By the 2000s, Big Tobacco had spun off its food companies and largely exited the food industry, but it stopped short of leaving a lasting legacy on the food we eat.
The new study, published in the journal Addiction, highlights the rise of “highly palatable” foods that contain powerful combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives, making it difficult for people to crave them. You may end up eating too much. Addiction research shows that during the decades that tobacco giants owned some of the world's largest food companies, the foods they sold were far more palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies. It has been found.
Over the past 30 years, highly palatable foods have become It quickly spread into the food supply, coinciding with a surge in obesity and diet-related diseases. In the United States, the most rapid increase in the prevalence of hyperpalatable foods occurred between 1988 and 2001, when Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds owned some of the world's leading food companies.
Although tobacco companies no longer own these food brands, researchers believe that many of the ultra-processed foods we eat today are highly palatable, addictive, and alluring products. The study says the findings are important because the strategies were designed by the industry that wrote them. The kids.
“We find that tobacco companies are selectively introducing highly palatable foods into the food supply,” said Terra Fazzino, lead author of the new study and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas. . “It's important that people understand where these foods come from and who is responsible for putting them into our food system in a way that saturates the environment.”
How Tobacco Manufacturers Marketed Food
For their research, Fazzino and his colleagues combed through documents housed in the Industrial Document Library at the University of California, San Francisco. It contains millions of internal tobacco industry documents that reveal how companies designed addictive products and their strategies. To bring them to market.
Fazzino and colleagues identified the 105 best-selling products from brands owned by Philip Morris or RJ Reynolds from 1988 to 2001. At the time, RJ Reynolds owned Nabisco, whose popular brands included Oreo cookies, Teddy Graham's, and Ritz. Crackers and Snackwell Fat-Free Devil's Food Cookies.
Philip Morris once owned Kraft General Foods, the world's largest food company, which sold popular brands such as Kraft Mac & Cheese, Jell-O-O, Kool-Aid, and Oscar Mayer hot dogs.
Researchers compared the nutritional composition of these foods to 587 similar products sold by competing brands not owned by tobacco companies.
They eat foods that contain tobacco. 80% of the time, it contains a powerful combination of carbohydrates and sodium, which makes it so delicious. Brands owned by tobacco companies were 29% more likely to contain a similarly potent combination of fat and sodium.
Food to find your “bliss”
Ashley Gearhart, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies food addiction, said the findings suggest that tobacco companies have engineered processed foods to help us reach a state of “bliss” and elicit cravings. He said that it suggests.
She said that highly palatable foods have a lot in common with addictive substances. They contain ingredients from naturally occurring plants and foods that have been purified, concentrated, and converted into products that are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, thereby activating the brain's reward centers. Your abilities will be amplified.
“Every addictive substance is something we take out of nature, and we modify it, process it, and refine it in ways that make it more valuable. It's very clear what happened with food substances with high levels of He was not involved in the new study. “We treat these foods as if they come from nature. Rather, they are food that comes from the big tobacco.”
Philip Morris, which changed its name to Altria, declined to comment. RJ Reynolds, Kraft and Mondelez, which owns Nabisco, did not respond to requests for comment.
Flavor Business Expert
Tobacco companies entered the food business 60 years ago to diversify their product portfolios. These companies had extensive libraries of colors, flavors, and additives developed for tobacco, and executives realized that these materials could be used to make a variety of processed foods.
In the 1960s, RJ Reynolds launched a project to develop a sweet drink and did market research for children. In an internal memo that year, the company's head of biochemistry research wrote to RJR executives that the company was “more than just” a tobacco company. “In a broader sense, and in a more limited sense,” he wrote. flavor business. ”
The research director noted that many of the flavors the company has developed for cigarettes are “useful in food, beverages, and other products” and could lead to “significant economic benefits.”
Hawaiian Punch as a kids drink
The following year, RJR acquired the maker of Hawaiian Punch. Hawaiian Punch was a cocktail mixer that at the time only came in two flavors. After conducting dozens of market studies with children and housewives, RJR expanded Hawaiian Punch to at least 16 flavors, including some that are popular with children. The company was one of the first to introduce a nationwide “juice box,'' which quickly became a hit.
