Transcript
Anderson Cooper (0:07)
There is no way for any American to know if a product is safe if it is ultra processed. It's hard to find two people who disagree more on health policy than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And former FDA commissioner David Kessler. But they have found common ground over a common culprit, ultra processed food. How does this compare with tobacco? It's as large, if not larger.
Leslie Stahl (0:38)
Everyone keeps calling you the babies and you're 80.
Anderson Cooper (0:44)
Yes.
Leslie Stahl (0:45)
Eva Clark, Hanna Berger Moran and Mark Olsky are among, if not the youngest survivors of the Holocaust.
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A woman presented her baby to him.
Leslie Stahl (0:56)
He's now just seen all these dead bodies and there's a baby.
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This one we have to try to save.
Leslie Stahl (1:06)
I'm Leslie Stahl.
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I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim.
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I'm Cecilia Vega.
Anderson Cooper (1:14)
I'm Anderson Cooper. Those stories and in our last minute, filmmaker Ken Burns with a surprise. Tonight on 60 Minutes. Today, an increasing number of Americans across the political spectrum, from make America Healthy Again activists to everyday shoppers are voicing concern about the health impact of ultra processed foods, those boxed and wrapped in plastic ready to eat items lining grocery store shelves. Leading the charge are two men who disagree on pretty much everything else about public health, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And Dr. David Kessler, the former commissioner of the U.S. food and Drug Administration. The two men have found common ground over a common culprit, a 67 year old government classification for substances in our food. It's called grass or generally recognized as safe. Kennedy and Kessler say it has allowed big food companies to use ingredients without a full government safety review and flood the market with ultra processed foods that now make up 50% of our calories and 60% of our children's diets. Over the last 40 years, the United States has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to to handle. Energy dense, highly palatable, rapidly absorbable, ultra processed foods that have altered our metabolism and have resulted in the greatest increase in chronic disease in our history. Type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, hypertension, abnormal lipids, fatty liver, heart attacks, stroke, heart failure. From our food. From our food. David Kessler was commissioner of the U.S. food and Drug Administration during the 1990s when he helped expose how the tobacco companies manipulated nicotine levels to hook consumers. I am here to provide you with actual instances of of nicotine control and manipulation in the tobacco industry. If you raise your right hand. He was a driving force in bringing tobacco executives before Congress and turning public attention to the industry. He's now aiming to do the same with the food industry in terms of a public health crisis. How does this compare with tobacco? It's as large, if not larger. It's that significant. The scale of this. This affects everybody. Understand, not everybody smoked. Look at the number of people who consume ultra processed food. It touches all of us. 70% of Americans are either obese or overweight. And it's not because they got indolent or because we became lazy or because we suddenly developed giant appetites. It's because we're being given food that is low in nutrition and high in calories, and it's making. It's destroying our health. I see it when I go across the country. We met with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Last month after he issued new dietary guidelines that for the first time advise against highly processed food. You have said that these ultra processed foods are poisoning us. I think many Americans would be surprised to hear that we're seeing in our population people who are obscenely obese and at the same time malnourished. Who wants us? All right. Kennedy says that's largely because we don't know the health consequences of what we're eating. Thanks to the grass exemption enacted by Congress in 1958 that allows food companies to independently verify the safety of their ingredients with no government oversight if they are generally recognized by experts as safe. Pending White House approval, he intends to close that back door. That loophole was hijacked by the industry, and it was used to add thousands upon thousands of new ingredients into our food supply. In Europe, there's only 400 legal ingredients. This agency does not know how many ingredients there are in American food. We do not know. They do not know. The estimates are between 4,000 and 10,000. We have no idea what they are. How do we know what is safe to eat? There is no way for any American to know if a product is safe if it is ultra processed. For his part, David Kessler is petitioning Kennedy to go further and outright revoke the grasp status for dozens of processed refined carbohydrates, sweeteners and starches such as corn syrup and maltodextrin, unless the companies can prove they are safe and not fueling obesity. They took starch, right, Those cheap, easy calories, and they converted those into. Into a whole panoply of ingredients that it was able to reassemble. And those products are so rapidly absorbed in our system that they cause metabolic havoc. They target the brain reward circuits to keep us coming back for more, they trigger overeating. They deprive us of any sense of fullness, what we all call empty calories. Those calories are not just empty. They're ending up in your liver. And that fat in your liver is going to migrate into other organs, and it's the cause of cardiometabolic disease. Kessler, a pediatrician, filed his petition with the FDA after zeroing in on grass ingredients listed in plain sight on the backs of