The San Francisco’s attorney’s office, on behalf of the citizens of California, has filed a devastating suit, California v. Kraft Heinz, which targets 10 food company giants, such as Mars, Pepsi, and General Mills and contemplates adding others. I thought I was reasonably knowledgeable about health costs of ultraprocessed foods. But the history and litany of harms in this complaint go far beyond what I’ve encountered into the mainstream press and a handful of studies I’ve reviewed.
If you read the filing, which I strongly urge you to do at the end of this post, 1, you’ll never want to eat a Cheetos again, although the document also explains why you may be unable to resist. One section of the claim discusses a 1988 Surgeon General list of criteria for addictive substances and how these products meet all three conditions: the substance’s ability to cause compulsive use, induce psychoactive effects via their impact on the brain, and reinforce behavior. The result is that 14% to 20% of US adults being hooked, with results like 20% to 50% of gastric bypass surgery patients continuing to overeat ultraprocessed foods despite vomiting and diarrhea.2
We’ll explain below why this is a formidable filing. The short version is that San Francisco is experienced in this sort of action and won sizeable settlements and judgements in tobacco and opioid litigation.
he filing chronicles how Big Tobacco, using the same techniques they had honed with cigarettes, turned food into a blockbuster opportunity for predation and profit. RJ Reynolds targeted food in the 1960s, with the stated intent of building on its expertise in flavors. Hawaiian Punch was the first in a series of deals, with Nabisco in 1985 upping its ante. Phillip Morris bought General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1988. A 2006 article article explained the strategy:
112. Philip Morris’ Director of Applied Research distilled his company’s acquisition philosophy thus: “control all of the pleasure drugs that are not regulated.”
113. R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris did not operate their food companies as wholly independent entities but instead rapidly integrated them into the pre-existing tobacco companies.
114. As a result, there was a systematic transfer of people, knowledge, information, and technologies from “Big Tobacco” to the food and beverage industry in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Big Food put the institutional knowledge of these employees to work…
120. The purpose of all this research was not to determine how to make food more flavorful. The purpose was to understand how to exploit the physiological structures of the human brain, to override the body’s natural mechanisms for resisting its addictive qualities, and to evade the body’s ability to control intake.
121. As Dr. [Phillip Morris scientist Frank] Gullotta explained in 1990, the senses of taste, smell, and touch don’t “matter a didley if you don’t have the effects in the brain. [Consuming UPF] are only pleasurable because of the consequences” in the brain.
The filing gives examples of ongoing, extensive research efforts at defendants like Nestle, Kellogg. ConAgra and Mars to understand and better trigger desired brain reactions, as in pleasure responses as well as the bypassing of normal mechanisms of recognizing satiety.
And it’s not as if these and the other giant defendants can plead ignorance of the tobacco-level damage of their ultraprocessed products. The pleading opens in 1999 with Michael Mudd, Vice President to the predecessor of Kraft Heinz, pleading with industry executives to change course over their exploitation of ultraprocessed foods. It returns to that session later:
200. In December 1953, the CEOs of the major tobacco companies met secretly in New York City. Their purpose was to counter the damage from studies linking smoking to lung cancer. What followed “were decades of deceit and actions that cost millions of lives.”
201. As depicted in the Introduction to this Complaint, Big Food had its own version of that meeting in April 1999, when CEOs from Defendants met secretly in Minneapolis to discuss the “devastating public health consequences” of their actions, including 300,000 excess deaths every year and massive public health costs upwards of $100 billion each year. Executives from Defendants Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Post Holdings, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Mars, or their predecessors, all attended this meeting.
202. Unfortunately, just like Big Tobacco, Big Food did not change its ways, but, instead, spent the ensuing decades deceiving the public.
