Can We “Fix America’s Food System”? A Closer Look at RFK Jr.’s Claims and What the Evidence Actually Says

In April 2026, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, a government-backed platform designed to bring public health conversations directly to the public. On its surface, the pitch is compelling: cut through bureaucracy, speak plainly, and confront the chronic disease crisis head-on. The debut episode, featuring Robert Irvine, zeroes in on a familiar and politically powerful claim that America’s food system is fundamentally broken and that processed foods sit at the center of the problem.

The show blends legitimate public health concerns with sweeping claims about government failure, industry capture, and simple, scalable solutions. That combination is potent. It resonates with a public that is increasingly skeptical of institutions. It also risks flattening complex, evidence-heavy issues into stories that feel true, even when they overreach.

So, rather than dismissing it or accepting it at face value, we are doing something more useful.

In this piece, we take in a deep dive into the conversation in what we hope will be a limited series. We walk through the conversation and pause at key moments. Our comments will be interjected and highlighted in this green-ish color.

Rather than dismiss the conversation outright, it is more useful to unpack what is being said and examine where policy rhetoric helps or harms.

Robert Irvine: We talk about food being expensive. If you’re buying expensive food, it’s expensive, but if you’re buying food and you know what to do with it, it’s not expensive.

Secretary Kennedy: Hi, I’m Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS secretary. Welcome to the Secretary Kennedy Podcast. And the purpose of this podcast is to talk about how we’re going to move from policy on paper to reality, to implementing these revolutionary policies from the Trump administration that are going to end the chronic disease epidemic and that are going to change the experience that Americans have with our healthcare system and make it much better, improve the quality of healthcare, make it affordable. But also the subject that we’re talking today is to improve our food supply. How do we go from eating 70% processed foods to eating all whole foods, foods that are actually going to keep us healthy. The processed foods are making us sick. We now have the highest chronic disease burden in the entire world and we’ve gone from spending zero on chronic disease when my uncle was president in 1960 to spending $4.3 trillion a year.

There is some truth here, but the framing is overly simplistic. Research consistently shows that ultra-processed foods are associated with higher risks of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic disorders. A landmark study by Kevin Hall demonstrated that diets high in ultra-processed foods lead to increased calorie intake and weight gain, even when nutrient intake is matched. But jumping from association to a single-cause explanation ignores the broader system. Chronic disease is shaped by income and food access, built environment and physical activity, healthcare access, and marketing and policy environments. Blaming “processed food” alone risks obscuring structural drivers like poverty and food deserts. It also creates the illusion that individual behavior change is sufficient, when decades of public health research say otherwise.

It’s the biggest budget item in the federal government, and it’s also the fastest growing cost. It’s existential for our country. 77% of our kids can’t qualify for military service. And that should get everybody’s attention, but also just the costs are ruinous. 40 cents out of every taxpayer dollar that we give to the federal government is going to treat diseases that are diet related. So we need to change our diet or we’re going to lose our country. And I have here today a man, Robert Irvine, who’s going to tell us how to do this, who’s actually doing this. This is the man who’s making my dream come true. As you know, Brooke Rollins and I, the USDA secretary, the greatest USDA secretary we’ve had in history, released a couple of weeks ago, new dietary guidelines. And those dietary guidelines go from the old guidelines which were driven by the Mercantile interests of large food industry corporations that it captured FDA and captured USDA and were giving us food-like substance.

This is the mercantile impulses that drove fruit loops to the top of the food pyramid. So that’s not even a food. It’s a food-like substance. And that’s what the government was lying to us for 50 years, telling us these things were good to eat. We took whole milk away from two generations of kids and starved their brains and starved their immune systems and their metabolic energies and did so much damage. And now we have a chance to reverse that. The dietary guidelines will drive changes in American food culture. One of the reasons for that is that the US government subsidizes huge numbers of meals every day. $405 million a day from the USDA alone, the fun head start, the Indian Health Services, the prison meals, the school lunches, wicks, and all these other meal systems. And then we have the VA and the military. And the big question that people have is, are we going to be able to provide high quality food at a low enough cost that people can afford it?

This is where rhetoric starts to drift into distortion. It is fair to say that industry influence has shaped U.S. nutrition policy. Scholars in Public Health Nutrition have documented lobbying effects on dietary guidelines and agricultural subsidies. However, the claim that guidelines “starved brains” or broadly harmed populations is not supported by evidence. In fact, The USDA dietary guidelines have generally moved toward more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains over time. Removal of whole milk in schools was based on evidence linking saturated fat to cardiovascular risk, though that evidence is now debated. This is a classic case of partial truth used to justify sweeping distrust. That matters because public health already struggles with declining institutional trust. Overstating past harms can unintentionally fuel misinformation rather than reform.

And that answer is being provided us right now at Fort Hood in Texas in a new military program designed by television chef Robert Irvine. And Robert, I’m not going to introduce you. I’m going to let you introduce yourself. And let me just … You started out as a Navy cook.

Robert Irvine: Yes, sir.

Secretary Kennedy: In the British Navy, on the Britannica.

Robert Irvine: Royal Britania. Yes.

Secretary Kennedy: And so tell us what you learned on that.