packaged foods. Pick up any one of these products, you have a look at the ingredient label. A lot of them are things I can't even pronounce right. Is that food? Corn syrup, corn solids, maltodextran, dextrose, xylose, high fructose corn syrup. And then these ingredients were subjected to industrial processing so that our system can't handle it. We will act on David Kessler's position, and the questions that he's asking are questions that FDA should have been asking a long, long time ago. Kennedy told us he will use gold standard science to review grass ingredients, but his credibility on that score has been widely called into question because of his history of vaccine skepticism and his agency's revision of the childhood vaccine schedule. Are you concerned at all that your stance on vaccines might make people reluctant to support you on ultra processed foods? My stance on vaccines? The same people should have good science and they should have choice. Some doctors worry that the new immunization schedule sows confusion and will lead some Americans not to vaccinate their children. People who want to get those vaccines can get them and they can get them fully insured. Secretary and I, you know, we disagree on a number of issues. I mean, in the strongest possible terms, when it comes to vaccines, I disagree. But if he's willing to take action on these ultra processed foods, I will be the first to applaud that. If you don't trust him on vaccines, why trust him when it comes to ultra processed foods? I don't think it's a question of trust, Bill. I mean, this country is ill. I'm a doc. I care about the public health of this country. And if we can make progress on that, let's do that. The impact on children has been particularly alarming. In December, San Francisco City Attorney David Chu filed a landmark lawsuit against 10 manufacturers of Ultra processed foods, alleging that, like the tobacco companies, they knowingly engineered and marketed addictive, dangerous products while hiding the risks and causing a public health crisis. The Consumer Brands association, one of the largest trade groups representing the food industry, declined to respond to us about the lawsuit. But in a statement to 60 Minutes said there's no agreed upon scientific definition of ultra processed foods. And companies adhere to rigorous evidence based safety standards and nutrition policy established by the FDA to deliver safe, affordable and convenient products that consumers depend on every day. And the granddaddy Oreos. We met with food author Michael Pollan, who for decades has been warning about inexpensive factory processed food. Granola bars. Those look very healthy. All of these would qualify as ultra processed foods, even though they're very different. You know, we have a snack food, couple snacks. Nature Valley, I would argue, because of the number of ingredients in it. So there's a lot of sugar in here, but this is sold as health food. Pollan commends Kennedy for shining a light on ultra processed foods. He ties their ubiquity to longstanding federal farm subsidies. We subsidize as taxpayers through the farm bill the least healthy calories in the diet, most of which goes to people farming corn and soybeans. What's wrong with corn and soybeans? When you hear corn and soy, you think food. This is not corn on the cob. This is commodity corn. It's not the sweet corn we eat in the summer. You can't eat it. In fact, it's all starch, big cobs. You'd break your teeth on it. And then soy, which is not in the form we grow it as a commodity, is not edamame. You can't eat it. These are raw ingredients for processed foods and animal feed. So the government is subsidizing crops that are making us unhealthy? Yes. Yeah. One way to look at it is we are supporting both sides in the war on type 2 diabetes. We're subsidizing the high fructose corn syrup that's contributing to causing it, and then we're paying for the healthcare costs. I mean, it makes no sense at all. In a statement, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest general farm organization in the US Told us a healthy diet relies on a variety of nutrient dense foods and a balance of healthy fats, carbohydrates, protein and fiber, some of which can come from shelf stable foods. Why are there not subsidies to produce more of the healthy foods? Cheap food is the goal of all governments. If you were to remove these corn subsidies, there's concern that the price of corn would raise and that would be a problem for the whole food industry, which of course is a very powerful lobby and would be a problem for the consumer. Conceivably, when you're taking on ultra processed foods, you're also taking on powerful industries, big, aggressive, big food. What makes you believe you will prevail? My belief that I will prevail is because we have the President behind us. But the President has shown himself to be pretty much against regulations. So why would he support regulating ultra processed foods? Well, I'm not saying that we're going to regulate ultra processed food. Our job is to make sure that everybody understands what they're getting, to have an informed public. There are Americans who live in so called food deserts with little access to whole foods and these are foods that many of them can't afford anyway. So how do you speak to that American? We are laser focused on making all of these foods affordable and accessible to every American. The Consumer Brands association told us the GRAS process enables companies to innovate to meet consumer demand and that food companies adhere to FDA's science and risk based evaluations of ingredients before and after they are in the marketplace. David Kessler says that's not enough. We change how this country views tobacco. We need to change how this country views these ultra processed foods. Would you like to see the CEOs of Big Food companies come before Congress and raise their hand and be questioned like the tobacco industry was? I'd like them to understand the consequences of what they are doing and to do something about it.