The filing documents the strong connections of the food engineering to health damage. Sections from that discussion:
10. This case is not about food that is merely “unhealthy.” This case is about food products with hidden health harms, that Defendants designed to be cheap, colorful, flavorful, and addictive. This case is about food products whose ingredients and manufacturing processes interrupt our bodies’ abilities to function. It is about the Defendants—gigantic food conglomerates, all—who designed, manufactured, marketed, and sold these foods knowing they were dangerous for human consumption…
49. UPF are fundamentally different than the foods that make up traditional diets. A UPF is the result of combining, using a series of mechanized processes, cheap ingredients with enhancers, and additives with little to no food uses outside of processing.
50. UPF are formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, which are created by series of industrial techniques and processes.
51. Ingredients characteristic of UPF are either food substances of no or rare culinary use, or classes of additives whose function is to make the final product sellable and often hyper-palatable…
52. These components are assembled into a final food product using industrial processes which most American consumers have never heard of (such as extrusion, molding, hydrogenation, hydrolyzation, and pre-frying, each of which further transform the chemical makeup of UPF.
I have before recounted the mention in a lecture by an MD and Professor of Medicine at the University of Ohio that hydrogenated fat is so far removed from food that if you left a block on a counter, cockroaches would not touch it. Continuing:
71. Ultra-processing disrupts the nutrient balance that humans are genetically adapted to consume, and a growing body of evidence suggests the human metabolism is not be able to properly process nutrient distributions that substantially deviate from the range and structure of nutrient distributions in foods found in nature, known as the “food matrix.”35 Put simply, UPF bypass the signals our bodies send us that we are full and we can stop eating.
72. High-quality scientific studies with large representative samples have also found that consuming UPF significantly increases risks of a host of serious health problems, including breast, colorectal, pancreatic, lung, and brain cancer; cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel disease, chronic kidney disease, Crohn’s disease, chronic inflammation, Type 2 Diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, disruption of the endocrine system, depression, and anxiety.
74. Some of these alarming results may be attributable to the fact that many of the ingredients in UPF have not been independently tested for safety. Defendants have introduced more than 10,000 such chemicals in our food supply in service of producing UPF.
75. Almost none of these chemicals have undergone long-term testing to determine whether they are safe to be chronically consumed. In fact, the available evidence suggests that many of these chemicals may be toxic even at exceedingly low levels.
The filing also extensively documents how the food behemoths targeting of children, particularly from minority groups, to create life-long addicts, and the resulting population-level harm, notably the significant rise in ailments previously only very rarely seen in pediatric populations, such as what was formerly called “adult onset” diabetes and fatty liver disease.
Reading this complaint, I would think the defendants would be crazy not to settle, assuming they do not succeed via preliminary motions in keeping it from getting to discovery.
Given the 1999 industry conference where the damage to health was presented by industry executives and chosen to be ignored because profit (this by the way in the same time frame when Big Tobacco was negotiating its massive Federal-state settlement), one has to think that internal records contain simply ginormous amount of damaging information. Recall that some would contentd that despite the WHO deeming glyphosate to be a probable carcinogen to humans, that the case against Monsanto were scientifically weak. What cinched it for jurors was that Monsanto had its own workers wear hazmat-level gear when treating fields with its glyphosate product. Roundup, while giving no such warn to do so to farmers and consumer users.
And let’s not forget this recent, erm, unfortunate disclosure:
Campbell's is defending itself after a company executive was allegedly caught on tape calling the soup company's products "highly process[ed] food" for "poor people." https://t.co/NJvl7YxZ2f pic.twitter.com/dI3Ur2Jac6
— ABC News (@ABC) November 25, 2025
We’ll turn the mike over to the New York Times as to why industry execs ought to be sweating bullets over this case, which has the potential to open a tsunami of related litigation:
It is unclear how successful the suit will be…
But the San Francisco city attorney’s office has had success as a groundbreaking public agency on health matters. The office previously won $539 million from tobacco companies and $21 million from lead paint manufacturers.
In 2018, the office also sued multiple opioid manufacturers, distributors and dispensers, reaching settlements with all but one company worth a combined total of $120 million. San Francisco then prevailed at trial over the holdout, Walgreens, scooping up another $230 million.
