"When President Donald Trump named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his choice to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services, one group of health researchers was cautiously optimistic that their cause would finally have a champion at the highest levels of government: those focused on food and nutrition.

“These are the kinds of things I’ve been saying and writing about for decades!” Marion Nestle, a prominent food policy researcher, wrote in November of some of Kennedy’s stated Make America Healthy Again goals: removing ultraprocessed foods from schools, restricting purchases of soda with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and ridding government agencies of conflicts of interest.

 Dr. Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the US National Institutes of Health conducting some of the world’s only controlled trials on ultraprocessed foods, shared that optimism.

“When I saw the MAHA movement gaining bipartisan support last year, it was music to my ears,” Hall wrote in a letter late last month to Kennedy and incoming NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “I thought that after years of defunding human clinical research to understand metabolic disease perhaps NIH might finally prioritize the studies needed to uncover its root causes.”

Instead, Hall announced his early retirement Wednesday, after 21 years at the NIH, in a post on social media, citing censorship of communication of his research findings."

Meg Tirrell reports for CNN April 17, 2025. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"Leading Nutrition Scientist Departs N.I.H., Citing Censorship" (New York Times) [3]