OPINION:
San Francisco filed a lawsuit against 10 food companies for marketing and selling ultra-processed products allegedly known to be harmful to consumers’ health and addictive in nature.
This is a first-of-its-kind lawsuit. Expect more to come. Trial lawyers, flush with tobacco cash, dripping with opioid payoffs, are no doubt watching with bated breath. It’s potentially their next cash cow.
And the political climate is right for such suits.
Can you say eight syllables? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This Health and Human Services director has made clean food a central campaign of his administration. Food manufacturers who would’ve laughed off this lawsuit a decade ago don’t have that luxury now.
Here’s the backstory: The city says the foods from 10 major companies have created a public health crisis nationwide that has left hospitals, taxpayers and families with massive medical costs. According to San Fransico City Attorney David Chiu, “these products in our diets are deeply linked to serious health conditions, imposing enormous costs on millions of Americans and cities and states across our country,” NBC quoted him as saying.
“We have reached a tipping point in the scientific research about the harm of these products,” Chiu added.
Notice he calls them “products,” not food.
True enough.
Ultra-processed foods are basically the ones we all know are unhealthy — chips, frozen pizza, granola bars filled with sugar, canned soups, soda, most breakfast cereals, frozen prepared meals, prepackaged snacks and other convenience items. But we eat them anyway. Ad nauseam, it would seem.
In 2021, a 16-year study from the NYU School of Global Public Health found that Americans’ consumption of ultra-processed foods grew from comprising about 54 percent of their daily caloric intake in the 2001-2002 period to 57 percent in 2017-2018.
The trend didn’t slow.
In December of 2024, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found more than half of calories consumed daily by adults in America were from ultra-processed foods, leading to increased risks of obesity, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers.
“The perception can be that ‘junk food’ and ultra-processed foods are equivalent,” said Julia Wolfson, an associate professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of International Health and the study’s lead author, Johns Hopkins wrote on its website. “Yet ultra-processed foods encompass many more products than just junk food or fast food, including most of the foods in the grocery store.”
This is an important point.
A cookie baked at home from scratch is not the same as a cookie eaten from a prepackaged box in the snack aisle at the grocery store. The first may be junk food — but the second is certainly ultra-processed. And that makes it potentially poisonous to the body.
The 10 companies sued by San Francisco are Kraft Heinz Co., Mondelez International, Post Holdings, the Coca-Cola Co., PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestle USA, Kellogg, Mars Inc. and ConAgra Brands.
As NBC wrote: “The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court, alleges that the companies knew these foods were ‘dangerous for human consumption’ and that they used ‘deceitful tactics’ to market and sell their products.”
It’s the tobacco lawsuits all over again. It’s the same accusations that won big for trial attorneys on opioids. Billions of dollars in settlements and punitive damages are in play.
In the end, though, just as with tobacco, just as with opioids, it all comes down to personal choice.
Lawsuits have a place to play in course-correcting industries and companies that push products that cause harm. But the real reform is when individuals decide of their own free will to take the path of healthful living. Nobody sticks a cigarette between someone else’s lips. Nobody stuffs a pill down someone else’s throat.
Nobody shoves hot dogs in someone else’s mouth.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
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