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The sticky politics of banning 'junk food' from SNAP
Photo illustration: Christine Kao/STAT; Photo: Getty
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is on tour out West this week, touting a slew of state bills that promote his Make America Healthy Again goals like banning fluoride from drinking water and getting rid of food dyes and additives. Another key item? Making soda ineligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
It’s important to note that Kennedy’s agency doesn’t actually oversee SNAP — the USDA does. And this isn’t the first time politicians have tried something like this. But Kennedy has the support of USDA head Brooke Rollins, as well as many Republicans who used to worry initiatives like this would limit consumer choice.
At the same time, groups that previously supported bans are skeptical about Kennedy’s motivations. As is often true of the big-tent MAHA movement, STAT’s Sarah Todd writes, it’s an issue that makes for some unusual alliances, rhetorical pivots, and inherent contradictions. Read more from Sarah on the sticky problem.
first opinion
How one doctor uses AI every day
When physician Iyesatta Massaquoi Emeli walks into a patient’s room, she doesn’t carry a pen or paper — nor does she have a scribe with their laptop in tow. Her smartphone, equipped with ambient listening technology, captures the conversation. The very idea of AI not only listening to a conversation between clinician and patient, but then synthesizing it and drafting clinical notes from the appointment, may send a jolt of anxiety through some people’s hearts. (Last week, another doctor wrote for STAT about what she sees as the high cost of outsourcing doctors’ notes to AI.)
But “for now, for me, the promise of AI-driven ambient listening technology is simple and immediate,” Emeli writes in a new First Opinion essay. “It allows me to be more present with my patients and their families.” Read more about how one doctor — a former skeptic turned believer — integrates AI in her day-to-day work.
politics
A small safety and health agency gets pummeled
Amidst the chaos of the last seven days, this bit of news might have gotten lost: The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health lost the majority of its workforce. Over 90% of the under 3,000 workers who specialized in researching workplace hazards and recommending policies to guard against them were cut, employees say.
"The right to a safe and healthy work environment is something that the working people of this country fought for and won in 1970," said Micah Niemeier-Walsh, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees' chapter representing research and support staff at Cincinnati NIOSH facilities. "That's essentially what they're trying to take away."
NIOSH is perhaps most recognizable as the branch that oversaw the World Trade Center Health Program focused on 9/11 first responders, but the agency's work had direct and indirect impacts on tens of millions of other workers. It was the only federal agency devoted to identifying, measuring and studying workplace hazards (including infectious diseases). Its work was used by the better-known OSHA to design regulations and laws. Just yesterday, President Trump signed four executive orders aimed at reviving the coal industry — NIOSH also worked to protect miner health through initiatives like the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program.
Under the HHS reorganization, NIOSH will move out of the CDC and into the new Administration for a Healthy America — Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s catch-all creation that will combine various other programs into one. "I don't know how they're going to do the research without the researchers," Niemeier-Walsh told STAT. — Isabella Cueto
