Health is wealth: Why California must lead on children’s nutrition

This week, the California Senate faces one of the most consequential votes on children’s health in state history.

Assembly Bill 1264, authored by Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, would make California the first state in the nation to legally define ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and begin phasing the worst of them out of schools. As so often goes California, so goes the nation.

The stakes could not be higher. About two-thirds of the calories American children consume come from ultra-processed foods. In California alone, schools serve close to one billion meals each year, many of them ultra-processed, making our state one of the largest distributors of such foods to children in the country.

These products were deliberately engineered to be hyper-palatable and addictive. In the 1980s and 1990s