seed Oils Most Americans Don’t Know – But Should”