President-elect Trump's nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services has raised a number of questions in the public health community about Kennedy's long history of opposing vaccines.

It's also put a spotlight on a number of other comments he's made, including about what millions of Americans eat and drink each day.

For more on those claims and what the science says, here's William Brangham. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is trained as an

environmental lawyer, but in recent years, he's focused almost exclusively on public health, and he

stirred a great deal of alarm with some of his claims.

So we're going to dive into a few of them here to better understand what the research tells us,

what those claims tell us about Kennedy, and what this could mean for Americans should he get

confirmed as health secretary. Let's start with ultra-processed foods.

Kennedy has vowed to remove them from school lunches.

We are literally poisoning our children systematically for-profit.

Ultra-processed means foods that have been altered in a factory with added dyes, sweeteners, or preservatives,

and they tend to be high in calories, sugar, fat, and sodium.

This category contains a lot of things you'd expect, sodas, frozen pizzas, hot dogs,

but also things you might not expect, like flavored yogurts, plant milks, whole grain breads,

and cereals.

The U.S. has been slower than other developed countries to regulate

ultra-processed foods, even though the consensus on their health impacts, including from the

National Institutes of Health, is quite clear.

There's very strong scientific evidence about this link between consuming ultra-processed

foods and a wide array of health outcomes. In addition

to that, there's a large body of observational studies that show links between ultra-processed foods

and things like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and also mental health. Kennedy's attempt

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