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The Authority: Dr. David Kessler
The FDA Commissioner who took on Big Tobacco and trans fats sets his sights on Big Food
On August 6, 2025, Dr. David Kessler filed a citizen petition asking the FDA to revoke the “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS) designation for the core ingredients of highly processed foods: refined carbohydrates.
Kessler brings unmatched experience to the matter. A graduate of Amherst College, the University of Chicago Law School, and Harvard Medical School, he trained in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins before moving seamlessly between medicine, law, and government. From 1979 to 1990, he advised the U.S. Senate, managed Montefiore Medical Center, taught food and drug law at Columbia, and served as medical director at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine hospital.
Kessler then served as FDA Commissioner from 1990 to 1997. Under Presidents Bush and Clinton, he sped drug approvals for AIDS therapies; introduced the Nutrition Facts label; scrutinized trans fats (GRAS revoked in 2015); exposed evidence of nicotine manipulation, paving the way for the $200 billion Master Settlement Agreement between states and Big Tobacco; and placed a moratorium on silicone breast implants. Next, Kessler served as dean of Yale and then UCSF medical schools. As an author, he has explored the roots of overeating and the neurobiology of suffering. Most recently, he led the U.S. government’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution and therapeutics effort.
At Stake: A Momentous Opportunity
America’s chronic illness epidemic consumes 18% of GDP, averaging $11,300 per person. Rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, mental illness, cancer, and autoimmune disease are climbing. Life expectancy and birth rates are dropping. The CDC and the NIH identify poor nutrition as a central driver, placing this crisis beyond tobacco for its toll on public health.
HHS Secretary Kennedy has made reducing ultra processed ingredients in the food supply a central focus of his agenda. In Kessler’s own words, this petition ‘provides a realistic, science-based, and legally sound path for the Administration to do just that’.
The fact that Kessler, a methodical institutionalist, and Kennedy, a combative disruptor, see eye to eye on both the crisis and its cause presents a momentous opportunity to solve the most consequential health threat of our time.
The Focus: ‘Primary Causal Determinants of Metabolic Harm’
By specifying refined carbohydrates, Kessler sidesteps ongoing, professional debate about what constitutes ultra-processed foods and delivers a legally enforceable target for FDA action. In so doing, he educates the public.
We know whole foods are best, but what’s so bad about processed ingredients? Kessler makes it plain. In the petition, he names them, describes how they are manufactured, and details the ways they wreak havoc on satiety, digestion, and nutrient absorption (summarized below).
Kessler identifies these ingredients as the ‘primary causal determinants of metabolic harm’, thus advancing a desperately needed focus in medicine: that the crisis of chronic disease is a crisis of metabolism -- one that, Kessler emphasizes, for many, begins at birth, since more than half of infant formulas contain corn syrup solids. Such refined carbohydrates permeate our food supply, driving metabolic harm at every stage of life.
The Culprits: Do You Recognize These?
The Challenge to the FDA: What Industry Must Do
Kessler’s message is clear: these ingredients are making us sick, and the FDA must act. It must require industry to prove these manufactured ingredients are safe or stop using them. The petition calls for these steps:
Declare these processed refined carbohydrates are no longer Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS)
Revoke existing GRAS approvals
Require industry to secure food additive petitions within 24 months
Remove non-compliant products from commerce
The Priority: We The People
The FDA must answer the petition by February, 2, 2026. Its response will reveal its priority: public health or industry profits.
We, the people, can shape the outcome.
Urge your representatives to support FDA action to adopt the petition’s measures so that Americans have a real chance at vibrant health.
The media has largely ignored Kessler’s petition. Help get the word out. Share this story with your networks. The more visible the petition, the harder it will be for regulators to ignore.
📄 Read the petition: Kessler Petition (PDF).
📄 Read the letter: Kessler’s Letter to Secretary Kennedy (PDF)
