2 days Ago By Alice Callahan
For the past two decades, Kevin Hall, a nutrition and metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health, has devoted his career to studying how people’s diets affect their health. He has led some of the world’s most important research on , including that demonstrated, for the first time, that they caused people to overeat. This linked ultraprocessed foods to chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and obesity.
Dr. Hall had planned to keep doing this work for many years — and hoped it might accelerate under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
, who has said that is a priority. But now, at 54, he is . In an interview with The New York Times, Dr.
Hall said his decision was driven in part by several instances in which federal officials censored his work. In one, he said he was barred from speaking freely with reporters about a study that might have been seen as contradicting Mr. Kennedy’s stance on the addictive nature of ultraprocessed foods, which include products like chicken nuggets, hot dogs, packaged cookies and chips.
“We experienced what amounts to censorship and controlling of the reporting of our science,” Dr. Hall said, adding that he was worried that if he stayed, officials might also interfere with the design and execution of his studies. “That would make me hate my job every day,” he added.
Outside health experts said that Dr. Hall’s retirement is a setback for diet and chronic disease research. “It’s a sad day when one of the most prominent nutrition researchers at N.
I.H. feels forced to leave a job that he loves in an area that he’s having major public impact,” said Dr.
Dariush Mozaffarian, the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and your Times account, or for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? . Want all of The Times? ..
