Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
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This Mother's Day, be the dad who went to Jared. Now get 20% off storewide for Mother's Day. Exclusions apply. See store for details. Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last fall, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was angling for a position in the second Trump administration...

He introduced the slogan, Make America Healthy Again. Maha. It riffed on MAGA, but focused on themes far more familiar in liberal circles. Toxins in the environment, biodiversity, and healthy eating. So it's all kind of confusing. At the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy said,

is undermining public trust in vaccines even during a deadly measles outbreak. And he's overseeing massive cuts to research across American science, ending critical diabetes studies, for example. But meanwhile, the FDA says it wants to curtail the use of certain food dyes, and Kennedy is talking about seed oils and processed food. Here's Kennedy recently in an interview with Sean Hannity that took place at a Florida burger chain. You know, all the science...

Kennedy has put ultra-processed food, or junk food, call it what you will,

right into the political conversation. Now, you wouldn't necessarily expect this, given his boss's devotion to fast food chains. It's not probably healthy, but I'm not sure I believe in that. You know, you eat, who knows? You know, they say, don't eat this food, don't eat that. Well, maybe those foods are good for you. The New Yorker's Dhruv Kular is a physician, and he's been reporting on the American diet for The New Yorker.

When I started researching this topic, I knew that I wanted to talk to Marian Nessel. She really put on the map the ways in which politics and economics influence our food environment and ultimately our health. Marian Nessel is a professor emerita at New York University, and her books include Food Politics. She spoke with Dhruv Kular.

I want to talk a little bit about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. You know, he has many controversial claims, of course, on vaccines and other parts of health. But he is very concerned about ultra-processed foods and rates of chronic disease in this country. And what do you make of, you know, the potential that he's going to drive real change in this area that's towards the good?

Well, first of all, when President Trump tweeted that he was nominating RFK Jr. for this position, he talked about the food industrial complex. I nearly fell off my chair. That sounds like me. I talk about the food industrial complex. And the first thing...

that the president did was to appoint this high-level council, which is to write a report on the nutritional health of the population and how to prevent chronic disease. And when I read that, I thought, this is so exciting. And my second thought was, wait a minute, I've seen this already. Didn't we already do this? Isn't this exactly what Michelle Obama did?

Well, that's what I want to ask you is the rhetoric seems to be there, but are we going to see the requisite action? And what would that action even look like? Like if you were to counsel RFK Jr. on how to actually make a dent on ultra-processed foods and the chronic diseases that are associated with it,

What would you want to see him do? Let me first state very clearly that nobody has asked me. I think what you have to do, first of all, is you have to put restrictions on the food industry. You have to stop the food industry from marketing junk foods to kids, ultra-processed if you like. You've got to stop that.

Is RFK Jr. going to take on the food industry? I'll believe it when I see it. When Michelle Obama attempted to do even much, much less than this just to get food companies to voluntarily stop marketing junk foods to kids, the pushback on it was extraordinary from exactly the people who are for it now. Well, I'm glad times have changed. I want to see them do something. Yeah.

What exactly are ultra-processed foods? Like, how do we define ultra-processed foods when we're trying to study them? You have to understand the background of this a little bit. And that is that a professor of public health in Brazil, Carlos Monteiro, devised this concept in 2009. And he divided foods into four categories, unprocessed or minimally processed foods, like corn on the cob or apples or, you know, things that you just eat.

A second category was processed culinary ingredients. And by that, he means salt, sugars, salad oils, vinegar, the kinds of things that you cook with. And then the third category is processed foods, things that are frozen, foods that have been packaged, foods that have been cut and processed in some way. But they're really pretty simple.

The fourth category is different. These are foods that have been industrially processed. The operating definition is you can't make them in your home kitchen. I brought some groceries that I was hoping that we could go through together. And you can tell me whether they're ultra-processed, and if so, what is making them ultra-processed. Okay. Let's go.

Let's take a look here. What do we got? Oh, Doritos. The prototype. I can probably guess which category this falls into, but just take a look and tell us what makes it ultra-processed. This is the prototypical ultra-processed food because it started out with corn. Corn is the first ingredient. Does this look anything like corn to you? Not so much. No. Industrially processed. It's got real food in it. It has corn, vegetable oil, but

But then it has corn maltodextrin as the third ingredient. But it's got things like whey protein concentrate, potassium salt, tomato powder, lactose, spices, artificial colors, lots of them, disodium inositate, disodium guanylate. You don't have that in your home kitchen? I don't.

