MAHA Just Cost the NIH Its Star Nutrition Researcher
Hundreds of millions of Americans will pay the price
If there is such a thing as a celebrity nutrition researcher, it is without a doubt Kevin Hall.
Hall is author of arguably the most important study to date on ultra-processed foods, which showed that people who ate an ultra-processed diet consumed more calories, and gained more weight, than when they were fed a diet of minimally processed foods. He is also the lead researcher on a soon-to-be-published followup study that explores why this is so: Is it the physical processing that makes us eat more? Or is it what’s in ultra-processed foods — the unnatural combinations of sugar, salt, and fat — that make them so difficult to resist?
Perhaps I should say that Hall was the lead researcher on that study. Today, Hall announced that he would be taking early retirement from his position at the National Institutes of Health. The abrupt end to Hall’s time at NIH wasn’t what he wanted, and it amounts to a major loss for the nation’s premier public health organization at a moment when a poor diet is the leading cause of death in the U.S.
Why is Hall leaving? Ahead of his announcement, I got my hands on the email he sent to the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. In it, Hall expressed dismay at the government’s failure to support nutrition research, and at “substantial disruptions” experienced under the new administration that hobbled his team’s ability to feed patients and censored his ability to speak freely about his work.
“These experiences have led me to believe that NIH may be a difficult place to continue the gold-standard unbiased science required to inform the needed transformation of our food supply to make Americans healthy,” Hall wrote. “I truly hope that I am wrong about this, but the short time period of the [Voluntary Early Retirement Authority] deadlines do not give me the luxury to wait and see.”
Hall got no reply.
Since Kennedy was elevated to the most powerful man in public health, he has been touring the country, building what he calls the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. At the top of his agenda is liberating Americans from ultra-processed foods, which he blames for fueling obesity and skyrocketing rates of diet-related chronic disease. Hall’s work holds a key to understanding the role that ultra-processed food plays in America’s obesity epidemic. His departure is proof that Kennedy has the same disdain for nutrition science that he does for vaccine science: It’s only worth doing if it fits what he already believes.
Nutrition research has always been a red-headed stepchild at NIH, underfunded and undervalued. In 2023, the NIH allocated $2.2 billion to nutrition research, just over 4 percent of its total research budget. This, despite the fact that nearly 40 percent of Americans are obese, and the cost of obesity-related medical care is estimated to be nearly $173 billion annually.
There is no “national institute” of nutrition at NIH, as there is for cancer research or alcohol abuse, even for eye conditions. (Eye disease contributed to 51,000 deaths in America between 2010 and 2019, about 1 percent of the total; while diet-related illnesses kill 678,000 Americans each year.) Meanwhile, the already-small Office of Nutrition Research, which helps to prioritize and coordinate research, is starved. Its 2024 budget was just $1.3 million, compared to the $28.5 million for the Office of Dietary Supplements. ONR also lost two of eight staffers in the latest round of cuts.
Such tepid support can be at least partly explained by a quiet disdain for nutrition research, which many in the scientific community believe lacks rigor. This is because most nutrition studies are observational studies, which rely on people to report to researchers what they are eating. If you’ve ever kept a food diary, you know why this is an extremely flawed way to collect data. People forget. (Can you remember what you had for breakfast yesterday?) And people flat-out lie to try to make themselves feel better.
Scientists have tried to make up for imperfect data by conducting studies with broad populations, often over decades. But even so, they do not meet the gold standard of randomized controlled trials: In these studies, researchers divide patients into groups at random. One receives the intervention –– say, a vitamin or new medication –– while another, the control group, is given a placebo. This allows researchers to isolate any statistically significant impact.
And this is why Kevin Hall matters so much. Against the odds, Hall was performing randomized controlled trials. He was conducting them on ultra-processed foods, the hottest issue in nutrition policy. He has persisted in the face of deep cuts: In 2017, the NIH clinical trial unit went from 10 beds to seven, reducing the speed at which Hall could conduct his research (participants must live at the research facility during the study): According to one insider, the lost beds were not used by other research teams as planned; instead, the rooms they were in served for several years as storage.
