Despite whatever wacky nonsense MAHA Czar RFK Jr. comes up with, it’s hard to argue that something must be done to deal with the unhealthy eating habits of Americans, in general, and American youth, in particular, when the president’s favorite food is the Big Mac. Clearly, it hasn’t done much to help Trump’s expansive girth, but he’s old and can eat whatever he wants. So what if he’s large. The same isn’t so easily said for kids who find themselves suffering from Type 2 diabetes. That’s not supposed to happen.

Bryce, then 16, was bewildered. He’d developed obesity early in childhood, but until that chest pain, had no other sign anything was wrong with his health. He hadn’t even realized kids could get Type 2 diabetes.

Back home, he searched online for information about his illnesses, devouring news articles and videos. He learned that American children live in dysfunctional food environments, where the least healthy options tend to be the most affordable and accessible. That as parents took on more working hours, there was less time for cooking than in previous generations. That food companies filled the gap with convenient, ultraprocessed food, containing industrially manipulated ingredients that you wouldn’t find in home cooking. That these foods are often full of salt, sugar, fat and additives. Bryce was shocked that regulators didn’t vet all food additives for health and safety, and that companies could slap healthy labels on nutrient-bankrupt junk.

There’s a lot packed in there, but the crux of the claim is the neither food manufacturers nor regulators saved children and their parents from being responsible for anything they put in their mouths. The food industry makes food that tastes great and is inexpensive. Parents buy it for their children to eat because they’re working and have no time to either feed their children healthy food or oversee what their children eat.

Damn those food companies for making food that tastes great and is inexpensive. Damn those regulators for not forcing food companies to make food that’s healthier at the cost of flavor and more expensive. Why won’t somebody think of the kids? That’s where the courts come in.

By age 18 he started to understand that the responsibility didn’t lie with him alone. Mr. Martinez sued 11 major food manufacturers — including Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé USA — alleging the consumption of their products brought on his Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease in childhood. The lawsuit, filed at the end of 2024, was the first personal injury case related to ultraprocessed foods.

As Julia Belluz writes, there is a solution to this problem.

I’ve followed these cases because I’ve become increasingly convinced that litigation may be our only path to a healthy food environment.

There are questions that remain unanswered in this assertion. What constitutes “ultraprocessed,” a word thrown about with abandon but without definition that replaced what we used to call “junk food.” How much processing is good, and where does it morph into the evil “ultra” processing? Is processing the problem at all, or is it the something about the processing, the addition of excessive salt and sugar combined with the removal of vitamins and minerals? Is part of the problem marketing and not processing at all, by promoting the aspects of a food that can be spun as a positive and ignoring the negative? Isn’t that how all businesses, not to mention politicians, sell their products?

Polling shows that across the political spectrum, a majority of Americans now believe ultraprocessed foods can be addictive, that companies deliberately try to hook children and that regulation is needed. Policies that seemed politically toxic in the era of the “Big Gulp” ban in New York under Mayor Michael Bloomberg now appear less so. Ashley Gearhardt, a food addiction expert at the University of Michigan, sees the craving economy in the world of food and beyond.

Addiction isn’t a matter of pop sensibilities, but a physical compulsion that cannot be overcome. Kids are “addicted” to foods they like. Who isn’t? This is usually called “preference,” but that word doesn’t carry the requisite stigma. There’s a reason eating crickets hasn’t yet caught on in America, and why most people prefer a bowl of ice cream to stewed beets in the evenings.

But the assertion that parents are somehow being victimized by Big Food, and thus not responsible for their own actions or the health of their children, is deeply concerning.

“As a parent, I feel like there’s corporate vultures that are just circling my head waiting for me to have a bad day, so they can swoop in and make my child a lifelong loyalist to their damaging product,” she said.

What does having a bad day have to do with justifying the neglect of your children? Yes, adulting is hard. Get over it. Children can be a huge pain at times, even when it’s inconvenient for the parent who has their own feelz to worry about, but they still need to eat. Every day. What they eat is largely your responsibility as a parent. Sure, this is a burden, but nobody said parenting was just the hugs and kisses without the feeding and diaper changing parts.

The reason Bloomberg’s “Big Gulp” regulation was panned was because it wasn’t government’s job to parent your children or permit only what some bureaucrats decide was good for you. Yes, our supersize culture is a health disaster, but the cure isn’t lawsuits against companies that sell us what we want for a price we’re all too happy to pay. We are addicted, not to ultraprocessed food but to lawsuits and courts to fix whatever problem ails us when we refuse to take responsibility for ourselves.