I don't have that in my kitchen, and I cannot buy it at my local grocery store. These foods are processed to make them. A lot of people use the word addiction. I'm a little uncomfortable with it, but there it is. The idea that that old Frito-Lay's commercial that you can't eat just one, that's exactly the point of these. These foods were deliberately designed to be profitable.

That was their purpose. They weren't designed for public health purposes. This is something that I would walk past in the grocery store and think, okay, 100% whole wheat bread. This has got to be good. This cannot be ultra-processed. Whole wheat bread is in what I call the conditionally ultra-processed

because you can get whole wheat breads that are ultra-processed, and you can also get whole wheat breads that are not. Okay, the ingredient list. I love starting. Whole wheat flour, nothing wrong with that.

Second, third ingredient, wheat gluten. Uh-oh. So that's to boost the protein content. Sugar, yeast, fine. Vegetable oil, fine. Salt, fine. Preservatives. Calcium propionate. Sorbic acid. Datum. Natural flavors. There's no such thing. Monoglycerides. Monocalcium phosphate. Soy lecithin. Citric acid. Vinegar.

Sesame seeds. That sounds extremely ultra-processed. Ultra-processed. And why would they do that? Two reasons. Yeah. People like soft bread. People don't like whole wheat bread. Whole wheat bread is an acquired taste. It's very difficult for people. Humans have been making white bread for millennia because it tastes better. It's easier to digest. You don't have to chew it as much. This stuff is really soft. Mm-hmm.

Very, very soft. So that's what the datum and these other things in there are doing. And it'll sit on the shelf for a really long time. It won't get moldy. All right. What do we got here? We have yogurt. So most people would think yogurt. That's pretty healthy. We have a very vanilla yogurt here. So maybe there's some trouble there. So what's this one?

So it's got cultured grade A nonfat milk. Yes. Water. Yes. Modified food starch. Sigh. Oh, it's got allulose, one of those indigestible sweeteners. Kosher gelatin, cornstarch, citric acid. Where'd you find this? Sucralose, an artificial sweetener. Tricalcium phosphate, potassium sorbate.

Oh, another artificial sweetener. This thing has three artificial sweeteners in it. Doesn't have any sugar. Doesn't say anything about the cultures. What you want in yogurt is you want all those friendly bacteria to make your microbiome happy. I'm not sure the friendly bacteria like all this stuff. So...

A yogurt that has an emulsifier or a thickener is surely not the same as a bag of Doritos or gummy bears, right? No, it's not. But how do you help people understand that nuance? Is it like if you could make it at your home, but it has this one ingredient, it's probably okay? Just try to help us understand.

I mean, everybody knows what junk foods are. You know, when I talk about ultra-processed foods, everybody gets it right away. If you've got a yogurt in front of you and it's got M&Ms added to it and it's loaded with sugar and it tastes like a dessert, you know that you're dealing with something that's ultra-processed. But then aren't we just back at square one where ultra-processed foods is a fancy way to say junk food? Oh, sure.

The point about the ultra-processed food classification is that people were able to do research. And this research has been overwhelming in its consistency.

Let me tell you, in nutrition, this is very unusual. It's unusual to have this level of consistency where every study of ultra-processed food shows that people who eat a lot of these kinds of things have worse health outcomes. And the controlled clinical trials that show that these foods get people to eat more, not only more, but a lot more, are the results.

So tell us a little bit about the ways in which people have been studying this concept and why you think it's such a consistent story. The observational research looks at what people self-report eating.

All it can do is demonstrate association, that if you eat a lot of ultra-processed foods, the chances are, and we're talking about probabilities here, you have a higher chance of gaining weight, becoming obese, having type 2 diabetes, having heart disease later on. And the problem with self-reports in nutrition is, I'm going to put this politely, people have a hard time remembering what they eat.

Out and out, they lie. So to get around that, you need really well-controlled clinical trials. These are breathtakingly expensive to run because they require a locked metabolic ward facility in which people volunteer to be locked up for some period of time, never more than four weeks because people can't stand it. And everything they eat, drink, drink,

or ingest is monitored and everything they excrete is monitored and their behavior and their physical activity and everything else is monitored and they can't lie or cheat.

