Americans in five states who get government help paying for groceries will see new limits starting Thursday on soda, candy and other foods they can buy with those benefits.

Starting Thursday, Americans in five states who get government help paying for groceries will see new restrictions on soda, candy and other foods they can buy with those benefits.

Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and West Virginia are the first of at least 18 states to enact waivers prohibiting the purchase of certain foods through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

It’s part of a push by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to urge states to strip foods regarded as unhealthy from the $100 billion federal program – long known as food stamps – that serves 42 million Americans.

“We cannot continue a system that forces taxpayers to fund programs that make people sick and then pay a second time to treat the illnesses those very programs help create,” Kennedy said in a statement in December.

    • defunct_punk@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Let’s do it. Shit is poison and I’d love to see it banned across the board like every other developed country, but the US government has neither the infrastructure nor the independent power to do something like that.