On a Sunday night in February, on the 60 Minutes couch, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the promise that sounded like the whole reason he took the job. “We will act on David Kessler’s petition,” he said, invoking the citizen petition a former FDA commissioner had filed to force the agency to reckon with the additives it lets into food without ever reviewing them. Kessler was asking, Kennedy added, “questions that FDA should’ve been asking a long, long time ago.”
He was right about that part. Six months later he showed what “act” meant, and it was a good deal less than the couch had promised.
In August the FDA rolled out two things: a proposed rule on food additives and the government’s first official definition of ultra-processed food, submitted for final review and built on the dietary guidelines the administration rewrote earlier this year. There was a 120-day comment period. There was a new public database. There was a lot of language about transparency. What there was not, when you read the rule instead of the announcement, was anything that stops a company from putting an untested chemical in your food.
Start with the loophole Kennedy said he was closing, because it is the most concrete institutional failure in the whole ultra-processed food story. Under a provision that has been quietly load-bearing for decades, a manufacturer can decide on its own that an ingredient is “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS, and start using it, without ever telling the FDA. This is not a partisan reading. It is how the system was built, and the result is a food supply full of additives that no independent reviewer at the agency ever looked at.
Kennedy’s rule asks manufacturers to notify the FDA when they add a new substance, and to log what is already on shelves into that public database. A new notice draws a 45-day check that the paperwork is complete, then a 180-day substantive review. That is a real change from a system that asked for nothing. But it is a notification, not a gate. Peter Lurie, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, noted that companies can still sell the product before they ever file the notice. “Mandatory without enforcement,” he said, “is not mandatory at all.” The rule tells companies to raise their hand. It does not tell them to wait for a reply.
For the chemicals already in the pantry, the picture is thinner still. Alyssa Moran, who runs food-and-nutrition policy work at the University of Pennsylvania, told NBC News the rule “does not prevent companies from self-affirming the safety of their ingredients,” and that as she reads it “there’s not even a timeline for notification, so companies can introduce these ingredients and then eventually notify FDA.” Her verdict on the framing was sharper: “It’s just quite misleading to say we’re going to close the GRAS loophole, and then to still allow companies to self-affirm the safety of their ingredients.” Critics point out the fix that would actually close it, mandatory pre-market approval, is not something the FDA can conjure by rulemaking. It would take an act of Congress.
Then there is the awkward part. The complaint that the rule underdelivers is not coming only from the usual public-health quarter. It is coming, in part, from David Kessler, whose petition Kennedy invoked on national television as the thing he was finally answering. Kessler’s read on the proposals was that they “do not tackle the root causes of chronic diseases.” The man who wrote the plan looked at the response and said it missed the point.
None of which means the target is imaginary. If anything the evidence that ultra-processed food actively drives people to overeat is stronger than the policy built to address it. In 2019, NIH researcher Kevin Hall ran the kind of study almost nobody funds. He admitted 20 adults to a metabolic ward and fed them, in two-week stretches, an ultra-processed diet and an unprocessed one, matched meal for meal on calories presented, sugar, fat, sodium, and fiber, and let them eat as much or as little as they liked. On the ultra-processed diet they ate 508 calories a day more, and gained weight. On the unprocessed diet, eating the same nutrients in less-processed form, they lost it. The processing itself, not just the sugar or the salt, was doing the work.
That is a controlled, causal signal, from a government scientist, that the food is the problem. The broader literature Kennedy leans on is mostly observational, correlations between diet and disease that cannot prove which way the arrow runs. Hall’s ward is one of the few places anyone pinned the arrow down. The administration is holding the strongest piece of the case, and what it proposed in return is a form, a database, and a definition that food companies will now spend the comment period contesting word by word.
The rule does reach a little further in one respect: companies would have to hand the agency a list of what they are using, the dyes and preservatives and sweeteners and the emulsifiers, exactly the class of processing agent a calorie-matched ward study cannot isolate but a suspicious eater might want named. Disclosure is not nothing. Sunlight has moved industries before. But sunlight is also what an agency offers when it cannot, or will not, reach for the switch.
Kennedy campaigned on the charge that the captured agencies had spent decades protecting the wrong people, and on the GRAS loophole he had the diagnosis exactly right. His own rule leaves the question of what changed. It still lets industry move first and file later, with the FDA reading the paperwork on its way past. Kessler filed the petition that started all of this. He read the answer and said root causes. He is not, so far, satisfied.
Sources
- STAT, FDA proposes GRAS rule requiring notice of food additives (Aug 2026)
- STAT, Kennedy says he’ll act on the Kessler ultra-processed food petition (Feb 2026)
- NBC News, RFK Jr. proposes GRAS fix; critics say it doesn’t go far enough
- Cell Metabolism, Hall et al. inpatient RCT (2019)
- Current Nutrition Reports, ultra-processed food and obesity: what is the evidence? (2024)