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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced on Friday that the Trump administration will begin allowing states to bar recipients of federal food assistance from using the money to pay for soft drinks.
Mr. Kennedy announced the change to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, in Martinsburg, W.Va. He appeared there with Gov. Patrick Morrisey, who recently signed legislation banning foods containing most artificial food dyes and two preservatives, the first state to do so.
The health secretary is talking to 15 other governors about similar moves, according to Calley Means, a health food entrepreneur who recently joined the White House to help carry out Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. Mr. Kennedy told the audience in West Virginia that the food companies had used science to make their products addictive, just as tobacco firms had.
“Food is medicine,” Mr. Kennedy told a group of teachers, children and parents in the gymnasium of a local school. He added: “It treats our health. It treats our mental health.”
He framed being healthy as “an act of patriotism,” adding, “If you love this country, you need to take care of yourself.”
Mr. Kennedy does not have authority over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which falls under the Agriculture Department. But Mr. Means said that the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, has agreed to grant the waivers.
Joel Berg, the chief executive officer of the nonpartisan advocacy group Hunger Free America, called Mr. Kennedy’s plan “illegal and horrible public policy.” He said a similar waiver request by the state of Minnesota was denied in 2004 because the law that created federal food assistance, then known as “food stamps,” barred the purchase only of cigarettes, alcohol and hot foods.
Mr. Kennedy’s proposal discriminates against low-income people. A far better plan for reducing obesity, he said, would be to expand SNAP funding so that Americans in need of help could afford to purchase healthier food.
Mr. Morrissey announced a new statewide exercise initiative, and said he intended to “start shedding a few pounds” himself.
Mr. Kennedy then urged other governors to submit waivers to his department, and said he would approve them, though doing so falls within Ms. Rollins’s purview.
Mr. Kennedy’s healthy eating agenda is broadly popular. It harks back to the days of President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, who planted a garden on the White House South Lawn and initiated a healthy eating and exercise program that she called “Let’s Move.”
In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Kennedy also called on Americans to eat better and exercise more as a way of preventing the next pandemic.
“The biggest thing we can do for pandemic preparedness is to make ourselves healthy,” Mr. Kennedy said.
He also falsely asserted that otherwise healthy people did not die from Covid.
“Healthy Americans were not dying of Covid,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It was a disease that attacked the sick, as with all infectious diseases.”
A 2021 study of Covid mortality found that roughly 30 percent of Covid deaths occurred in patients without underlying diseases.
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