PREPARED REMARKS: Sanders Questions FDA Leaders on Diabetes & Obesity Epidemic
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today led the committee in a hearing titled “What Is the FDA Doing to Reduce the Diabetes and Obesity Epidemics in America and Take on the Greed of the Food and Beverage Industry?”
FDA Commissioner Robert Califf M.D. and Deputy Commissioner Jim Jones of the FDA Human Foods Program joined the hearing in person to provide testimony.
Sanders remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below and can be watched live HERE:
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will come to order.
In America today, we have an obesity epidemic and a diabetes epidemic. They are both directly related and they are both getting worse.
More than 35 million Americans have type 2 diabetes – over 10 percent of our population – and about 90% of those with type 2 diabetes are obese.
Diabetes is not only a serious illness unto itself, but it is a contributing factor to heart disease, stroke, amputations, blindness, and kidney failure.
And the cost of treating that disease is staggering.
According to the American Diabetes Association, the total cost of diabetes in the U.S. was nearly $413 billion last year – up 27% over the past six years. This amounts to about ten percent of our total health care expenditures. This is an extraordinary and unsustainable amount of money.
And when we talk about the type 2-diabetes epidemic, and the huge increase in new cases, we must also talk about the epidemic of obesity in America. Some 90% of people with type-2 diabetes are overweight or obese. These two epidemics go hand in hand.
The time is long overdue for us to pose some very simple questions: How did it happen that, according to the CDC, the rate of childhood obesity in America has tripled since the 1970s and has gotten so bad that one out of every five kids is now obese?
How has it happened that over 40 percent of adults in our country today are now obese?
In my view, the answers to these questions are not very complicated.
For decades, Congress and the FDA have allowed large corporations to make huge profits by enticing children and adults to consume ultra-processed food and beverages loaded up with sugar, salt and saturated fat.
There is growing evidence, including testimony before this committee that these foods are deliberately designed to be addictive – similar to cigarettes and alcohol – and lead to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
Shockingly, according to a study published in the British Medical Journal, ultra-processed foods make up an incredible 73% of our nation’s food supply.
Bottom line: Much of the food that we as Americans are now consuming are making us unhealthy and are contributing to the fact that our life expectancy is significantly lower than many other wealthy countries.
None of this is happening by accident.
The food and beverage industry is spending $14 billion a year on advertising to push these unhealthy products onto the American consumer.
Even worse, $2 billion of this money is spent to directly advertise these unhealthy products to our kids in order to get them hooked at an early age.
According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, children and teens view about 4,000 food and beverage ads on television each year, an average of 10 advertisements each day.
Last year, for example, Coca-Cola spent $327 million on advertising in the United States alone while it raked in more than $9.5 billion in profits.
Not one of their ads will tell you that a 20-ounce bottle of Coke contains more than 15 teaspoons of sugar – over twice the recommended daily limit for kids.
Not one of their ads will tell you that drinking one can of Coke a day could increase your chances of getting Type 2 diabetes by up to 26%.
Given this reality, which has been widely discussed by scientists and doctors for decades, the question then arises: What has the Food and Drug Administration done to address these epidemics which have impacted the health of millions of Americans and cost us hundreds of billions of dollars every year?
As far as I can tell, not much.
Way back in 2010, the National Academy of Medicine recommended that the food and beverage industry be required to put nutrition labels on the front of their products that the American people could easily understand. That was in 2010.
On June 13th, 2023, the FDA announced it would propose a rule to require the food and beverage industry to put nutrition labels on the front of their products no later than October of 2023. The FDA missed this deadline.
On December 6th, 2023, FDA announced that this proposed rule would be made public in June of 2024. The FDA missed that deadline.
On July 5th, 2024. the FDA announced that this proposed rule would be made public by October of 2024. The FDA missed that deadline.
I have been told that on November 21, 2024, after more than 14 years of inaction, the FDA finally sent this proposed rule to the Office of Management and Budget for their review, but it has still not been made public.
That is absolutely unacceptable.
In 2016, Chile implemented a law mandating warning labels on the front of unhealthy food and beverage products. After this law was implemented calories consumed from these products went down by 24%.
Similar labels were put into effect in Peru in 2019; in Israel and Mexico in 2020; in Uruguay in 2021; and in Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela from 2022-2024.
Nearly 30 years ago, the FDA and Congress had the courage to take on the tobacco industry whose products killed over 400,000 Americans every year.
And, as a result of these actions, smoking rates among adults dropped from 43% in 1965 to 12% in 2023. Smoking rates among teens dropped even more significantly.
Now is the time for us to seriously combat the type-2 diabetes and obesity epidemic in America.
In order to do that, we must have the courage to take on the greed of the food and beverage industry which, every day, is undermining the health and well-being of our children.
For starters, we need strong front-of-package food labels so that all consumers, especially children, can be warned as to which products are harmful to their health.
Tobacco labels in the United States do not say “high in tar, high in nicotine, high in carcinogens.” They say “cigarettes cause lung cancer, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy.”
And let’s be clear. Not only must we put strong warning labels on unhealthy food and beverages, we must also ban junk food ads targeted to kids.
The National Institutes of Health has estimated that if the United States banned fast-food advertising marketed to children, we could cut the childhood obesity rate by up to 18%.
This is not a radical idea.
In the 1980s, Quebec banned junk food advertising to children under 13. Today, Quebec has the lowest childhood obesity rate in Canada and the highest consumption of fruits and vegetables of any Canadian province.
Last summer, the World Health Organization called for countries to substantially reduce the marketing of junk food to children, and Norway announced that it would be banning all food and beverage advertisements to children.
Ireland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan and several other major countries have either seriously restricted or banned junk food ads targeted to children.
Finally, we have got to substantially reduce the outrageous price of diabetes and weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.
It is unacceptable to me that Novo Nordisk charges Americans with diabetes $969 for Ozempic while that same exact drug can be purchased for just $155 in Canada, $122 in Denmark, $71 in France, and just $59 in Germany.
It is also unacceptable that Novo Nordisk charges Americans with obesity $1,349 for Wegovy while that same exact drug can be purchased for just $265 in Canada, $186 in Denmark, $137 in Germany, and $92 in the United Kingdom.
In April, I introduced legislation to enact a federal ban on junk food advertising targeted towards children and to require the FDA to put strong warning labels on products high in added sugar, salt and saturated fat.
I have also introduced a bill to cut the price of prescription drugs in half by making sure Americans don’t pay more for these prescription drugs than people in other major countries.
Bottom line: We cannot continue to allow large corporations to put their profits ahead of the health of our children.
Senator Cassidy: You are recognized for an opening statement.
