During a press conference on Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about a Gardenia-based food dye the Food and Drug Administration approved.
00:00At this time, I'd love to welcome to the podium, again, my partner in this very valid, righteous, and incredible effort.
00:09Please help me welcome Secretary Bobby Kennedy.
00:16Thank you, Brooke. I'm particularly happy to be here today because this is relevant to my favorite food, which is ice cream.
00:30I want to, you know, since we, you know, since we came in about five and a half months ago and started talking about eliminating dyes and other bad chemicals from our food, we've had this extraordinary response from the industry.
00:46And Brooke just rattled off this inventory, this extraordinary inventory of national corporate food producers have all made commitments to remove food dyes from their food.
01:01And with this addition today of the dairymen and the dairy food producers, we now have about 35 percent of American food industry that has made commitments.
01:17And that's in addition between 35 and 40 percent.
01:21And that is in addition to the 35 percent of the food industry that was already organic and healthy and chemical free.
01:32Brooke and I have often talked about the fact that we can't make Maha succeed without the partnership of the American farmer.
01:40And our job is to help them to open the doors, to make sure that they're that they have adequate resources in their supply chains and that the approvals for new chemical free dyes are happening very quickly.
01:59And I'm going to bring on Marty McCary in a moment and he's going to make an amazing announcement that today FDA has approved a new blue vegetable dye in addition to many of the other dyes that we've all the three dyes that we've already rapidly approved over the past two months.
02:21So we are going to be there for these, for the dairy industry.
02:27I grew up in a world where milk was the healthiest thing that you could eat.
02:33There's been a, there was an attack on whole milk and cheese and yogurt over the past couple of decades.
02:40And Brooke and I, our agencies are about to release new dietary guidelines in the next several months that will elevate those products
02:51as well as to where they ought to be in terms of, of contributing to the health of our children.
02:57There's a there's tremendous amount of emerging science that, that talks about the need for more protein in our diet and more fats in our diet.
03:10And there's no industry that does that better than this industry.
03:14So I'm very grateful for this industry for stepping up, not only on this, but over the past 10 years, they've removed 60% of the sugar from milk products in, in school lunches.
03:28They've pledged to continue to reduce the amount of sugar in the food.
03:32But this step is an extraordinary step, and I'm very proud to be part of this partnership.
03:39I'm very, very grateful to the industry.
03:41There are many dairymen and women in the audience, and we met with them this morning, and it was an amazing meeting with amazing people.
03:50And we want to make it so that they're successful and that they can do what they want to do, which is to provide our children with the healthiest food possible.
