In a new administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ( USDA ) will have its new chief of staff, a junk food lobbyist with experience in the likes of the National Oilseed Processors Association ( NOPA ) and the Edible Oil Producers Association ( EOPA ).
On Tuesday, the USDA announced Kailee Tkacz Buller’s interview under Secretary-Designate Brooke Rollins, who testified in a confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. Prior to joining the Corn Refiners Association, a trade organization that produces high-fructose corn syrup, Buller also served as a lawyer for the breakfast industry trade group SNAC International. After serving for more than three times in the Department of Agriculture during President Trump’s first phrase, the USDA’s new chief of staff became president and CEO of NOPA and EOPA.
Buller’s visit became a rising issue on X Thursday evening after Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., published a picture of the USDA’s press transfer.
Some argued that the hiring of a seed oil lobbyist allegedly contradicts the new administration’s plan to “make America good again” by removing commercial dominance over the country’s most powerful regulatory bodies.
” Not the best of reports”, wrote Max Lugavere, an author who appeared at a roundtable on diet organized by supporters of President Trump’s heath plan last September.
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for president of the United States to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has consistently criticized seed oils as aggressive causes of chronic disease and obesity. In his August endorsement statement of the Republican nomination, Kennedy indicted foods that” consist mainly of processed sugars, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils” engineered by “laboratory scientists” from the cigarette industry for proliferating the nation’s health care crises.
” We are large poisoning all of our children”, Kennedy said.
Kennedy has been even more outspoken about the” corporate capture” of the nation’s most power regulatory agencies and pledged to” slam shut the revolving door” of influence. Kennedy claimed on NewsNation that President Trump had given him his top priorities in the days leading up to the November election, eradicating problem and conflict of interest. A series of the government’s top picks at the USDA, but, according to Politico, have shown the “potential limits of Kennedy’s energy to do his ‘ Make America Healthy Again ‘ plan in a Trump presidency attuned to the concerns of business”.
A source close to Kennedy described the government’s recent decision of a plant oil lawyer as a” slap in the face to the MAHA motion” and claimed his team had pushed for Massie to become USDA’s secretary.
Nina Teicholz, Ph. Dr. in nutrition and author of Big Fat Surprise wrote an article for the Washington Examiner last December explaining why the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) should re-examine the oils ‘ status of “generally recognized as safe” under Kennedy.
” Seed oil is chemically unstable. Free radicals and degraded triglycerides are two oxidation products that are produced by it. In one analysis, 130 volatile compounds were isolated from a piece of fried chicken, and these oxidation products can pass through the blood-brain barrier”, she wrote. ” Seed oils degrade and oxidize even at room temperature, but heat accelerates the process, making frying especially hazardous … Yet, public health institutions remain staunch supporters”.
U. S. consumption of soybean oil jumped more than a thousand-fold from 1909 to1999 while grain consumption has increased nearly 30 percent since the 1970s. Currently ultraprocessed products that are funded by enormous taxpayer subsidies account for 73 percent of the country’s food supply. Given that the current program is” so backward that less than 2 % of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables,” Kennedy stated in an October op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that he wanted to reform these subsidies.
” Soybean oil in the 1990s became a major source of American calories”, Kennedy wrote,” and high-fructose corn syrup is everywhere”, driven by a subsidy regime to make corn, soybeans, and wheat, “artificially cheap”.