Robert Irvine: So I started at a young age, just young cook. I joined the military at the age of 15 and a half years old. Joined and signed up for 15 and a half, joined at 16, went to a warship, did my training, ended up on the Royal Oak Britania, traveled with a royal family for a while and realized that actually not on the royal, but on a warship, realized what food actually did. We didn’t have females in the Navy then. It was just males. 240 men on a warship heading to the forklifts during the war. How do we feed them? What do we feed them and how do we keep them healthy and morale? And I used to make baked goods, funny pies and cakes and whatnot in the afternoon and sandwiches. And the Navy adopted that as a tradition, and it still happens to this day.

But that’s how I started my career in the Navy as a young cook. When I got out of the Navy, I was more interested. The food was so bad in the British Royal Navy. Then I came to the States. I ended up actually working at the White House a couple of days at work. I was working with President Trump at his casinos. Two days a week, I would work in the White House teaching the Navy cooks how to cook. The old days, people didn’t care about what they were putting in their bodies. And first of all, I want to go back a little bit and say, thank you for your secretary roles for changing the dynamics of feeding because the country is in such a state. You said 77% of young children or young adults are not applicable for military service, which is actually true.

We extended the training to lose 10 pounds off those people, which is $100,000 a piece. So by facing- What do you

Secretary Kennedy: Mean it’s $100,000 savings of page?

Robert Irvine: No, it costs more to lose 10 pound of weight because there’s a remedial class, meaning when you can’t make the physical fitness requirement, we put you into a class till you can. And this is the same with the academic requirements. So by fixing, and this is a holistic approach of what you’re trying to do, and I love it because I’ve been trying to do this in the military for 14 years, we first started looking at with the military specifically, how do we buy the food? What food are we buying? Who’s cooking it? Who’s serving it? How are we serving it? Who’s eating it? In a whole holistic circle. And then we go into say, okay, well, the manufacturers are producing, and I give you an example, a centipiece cut of salmon for $6 a pound as opposed to a frozen tail end of salmon at $9.75 a pound.

So why are we not using fresh food? We’re buying frozen. So my whole approach with Fort Hood, which you just mentioned there, thanks to Chris Mohan and the chief Randy George of the Army secretary disco and- And Peter.

Absolutely. I was getting to that and you beat me to it. But thanks to them, they’re changing the way we do business. They’re allowing us to look at what industry is doing outside that we’ve never done since 1930s in the military. We look at a bottle of water. What does it cost us here? Why are we selling it? And what does it cost us over here? And the difference between buying it in Alabama and buying it in Kentucky is it’s the same water, but it’s 10 cents more over here. So the first thing I look at when they asked me to help through my foundation, Robert Robin Foundation, helped the military modernize their feeding systems. So I took them to universities, took them to colleges. Columbia University in New York City, I took them there. There’s no refrigeration in Columbia University. A few opening, but no big walk-ins.

And yet they’re feeding 10 to 12 to 20,000 people a day. Food comes in at two o’clock in the morning, it gets prepped fresh, it gets served, and they have a 96% retention rate in New York City where you can get any food at any point at any time within two mile radius. Why is that? The food is fresh, it’s healthy, you see it, it’s prepared. It looks sexy because

Food has to look sexy to be able to eat it, and they know it’s prepared fresh every day. That’s why they’re successful. And I took the same approach when I took leadership to there. I said, look, we can do this. It’s not about money. And people raise this thing and I get really upset when they say, “Oh, we need more money. We need more money. We need more money.” You don’t. We need to buy correctly. We need to look at what we’re purchasing, where it’s coming from, the farmer, what the excess product is, all those things that I look at and say, “Okay, here’s a menu. It’s healthy. There’s no processed foods in it. You’re going to sleep better, you’re going to get better nutrients, you’re going to feel better.” And if I took blood, and I know you work out, but if I took blood at you today and then put you on a healthier, not you’d need healthier diet, but a different diet and took your blood 90 days to now I can guarantee you will be a better, more resilient human being, you will sleep better and you will live longer.

This is one of the more compelling parts of the conversation and deserves serious attention. There is real evidence that institutional food environments matter. Improvements in school meals following the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act led to: better diet quality among students, no significant increase in food waste (contrary to early claims), modest improvements in obesity trends among low-income children. Similarly, interventions in workplaces and military settings have shown that default options shape behavior. However, the claim that cost is irrelevant is misleading. Scaling fresh food systems across schools, prisons, hospitals, military bases requires infrastructure, labor, and supply chain investment. Local success stories do not automatically translate to national feasibility. The insight is valuable. The policy conclusion is incomplete.

And that’s the problem with our food service. And we go back to the manufacturers, right? Those greedy people that have taken all the money and put dyes and all those things in food, and that’s not everybody, but it’s a lot of people. We have to stop there. Noodles. Look at what Korea and Japan and-

Secretary Kennedy: And

Robert Irvine: Asia. And Asia, Asia in general, their noodles don’t have 1,000 milligrams of sodium in. Why do ours? We spend X amount of billions on 1.4 million active due to men and women because we make them sick with the food we serve them. And then we go on the other end. So if a 19-year-old comes in the military and we cut their hair, we teach them as a march, we give them food. 10 weeks later, they’re a soldier, they serve 20 years, then the VA has to pick up the rest of that in the next 20 years of life because we’ve poisoned them with sugar, salt, colors, dyes and all the other things. We can do better than that. We can go to the manufacturers and we can say, “We want this amount of sodium in this and this is what we’re going to pay for it.”

