When Bryce Martinez started feeling an aching around his heart, he thought it might be an asthma attack. But at the school nurse’s office, his blood pressure was found to be so high that he was rushed to the emergency room. There, doctors diagnosed him with Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease.
Bryce, then 16, was bewildered. He’d developed obesity early in childhood, but until that chest pain, had no other sign anything was wrong with his health. He hadn’t even realized kids could get Type 2 diabetes.
Back home, he searched online for information about his illnesses, devouring news articles and videos. He learned that American children live in dysfunctional food environments, where the least healthy options tend to be the most affordable and accessible. That as parents took on more working hours, there was less time for cooking than in previous generations. That food companies filled the gap with convenient, ultraprocessed food, containing industrially manipulated ingredients that you wouldn’t find in home cooking. That these foods are often full of salt, sugar, fat and additives. Bryce was shocked that regulators didn’t vet all food additives for health and safety, and that companies could slap healthy labels on nutrient-bankrupt junk.
Junk, Bryce realized, was a lot of the food he grew up on in Pennsylvania. Even the food that didn’t seem too bad. A bowl of cereal on the way out the door — marketed to kids, and sometimes advertising fiber and nutrients, but also high in sugar. At school, the lunches featured pizza, burgers and mac and cheese. Bryce’s parents tried to cook nutritious meals whenever they could, but they both had full-time jobs. When he arrived at home before his parents got off work, he’d pull a can or box from the cupboard or freezer to heat in the microwave — more mac and cheese or a ready-to-heat meal. Juice pouches washed the meals down. Some of the food he snacked on — chips, ice cream — appeared to be designed so that he couldn’t stop eating. He used to blame himself for that.
By age 18 he started to understand that the responsibility didn’t lie with him alone. Mr. Martinez sued 11 major food manufacturers — including Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé USA — alleging the consumption of their products brought on his Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease in childhood. The lawsuit, filed at the end of 2024, was the first personal injury case related to ultraprocessed foods.
Since then, I’ve tracked more than half a dozen other personal injury lawsuits filed against major food manufacturers, all alleging ultraprocessed foods, engineered to drive addiction and marketed to children, caused chronic diseases in someone under the age of 18. I’ve followed these cases because I’ve become increasingly convinced that litigation may be our only path to a healthy food environment.
Polling shows that across the political spectrum, a majority of Americans now believe ultraprocessed foods can be addictive, that companies deliberately try to hook children and that regulation is needed. Policies that seemed politically toxic in the era of the “Big Gulp” ban in New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg now appear less so. Ashley Gearhardt, a food addiction expert at the University of Michigan, sees the craving economy in the world of food and beyond. “As a parent, I feel like there’s corporate vultures that are just circling my head waiting for me to have a bad day, so they can swoop in and make my child a lifelong loyalist to their damaging product,” she said.
Read the complete article at The New York Times
