To hear the usual pundits tell it, banning candy and soda from food stamps is an act of cruelty. You know, denying the "dignity" of buying a bag of Skittles with taxpayer dollars somehow strikes the professional outrage class as tyrannical.
But if you listened to U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week, you heard something far more revolutionary: a clear-headed, unapologetic defense of common sense.
"For years, SNAP has used taxpayer dollars to fund soda and candy — products that fuel America's diabetes and chronic disease epidemics," Kennedy said at this week’s MAHA ("Make America Healthy Again") Monday event on the National Mall.
"The U.S. taxpayer should not be paying to feed kid's foods, the poorest kids in the country, that will give them diabetes."
He’s right.
With the approval of new federal waivers under the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, twelve states — now including West Virginia, Florida, Colorado, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas — will be allowed to redefine what qualifies as a SNAP-approved food item.
That means the end of soda, energy drinks, candy bars, and donuts on Uncle Sam’s tab.
Cue the hysteria.
This policy is not about shaming the poor or paternalistic micromanagement.
It’s about drawing a moral and fiscal line in the sand: federal assistance should feed health, not disease.
If you’re on public assistance, your groceries should nourish you, not accelerate the onset of chronic illness.
It’s not cruel.
What's cruel is watching the federal government subsidize obesity, diabetes, and heart disease—then turning around and spending billions more trying to treat them.
SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—spends over $400 million a day. By Kennedy’s own estimate, 10% of that goes to sugary beverages.
Add in candy, and that number balloons to somewhere between 13% and 17%.
We are talking about tens of millions of dollars every day being spent not on food, but on the industrialized garbage that built the modern American disease economy.
And make no mistake, it is an economy.
Our nation’s healthcare system doesn't treat people — it manages their symptoms.
That’s not an exaggeration; it’s a critique made by Tim Keller, a respected healthcare and lifestyle analyst and founder of U.S. Diabetes Care, who’s made it his mission to upend the pharmaceutical status quo.
"Western medicine is broken," Keller says. "Doctors treat a symptom, not a patient."
Instead of reflexively prescribing insulin or cholesterol medication, Keller teaches people how to reverse diabetes through scientifically validated lifestyle interventions — diet, exercise, and discipline.
He’s created a diabetes management app to support this, giving patients tools to monitor and correct their health in real time.
His message is simple, "Diabetes is not a life sentence — we’re here to prove it."
But even the best app can't compete with a federally funded diet of Mountain Dew and gummy worms. That’s why policy must catch up to the medicine. And now, under MAHA, it’s beginning to.
Some critics argue this amounts to government overreach, an intrusion into personal freedom. But let's be serious: there's no constitutional right to buy Pepsi with someone else’s money.
No one is saying you can’t drink soda — only that taxpayers shouldn't subsidize your path to a triple bypass.
This isn't even a new idea.
The WIC program — Women, Infants, and Children — has operated for decades with strict nutritional guidelines.
It works.
Nobody cries "Nanny State" when WIC restricts purchases to fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Why? Because the program’s goal is explicitly tied to nutrition.
Shouldn’t SNAP share that goal?
The Trump administration's broader MAHA vision is centered around that premise — that public health is not a partisan issue, but a patriotic one.
That it's a moral duty to not just feed Americans, but to feed them well.
If we want to end the diabetes epidemic, we need to stop funding it first.
Consider the generational implications.
When candy and soda are removed from food stamp purchases, that decision cascades down through families, school lunches, community grocery stores, and cultural expectations.
It reorients the SNAP program away from being a blank check for processed food giants and toward a tool for nutritional rehabilitation.
But perhaps the most powerful aspect of these reforms is the message they send, that government should not be an enabler of disease.
If someone is committed to improving their health, the system should lift them up — not sabotage their efforts with a wink and a candy bar.
So let the critics moan about lost freedoms and paternalism.
The rest of us will be applauding a long-overdue correction to a deeply broken system.
Because if we truly care about the future of this country, it's not just time to reform SNAP— it’s time to Make America Healthy Again.
Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, cybersecurity researcher, founder of ItFunk.Org, and a political commentator and columnist. His writing, which is focused on cybersecurity and politics, is regularly published by many of the largest news organizations in the world. Read More of His Reports — Here.
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