And it’s not as if a Trump Administration that has gone all in for MAHA will file an amicus brief on behalf of Big Food. Pass the popcorn. I am pretty sure it is healthier than Doritos.
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1 Thank reader Bugs for having super duper compression software that could reduce the file size enough for WordPress.
2 A real doozy:
san-francisco-v-kraft-heinz-complaint89. Tellingly, rodents will risk aversive experiences (e.g., electric shock) to consume UPF (in the form of industrially-produced sweets) when other calorie sources are easily available to them. Rats even show greater resistance to electric shock when attempting to access industrially-produced sweetener than when they are attempting to access methamphetamine. Non-UPF do not elicit these responses in humans or rodents.
Yes, I hope they add McDonald’s to this list since they’ve used substances in their pink slime (meat products?) to cause addiction in people who eat their salty and fatty foods. It causes an explosive experience in our brain chemistry, much like UPFs.
I hope the San Fran lawyers do NOT settle, regardless of the amount offered, because the people need to know the crap they’re eating. I purchased one of Nestle’s new pretzel offerings and was sick to my stomach and badly bloated afterwards. I checked the ingredients, which included lots of chemicals, including MSG. I am allergic to monosodium glutamate (MSG). I thought Big Food stopped using MSG in the 1990s. I then checked my daughter’s Cheetos, and guess what – more chemicals and MSG. I didn’t see any food substance; it was all chemicals.
And I consider myself a very picky foodie. I don’t even like eating meat because of all the junk they feed or inject into our animals. They’ve got chickens growing to these massive sizes in fewer days by injecting them with steroids and manipulating their genes. And, pretty much ALL meat raised in CAFOs is unhealthy for the animals and humans.
Therefore, once again, I hope this becomes very public, and discovery discloses all the disgusting methods that Big Food uses in their “food products.”
Judges VERY VERY VERY much want cases to settle. But I agree, aside from the value of discovery, that if a judge or jury found against any of these plaintiffs, that would establish findings of facts. Which pretty much guarantees other litigation making use of those findings as well as an appeal.
See our coverage of Kentucky Retirement Systems. That case was filed in 2017. It still has not gotten to discovery. That shows you how long defendants with big building lawyers can stymie litigation via what is called motions practice.
Also assuming Congress doesn’t jump in at some point and limit the ability for states and locals to sue on this. These deep pocket defendants pay (and can pay more) for campaign contributions.
20 years ago, used to drink >4 cans of diet soda a day. Stopped, lost 10 lbs without even tryinnow I’m just addicted to coffee and barley tea. lmao
and lay-off of shelf-stable food for a a week or two, soda too….
you taste buds “reset”, and everything processed taste so much more salty and industrial (which it ough to, given the sodium levels). …and you really don’t want to gorge on bag of Doritos like when you were 15
I’m sure all of this is very true and IM Doc, who does his own canning, could step forward to verify. But one reason it is called poor people food is the convenience for those who may be working multiple minimum wage jobs to get by. One should also point out that restaurants and their food services–not just McDonalds–are often just as guilty of using ultra processed unless they are the expensive restaurants that only the non poor can afford.
All of which is to suggest that it’s a class issue and not just a greed issue. Cigarette use has, after many years, been greatly diminished although movie companies still seem to work them in as often as possible and they are still around. But going after the food system itself may be a much bigger hill to climb. That said raising public health consciousness, as with cigarettes, can only be a benefit to the public and a blow to big food. No doubt they will settle to withdraw the issue from more visibility and perhaps we will get food that, while still coming out of a factory, has far fewer mystery chemicals.
Convenience, yes but not just poor people (unless you want to define ‘poor’).
I know alot of very unhealthy fat rich (dare I say, lazy?) americans who rarely eat food made by our Creator.
“I know a lot of people” is not a valid statistic.
“But going after the food system itself may be a much bigger hill to climb.”
Yes it will. How do first amendment rights enter into the action when the “food” products of the UPF manufacturers are disparaged openly?
I’d lie to see RFK Jr stand up to Trump and the mega “food industry” donors and join the lawsuit on the side of SF by supplying many lawyers and forcing fast litigation.
