Big Beautiful Food Stamp Cuts and RFK Jr.'s Proposal on Wearables for All Americans
- Michelle Adams
- 3 minutes ago
- 13 min read
.You can check out the video version of this article here.
If you want to jump ahead to the segment on RFK Jr.'s proposal on wearables, click here.
On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson uttered the following words as part of his historic speech on the War on Poverty in America:
"All Americans must have the privileges of citizenship regardless of race, and they are going to have those privileges of citizenship regardless of race. But, I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty. Of course, people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless poverty just drawing a welfare check. So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we are also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates."
How did we go from that ideal of equal opportunity, to this…
I have been really focused on nutrition policy lately on this blog, which I know may seem like a sudden shift for my older followers, but there is so much significant change happening in that realm of nutrition that I simply cannot ignore it. I think that we all need to be paying attention to the decisions being made by the few that will affects millions of us for generations to come. I will be making posts in the future on nutrition science and cooking, but for now, my focus will be on public health. I hope that you stick around for this arc and still walk away with something useful.
So, one of the Trump Administration’s latest moves in their supposed mission to “Make America Healthy Again” was to completely cut out federally funded nutrition education for low-income Americans via the SNAP program.
Somehow, Americans are supposed to become healthier with less nutrition education, less money to buy food, rising food costs, and more restricted access to healthcare.
This doesn't seem like a winning combination.
In today’s post, I’ll be talking about what exactly was cut, what the Trump Administration is moving towards with their public health policies, and how this approach is likely going to have very serious, detrimental, and far-reaching consequences in the future.
But first of all,
What is SNAP-Ed?
SNAP-Ed is the educational component of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which is designed to make it easier for people to make healthier choices by promoting healthy habits, providing nutrition education, and influencing policy and environmental changes that improve access to the tools needed for people to engage in healthier lifestyles.
Historical timeline of nutrition assistance and education in the United States
When the Food Stamps Program was first introduced, nutrition education was not originally integrated into it.
After the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the United States and several other countries experienced record levels of poverty and unemployment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal as a way to stabilize the economy of the country by way of massive government intervention. This led to the creation of several key government programs that we rely on to this day, such as social security and the 40-hour work week.
A few decades and a few wars later, the United States was battling with fundamental issues like civil rights and women’s liberation. All the while, the population continued to soar and millions of Americans remained unemployed, uneducated, unhoused, and without access to proper healthcare. At the same time, farmers were producing a surplus of crops and had no way of getting that surplus to those who could most benefit from it. These overlapping realities led President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Food Stamps Act in 1964. The purpose of the program was to connect extra food produced by farmers to low income households across the nation, and more broadly, to create a population of healthy individuals who could contribute to their communities and live fulfilling lives.
The Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) was created separately from the Food Stamps Program in 1969 to provide nutrition education to low-income families. Then, in 1992, The Food Stamps Nutrition Education (FSNE) program received its first funding dollars. In 2008, the Food Stamps Program was re-named as the SNAP program, and FSNE became SNAP-Ed. At the outset, it was funded by both state and federal dollars, but the current iteration of this program is fully federally funded.
Now, you might be thinking...
What is EFNEP, and why do we need SNAP-Ed if we have it?
The quick answer is that both EFNEP and SNAP-Ed are programs that are designed to provide nutrition education to low-income families. They target the same demographics using similar approaches. You may be thinking that this is what people in favor of slashing SNAP-Ed were talking about when they claimed that the program was duplicative, but you should know that these programs are not the same in terms of the amount of people that they reach every year.
EFNEP receives $70 million a year in federal funds and reached around 275,000 people last year, while SNAP-Ed received $536 million this fiscal year and served 1.8 million people. Furthermore, about 90 million people qualify for SNAP-Ed based on the federal poverty line cutoff, so even though EFNEP is similar to SNAP-Ed, it cannot replace it or meet the needs of their shared target population alone.
By the way, I know that $536 million sounds like a ton of money, but funding for SNAP-Ed only makes up a very tiny fraction of the federal budget. According to data from treasury.gov, so far, for fiscal year (FY) 2025, the US government has spent $5.35 trillion dollars. The FY isn’t over yet, but this quick calculation will still be useful. If we divide the total cost of SNAP-Ed by $5.35 trillion, we get
536,000,000 / 5,350,000,000,000 = 0.0001
This means that SNAP-Ed only accounts for 0.01% of the federal budget.
That is nothing compared to the approximately 3 trillion dollars that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Big Beautiful Bill will add to the national debt over the next decade.
So, what did SNAP-Ed actually accomplish?
Research on the effectiveness of SNAP-Ed programs has shown that SNAP-Ed classes can help to significantly increase food security among SNAP-eligible households. Classes which focus on how to stretch the money that you have while still making healthy choices – a conundrum that many people are familiar with - can help families to make it to the end of the month without running out of food.
