Last week, a 60 Minutes segment on ultraprocessed foods stopped millions of Americans mid-bite. Former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler made a statement that should have landed like a thunderclap:
“Over the last 40 years, the United States has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to handle.”
He was talking about ultraprocessed foods, those energy-dense, rapidly absorbable, industrially engineered products that now make up 50% of adult calories and 60% of children’s diets in America.
I wasn’t surprised by a single word of it. Because on December 6, 2009, my body already told me everything Dr. Kessler spent years researching.
The Regulatory Loophole Nobody Talks About
Here’s the science story underneath the headline: a 1958 government classification called GRAS Generally Recognized As Safe has allowed food manufacturers to independently verify the safety of their own ingredients with minimal government oversight for nearly 70 years.
The result? Experts estimate there are somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ingredients currently in the American food supply. No one knows the exact number. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a documented regulatory gap.
In contrast, the European Union permits approximately 400 food ingredients.
Dr. Kessler a pediatrician and the man who helped expose how tobacco companies manipulated nicotine levels to addict consumers is now petitioning to have the GRAS status revoked for dozens of processed refined carbohydrates: corn syrup, maltodextrin, dextrose, high-fructose corn syrup, and dozens of starches that have been industrially transformed beyond anything the human metabolic system was designed to process.
His argument is precise and well-documented: these ingredients are rapidly absorbed, trigger brain reward circuits that override satiety signals, drive overeating, and deposit fat in the liver which then migrates into other organs and becomes the foundation of cardiometabolic disease.
Type 2 diabetes. Pre-diabetes. Hypertension. Abnormal lipids. Fatty liver. Heart failure. Stroke.
From our food.
What “Metabolic Havoc” Actually Looks Like From the Inside
I have 21 years of documented medical records.
In 2004, I was on the same path as millions of Americans eating what was available, convenient, and culturally normalized. By almost every marker, my health was declining in ways that felt gradual and inevitable. The kind of slow deterioration that gets blamed on aging, genetics, or simply bad luck.
Then on December 6, 2009, I made a single decision: I would eat only what Mother Nature made directly. No packages. No ingredient lists I couldn’t pronounce. No industrial intermediary between the earth and my plate.
What the researchers now describe as “metabolic havoc” reversed. Systematically. Measurably. Documented in labs drawn year after year.
My philosophy has never been complicated:
“If it’s not made by Mother Nature, it’s not going on my plate.”
Not because of ideology. Because of biology. The same biology Dr. Kessler is now describing from a research platform that our systems were simply never built for what the food industry has been feeding us.
The Subsidy Problem Nobody Wants to Touch
Author and food journalist Michael Pollan appeared in the same segment and raised the point that, in my view, is the most structurally important of all: the United States government subsidizes commodity corn and soybeans the raw ingredients that the food industry converts into high-fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, refined starches, and cheap processed fats and then turns around and pays for the healthcare costs those ingredients generate.
We are, as Pollan put it, supporting both sides of the war on type 2 diabetes.
This is not a partisan observation. It is arithmetic.
A food system that incentivizes the production of the lowest-nutrition, highest-calorie inputs and then builds an entire grocery store infrastructure around making those inputs hyper-palatable and cheap is not a food system. It is a chronic disease delivery mechanism.
The Tobacco Parallel Is Exact
Dr. Kessler drew the tobacco comparison deliberately, and it holds. The tobacco industry knew. Internal documents proved they knew nicotine was addictive and that they were engineering products to maximize that addiction. The food industry has known. The neurological research on how ultraprocessed foods target the brain’s reward circuitry bypassing satiety, overriding fullness cues, keeping people coming back has existed for years.
The difference is that food is not tobacco. Everyone eats. The entry point is infancy. The normalization is total. And the health consequences have been slow enough, and widespread enough, that they became invisible simply the new baseline of human health.
70% of Americans are currently classified as overweight or obese. That is not a moral failing of 70% of the population. That is a systemic outcome of a systemic problem.
What You Can Do Right Now Without Waiting for Regulation
Regulatory reform, if it comes, will take years. GRAS review processes, FDA rulemaking, industry litigation none of that happens quickly. And none of it will happen on your plate tonight.
Here is what I know from 16+ years of living this:
The simplest rule in nutrition is also the most radical: eat food that comes directly from nature, in the form nature made it. Not processed. Not reassembled. Not engineered for palatability. Whole fruits. Vegetables. Nuts. Seeds. Sprouted grains. Foods that rot if you leave them out because that means they’re alive.
When something has an ingredient label with items you cannot picture growing from the earth, that is information. Your biology will treat it the way Dr. Kessler describes: as something it was never intended to handle.
You don’t need a petition. You don’t need to wait for GRAS to be reformed. You need to understand what your body was designed to run on and then run it on that.
A Note on What’s Coming
I have spent the last several years writing what I believe is the most comprehensive personal case study of this truth: IN NATURE WE TRUST: A Raw Food Manifesto For Energy, Healing & Longevity launching in March 2026.
It is not a recipe book. It is a documented account of what happens to a human body when you return it to what it was designed for backed by two decades of medical records, lived experience, and the science that is finally reaching mainstream conversation.
What 60 Minutes reported last week? I started living the answer in 2009.
The mainstream is catching up. And that is a very good thing.
–Axay Shah
IN NATURE WE TRUST