I had a chance to go to the NIH to observe one of these clinical trials recently, and it's hard to overstate how meticulously they go about doing things. I mean, someone comes into the lab, every bite that they put in their body is measured. The chefs who are cooking the food, you know, they are basically doing chemistry experiments in the kitchen to try to make sure that the amount of salt and fiber is exactly matched in ultra-processed and processed diets. When people were on the

unprocessed diet versus the ultra-processed diet. On the ultra-processed diet, they ate 500 calories more each and every day, which is an enormous increase. It's just an enormous amount, and they gained weight. Of course they gained weight. They gained a pound a week. That's 500 calories a day, 3,500 calories a week. That's a pound. The people who were in this study didn't know which diet they were eating.

Because they all tasted good. They liked the food. The chefs must be unbelievable. Then the big heavy criticism of the study is that it's too short and that there would be regression to the mean later on. And that's possible. So I tell the critics –

great, go ahead and criticize, but why aren't you fighting to get him more money to do longer studies with more people? So the headline finding here is that ultra-processed foods tend to make people eat more than they otherwise would. And it seems there might be two reasons for that. One is hyper-palatability, and so combinations of sugar and fat, exactly, yum. These combinations of things that you don't often find in nature, but you find in ultra-processed foods in high quantities, people can't eat just one, as you said.

The other big driver seems to be calorie density. So for every bite that you take, there's just many more calories per bite. So of course, you're going to tend to eat more and your body may not have time to realize it's full before it's already consumed many more calories.

You could envision ultra-processed foods doing a number of other things to the body. I mean, one is changing the microbiome. And so maybe the microbiome changes in interesting ways. You process food differently than you would on a more natural diet, let's say. Two is changing the endocrine system in some way, the hormones that help us regulate how full we feel and how our body responds to food. Yeah.

And the third is our taste buds. You know, if you're getting big hits of salt and sugar and fat, your taste buds are going to adapt in a way that they want more of that over time. Well, we know that works with salt. Yes, okay. We absolutely know that, and with sugar. But those are difficult theories. I like simple explanations. The simple explanation is these things just are so yummy that people can't stop eating them. You know when you're eating a salad. You know when you've had enough salad.

You've got a bunch of Oreo cookies in front of you. Well, I'll just have one more. They're small. Yeah. I want to ask you about the dietary guidelines. So a group of experts met in the fall to preview their recommendations for the next five years of dietary guidelines for the United States.

And that group of nutrition experts at least seem to say that we don't have enough high-quality evidence to make a strong recommendation against ultra-processed foods. I think they talked about some caution around processed meats, but they declined to basically tell people in a clear way that you should avoid ultra-processed foods. What did you make of that?

They deliberately excluded any consideration of the controlled clinical trials because they said they were too short. So they were completely dismissed as if they never existed. All of the studies that they looked at were either animal studies or observational studies.

And on that basis, they said, well, we can't make a decision about it. I thought that was a very weak recommendation. I was very disappointed. What do you make of some of the other ideas? I mean, I'm thinking about things like no ultra-processed food in schools. I'm thinking about taxes on certain types of foods or food additives, changing the subsidies to corn and soy, for instance. You know, what do you make of those types of proposals? I'm for all of those. For all of those.

You know, I think if we're really going to change the food system, the first thing we have to do is get money out of politics. But that's a little off topic. Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. As I understand it, there's this what I call the vitamin era, you know, around the Great Depression and the World War II. There's the nutrient era, maybe mid-century to the 90s, where people are focused on individual nutrients and then kind of more of a dietary pattern era. Maybe we've been in that one since the 90s. How does...

ultra-processed food fit into that framework, if at all? Yeah, I mean, that's my trajectory. The first thing I was interested in was vitamins. I loved them all. They're all so interesting. Each one is different. They do different things in the body. To me, they were intellectually fascinating. I just adored them. And then I realized that people don't eat vitamins, except people who take supplements, and they eat food. And food is really complicated. Right.

Eventually I thought, well, wait a minute. People don't eat food, they eat diets. They're eating lots of different foods. These foods interact in different ways. The basic principles of nutrition are try to eat as much of a variety of real food as you can. I mean, the big change was the shift from not having enough nutrients to having too many calories. And then in 1980, the inflection point happened.

