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Land of the Free

  • 14/07/2003

Land of the Free Land of the Fat
In the last week of June, the big fight regarding obesity in the US took on real flesh as more than 100 lawyers, consumer advocates and activists landed up at Shillman Hall in Northeastern University, Boston, US, to attend a two-day conference on "Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic'. The conference, "intended to encourage and support litigation against the food industry', was hosted by the university's Public Health Advocacy Institute.

The conference was the first-ever of its kind. It comes in the wake of a spate of lawsuits against fast-food companies. In the conference, people debated issues such as companies not informing people about fat content in their products, deceptive advertising and whether fast food was addictive (as claimed by a controversial article in The New Scientist in February this year). Also discussed were methods of litigation, guerrilla tactics such as several types of unexpected lawsuit filings and pushing the envelop with cases that appear

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