Rollins extends sugary drinks ban to six more states — including Louisiana
Rollins signed waivers exempting soda and energy drinks from being included in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs in Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia. The six states join Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Utah and Nebraska in restricting sodas and energy drinks from SNAP.
'Since my confirmation, our department has encouraged states to think differently and creatively about how to solve the many health issues facing Americans,' Rollins said. 'One way is by not allowing taxpayer-funded benefits to be used to purchase unhealthy items like soda, candy and other junk food.'
Critics of the new push to ban soda and energy drinks under SNAP say it unfairly targets lower-income families, limits consumer choice and won't result in better health outcomes.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is the first Democrat governor to request a waiver of sugary drinks from the states SNAP program.
'This is not red or blue, Republican or Democrat. We are discussing and working with every state. So (I am) really excited to continue to work with Gov. Polis,' Rollins said.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey joined Rollins for the announcement.
Morrisey praised his state's inclusion as part of the SNAP waiver program. He said the lack of access to healthy foods in West Virginia contributes to the prevalence of chronic disease in residents.
'I'm happy now that West Virginia taxpayers are not going to be subsidizing soda and these sugary drinks, things that have no nutritional value and are directly linked to obesity, diabetes, and a lot of other terrible health care outcomes,' Morrisey said.
HHS Secretary Kennedy agreed with Morrisey. He said the inclusion of soda and energy drinks in SNAP increases the cost to medicaid and medicare programs due to increased chronic disease.
'U.S. taxpayers should not be paying to feed kids foods – the poorest kids in our country – with foods that are the gift of diabetes. And my agency ends up through Medicaid and Medicare paying for those injuries,' Kennedy said.
Kennedy also gave an update on the dietary guidelines for Americans that he is working alongside Rollins to complete. He said the guidelines will be complete in late September, 'three months ahead of schedule.'
'They will drive changes in the school lunch program, in prison lunches and military food, and they will begin to change America almost immediately,' Kennedy said.
Not everyone agrees.
'Make no mistake, this waiver won't make an ounce of difference on health,' the trade organization American Beverage said when a waiver was being discussed in Ohio. 'Obesity has skyrocketed in the last two decades while beverage calories per serving have dropped by 42% – thanks to our industry's efforts to empower Americans with more choice and information. In fact, 60% of beverages Americans buy today have zero sugar due to our innovation.'
The U.S. government spent $112.8 billion on SNAP in 2023, covering 100% of the cost of food benefits and 50% of states' administrative costs.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
23 minutes ago
- CNN
Here are good and bad ultraprocessed foods, according to the American Heart Association
Step aside, MAHA. The country's largest heart-health organization has just released its long-awaited guidelines for the consumption of ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs. The new scientific advisory statement from the American Heart Association comes just days before the arrival of the second 'Make America Healthy Again' or MAHA Commission report, spearheaded by US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The first MAHA report, released in May, described how ultraprocessed foods were contributing to chronic illnesses in children. The second installment, due by Tuesday, is expected to lay out proposed policy changes. The American Heart Association's key message is not surprising: Most ultraprocessed foods are terrible for health, including heart health, and it is high time the food industry stopped producing them and regulators stopped letting them, the nonprofit says. But surprisingly, the AHA also dives nose first into the hotly debated question: Are all ultraprocessed foods unhealthy? Maybe not, according to the new guidelines released Friday in the journal Circulation. In reality, however, it's just a few categories, like 'certain whole grain breads, low-sugar yogurts, tomato sauces, and nut or bean-based spreads,' the report states. Even those 'healthy' options, the report adds, should be monitored to ensure they remain that way. That's no reason to celebrate, says Christopher Gardner, who is vice chair of the AHA report's writing group. 