The way out of our ultraprocessed dystopia

Since publishing Food Intelligence, I’m frequently asked about what people can do to make food environments healthier for all. I often answer with some version of: fight for change at every level you can. Home. Workplace. School. City. Country. I still believe think that work is important, but after covering health and chronic disease for more than a decade, I also know how hopeless it can seem. Despite mounting evidence of the harms of our food environment over decades, not much has changed policy-wise.

A few months ago, I found a better answer looking back in the history of public health. I wrote about it for New York Times Opinion today.

In a word, the answer is litigation.

Again and again, bands of clever lawyers interested in public health and social justice fought for protections that policymakers had failed to deliver, long after the harms of a product were established. Litigation forced substantive opioid regulation. It helped curtail the use of leaded paint and asbestos, and made driving safer. But the most thoroughly developed use of litigation for public health involves the cigarette.

The history of the fight against the cigarette is particularly interesting, and I cover it in some detail in the piece. I used to think science and policy were the key drivers of America’s smoking-rate nosedive. But now I understand the real game-changer was litigation.

Though individual plaintiffs suing tobacco companies overwhelmingly lost over several decades, as the historian Allan Brandt detailed in his magisterial “The Cigarette Century,” the cases snowballed, and spurred legal discovery that unearthed damning industry documents. (Side note: you can read Brandt, with Kelly Brownell and fellow Substacker Ashley Gearhardt on the parallels between Big Tobacco and Big Food.) The findings in the secret documents spurred state attorneys general to successfully sue the tobacco companies, and gave law- and policy-makers the ammunition they needed to finally pass regulations and policies that would meaningfully protect public health.

I started researching this history of public health litigation because I became fascinated with the case of a young man, Bryce Martinez. He filed the first of a flurry of lawsuits against 11 major food manufacturers. Bryce was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes, obesity, and fatty liver disease as a minor. His complaint alleges the consumption of ultra-processed foods brought on his diseases in childhood.

Since that lawsuit, I’ve tracked eight other personal injury cases, all making similar claims against roughly the same set of food companies, most of them filed this year. Last year, another lawsuit was filed by San Francisco’s city attorney, on behalf of the people of California. The city alleges food companies essentially worsened a public health crisis that’s strained health budgets.

It’s not just the existence of the lawsuits, and the fact that the filings have accelerated. It’s the context around them. As I write in the Times, “Policies that seemed politically toxic in the era of the “Big Gulp” ban in New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg now appear less so.”

It’s a moment when, from cell phones to social media to dopamine-spiking everything, people are concerned that they’re not in control of what they or their kids are consuming. Too many industries waste our youth (and older age for that matter) and hurt our health. Too many industries erode our individual agency— our ability to be personally responsible — rather than enhance it. The same is true of what we eat and I’m glad more people finally see that.

You can read the full article here. Let me know what you think.