Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s endorsement of Mom's Meals, a company providing $7 ultraprocessed meals to Medicaid and Medicare enrollees, raises concerns. Despite being marketed as health-enhancing, an AP review found these meals are high in sodium, sugar, and saturated fats, contradicting Kennedy's typical criticisms.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.
He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.
“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week.
The movement, which is focused on addressing “America’s escalating health crisis” by investigating food, pharmaceuticals, vaccines and environmental contaminants (and has frequently platformed pseudoscience), found a home in Donald Trump’s administration after Kennedy endorsed the president. Indeed, during his confirmation hearings to become head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy called ultra-processed foods “poison” and the main culprit of the United States’s “chronic disease epidemic”.
The GRAS system came into effect “well before the majority of calories consumed by adults and children were in the form of ultra-processed food products,” Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health attorney and associate professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, wrote in an email to Undark. By self-affirming that a given additive is GRAS, companies can avoid time-consuming regulatory submissions. The process is easier and cheaper for companies, Pomeranz wrote, but it undermines “public trust of the food supply.”
The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.
Despite claims from Mom's Meals that their products avoid certain harmful additives, experts such as Marion Nestle contend that the meals remain heavily processed and could be replaced with more wholesome alternatives made from real foods . This contradiction between Kennedy’s endorsement and the actual content of the meals reflects a broader trend in healthcare where "medically tailored" meal programs are funded by taxpayer dollars yet may not deliver on their promise of promoting healthier eating habits .
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