One of the West’s leading exports to the developing world is obesity, fueled by a deluge of Doritos and Kit-Kats, Cookie Crisp and Koko Krunch, KFC and Coca-Cola. A team of New York Times journalists led by Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and technology reporter, and Andrew Jacobs, a veteran foreign correspondent, set out to explain the epidemic of fatness that has crept across the globe, contributing to four million premature deaths a year from diet-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease.
This crew of foreign correspondents, business reporters and health specialists, videographers, photographers and graphics journalists told deeply reported stories from seven countries across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
The scale of the problem they set out to demystify is mind-boggling: There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children. They live in dozens of countries where giant food, soft drink and fast-food multinationals are expanding at a white-hot pace as sales growth slows in the West, using their vast political and economic muscle to combat efforts to restrict marketing of junk food, to tax soft drinks and to warn consumers about foods high in sugar and saturated fats.
The team meticulously documented how Big Food and Big Soda have used their might around the world to block efforts to counteract the damaging consequences of their products. The most shocking example came from efforts to block a soda tax in Colombia. Jacobs reported that opposition to the tax came from a powerful national conglomerate that owned not just Postob’on, a drinks maker and distributor for Pepsi, but also sugar cane growers, sugar mills and the country’s biggest media company. As debate on the tax neared in Congress, the country’s consumer protection agency – at the behest of Postob’on – ordered a public service announcement off the air that warned consumers that sugar-laden drinks can lead to obesity and diabetes. The agency also censored the tiny nonprofit group championing the tax, prohibiting its staff from discussing the health risks of sugar, under penalty of a $250,000 fine.
Other pieces in the series tackled the deep financial partnerships between the world’s largest food companies and nutritionists in Southeast Asia and one man’s campaign to halt the sale of junk food near schools across India, where overweight and obese people have a much higher risk of developing diabetes than in other regions of the world.
Though not in this entry, another piece discussed the role of Nafta in the spread of obesity in Mexico, and a video shot in Northern Australia used humor and incisive reporting to show how one of the world’s biggest sugar-producing regions finds itself in a conundrum: Obesity is soaring, but elected officials reject a soda tax as harming an area dependent on the sugar industry – even as a politician at the center of the story has joined growing numbers of his countrymen in getting bariatric surgery for obesity.
Judges’ comments: This series alerted readers to the rising problem of obesity in less-wealthy countries and shined a light on the food industry’s aggressive efforts to continue growing market share, regardless of the health consequences. More than a result of resources, the series shows that smart and alert reporters can recognize a serious and growing problem, study it from all angles, and turn it into riveting journalism. Many of the other entries had that “I didn’t know that” effect. But this one went beyond with its stellar design, packaging and writing.