Is RFK Jr. Making Fast Food Healthy Again Or Is He Whitewashing It?

American junk food brands are making sweeping changes to their ingredients. But do these new recipes amount to anything?

A Steak’n Shake in Georgia advertising its new beef tallow french fries. Photo credit: Zaid Jilani.

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office and nominated and confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to his position as Health and Human Services Secretary, one of America’s top fast-food brands announced a sweeping change to their menu.

“A major fast-food giant is giving HHS Secretary RFK Jr. one of his first victories on the Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA, agenda. Steak'n Shake says all locations will be quote, RFK’ed as they swap vegetable oil for a healthier beef tallow to cook their iconic shoestring fries,” Fox News’s Steve Doocy announced during a segment in February.

Doocy was joined by the company’s CEO, Daniel Edwards, to explain the pivot.

“We wanted to switch I guess years ago, but they couldn’t get a chemical-free, additive-free, all-natural, pure beef tallow because they put defoaming agents and things. So, it tells me we have to do beef tallow, but we have to do it all-natural. No additives, no preservatives,” he explained. “And we found a supplier that could finally do that for us….so we did. We RFK’ed our fries!”

RFK Jr. wasted no time touting the victory.

“We’re very grateful to them for RFK'ing the french fries,” he said last March during a Fox News segment where he dined at a Steak'n Shake location.

The Steak 'n Shake change previewed what appears to be a major component of the administration’s strategy: fast food and junk food suppliers will switch to ingredients that RFK Jr. believes are healthier, and in exchange the administration will become a government-sponsored advertisement for their brands.

This strategy notched a second win over the summer, when beverage giant Coca Cola announced that it will start producing Coke products in the U.S. with cane sugar as opposed to high fructose corn syrup.

“I welcome President Trump's announcement that Coca-Cola has agreed to use natural cane sugar in Coke in the United States,” RFK Jr. told Newsweek after Trump announced the move. “Americans deserve access to the same natural foods that other countries enjoy and the President is delivering that.”

In both cases, it’s obvious that RFK Jr. believes these are salutary steps by these firms because they are shifting to ingredients he perceives as natural — in the words of Edwards, the beef tallow that now is used to cook their french fries is “all-natural.”

But by and large, nutritionists are skeptical that you should be running out for a fries and Coke anytime soon.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Kantha Shelke, a long-time food scientist who is a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, told me that the shift to beef tallow, for instance, may be overrated because both options have pros and cons.

“[Vegetable oils] have unsaturated fats, it’s good for your heart, good for your heart. And then the other one, you’ve got tallow…I believe that exists in nature and is digested differently, so the two of them have two different health implications,” she told me. “Is one healthier than the other? No.”

But tallow may in some ways be worse for people’s health.

“If you are going to push me to say is tallow going to be healthier than unsaturated fats, I would say definitely not. Because saturated fats have been shown to cause problems. Especially for the crowd that has health-related issues,” she said, pointing to ailments like heart disease.

When it came to Coke’s shift to cane sugar — which the soda giant already relies on in terms of its offerings elsewhere in the world — she was more unequivocal, telling me there is no health difference at all.

“The human body does not distinguish between high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar. All it knows is how much fructose am I getting, and how much glucose am I getting?” Shelke said.

And that may amount to no meaningful difference from a health standpoint.

“From a biochemical standpoint, [high-fructose corn syrup] and cane sugar are virtually identical,” she told me. “Both contain approximately 50% fructose and 50% glucose. Both sweeteners elevate blood glucose, triglycerides, and hepatic fat accumulation to the same extent. Extensive research demonstrates no differential health impacts between these sweeteners regarding cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or obesity risk.”

Photo by James Yarema on Unsplash

A bigger problem Shelke identified is that while switching to tallow may make french fries slightly unhealthier and switching to cane sugar could make no difference at all for Coke, there could be what she calls a “health halo” effect — where consumers think these products are now healthier than they really are.

“It’s OK to have a few french fries here and there,” she said. “But when you’re looking at it as which one is healthier then you’re looking at somebody who consumes them in large quantities. And that is when the answer is, wait a minute. It’s not healthy for you anyway!”