SNAP-Ed classes have also been shown to help participants to change health behaviors, for example:
Increase fruit and vegetable intake
Reduce intake of less nutritious foods like fast food and sugar-sweetened beverages
Increase intake of folate, a nutrient that is essential for preventing neural tube defects like spina bifida, among low-income women of childbearing age
Use the nutrition facts label more often when shopping for food
Do more meal planning
Let’s look at a specific example of a SNAP-Ed funded program that was able to not only help people to change their health behaviors, but also to change their health outcomes.
This study was carried out among Black adults living in the deep south. The aim of the study was to use weekly educational sessions, cooking classes, exercise, and the power of social connection to produce measurable health improvements. Over the course of 12 weeks, participants were taught how to prepare their traditional foods like collard greens and sweet potatoes, as well as some foods that they maybe hadn’t tried before, in healthy ways. They were sent recipes and meal kits with the ingredients for them to actually put into practice what they were learning. They also received instructions to exercise and they had support for this from leaders in their own community who they respected and could relate to.
Now, here is the amazing part. At the end of the study, participants saw a significant decrease in:
Body mass index (BMI)
Waist circumference
Total cholesterol
LDL cholesterol (aka your “bad cholesterol”), and
Inflammation, as measured by high-sensitivity C-reactive protein
These people actually started to eat healthier and exercise more, and they lost weight, lowered their cholesterol, and lowered inflammation in their bodies, which all translates to a lower risk of the common chronic diseases that we know are plaguing this nation: heart disease, diabetes, some forms of cancer, etc.
Their lives were transformed, and what was not measured and not reported is the butterfly effect that this sort of intervention can have. This is just me talking here, but I would like to believe that as people in the study improved their diets and were able to enjoy the benefits of being in better health, they told a friend or a family member about what they learned, maybe even shared a recipe or two with them, or perhaps invited them to work out with them, and so the benefits of this study were propagated beyond the people who took part in the study. This sort of social change can transform people’s ideas of what is normal or possible, and it would be ideal to get funding to carry out larger, longer-term interventions like this one to really help people to take the steps necessary to transform their lives and their communities for the better.
Despite these positive results, there are some issues with the SNAP-Ed program that would need to be addressed if this program were to continue. The studies that I could find on SNAP-Ed interventions were generally short-term studies with small sample sizes; to get a clearer picture of what sorts of interventions are effective at reducing health disparities in the long term, we need studies with thousands of people who are followed for several months or even several years. It would be even better to see randomized controlled trials where the group who gets the SNAP-Ed intervention is compared to a similar group of people who do not get the same intervention, and that would allow us to really see if the SNAP-Ed class is the true differentiator.
The data that is available points to SNAP-Ed having a favorable impact on people’s health and ultimately, the health of the nation. This should be enough to at minimum encourage people in positions to provide funding for more research on how to effectively execute health intervention programs in the communities that need it the most to act in favor of such initiatives. At this point however, with the SNAP-Ed program being currently defunded, such research will likely never be carried out. Low-income communities and states with high concentrations of those communities are likely not going to be able to fund this sort of research without help from federal grants.
Instead of funding research on public health interventions that have been shown to have some level of effectiveness, our current Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary RFK Jr. has suggested that our money would be better spent on wearable health-tracking devices.
So, let’s talk about that.
RFK Jr.'s Proposal on Wearables
Take a look at this clip.
He didn’t say what the wearables would be exactly, so I’m going to have to do some speculating. Is he suggesting that we all wear continuous glucose monitors (CGMs)? Fit bits? Apple watches? We will have to wait for his big announcement to find out.
Until then, I definitely have some questions.
Is the cost going to be $80/month for a specific amount of time, or indefinitely? Will users be expected to share some of that ongoing cost, or will the federal government foot the bill? What about people who don’t want to wear a device? Will that affect their insurance coverage? If this is a device that will allow remote patient monitoring, something else that he advocated for during the same session, that will increase the cost. Who will foot the bill for the transmission and storage of real-time patient data, and perhaps more importantly, the protection of the privacy of that patient data? Did you notice how he skirted the question about data privacy during the hearing? I can’t help but feel concerned, not only because there was no clarity given with regards to how patient privacy would be protected, but also because this approach will be grossly ineffective.
The main problem with this approach is that it does not address well-established social determinants of health.
If you work in healthcare, you likely took a class on this in school at some point. Even if you never took a class on this topic, it will immediately make sense to you as it basically describes real-life factors that play a role in how healthy or unhealthy someone is likely to be.
Social determinants of health can be grouped into 5 areas:
1. Healthcare access and quality
2. Neighborhood and built environment
3. Social and community context
4. Economic stability
5. Education access and quality
Let’s get a little bit more granular now.
With regards to healthcare access and quality, if a person does not have health insurance, that makes it likely that they do not have a primary care provider, are not getting preventative care services, and may not be able to afford health care services and medications that they need.
With respect to neighborhood and the built environment, people who live in neighborhoods where there are high levels of noise and water pollution and no bike lanes or sidewalks to walk on are likely to have poorer health outcomes than people in communities that do not have to contend with those problems.
