The Long Reach of “Big Food”

It wasn’t always this way. Not so long ago, the produce, meat, and baked goods people bought were fresh, unprocessed, and sourced locally. A significant amount of time was spent shopping for, preparing, and cooking food for the family.

Over the past century, developments in manufacturing, marketing, shopping, and yes, even eating, has dramatically changed the way we buy, cook, and think of food. The days of a local shopkeeper who knows your preferences are mostly gone. We no longer have to wait for fruits and vegetables to be in season to purchase them. Fish and meat come from halfway around the world. Our groceries are delivered right to our door. Many Americans eat out at restaurants and fast-food joints more than they eat at home. Food doesn’t always even look like food anymore.

While no one is proposing that we go back to the days before refrigeration, we do have to grapple with the challenges that come with this modern age of food.

“The increasing industrialization of the food supply has not been good for health,” says Dr. Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University and a leading critic of the food industry. According to the CDC, more than 70 percent of American adults are overweight, and poor diet was responsible for 10.6 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2021.

In an interview with the Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center, Nestle points out that food companies are not social service or public health agencies; they’re businesses with stockholders to please, and profits are their main, if not only, priority.

As these food companies vie for our attention and dollars, the range of choices in our grocery stores seem to have grown exponentially. The challenging reality is that not all those choices are good for us, and that our choices may be even more limited than we realize.

According to Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People and an infectious disease doctor at UCLH (University College London Hospitals) who researches how corporations affect human health, what we eat is determined by the food around us, its price, and how it’s marketed. Most of this is being determined by the $1.3 trillion food industry, dominated by a handful of multinational companies commonly known as Big Food.

Lawrence Gostin, professor of Global Health Law at Georgetown University, is sharply critical of Big Food and the long reach of its influence. He posits that the USDA’s food plate (the updated version of the food pyramid) has been influenced by Big Food, giving greater preference to red meat, sugar, or high-fat dairy products than science would dictate.

“The industry produces and aggressively markets foods laden with sugar, salt, saturated fat, and calories,” Professor Gostin wrote in the journal Milbank Quarterly. “It obfuscates nutritional information to confuse consumers, targeting young people and minorities in particular.”

Misled by Labels

A classic example of the cat and mouse game played by health researchers and food manufacturers is the story of sugar. When studies started showing its negative health effects, companies reacted accordingly. Not by eliminating or reducing sugar levels per se (because, hey, they still need food to taste good), but rather by obscuring the facts.

“ Sugar has a lot of sneaky names,” says Yocheved, LPCC, a certified nutrition coach and mental health therapist who works with women struggling with weight and emotional eating. “Companies realize that people are looking out for sugar, so they have other names that they can put on their labels, such as dextrose, fructose, galactose, glucose, lactose, maltose, and sucrose, to name a few.”

In addition to calling sugar by any of its other names, in the 2000s, food companies started using artificial sweeteners (like aspartame, saccharine, and sucralose) and started labeling their products as no-sugar, sugar-free, or low sugar. This doesn’t mean that the products are less sweet. In many cases, they’re actually sweeter than if they contained actual sugar, and some chemical sweeteners, like aspartame or sucralose, have since proved to have worse health effects than real sugar.

Words like “healthy” and “all natural” don’t have clear-cut definitions, which means that companies seeking to profit off the “eat healthier” trend can easily manipulate customers. While the FDA has recently updated its definition of what can be labeled healthy, the last time “healthy” was defined on a package was in the 1990s, and could be found on foods like fortified white bread, highly sweetened yogurt, and highly sweetened cereals, like Honey Nut Cheerios or Frosted Mini Wheats.

When the new FDA definition of “healthy” went into effect on April 28, 2025, we found some new items on the approved list, such as nuts, seeds, olive oils, higher-fat fish (like salmon), and eggs. Hard to believe, but these nutrient-rich foods didn’t qualify under the previous definition. Water will also qualify as healthy, though many might wonder why water even needs such a designation.