This language is emotionally powerful and scientifically imprecise. High sodium intake is clearly linked to hypertension. Added sugars contribute to metabolic disease. These are well-established findings. But framing food additives broadly as “poison” crosses into territory often associated with nutrition misinformation. Regulatory bodies like the FDA evaluate additives based on toxicological evidence. While some additives remain controversial, most approved ingredients are considered safe within established limits. The danger of this framing is twofold: 1) It overstates risk, which can lead to public confusion, 2) It distracts from larger issues, like overall dietary patterns and structural inequities. Public health messaging works best when it is precise, not alarmist.

We should not be listening to those people telling us what, as the largest purchaser of food in the world, what we should be paying for it. I did it when I was working at the casinos, I went and bought 50,000 pounds of beef shrimp, da, da, da. And I said, “Okay, I don’t care whether it’s ground beef, whether it’s silloin, whether it’s filet, this is the price per pound and this is what we’re going to do with it. ” But it’s an education of not only the purchasing piece, then how do we cook it? What do we do with it when we have it? And we know our country is made up of many nice aldies and British. We grew up on fishing chips and sinking pie. I don’t want to live and eat that. That’s how I grew up. But if we give you the means of education to be able to cook that, whether you’re from Puerto Rico, whether you’re from England or from Somalia, from wherever, right?

This is one of the most important policy ideas raised in the conversation and one of the least critically examined. Government purchasing power is indeed enormous. Programs like USDA school meals, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and military and institutional food contracts shape entire sectors of the food economy. There is strong evidence that procurement policies can drive change. For example, “farm-to-school” programs have increased access to fresh produce and supported local agriculture. But using purchasing power effectively requires navigating contracting rules and bureaucracy, political pressure from industry, regional supply limitations, equity concerns across vendors and communities. The idea that the government can simply “demand better food” overlooks how contested and complex these systems are. Still, this is an area where rhetoric and evidence actually align more than usual. If there is a real lever for change in this conversation, it is here. The question is not whether procurement matters. It is whether there is the political will to use it in ways that prioritize public health over industry interests.

We give you the information to be able to cook this and buy it at a cheap cost. There is no reason that our health of this nation doesn’t get better, none at all. And it’s not through money. It’s going to the suppliers. It’s going to demand that we don’t want a thousand milligrams of sodium in that noodle. We want 200 milligrams of sodium because the FDA says, “This is what we need a day.” And you’re doing that right now. That’s what’s changing the world. And it’s took me 14 or 15 years to be able to get those changes. I needed you 15 years ago. Where were you 15 years ago? So come on. But now we start to see that people want it. They just don’t know how to do it. And I think with you and Secretary Rawlings and the whole team putting it in front of faces and the Super Bowl ad where it’s really in people’s faces and you’ve got to meet them where they are because not everybody can afford this and this and this.

This framing subtly shifts responsibility from systems to individuals. There is some truth here. Cooking skills, nutrition literacy, and food confidence do influence diet quality. But public health research has repeatedly shown that knowledge alone is not the primary barrier. It NEVER is. People make food choices within constraints: time scarcity, especially for working families, unequal access to grocery stores and fresh food, price differentials between processed and whole foods, and aggressive marketing of ultra-processed products. Blaming a lack of knowledge risks ignoring the reality that for many households, convenience is not a preference. It is a necessity. This matters for policy. If the problem is framed as education, the solution becomes cooking classes and awareness campaigns. If the problem is structural, the solution looks more like subsidies for healthy foods, zoning and retail reform, and labor and time policies. Those are much harder conversations, and they are largely absent from this discussion.

But if we go to those manufacturers and we know what they’re providing and we know what it costs them and we know what they’re making, we can demand, and I use that word very strongly, we demand what we want to feed our country on.

Secretary Kennedy: You mentioned Columbia University and Columbia had an interesting story because it was throwing out most of its food. It was serving really bad food and really sort of cafeteria food. It had only 2,000 people using its food services and a lot of them weren’t even showing up. And now it has, as you say, somewhere around 10,000 people because they switched the food, which they’re not paying more for it. And it’s high quality food. I saw pictures of their cafeteria. The food looks just incredible and the students are flocking to it. And that was one of the templates you use for showing the military what could happen.

Robert Irvine: We use less money for better food to get a more nutritious meal into somebody than any college out there right now.

Secretary Kennedy: This is at Fort Hood.

Robert Irvine: Right now, Fort Hood, we got Fort Leo. Fort Hood, which is one of the biggest

Secretary Kennedy: Bases in the country.

Robert Irvine: We’re doing it right now. So we know it will- You’re doing it

Secretary Kennedy: There at five bases altogether.

Robert Irvine: And we’re about to

Secretary Kennedy: Expand to 20 basis.

Robert Irvine: So that will extend in March. I think we’ll name the next 20 at the end of March at AUSA Global, but right now it’s five bases. And we started at Fort Jackson and nobody was really, again, nobody was pushing for it. I asked the commanding general, General Kelly, he gave me $1.4 million to show that I could do it. In four months, we’d already proved it. The usage was more, everything was made fresh, daily, healthy. Chicken salad was real chicken, not a thousand milligrams of sodium. We made the food and there was lines out the door. So we know there’s no dilatation. If you build it, they will come. Food is sexy. We need it whether we like it or not. We got to eat.