My first thought, Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth published 1952. There is an addictive loop in the novel of snack food, a drink called Popsie IIRC and a cigarette. Each kicks off the desire for the other. Pohl followed up with The Merchants War in the 1980s. Not for the first time, life imitates art.
Robert Lustig’s two books (Metabolical and Fat Chance) document this case to the letter. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s somehow involved with this lawsuit or his work is referenced therein. He’s a child pediatrician (at UC San Francisco) who’s seen and treated the effects of sugar and UPFs firsthand. He then pursued a law degree with the objective of working to solve this problem.
I highly recommend his books.
Lustig’s work is 15+ years old now. Normies—even “NPR Normies”—-haven’t changed a thing, to wit: my kids’ Sodexho Marriott school menu.
The war was over when my kids discovered “Uncrustables” ™, lmao
Robert Lustig was a pioneer. Lately he has blurbed Casey Means MD’s book Good Energy. The future Surgeon General’s book is good on the basics of metabolism for the general reader, but after that it is MAHA/Functional Medicine nonsense intended solely for the rich. Fits right in with the current Zeitgeist.
As for the school menus, exactly. When I was in school the food was cooked by the lunchroom ladies every day. It wasn’t exactly gourmet, but it was good. And healthy. Three days a week the entire building was suffused with the aroma of yeast rolls made from scratch. Now? My granddaughter’s parents do not let her go near the stuff that comes straight from the food service truck, ready to thaw-heat-serve. And eat if there is no alternative.
Two citations
Robert Lustig, The Hacking of the American Mind (2017).
Robert H. Lustig, Ultraprocessed Food: Addictive, Toxic, and Ready for Regulation, 12, Nutrients 3401 (2020).
I get together with my friends for a shindig or sailing and they always whip out the Cape Cod Kettle Cooked Potato Chips. I tell them that the chips should be categorized as a Class I addictive drug. They don’t care. And now I’m hooked. I’ll probably get ADHD.
Thanks for this post.
This docu-movie is a good bookend to your post, imo. utube, no paywall. ~1 hr, 32 min. A Toronto International Film Festival official selection, 2013.
FAT | Food Addiction Movie | A Hard Hitting Drama Movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J18gNkCb7ZA
Walgreen’s has paid about $70 billion of the $230 billion settlement. There has been no pressure, no reporting, no nothing. Meanwhile every day, and especially every day, people line up at the abandoned Walgreen’s at 16th and Mission waiting for their next fix. Walgreen’s has a monopolistic position here and probably threatening to leave the city entirely if they have to pay. Meanwhile the public picks up the tab, paying fore homeless and rehab costs Walgreens and the Sacklers impposed on the city, along with the addiction and death their profit hungry inhumanity has caused.
I raise a handful of pigs time to time, and had a source of about 20 gallons of whole milk/day. I was curious whether it would be safe to feed so much milk to 5 pigs so I did a little reading and found that the conventional wisdom is that pigs will grow on whole milk, and will grow fat on skimmed milk. The calories are in the sugar, but the satiety is in the fat. The pigs would eat the whole milk until they were full, then my chickens would eat the rest. Our high carb, low animal fat diet is designed to take away our feeling of satiety.
I have a very distinct memory of a trade magazine named “Food Engineering”, which I perused in the school library while slightly bored one day. Even then, nearly 60 years ago, it struck me, a kid from a rural environment where much of our food came from local sources, ‘why does food have to be engineered?’ Doesn’t make sense. Reading some of the articles, even at my tender age, it was clear to me that there was a significant industry dedicated to creating addiction.
Bravo to the San Fran lawyers! And a small hope that RFK, Jr might, even in some small way, start the revolution against the truly nefarious practices of the industrial food monopolies. It will be a long and difficult process.
