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Stephanie Armour
Complaints about hospital food are certainly not new, and Jell-O and fruit juice are often the butt of related jokes. But the Trump administration has recently upped the ante.
It is urging the public to report hospitals and nursing homes that serve sugary drinks, nutrition shakes, or meals that it says don’t meet dietary guidelines established last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with officials vowing to withhold millions of dollars in federal funding if violations occur.
The initiative from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is spurring backlash from some doctors and medical providers who say it fails to account for patients’ unique dietary needs and is anathema to Republicans who have long embraced an anti-regulatory stance.
It’s also not clear that HHS has the regulatory authority to enforce its threat without going through a formal rulemaking process, lawyers and dietitians say.
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