2025 in review: power, profits, public reckonings and food-system fatigue

By Nonie DeLong, ROHP, CNP

And it blew up with soup….but consumers are paying the bill with metabolic dysfunction.

If future historians ever want to pinpoint the moment people in North America collectively said “Wait… what the hell are we eating and why?” — 2025 will be the year they circle.

This was not a quiet year in nutrition. It was explosive. And it didn’t blow up with a study.

It blew up with soup.

Campbell’s soup: karma, classism, and corporate contempt

In November 2025 a normal working Joe by the name of Robert Garza released a secret recording he allegedly made the previous year as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit against Campbell’s Soup. In the more than an hour-long rant, which was made in public at a restaurant, the voice of Martin Bally, Campbell’s then vice president and chief information security officer, (confirmed in later statements from the company), can allegedly be heard saying:

“We have sh— for f—ing poor people. Who buys our sh—? I don’t buy Campbell’s products barely anymore. It’s not healthy now that I know what the f—‘s in it. You can eat bioengineered meat. I don’t want to eat a piece of f_ing chicken that came from a 3-D printer.”

He then goes on to disparage coworkers in equally offensive terms.

Campbells retorted by releasing this statement: “We are proud of the food we make, the people who make it and the high-quality ingredients we use. The comments heard on the recording about our food are not only inaccurate – they are patently absurd. We use 100 per cent real chicken in our soups…”

Was Garza a whistleblower or disgruntled employee? Take your pick.

Either way, the recording detonated in a public already simmering with class resentment, corporate mistrust, and what I can only describe as food-system fatigue.

Because soup is intimate. Soup is what you feed someone when they’re sick. When they’re grieving. When money is tight.

In narrative terms, soup is humble magic — scraps transformed into comfort. Resourcefulness made edible. Community in a bowl.

So, when a corporate executive sneers at the very product millions rely on, that’s not a branding problem. That’s a rupture.

The scandal cracked open something much larger than a can. It exposed the widening gap between those engineering the food system — and those eating from it.

Diet culture: from willpower to corporate power

2025 was also the year the “personal choice” narrative finally looked… thin.

We were told for decades that health was about discipline. That weight was about effort. That hunger was a character flaw.

Meanwhile, the food system was quietly engineered around shelf life, commodity subsidies, hyper-palatability, and shareholder return.

This isn’t an attack on farmers. They didn’t design this machine. Many are trapped inside it too.

But consumers — remember when they were citizens? — are paying the bill with metabolic dysfunction.

In 2025:

• San Francisco launched a sweeping lawsuit against major food corporations — including Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, Nestlé, Kellogg’s, Mars, and ConAgra — alleging manipulation of consumer perception around ultra-processed foods linked to Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and cancer.
• The Lancet published a three-paper series connecting ultra-processed food consumption to rising non-communicable disease rates, alongside an editorial bluntly titled: “Ultra-processed foods: time to put health before profit.”
• The UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned of accelerating food system insecurity driven by land degradation.
• And Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss revisited his investigations into food industry “bliss point” engineering — detailing how labs, boardrooms, and marketing teams fine-tuned addiction into product design.

The short answer? Industry capture.

And then GLP-1 medications exploded in popularity.

Drugs that modulate appetite hormones and insulin signaling began quieting “food noise” almost overnight for millions of people. The cravings stopped. Satiety improved. The weight dropped.

And not because people found new discipline, but because their biology changed.

So, let’s ask the uncomfortable question: If it was willpower… why does a hormone flip the switch?

For years, ultra-processed foods have been designed for maximum craveability — precise salt-sugar-fat ratios engineered to override natural satiety signals. Then individuals were blamed for responding predictably to those signals.

Now doctors prescribe medications to dampen the appetite pathways those same products overstimulate. Do you see the picture?

1. Manipulate appetite to create addiction.
2. Blame appetite.
3. Medicate appetite.

That’s not about willpower. It never was.

It’s a remarkably efficient business model.

This is where the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign connected with American citizens hungry for change. No matter what side of the political spectrum we sit on, a deep review of corporate influence in farming and food systems is inarguably long overdue.

Metabolism: from diabetes to depression to dementia

2025 was the year metabolic health stopped being about weight loss alone and became foundational to public health discussions.

Low-carb stopped sounding radical. Keto, Paleo, and carnivore diets surged in interest as researchers increasingly connected insulin resistance not just to diabetes — but to mood disorders, neurodegeneration, chronic pain, hormonal disruption, and inflammatory disease.

Metabolism became understood as infrastructure. Stabilizing blood sugar is no longer just about shrinking bodies. It’s about stabilizing brains, sleep, focus, energy, and resilience.

We began to understand something profoundly simple: our bodies are not failing. They are responding.

When highly addictive, rapidly metabolized substances saturate nearly every processed food and processed foods are ubiquitous in our grocery supply, metabolic consequences are not mysterious.

They are predictable.

Women’s health: from passed over to pissed off

2025 also witnessed a spotlight on decades of systemic gaslighting and negligence around women’s health issues. Connected by social media, women have begun comparing notes en masse and are recognizing collectively that we have been done dirty.

Globally, only about five per cent of health R&D funding is directed toward women’s health, and just one per cent goes to conditions specific to women outside of cancer.

Fewer than 30 per cent of medical schools include comprehensive education on sex-specific differences in disease presentation and treatment.

Endometriosis — a painful, systemic, inflammatory condition affecting an estimated one in 10 women — receives a fraction of the funding allocated to male health conditions with comparable prevalence.

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in women, yet women experiencing stroke symptoms are significantly more likely to receive an incorrect initial diagnosis. Younger women presenting with chest pain wait longer to be evaluated and are less likely to be admitted than men.

While menopause is a universal transition for women and we have an aging population, many feel like it’s a secret curriculum they have to pay to access. Shockingly few doctors are trained to recognize, understand, or manage it effectively. The result? Women are shuffled from appointment to appointment — anxiety, weight gain, mood swings, UTIs, sleep disturbances, and more are never connected as pieces of the same hormonal puzzle. Women are put at avoidable risk of fractures and heart disease because proper, timely hormone care is often withheld or overlooked, forcing us to pay out of pocket if we want comprehensive support.

This isn’t about feelings. It’s about funding priorities, training gaps, and diagnostic bias.

In 2025, women began to connect the dots.

The data was already there. We just started reading it out loud.

Medicine and policy: collapse of blind trust

In light of all these coalescing events, it’s not hard to understand the shift in health awareness that epitomized 2025.

More and more people started questioning food policy, pharmaceutical influence, government safety data, conflicts of interest, and industry capture, not because they’re “antiscience,” but because real science welcomes scrutiny.

2025 wasn’t about dismantling institutions — it was about demanding transparency from them.

And once people begin to see how tightly food, medicine, agriculture, finance, and food and health policy are intertwined… they cannot unsee it. There’s no going back.

2025 wasn’t just a year of trends. It was a line in the sand.

And honestly?

We’re just getting started.

Namaste!

Nonie Nutritionista

To understand how Canadians are fighting industry capture of our natural health practitioners and products, go to NHPPA.org and get involved!

As always, if you have a nutrition or supplement/herb related question, or questions about food intolerances, send it to me at nonienutritionista@gmail.com or visit https://www.hope-health.ca/ 
Namaste!

Nonie Nutritionista

Nonie DeLong is a registered orthomolecular health practitioner, licensed nutritionist in both Canada and the U.S., and student of the Ontario College of Homeopathy.  

Photo credit: © Anthony Rahayel via Canva.com