{"id":48784,"date":"2025-07-08T13:30:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-08T13:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/48784\/"},"modified":"2025-07-08T13:30:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-08T13:30:13","slug":"rfk-jr-promoted-a-food-company-he-says-is-healthy-their-meals-are-ultraprocessed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/48784\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Jr. Promoted A Food Company He Says Is Healthy. Their Meals Are Ultraprocessed."},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr<\/a>. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees.<\/p>\n

He even thanked Mom\u2019s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals \u201cwithout additives\u201d to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,\u201d Kennedy said<\/a> in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company\u2019s Oklahoma facility last week.<\/p>\n

But an Associated Press review of Mom\u2019s Meals menu, including the ingredients and nutrition labels, shows that the company\u2019s offerings are the type of heat-and-eat, ultraprocessed foods that Kennedy routinely criticizes for making people sick.<\/p>\n

The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is perfectly possible to make meals like this with real foods and no ultra-processing additives but every one of the meals I looked at is loaded with such additives,\u201d Nestle said. \u201cWhat\u2019s so sad is that they don\u2019t have to be this way. Other companies are able to produce much better products, but of course they cost more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mom\u2019s Meals do not have the artificial, petroleum dyes that Kennedy has pressured companies to remove from products, she noted.<\/p>\n

Mom\u2019s Meals\u2019 products \u201cdo not include ingredients that are commonly found in ultra-processed foods\u201d such as synthetic food dyes, high fructose corn syrup, certain sweeteners or synthetic preservatives that are banned in Europe, Teresa Roof, a company spokeswoman, said in an email. She did not address the company\u2019s use of additives in the foods that make them ultraprocessed.<\/p>\n

The meals are a \u201chealthy alternative\u201d to what many people would find in their grocery stores, said Andrew Nixon, U.S. Health and Human Services spokesman, in response to questions about Mom\u2019s Meals.<\/p>\n

Mom\u2019s Meals is one of several companies across the U.S. that deliver \u201cmedically tailored\u201d at-home meals. The meal programs are covered by Medicaid for some enrollees, including people who are sick with cancer or diabetes, as well as some older Americans who are enrolled in certain Medicare health insurance plans.<\/p>\n

Patients recently discharged from the hospital can also have the meals delivered, according to the company\u2019s website.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear how much federal taxpayers spend on providing meals through Medicaid and Medicare every year. An investigation by STAT news<\/a> last year found that some states were spending millions of dollars to provide medically tailored meals to Medicaid enrollees that were marketed as healthy and \u201cdietitian approved.\u201d But many companies served up meals loaded with salt, fat or sugar \u2014 all staples of an unhealthy American\u2019s diet, the report concluded.<\/p>\n

Defining ultraprocessed foods can be tricky. Most U.S. foods are processed, whether it\u2019s by freezing, grinding, fermentation, pasteurization or other means. Foods created through industrial processes and with ingredients such as additives, colors and preservatives that you couldn\u2019t duplicate in a home kitchen are considered the most processed.<\/p>\n

Kennedy has said healthier U.S. diets are key to his vision to \u201cMake America Healthy Again.\u201d His call for Americans to increase whole foods in their diets has helped Kennedy build his unique coalition of Trump loyalists and suburban moms who have branded themselves as \u201cMAHA.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a recent social media post where he criticized the vast amount of ultraprocessed foods in American diets, Kennedy urged Americans to make healthier choices.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis country has lost the most basic of all freedoms \u2014 the freedom that comes from being healthy,\u201d Kennedy said.<\/p>\n

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Aleccia reported from Temecula, Calif.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":48785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[210,1182,15010,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-48784","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-nutrition","10":"tag-robert-f-kennedy-jr","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114817861297570693","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}