Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s food fight is coming to Brussels

BRUSSELS — The Make America Healthy Again crusade against Big Food is crossing the Atlantic. Donald Trump’s health secretary has made packaged, mass-produced munchies one of the targets of his health agenda. And while Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s broadsides against vaccines have alarmed Brussels he has found an ally in the European Commission on this pillar of the MAHA mission. Health Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi — former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s man in Brussels — has backed Kennedy’s push, saying Europe and the U.S. share an ambition to tackle unhealthy diets. “I welcome the US – including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – putting a stronger spotlight on this agenda including the #eatrealfood campaign,” Várhelyi wrote on LinkedIn after his appearance at the USA-EU Transatlantic Business Summit in Brussels earlier this year. But sharing an ambition is the easy part. Deciding what ultra-processed food is — and whether or how it should be regulated: not so much.At the heart of the debate is a growing body of research linking UPFs to conditions such as obesity and diabetes, risks everyone says they want to reduce. But the challenge is translating that evidence into public health policy without dictating what people eat. An ashtray and lit cigarette sit beside a cigarette pack with a warning label on a café terrace in Lorient, France, on Oct. 19, 2019. | Maud Dupuy/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images For industry, the priority is protecting personal choice. For public health advocates, the problem is systemic. What appears to be an individual choice is often the result of inequality, they argue — influenced by income, education and a food environment that can make healthier options harder to access. The issue has been pitting health advocates against Big Food companies on multiple continents for years now — but global momentum is moving toward regulation as the World Health Organization prepares to unveil new tools to help policymakers this week. The “million dollar question,” as health activist Liz Arnanz put it, is how to define ultra-processed foods. The term might bring to mind salty chips, preservative-filled pastries and sugary drinks, but that category can also include whole-grain bread or fortified yogurt. “We are seeing a huge increase of deaths linked to unhealthy diets,” said Arnanz, of the NCD Alliance, an NGO fighting against noncommunicable diseases. Not only are UPFs usually “high in fats and sugar and sodium,” she argued, but there is also “an independent unhealthiness layer of the processing of food.” Her last point is a controversial one, directly disputed by industry and up for debate among scientists. Where health advocates see cheap junk food that’s chemically engineered to be addictive, the industry can point to innovations that make products more nutritious, less expensive and safer to eat, for longer. Echoes of the tobacco debate For all the increasingly tough talk around UPFs from both Kennedy and Várhelyi, concrete regulation remains scarce in both Washington and Brussels. Latin America has arguably been the trailblazer, with Brazil a leading example. It became one of the first countries to explicitly tell its population to avoid UPFs, and backed this up with rules to limit them in schools. On the international level, the WHO is developing its own global guidance, with plans to present a food profiling tool intended to help governments decide on UPF regulations on Monday at an event in Nuremberg, Germany. The global health body has come down hard on the UPF industry. It accused it in a 2024 report of using the same playbook as alcohol and tobacco industries “to influence entire systems,” from “political lobbying and spreading misinformation and disinformation in the media, to harmful financial practices, and targeted marketing strategies directed at children and young people.” Connecting the consumption of processed foods with the tobacco and fossil fuel industries is “irres