RFK Jr. faces grilling on ‘anti-vaccine’ comments and animal ‘mutilation’ at confirmation hearing: Trump live updates

Consumers have repeatedly raised concerns over the number of potentially harmful additives and pesticides added to their foods, substances that are often outlawed in Europe.

Health officials have also sounded the alarm over ultra-processed foods and America’s escalating obesity crisis, with 73 percent of adults now overweight or obese.

Mr Kennedy proposes to change all that with his radical policies aiming to ban pesticides, food additives, seed oils and some ultra-processed foods.

Details on which could be banned are not clear, although the idea formed a key plank of his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ plan, which he said aimed to provide families ‘with safe food and end the chronic disease epidemic plaguing our children’.

He has only explicitly mentioned Yellow 5, but similar ingredients that could be under the microscope are Red 40, Blue 1, titanium dioxide, propylparaben and potassium bromate, which are often added to sweets and baked goods.

The ingredients, which are either banned or heavily regulated in Europe, have been the focus of new laws trying to make food safer.

Democratic states like California, New York and Illinois have been spearheading efforts to ban these substances in the US at present.

California has a ban on four additives — brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and red dye No 3 — which is set to come into force in January 2027.

It is also possible he will look to tighten regulations around contaminants in food, such as lead and cadmium that can be detected in spices and dark chocolate and has been linked to neurodevelopmental problems.

Robert F Kennedy Jr. has been praised for calling out medical and pharmaceutical companies who profit from people’s chronic illnesses, like obesity and diabetes.

In an unearthed interview with Dr Phil, he slammed pharma giants for ‘making money from keeping us sick’ and promoting dependency on weight-loss drugs at a huge cost to the taxpayer – instead of encouraging people to make healthy lifestyle choices.

He linked his complaint to proposed legislation to make weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy available to around a million obese Americans.

Under the Biden-era policy, seniors enrolled in Medicare and low-income people enrolled in Medicaid would gain access to weight-control drugs for free.

RFK Jr. said he would rather provide people with organic food three times a day than hemorrhage trillions of dollars giving every obese American the expensive shots.

The Republican, who Donald Trump has nominated as his secretary for the Department of Health, instead said that ‘diabetes is treatable with food, with exercise.’

Caroline Kennedy has released an extraordinary video of comments to senators where she calls her cousin RFK Jr. a ‘predator’ who set family members on a path to drug addiction and mistreated small animals.

The daughter of president John F. Kennedy said she held back on criticism of her cousin during his failed presidential campaign due to her role as U.S. ambassador to Australia.

But she unloaded on her famous cousin in her statement on the eve of his Senate confirmation hearing, as he faces an uncertain future in the Senate as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department.