'Let's not give the industry a write-off just because there's a few things that are a bit healthier than the vast majority of ultraprocessed foods full of sugar, salt and fat,' he said. 'We have tons of evidence that too much salt, sugar and fat are harmful — we've known that since the days of junk food,' said Gardner, Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, who directs the Stanford Prevention Research Center's Nutrition Studies Research Group. 'But today's junk food is ultraprocessed with cosmetic additives that lead to overeating and tons of health issues,' he added. 'That's the problem. Can we please double down on those?' Guidance from the AHA is highly regarded by medical professionals and policy makers, and experts say tackling the issue of ultraprocessed food couldn't come at a better time. New data released Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found Americans over the age of 1 get 55% of their daily calories from ultraprocessed food. That number jumped to 62% for children between 1 and 18 years old. That's concerning, the AHA report said, because research has found a dose-response relationship between ultraprocessed foods and heart attacks and stroke, type 2 diabetes, obesity and all-cause mortality. Just one extra serving a day of ultraprocessed food led to some 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death, according to a February 2024 review of 45 meta-analyses on almost 10 million people. Eating more ultraprocessed foods may also increase the risk of obesity by 55%, sleep disorders by 41%, development of type 2 diabetes by 40% and the risk of depression by 20%, according to the review. To counter these potential health harms, the AHA says Americans should stop eating as many of the most harmful UPFs as possible — especially those high in unhealthy fats, added sugars and salt — while allowing 'a small number of select, affordable UPFs of better diet quality' to be eaten as part of a healthy diet. Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, was disappointed with the guidance. 'The emphasis on 'healthy' UPFs is not helpful for two reasons,' Nestle said in an email. 'The small number of foods in that category (of healthy UPFs), and the recent research demonstrating that even 'healthy' UPFs induce people to eat more calories than they would if they were eating minimally processed foods.' Nestle, who was not involved with the report, is referencing an August 4 study in which people in the United Kingdom lost twice as much weight eating meals typically made at home than they did when eating store-bought ultraprocessed food considered healthy. The research, which was one of the largest and longest randomized controlled clinical trials of UPFs to date, tried to create a healthy ultraprocessed diet. Ultraprocessed foods in the study included a recommended number of fruits, veggies and fiber as well as lower levels of salt, sugar and saturated fats. Yet, the study found, whole foods cooked at home still won the day when it came to weight loss. While science attempts to find out just what it is about UPF additives or processing that contributes to such findings, the AHA has provided some basic advice by assigning ultraprocessed foods into one of three categories: least healthy, moderately healthy and healthy. Healthier choices included fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables without added sugar or salt; whole grains such as oats and brown rice; unsalted seeds and nuts; dried beans and legumes; plant oils; low-fat plain milk or yogurt; lean, unprocessed meat; and dairy, unsweetened beverages and water. Plant-based meat and dairy that was low in added sugar, salt and fats were also considered healthy. Moderately healthy foods included white rice and pasta; full fat dairy; freshly made refined grain bread; salted nuts; canned fruits in light syrup; canned beans with salt; hard cheeses; egg replacements; and low sodium, low fat soups. Store-bought meals made with choices from the healthy group above were also in the category. The unhealthy group contained the usual culprits — high fat red meat, pork, processed meats (chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausage), butter, lard and tropical oils such as coconut. Sour cream and 100% fruit juice made the list, as did sugar, honey, maple syrup, crackers, sweetened dried and canned fruit, tortilla or potato-based chips and French fries. Refined grain breads, rolls and tortillas were included as unhealthy, as were sugar-sweetened beverages (which included energy drinks), liquid cheese products, cookies, crackers, candies, gummy fruit snacks, ice cream, boxed macaroni, instant noodles, pizza, some canned or instant soups and canned fruits in syrup. Sign up for CNN's Eat, But Better: Mediterranean Style. Our eight-part guide shows you a delicious expert-backed eating lifestyle that will boost your health for life.
Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
So Much for the ‘Best Health-Care System in the World'
Here's a piece of Republican rhetoric that used to be ubiquitous but that you never hear anymore: America has the best health-care system in the world. Republican politicians liked this line because it helped them dismiss the idea that the system needed major reform. American health care at its finest offered the most advanced treatments anywhere. Democrats wanted to expand coverage, but why mess with perfection? 'Obamacare will bankrupt our country and ruin the best health-care-delivery system in the world,' then–House Speaker John Boehner said in 2012. In Donald Trump's second term, Republicans haven't given up their opposition to universal coverage—far from it—but they have mostly stopped singing the praises of American health-care innovation. Indeed, they are taking a meat axe to it, slashing medical-research funding while elevating quacks and charlatans to positions of real power. The resulting synthesis is the worst of all worlds: a system that will lose its ability to develop new cures, while withholding its benefits from even more of the poor and sick. The line about the world's best health care always had a grain of truth. The United States has for decades languished behind peer systems in terms of access and outcomes. We are the only OECD country that lacks universal coverage, and the failure to provide basic care to all citizens contributes to our mediocre health. But America really was among the best countries at producing cutting-edge treatments. Those of us who have access to health insurance benefit from high-level technology and a for-profit system that generates incentives for new drugs and devices. There is a reason wealthy patients with rare conditions sometimes travel to the U.S. for care. This was never a convincing reason that the United States could not expand health-care access to citizens who couldn't afford it. But although the trade-off was false, the Republican Party's support for medical innovation was genuine. Even during the height of anti-spending fervor during the Obama administration, Republicans in Congress approved large funding increases for the National Institutes of Health. During his first term, Trump tried and failed to repeal Obamacare, but he also engineered a spectacular success in Operation Warp Speed, which mobilized the pharmaceutical industry with unprecedented efficiency to bring effective COVID vaccines to market. In the second Trump era, the party's opposition to universal health care has, if anything, intensified. The signature legislative accomplishment of Trump's second term thus far is a deeply unpopular budget bill that is projected to take health insurance away from 16 million Americans once fully implemented. But now the party has turned sharply against innovation too. Trump has wiped out billions of dollars in federal support for medical research, including canceling a promising HIV-vaccine project. This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for mRNA-vaccine research, one of the most promising avenues in all of medicine. The United States is going to forfeit its role as medical pioneer even as it recedes further behind every other wealthy country in access. Katherine J. Wu: How many times can science funding be canceled? Kennedy has made the party's pivot explicit. He does not boast about the American health-care system. Instead, he calls it a disaster. 'We spend two to three times what other countries pay for public health, and we have the worst outcomes—and that's not acceptable,' he said on Fox News earlier this year. Kennedy is not wrong about the bottom line; American health care is costly, and the results are poor. But he is almost completely wrong about the cause of this failure. There are many reasons for Americans' poor health, and shutting down vaccines and medical research, while depriving millions of access to basic care, will make all of those problems far worse. It's not that the entire Republican Party has abandoned its previous support for medical innovation. To the contrary, many Republicans in Congress have complained about cuts to medical research; last week, a key Senate committee voted overwhelmingly on a bipartisan bill to increase funding for the National Institutes of Health. But the anti-science wing of the party is in control of the agenda. Two main forces have driven the shift. One is the emergence of Kennedy's 'Make America healthy again' movement, a faction of gullible skeptics that Trump has brought into his coalition. RFK Jr.'s transition from left-wing kook to right-wing kook personifies the realignment of a certain strain of modern snake-oil peddlers into the Republican tent. Although they make up only a small share of the party, their intense interest in health and medicine has given them special sway—a classic instance of a tiny special-interest group determining policy for a larger coalition. The second force driving this policy change is the rising power of the national-conservative movement. Natcons are a wing of almost fanatically illiberal culture warriors who believe that the Republican Party must use government power to destroy its enemies. The fact that cutting university medical research will harm the United States in the long run is, for the natcons, a minor consideration when weighed against the fact that universities and government-funded labs are full of Democrats. The combined desire of both factions to attack the scientific elite has pushed the party into a retrograde opposition to medical innovation. Making matters worse, the unabashed corruption of the second Trump administration will further weigh down the sector's innovation potential by elevating politically connected firms over market-competitive ones. As The New York Times reports, Trump delayed the implementation of a plan to reduce excessive Medicare reimbursements for 'skin substitute' bandages after a co-owner of a company that sells them donated $5 million to a pro-Trump PAC and dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The traditional Republican position defended cutting-edge medical innovation while denying its benefits to those too poor or sick to afford access to it. Who could have guessed that liberals would one day look back at that stance with nostalgia?
