The world’s largest ultra-processed food corporations are using lawsuits to obstruct public health measures, delay new regulations and protect the profits they make from unhealthy food.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, has accused global food companies of hindering efforts to tackle obesity and forcing governments to spend billions on healthcare and legal battles.
Almost 1 billion people worldwide are now living with obesity. Unhealthy diets are a major cause of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer, while ultra-processed foods now make up around half of the average diet in countries including Britain, the US and Australia.
This isn’t simply the result of millions of people independently making poor choices. The modern food system is organised by huge corporations whose profits depend on selling cheap, heavily marketed products in enormous quantities.
Ultra-processed foods are designed to be convenient, heavily advertised and highly profitable. Meanwhile, working people are left with less time to cook, less money to spend and fewer affordable alternatives. The same capitalist system that produces unhealthy food on an industrial scale then blames individual consumers for becoming ill.
Governments have begun introducing limited measures to reduce the harm, including warning labels, restrictions on advertising and taxes on junk food. But even these modest attempts to protect public health have met fierce resistance from corporate monopolies.
An investigation by the Guardian, academics, Lighthouse Reports and media organisations across four continents found that 235 lawsuits were lodged against health policies targeting ultra-processed food in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US and Britain between 2010 and 2025.
Three-quarters of the lawsuits were filed by food corporations or their trade associations. Of the cases where the company responsible could be identified, 38 percent were brought by just eight parent corporations: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelēz, Kellogg’s, Danone, Ferrero, Xignux and Heartland Food Products Group.
Some corporations even asked courts to conceal their identities.
Publicly, these companies claim they support informed consumer choice and want to help tackle obesity. In court, however, they fight warning labels, advertising restrictions and taxes that might reduce sales.
“The findings of the global investigation by the Guardian and other outlets into ultra-processed food come as no surprise, but they are met with grim recognition,” Tedros said. “When harm and profit are tied to the same product, a familiar pattern of industry interference emerges: sowing doubt and obstructing regulation.”
The food corporations lost three-quarters of the lawsuits that reached a conclusion. But winning every case was never necessary.
A corporation can achieve its aims simply by dragging proceedings out for years. Governments must spend money defending the law, public health officials are tied up in litigation and regulations remain suspended or uncertain. Other governments may then decide that introducing similar measures isn’t worth the financial and political struggle.
The lawsuits examined by the investigation amounted to almost 600 cumulative years of legal battles, with each case lasting an average of two and a half years.
“The report documents how litigation has been used to oppose or weaken public health measures on obesity and unhealthy diets, amounting to nearly 600 cumulative years of costly legal battles, an average of 2.5 years per case, most of them unsuccessful.
“These delays cost countries billions in healthcare and legal expenses and create a regulatory chill that deters governments from adopting vital protections.”
This is how capitalist power works in practice. Corporations don’t need to win democratic support for their position. They can use their concentrated wealth to hire armies of lawyers, lobby politicians and exhaust public institutions.
Formally, a multinational corporation and a government may appear equal before the law. In reality, the corporation has resources greater than those available to many poorer states. The law becomes another battlefield on which wealth translates directly into power.
That imbalance is particularly severe in countries kept poor by imperialism. Governments in the imperialist states may at least possess the money and legal capacity to defend regulations through years of litigation. Many poorer countries don’t.
Tedros noted that effective measures remain concentrated in upper-middle-income and wealthy countries.
“Unfortunately, these policies remain concentrated in upper-middle- and high-income countries,” he said. “This reflects a broader inequity, not only in the growing burden of disease but also in governments’ capacity to respond, an inequity that litigation compounds by delaying action where the need is greatest.”
The same multinational corporations can therefore sell unhealthy products across the world while placing the greatest legal pressure on countries least able to resist them. Profits flow upwards to corporate owners and investors, while the resulting healthcare costs are pushed on to workers, families and public services.
Britain is no exception. Last year, the Guardian revealed that the British government abandoned guidance encouraging shops to promote nutritious and minimally processed food after lobbying by ultra-processed food companies.
This shows the limits of the claim that capitalist governments act as neutral referees between corporations and the public. Governments may sometimes regulate individual companies, particularly when the social damage becomes too expensive to ignore. But the state remains tied to the wider interests of capital.
Workers must be healthy enough to work, and the state must prevent healthcare costs from becoming unmanageable. Yet governments are also reluctant to threaten the profits and property of the corporations that dominate the economy. Public health policy is therefore weakened, delayed and repeatedly compromised.
Tedros welcomed claims by some food companies that they had made their products healthier, but said voluntary changes weren’t enough.
“These efforts are welcome, but they are not sufficient on their own to meet the scale of this global health crisis. To contribute meaningfully to the solution, companies should also end litigation and other tactics that strain limited government resources and hinder efforts to protect public health.”
But corporations won’t voluntarily place health above profit. Their directors are employed to expand sales, defeat competitors and deliver returns to shareholders. A company that willingly surrendered profitable markets would be punished by investors and overtaken by rivals.
The problem isn’t that a handful of executives have forgotten their social responsibilities. They’re following the logic of the system exactly as it was designed.
Warning labels, advertising restrictions and junk-food taxes can reduce some of the immediate harm, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for the state siding with the public against capital. Governments introduce such measures when the damage caused by one section of capital — rising healthcare costs, an unhealthy workforce and wider social instability — begins to threaten the interests of the capitalist system as a whole. Even then, they act cautiously, because protecting the conditions for profit remains their overriding concern. That’s why these limited safeguards are so readily weakened, delayed or abandoned when powerful corporations push back.
As long as food production remains controlled by corporations, decisions about what is produced, how it is advertised and where it is sold will be shaped by profitability rather than human need.
The obesity crisis is one more example of capitalism creating a social problem and then charging the working class for the consequences. The corporations take the profits. Workers get the illness, the overstretched health services and the bill.
