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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is continuing to take steps to rid America’s food industry of potentially harmful chemicals and additives that may be contributing to an era of chronic disease nationwide.
In an interview this week with Fox News, Kennedy emphasized his decision to direct key federal agencies to assess and terminate GRAS standards for food, or foods that are “generally recognized as safe.”
“One of the things that we’re doing is we’ve launched a review of the GRAS standards, and we’re going to get rid of the GRAS standards for most products,” he said.
Kennedy explained, “The GRAS standard[s] is a standard that was adopted in 1958, it was adopted because when the FDA was created to regulate food, there were foods that were generally recognized as safe…like flour, like dairy, like eggs. They didn’t want to make companies test those products, so they created a designation, but that designation was expanded by an industry that began taking advantage of it.”
Kennedy said this has created a mechanism that allows chemicals to be added to modern food products outside of such original definitions, noting, “any new chemical that they want to add to our food, is generally recognized as safe, and gets no review.”
Shockingly, Kennedy said the United States has over 10,000 ingredients in its food products, but Europe only has 400. “We have the worst chronic disease burden of any country in the world,” he stated. “So, we are going to get rid of the GRAS standards for new products.”
He said the HHS would review these purported 10,000 ingredients and urge food manufacturers to “get rid” of harmful ones as quickly as possible.
As reported by RSBN, Kennedy campaigned heavily on the issue of addressing what he calls the “chronic disease epidemic” in America, and as the new health secretary, he has already netted a major win as some fast-food restaurants in the United States have begun switching their frying oil from seed to beef tallow – something Kennedy has strongly advocated for.
