Today, Explained - RFK Jr. and the chocolate factory

Episode Date: October 23, 2026

The HHS secretary has pressured food companies like Mars, which makes M&M's, to stop using artificial dyes. Easier said than done. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. A close-up image shows a bowl of blue M&M candies. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Big news in Maha world yesterday. Callie Means, an advisor to RFK Jr., and one of the administration's loudest critics of ultra-processed foods, announced he was stepping down. An eagle-eyed reporter with the Wall Street Journal noticed and reported that shares of food companies jumped in the hours after Means announced his resignation, apparently signaling relief from big food that a nemesis was departing. Means, who is a bit of a brawler, replied to the reporting on Twitter. This is a misread by the markets. Moms are not going to settling for their kids being poisoned for General Mills to gain 8% on their stock. This cultural movement has just started, and we are not going back.

Today on Today Explain from Vox, the Maha movement has been trying to strong-arm food companies into changing how they do things in the interest of our health. That eagle-eyed WSJ reporter is going to tell us just how hard that really is, starting with the blue M&M. Support for TakeSwind comes from Adio. There are sales teams out there who never seem to stop moving, always a step ahead, always working with a level of precision that doesn't seem normal. They may be on Adio, the agenic CRM. Adio is built for humans and agents with the guardrails of human software and the scale

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CA to learn more. Consumer reports that's not indoors products or services. And everything is blue for him and himself and everybody around because he ain't got nobody to... Do they explain? I'm blue. My name is Jesse Newman and I'm a food reporter for the Wall Street Journal. We're going to be talking about the blue M&M today. Among other things, your family has some sort of history with the blue eminem. What is it?

That makes it sound a lot shadier than it really was. So my mother, peanut M&Ms were her snack of choice. And somehow when my younger sister was little, she started collecting blue M&Ms, and she would sort of like hoard them, squirrel style. And she wouldn't even eat them, but she would take all the blue M&Ms out of the pack and then put them in the freezer. And I'm pretty sure when she left for college, my mother sort of handed her these, you know, bags. the blue Eminem, it's like, you know, had been in the freezer for years. So, yeah, makes us sound a little like serial killers or something. It was Eminem's not bodies. You're okay.

So the Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFKJR, has got some issues with the blue M&M. What exactly happened? How did it draw his attention? Yeah, they, artificial colors are, I would say, one of the main ingredients, additives into food that have, you know, that are in his crosshairs. I was talking with my staff about these petroleum-based dyes, and I said if they want to eat petroleum, they ought to add it themselves at home. They shouldn't be feeding it to the rest of us. Doritos, cheesits, cat and crunch, gummy bears.

The ingredients include a lot of poisons, including a harmful yellow dye called Tatrazine or yellow dye number five. He is not a fan of any sort of kind of. or, you know, he's really concerned about toxins in our food. Something is poisoning the American people. And we know that the primary culprits are changing food supply, the switch to highly chemical intensive processed foods. And, you know, Blue One, which is the food dye that makes Blue Eminem's Blue, you know, that is a synthetic chemical.

And he really takes issue with artificial dyes. He believes that they cause hyperactivity in kids, some neurological challenges. Also, you know, he thinks artificial dies are linked to cancer. So there's a whole, it sort of runs the gamut, you know, his concerns about artificial dies and foods. But he formally, as a member of the Trump administration, he formally sort of set out to get them removed, didn't he? Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's been putting a lot of pressure on the industry to strip artificial dyes from all kinds of products.

Food are kids eating today is not really. food. It's food-like substances, and some of it was made in petroleum refineries. What do we know, for real, for real, factually, about artificial dies? We do, we hear that they're bad for us. We hear that a lot of things are bad for us. We're all still alive and kicking. Are artificial dies, like really detrimental to our health? So, you know, if you look back, FDA for decades has said that the artificial dies, there are nine artificial dies that they had originally approved for use in food. And they said that those artificial dyes are safe and have said so for years and years and years as have other global bodies, you know, so long as they're used in

accordance with, you know, some of the standards that FDA laid out. And there are other bodies that have found, you know, that have found California as an agency in California that has, you know, found that dies are linked, again, to hyperactivity in children. And FDA itself has said, okay, we think that these dyes are safe for, you know, the vast majority of kids, but some kids might be more sensitive to them and others. So I think the real issue is that, you know, it's a chemical doing it. They're purely cosmetic. They don't do anything except color food. So, you know, there is no nutritional benefit that you are getting from these dyes. And so do we need them? Absolutely not. You know, I think one of the issues is just that if you're looking at, you know, the ways our food