Secretary Kennedy: And before you came along, the food was so unpopular in those military cafeterias that a lot of the soldiers were buying fast food, which is insanely expensive. I think it’s nine or $10 now just for a big Mac meal. They were using up their paycheck and they were throwing away the food in the military cafeteria. And what’s happening now?

Robert Irvine: Yeah. So if you think that the old side of military cooking was … We know there’s 13 million meals over a week. We know that there’s 2,000 soldiers at lunch, 3,000 at dinner, breakfast, whatever. So we would cook the food, put it into these big hot boxes. Nobody would come in. We’d take their allowance from their money. They would go to the APs, buy something, and we would throw all this food away. And it’s still happening today. We’re changing that. The biggest problem with schools, with military, it’s the same thing. How do we buy it? How do we train them to cook it? How do we educate them how to eat it and what’s good for them and not waste it because we’re wasting more food than we actually … We should be cooking like we do in a restaurant. When you go to a restaurant, I don’t give you a meal that’s cooked for eight hours in our bands in a hot box.

You order it, I cook it, you eat it, and hopefully you like it, and you come back next time. Well, that’s how we should be doing this with school feeding, with prison feeding, with military feeding with … And the five bases that we’re testing with the military, I believe we’re going to go off the charts and you’ll see the savings in waste and food purchasing, how we’re buying the food. And that’s a big, big aspect of … I can create a menu, but nobody wants a 24 ounce steak on a menu. We can’t afford that. We get $15 here, $17 there, $5 over … I can put a meal for a soldier for five to $7 depending on what you’re eating, right? And yet we’re getting 15 or $17. Don’t tell me there’s not enough money. There’s plenty of money. It’s how we purchase. And I have this fight inwardly because I’m a chef by trade and I want the best of the best.

When you come to my restaurant, the present comes or whoever comes to the restaurant, I want you to get the best possible, but I don’t want you to pay for the nose for it. It’s the same when I purchase. I want to purchase stuff and say, okay, this is the best I can possibly do. I’m going to do the least to it. I’m going to season it very lightly with something, use some fresh ears, I’m going to put it there and I’m going to serve it to you. And to me, that’s not difficult. That’s what chefs do. But we’ve complicated the system that people, and the biggest argument, and I’ve heard it for the last 14, 15 years, “Oh, we need more money. We need more money. We need more.” You don’t need more money. You need to be smart in the purchasing. You need smarter in the menu, smarter in nutritionals.

This is a compelling narrative, especially to policymakers looking for cost-neutral solutions. But it runs directly counter to decades of implementation research. In reality, improving food systems at scale almost always requires upfront investment. Studies of school nutrition programs, hospital food reform, and community-based interventions consistently show that better outcomes depend on workforce training, kitchen infrastructure, supply chain coordination, monitoring and evaluation systems. Frameworks like Implementation Science emphasize that even the best-designed interventions fail without sufficient resources and capacity. Efficiency gains are real. Waste reduction matters. Smarter procurement helps. But presenting cost as a non-issue risks setting programs up for failure when they inevitably encounter real-world constraints. This is a familiar pattern in public health: promising transformation without accounting for the cost of implementation.

Just like Japan, Korea, when you go for a meal as a child in Japan, Korea, or Asia, it’s an experience. With the military, my biggest fear is we build these houses and then we put a kitchen and then these kids go and sit in their rooms and eat on their own and that suicide rates go through. Dining is supposed to be an experience with kids and it’s communal, it’s mindful and we don’t have that. We’ve lost that. There used to be, when I grew up, Sunday lunch, it was everybody around the table eating no phones, phones away and eat and talk. And we’ve lost that in society and food is the only way to move back. We talk about food being expensive. If you’re buying expensive food, it’s expensive, but if you’re buying food and you know what to do with it, it’s not expensive.

Look how much chicken is thrown away from manufacturers, and I used this a second ago. When you think about chicken wings, chicken wings used to be cat food, dog food, throwaway food. Now it’s more expensive than chicken breast. So why are we not using dark meat? Why are we not helping people understand those cheaper cuts of meat or cheaper vegetables and finding what is being tilled? And if you look at our throwaway rate from farmers, bless them, and we’re trying to figure that out and subsidize them, why are they growing it? And then we till it because we can’t use it. There is enough technology in this world to redirect that food to where it needs to go without being ultra processed.

Secretary Kennedy: You mentioned Japan and Indonesia. In Japan, they feed at 10 million kids a day, school lunches. They pay between $1.70 and $2.50. And they have a lot harder time getting food than we do. We’re the bread basket of the world. And they make it, as you say, they make it a culinary experience. They teach culinary skills to the kids. They teach good eating habits. They use the experience to teach character to their kids.

International comparisons are useful, but only when contextualized. Japan’s lower obesity rates are not just about school meals. They reflect urban design that promotes walking, cultural norms around portion size, strong primary care systems, and lower income inequality. Similarly, low-cost school meals in countries like Indonesia reflect different labor costs, agricultural systems, and economic conditions. Cherry-picking these examples risks promoting policy mimicry without systems thinking. What works in one context does not automatically transfer to another.

