Boxes of brightly colored breakfast cereals, vivid orange Doritos and dazzling blue M&Ms may find themselves under attack in the new Trump administration.
In excoriating such grocery store staples and their mysterious ingredients, Robert F. Kennedy tapped into a zeitgeist of widening appeal for healthy foods to curb obesity and disease that helped propel President-elect Donald J. Trump to select him to oversee the country’s vast health agency.
“We are betraying our children by letting these industries poison them,” Mr. Kennedy said at a campaign rally on Nov. 2, to raucous applause.
As Mr. Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, he would have far-reaching authority over the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates about 80 percent of the nation’s food supply. That includes shaping regulations on packaging that declares something “healthy” or discloses the amounts of sugar, salt and other ingredients in most packaged foods.
But in vowing to upend the nation’s food system, Mr. Kennedy is taking a direct shot at Big Food, one of the country’s most powerful industries whose traditional allies are Republicans. Even something as simple as removing artificial dyes is likely to result in a knockdown battle for the multibillion-dollar food sector, which is wary of higher manufacturing costs or a dip in sales of products favored by loyal consumers.
More broadly, Mr. Kennedy has set an agenda to root out what he considers corruption in the arena of government and public health, arguing that regulatory agencies overseeing food and drugs have been working hand in hand with corporate America to enhance profits rather than to benefit consumers.
Many of the issues Mr. Kennedy raises about healthier foods and on changing the practices of established industries through tougher measures have traditionally been pursued by Democrats.
But Mr. Trump has adopted Mr. Kennedy’s sentiments, at least for now. In announcing his choice to run the top federal health agency, Mr. Trump said on social media: “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation and disinformation when it comes to public health.” He said he expected Mr. Kennedy to “end the chronic disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Mr. Kennedy still faces the challenge of being confirmed by the Senate amid concerns about his persistent vaccine skepticism and a long history of espousing conspiracy theories. On the food front, his singling out of seed oils like canola and sunflower as a root cause of disease, a position that puzzled many experts, could give the industry the ammunition it needs to derail him.
Those who carefully watched Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House also question whether Mr. Kennedy may be setting off on a collision course with the president-elect, whose record of deregulation is well-documented. And forcing changes could further raise the cost of food at a time when the public is frustrated with grocery prices.
Clamping down on the food industry also pits Mr. Kennedy against agricultural and food titans, companies that have a history of wielding their power as major donors in congressional and presidential elections.
The lack of policy coherency — and a boss who loves McDonald’s burgers — could limit Mr. Kennedy’s reach, said Mary Summers, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who lectured on the politics of food.
“On the one hand, he’s claiming he’s going to dismantle it all,” she said, noting his threat to fire F.D.A. staff members who “suppressed” certain therapies. “On the other hand, he’s claiming, I’m going to regulate. I’m going to go to war for you and battle all this bad stuff in your food. And those two things don’t go together.”
The food and agriculture industries are already eyeing the landscape of a second Trump administration, generally viewed as corporate-friendly. They are calculating where they are likely to have easy victories, say, on removing regulations that they view as overly burdensome or cutting too deeply into profits, like the new requirements to track food items carefully so they can be recalled in the event of contamination.
And the industries are assessing the potential battlefields, like the threat of mass deportation of immigrants, whom giant industrial farms rely on to harvest crops, slaughter cattle and provide the bulk of their labor force.
The rise of Mr. Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again movement are making the food industries particularly nervous.
“When political ideologies are used to create fear and disregard the role of science, it undermines public trust in food safety and can cause consumers, particularly those in vulnerable populations, to lose access to safe, nutrient-dense foods,” Sarah Gallo, a senior vice president of product policy for the Consumer Brands Association, a lobbying group for the food and beverage industry, said in an emailed statement.
Still, Mr. Kennedy has struck a rich crossover vein marrying odd alliances by taking aim at ridding the food supply of artificial colorings and chemicals that have been banned in European foods for years. In addition, his interests have aligned with groups — traditionally associated with Democrats — that are concerned about whether processed foods and excess sugar and sodium have contributed to a rise in obesity, diabetes, heart disease and chronic illnesses.
The growing power of social influencers has helped to magnify his cause. Among them is Casey Means, a Stanford-trained physician whose name has been floated as the next commissioner of the F.D.A. She blames the ultra-processed food system for much of the chronic disease in America. Another prominent social influencer is Vani Hari, known online as the Food Babe, a clean-food activist who has been campaigning for WK Kellogg to remove artificial dyes and chemicals from its U.S. cereals.
“There have been people working on this issue for a long time,” Ms. Hari said, “but it feels like a lot of momentum is coming now from Kennedy joining forces with Trump.”