contribute to health problems. Artificial dyes is probably pretty low on the list. Okay, so the maker of M&Ms is Mars? Yep. Mars company. All right. So you went inside a factory where they make M&Ms and you looked at how they're trying to make this happen. Tell me everything. So I went to this plant in Topeka, Kansas to see how they were made. And, you know, it's a massive industrial food plant. where they sort of mix these colors and spray them onto what they refer to as lentils. They call, you know, these sort of small chocolate orbs, they call them lentils. And then the Eminem's move through the plant and they arrive at these massive, they're called pans, but they look like, you know, they look like big tumble dryers and the Eminems just tumble around in these pans and the color is sprayed on.

So it's a very, very industrial process, millions of M&Ms a day. And, you know, the challenge that Mars has now is making that happen with a natural dye instead of an artificial one. So a blue natural dye is the challenge. What are they got? So they've been working on this for years. And what they went with is a product called spirulina, which is made from algae. But spirulina comes with a host of problems that they are now dealing with. You know, Blue One, which is the artificial dye, it arrives at the factories as a liquid.

And they just, they pour it into these mixers and they mix it up with this, you know, sugary syrup. And it's pretty easy to handle. Spirulina arrives as a powder. So now you're mixing a powder into this same mixture, into the same recipe. And that is very different. Also, because it's a protein, the resulting mixture becomes a lot thicker. So what they found was that the mixture containing spirulina that it would really clog up the clog up the piping, essentially. It was getting stuck. It just moved less smoothly through the pipes.

Also, because it is a protein, it was starting to coat sort of build up on the inside of the machinery. And when that happens, it's a food safety hazard. It can mold. It can cause problems. So for many reasons, it was just really a challenge to handle. Was this an expensive process? I'm just thinking of clogged pipes and some of my experience with that. Clogged or frozen pipes, it does tend to be very expensive. How much did this all cost? Well, I should say it's not done.

Mars wouldn't give me an official figure for how much, but they said that they're spending millions, millions of dollars. They're having to retrofit their plants, essentially. They're having, Mars said that they're having to change about 300 types of machinery. in their plans. So it is. It's a real investment. And at the end of the day, it all comes down to cost. So what did they actually end up getting done? What was the outcome here? Well, so if you go back, Mars said what they committed to was that they were going to release an option, a new option, a new version of their M&Ms and a few other of their products this year that was made with natural dyes instead of artificial dyes. In March 12,

In 2020, products made without food, drug, and cosmetic colors will be available in the United States across gum, fruity confections, and chocolate candy from several of our iconic brands, extra, Skittles, Starburst, and M&Ms. They didn't come out and say we're eliminating artificial dyes, and so folks should be really clear about that. Their artificially dyed M&Ms aren't going anywhere. They are still on shelves. So what they said is that they're going to come out with an option that is naturally dyed. So they tried to do that. And what they found was that they couldn't. They couldn't at a cost that was acceptable to them. Because it was challenging with the blue and with the spirulina,

it would have been far too expensive to make it work at scale. You know, we're talking millions and millions of Eminemps per day. And so this year, earlier this year, they launched online only. They launched their naturally dyed version of Eminem's with red, orange, yellow, and green Eminem's. And if you,

if you take a look at this bag, my colleague, you know, refer to these as atumnal. They look very atumnal. You know, it really isn't the same. It looks like a very, a very, you know,

mature person's eminem. Have you spoken to your sister about any of this? She, yep, she's not hoarding them anymore. I'm happy to say. At the end of the day, what is all the,

what are the changes to the M&Ms? Let's say I'm to go online and get the natural dyed ones. What does that mean for my health? Am I now a healthy and virtuous person if I'm eating the autumnal ammonyms? I would say it means very little. I would say, you know, hopefully you're still enjoying that, you know, sugary treats and the, you know, pick me up in the afternoon as you're starting to flag. But, you know, you're still eating candy. You're still eating sugar.

It really hasn't changed very much. When we return, what has Maha accomplished? So far, Jesse Newman is going to come back. The new Subaru Cross Trek Hybrid is the most fuel-efficient cross-track yet. That means less time filling your tank and more time filling your day. More court time. More ride time. More lake time.