Social and community context is another big factor – growing up around people who engage in unhealthy behaviors like smoking and living in unsafe neighborhoods where there are gangs and people trying to make money in desperate and illegitimate ways can have a negative impact not just on the safety of a person, but also on their mental health.
Economic stability is an obvious one – how much money you make determines what neighborhood you can afford to live in, what type of food you can afford, the quality of healthcare that you have access to, the educational opportunities that you can provide to yourself and your family, the flexibility that you have with securing employment, and so on. Poverty limits all those things.
Lastly, children who have no choice but to attend poorly performing schools and are not able to get a good higher education are less likely to go to college and get high-paying jobs that will allow them to live healthier lives.
These are the very real hurdles that people are facing every single day that keep them from being in the best health.
The average person on Medicaid is not suffering from a lack of wearables – they are suffering from the things that I just mentioned. Giving everyone a heart rate and blood sugar monitor is not going to help them get health insurance, or get a better education, or find themselves in a better economic situation. Wearables can be useful for people who have a health diagnosis; a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) can be very useful for someone with type 1 diabetes. Nevertheless, for people without such a diagnosis, a wearable is not likely to be of much use, especially not when they are still struggling against the factors that are contributing to them being in poor health in the first place.
This approach comes off as… out of touch. The fact that his defense for wearables was that he saw his other educated and wealthy friends benefit from them just underscores the fact that there is a major disconnect between some of RFK Jr.’s proposed policies and their intended audience. Sure, perhaps his friends did benefit from wearables, but what health diagnoses did they have? What jobs do they have? Were they contending with not having access to healthy food, hearing gunshots at night in their neighborhoods, or working 3 part time jobs to make ends meet? Those anecdotes do not hold water against decades of public health research by trained professionals who have actually worked in the field.
Frankly, it is not a mark of progress to be able to say that you reduced the federal budget by leaving millions of citizens without a reliable source of food and nutrition education. To brag about reducing our national debt by making decisions which will harm people in both the short and long term is ... very odd. The real consequences of the defunding of the SNAP-Ed program will take years to become evident. As community programs aimed at improving health outcomes disappear due to states being unable to fund them on their own, we will see poorer health outcomes among low-income Americans. This will impact not just those families, but the country as a whole as more people will need healthcare for preventable diseases and will be unable to participate fully in the workforce – more illness means more sickness and disability.
There is an old saying: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”
Nutrition education programs belong to the class of programs that teach people how to fish. These programs give people the skills that they need to stretch their dollars, shop better, grow their own food, and feed their families nutritious food on a budget. The skills people learn in these programs can be passed from one generation to the next, and can transform and connect communities.
What do you think about the elimination of the SNAP-Ed program and RFK Jr.'s proposal on wearables? Feel free to share your comments down below!
Anyway, that’s all for today.
Take care.
References
About SNAP-Ed:
Websites:
USDA Food and Nutrition Service
Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Nutrition
Education (SNAP-Ed) Final Allocations
August 29, 2024
Research on SNAP-Ed:
Keller KJM, Bruno P, Foerster S, Draper C. Thirty Years of SNAP-Ed: The Transition of the Nation's Largest Nutrition Education Program Into a Pillar of the Public Health Infrastructure. J Nutr Educ Behav. 2024 Aug;56(8):588-596. doi: 10.1016/j.jneb.2024.03.011. Epub 2024 Jun 19. PMID: 38904598.
Rivera RL, Maulding MK, Eicher-Miller HA. Effect of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) on food security and dietary outcomes. Nutr Rev. 2019 Dec 1;77(12):903-921. doi: 10.1093/nutrit/nuz013. PMID: 31077323.
Sterling SR, Bowen SA. Effect of a Plant-based Intervention Among Black Individuals in the Deep South: A Pilot Study. J Nutr Educ Behav. 2023 Jan;55(1):68-76. doi: 10.1016/j.jneb.2022.08.013. Epub 2022 Nov 2. PMID: 36333197.
About EFNEP:
Government spending:
How much has the U.S. government spent this year?
Data retrieved 7/16/25
Effect of the Big Beautiful Bill on the federal budget:
Trump's Big Bill for Billionaires Steals from the Poor to Give to the Ultra-Rich
June 12, 2025
Breaking Down the One Big Beautiful Bill
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Jun 4, 2025
The social determinants of health:
Healthy People 2030, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
Social Determinants of Health https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/social-determinants-health
Videos:
LBJ State of Union War on Poverty
Channel: Texas Housers
19 oct 2008
Trump backs GOP bill with large cuts to Medicaid and food stamps
Channel: CBS News
20 feb 2025
RFK Jr. Tells Lawmakers That 'Wearables Are A Key To The MAHA Agenda'
Channel: Forbes Breaking News
24 jun 2025
Lyndon B. Johnson's Special Message to the Congress: The American Promise
March 15, 1965