The FDA Has Officially Lost The Plot

"We're going to do front-of-package food labeling. So, every food in your grocery store will have a label on it. It'll have maybe a green light, a red light, or a yellow light." That's RFK Jr. on the Joe Rogan Experience a month ago.

Some form of front-of-package label is coming. That much is settled. The only question left is what the criteria will be. Because under the proposal currently sitting in the FDA, your butter, your cheese, your whole milk, and your salt would all get a "high warning" stamp on the front of the package. A diet Coke would not. Bill Gates' lab-grown butter, made from carbon dioxide using chemistry originally developed for the fuel industry, would also not. The FDA has publicly stated this label is their official 2026 priority.

This is the most consequential labeling fight in modern food history, and there are two completely different versions on the table. One was rushed out the door by the old FDA four days before the Biden administration left office. The other is being drafted right now by RFK and the MAHA movement. Whichever wins doesn't just decide what stickers go on American food. It likely decides what stickers go on the food of billions of people. When the US mandated the nutrition facts panel in 1990, over 90 countries adopted nearly identical versions. When the US banned trans fats in 2015, more than 50 countries followed within a few years. The precedent is global.

The old FDA published its proposed rule on January 16th, 2025. That date is not random. It was four days before Biden left office and Trump and RFK walked in. The officials who wrote it knew that under RFK, this version would never see daylight. So they pushed it through the door before he could close it. Here's the thing, once a bill has been published, it's extremely difficult to undo.

Since then, the people backing the original proposal have not let up. A coalition of 28 health organizations formally urged the FDA to keep the rule and make it stronger. 210 scientists and doctors, led by researchers at Harvard, signed a letter directly challenging RFK's entire approach to nutrition. They've taken it to Congress, backing something called the Truth in Labeling Act, designed to force the original rule through and bypass RFK entirely. They've submitted over 34,000 public comments, every one of which has to be formally reviewed and responded to before the rule can change. This is, in my opinion, designed to bury the MAHA team in paperwork.

The original proposal

The old FDA's rule is a black and white box on the front of your food. It rates three things and three things only. Added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium, all based on percent daily values. 5% or less is low. 6 to 19% is medium. 20% or above is high. Over 300,000 products would need to carry it.

Now, walk through your kitchen with this rule in mind. Your butter, cheddar cheese, whole milk, cream cheese, lard, and even salt all get a "high" stamp. Single-ingredient whole foods, all flagged. Now look at a bag of potato chips. Potatoes, vegetable oil, salt. You'd think something this processed would carry a warning. Well, no. Low sugar, low saturated fat, moderate salt. It gets the medium tier. Crackers with 15 different ingredients also get medium. A loaf of white bread and a can of diet Coke? Both end up in the low danger category, despite being some of the most processed foods on the shelf.

The Savor loophole

Then there's Savor, the Bill Gates funded startup making their quote, "butter." This is not real butter. To make it, they take carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas, heat them under pressure, and use a chemical reaction to build fat molecules from scratch. The chemistry was originally developed for the fuel industry.

Right now, Savor builds saturated fat molecules, which means under the FDA rule, their product gets the same "high" warning real butter does. But here's the thing. They built the molecule. They can rebuild it. Add a couple of double bonds and it becomes polyunsaturated fat, the same type primarily found in seed oils. The label only looks at sugar, salt, and saturated fat. It does not look at chemical additives. So the lab-made version drops to "low" while real butter, which can't be redesigned, stays stuck wearing the high warning. The synthetic version sits right next to it on the shelf with a label saying it's safe.

RFK's version

The MAHA proposal is structured completely differently. A red light, yellow light, green light system that looks at all ingredients, not just three nutrients. Artificial dyes, seed oils, preservatives, chemical additives. All factored in. Whole foods with nothing artificial added get green. Lightly processed gets yellow. Anything loaded with synthetic ingredients gets red.

Under this system, your butter, cheese, whole milk, tallow, and salt all get green. The potato chips, the crackers, the white bread, and the diet Coke all get red. To be fair, this version hasn't been formally finalized yet, so the final rule may differ slightly. But based on what RFK and the MAHA team have stated publicly, this is roughly what they're going to put forward.

