Officials in Arkansas and Indiana moved on Tuesday to ban soft drinks and sweets that helps low -income people to pay food, becoming the first states to ask the Trump administration to eliminate said items from the long stamps of the program.
The governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that the application of her status aims to improve the health of almost 350,000 residents who participate in the supplementary nutritional assistance program, or SNAP.
“It is clear that the current system encourages and subsidizes the excessive consumption of unhealthy food and beaver, highly processed and addictive,” said Sanders, who announced the application at a Little Rock press conference with US Agricy Break.
In Indianapolis, Governor Mike Braun joined the United States Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mehmet Oz, which leads Medicare centers and Medicaid services, to announce radical changes to “focus on nutrition, not sweets and soft drinks.”
The two states are among several measures to eliminate the purchase of certain foods that can contribute to poor health through the federal program that spent $ 100 billion to serve almost 42 million Americans in 2024. The restriction has been a key objective for Rollins and Kennedy and its “Make America Healy antin” schedule.
“They changed our food system in this country to be poisonous to us,” Kennedy said on Tuesday. “We can be a strong nation if we are not strong people.”
The Arkansas Plan, which would come into force in July 2026, would exclude soft drinks, including NO and low -calorie sodas; Fruit and vegetable drinks with less than 50% natural juice; “Little healthy drinks”; Candy, including the flour -made contrections, such as Kat Bars Kit; and sweet artificial sweets. It would also allow participants to use benefits to buy chicken with hot grill horn, which is now excluded from the program.
Indiana’s change would exclude the sweets and soft drinks from the elder food list to be paid with Snap benefits. Braun also issued executive orders that change the work requirements for SNAP participants, the restitution of the revenue and asset verification rules, and the launch of a review of “inappropriate payments and other administrative errors” to ensure that SNAP meets federal objectives.
Anti-Hunger groups oppose Snap food restrictions, saying that research shows that program participants are no more likely than other low-income Americans to buy sugary drinks or snacks. And they say that limiting food elections undermines the autonomy and dignity of people who resort to a benefit of approximately $ 187 per month, or $ 6.20 per day.
“They simply seem to be pointing to a specific population without having data that say they are the problem or that this will improve,” said Gina Plata-Nino, deputy director of the Food Research and Action Center, a non-profit defense group.
The commercial groups that represent the manufacturers of drinks and sweets criticized the effort, saying that SNAP participants closely point.
The representatives of the American drink accused state and federal officials of “choosing to be the Food Police instead of taking really significant measures to get SNAP people with well -paid jobs.”
Chris Gindlesperger, a spokesman for the National Association of Confections, described the “wrong” approach.
“SNAP participants and non -SNAP participants understand that chocolate and candy are replacements for sweet foods,” Gindlesperger said.
The SNAP program is administered by the USDA and is administered through individual states. It is authorized by the Federal Food and Nutrition Law of 2008, which says that SNAP benefits can be used for “any food product or product destined for human consumption,” except alcohol, tobacco and hot food. In general, the benefits are available for homes with gross income in or less than 130% of the federal poverty level, or around $ 33,500 a year for three people.
Excluding any food would require Congress to change the law, or for states to obtain fans that allow them to restrict purchases, said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst for the Budget Priorities Center and Policies, a non -partisan research group.
AP
Around the last two decades, legislators in several states and both political parties have proposed to stop Snap payments for soft drinks, fries, ice cream and “luxury meats” such as the steak, as well as for bottled water and dated birthday cakes.
Since 2004, there are six previous requests for Waatvers, including four that were not approved, one that was withdrawn and an application that was incomplete.
By rejecting the Waaivers, the USDA said that there was no clear standard to define certain foods as unhealthy and that restrictions would be different to implement, complicate, expensive and not change participants or improve health.