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I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon and butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I've seen the future. You know what it is? Today, Explained. Okay, so, Jesse, in the first half of the show, we talked about the time and trials and money spent getting artificial colors out of M&Ms. But RFK Jr's ambition is much, much bigger than that. If we were to think about a grocery store, what is RFK Jr.'s ideal grocery store look like? What's, what's in there, what's

not in there? Yeah. So, you know, if you think about the totality of food initiatives that he has talked about and the way he talks about food, you know, he's very concerned with processed food. He's very, you know, he talks about processed food sort of poisoning kids. We are poisoning ourselves, and it's coming from, you know, principally these ultra-processed foods. We shouldn't be giving 60% of the kids in school processed food that is making them sick. And he's really encouraged people to eat, you know, far less ultra-processed food and to eat more whole foods. The new guidelines recognize that whole nutrient-dense food is the most effective path to better health and lower health care costs. So, you know, we're talking produce.

or talking, you know, meat. So, you know, his ideal version of the grocery store would probably, you'd probably see a lot of steak. You'd see a lot of whole fat, you know, milk, butter. You'd see a lot of beef tallow. You would see, you know, a lot less packaged food, if any. You know, and he encourages people essentially to shop more on the perimeter of the grocery store and to cook meals from home.

And so, you know, there'd just be a lot more raw whole foods rather than, you know, rather than what comes in. packages. He has an idea of what he wants. He's been in this role for a year plus. How many changes, like real changes along the lines of we're going to try to make a naturally blue M&M, could I actually see if I were to go in the grocery store this afternoon? So the food industry is making a lot of changes. Not all of them have anything to do with RFK Jr. And, you know, one of the big criticisms of him in particular, is that he talks a lot. He has asked the food industry to do a lot of things, but he has done very little when it comes to, you know, actual rulemaking or, you know, mandatory

requirements. So really, you know, there are changes that we're seeing in the grocery store, but they relate to, you know, big consumer trends that were already in the works well before Maha. Now Maha has really brought a lot of these issues to the fore and sort of accelerated, you know, the conversation. But, you know, for example, take protein. You know, RFK talks about protein quite a bit and, you know, wants you to be eating a lot more red meat and whole fat dairy to make sure that you're getting a lot of protein. But protein is, you know, there was sort of a protein craze well before RFK and MAHA. ECO just came out with protein waffles. We got strawberry. We got chocolate. I'm going to try them

today. Whoa. Look at those nacho cheese chips. 16 grams of protein? That's good. That is good. Now eat it like a rabbit chip bunk. Pop-Tarts protein have 10 grams of protein. New Pop-Tarts protein.

When you're looking for the satisfaction of a Snickers with the nutrition you desire to power through your day, try a stickers high protein bar. So, you know, the fact that you're seeing protein sort of like sprinkled over everything in the grocery store has that conversation has really intensified, you know, since he has been in office. But it didn't start with him. Since RFK Jr. has been pushing food companies to remove artificial dyes, they, you know, they've been working on it. So today, I believe General Mills has removed all artificial dyes from their cereals. And so, you know, if you look at tricks in the grocery store today, tricks will not be made with any artificial dyes. Tricks are for kids. Silly rabbit.

So that is a change that you can see. You'll see a more muted version of tricks. And Kellogg, you know, which owns Fruit Loops, is working on this too. So the colors are the, you know, one of the most significant changes. But it's, you know, it's not all food. It's, you know, many companies have made commitments, not all. How is he actually putting pressure on the companies to get this done? Is he calling them up and being like, I will call you out in a White House press briefing if you don't make these changes? Like, there's got to be some amount of leaning on these companies here, right? Oh, there's a ton of it. And it started, you know, even before he was put. But in position as health secretary, you know, if you recall during President Trump's campaign, that is when Maha really started to gain a footing. And, you know, RFK Jr. was all over the airwaves, you know, saying that the very first thing he was going to do was get artificial dies out of fruit loops. If you look at a pack of fruit loops in this country, it's all chemical dyes, yellow, blue, red dye, which are poison.

these kind of chemicals are designed to make us insatiable continually eating all day, never full, never satisfied. So, you know, this was before he was anywhere near HHS. And so he has really used social media. He's really now his bully pulpit to sort of put pressure on companies by calling them out by name, you know, by talking about fruit loops. I think he talked about Twinkies. And so, you know, he has put a lot of public pressure, you know, just through what he has said. And that has, you know, that has been powerful in some ways in getting some of these commitments from companies. The challenge is that these commitments are all voluntary. There's no regulatory teeth behind any of them. And so, you know, the concern, of course, is that if enthusiasm for this fades, if consumer trends change, you know, if Maha goes away, that these companies can just as easily, you know, revert back to,

artificial dyes or other ingredients, but there's nothing, there's nothing really at this point that's barring them from changing their minds. The question is what the competition does, right? Because there are M&Ms and then there's half a dozen knock off M&Ms. Do other companies need to follow in Mars's footsteps here, lest they be, you know, either called up by RFK or consumers are like, oh, that's the unhealthy M&M? Like, how do you see this playing out in the actual, in the field of competition? among food companies?

