Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday his intention to eliminate the Generally Recognized As Safe standards for most domestic products.
“We’ve launched a review of the GRAS standards, and we’re going to get rid of the GRAS standards for most products,” Kennedy told Fox News. “The GRAS standards is a standard that was adopted in 1958. It was adopted because, when FDA was created to regulate food, there were foods that were generally recognized as safe.”
According to Kennedy, these included flour, dairy products, and eggs, and the government did not want to force companies to test them. However, the GRAS standard has since been corrupted.
NEW: HHS Secretary @RobertKennedyJr plans to rid the American food system of harmful ingredients by overhauling outdated GRAS standards:
“We have 10,000 ingredients … and in Europe they only have 400, and we have the worst chronic disease burden of any country in the world.” pic.twitter.com/7NigSQZ5Rm
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) March 20, 2025
“That designation was expanded by an industry that began taking advantage of it so that any new chemical that they want to add to our food is generally recognized as safe and gets no review,” the secretary said.
“That’s why we have 10,000 ingredients in our food in this country,” Kennedy added. “In Europe, they only have 400, and we have the worse chronic disease burden of any country in the world.”
Earlier this month, Kennedy directed the Food and Drug Administration to eliminate a loophole in safety rules permitting companies to self-affirm that the sum of their ingredients is safe without offering data to prove it.
“For far too long, ingredient manufacturers and sponsors have exploited a loophole that has allowed new ingredients and chemicals, often with unknown safety data, to be introduced into the U.S. food supply without notification to the FDA or the public,” Kennedy said in a March 10 press release.
RFK JR. TO CHANGE FDA RULE THAT ALLOWS COMPANIES TO HIDE FOOD INGREDIENT SAFETY DATA
Kennedy echoed this sentiment Thursday.
“We are going to get rid of the GRAS standards for new products,” he said. “We’re gonna go back and review all of these old ingredients to make sure that they are safe, and we’re gonna encourage these companies to get rid of them as quickly as possible.”