Going Up Against ‘Big Food’

February 20, 2014
NACS Online
A law firm believes it has a case against “Big Food” to recover obesity and health-related costs, even though the evidence is severely lacking.
​WASHINGTON – A law firm’s prompting of state attorneys general to try to recover a portion of their obesity-related Medicaid bills from food companies lacks the “smoking gun” of the 1990s Big Tobacco lawsuit, Politco reports.
Bruce Silverglade is a food industry lawyer who maintains there is no evidence that food companies made their products addictive at the expense of public health. “Food is not tobacco,” he said. “The case simply isn’t there.”
The effort by Valorem Law Group to recover billions in obesity-related health-care costs, while generating significant media buzz — does not offer the contingency fee payday like the case against the tobacco industry that resulted in a $246 billion settlement.
“One of the main issues here is the lack of a ‘smoking gun,’” explained Silverglade, who now represents several food industry clients. Whereas Big Tobacco documents detailed how tobacco companies concealed the adverse effects of tobacco and whether nicotine was addictive, “[t]hat has simply not occurred here,” he said. “[Former FDA Commissioner] Dr. David Kessler and others theorize that large food companies manipulate ingredients, but do not have hard proof. Food companies adjust sugar, salt and fat content for a variety of reasons including taste, functionality and cost.”
Paul McDonald, the lawyer leading the effort at Valorem, speculates that such incriminating documents from food companies exist, and he wants state attorneys general to use their powers to find them.
Stephen Gardner, director of litigation for the Center for Science in the Public interest, a group known for litigation in the food industry, said he would advise attorneys general to avoid joining Valorem’s fight.
“There’s no question that the junk-food industry bears a direct responsibility for degrading consumers’ health, but the issue isn’t that simple,” he said, adding that food and tobacco are distinct and proof would need to be offered to put a similar case together.
“Big Tobacco was not just a conceit — a very limited number of tobacco companies worked jointly to hide the very real risks of a product that was known to cause lung cancer and other diseases,” Gardner said. “There is no correlative Big Food — there are thousands of food companies producing wide varieties of foods.”