National Geographic
an hour ago
- National Geographic
How cutting out certain foods can trigger new allergies
Bagels, which often include gluten, are one of many foods often excluded in elimination diets. But for allergy-prone individuals, cutting out foods for too long may disrupt immune tolerance and trigger dangerous reactions. Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic Elimination diets are everywhere—from parents managing eczema to influencers cutting out gluten and dairy in pursuit of 'clean eating.' But research shows that removing foods from your diet can subtly change how your immune system reacts when you eat them again. In some people, especially those with conditions like eczema or past food allergies, that loss of tolerance can spark dangerous reactions—even life-threatening anaphylaxis—when the food returns. This risk is often overlooked in the growing popularity of elimination diets. According to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, Americans are cutting more from their plates than ever. Some do it to manage celiac disease or irritable bowel syndrome, others to reduce bloating, fatigue, or joint pain. Social media trends like #cleaneating have only amplified the appeal. By 2024, more than half of Americans reported following a specific diet or eating pattern, compared to just 38 percent in 2019. Yet for the immune system, regular exposure to food proteins helps maintain a state of tolerance—one that can be disrupted when those foods disappear from the menu for too long. Understanding how and why that shift happens is key to knowing when elimination diets help, and when they might put you at risk. The science of oral tolerance and food allergies 'The intestine has an unenviable task,' says Brian Vickery, chief of allergy and immunology and director of the food allergy program at Emory's Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. 'It has to identify and respond to a constant barrage of environmental stimuli that can be both dangerous and beneficial.' (Is gluten really that bad for you? Here's what happens when you stop eating it.) The gastrointestinal tract, which has more immune lymphocytes than any other body part, encounters trillions of microbes and more than 30 kilograms of food proteins each year. Yet, it manages to defend against harmful invaders while ignoring harmless foods and friendly bacteria. This balancing act relies on oral tolerance, a process in which immune responses to ingested food proteins are actively suppressed, which in turn prevents harmful reactions like food allergies. While the underlying immune mechanisms are not entirely understood, the latest studies indicate it begins with specialized antigen-presenting cells that capture food antigens in the gut and instruct nearby T cells to stand down. This signal gives rise to antigen-specific regulatory T cells, which calm the immune response to food proteins. (As food allergies rise, new treatments are on the horizon.) 'The gut is important in the initial establishment of tolerance,' says Michael Pistiner, director of Food Allergy Advocacy, Education and Prevention, Food Allergy Center at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children. 'If you're not already allergic, early introduction to foods can help promote tolerance and protect infants from developing a food allergy.' That protection doesn't end in childhood. Regular, ongoing exposure to foods helps maintain oral tolerance throughout life. Recent research in food allergy patients treated with oral immunotherapy, where gradually increasing doses of the culprit food are given orally, highlights how continued ingestion is often needed to maintain a desensitized state. Conversely, there's evidence that elimination diets for some can disrupt oral tolerance and encourage the immune system to develop allergies. When elimination diets increase allergy risk For parents of children with eczema, it's common to suspect certain foods are worsening flare-ups. Many turn to elimination diets in hopes of finding the culprit. But research has uncovered a hidden risk. Anne Marie Singh, professor and chief of Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Rheumatology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues evaluated almost 300 children with eczema on elimination diets. (How a tick bite can cause food allergies in humans.) 'We found that if you removed the food from their diet, upon reintroduction there was a significant increase in the risk of allergic reactions, including potentially severe immediate allergic reactions,' says Singh. The results were striking: almost one in five children (19 percent) developed new immediate allergic reactions when the eliminated foods were reintroduced, even though they had no previous history of such responses. Most were mild, but alarmingly, 30 percent of reactions were severe, classified as anaphylaxis. The danger isn't limited to children. In a separate study of 30 adults who developed allergies to foods they had previously tolerated, 70 percent had been on elimination diets beforehand. Half experienced anaphylaxis, and the vast majority (80 percent) had pre-existing allergic conditions such as environmental allergies, asthma, or eczema. For people without a history of allergies, the risk appears much lower. If you're thinking about trying an elimination diet, experts say the safest approach depends on your risk level. If you're at higher risk (children or anyone with pre-existing allergy conditions), consult with a healthcare professional before starting an elimination diet. 'The more allergic you are, an elimination diet could potentially be a problem,' says Singh. Pistiner adds that 'in infants with eczema, elimination diets can be detrimental, especially at this very important time of early introduction.' Experts also recommend that children following elimination diets have close medical supervision to ensure nutritional adequacy and healthy growth. (What scientists are learning about how to prevent allergies in kids.) Duration matters, too. A shorter elimination phase gives less time for oral tolerance to break down. Singh notes that 'two to four weeks of elimination should be enough time to know if it makes a difference and also short enough to not risk an allergic reaction when you try it again.' In some cases, completely cutting out a food isn't necessary. If symptoms are mild, keeping small, tolerable amounts in the diet may help maintain oral tolerance while still easing discomfort, adds Singh.
