Calley Means & Kyle Diamantas: On MAHA, Food Dye Reform, GRAS Loopholes & US Food Crisis | TUH #260
What this video covers
Episode #260 of The Ultimate Human Podcast, hosted by Gary Brecka, recorded a little over a year into the Trump administration. Brecka interviews two officials working inside it: Calley Means of HHS and Kyle Diamantas, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods. Diamantas explains the FDA’s food remit and its new post-market review system for food chemicals, while Means recaps the administration’s year-one MAHA wins — SNAP soda restrictions, a flipped food pyramid, dye removals, and GRAS reform — and both men argue the changes are built to outlast the administration.
Key points
- Diamantas explains the FDA regulates about 80% of the US food supply across three pillars — microbiological safety (roughly 55–60% of the budget, 30,000 samples and 500+ recalls a year), nutrition, and food chemical safety.
- He says the FDA historically had no systematic process to re-evaluate chemicals already in the food supply, and that the administration has created a post-market review framework he calls a legacy item; Brecka’s introduction adds that over 90% of novel food additives were never reviewed by the FDA under the 65-year-old GRAS loophole.
- Diamantas pushes back on villain narratives: “I don’t subscribe to the theory that there’s an evil wizard behind the curtain,” he says, adding that large food companies are “largely partnering with us” and want the oversight and reform.
- Means calls hospital food “absolutely disgraceful,” asking why the government pays hospitals trillions of dollars “to serve food that is fueling the chronic diseases.”
- Means lists year-one wins: soda and candy taken off SNAP in the majority of US states, the food pyramid “flipped upside down” to put real food at the top (which he notes flows directly into government procurement), red dyes removed, GRAS reform, and black-box warnings removed from female hormone therapy.
- He also notes the US spends $120 billion on SNAP while, by the panel’s figures, 70% of the food the government procures for children is ultra-processed, and asks why the same US brands carry less sugar in other countries and market 20-gram-sugar cereals to five-year-olds without safety studies of daily use.
- Both men stress timelines: Diamantas compares MAHA to generational movements and says formal rulemaking is deliberately slow so reforms “can’t just be reversed on the spot”; Means says the real accomplishment is that every food-company boardroom in America is now talking about chronic disease and prevention.
- Means closes with a grassroots pitch: 30 states have passed MAHA bills — cell phones out of schools, better school lunches, dyes out of schools, SNAP soda waivers — driven, he says, by calls from MAHA supporters to state legislators.