April 17, 2025 – Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made curbing the consumption of ultra-processed foods a central tenet of his Make America Healthy Again campaign. But yesterday, Kevin Hall, the country’s leading researcher studying those foods, resigned from his position at the National Institutes of Health, a subagency of HHS.
“Unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science,” Hall wrote in a post on X. “Specifically, I experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”
Hall said NIH freezes on hiring and purchasing also made it difficult for him to staff his research projects and pay for supplies, including food for research participants, he wrote in a letter to Kennedy and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya. But Hall said since he received no response to the concerns, he felt compelled to accept early retirement, at 54.
Hall was the lead researcher on the most important randomized, controlled trial to date that showed diets high in ultra-processed foods cause individuals to eat more and gain more weight, even when matched for nutrients with a whole-food diet. At the National Food Policy Conference in March, as the keynote speaker, he talked about the preliminary results of his latest trial, which was intended to help get at why the foods “are bad news for health,” he said, in terms of their link to an epidemic of chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity.
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