Leading Nutrition Scientist Departs N.I.H., Citing Censorship

For the past two decades, Kevin Hall, a nutrition and metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health, has devoted his career to studying how people’s diets affect their health. He has led some of the world’s most important research on ultraprocessed foods, including one study that demonstrated, for the first time, that they caused people to overeat. This linked ultraprocessed foods to chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Dr. Hall had planned to keep doing this work for many years — and hoped it might accelerate under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said that fixing the nation’s food supply is a priority. But now, at 54, he is retiring early.

In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Hall said his decision was driven in part by several instances in which federal officials censored his work. In one, he said he was barred from speaking freely with reporters about a study that might have been seen as contradicting Mr. Kennedy’s stance on the addictive nature of ultraprocessed foods, which include products like chicken nuggets, hot dogs, packaged cookies and chips.