When President Reagan was elected and lots and lots of policy changes took place, then rates of obesity, the prevalence of obesity started to rise very, very rapidly. The reasons for that, I think, are pretty well understood. People ate more. And there's tons of evidence that people started eating more in the 1980s.

These portion sizes got larger, a sufficient explanation. So, Marian, you're someone who's probably thought about this more than anyone that I know. What's your relationship to food? How do you make the right decisions? Okay. And how do you choose the right foods? I like real food. I mean, I have my favorite junk foods and I eat my favorite junk foods. I just don't eat a lot of them. Yeah. Marian, this is so helpful. Is there anything that I haven't asked about that you want to make sure that we get to or that you want to add?

Well, just that this is such an interesting time in American politics. And I think it would be wonderful if RFK Jr. could make the food supply healthier. I just think that in order to do that, he's going to have to take on the food industry. And I don't think Trump has a...

a history of taking on corporations of any kind. So we'll see. Maybe he'll get them to volunteer. Maybe he'll be able to do what Michelle Obama was unable to do because of the opposition. I guess time will tell. Thank you. Lively. This was great. You're fun to talk to. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, I appreciate it. Marion Nessel is a nutrition researcher and the author of books including Food Politics, which is also the name of her blog. Dhruv Kular is a physician and a contributor to The New Yorker.

Now, after they spoke, one of the NIH's top scientists studying ultra-processed food, Kevin Hall, left the agency. Hall says that he experienced censorship. He wasn't allowed to speak to the media about research results that did not support what he called preconceived HHS narratives. A spokesman for the department told CNN that this was a deliberate distortion of the facts. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

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More fashion. The people want it. The people have asked for it. The people are getting it. Yes, everyone's in luck. I'm Nicole Phelps, the director of Vogue Runway, and I'm excited to announce that the run-through is coming to Tuesdays. The run-through is now going to be twice a week. Every Tuesday, join me and the Vogue Runway team as we dig into the latest fashion news. Thursdays will still be Khloe and Shoma talking about the latest in fashion and culture, per usual. And Tuesdays, more fashion. Fashion. Fashion.

The run through with Vogue is available wherever you get your podcasts. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Kelly Fasaneh. I'm here with the brilliant and perceptive David Remnick, who is not only the host of this show, he also writes the intros. This is such a setup. David, we're going to talk about one of the most influential bands of all time. Uh-huh.

I'm going to play you some tracks and explain why they're influential. And here is our first snippet. I'm all ears. ♪♪♪

David, name that band. Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk, of course. This is Rook Zook. I'm seeing them tomorrow. From their 1970 debut album. You're going to see Kraftwerk. I am at my kids' behest. Well, this will be a pre-concert primer for you then. Oh, I hope so.

Listeners of a certain age may know that song, Rook Zook, because it was used as the theme song to Newton's Apple, the public television show about science. And back then, Kraftwerk, they were kind of like a progressive rock band back then, right? It kind of almost sounds like Tubular Bells or one of those records. They've been around. I mean...

The Beatles had just broken up when they got together, Kraftwerk. Yes, early 70s. 73, too? Well, the debut record is 1970. And, you know, they're obsessed with electronic instruments, but also electronic rhythm, which turned out to be important to the history of music. Sure did. In 1974, they made this album called Autobahn. Here's a little bit of it. Ah, yes.

Ah, yes. I remember it well. The album was kind of a hit. It went to number five on the American album chart. And it was kind of, like a lot of great bands or great tracks, it was kind of considered a novelty record, right? Like these Germans singing about the Autobahn. The Autobahn, the Autobahn.

And there was this idea that, like, these artsy Germans from Dusseldorf were making the music of the future. And the funniest thing about that joke is it turned out to be true, more or less. Although, if you wanted to make a parody of German music, you probably couldn't do much better than this track, Trans Europe Express, 1977. Rendez-vous en Champs-Élysées Leave Paris in the morning with T.E. France

It's tidy, it's severe, there's lyrics about trains. But the funny thing about this is a few years later, Trans Europe Express was reborn as a track called Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa and Soul Sonic Force.

Yeah, something else is creeping in here. Yeah. And part of what I like about this history is it kind of flips the history of rock and roll, right? You have this rock and roll history of these beloved old black blues musicians and these upstart white bands are ripping them off. And here the role of the beloved black older blues musician is played by the members of Kraftwerk. Ha ha ha!

