NYT accidentally makes the case for nutrition while defending Big Food
The New York Times inadvertently supported remarks on nutrition by Trump health czar Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. while trying to prove them wrong.
Kennedy, who President-elect Donald Trump tapped to be the new secretary of Health and Human Services in January, has vowed to “make America healthy again” by combatting the causes of obesity and chronic diseases. According to Kennedy, those causes include poorly tested vaccines and ultra-processed foods from manufacturing giants like Kraft-Heinz, Nestlé, General Mills, PepsiCo, and others.
"In some categories, their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA, they have to go,” Kennedy said in an interview after Trump’s election victory this month. “They’re not doing their job. They’re not protecting our kids. Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients, and you go to Canada, and it’s got two or three?"
Predictably, the legacy media have come out swinging in defense of Big Food. In an article for The New York Times Friday, Christina Jewett and Julie Creswell tried attacking Kennedy for his statement while inadvertently proving his case that America’s snacks are loaded with harmful chemicals.
“Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong,” they wrote. “The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used ‘for freshness,’ according to the ingredient label.”
Yellow 5, also known as tartrazine, is a chemical derived from coal tar which was mostly used to pave roads until food manufacturers discovered it could be used to cover up the discoloration of low-quality edible products. The substance has been banned in most European countries for causing neurological and developmental disorders but remains approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
"This is what passes for a 'fact check' at The New York Times," Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk wrote on X. "The media lie a lot, but fortunately for us, they are also VERY stupid."
Big Food wields major influence among media companies
The article’s authors openly acknowledged the powerful influence of Big Food companies.
“Clamping down on the food industry also pits Mr. Kennedy against agricultural and food titans, companies that have a history of wielding their power as major donors in congressional and presidential elections,” wrote Jewett and Creswell.
But in addition to being political donors, food giants are also some of the media’s top advertisers. PepsiCo, Mars, and Nestlé, for example, are part of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), a group that accounts for 90% of the world’s advertising, or roughly $1 trillion in annual ad spending. In 2019, the WFA created the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), which bullied media companies and social media platforms into embracing the woke agenda by threatening to withhold advertising. While GARM was recently officially disbanded, it is unlikely that these major corporations no longer wield powerful influence among media outlets.
Big Food stocks drop after Kennedy announcement
The day the New York Times article was published, which came the day after Trump announced Kennedy’s appointment, Big Food stocks took a dive. According to the Daily Caller, Nestlé and Kraft-Heinz stock fell to 52-week lows. PepsiCo’s stock dropped almost 4%, Coca-Cola’s by more than 1%, General Mills by more than 2%, and Campbell Soup Co by almost 3%.
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