“They took what was an adult cocktail mixer and turned it into a children's drink a year later,” said Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy at the UCSF School of Medicine. He has published research examining the tobacco industry's involvement in food. companies.
RJR used its cartoon mascot, Punchy, to market Hawaiian Punch to children. Over the decades, Punchy has appeared in television commercials, Sunday cartoons, textbook covers, toys, and magazines, helping generate tens of millions of dollars in sales and making it one of the best beverages in history, as RJR calls it. became a salesman.
The Rise of Teddy Grahams
Due to its success with Hawaiian Punch, RJR expanded into other food products such as pudding and maple syrup. Then, in 1985, the tobacco giant acquired Nabisco, and the company became a major player in the food industry. The conglomerate went on to launch many successful new processed food products, including Teddy Grahams, a bite-sized children's snack, and soon Chips Ahoy, also made by Nabisco. It became the third best-selling cookie after Oreo.
RJR Nabisco promoted Teddy Grahams as a “delicious and healthy snack because they are made with graham flour and other healthy ingredients.” But critics pointed out that the product is made primarily from white flour and contains only 2 grams of graham flour per ounce. This snack was so popular that Nabisco created an adult version of it: Honeymaid Honeycomb Graham Snacks. According to a 1990 New York Times article about the new snack's launch, “Nabisco thought its sweet taste and relatively healthy image would appeal to adults.”
A few years later, during the low-fat craze, Nabisco introduced the wildly popular Snackwells Cookies, which sold out in stores across the country and reached nearly $500 million in sales in just three years. Snackwell's low-fat and fat-free cookies appealed to weight-conscious consumers. But critics say snacks contain large amounts of sugar and calories, and people often binge on them in the belief they won't make them fat, a phenomenon known as the snack well effect. be.
Kool-Aid and Lunch Menu Marketing
Nabisco was acquired by Philip Morris in 2000. Philip Morris was already a dominant player in the food industry thanks to its acquisitions of Kraft and General Foods in the 1980s. UCSF's Schmidt said that when Philip Morris acquired General Foods in 1985, it placed tobacco executives at the company and began efforts to market sugary drinks and processed foods to children and ethnic minorities. said.
Philip Morris adopted a marketing strategy called “line extension'' to expand the reach of its cigarettes. Marlboro cigarettes targeted men, Virginia Slims targeted women, and menthol cigarettes targeted black consumers.
Schmidt said the company applied the same tactics to processed foods. We've added new flavors and formulations to many of our existing products, giving consumers an endless variety of highly delicious foods to purchase.
Between 1986 and 2004, Philip Morris developed 12 new liquid and frozen Kool-Aid products, including around 36 kid-tested versions, including Kickin' Kiwi Lime and Great Brudini, both featuring their own cartoon mascots. Introduced Flavor.
One of their best-selling products, Lunchables, was introduced by Oscar Mayer in 1988. The iconic prepackaged meals of bologna, crackers and processed cheese, designed to look like TV dinners and marketed to busy mothers and their children, are extremely high in sodium and saturated fat. , some doctors called it a “blood pressure bomb.” One of his Morris executives joked about mentioning that the healthiest item in the Lunchables package was a napkin.
According to the best-selling book Salt Sugar Fat by investigative journalist Michael Moss, Lunchables generated $218 million in sales in its first 12 months on the market. This prompted Oscar His Mayer to introduce line extensions such as Lunchables with Snickers His Bars, Reese's Peanut Butter His Cups, Kool-Aid, and Capri Sun.
By the early 2000s, Philip Morris was embroiled in tobacco litigation. Moss said the company's management has warned food executives that they could face similar litigation risks over the health effects of processed foods. Moss said Michael Mudd, a senior Kraft executive, reviewed the company's records and products and found that some of the company's cookies and processed foods could lead people to eat compulsively. He said he told his lawyer.
Although tobacco companies are no longer in the food business, their impact on the food supply was significant.
Fazzino's new study found that by 2018, the differences between foods previously containing tobacco and other foods had all but disappeared. Fazzino said it's possible that the food hasn't become healthier, but rather that other companies have found an effect and reformulated it so that many products are just as delicious as those sold by competitors. He said there is.
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