Ultra-processing disrupts the nutrient balance that humans are genetically adapted to consume, and a growing body of evidence suggests the human metabolism is not be able to properly process nutrient distributions that substantially deviate from the range and structure of nutrient distributions in foods found in nature…
I haven’t seen a definitive report, but I suspect that the large rise in the number of people who require gluten free diets may be do to the fact that what they are eating isn’t actually wheat any more once it’s been so highly processed, and people’s bodies just can’t digest the adulterated product.
lyman alpha blob: Have you had this anecdotal experience in Greece? People mention that in Italy, they can eat bread. One of my nieces, who has some trouble with gluten in the U S of A, mentioned that In Italy she was eating pasta and bread, with fewer gastro incidents.
Here, in Torino, I made a Thanksgiving dinner for seven of us last Saturday. I always make bread on Thanksgiving. What I noticed with my nose and eyes and felt with my hands during kneading is that Italian flour is much different from U.S. flour. This year, it truly hit me. Admitttedly, I had bought a flour made from a specially bred Italian wheat. Yet in the U S of A, I almost always used Bob’s Red Mill flours, so I wasn’t stinting.
So something in the farming, harvesting, and processing of grains in the U S of A has gone seriously wrong.
I also noticed that Italian yeast is distinctively lively (like Italians) and smells better, too. I’m still figuring that out that phenomenon.
The wheat itself is not what our ancestors grew, but has been bred for characteristics making it optimal for industrial food processing. I have seen allegations – admittedly from proponents of sourdough and home made breads etc., that the introduction of rapid-rise yeasts that the industrial bread makers like so much has altered the nutritional characteristics of the bread most people eat – even if they make it at home – to our detriment. I have largely switched to sourdough made from what I obtained from the 1837 Oregon Trail sourdough people, who distribute it free – just send them a SASE. Might not be much better but tastes great and it’s slow food.
I doubt that the use of glyphosate (Roundup) in the harvesting process is much help to the health of the consumer.
An internist friend recommended Wheat Belly. I haven’t read it yet, but I seem to remember the point was that modern “industrial” wheat grown in the Great Plains is quite different from the wheat of 100 years ago. It appeared to be mostly “Medical Medium” hype. Maybe not. I should dig it out of the pile and give it another look.
Most people who insist on gluten free do not “need” those diets, as in they are not allergic. It’s another health fetish. But that does not mean minimizing or avoiding modern wheat is a bad idea.
Wheat, specifically (as opposed to gluten more generally) is behind some fraction of cases of eosinophilic esophagitis — nuts and dairy are the other “usual suspects.”
Thank you so much, Yves, for this news but especially for your expanded comments. After a cancer diagnosis in 2003 and major surgeries, I began searching for related info, reading medical and science journal articles about diseases, pesticides, herbicides.
Shocked to learn from those journals that I was eating so much poison back then as a single mom of 2 active boys and little time for cooking from scratch. It didn’t happen in a day or a month, but I did a 180° switch in foods and beverages which I maintain today. Mostly whole, fresh veggies & fruits, also eggs, fish, herbs, nuts, seeds, coconut milk, and Irish cheese. Organic as much as possible. I don’t even buy cotton things now unless they’re organic.
But your information today and the link is even MORE shocking than back then. Will share widely.
Fascinating and disgusting. To Elissa3’s point, I’ve mentioned cooking for vegans in the past using plant-based “meat” and “cheese.” The ingredients list looks like something from a lab. What started out as beet, carrot, or soybean was “engineered” into a weenie or mozzarella. I think a deep dive into vegan products is warranted. I suspect they would qualify as UHF.
Yves Smith. Thanks for this. And félicitations to Bugs for the magical file-smashing powers.
In the filing, some items pop out at me, in part because I once worked in a food-service-adjacent foundation so that the players are familiar to me.
–Note under parties (starting at point 15) how many are merged conglomerates, with enormous product lines. This is what happens when the business of America is business and money is all that matters. It would help if antitrust law came into play here, but antitrust law no longer exists in the US of A. See: Amazon.
