If you have ever felt like you couldn’t stop eating your favorite sweet treats and savory snacks, that’s by design. The tobacco industry had a heavy hand in the growth of ultraprocessed food in the U.S. And despite no longer being involved, its marketing tricks have remained.
A new addiction
Big Tobacco employed its tactics in marketing cigarettes to also market ultraprocessed food, according to a series of papers published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). In the 1980s, U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds made a “major entrance into the food industry” when they had “strong cash flows yet experienced growing scrutiny regarding their tobacco products,” said one of the AJPH papers. Investing in food and beverages was an attempt to improve their corporate image, so the team acquired several major brands, including Del Monte, General Foods, Kraft, Nabisco and 7Up.
Tobacco companies also “spent decades amassing research on how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and addictive with chemical additives” and “deliberately applied this knowledge to food manufacturing,” according to “internal company records,” said NPR. Thus came the rise of added sugars and artificial flavorings in food and beverages. These additives are known to be “hyperpalatable,” activating the same part of the brain as cigarettes or other drugs.
Along with changing the composition of the products, aggressive marketing tactics became the norm. Big Tobacco “applied the same strategies to developing light and reduced food products with the express goal of retaining customers who might otherwise stop consuming some of their products,” said lead paper author Tera Fazzino, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, to NPR.
The companies “divested from the food system from 2000 to 2007,” said the papers. However, their impact has been everlasting. Ultraprocessed foods “now account for 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. and 62% of the calories in children’s diets,” said Fast Company. And these foods have been linked to a variety of health problems, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
“Children are really, really vulnerable to this kind of messaging,” said paper author Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, to The Washington Post. “The goal is to hook the consumer at the youngest possible age because, as you grow up, they have instilled brand loyalty in you.”
Trying to quit
There have been growing calls for regulating the production and sale of ultraprocessed foods, notably as part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Last summer, for example, federal agencies “began a joint effort to define ultraprocessed food,” said Bloomberg. This definition could be “used on product labels in an effort to nudge consumers to reach for healthier items.” The ultimate goal is to implement labeling on the front of packaging that indicates what foods are ultraprocessed. But creating such a definition is not so simple, as it could “inadvertently ensnare some healthier items like yogurt.”
While Kennedy may be pushing back against ultraprocessed food, the Trump administration has made “policy changes that could exacerbate the problem,” said The Guardian. The administration also “failed to direct policy changes that could help, like redirecting government corn subsidies toward whole fruits and vegetables.”
But better monitoring could lead to needed changes. Countries might “consider establishing a baseline of ultraprocessed or hyperpalatable food availability in their food environments to monitor food system health,” said the papers. There may also be a “global need to consider regulation of multiple addictive products disseminated by tobacco companies.”