Robert Irvine: They

Secretary Kennedy: Have the lowest obesity rate in the developed world. And then Indonesia does the same thing. They feed 80 million kids and they’re paying 60 cents a meal. That’s a developing country, but we ought to at least be able to match what Japan is selling. Japan grows almost nothing at Japan.

Robert Irvine: Think about that. 60 cents. Scale. You just mentioned the scale. When we buy at scale, it shouldn’t be more expensive. It should be cheaper.

Secretary Kennedy: What is your experience with the Defense Logistic Agency?

Robert Irvine: For me, I have a hard time, and I do.

Secretary Kennedy: Because they actually pay more for the food. They should be … They’re buying at scale.

Robert Irvine: I have a hard time, sir, because what makes America great or had made America great was challenges, right? Was, you’re selling for this and I’m standing for this. Economies of scale, if I’m buying this much, I’m going to buy it from you. We’ve lost that because now I’m the only one that’s got it and you’re going to pay me whatever I ask for at. How am I supposed to be able to do that? And we can, by the way, but we’ve got to hold … I go in and I’ve just done it with the military. And by the way, the military is a group of people. I’m just the independent nonpaid guy on my foundation is got a service agreement with them. And I just go in there and I say, “Okay, give me the information. Let me dissect the information. Why am I paying this?

” “Well, because we’ve got to come do this. “And I said,” Well, why? Why can’t I go over here and buy it? It’s cheaper and it’s better quality. “”Well, because we’ve been doing this for 36,000 years, that’s what we want. ” I’m like, “Well, sir, can I get an exception to policy for this? We want to test. I want to prove to you we can save money getting better product, a better end product for the end user, make a more nutritious meal. And by the way, sir, Merry Christmas, there’s a billion dollars I just saved you. ” Isn’t that a win-win for everybody?

Secretary Kennedy: We skipped over big apps in your curriculum vitae, which I think are relevant to this discussion because you were a television chef after your military experience. You were a television chef, and then you specialized in turnarounds at restaurant. Talk about that, about your experience as a television chef, because you had a couple of shows.

Robert Irvine: Yes. Yeah. Restaurant Impossible was really important because I’d get about three to 4,000 emails a week from restaurants saying, “How do we fix this? ” And eventually we made a TV show, Restaurant Impossible. We did 300 plus episodes, anywhere from people being 300,000 to a million one in debt. And now I have guys that were a million debt, making three and a half million dollars in profit and so on. And it’s really about education. We put the military, and I use that because it could be a prison, it could be a school. We put on these menus what we think these kids are going to eat, and we prepare it poorly, we buy it poorly. And I’m not saying every place, because you can’t broadstroke everybody the same thing, but we don’t do it well. And then these kids take all their money and they go to the snack counter and they buy all this junk, and then we expect them to be healthy.

It’s just like a soldier. If I don’t give them an opportunity to eat somewhere for breakfast and he’s flying a 180 milli drone and falls asleep because he didn’t have a $5 breakfast, whose fault is that? Mine or his? It’s mine as a military because I didn’t give them options. And I think that’s the problem. It starts with purchasing, and this is the same with the restaurant. So I look at when I walk in, what was your original idea?

Oh, you wanted a Mexican restaurant, but you’re on an Indian reservation. How does that work? So the original idea, what are you making? Where are you buying? What’s your cost of goods? Your labor thrown on top of that. What’s your percentage of profit on top of that? And how are your sales? And by the way, don’t bring your family into this because you never work with family. It’s not a good idea. You fire your family. You don’t pay them. So I look at that the same way in big business, big, whether you’re Walmart, whether you’re American Airlines, whether you’re a Comcast NBC, whether the Army, whether … It’s the same process as a TV show. It’s fact finding. It’s sorting through all the garbage and then saying, Hey, here’s the plan of action, but this is what it takes to get it done. It may need an exception to policy.

It may need a change of policy. But the minute that’s done, this is what’s going to free up and this is how it’s going to give you a better quality product. And by the way, look at your checkbook and your balancing your bank account at the end of the month. It’s going to be there. Why? Because I’ve saved on waste. I’ve saved on purchasing and I’ve put more people through the door. The more people, word of mouth, and it’s like me saying, they’ll tailor the fish. “Oh, I caught a fish this week. It was this big. By the time it gets to you three times later, it was this big. “So word of mouth on something good is like wildfire. And the more you tell the story of success, the more people buy into it. Because there’s education too, because I grew up in England, stay kindy pies.

I didn’t know about okra and avocados and all the other stuff. Now I do, obviously. So it’s about education, purchasing correctly, cooking correctly, but also understanding the audience.

You’ve got to understand who’s coming to your restaurant, who’s coming to your business. And that’s what the TV show was. And I took that, I wrote a book about how to be successful and build teams and catapult to success. And I do that with my life’s passion is just like you, I want to leave this earth better than when I came to it. I want to know that the kids after me are getting great food, the military that we’re asking to do great things every day, these athletes are getting the right nutrition. And don’t tell me it’s going to cost more money. Just tell me, give me the details and let me figure it out and let me show you how to do it. Because those naysayers, and there are a lot of them, I want to know that when I go to a supplier that I can get this water and you’ve been buying it, because we’re friends, you’ve been buying it for 2012, I’m now getting it for 99 cents and the extra dollar is going into that food, it’s going back in.