And, you know, it's funny how quickly that sound, that Kraftwerk-y sound comes to be associated with other things. It comes to be associated with break dancers and stuff. That's absolutely true. In the subway, more often than not, when you'd see break dancers, when it first kind of popped up, Kraftwerk was not an uncommon music to be, you know, the backing track for that genre.

for that scene as much as hip-hop. Did you ever bust out a little bit of cardboard and do some moves, David? Less frequently than you would have thought. I can barely spin on my feet. It wouldn't have worked well.

So in 1981, Kraftwerk, you know, synthesizers are not so new anymore. And Kraftwerk makes basically a concept album about a different emerging technology, the personal computer. Also turned out to be important. I heard that. They called it Computer World, and one of the best tracks is Numbers. Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

You know, the vocals kind of sound like they're coming from a speak-and-spell. But in fact, I believe they're coming from a device called the Language Translator, which was made by the same company, Texas Instruments, that made the speak-and-spell.

They were experimenting with all this stuff. And one of the things they realized is, you know, I think a lot of us thought that to be a hit, a song probably needed a catchy tune. I think what they realized is they got more and more interested in the textures and sounds that were coming out of these electronic equipments. And they realized that you could have a rigid electronic beat

but somehow have enough happening that it wouldn't be boring and it wouldn't be predictable. Or if it was predictable, it would be predictable in a good way. But they were arguably the first. Well, you know, a lot of people were using this stuff, right? Like Sly Stone has one of the first drum machine hits, right, in 1971. So, you know, people are using this electronic stuff, but there was something about their vision. And as with anything else, they put elements together in a way that was catchy.

It's a funny word to use about a track like Numbers, but Numbers comes back. Here's a way in which Numbers comes back. A trio from Florida called Anquette has a song called Shake It, Do the 61st. And if you listen closely, you can hear those chirping, fluttering synthesizers in the background from Numbers. Shake it, shake it.

That's the group Anquette. Yeah. So I know we are a little bit digressive. I'd like to get extra digressive here for a moment, David. Anquette, this group, had an album called Respect, executive produced by Luther Campbell from 2 Live Crew. And it includes a song about guys who don't pay their child support. And I guarantee you, this is a group from Florida, late 80s, you will never in a million years guess what this track is called. We don't pay child support and tell you lies.

The single is called Janet Reno, who at the time was, I believe, a U.S. attorney in Miami-Dade County. Oh, it was before she was in the Clinton administration. Yeah, because she was a local figure. And the idea was that if you don't pay your child support, Janet Reno was going to come after you. I don't know if she owns an autographed copy of that single, but I hope she does.

Anyway, back to Kraftwerk. This one particular track, Numbers, kept getting recycled and sampled and sampled. You might recognize the robotic counting in this techno track. ♪

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

And for a techno producer, that's a way of paying tribute to, you know, the eight, by this point, eight years old German track that helped inspire them. Okay, one last Kraftwerk track, Computer Love, from that same 1981 album, Computer World. It's kind of a love song about computers. I think the sense of humor in Kraftwerk is sometimes underrated. Overlooked. Yeah, they're like a kind of, there's a silliness to them or a sense of play. It's over.

This is familiar. And does the creativity and the innovation come to a halt at a certain point? Do they become an oldies band in a way? Well, I think it's fair to say most of the people who come to see them now are there for the older songs, right? They would call that a legacy act, right? Not oldies. It's pejorative. And the original members?

One of the original members, yes. So everybody else is kind of a replacement along the way. Yeah, so the heart of Kraftwerk was Florian Schneider and Ralf Hutter. Ralf Hutter is still alive and touring. Florian Schneider died in 2020. So, you know, it's partly an opportunity to pay tribute to this legacy. But David, I think you might have told on yourself a little bit. You said that this track, Computer Love, sounded kind of familiar. Something. I think I know why. Why?

Because Coldplay took the melody and used it for Talk from 2005. Wow. This is the ultimate musical lesson that no matter what kind of pioneer you are, you're going to come back to life as a Coldplay song. That's a hard fake. Kellef, thanks so much. I'll see you next time. Kellef Asana is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and you can find his work, of course, at newyorker.com.

The Kraftwerk tour is on to the UK and Europe in June. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deket.

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