The Story of CANFIT
February 9, 2011
The Story of CANFIT
Public Health Trust Newsletter - Volume 5 No. 1 2/2011
Childhood obesity is a growing U.S.problem, gaining attention from public health officials, food companies, and the general public. One important resource for reversing this trend is a visionary program created in 1993 with cy pres settlement funds from a class action lawsuit in California. Today, that program continues its innovation and community focus across the U.S., and is also the first cy pres settlement grantmaking by what became the Public Health Trust program of the Public Health Institute. Communities-Adolescents-Nutrition -Fitness (CANFIT) was created in 1993 as a result of a 1977 lawsuit that involved Kraft General Foods, and a class of plaintiffs represented by the nonprofit law firm Public Advocates. Pre-settlement research by consultants from the University of California,
Berkeley School of Public Health and the University of California, San Francisco Division of Adolescent Medicine pointed to low-income, multiethnic adolescents as the group within the class most at risk of being affected by defendant’s alleged misleading marketing. Read more.