Following the money

This brings us to the food industry's response. They've created something called Americans for Ingredient Transparency. Sounds like they're fighting for your right to know what's in your food. Not even close. The actual goal is to create a single federal standard that overrides all other food safety laws. This is backed by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, General Mills, Tyson Foods, and Conagra. Despite being commercial enemies, they've all teamed up. Their spokesperson has previously defended vaping as beneficial and partnered with Monsanto, the company behind Roundup, made from glyphosate.

In 2025 alone, the food industry spent $13 million lobbying the White House, Congress, and the FDA. Two million of that went directly to lobbying on food labeling requirements. They've also launched a six-figure advertising campaign in Washington. Now, the Constitution explicitly states that you cannot bribe a public official. But corporate donations to a politician who just happens to do what you want, well, that is not considered a bribe.

These companies have a track record. In the 1960s, when they started getting blamed for the rise in disease, they paid a Harvard scientist to leave out data and fabricate results blaming saturated fat instead. Coca-Cola has funneled millions to researchers to claim that sugary drinks don't cause obesity. The New York Times exposed it in 2015.

The science on saturated fat

RFK threw out the FDA committee that wrote the original guidelines and installed a new one. He stated the old committee's 2025 report "looks like it was written by the food processing industry." One of the thrown-out members, Christopher Gardner, came out publicly accusing RFK of ignoring decades of evidence, saying his new food pyramid "goes against decades and decades of evidence and research." But there's another Gardner clip worth pausing on. He admitted that "anybody who has the stature and background to be on this committee, at some point in their life, took money from someone that you could attack." Christopher himself was on that committee. So I did a little digging. Sure enough, Christopher Gardner has had his research funded by Beyond Meat. The plant-based meat substitute company that sells a quote, "healthy alternative to meat" with 26 ingredients.

This isn't a one-off. Of the 20 members of the 2020 DGAC, 19 had at least one tie to a food or pharmaceutical company. Half had 30 ties or more. One advisor alone, Sharon Donovan, had ties to at least 31 different food and pharma companies. The leading signatory on that 210-doctor letter, Walter Willett, who is one of the most cited nutrition scientists alive, has received up to $1.5 million from vegetarian product companies and up to $950,000 from pharmaceutical companies under his leadership at Harvard, according to the Nutrition Coalition. He rarely if ever discloses any of this.

In fairness, on RFK's scientific foundation panel, four of nine members have been funded at some point by the livestock and dairy industries, according to NBC. So both sides have funding in their history. But four out of nine is a lot better than 19 out of 20, and at least the way I see it, there's a meaningful difference between taking money from a company that sells beef, a single-ingredient food humans have eaten for thousands of years, and taking money from a company that engineers food with dozens of lab-made chemicals specifically designed to make you eat more of them.

On the actual science, RFK believes saturated fat is great for humans. His FDA commissioner Marty Makary has stated they're "ending the 50-year war on natural saturated fat" waged by "medical dogma." The old FDA position is that saturated fat is the main driver of heart disease.

There are five recent meta-analyses on saturated fat and heart disease. Every one found no significant correlation. A 2025 meta-analysis combining randomized controlled trials, the strongest type of evidence we have, found no significant difference in heart attacks, cardiovascular deaths, or deaths from any cause. Big food defenders keep telling us to trust the science. On the topic of saturated fat, the science says I should be eating more of it. So I guess tonight I'm going to be cooking two steaks.

Where this goes from here

Some form of front-of-package label is happening. That much is locked in. The only fight left is whether it ends up labeling real food as dangerous and fake food as safe, or the other way around. The original rule sits in the comment period, which means it has not been finalized yet. RFK's FDA controls the rule-making process. They can let the comment period close, review the comments, and rewrite the rule entirely. The Truth in Labeling Act, which would force the original through, would need to pass the House and the Senate and be signed by the president. Under the current administration, that is certainly not happening. But come the next election, the House, Senate, and presidency may change. So hopefully this gets done quick.

One bit of good news. None of this affects meat. Meat products do not fall under FDA jurisdiction, so they cannot enforce labels on meat packaging.

Honestly, the most reliable label in the grocery store is still the simplest one. Turn the package over, look at the ingredient list, and you already know everything you need to know. The whole reason this labeling system even matters is because most people don't do that. So while RFK's team fights to put a green light on real butter and a red light on diet Coke, what I'm going to do is what I've been doing the whole time. Buy real food, read the back of the label, and ignore whatever sticker ends up on the front.