Both women, along with Mr. Kennedy, were speakers at a nearly four-hour round table in September hosted by Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican of Wisconsin, that focused on alternative diets, the risks of processed foods and the conflict-ridden food and drug regulatory agencies. The event also drew the attention of other Republican lawmakers who joined the audience.
But getting the food industry to change its formulations may not be easy. Nearly a decade ago, companies responded to public pressure, and Kellogg’s, Mars and General Mills removed synthetic colors from cereals and snacks. Some companies said sales slumped because consumers missed the bright colors, so they reverted to those ingredients.
Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.
In a statement, WK Kellogg, the manufacturer of cereals that was formed last year when parent company Kellogg Co. split into two separate companies, said that its cereals complied with U.S. and Canadian regulations. The artificial dyes it uses are certified by regulators and allowed in Canada, the company said. Lastly, Kellogg said that its foods have evolved and that “70 percent of our cereal sales have less than 50 calories from added sugar” and 85 percent of cereal sales do not contain artificial dyes.
Still, other companies have successfully removed artificial dyes from popular foods, including Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, which bowed to public pressure in 2016 and switched to turmeric and paprika to keep its characteristic orange noodles.
European Union regulators have already taken stricter measures, requiring a warning label on foods that included artificial colors linked to attention and behavioral problems in children.
The U.S. food system, under the F.D.A., operates very differently than the food system in Europe, where chemicals tend to be subject to safety review before they enter the food supply. In the United States, new ingredients regularly debut in food with no notice to the F.D.A. or the public.
Companies are allowed to certify an ingredient as “generally regarded as safe,” or GRAS, and file a report supporting their decision. Congress meant for the designation to apply to common ingredients like olive oil or vinegar.
“In 1958, Congress imagined 99 percent of the chemicals would be reviewed by F.D.A.,” said Scott Faber, of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group. “And perhaps one percent would enter commerce through the GRAS loophole. Today, the reverse is true.”
Left-leaning lawmakers have long supported consumer advocates and activists who have pushed for scrutiny of chemical additives in foods. Now those arguments are being embraced by some on the right as well.
“Historically, Republicans haven’t been very supportive of this issue,” said Jerold R. Mande, a former regulator in the Clinton and Obama administrations who is now an adjunct professor of nutrition at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University. “But, more recently, we’ve seen Republicans join in on the discussion.”
Democrats including Senator Edward Markey, of Massachusetts, and Representative Rosa DeLauro, of Connecticut, recently introduced bills to tackle the food-ingredient loophole.
Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat of New Jersey and co-sponsor of one of the bills, agreed in an opinion essay for The Hill just before the election that the food system was “painfully broken.” But he argued that moves made in the first Trump administration, like reversing efforts to make school lunches healthier and allowing the use of dozens of toxic chemicals that are banned in other countries, illustrated that Mr. Trump “has no intention of bringing needed change to our food system.”
This week, Dr. Robert Califf, commissioner of the F.D.A. said he did not want to respond to Mr. Kennedy’s threats issued during an NBC interview to fire agency nutrition staff. He also said that there were things he wanted to overhaul, but that he faced “gridlock of various interests that made it difficult to change things.”
In recent months, the F.D.A. has responded to rising public concerns by reorganizing its food division, now run by Jim Jones, who reviewed chemicals for the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency has been advancing a plan to update how food companies can use the term “healthy” on packaging. In recent weeks, the agency held a meeting about an effort to review chemical additives.
Other federal officials have been reviewing whether dietary guidelines should warn against ultra-processed foods, although a panel of experts recently said various research studies were too limited to clearly link the foods with obesity and other health issues.
Stuart Pape, a lawyer who represents food companies, said it could take two years or more for the F.D.A. to decide whether to remove a single ingredient from products. But a more forceful team, he said, could find a way to move faster.
“Process and guardrails matter only if the person in authority cares about process and guard rails,” Mr. Pape said. He added that he would expect the Trump administration to “find ways to push the edges to find ways to be more disruptive more quickly.”
In recent years, absent regulation by the F.D.A., some states are imposing their own rules. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that banned several food additives, including Red Dye No. 3, which the F.D.A. had outlawed in cosmetics decades earlier over cancer concerns. (The F.D.A. said it was reviewing the dye, with a determination expected soon.)
Similar bills are pending in New York and Illinois. Another New York proposal would require companies to disclose the ingredients they designated as generally safe.
“There is a valid sort of outrage at the system,” said Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy for the Consumer Federation of America, a trade group. “Because it’s not like the F.D.A. has been heroically standing up to the food industry under Democratic or Republican administrations.”
