Teenager Greta Thunberg, from Sweden, who was 15 years old in 2018, staged a climate change protest outside of her country’s parliament. This vaulted her to the Forbes list of the 100 most influential women in the world in 2019 and made her Time magazine’s youngest-ever person of the year.
Could there be the Thunberg of food looming on the horizon?
The detrimental impacts of processed foods on the United States food supply are now the center of attention for 18-year-old investigative journalist Grace Price of Austin, Texas. Through her online campaigns—which include a documentary titled Cancer: A Food-Born Illness—and petitions to stop the use of vegetable oil in french fry cooking, she has amassed more than forty thousand followers.
According to Grace, junk food has a harmful impact on her generation, equivalent to that of smoking cigarettes. French fries, chocolates, and Diet Coke are among her classmates’ favorite things to eat and drink, but she makes a conscious effort to avoid them. She thinks it’s critical to bring attention to the fact that pesticides, highly processed foods, and sugar are all possible causes of cancer.
It is thought that the majority of cancers are caused by changes in genes, with the rest being impacted by bad lifestyle choices, including smoking, drinking too much alcohol, and eating poorly. Incidences of colon cancer in those younger than 50 have more than doubled in the past 20 years, according to research.
On her social media account, Grace demands that big food companies stop making french fries with vegetable oils like maize and soybean. She plans to grill Coca-Cola executives on the company’s sugary drinks. She supports the ban on food dyes used in candy, saying they are carcinogenic.
After her grandfather, Hank, died of cancer when he was 89, Grace felt that with a better diet, he could have lived longer. Hank outlived the typical American male by an entire decade, with the poor diet she believes shortened his life.
Grace thinks that growing up in South Texas without access to healthy food led to his frequent ingestion of processed foods and fried chicken, which ultimately caused his stomach cancer.
Many people would love to live to just under 90 while “eating what they want.”
Nevertheless, the young woman is on a noble crusade to educate people about the dangers of junk foods.