Even with this updated definition, placing a “healthy” claim on a food product is only a voluntary move that a company might choose to make, not a way to protect shoppers. In Chile, Mexico, and other countries, a stop-sign-shaped symbol appears on packaging to alert consumers that an item contains unhealthy ingredients like, for instance, high levels of sugar.

These clear-cut symbols appear on obvious treats like cookies, as well as on many ketchups, yogurts, and breakfast cereals, making it easy for customers to see, at one quick glance, how healthy a food product is. In the States, the responsibility falls on the consumer — not just to flip the package over to read the often long and complex list of ingredients, but also to know how to read between the lines.

Yocheved’s advice: “Ideally, food should be as close to the way Hashem made it as possible. If you’re reading a label, it should have ingredients that you recognize, can pronounce, and know what they are.”

Regulatory Rodeo

While there are many compelling arguments against excessive governmental regulations, food may be one area where it might not be bad to have a little more oversight. There is a long list of ingredients that have been banned in other countries, but not in the United States. Food additives like Titanium Dioxide, Potassium Bromate, Propylparaben, Brominated Vegetable Oil (BVO), and dyes like Yellow 5, Yellow 6, and Red 40, and perhaps most famously, Red 3, have all been banned in Europe, but are freely found in food in the US, though recently some changes have been made.

Red Dye 3 has been banned by the FDA from cosmetics since 1990 after animal studies linked it to cancer, but was only banned in food by the FDA this past January. There are 36 food dyes currently approved by the FDA — nine are petroleum-based dyes, the others are derived from natural sources. On April 22 of this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his goal to phase out all artificial dyes from the food supply by the end of 2026. This includes Red 40, Yellow 5, and Yellow 6, which make up 90 percent of all the food dye used in the US.

While the phasing out is a step in the right direction, as of now there are no statutory or regulatory changes, so only time will tell how compliant manufacturers will be and how this initiative will last through future administration changes. BVO, often found in citrus-flavored soda and sports drinks, was also recently banned as a food additive after repeated pressure from consumers.

When responding to media questions about banned ingredients, the FDA maintains that “just because an ingredient is not authorized for use in a specific country doesn’t mean that is unsafe at levels for which it is used in another country.” This response doesn’t satisfy many consumers who are increasingly looking into what exactly is going into their food, and who feel that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

It may be easy for smaller countries to regulate ingredients, and on a state level it does seem like change is more possible, with California leading the way on banning Red 3 prior to the federal ban. National oversight can be unwieldy, and certain well-meaning guidelines can lead to abuse.

For instance, there is an ingredient designation called GRAS, an acronym for Generally Recognized as Safe. In 1958, a law was enacted that required companies to demonstrate the safety of prospective ingredients. GRAS was created to provide an exemption for common ingredients like vinegar and baking soda, which were already widely used and known to be safe.

This loophole was only supposed to exempt the most well-established substances from undergoing the required thorough premarket safety testing. However, in 1997, the FDA introduced a new rule that allowed companies to decide for themselves which ingredients qualify as GRAS, and to report them, or not report them, on a voluntary basis. Critics unsurprisingly claim that the result has been an increase of questionable practices on the part of food companies, and a frustrating lack of response from the FDA.

According to Consumer Reports, “Data suggest that the food industry is seeking FDA approval for fewer and fewer of these chemicals, and is instead designating more and more of them as GRAS. In all, there are an estimated 1,000 GRAS substances for which safety decisions were made by the food industry without any notice at all to FDA, and thousands more chemicals for which both proof of safety and continued federal oversight are minimal.”

Food-Like Substances

Most of these issues are found in Ultra-Processed Foods (UPF), items that have drawn increasingly more attention in recent years. The formal definition of UPF was developed by a Brazilian team in 2010, but van Tulleken gives consumers an easy way to identify UPF: “If it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a standard home kitchen.”

Also referred to by critics as food-like substances, UPFs often have so many ingredients that no one could possibly make them in a home kitchen, unless you’re a chemist. These products are designed to make consumers want to eat more, with a combination of smell, taste, and texture that has been market-tested to make it possible to eat a whole bag in one sitting, even if that bag really contains seven servings and each serving is 200 calories.

