Fighting our toxic food environment: what can I do?

Note: I had the pleasure of getting to know Stuart Gillespie, veteran international nutrition policy expert (with a great Substack), because we published remarkably similar books within weeks of each other last year. That sparked a conversation that led to this post below. I hope you enjoy! — Julia

This is a joint post by Stuart Gillespie, author of Food Fight, and Julia Belluz, co-author with Kevin Hall of Food Intelligence.

We are living in the era of diet and nutrition hype. Top up your protein! Don’t spike your glucose! Take these supplements! The advice is both omnipresent and inescapable. A Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of US adults found 72 percent reported seeing weight loss, diet, or nutrition content on social media over the last month, making it among the most popular content categories. Even people who didn’t seek out the diet advice and don’t have social media said they were exposed.

And yet, what we’ve learned spending decades researching nutrition and diet-related diseases is that this industry of wellness products and individual diet protocols amounts to a great big distraction. Eating well is not that complicated, and it’s not a problem of individual choices and will. It’s a collective action problem. If junk food inundates people everywhere, even the best nutrition advice is going to be impossible to follow. If healthy food is the most expensive and laborious to prepare, eating well becomes a privilege few can afford.

Instead of more individual diet advice, we need to use our power to tackle the systemic and structural drivers of the toxic food environments around us. We need to fight to make healthy food the default.

Since we published our books, one of the most common questions we’ve received is: ‘Ok, but what can I do to help?’

We’ve learned a lot from discussions and responses to that question, in different settings. Drawing on this and the literature on activism and action in the food and health space, here are six key things individuals can do. (We promise, they don’t involve protein or supplements.)

As citizens in democracies, we have the power to vote in the governments we believe will act in the public interest. Elected officials have a range of policy and regulatory tools they can use to make food environments healthier for all. We detail them in our books, but briefly they include:

a) Using government budgets to procure healthy foods (and limit ultra-processed foods) for institutions such as schools, government agencies, hospitals and clinics.

b) Regulating advertising, labelling, marketing and the commercial promotion of unhealthy ultra-processed foods — including infant foods — using enforceable mandatory standards.

c) Deploying economic tools to push people away from unhealthy foods (e.g. taxing harmful products, reforming agricultural subsidies) and toward healthier options (e.g. earmarking tax dividends to subsidize healthy diets for low-income families, supporting businesses that offer convenient and healthy ready meals in marginalized communities).

d) Ridding advisory bodies, food regulatory bodies and dietary guideline committees of conflicts of interest, and cleaning up industry lobbying practices (via public registers, disclosure and bans on the ‘revolving door’ from food industry into public office).

Look out for representatives or parliamentarians who make these issues part of their platform, and support or vote for them. But don’t stop there. Hold them accountable once they’re in power. Write to them to ask what they’re doing on regulating food environments, especially to protect young children from harmful products.

At a more personal level, the food environments at the places we spend a lot of time outside the home — like our offices, schools, or community spaces — shape what and how much we eat every day, even below the level of conscious awareness. If you find you or your kids are being nudged in unhealthy directions by the lunches at school, or bottomless snacks at work, push for change. Form a coalition with other colleagues or parents who want to improve the food environment. Document the status quo, and how it’s harming collective health. Use that evidence to demand change. Convene a regular workplace committee meeting to discuss how your school or employer responds to your concerns. (For inspiration, Chefs in Schools is one group that’s organizing on the education front.)

There are other measures you can take to affect change locally. These include joining public campaigns, signing petitions to demand local governmental action, or using local media to get the word out.

You also have a right to protest. This can be digital (online, social media) or, physical (like marches, or protests outside industry HQs and government offices). ‘Democracy’ after all derives from the Greek for ‘people power’. (For more inspiration, Stuart provides examples of ‘food fighters’ who’ve had success in his book.)

The media part is easier than ever. You can reach out to your local, national or global media outlet of choice, or develop your own newsletter or social media campaign.

Savvy social movements can help raise awareness and affect change. One of our favorites is Bite Back, the UK’s leading youth-led activist movement on food and health. Their campaign started with a film about how marketing influences young people’s food choices below the level of conscious awareness. Eight adolescents were shown ads for unhealthy ‘triple dipped chicken’ and later asked to choose from a menu of 50 items. All picked the triple dipped chicken. (Julia and Kevin detail the group’s work in their book.)

In the last few years, the campaign has done more than just raise awareness. Its petitions and advocacy have helped expand the number of schools offering healthy free school meals, and restrict junk food advertising to kids in the UK.

There are other inspiring movements and campaigns working on improving food environments around the world.

In America, you can check out the Center for Science in the Public Interest, EWG, Food Tank, Food and Water Watch, and Plant Powered Meals in Schools. Leading organizations in the UK include Action on Sugar, Children’s Food Campaign, Food Foundation, the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, First Steps Nutrition Trust, the Right to Food Commission and Sustainable Food Places, and the Obesity Health Alliance. Globally, there’s the Slow Food movement, IPES-Food, the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator.

