Yesterday, one of the nation’s leading food researchers resigned from the National Institutes of Health, citing concerns over censorship. For anyone still holding out hope that the Trump Administration will take effective action to reduce diet-related disease and follow through on the Make America Health Again (“MAHA”) agenda, the story of Dr. Kevin Hall offers little comfort.
As much as anyone, Dr. Hall established the credibility of theories linking ultra-processed foods to obesity and other diseases. Convinced that ultra-processing was a red herring, he designed a study in which 20 healthy adult volunteers stayed at an NIH facility for four weeks, randomly assigned to eat either an ultra-processed or minimally processed diet for two weeks, and then switched to the other diet for the remaining two weeks. In 2019, Hall published the results of his randomized controlled trial showing that, despite the study participants rating the UPF and non-UPF diets similarly, they ate a far higher number of calories (508) on the UPF diet, and gained an average 0.8 kg while on the UPF diet, while losing 1.1 kg on the “unprocessed” diet.
In the years since, Dr. Hall had continued to study how ultra-processed foods affect metabolism and the body, in the hope of shedding light on the specific mechanisms that account for these foods’ links to disease. Last month, at Consumer Federation of America’s National Food Policy Conference, he presented the results of a study that measured how people’s brains responded to drinking a high-fat ultraprocessed milkshake. His team’s conclusion: there was no statistical difference in brain dopamine levels before and after drinking the shake, seemingly undermining theories that UPFs cause overeating in the same way that some addictive drugs cause overuse.
That’s not to say that UPFs may not have more subtle addictive properties, or that other mechanisms, such as damage to the gut microbiome, might not account for their links to disease. But Trump Administration officials were not comfortable with letting the science speak for itself. As Dr. Hall explained in a social media post, his team “experienced censorship in the reporting of our research.” Now Dr. Hall is leaving, and the promise of MAHA seems more ephemeral than ever.
Dr. Hall’s departure comes on the heels of thousands of firings at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, many of dubious legality. Before the censorship drove him out, Dr. Hall expressed concern in a letter to superiors that hiring freezes and funding disruptions were preventing his staff from meeting basic research needs, like purchasing food for study participants living in the NIH metabolic ward. His story begs the question: if this Administration is unwilling to support research on ultra processed foods, will it support any scientific inquiry at all? The answer is becoming increasingly clear.