Such limited resources meant it took eight months to conduct research on 20 patients for his 2019 breakthrough study. Today, Hall has access to only two beds –– one of the key reasons that his followup has taken six years and counting.
In his email to Kennedy and Bhattacharya, Hall said that growing bipartisan support for the MAHA movement was initially “music to [his] ears.” Hopeful that NIH might finally prioritize nutrition research, Hall circulated ambitious plans about how he and other researchers could “quickly and efficiently obtain the data needed to understand exactly how our food is making us sick.” In this case too, he received no reply.
Instead, like many other scientists in the Trump era, Hall found his work becoming more difficult. Credit cards were restricted with little or no warning, making it tricky to purchase food for patients or obtain research supplies. (According to The New York Times, Elon Musk’s DOGE put a $1 limit on government credit cards without understanding how they supported basic operations.)
Hall also was limited from talking about his work. An executive order signed by Trump in February mandated a communications pause for all federal health agencies, including NIH. Hall was forbidden from talking to the media and was forced to cancel at least one scheduled presentation of his work.
Worse, perhaps, was the administration’s ham-handed attempt to spin the results of his research. In his email, Hall describes a “recent intervention” by an HHS communications director who denied an interview request on his behalf from a New York Times reporter trying to write about the results of a new study on how the human brain responds to ultra-processed foods.
The study attempted to answer one of the burning questions surrounding ultra-processed foods: Are they actually addictive, in the same way as alcohol and drugs? To test the theory, a team of researchers, including Hall, set out to hijack the brain’s reward system. Instead of using cocaine, though, they gave patients an ultra-processed milkshake, high in fat and sugar. The team then conducted PET scans to monitor the brain’s dopamine response.
The result: More than half of the participants showed a small dopamine increase after drinking the shake. But on average, there was no statistical change in dopamine levels after drinking it.
Those findings complicate suggestions by Kennedy and the wider MAHA movement that the many additives and chemicals in ultra-processed foods contribute to their addictive nature. And so, it appears, HHS tried to bury them. According to Hall, his written responses to that Times reporter’s questions were edited and submitted without his approval. HHS also contacted the reporter directly to “downplay” results, “because our data might be viewed as failing to support preconceived HHS narratives about ultra-processed food addictions,” Hall wrote. (You can read the NYT story here.)
That Kennedy is not following the science on infectious disease, as he promised to do, is not really a surprise. In his two-plus months on the job, he has called vaccination a personal choice, even as an outbreak of the measles grew in Texas. He has frozen funding for researchers who study vaccine hesitancy. He even forced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to halt an advertising campaign for the flu shot.
Nonetheless, many people, myself included, have held out some hope for MAHA, and Kennedy’s ability to focus the country’s attention on the root causes of diet-related disease. Hall’s departure is a sad confirmation that Kennedy is unwilling to invest in nutrition science, and more than willing to exile leading nutrition researchers upon whose work his success depends.
Was it foolish to hope? Is there even a small chance that Hall’s departure is a result of the broader chaos that has consumed NIH since January? Will someone –– anyone? –– make this right? Hall, himself, ended his email to Kennedy on a hopeful note. “Perhaps I could soon return to government service and lead an effort to expand on our research to rapidly determine what are the most important factors in our toxic food environment that are making Americans chronically sick,” he wrote. Hall’s career and the fate of millions of Americans suffering from diet-related disease depend on what RFK does next.
Thank you for this informative post. I'm very sad on so many levels to hear this. Just another signal that we don't really want to save lives or even save millions of dollars with preventative medicine (if that were to be born out by the research - which researchers like Hall should be allowed to pursue). He sounds like a talented and thoughtful asset and the idea that no one replied to him is enraging. Ugh!
To whomever wrote this- Well said!!
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