Harmful ultraprocessed foods may be removed from billions of California school lunches

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN

(CNN) — Move over, MAHA. California has just overtaken President Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” Commission in the quest to identify which ultraprocessed foods are the most harmful for human health.

Numerous studies have linked an additional serving a day of ultraprocessed foods, or UPFs, to a greater risk of developing or dying from dozens of adverse health outcomes, including cancer, heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes and various mental health conditions.

Which of the thousands of ultraprocessed foods on grocery shelves could be most responsible for such ill health? To date, answers are elusive. Research is in its infancy. Expert advocates and food manufacturers disagree on harms and definitions, while lobbyists battle behind the scenes.

California, however, intends to offer a solution in just over a year.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan coalition of the California State Assembly voted to pass AB 1264, which lays out a plan to remove “particularly harmful” ultraprocessed foods from the state’s school meals. The bill’s passage is expected to be finalized Tuesday night.

The legislation requires that the first step, defining which ultraprocessed foods are most detrimental to human health, be completed by July 1, 2026.

Once passed by the California Senate and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, AB 1264 would be the first such legislation in the nation, said Jesse Gabriel, the Democratic California assemblymember who introduced the bill.

“Our understanding is that this would actually be the first statutory definition in the world, not just in the United States,” said Gabriel, who represents California’s 46th Assembly District.

Focusing on school lunches will have a significant impact on children’s health, he said.

“The busiest restaurant in California is our school cafeterias,” Gabriel said. “We’ll serve over a billion school breakfasts, lunches and dinners in 2025 alone. If you want to improve the nutritional health of young people, starting with school lunches is a really powerful way to do it.”

Upstaging MAHA

The MAHA Commission, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is also trying to address children’s nutrition.

In mid-May, the commission released a Trump-mandated report recommending federal agencies reassess the impact of ultraprocessed foods (as well as vaccines, lifestyle, pollutants and the overprescribing of drugs) on the “childhood chronic disease crisis.”

The document was quickly criticized for errors and citing studies that don’t exist, as first reported by NOTUS, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news site. The administration discounted the errors as “formatting issues,” but some experts who previously spoke with CNN said the mistakes suggest the report was likely created using artificial intelligence.

Regardless, the MAHA Commission is expected to identify more specific actions on ultraprocessed foods and its additional concerns by August 12.

By then, AB 1264 should be close to a signature if all goes well, Gabriel said.

“We hope to have this bill on the Governor’s desk for a signature in late August or early September,” Gabriel said. “We are really targeting the worst of the worst UPFs, where there is really strong science and research and data. If federal regulators were doing their job as intended, there wouldn’t be a need for states to do this.”

In response, the Consumer Brands Association, a national advocacy group that represents food and beverage manufacturers, told CNN the new California bill would create an unnecessary duplicate regulatory framework.

“AB1264’s attempt to classify certain proven-safe ingredients as unhealthy is so broad that it could limit access to certain nutrient-dense foods, such as fruits, salads and soups, cause consumer confusion, and lead to higher prices for Californians,” said John Hewitt, CBA’s senior vice president of state affairs, in an email.

In response, Gabriel told CNN that suggesting AB 1264 would ban healthy foods or drive up prices is “ridiculous.”

“On the contrary, the bill would phase out foods with dangerous chemical additives linked to cancer, reproductive harm, and other serious diseases from our schools,” Gabriel said via email. “That’s why AB 1264 has received broad bipartisan support.”

What is a ‘particularly harmful’ ultraprocessed food?

If passed, AB 1264 will go in effect on January 1, 2026. Then the clock starts ticking. By July 1, a mere six months later, experts from the University of California and the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment must establish a subcategory of “particularly harmful” ultraprocessed foods. Because research on UPFs is exploding, the bill requires that definition to be updated every two years.

Experts deciding how to identify an ultraprocessed food as “particularly harmful” should use the following criteria, according to the bill:

• Are any of the ingredients linked by established science to cancer, obesity, metabolic or cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, or developmental or reproductive harm?

• Does the food contain additives that have been banned, restricted or required to carry a warning by other local, state, federal or international jurisdictions? (The European Union has banned various UPF additives over health concerns.)

• Has the food been modified to include high levels of sugar, salt or fat? (That’s a key way manufacturers design ultraprocessed foods to meet the “bliss point” human taste buds yearn for.)

• Can any ingredient contribute to food addiction by being hyperpalatable, or extremely difficult to resist? (The Bert Lahr potato chip commercial from the 1960s said it all: “Betcha can’t eat just one.”)

Foods may also be considered ultraprocessed, the bill says, if they contain additives such as emulsifiers, stabilizers and thickeners, flavor enhancers and non-nutritive sweeteners that aren’t on the US Food and Drug Administration’s radar. (Manufacturers are constantly inventing new ways to make food delicious, and not all of those are reported to the FDA.)

Getting the ‘harmful’ ultraprocessed food out of schools

Once the “harmful” ultraprocessed food definition is established, the bill moves on to implementation. Beginning on February 1, 2027, vendors selling food to California schools will be required to submit an annual report listing any UPFs that fall under the new definition.

Because school districts often create menus up to three years in advance, the bill gives school nutritionists a bit of breathing room — using the information provided by vendors, they must begin phasing out all particularly harmful ultraprocessed foods by January 1, 2028.

The bill’s momentum then slows. Six years after the bill goes into effect, by January 1, 2032, vendors may no longer offer harmful ultraprocessed foods to school district nutritionists to be included in their menus. Three years later, by January 1, 2035, school districts will no longer be able to provide children any meals containing particularly harmful UPFs. (That restriction, however, does not apply to school fundraising events.)

“While the timeline may appear long, we think that change is going to happen right away. We’re already seeing schools take action, and this bill is going to help put pedal to the metal on getting schools to make that shift way ahead of 2032,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, the senior vice president for California at the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a health advocacy organization based in Washington, DC, that cosponsored AB 1264.

“I can tell you that farmers are really excited about it — nothing would please them more than to be able to deliver food directly to California’s kids and schools,” Del Chiaro said.

“And we have strong bipartisan support — a left and right grassroots movement of people saying, ‘Let’s correct this. Let’s get our schools to be healthy.’ So there’s all of these really great win-win-win elements to this bill.”

Grassroots movements already in place

Success stories already exist. One school district in Santa Clara County, California, is now feeding over 8,000 students with grass-fed beef, organic milk, and antibiotic-free chicken and pork from local farmers and ranchers.

However, what the Morgan Hill United School District did to remove added sugars was truly startling, said Nora LaTorre, CEO of Eat Real, a national nonprofit that provides K-12 schools around the country with free tools to transform their menus.

“Morgan Hill removed 34 pounds of sugar per student per year by removing foods with hidden added sugar, such as sauces, dressings and condiments,” said LaTorre, who gave the school district an Eat Real certification in 2024. “Now the children are served items with less than 6 grams of added sugar.”

Replacing ultraprocessed foods with real food is not only possible, but easy, said LaTorre, who has testified in support of AB 1264. One example: a makeover of a school-purchased high-sugar yogurt cup with 13 grams of added sugar and flavors.

“The children are now served parfaits out of plain Greek yogurt, which can be purchased through USDA commodities,” she said. “The parfaits are topped with fresh fruit or house-made fruit compote with zero added sugar.

“It really doesn’t take that long to make a significant change in children’s school nutrition,” LaTorre said. “Eat Real is on track to reach 1 million kids in schools across some 20 states. Our average time from initial assessment of a school to certification is about 23 months.”

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