“ Ultra Processed Foods are engineered to bypass the brain satiety signal. You could overeat a bag of potato chips, but you’re not going to overeat plain Greek yogurt with berries. Your body’s going to tell you when you’re hungry or when you’re full, but UPF overrides those instincts,” says Yocheved. This is how it’s possible to eat an entire day’s worth of calories and gain basically zero nutrients. Studies have found that a UPF-heavy diet could lead consumers to eat around 1,000 calories a day more than with an unprocessed food diet.

Van Tulleken notes that UPF aren’t limited to junk food, and there are plenty of “organic, free-range, and ethical” UPF as well, which could be marketed as healthy, nutritious, environmentally friendly, or useful for weight loss. Van Tulleken says wryly, “It’s a rule of thumb that almost every food that comes with a health claim on the packet is a UPF.” According to van Tulleken, the typical American is already eating around 60 percent of our calories from UPF.

The proliferation of UPF since the 1980s has come to dominate the American food environment, and has coincided with dramatic increases in childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and other health concerns. These conditions used to be rare among children but are now alarmingly common, which suggests a direct link to the consumption of these foods. It has been an increasing source of conversation, research, and most recently, the subject of a landmark lawsuit filed in Philadelphia in December 2024.

Bryce Martinez, a young adult from Pennsylvania, is suing several Big Food companies that make UPF, claiming that his type-2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a result of consuming these highly addictive foods. In the lawsuit, the companies are accused of causing widespread health issues through the manufacture and marketing of these products.

Choosing Wisely

Taking such a close look at the food industry can be discouraging, to put it mildly, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. Many mothers want to prepare healthy food for their families, and themselves, but quickly get overwhelmed by the amount of work it seems to require to make healthy choices. If we’re surrounded by unhealthy foods that are labeled in a sneaky way, and UPF are part and parcel of our environment, what are we even supposed to do?

Also, it’s so much easier to pop something in the oven, toaster, or microwave, and we all know that most kids, given the choice between the healthy food you spent actual time and effort making, or the pizza snaps, are going to choose the pizza snaps.

“You can go down a big rabbit hole on this topic, learning about all the chemicals that are in our environment,” confirms Yocheved. “The main thing is to remember that you just have to do your hishtadlus, and that your health is in the Hands of Hashem.”

She notes that the research is always changing. “If there’s a contradiction in halachah versus whatever the latest and greatest that they’re telling you is healthy, then obviously we follow halachah. And sometimes these things are fads. It’s very easy to get caught up and think this is the final say, but remember that tomorrow it’s going to be different.”

Yocheved adds that we don’t really realize the extent that we’re protected by keeping halachah. “Of course we don’t attach a reason to a chok, but there are things in our environment that we’re protected from that we don’t even realize,” she says. “For instance, think about how thoroughly we wash our fruits and vegetables because we don’t eat bugs. That can protect from pesticides. And now there’s so much research on the efficacy of fasting. Well, we as the Jewish people have been fasting for a long time. It really resets your immune system when you do a long fast. The Torah gives us a prescription on how to live our lives,” she says.

The Rambam says that most diseases come from overeating, shares Yocheved. “And he said that a long time ago, when there wasn’t a whole lot of food and there wasn’t refrigeration. I think he says out of a thousand people who die, only one dies from not enough food. Everybody else dies from too much food.” The Rambam also teaches that it’s not so much what we’re eating, but how we’re eating, and recommends leaving one’s stomach always a quarter empty.

Noting that we are what we eat, and that the bulk of our religious observances revolve around food in some way, Yocheved emphasizes that food has a spiritual power. “We’re literally taking the outside world in and bringing it inside our bodies, so you want to really think about those choices. At the same time, we tend to overcomplicate things. Ultimately, how much we eat is really the most important thing.”

She adds that while it’s good to strive to make healthy choices, it’s also good to be flexible. “My grandmother’s hamantaschen calls for Crisco. I would never use it regularly, but I also want to make her recipe. So I use Crisco when I make her hamantaschen. It’s a once-a-year thing, and that’s fine.”

Back to Malky in the grocery store. What should end up in her cart to bring home?