I’m not taking it away. And I think that’s the difference between Asia and us. It’s an experience, it’s cultural, it’s health-based, nutrition-based, but it’s also mental health that goes along with it.

Secretary Kennedy: And what should a military meal cost?

Robert Irvine: And what does it cost? I think a breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I can give you in a restaurant for anywhere from 10 bucks to … It costs me anywhere from five to seven to do a great job. Well, that’s the

Secretary Kennedy: Ingredients or is that ingredients and labor?

Robert Irvine: Well, right now that’s ingredients, but labor is very minimal based on, depending on the menu style that you put in. So if I’ve got 20 items on a menu, there’s more labor. But if I can take, and this is what I always think of with the military, if I can take a value added product, for example, a sweet potato, I can have somebody make a sweet potato that’s clean, just sweet potato, bake them, steam them, mash them, lot seasoning in a bag, boil it, serve it. The nutritional data on that is way better than me going and putting butter and adding and mixing and cinnamon and all that. If I can take a value added product, it costs my labor down. I’m not peeling potatoes. I’m not cooking it. I’m not matching it. So there’s a mix of both there taking the value added product’s already been done, a marinated chicken that costs $2.12 a pound as opposed to a chicken breast with a thousand milligrams of a sodium pump.

And then a guy like me comes and does this or a girl and then we cook it and then we wonder why the blood pressure is through the roof of these young people. There’s ways around that. And so I can tell you that I can feed a soldier that’s 25 years old under $10 for three meals and make it spectacular.

Secretary Kennedy: $10 for each meal?

Robert Irvine: For all meals for the day. $10

Secretary Kennedy: For the day. And what-

Robert Irvine: And we get 17- Military

Secretary Kennedy: Contracts that the Defense Logistics Agency is giving out, how much do they give the contractors per meal?

Robert Irvine: Well, so I think the Aberies now, the Navy is 17 dollars. The army is 15.82, I believe, something like that. And it changes based on the bases and volume and things. But anywhere from the contractors get paid between $ 15 and $20. So don’t tell me you can’t make-

Secretary Kennedy: That’s for three meals?

Robert Irvine: That’s for three meals. So is there a lot of room for improvement? Absolutely. But we’ve got to hold the manufacturers accountable. We’ve got to hold the retailers accountable. We’ve got to hold the stakeholders that are running these schools accountable.

Secretary Kennedy: It’s about being smart, not having more money.

Robert Irvine: It’s not about … You’re exactly right. It’s not about money because if we are smart and we understand the economics of the products that we buy … Say there’s a five days of school and there’s a five-day menu or a 12-day or 18, whichever it is, we know what that menu costs because we know what we’re selling. It’s like me in a restaurant. When you go into a restaurant and you order Chicken Isla King or a chicken, whatever, it comes off on a computer because the server’s done it. I know exactly what we serve, so I know exactly the poundage of meat I use. I know what it’s going to cost to produce that dish because it’s analyzed. Every ounce, everything that goes into it, there’s a recipe card, there’s a standing operating procedure, how to cook it, how to serve it. It’s second nature to me because I’ve been doing it so long.

But when we put somebody in charge of something that we think knows or has been doing it for years and never changed because they’ve never been trained to change, it will be like the military from 1936, it will stay the same. Nothing will ever evolve.

Secretary Kennedy: And now have you seen any measurable differences in morale or performance in the troops that

Robert Irvine: You’re … Morale, number one, through the roof. Number two, usage of facility, line out the door wrapped around. I get data points every 15 minutes of the dynasty. I know exactly what’s happening at any point in time. And that’s what I said to secretaries of war and whatnot. I’ll give you the data. I’ll prove the data works just like the fitness and health. How do we … The H2F movement now. We know that we’ve got 8% of less breakages and sprains and better service members because of that. We can do the same thing with food. Less waste, better human being, better sleep, better cognizant, speed, recovery, decision making. All these things are tied to food, but we don’t think of that. We think families think that, oh, we just eat food. It’s okay, great, Willie, again, four or five hours later. Or do they? Some people can’t do that.

So I think food has got a lot more. It’s not just feeling your belly and feeling good. It’s about mental health. It’s about relationships. It’s about common sense. And again, I go back to the same thing you just said. It’s not about money. It’s about being smart and getting the data and understanding where that data come from being able to use it. When somebody says something, they say, “No, no, no, no, no, no.

It’s here. It’s right in front of you. It’s telling you. ” And that’s why successful restaurants can tell you down to the ounce, the penny, the pound, the cent, exactly how they’re making money. And it’s no different. We’re just bigger business. The government is a bigger business. It’s got bigger expenditures, but it’s the same thing. Holding people accountable for what they spend, what they buy, how they use it to the point of we can tell you what the waste factor is at any given time and any given meal period in dollar and in poundage, which is next to zero, by the way. So it works. We know the system works. It’s now getting people to change and hold them accountable to do it. And I think the change is the tough part. And I went through a lot of fights and I’m okay with the fights.

I’m a good fighter, but I know the information before we go into a fight because that’s important.

