For a lot of us, these household names are synonymous with joy. For me, that was Saturday morning cartoons with a heaping bowl of Frosted Flakes. And if I'm being honest, I love Coca-Cola. And so do most Americans. By one measure, ultra-processed foods, things like Cheez-Its or Fruit Loops, made up about 60% of American diets. Which makes sense, considering it's everywhere, and in a lot of cases, cheaper than fresh food. That means for someone trying to budget their money and time, easy package foods are all the more enticing. And let's be real, they're tasty as hell. But behind every toucan on a box of Froot Loops lies a dark secret. We don't just love these foods because they taste good. The chemistry of them is artificially designed to hook us. Decades of research has been poured into discovering the perfect levels of sugar, salt, and fat to trigger our brains not just to want, but to crave. And this week, they came under scrutiny from an unlikely place. For

20 years, I've gone up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease that I have in this country. On August 23rd of last year, God

sent me President Trump.

This is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Yes, as in that RFK and those Kennedys. The reason his voice sounds like that is due to a medical condition called spasmodic dysphonia. And unlike his dad, who's been canonized by Democrats, Kennedy is Donald Trump's pick to be in charge of health and human services. As of this week, he's been confirmed to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the financing of Medicare and Medicaid, and also the Food and Drug Administration.

Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?

I probably did say that. Kennedy's a

controversial figure, someone both Republican and Democratic senators have been wary about. Prior to becoming a presidential candidate and then Trump's pick for HHS, Kennedy was a prominent vaccine skeptic, and he's promoted a dubious claim that the measles and mumps vaccines cause autism, a claim that's widely disputed within the medical community. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy proposed COVID was a bioweapon. Then he sued the government to prevent the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines based on false claims. At one point in his 2024 presidential campaign, Kennedy also floated the theory that the pesticide atrazine was infecting the water supply and could potentially lead children to develop gender dysphoria and then become transgender. They

took male frogs, gave them atrazine, 10% of them turned into female and produced fertile eggs. And we're subjecting our children to exposure to that every day. What is atrazine? It's in the water. It's a pesticide.

The author of that study, Kennedy mentioned, is actually named Tyrone Hayes, and he's a professor at UC Berkeley. And when Hayes was asked about Kennedy's comments, he'd bluntly rejected them, and said there's no data on atrazine's effect on human gender identity. Perhaps more importantly, he also pointed out that frogs and humans have very different biologies. Kennedy's concerning record on science, however, hasn't completely led him astray. In fact, Kennedy's conspiratorial mindset and concerns about institutional capture of the government have made him a vocal opponent of the influence of processed food companies on our food system. Something

is poisoning the American people, and we know that the primary culprits are changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical intensive processed foods.

Now, even in this crusade, Kennedy has promoted some questionable ideas. One being that people should consume raw milk, which the FDA, CDC and many scientists in the field warn has risks of containing diseases in it. Perhaps most importantly right now, H5N1, also known as bird flu. But when it comes to ultra-processed foods and their influence, in this area, Kennedy is actually in alignment with decades of research, much of it funded by the food companies themselves. These food companies have long been aware of the addictive nature of their food, often before the general public is. And that's been a selling point for them. It's why Coca-Cola refers to their best customers as, quote,

heavy users. This is all what led me to talking to Andrew Gallegos, who we heard from earlier.