Granola with yogurt or oatmeal with nuts and berries?

Many store-bought granolas are high in sugar and unhealthy fats. Flavored yogurts also add extra sugar. Plain oats with natural toppings like nuts and berries provide fiber, protein, and antioxidants.

Caesar salad or grilled chicken salad with olive oil and vinegar?

The dressing and croutons of a Caesar salad add a lot of fat, calories, and sodium, making it less healthy than it seems. A grilled chicken salad with lean protein, healthy fats, and natural dressing is a much better choice.

Organic veggie chips or carrot sticks with hummus?

Veggie chips are often just potato chips with a little vegetable powder, still high in fat and sodium. Carrot sticks with hummus is a fiber-rich, protein-packed snack with real vegetables.

Vitamin Water or fruit-infused water?

Vitamin Water may be marketed as a healthy choice, but it’s often loaded with sugar and artificial flavors. Naturally flavored water is tasty without added sugars, keeping you hydrated and refreshed.

Fat-free frozen yogurt or dark chocolate with almonds?

Fat-free frozen yogurt is usually packed with sugar to compensate for the lack of fat. Dark chocolate with almonds is rich in antioxidants and healthy fats when eaten in moderation.

So much of what we eat may be out of our control, but we can focus on the things that are in our control. We can read the ingredients, learn how to decipher labels (see sidebar), take note of portion sizes, and remember that we do have a choice over what we bring into our homes. It’s up to us.

This Worked for Me

I wouldn’t advise people to suddenly start taking things away. Rather, deliberately add more fruits and vegetables into your family’s diet. Crowd out the bad with the good, and slowly and surely, you can take away the things you don’t want in your diet. —Yocheved

I try to eat two things at lunch and dinner that are plant-based. Some examples are beans, quinoa, salad, or fruit. There is so much variety, and it helps me make sure I’m getting lots of nutrition as well as balance in my diet. —Sonia

I use an air fryer for everything. I have one for milchig, another for fleishig. Nothing is pan-fried in a layer of oil… except for latkes once a year! Also, cut-up veggies are much more likely to be eaten, especially with hummus, techinah, or dressing. It’s worth the extra minute to cut cucumber or pepper sticks and put them out with dinner. I serve salad plain and put a few dressing choices on the side. —Favia

Kids still hungry after dinner? Try fruit or veggies (or even more dinner) and not “snack foods.” In most recipes, I also use much less oil than what’s called for and choose a healthier oil. Finally, I try to model healthy eating. Kids will be influenced by what they see! —Favia

Being aware of added sugar is a big yet easy way to start. I want sugar in my dessert and candy, but not in my tomato sauce. One baby step: I stopped buying duck sauce and store-bought salad dressings. —Chavie

I don’t have items with ingredients that are banned in other countries in my house. Gushers, Laffy Taffys, food dye, sugar sticks, things like that. If my kids bring it home from school, I’ll say, ‘Oh, yum, that’s so nice they gave you that!’ but I don’t need to offer it in my house. —Ora

Don’t do an overhaul, just do one meal a day better. Make one change during breakfast, and leave the rest of the day as it is. Once that’s integrated, take another step. —Ora

Decoding Labels

Light: Calories and fat have been reduced. Be careful to check the ingredients label to see what has been added to make up for those missing components.

Fresh: This only means that meat was never stored in temperatures below 26 degrees Fahrenheit. It doesn’t indicate anything about the quality of processing or preservation.

Multigrain: While it might seem like the healthier bread option, it simply means multiple grain types were used instead of one.

No Added Sugar: This doesn’t mean the item doesn’t contain sugar, rather, it means no additional sugar has been added to the sugar already included.

Organic: The product followed certain governmental standards to be considered “organic,” including how they were raised, fed, and processed. It doesn’t automatically mean it’s a healthy food item.

Low-Calorie: The calories are lower, but only by one-third of the original product’s calorie count.

Non-GMO: This means that a product was non-genetically modified and doesn’t contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Are GMOs actually unhealthy? Researchers cite evidence that they’re perfectly fine, but there’s still a lot of distrust about them.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 944)