Bottles of Coca-Cola products are placed on a shelf at a store in Denia Beach, Florida on October 20, 2020.
Wilfredo Lee/AP
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Wilfredo Lee/AP
The city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit Tuesday against some of the nation’s top food manufacturers, arguing that ultraprocessed foods like Coca-Cola and Nestle are to blame for the public health crisis.
City Attorney David Chiu named 10 companies in the lawsuit, including makers of popular foods such as Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids, Kit Kat, Cheerios and Lunchables. The lawsuit argues that ultraprocessed foods are linked to diseases such as type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and cancer.
“They took food and made it unrecognizable and harmless to the human body,” Chiu said in a news release. “These companies created a public health crisis, they made handsome profits, and now they need to take responsibility for the harm they caused.”
Ultraprocessed foods include candy, chips, processed meats, sodas, energy drinks, breakfast cereals and other foods designed to “stimulate cravings and encourage excessive consumption,” Chiu’s office said in the release. “Such foods are often mixtures of chemically manipulated cheap ingredients with little to no whole food added,” Chiu wrote in the lawsuit.
Other companies named in the lawsuit are PepsiCo; Kraft Heinz Company; Post Holdings; Mondelez International; General Mills; Kellogg; Mars Incorporated; and ConAgra Brands.
None of the companies named in the lawsuit immediately responded to emailed requests for comment.
US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been vocal about the negative effects of ultraprocessed foods and their links to chronic disease and has targeted them in his Make America Healthy Again campaign. Kennedy has pushed for banning such foods from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for low-income families.
An August report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that most Americans get more than half their calories from ultraprocessed foods.
In October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the first law in the country to phase out certain highly processed foods from school meals over the next decade.
The San Francisco lawsuit cites numerous scientific studies on the negative effects of ultraprocessed foods on human health.
“Increasing research now links these products to serious diseases — including type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, heart disease, colorectal cancer and even depression at an earlier age,” Kim Newell-Green, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said in the news release.
The lawsuit argues that by producing and promoting ultraprocessed foods, the companies violate California’s unfair competition law and public nuisance statute. It seeks a court order to stop the companies from “misleading marketing” and to require them to take steps such as consumer education on the health risks of ultraprocessed foods and limiting the advertising and marketing of ultraprocessed foods to children.
It also calls for financial penalties to help local governments offset health care costs caused by the consumption of ultraprocessed foods.
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