Secretary Kennedy: You know what? Probably our gold standard objective, the holy grail of this is to get this kind of good food into our schools. One of the big impediments with that is a lot of the schools have shut down their cafeterias. Oh, they’re just giving the kids packaged foods, which is the worst thing in the world for them. Do you have any ideas about how to overcome that?

Robert Irvine: Well, I think number one, each area is different. And I said this before. I feel that you’ve got to take … And each state is different. I don’t know what the states are getting per money, different, whatever. But the military’s having the same problem with closing down. Two days ago, Space Force space closed down facilities. There’s no eating facilities on the Space Force. Why? Well, because they couldn’t get people to work there. The food was garbage. Nobody was using it. That’s fixable. Find people that want to do the right thing, train them correctly. And that’s what we do. When I take over a facility, I go in, I train the people. Even if you’ve got the contract, I train you. You do it this way. There’s no change of policy. This is what you’re doing. And I can tell you, and I’m very proud to say this, after a year and eight months of Fort Jackson, and I pop up there all the time just to see if they’re on key.

No changes in recipes, no changes in presentation, no changes in it. This is the way we tour you. This is the way it goes. That’s the beon elder. And I think that’s what you have to do to reestablish standing operating procedures for schools. And I just watched a program in Korea two days, three days ago about how they do it and how they hold people accountable. And the sanitation records and the way they do it and the way the people and how happy the kids are. Happy kids go to school and become brighter people. Sorry, that’s just science. That’s not Robert Irvine. Tha’s science. They’re happier. They learn more. They don’t fall asleep at 10 o’clock in the morning because they’ve had a coconut at Snickersboro. So I think, is it possible I’m going to do this? Sorry, guys. Yes, it is possible. Absolutely. But it takes getting any information and getting after it because people are always afraid of change.

I’m not afraid of change. I’m not afraid of fights. You can fight me all day, but I’m going to come with data and you better be able to change the data. And if you tell me different data, well, this was yesterday at four o’clock. When was yours? Five months ago? No. So I think it’s a holistic approach of understanding the purchase power, the menu cycles, the people cooking it, the people going to eat it, and making it fun and enjoyable for the end user, meaning the child or the military person or the prisoner. Because it’s the same process. We’re doing the same thing. It’s food. I’m not Dr. Os doing cardiac surgery. I’m putting food on a plate for people to eat and have fun and enjoy it and go away feeling better and sleeping well and less chronic disease. Let’s talk about disease that we’re creating in the food supply.

So all those things come into better, wholesome food that we don’t think about. You and I think about it and your team thinks about it, but the general public don’t. They just think, “Oh, we’re going to eat this because it’s there.”

Secretary Kennedy: One of the craziest things is the junk that they serve in hospitals. I mean, do they do that in angle? I can’t believe they’re doing better in England.

Robert Irvine: I could sit and agree with you every three seconds because we’re supposed to be getting healthy in hospitals. We’re not getting healthy. They’re serving … Again, I go back to anything- Oh, it’s

Secretary Kennedy: Appalling. The

Robert Irvine: Stuff that they

Secretary Kennedy: Serve.

Robert Irvine: It’s education. It’s the same thing. The lowest common denominator, a chef’s job used to be very prestigious. Now nobody wants to do it. And now I’ve got an answer for that. That’s okay. But the ones that do, let’s train them more. Let’s buy the value added products so we don’t have to peer potatoes and we do it and we pour nutritious. I don’t have to cut fruit. I can buy fruit cut at a great price as opposed to cutting a melon myself because I don’t have the time. There’s no reason we can’t make great menus for the same amount of money with less people or if we have more people and then we do it by hand. But to me, it’s a waste of an hour to peel melons when I can buy it cheaper. And again, is it labor or is it food cart?

Is it labor? Is it food? Is it labor as it food? But there’s no more money than you did. It’s just the adjustment of balance.

Secretary Kennedy: You were talking about good food makes happy kids. And one of the things that we talk about here a lot is the link between good diet and mental health, because everybody knows it affects physical health. There’s also 75 years of peer of you now that link it directly to bad food, ultra processed food. The conditions like ADHD to bipolar disorders, schizophrenia. There’s a professor at Harvard, Christopher Palmer, who is dramatically reducing the symptoms of schizophrenia using ketogenic diets. And you can go on the internet and look up all these studies on these experiments, these controlled experiments that they do in prisons where they switch the diet maybe in one wing of the facility and they leave the tie in the other. And the level of violence goes down 40 to 50%. The use of restraints and juvenile detention facilities goes down to 75%, disciplinary problems, all of those things.

There is emerging research connecting diet and mental health, particularly through inflammation, gut microbiota, and metabolic pathways. For example, work by Christopher Palmer explores metabolic interventions like ketogenic diets in psychiatric conditions. But the evidence is still developing, and causality is far from established for many claims. Statements about 40 to 50 percent reductions in violence and large-scale psychiatric improvements should be treated cautiously unless tied to specific, peer-reviewed studies. Overstating these links risks undermining legitimate, promising research in nutritional psychiatry.