–Note an interesting exception under points 37 and 38. Mars is the only defendant still privately owned — by the Mars family, who really exist, and who really have that surname. Then note that Mars has “stuck to the knitting.” Its list of products centers on chocolates and little candies. That’s about it. Mars will be a hard nut to crack. Later in the filing there is some talk about a flavor lab at Mars, as if this were scandalous. Anyone working with chocolate and fruit flavors would have a flavor lab. Not that I’m defending Snickers.
–The preponderance of conglomerates means that everything centers on management and its impulses, marketing and its know-it-all-ism, and the icky “synergy” of these two parasitical elements in the modern corporation. To paraphrase, John Wanamaker, Half the money I spend on management is wasted and all of the money I spend on marketing is fantasyland.
–The number of characters invented to promote this stuff astounds. It’s a field theory of bad marketing, maudlin characters, television addiction, and too much high-fructose corn syrup.
–I have written before that the big hidden problem in the U S of A is bad oil. I recall how my parents’ generation was pushed to use margarine (hydrolyzed oil) — and how so many of them developed heart disease in their forties and fifties, in short, early, much too early. Further, the U.S. allows the use of crap oils like cottonseed oil (pure junk), soybean oil (a mystery), and corn oil (another mystery). This suit will break into this swamp only if more ingredients are called into question.
I beg to differ re Mars. It owns a ton more brands that in chocolate. Some are in food like Ben’s. And it also make those fake natural Kind bars: https://www.mars.com/our-brands/all-brands
You also don’t whether Mars acquired some sort of questionable industry processes via hires from other food giants.
Hershey which is public but still controlled by the Milton Hershey Trust due to having two classes of stock, would have a lot of disclosure of its ops. It is not a target of this suit. The filing specifically complains about the synthetic dyes uses in Skittles, which is owned by Mars. Mars very likely uses similar colors for M&Ms. Hershey’s only sorta comparable product is Reese’s Pieces, and those don’t have crazy bright yellows, reds, greeens, and blues.
Yves Smith: Thanks. My knowledge of Mars is somewhat out of date, evidently, because I still recall doing research about its lines of chocolates and candies (and M&Ms, a combo dragée).
What’s with all of the dog food and the veterinary clinics?
And all of that chewing gum. I forgot that Mars is where Wrigley’s went to die.
And bottled spaghetti sauce. Hardly a “Miracolo.”
Sheesh.
Mars is still a closely held family company, and it has always been hard to get information out of Mars. For years, it was considered something of a mystery as to their earnings and profits. Now that they are spread too thin, they may have ended up as an easier legal target, like Kraft Heinz. They should have “stuck to the knitting.”
Anecdotally, as to Hershey’s, I consider it a nostalgia brand. The chocolate bars are no longer good. Every once in a while, in the U S of A, I will have a Kiss as a kind of Proust’s madeleine for an American.
If only this were legislation instead of litigation. Any business is a conspiracy against the society as a whole, but where basic human needs are involved, like food, water, and shelter, industrial regulation is a matter of public health. Freedom is often invoked in defending companies supposed right to poison us; ‘I like being experimented on, and I should be free to continue”, we are supposed to imagine the American consumer saying. It is rather the freedom of business owners to experiment upon us which we are defending when we take this line of argument.
It might be hoped that the damages awarded will be so overwhelmingly large that the effect will be to disincentivize this kind of industrial experimentation. This would be the civil law standing in for government controls on industry, a kind of a free market approach to public health. The regulators, one imagines, have all been captured long ago, though, and so this might be the best we can immediately hope for.
Re DJG’s comments above about the crap oils in U.S.: Ever since we’ve lived in Italy for much of the year–about 30 years now–I’ve only used olive oil for cooking and pouring. I even pop popcorn in olive oil and put olive oil on it instead of butter. Of course it’s fresh oil for pouring, last year’s oil for cooking, and from friends and neighbors or farms I trust. We bring it to the States in luggage in 1 liter tins or have it shipped in 3 liter tins.
Tbh these companies should be considered as a national security threat. They are poisoning millions of americab citizens and if ever compromised cna be weaponised by malicious countries.
They are already weaponised by a malicious country, USA.