Unfair food: obesity litigation twist.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Citings - Brief article

OBESE PEOPLE who blame restaurant chains or other food sellers for making them fat face a daunting obstacle when they try to recover damages in court: They have to show that a particular company is responsible for their obesity. But Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University law professor who runs the Obesity and Law Project at the Public Health Advocacy Institute, thinks he has found a solution: suing food companies under state consumer protection laws, which "avoids complicated causation issues."

In the January issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Daynard and a co-author note that most of these statutes "do not require a showing that the defendant's misbehavior caused a specific illness." Indeed, "many state consumer protection statutes do not require a showing that individual plaintiffs relied on the [defendant's] misrepresentations."

Shortly after the article appeared, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) took Daynard's advice and ran with it, announcing a lawsuit against Kellogg, maker of...