You can join or support these or other civil society organizations. Many provide resources, expertise and platforms for citizen action. They also do a great job of raising public awareness about the way our food system operates, exposing problems, lobbying politicians and proposing alternative solutions, including drafting legislation, policies and standards.

Closer to home, you can start or join local food groups and volunteer on community schemes and social innovations, including local food partnerships that share ideas and resources across a national network.

Use your skills, energy, time and money to invest in a healthier world. Do you work for an organization that’s positive, negative (or neutral) with its impact on food and health?

What can you do, in your workplace, to push for change? How can your employer help create a healthier food environment for all?

Ask about your pension fund: what’s it invested in? Speak to your colleagues or workplace committee and challenge investment decisions. If your funds are invested in a Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street ‘ESG fund,’ dig deeper and ask which companies sit within the fund (recent research has shown that many such funds invest in harmful ultra-processed food corporations). Outside work, you have agency in where you invest your personal savings.

Shareholder activism and advocacy are gaining traction. NGOs purchase shares to acquire voting rights, which they use to challenge big food transnationals. These can shift their portfolios towards healthier products. ShareAction in the UK has been attending company AGMs and coordinating shareholders for several years, most notably with Nestlé. In 2023, it persuaded Tesco to report on the percentage of its profits that derive from healthy foods; Unilever soon followed suit.

Vote with your wallet by buying foods that reflect the kind of food system you want to live in. This can involve boycotting unhealthy and unsustainable or unethical foods, while ‘buycotting,’ or switching to, better products and brands.

Of everything on this list, we think the litigation lever is the one that has the potential to have the most impact on our food environment. Again and again in the history of public health, protections and regulations don’t arrive with just a damning pile of research evidence. They arrived following litigation.

More specifically, smart lawyers sue companies on behalf of individual plaintiffs who allege they’ve been harmed by products. Those lawsuits pile up, and often through legal discovery, even when the plaintiffs lose, secrets revealed change public opinion and embolden governments to act in the interest of public health. This happened with asbestos, cigarettes, and opioids. And as Julia recently detailed in the New York Times, such lawsuits have begun to pile up in the US against ultra-processed food companies. But we’ll need a lot more of them to really affect change and it’ll take time. We’ll also need cities and state governments to start to sue, too — something San Francisco took the lead on last December. You can get involved in this legal effort by launching a suit, as a lawyer, a plaintiff, or a city or state.

The lawsuits could also gain strength from proposed regulatory actions. The former US Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler — who was a leading anti-smoking crusader — proposed a way to regulate ultra-processed foods using existing agency rules. Kessler filed a petition with the FDA to ask the agency to reconsider whether a broad category of refined carbohydrates used in many ultra-processed foods should still be considered safe according to FDA regulation. The petition has gained traction among US health leadership, but that hasn’t translated to any action yet.

As we’ve seen with public health menaces of the past, we need a solid body of evidence to make the case that inaction on food environments is no longer an option. It took decades to build that case when it came to smoking, as well as lots of litigation. Right now, we have an overwhelming body of evidence on the links between diet and health, but we need more on how various factors in a food environment exert different levels of influence on peoples’ food choices. Nutrition research now is dominated by studies that focus on the impact of individuals foods or diets, and much of that evidence is observational, not causal. We need more high-quality, randomized control trials on the impacts of food environments.

This research needs to be free from conflicts of interest. It’s not enough to disclose a conflict. Industry-funded research is likely to generate a significant and systematic bias so conflicts need to be avoided.

One group that’s trying to address these problems in nutrition research is UPF.RAN (Ultra-Processed Food Research Action Network), a global network of researchers committed to advancing knowledge and action on ultra-processed foods. They’re focused on sharing documents and resources, grounded in scientific evidence and translating that evidence for policymakers, advocates, journalists, and educators.

Beyond the science and evidence, we need to get the message about toxic food environments out, and support those who do. Investigative and independent media are key players here. These groups include Lighthouse Reports which, along with others, highlighted the shocking degree of corporate litigation against governments who had introduced pro-health regulation. BMJ Investigations, meanwhile, exposed the rampant conflicts of interest within the UK’s foremost nutrition advisory body (Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition). In the US,

US Right to Know and Open Secrets have been using Freedom of Information legislation in their pursuit of truth and transparency in public health.

We can strengthen our own awareness and knowledge by enrolling in online or physical courses, discussion groups, summer schools, and webinars, or just listening to podcasts and lectures. (Stuart was recently involved in the launch of a new series of short courses, run by the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership, for example). There’s no need to start from scratch. Many of the NGOs mentioned above provide technical support and training and they’ve developed adaptable toolkits.

In sum, these are the six actions we think go a long way towards tapping into the latent power we hold, as individuals and collectively. But what do you think? Let us know what you find most compelling and if there’s anything — or group— we’ve missed.

This is a joint post by Stuart Gillespie, author of Food Fight, and Julia Belluz, co-author with Kevin Hall of Food Intelligence.