Robert Irvine: And you see that a lot with post-traumatic stress. So food is linked to post-traumatic stress. They’ve proven that on study after study, you hear about somebody popping a balloon and somebody jumping because of whatever. It’s the same if you put mashed potatoes or bacon or something. All these things that you’re talking about, they are. Food is related to most of those and aggression and starvation and meal periods. The body is not designed to eat three meals a day. It’s just not. So if you have breakfast at six o’clock and you don’t eat till 12:00, you don’t eat till six again, the body is designed to eat every three hours, something small. I’m not talking about the 28 hour steak at nine o’clock at night, but it’s designed to continually graze over a period of time to keep you at a level of alertness. We don’t do that.

We’ve grown up on this system of three meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And what I’ve said in the military side is that’s not good enough. It’s not good enough when we are asking these people to do what we’re asking them to do. They should be able to get a midday snack. They must be able to get a midnight snack at any point in time. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re putting food trucks, we’re putting 24 hour grab and goes as well as so when the big diner said these clothes, there are locations to get food. They don’t have to go and get a Big Mac or a Dorito or a whatever, whatever. And I think it’s the same. Kids’ attention spans. And if you go eight o’clock to 10 o’clock and I’m not at breakfast and I did this, I watched kids during a TV show I did in DC where the kids’ breakfast was Coke and a Snickers bar.

And I took the crew breakfast. My own crew, I said, “You’re not eating. The kids aren’t going to eat.” And we did that for a week while we filmed this TV show. The difference in the kids was completely different.

Eggs. I mean, eggs, nothing, but we’ve got to do better. And again, I give you kudos and the team kudos for the Super Bowl piece simply because it’s the most watched TV show on the planet and you’re talking about real food. Now it’s got to get sexy again. Now we got to put that message out, get the information and then start to do it. Not just dribble, dribble, dribble. I went full force with the army and I’m going to upset some people. As long as you got my back, you got it, right?

Secretary Kennedy: AJS is behind

Robert Irvine: You. I got you. I’ll do it. I’ll do the work. But I need an aircraft over me to say when I hit the wall, you got to come in and smooth me up. And that’s exactly what they did. And I had these fights with data and they couldn’t argue the data. And we moved, I think, faster in the last year than 70 years prayer. And we’re actually making physical change. And the first one, as I said, opens Fort Hood. We did Fort Jackson as a test. And after my first four months, I’m like, “We’re not testing anymore. We don’t need to test anymore. We know it. We know what to do. Now let’s roll it out.

” And I think that’s the exciting part. I’ve devoted my life to health, fitness, and the legacy of other people because I believe that we can do better with food, with exercise, with kids, with prisoners, with military folks. I believe we can do better than what everybody else is doing. Talking about making America healthy again, slap it in the face and do it just like you’re doing. Keep doing it and keep pushing it because that is a legacy play way beyond my life, your life. Imagine the history books when somebody picks up a history books and says, “This is what RFK did in this time, and it’s 30 years later.” That’s a play when they talk about something being done. And that to me is the exciting part. It’s not about Robert Irvine did this. It’s look what a team of people that were like- minded got together and didn’t talk about it.

They actually did it.

Secretary Kennedy: One last question. You mentioned that you toured with the Royal Family. Yes. Did you ever meet Lord

Robert Irvine: Monbant? So it’s funny, Lord Mount Banton, when I was the young secrete, so what you call ROTC here, when I was 11 years old, there was a competition called the Royal Navy Field Gun Competition. And basically what it was in the Boll War, I know I’m dating myself here, but in the Boll War, they had a carriage that carried the-

Secretary Kennedy: The gadling

Robert Irvine: Gun. The missiles, the bullets, basically the big shells, sorry, and then the cannon and it was drawn by horses. Well, Lord Mumbaton every year had a secret at Rumsey House, had a competition to cross the river. So it was a 28-foot chasm, you put two telegraph poles up, one guy swings over, takes another one, pots it, and you have to move a ton of equipment over this river. And it’s an event, and you can Google it called Field Gun Competition at Earl’s Court. It was done at Lord Ramsey, On my man’s house where Diana and Charles had their honeymoon. And I got to meet him there when I was a young man, not in the Navy, because he’d already passed. He’d been killed at that point, but I never forget- He was killed on it. Yes, he was killed by the IRA.

But yeah, those memories of my young childhood days in the military, again, that’s what drives me now. The military for me is, get it done. Stop talking about it. Here’s the plan, go and do it. And I think I’ve never lost that from that young age of … I used to carry a 120 pound wheel at 16 years old on a … I’ve got to show you the video. It’s funny. And then just hit a deck, roll it, go through a hole that’s six inches wide, put a gun back together, then run and fire it. It’s crazy. But that’s how I met Lord Monmount many, many years ago.

Secretary Kennedy: Robert Irvine, thank you very,

Robert Irvine: Very

Secretary Kennedy: Much. Thanks for what you’re doing for our country.

Robert Irvine: Well, I appreciate what you’re doing. Keep doing it and keep shaking the tree.

Produced by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Conclusion

What makes this conversation interesting (and ultimately frustrating) is not that it is entirely wrong. It is that it blends valid insights with exaggeration.

Yes, the American food system contributes to poor health. Yes, institutional food environments can be improved. Yes, ultra-processed foods are part of the problem.

But public health has learned, often the hard way, that simple explanations rarely produce effective policy.

The real challenge is not identifying a villain. It is building systems that make healthy choices accessible, affordable, and sustainable for everyone. That requires more than rhetoric. It requires evidence, humility, and a willingness to engage complexity rather than simplify it.