- guardian.co.uk, Sunday February 2 2003 01.35 GMT
The world is getting bigger: baggy jeans, extra-large vehicles and, more worryingly, super-sized meals. As an indication, we need only look at figures from the United States, where food corporations and local government are deeply entwined in a dietary conspiracy.
In 1997, Americans spent more than $54 billion (£33bn) on 14bn gallons of soft drink. The average teenage boy gulps down 19 oz daily - more than a can and a half. Pizza Hut regularly supplies school meals.
The consequences of this gluttony are obvious: in the US, nearly 12 per cent of boys and 11 per cent of girls are obese. Americans spend more than $110bn on fast food each year and, on any given day, almost one in four will visit a fast food restaurant.
The figures have started to worry British nutritionists who fear a similar health time-bomb here. At a recent conference held by the Royal Society of Medicine, Malcolm Law, an epidemiologist at London University's Medical School, asked for a ban on jumbo pizzas and two-for-one fast food meals.
Law, who has witnessed the effects of fast food on young bodies, also demands that chocolate bars and ice creams are shrunk to reduce the number of deaths from heart attacks, strokes and obesity.
'I want to see portions reduced by a fifth,' he said. Everyone is eating large Magnums, when all they need is little choc ices. Further: 'Extra large pizzas cost almost the same as a medium pizza, so there is a financial incentive to buy big. The Government should intervene to stop these incentives, and pizzas could be priced as small, medium and large. I'm not saying that people shouldn't eat, but our whole strategy should be to make people live more healthily and eat less.'
Is Law right to be so concerned? Last month, fast food giant McDonald's achieved a landmark victory when a US judge dismissed a lawsuit that blamed the chain for causing obesity. The case, which was closely monitored both by the industry and health organisations, would have led to a raft of similar actions. New York judge Robert Sweet said he had been aware that finding in favour of the plaintiffs could spawn thousands of similar lawsuits against restaurants.
The New York case was filed last year by the parents of two teenage girls in the Bronx who alleged that McDonald's had failed to properly disclose the ingredients of its food: the food had led to severe health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity.
According to the parents, one girl ate a McMuffin for breakfast each morning and a Big Mac meal for dinner. The younger girl, meanwhile, said she ate at McDonald's three or four times a week. The elder girl's father, Israel Bradley, said: 'I always believed McDonald's was healthy for my children.'
Given comments like that, it's no great surprise that news of the lawsuit initially attracted howls of derision. But for McDonald's it was a significant victory and the food industry remains worried. The years ahead undoubtedly hold more serious litigation challenges for it - challenges that could extend well beyond fast foods to snack foods, soft drinks, packaged foods, and dietary supplements.
'The precedents, the ammo, the missiles are already there and waiting in a silo marked "tobacco",' said Victor Schwartz, general counsel of the American Tort Reform Association. 'The precedent has already been set by those who have successfully taken on the tobacco industry. Ten years ago, critics were saying that tobacco cases would never get off the ground. Look at what has happened in that period of time.'
Junk food, argue its defenders, is nothing like as addictive or as harmful as tobacco. But, as the British Nutrition Foundation points out, weight, once gained, is notoriously hard to lose. And childhood weight patterns strongly predict adult ones. In the US, the number of overweight children has doubled since 1980, while obesity figures among adolescents have tripled. And in 1999, American physicians began reporting an alarming rise in children of obesity-linked type 2 diabetes. Once an obese youngster develops diabetes, he or she will never get rid of it.
'Children are most at risk,' says Greg Critser, author of the recently released study, Fatland: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. Part thesis on obesity, part future warning, Critser's well-received book underlines the steps fast food companies like Pizza Hut and McDonald's will take in order to keep their young customers.
'Fast food is like an addiction in itself,' says Critser. 'What you have to look at is the breakdown of the traditional family. In the Sixties, even the Seventies, it was a luxury to go out and eat a meal. These days, with both fathers and mothers working, it's not a luxury anymore, it's a necessity. For increasing numbers of young children, fast food is the only meal they will get during the day. That, obviously, cannot be a good thing.'
Critser points to the 'super-size' culture among fast food companies, 'where a much bigger meal costs roughly the same'. He continues: 'That competition sets the cycle for companies competing to offer their customers more and more for the same cost. Surveys have shown that customers respond to this - time and time again, customers come back complaining not about quality, but about quantity.'
Critser also points to the revolution in the drinks industry. There was a time, he says, when children drank water or milk. Wherever today's children gather - be it in fast-food restaurants, in cinemas, or at home - they are drinking cans of sugary drinks. In the UK last year, more than 200 litres of soft drink was consumed by the average youngster. Many of them are getting alarmingly fat.
Any connection between this consumption and obesity makes the soft drinks industry incandescent with anger. Yet the World Health Organisation (WHO), in a draft report on obesity and nutrition, urges governments to clamp down on TV ads pushing 'sugar-rich items' to impressionable youngsters and to consider slapping heavier taxes on them. The WHO goes one further: it suggests that school vending machines should be turned into scrap metal.
As evidenced by the 'McObesity' lawsuit, the WHO's recommendations suggest an inevitable showdown between nutritionists and the fast food industry. The WHO is concerned not only about rising obesity levels in rich countries such as the UK and US, but also that the same culture is now making headway in poor regions which have fallen for the fast food diet. Throughout countries like Malaysia, India and Pakistan, fast food is a barometer of fiscal achievement.
The soft drinks and fast food industries are intent on spending serious money pulling apart the scientific evidence. For many years, the food business, much like the tobacco giants, has fought a largely successful battle to have us believe that couch potato culture is more culpable than high-fat chips, burgers, chocolate bars and soft drinks. The breakdown of physical education at school and the selling-off of playing fields, they argue, means children have been cruelly denied exercise and, naturally, have gathered in front of the TV.
'We are going to see the most astonishing public fight,' said Crister. 'This is going to be a huge backlash, with parents leading the charge against big business. In the US, they will also turn on their government which has for so long been in the pockets of big corporations. For years, fast food giants have been successfully lobbying and operating behind the scenes to prevent the kind of confrontation that is now taking place. But the rise in diabetes and other nutrition-related diseases is a worrying trend. Parents will want someone to blame.'
The idea of bringing a lawsuit against the food industry is not unprecedented. In 1983, for example, the California supreme court gave the green light to action brought by a health organisation against General Foods over the way such breakfast cereals as Sugar Crisp and Cocoa Pebbles - which contain 38 per cent to 50 per cent sugar by weight - were being marketed to children. The plaintiffs argued that 'although promoted and labelled as "cereals" [they] are in fact more accurately described as sugar products, or candies'. The court suggested adverts that even implicitly claimed such products were nutritious or healthful made plausible lawsuit targets. The case was settled.
'These are the kinds of actions that will lead to a revolt against the fast foods industry,' said Critser. 'It will be a similar case to the way tobacco was fought: you keep pushing and pulling. Eventually, like all corporations, something gives.'
