The Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has endeavored to radically improve American nutrition and address those elements of the food system that are contributing to the chronic disease epidemic.
The department has, for instance, flipped the "corrupt food pyramid," worked to remove petroleum-based synthetic dyes from America's food supply, raised awareness about the health risks of eating ultra-processed foods, and expanded research into nutrition and metabolic health.
On Wednesday, Kennedy announced a new Make America Healthy Again initiative aimed at curbing chronic disease and improving nutrition: teaching Americans to cook.
'Eating together as a family is a sacred ritual.'
Kennedy joined Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins and USDA national nutrition adviser Dr. Ben Carson in announcing the commencement of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Strategic Partnerships, which the USDA characterized as an effort to encourage "the private sector to participate in educating the American people about the importance of the Guidelines and how they serve as the foundation to better eating."
During the press conference Wednesday, Kennedy noted, "Every American can feed themselves cheaper than fast food."
A YouGov survey taken last month found that 36% of Americans said they cook food daily; 40% said they cook a few times a week; 10% said they cook once a week; and 2% said they never cook.
A study published last year in the journal Current Developments in Nutrition noted:
Poor dietary quality, including high intakes of ultraprocessed food and food-away-from-home, is associated with an array of adverse health outcomes, including increased BMI, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Home food preparation, “cooking,” offers an affordable strategy for reducing ultraprocessed food intake and away-from-home intake.
The same study said that "the percentage of United States adults cooking has increased since 2003; however, the overall mean time spent cooking among cookers has remained relatively stable."
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"One of the challenges that we're facing and that we're working on all kinds of innovative devices to solve is that Americans have forgotten how to cook," said Kennedy. "The convenience of fast food is one of the things that attracts them, and many of them don't have the cutlery, they don't have the pots and pans, they don't have the cutting boards, and they don't know how to shop."
The health secretary said that he and his team have been discussing possibly deploying the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service and/or other organizations within HHS "to go out and actually teach people to cook."
Kennedy underscored that making and eating meals together is about far more than just bodily health.
"President Trump has talked about the spiritual malaise in our country. That spiritual malaise comes from the breakdown of families; it comes from the fragmentation, the atomization, the isolation — particularly in our children. They don't feel connections any more," said Kennedy.
"Cooking ... and eating together as a family is a sacred ritual," continued Kennedy, "and it's something that brings families together for an hour or two hours a day, where they talk, where they interact, where they work together on an act of creation, and they eat together in this wonderful ritual that brings families together.
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A study published Monday in the Milbank Quarterly, an esteemed peer-reviewed health policy journal, indicated that ultra-processed foods "share key engineering strategies adopted from the tobacco industry, such as dose optimization and hedonic manipulation."
While the overlap in approach and fallout is striking, it's also unsurprising given the industries' entanglements. After all, tobacco companies like R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris acquired food companies such as Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco in decades past.
'Not simply natural products but highly engineered delivery systems.'
UPFs are defined by the NOVA food classification system as "industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories from food substrates or other organic sources (flavor enhancers, colors, and several food additives used to make the product hyper-palatable)."
Grocery stores are replete with UPFs, which include store-bought biscuits; frozen desserts, chocolate, and candies; soda and other carbonated soft drinks; prepackaged meat and vegetables; frozen pizzas; fish sticks and chicken nuggets; packaged breads; instant noodles; chocolate milk; breakfast cereals; and sweetened juices.
Numerous studies have linked UPFs to serious health conditions.
A massive peer-reviewed 2024 study published in the BMJ, the British Medical Association's esteemed journal, for instance, found evidence pointing to "direct associations between greater exposure to ultra-processed foods and higher risks of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease-related mortality, common mental disorder outcomes, overweight and obesity, and type 2 diabetes."
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In the new study published this week, researchers from Harvard University, Duke University, and the University of Michigan noted that like cigarettes, UPFS "are not simply natural products but highly engineered delivery systems designed specifically to maximize biological and psychological reinforcement and habitual overuse."
The researchers identified a number of commonalities between ultra-processed foods and beverages, which apparently now dominate the supply across much of the globe, and ultra-processed cigarettes.
The primary reinforcer in ultra-processed cigarettes is nicotine, which is optimized for rapid delivery. UPFs also have primary reinforcers optimized for rapid delivery, namely refined carbohydrates and added fats.
Just as the nicotine dose in ultra-processed cigarettes is standardized — 1% to 2% by weight — "to balance reward and aversion," the researchers noted that refined carbohydrates and fats are precisely calibrated in UPFs to "maximize hedonic impact."
"On a biological level, carbohydrates and fats activate separate gut-brain reward pathways. Refined carbohydrates stimulate dopamine release via the vagus nerve, whereas fats do so through intestinal lipid sensing and cholecystokinin signaling," said the study. "When consumed together, their effects are supra-additive: the mesolimbic dopamine response can rise to 300% above baseline, compared with 120% to 150% for fat alone."
"This makes UPFs with high levels of refined carbohydrates and added fats some of the most potently rewarding substances in the modern diet," added the study.
In both ultra-processed cigarettes and food, the reinforcers are reportedly rapidly absorbed or digested; the reward is short-lived, leading to a desire for more; flavorants and sweeteners are added to processed ingredient bases to amplify appeal; risks of use abound.
The researchers noted further that both the tobacco and food industries have also worked diligently in their marketing to "create the illusion of reduced harm while preserving their core addictive properties."
"Many UPFs share more characteristics with cigarettes than with minimally processed fruits or vegetables and therefore warrant regulation commensurate with the significant public-health risks they pose," said the paper.
The researchers indicated that their analysis demonstrates "how UPFs meet established addiction-science benchmarks, particularly when viewed through parallels with tobacco."
The apparent aim of such scholarship is to provide the "basis for policies that constrain manufacturers, restrict marketing, and prioritize structural interventions."
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The $15-a-day debate is about whether we still value self-reliance, basic household skills, and personal responsibility.
Teaching people how to cook real food isn’t oppression, austerity, or punishment; it's independence and agency.
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