Well, that's the crux of it for food companies, right? Is that they always say that they want to follow the consumer and they want to, you know, give consumers what they want. And so in some ways, there are a lot of, a lot of these policy areas where food companies would prefer for there to be some sort of actual mandate from the government so that there is a level playing field. So that, you know, if one company is taking out artificial dies, that their competitors have to do that too, because they're, you know, they're concerned that if their competitors

aren't doing it. You know, if they're pressured to and competitors aren't doing it, then, you know, will they lose sales or, you know, will customers go over to the competitor? So they just want to be sure that they, you know, that they aren't jeopardizing sales. Are the all natural foods more expensive? Are consumers paying for them, paying more for them in any way? You know, in many cases, whether it's a cereal with protein in it or, you know, another product with more fiber or, you know, a potato chip using avocado oil instead of seed oil. In many cases, these products, you know, are sold at a premium. They are more expensive.

And that is a huge tension between, you know, this moment in which Health Secretary Kennedy is, you know, encouraging food companies to reformulate their recipes and the, you know, and the fact that food prices are significantly higher than they, you know, were five years ago. And consumers, you know, many of them are really stretched. And so they, you know, aren't in a position to pay more for food. Is RFK Jr. getting any pushback from anybody? Companies, consumers, a White House that might tell him, look, buddy, where, you know, people are five minutes away from getting the pitchforks out and running around the streets because they're too broke to afford the Aldi Bill. Like, is anyone telling him, no? I would say he's getting pushed back from a lot of different corners. We've seen a number of his initiatives on ultra-processed foods stall because there is such concern over.

affordability, this, you know, the run-up to the midterms. This is the last thing that the administration wants to do is to, you know, enforce or is to create any regulations that are seen as potentially jacking up, you know, consumers' brochure bills. We just had a story a couple weeks ago. The government is trying to define ultra-processed foods. You know, it's clear that RFK Jr. wants to have this definition so that down the road, it can be incorporated into labeling. So the government has been working on a definition, and HHS came up with the definition. And that has been held up. So a definition exists, but it's been held up, you know, by the administration at the White House

because there's, you know, there has been a lot of concern about affordability and then just also about other challenges that need to be thought through. So there's concerns about litigation that the food companies are facing. There's concerns about trade. And so this has just run into a lot of questions and opposition within the administration. All right. So if we look back, again, we are almost two years into the second Trump administration. If we look back at what has changed, what has not changed, what has stalled. How close have we come to making America healthy again?

I think there's a long way to go. Again, because so many of Kennedy's initiatives, there has been no rule. There has been no advancing any regulatory agenda. It's just been sort of a pressure campaign from HHS. And again, we're, you know, we're talking about artificial dies when it comes to sort of the chronic disease crisis that America is facing. You know, we're talking about diabetes. We're talking about heart disease. And, you know, these are really big problems and a huge portion of American diets are still made up with ultra-processed foods.

Food access and affordability is still a huge concern. I think, unfortunately, the progress has been pretty slow. Jesse Newman covers food for the Wall Street Journal. Huddini Mawaddy produced today show and Jolie Myers edited. Gabriel Dunitov checks the facts, Bridger Dunnigan, and David Tadishore, engineered. The rest of us in ascending height order, Miles, Brian, Daniel Hewitt, Ariana Espudo, Dustin, Desto, Kelly Wessinger, Denise Gera, and Peter Balinan-Rosen. Our supervising team is Avishai Artsi and Amina El Sadi.

Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. host is Sean Ramoswamy. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC and the show is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more, visit podcast.com. Listen ad free by signing up at Vox.com slash members. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained. That's two minutes for holding. But you're holding two times the chicken with Bogo box meals from KFC. Order in and focus on the ice, not what's for dinner. Get game day deals on Uber E. all season long.

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