Lawmakers on Kentucky's Make America Healthy Again task force, that's called the Maha Task Force, are putting together their policy recommendations heading into the upcoming state legislative session.

As our June LaFleur reports, lawmakers want to see more healthy foods and Kentuckians kitchens, especially Kentuckians using food stamps.

More on that in tonight's legislative update.

The Maha group released preliminary recommendations this week in Frankfort.

Those include eliminating processed foods and dyes from school meals, increasing physical education requirements in schools, adding warning labels for food additives, and reducing public exposure to environmental toxins.

That emphasis on what Kentuckians and their kids eat could mean changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Snap.

Policymakers can control what people on public assistance by.

If people are not going to access proper nutrition on their own, perhaps we do need to put some further guardrails or some more stringent guardrails around those programs.

And if they choose not to be in the program, that's entirely up to them.

Other states will soon ban snap purchases of candy and sodas.

That's possible through a waiver process with the USDA, which runs the federal program.

That all the states around us have applied for waivers to for their snap snap benefits not to include soft drinks and candy.

You know, those 18, 18 states across the country that applied for that.

And, so Kentucky is kind of, island.

This lawmaker suggests doling out benefits twice a month instead of just once a month.

Could change buying habits.

One of the things that I saw every month when when snap, when people came in with their snap benefits, they would spend them all on one day.

The whole the whole thing.

And and, you know, they get a grocery cart and they'd have, you know, four cases of Mountain Dew, four bags of potatoes, maybe a bag of apples and oranges and maybe one gallon of milk because they were buying for a full month.

And a gallon of milk won't last a full month.

Fresh fruits and vegetables won't last a full month.

And and not only that, you know, all of our farmers markets through the, I guess the, federal program of our farmers markets.

Now, during the summer, we'll give you $2 worth of, produce for $1 in Snap benefits.

But, you know, typical family doesn't have any Snap benefits left or two in the month.

The Trump administration wants to weed out fraud in Snap.

Trump is demanding more Snap related data from states.

Democratic governors, including Andy Beshear, say that Ask invades recipients privacy.

A federal independent watchdog released its report on Snap this week.

It says criminal groups and retailers have electronically stolen millions of Snap dollars, leaving recipients with an empty Snap account.

For Kentucky Edition, I'm Jim Leffler.

Thank you.

June State lawmakers will convene in regular session and less than three weeks on January the 6th.