Food giants are already winning the fight RFK Jr. started

A Promise, a Rule Change, and a Very Public Discrepancy

The FDA made genuine news this week. After 67 years, the agency is finally tearing up the Generally Recognized as Safe rule, the regulatory shortcut that allowed food companies to add new chemical ingredients to your food with zero independent scientific review, no notification to regulators, and no public record. Going forward, manufacturers must disclose those ingredients in a public-facing database and provide the science that was supposed to justify their safety claims all along.

That is not nothing. But it is also very far from what was promised.

RFK Jr. told Joe Rogan's audience earlier this year that a federal definition of ultra-processed food would arrive by April 2026, complete with front-of-package traffic-light labeling for every product in the grocery store. It is August. There is no definition. And as Neeta argues in this episode, based on what is visible in public records right now, there is no clear path to one arriving any time soon.

What the FDA Actually Changed, and What It Did Not

The GRAS overhaul is real and meaningful. A public ingredient database is a genuine transparency win. Requiring companies to back up decades-old safety claims with actual science could expose a significant number of additives that have never faced independent scrutiny.

But the gaps are equally significant. Food manufacturers still get to select the scientists who evaluate their own ingredients. Chemicals that are already banned across the European Union and OECD countries, including titanium dioxide, BHA, and potassium bromate, remain legal in the US supply chain. Europe operates on a precautionary principle: ingredients are considered unsafe until proven safe before they can enter the market. The American system still works the other way around.

And the headline omission: no definition of ultra-processed food. Without one, there is nothing to enforce, no labeling standard to build, and no legal threshold for any of the sweeping changes that have been publicly promoted.

A $4.8 Trillion Reason for Inertia

It is worth pausing on the scale of what is at stake for the industry. US food manufacturing alone represents close to $2.3 trillion across more than 21,000 companies. Add restaurants at $1.5 trillion and grocery at nearly another trillion, and you have an industry with extraordinary resources and an obvious motivation to move slowly.

The lobbying response reflects that. Kraft Heinz is running a high-profile campaign framing regulatory change as a threat to food affordability. The American Beverage Association, Nestle, PepsiCo, and Tyson are all reported to be spending at record levels, largely through trade associations and front groups that absorb the public-relations cost so individual brands do not have to argue openly for positions that poll badly.

The litigation strategy is equally telling. According to reporting in The Guardian, 235 lawsuits have been filed against governments across five countries since 2010. Most have been lost by the industry, but the goal, experts allege, is delay rather than victory: slow the regulatory process enough that momentum dissipates.

Some companies are also contesting the FDA's authority over GRAS disclosure entirely, arguing that Congress, not the agency, holds that power. Given Congress's recent legislative output, that argument functions as a practical veto.

The Mystery at the Center of the Story

Here is where the episode gets genuinely strange. In its Monday announcement, the FDA stated that it is coordinating with the USDA on an ultra-processed food definition currently under review at the Office of Management and Budget. RFK Jr. and HHS have made similar claims publicly.

The food industry flatly contradicts this. Their statement says the OMB submission is a white paper, not a binding rule, and that USDA is not involved at all.

The OMB's own public website appears to support the industry's version. The submission listed is from FDA and HHS only. No USDA.

That is not a minor discrepancy. Either the agency is misrepresenting the scope of an interagency process, or the industry is mischaracterizing a document. Both cannot be true. And the fact that public records seem to back the industry's account makes this an uncomfortable moment for the administration's credibility on food policy.

What This Means Going Forward

The scientific case for action is not in dispute. A major Lancet review published at the end of 2025 concluded that ultra-processed foods damage every major organ system in the body, a finding that places this squarely in the same category of known, documented public health risks that have historically taken decades and enormous political will to address.

The GRAS disclosure rule is a step, and a real one. But transparency without enforcement is a limited tool. Until there is a legal definition of ultra-processed food, there is no regulatory hook for front-of-package labeling, no standard for school lunch programs, no threshold for litigation to clear.

The short-term outlook, as Neeta puts it, is that no such definition is coming this year. The industry is too large, the lobbying too well-funded, the legal challenges too ready, and the political commitment too murky. The fight over what goes in your food is just getting started.