WASHINGTON, D.C. — When U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. took office, he was handed a behemoth: an official food pyramid guidelines document spanning a staggering 453 pages. “It was incomprehensible,” he says. “Nobody was ever going to read it.”
Taking the stage at the International Fresh Produce Association’s Washington Conference yesterday, the Make America Healthy Again mastermind sat down with CEO Cathy Burns to outline how he intends to disrupt the way Americans eat and the way our food is grown.
“This is a gentleman that has put nutrition and health at the center of the conversation,” says Burns introducing the session.
When asked how the administration plans to inspire a nation to finally embrace fruits and vegetables, Kennedy’s answer was clear: it starts by throwing out the old, unreadable rulebook and engineering a radical cultural shift toward real health.
Kennedy detailed his 16-month partnership with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, forged the week they were confirmed, and their bonding over the revamping of the food pyramid.
“It put fruit loops in the top of the pyramid, and we did something different,” says Kennedy of the move to turn the pyramid on its head.
“We have 10,000 ingredients in our food. Europe has 400,” he says. “We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world.
“When my uncle was president, I was a boy in this town, and a typical pediatrician had never seen one case of type two diabetes over a 40- or 50-year career,” he continues. “Today, 38% of American teens are diabetic, or pre-diabetic, and that’s directly related to the food.”
To address this issue, Kennedy says they assembled a dozen top nutrition experts from leading universities to formulate evidence-based dietary guidelines. Over an 11-month period, the panel developed a concise, reader-friendly guide under 10 pages long, thoroughly cited with peer-reviewed research and government databases.
“Fruits and vegetables are now where they ought to be at the top of the pyramid along with proteins and grains, and we are going to be able to now drive that to change the dietary culture in our country,” he says.
To drive this cultural shift, the administration plans to leverage federal food allocations, says Kennedy, noting that the USDA alone spends $9 billion annually — or $405 million every day — on food subsidies.
Over the next six months, the government intends to mandate that funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, WIC, school lunches, Indian Health Services, and Head Start completely align with the new dietary guidelines, he says. This policy overhaul will also extend to military, Veterans Affairs, and federal prison food programs, ensuring that public dollars directly enforce healthier systemic eating habits.
SNAP and WIC have faced significant funding cuts during the current administration, which IFPA has strongly opposed, particularly reductions to the programs’ fresh fruit and vegetable benefits.
Burns asked Kennedy what he sees for the future of those programs.
“How can we incentivize fruits and vegetables as opposed to obviously restricting sodas, candy and some of the other things, but how do we shift that behavior to actually get people over the produce aisle line and shift that to buying fruits and vegetables?”
Kennedy’s response steered the conversation to ultra-processed foods, a topic about which he has been highly vocal, calling them “poison.”
Ultra-Processed Foods
“One of the things that was really shocking is that we were spending 10% of SNAP dollars on sugar sweetened beverages, sugar beverages, and about 8% on candies. That is now changed,” he says. “One of the problems with ultra-processed foods was that there is no definition.”
Kennedy says they are working to publish a final definition of ultra-processed foods in the next couple of months and the FDA will implement a mandatory front-of-package nutrition labeling.
Building on that, he recommends the government partner with tech companies to “unlock everyone’s medical records with every American to be able to download their health data to their cell phones.” Those medical records would then be used to make personalized recommendations of what to buy and what not to buy as consumers scan the front-of-package nutrition label while shopping.
Nutrition Education
Kennedy also seeks to reform medical education, highlighting that 80% of newly graduated doctors say they only received two hours of nutrition training. To correct this deficit, his initiative has successfully pushed several medical schools to commit to 40 hours of nutrition instruction. Additionally, eight major medical examination and accreditation boards have agreed to restructure their licensing exams so that 15% of the test questions focus strictly on nutrition. This ensures medical students take the coursework seriously, he says.
It will also equip future doctors with the critical knowledge that conditions like type 2 diabetes and various chronic diseases can be significantly improved or reversed purely through dietary intervention.
“I’m very excited about that,” Kennedy says. Staying on the medical front, he then shared more about another program focused on improving the nutritional quality of hospital food.
“Most of you recognize that hospitals in the country need to start feeding good food to their patients,” he says. “Hospital food is actually pejorative in this country.” Kennedy says there a numerous studies that show when you start feeding patients good food, they recover much faster.
When asked what success looks like on the nutrition front, he points to dropping obesity and diabetes rates.
“This year, for the first time in 40 years, obesity rates in the country are down almost 2%, and that is a huge win,” he says. I would [also] like to see the diabetes rate drop.”
Regenerative Agriculture
Shifting the focus to America’s agricultural system, Burns asked Kennedy about government funding to promote regenerative agriculture.
Kennedy says modern farming has become dangerously dependent on chemically intensive methods. He says that after speaking with over 100 farmers, not a single one expressed satisfaction with the current status quo.
“People are sick,” he says. This crisis is hitting home in places like Iowa, a state whose cancer rates are the highest in the country. It’s a reality that is raising urgent alarms about environmental toxicity.
Kennedy says the heavy reliance on herbicides and pesticides does far more than pose a direct threat to human health; it actively destroys the soil microbiome. When the soil is impoverished, plants lose their ability to take up vital nutrients, resulting in crops that are fundamentally nutrient-deficient.
Degraded, chemically treated soil loses its structure, becoming incapable of absorbing water. This triggers massive agricultural runoff, creating toxic chemical dead zones in the ocean and leaving some experts to warn that the nation may only have 70 growing seasons left, he says.
To break this cycle, the administration is investing in technology that allows producers to transition to regenerative agriculture without hurting their bottom line, he says.
Kennedy shared a striking success story of an onion farmer in southwest Texas managing 8,000 acres. Overcoming her father’s initial skepticism, she invested a million dollars in a laser robotic weeding system. The results were immediate: her input costs plummeted from $3,000 per acre down to just $300, while her overall productivity jumped by 30% — prompting her father to buy two more machines just a month later.
By scaling these exciting technological alternatives nationwide, Kennedy thinks the government can empower farmers to protect both their economic survival and the environment.
“Farmers want sustainable operations,” Kennedy says. “They care for the land, they care for their families’ health, their own health, and they care for the quality of food.”
