If Republicans held a hearing in Congress on food, obesity, cancer and nutrition and nobody heard about it, did it happen? 

Yes it did. The informal roundtable hearing was held on September 23 in the Russell Senate Office Building by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin).  No major mainstream news outlet covered it. 

The inside the beltway non profit industrial complex (NPIC) groups were nowhere to be found. 

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why the hearing was widely ignored.

Johnson and his star witness, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who campaigned for President on the motto – Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) – are turn offs for NPIC and the corporate media. 

Or as Marion Nestle, a professor of Food and Nutrition at New York University put it –  “I’d rather see mainstream nutritionists screaming bloody murder that we’ve created a food supply that’s making people sick.” “Seventy-four percent of Americans are overweight,” Nestle told Civil Eats. 

That’s according an article in the November/December of the Capitol Hill Citizen.

“There is something seriously wrong.” Michael Jacobson, co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and founder of the Food Museum in Washington, D.C., defended

the inside the beltway groups. “Some DC advocacy groups may be so staffed with lawyers who are pre-occupied reading the Federal Register that they have no interest in attentiongetting, educational actions,” Jacobson told the Capitol Hill Citizen. 

“But in the long run, they will probably be more effective – though partly thanks to those who set the table by shouting in the streets and on Twitter.” 

The hearing was dominated by some of the most prominent younger social media activists – very popular in alternet land, unheard of in D.C. People like Grace Price, a high school student and passionate food activist who is out with a documentary titled Cancer: A Food-Based Illness. 

Courtney Swan, a nutritionist, real food activist, and founder of the popular platform – Realfoodology. She advocates for transparency in the food industry, promoting the importance of whole foods and clean eating. 

And Vani Hari, the self-described Food Babe, a food activist, author, and speaker committed to improving food quality and safety. She has built a powerful platform through her blog, advocating for the removal of harmful chemicals from processed foods. 

Hari was arguably the star of the hearing, outlining for the more than fifty grassroots activists in the room, and for a live internet audience, the duplicity of large multinational food companies that keep food dyes and hazardous chemicals in their U.S. products while removing them from the same brands for consumers in Europe, Canada, Australia. 

“Food companies are getting away with serving American citizens harmful ingredients that are banned or heavily regulated in other countries,” Hari testified. “Even worse, American food companies are selling the same exact products overseas without these chemicals, but choose to continue serving us the most toxic version here. It’s un-American.” “One set of ingredients there, and one set of ingredients here. Let me give you some examples.” 

“Take Skittles as an example,” Hari said pointing to a picture of the popular candy. “Notice the long list of ingredient differences – ten artificial dyes in the US version. Artificial dyes are made from petroleum, and products containing these dyes require a warning label in Europe that states it may cause adverse effects on activity and attention in children. They have been linked to cancer and disruptions in the immune system.”

Hari ripped into the government for not taking action. 

“The FDA is asleep at the wheel,” Hari told the panel. “They’ve admitted they’re not capable of regulating all these chemicals in our food and the food companies are using the lack of regulation to their advantage. But now there’s a significant wave of public awareness spreading about this corruption, and more people are asking for change.” 

“Right over the border in Canada, Kellogg’s is selling this box of Froot Loops. It’s colored naturally with watermelon, blueberry and carrot juice. The U.S. version contains four different artificial food dyes with the preservative BHT, which is an endocrine disrupting chemical linked in cancer.” 

“In 2015 Kellogg’s announced plans to remove dyes from their cereals by the end of 2018, but they never did. Instead, they kept producing new cereals for children with these dyes and preservatives, using the most popular toddler songs and movies to hook children, cereals like Baby Shark and Disney’s Little Mermaid targeting the most vulnerable children.”

Hari put out a call for citizens to join her at Kellogg’s headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan to deliver her more than 100,000 signatures calling on Kellogg’s to act. 

On October 15, more than 1,000 citizens – many moms with their children – joined Hari at the protest. While the Congressional hearing garnered zero press attention, the protest drove Kellogg’s nuts. CBS News, ABC News, New York Post, Associated Press all covered it. 

The headline at CBS News was typical of the coverage – Protesters gather in Battle Creek to demand Kellogg remove artificial colors from its cereals. Kellogg’s hasn’t budged, but Hari has now launched a boycott of all Kellogg’s products until the company takes the artificial colorings out of their U.S. cereals. (Hari now reports that Victoria Kellogg, the great great great granddaughter of company founder W.K. Kellogg, has signed on with the boycott.) 

Also testifying at the hearing was Marty Makary, a gastrointestinal surgeon at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and author of the best-selling book Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health (Bloomsbury, 2024). 

“My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States, but at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask – why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years?” Makary said. “Who’s working on that? Who’s looking into it? We are so busy in our healthcare system, billing and coding and paying each other, and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington, DC, and everybody is making a lot of money, except for one stakeholder – the American citizen.” 

“Can we be real for a second? We have poisoned our food supply, engineered highly addictive chemicals that we put into our food, we spray it with pesticides that kill pests. What do you think they do to our gut, lining in our microbiome? And then they come in sick. The GI tract is reacting. It’s not an acute inflammatory storm, it’s a low grade chronic inflammation, and it makes people feel sick. And that inflammation drives so many of our chronic diseases that we didn’t see half a century ago.”