Florida dropped a disinformation bomb from their “Healthy Florida First” platform, which says eating six Jolly Ranchers in a year could poison your child.

It’s total bullshit.

Look, I’m not going to defend candy. Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand the stuff. I haven’t touched a piece in decades and I think the industry is nuts.

But reading this Florida report that a single box of Nerds exceeds the “safe annual arsenic exposure” for a kid by roughly 20 times, throws more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

This is radical political campaign literature thinly dressed in an evil lab coat. Two and a half Snickers bars per year is the line between safety and cancer?

GTFO. Anyone reprinting or spreading this stuff needs to know what’s actually going on here.

As a disinformation historian, allow me to explain this has nothing to do with candy and everything to do with political extremists undermining elections.

The Pitch

On January 26, the Florida Department of Health released a two-page PDF through ExposingFoodToxins.com that claims 28 of 46 candy products contained arsenic “at elevated levels.”

Governor Ron DeSantis with his First Lady Casey DeSantis, flanked by the discredited Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, held a press conference at The Villages. Why there? It’s Florida’s largest retirement community and one of its most politically steeped Republican strongholds. They announced fraud to an audience that would never challenge the obviousness of it.

The document was curated for maximum viral impact by placing product photos alongside scary red numbers, consumption limits so low they’re absurd, and the word “arsenic” on repeat. Arsenic. Arsenic. Arsenic.

It does not include any methodology, there’s no peer review, it has no source data, no laboratory identification, no confidence intervals, or sample sizes per product.

Come on people.

None of the basic scientific documentation that would allow independent verification is in the release because none of it is real. Florida’s Department of Health was asked for clarification by multiple sources and so far there has been no update.

The Fraud

They tested for the wrong thing.

This lab used EPA Method 6010D, which measures total arsenic. That means they looked at organic and inorganic combined, despite organic arsenic being relatively harmless and found widely in food.

Inorganic arsenic is the dangerous kind. Without speciation testing, all the numbers are scientifically meaningless for assessing health risk.

Florida of course knows this. Every toxicologist of course knows this. Here’s what was pumped into a retirement community to juice political activism:

• Fabricated benchmarks: The “safe” annual consumption limits don’t correspond to any federal regulatory standard or peer-reviewed threshold for candy. The FDA has no arsenic action level for confectionery. Florida invented its own, didn’t explain the derivation, and didn’t subject it to review. When you control the benchmark, you control the alarm.
• FDA data contradicts them: The FDA released its Total Diet Study Interface on January 27 — one day after Florida’s press conference — providing public access to decades of food testing data. The FDA’s arsenic findings for confectionery are “significantly lower” than what Florida reported. Either the FDA’s multi-decade, peer-reviewed surveillance program is wrong, or a two-page PDF from Tallahassee is wrong. Florida hasn’t addressed the discrepancy.
• Propaganda-based consumption limits: Four pieces of Laffy Taffy per year. 2.4 Kit Kat pieces per year. These numbers don’t track with any toxicological framework in use anywhere. They weren’t meant to.

Who Eats This Shit Up

Casey DeSantis.

She presented the findings. Her husband is building a 2026 gubernatorial campaign under her name because he termed out. He’s been positioning her as his “successor” for over a year, telling audiences that she would “do better than me”, using his political committee to clear the field.

This is simply campaign infrastructure branded “Healthy Florida First”, a $5 million state-funded program to spoil elections. This is the disinformation campaign to fabricate a platform for Casey DeSantis, generate statewide media coverage with cooked-up photos of her literally taking candy away from babies.

The URL is ExposingFoodToxins.com, not floridahealth.gov. This is radical-right political branding.

DeSantis admitted it herself: the initiative is setup like how KKK “poison whisper” networks worked under “America First” of the early 1900s. She said she’s fueling “the federal MAHA movement by working as force multipliers” and announced plans to lead “a coalition of states” in political campaigns masked as food testing. She’s building an extremist national politician profile, adjacent to a “health” program.

Florida is falling in line with RFK Jr.’s directive to the FDA to do fake “investigations” and put on a show about it. Florida’s “independent” testing is coordinated with federal political operations on a timeline that coincides with the DeSantis’ gubernatorial campaign launch.

COVID Crank Ladapo

The scientific credibility of the candy report, let alone the whole Florida political campaign, falls on Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

You may remember Ladapo recommended men aged 18-39 avoid mRNA COVID vaccines in 2022. Yeah. That guy. He ran an internal Florida DOH analysis and told people not to get a vaccine for COVID.

Why?

