The Texas House on Monday passed a bill aimed at strengthening nutrition requirements for school kids and mandating labeling for certain food additives. SB 25, which has now passed both the House and Senate, would also boost exercise and nutrition requirements in schools.
Bayliss Wagner, who covered the bill’s progress for the Austin American-Statesman, says the bill gained support from both Democrats and Republicans. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This bill was dubbed a legislative priority at the beginning of the session, and it has already passed the Senate, unopposed. Is this a rare case of a measure with true bipartisan support? And what’s the motivation for this bill’s passing?
Bayliss Wagner: Yeah, I mean, it definitely has bipartisan support. And I think it comes from this charge that’s being led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to go after chronic disease. So he’s talked a lot about obesity and other conditions that affect Americans more than they affect some other Western countries.
And so it was also a group of Republican influencers – podcasters who joined Republican senators and lawmakers and representatives to present these Make America Healthy Again bills in a press conference earlier this session.
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Tell us about the bill’s exercise and nutrition requirements for schools.
The exercise requirements are simply increasing the PE requirements for schoolchildren and then also adding a required half credit of nutrition classes in Texas public schools – high schools specifically.
The nutrition requirements are really interesting. They would say that for a list of about 50 ingredients, that manufacturers would have to tell consumers that the ingredients had been deemed not recommended for human consumption by authorities in Australia, Canada, the European Union or the United Kingdom, essentially saying, in other countries, they don’t eat this.
So these would include additives like Red Dye 40, synthetic trans fatty acids, and a lot of other ones that are hard to pronounce, but are in a lot of foods. To avoid this label, manufacturers would take out those additives.
How about the nutrition labeling? I mean, that amendment caused some controversy at the last minute.
Yes, so there was an amendment from a co-sponsor of the bill, Republican state Rep. Gary VanDeaver, that said if the federal government regulates or has a law about this additive – say they have a labeling requirement for this additive or the FDA has already banned the additive or limited it in some way – then the labeling requirement that Texas wants to impose is null.
What the House sponsor of the bill said is that it effectively guts the bill. What she said was, you know, the entire point of this bill is because of decades of federal inaction. And I believe she’s worried that kind of weak labeling requirements from the federal government could take over Texas’ very strong language here.
The House sponsor, Rep. Lacey Hull of Houston, said the White House had been telling her, “you know, this bill, we’re looking to Texas to set an example for the rest of the country.”
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Do we know if the governor intends to sign the bill into law?
No, we don’t know, but I would assume that he does, because it got this far and because he has good relationships with the lawmakers who put forth the bill. And I assume it would be the kind of signing with lots of fanfare, which is interesting because some Democrats accused the bill’s authors of distracting from other problems that face Texans.
Rep. Gene Wu, the Democratic caucus chair, called it a boondoggle that distracts from problems like why parents don’t have time to prepare healthy meals and food insecurity.