Public records requests revealed that he personally had tampered with the findings by deleting conclusions that showed no significant risk. He added language suggesting the vaccines were dangerous. The file was literally labeled “Dr. L’s Edits.” Five successive drafts show the systematic removal of every sensitivity analysis that failed to find a statistically significant relationship between vaccines and cardiac mortality.

Imagine having a cartoonish villain for Surgeon General. Then imagine that villain announcing a candidate for governor who will save the children from dangerous… candy.

A University of Florida College of Medicine committee called Ladapo’s work “seriously flawed.” Researchers from Johns Hopkins and UF concluded the alterations were politically motivated. Yeah, you think?

An internal complaint accused Ladapo of scientific fraud. The FDA and CDC jointly rebuked him for “incorrect, misleading and harmful” use of the VAERS database. His former supervisor at UCLA told Florida not to hire him, saying he relies on opinions over evidence. The Orlando Sentinel editorial board called him a “COVID crank” affiliated with America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization whose members include a physician who attributes illness to sex with demons in dreams.

And yet here we are talking about him again. He attended the DeSantis political press conference to thank them for having “the vision” to test candy for risks, and promised “there’s plenty of dirt, unfortunately, to uncover.”

A scientist describes findings. A political operative, a DeSantis crank, promises dirt on candy.

And Then Nothing Happened

ZOMG. Arsenic. Arsenic. Arsenic. Babies eating poison.

And then?

No recalls issued. No enforcement actions. No emergency orders, injunctions, mandatory testing requirements, or referrals to the FDA.

The FDA Total Diet Study found arsenic was not detected in the majority (57%) of food samples, and when it was found in confectionery, it was at levels far below what Florida reported. When Florida suddenly claims Jolly Ranchers clock in at 540 ppb, that goes up against decades of peer review that say… nope.

If these “health” geniuses really just discovered a box of Nerds delivers 20 times the safe annual arsenic dose to a child, everyone would pull the fire alarm already. We wouldn’t be sucking on a poison dinner mint while scanning a colorful PDF for a “meet my wife” stump speech at The Villages.

The alarm is the product. It’s to generate demand for fire trucks and emergency support where there’s no fire.

Casey DeSantis announced the initiative is expanding to “other products marketed for children” already, because “save the children” is a right-wing radical disinformation gold mine. She is setting up a production schedule.

The Real Harm is DeSantis

Food safety in the United States is genuinely shit. The FDA’s framework for heavy metals in food is slow, underfunded, and subject to industry capture. Arsenic in food is a concern, particularly for children, particularly in rice-based products where the science is well established.

This is what military intelligence troops know as a grain of truth that can be weaponized to radicalize voters and dismantle democracy.

Florida’s stunt makes the actual health problems harder to fix, while making elections easier to fix.

When a state health department publishes methodologically indefensible claims using fabricated benchmarks, it hands the industry legitimate ammunition to dismiss every future concern as a “scare tactic.” The National Confectioners Association is already using Florida’s report to characterize all heavy metals concerns as political theater.

Florida didn’t expose food toxins. Florida gave the food industry a shield to dismiss concerns, which in reality means the food industry is incentivized behind closed doors to fund the campaign. Once in office the fake reports can flip to “all safe” because they were lies to begin with.

Meanwhile, the FDA’s Closer to Zero initiative has been actually doing the slow, unglamorous, peer-reviewed work of establishing defensible action levels for arsenic in children’s food. Real science will be drowned out by the lies spread at a press conference in a retirement community.

The candy industry doesn’t need defending. I hate candy.

Science is real and needs defending. The idea that state health departments should produce honest research rather than such bullshit campaign materials is apparently now a necessary position to re-establish.

Put your Pringles can down for a minute and read this:

A study by researchers at three United States universities claims to have identified similarities between the addictive characteristics of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and cigarettes, and has recommended similar levels of regulation.

According to the study, which was published this week in the Milbank Quarterly healthcare journal, UPFs “share key engineering strategies adopted from the tobacco industry” which are designed to drive “compulsive consumption.”

Designed?

UPFs are not just nutrients but [are] intentionally designed, highly engineered and manipulated, hedonically optimized products.

Hedonically? This sounds like something that would be used to target oppressed communities with a dangerous illusion.

Responding to the Milbank Quarterly study, Dr. Githinji Gitahi, the chief executive of Kenya-based NGO Amref Health Africa, warned of a “growing public health alarm” across Africa.

“Corporate [organizations] have found a comfortable, and profitable, nexus: weak government regulation on harmful products and a changing pattern of consumption,” he told The Guardian. “This places new and preventable pressures on already stretched health systems.”