"The Role of Corporate Influence in the Obesity Epidemic"
The plague of tobacco deaths wasn’t just due to the mass manufacture
and marketing of cheap cigarettes.
Tobacco companies actively sought
to make their products even more craveable by spraying
the sheets of tobacco with nicotine and additives
like ammonia to provide a bigger nicotine “kick.”
The food industry employs taste engineers to accomplish
a similar goal: maximize the irresistibility of their products
Taste is the leading factor in food choice.
Salt, sugar, and fat are used as the three points of the compass
to produce “superstimulating” “hyperpalatability” to tempt
people into impulsive buys and compulsive consumption.
Foods are intentionally designed to hook into
our evolutionary triggers and breach whatever biological barriers
help keep consumption within reasonable limits.
Big Food is big business.
The processed food industry alone
brings in more than $2 trillion a year.
That affords them the economic might to manipulate more than just
taste profiles, but public policy and scientific inquiry as well.
The food, alcohol, and tobacco industries have all used
similar unsavory tactics: blocking health regulations,
co-opting professional organizations, creating front groups,
and distorting the science.
The common playbook shouldn’t be
surprising given the common corporate threads.
At one time, for example, Philip Morris owned both Kraft and Miller Brewing.
In a single year the food industry has spent more than $50 million
to hire hundreds of lobbyists to influence legislation,
most of whom were “revolvers,” former federal employees
in the revolving door between industry and their regulators
who could push corporate interests from the inside,
only to be rewarded with cushy lobbying jobs after their “public service.”
In the following year the industry acquired a new weapon—
a stick to go along with all those carrots.
On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 Citizen’s United
ruling permitted corporations to spend unlimited amounts
of money on campaign ads to trash anyone who dared stand against them.
No wonder our elected officials have so thoroughly shrunk from the fight,
leaving us largely with a government of Big Food, by Big Food, for Big Food.
Globally, a similar dynamic exists.
Weak tea calls from the public health community for voluntary standards
are met with not only vicious fights against meaningful change
but massive transnational trade and foreign investment deals
that cement protections of food industry profits into the laws of the lands.
The corrupting commercial influence extends to medical associations.
Reminiscent of the “Just what the doctor ordered” cigarette ads of yesteryear,
the American Academy of Family Physicians accepted millions
from the Coca Cola Company in part explicitly
to “develop consumer education content on beverages and sweeteners.”
On the front line, fake grassroots “astroturf” groups
are used to mask the corporate message.
In the footsteps of Get Government Off Our Back
(memorably acronymed GGOOB)—
a front group created by RJ Reynolds to fight tobacco regulation—
Americans Against Food Taxes may as just well be called
Food Industry Against Food Taxes.
The power of front group formation is enough to bind bitter corporate rivals;
the Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association linking arms
with the National Confectioners Association to partner with
Americans for Food and Beverage Choice.
Another tried-and-true tobacco tactic - research front groups
can be used to subvert the scientific process by shaping or
suppressing science that deviates from the corporate agenda.
Take the trans fat story.
Food manufacturers have not only long denied
that trans fats were associated with disease,
but actively worked to limit inquiry and discredit research findings.
At what cost?
The global death toll from foods high in trans fat,
saturated fat, salt, and sugar are at 14 million lost lives.
Every year.
The inability of countries around the world to turn
the tide on obesity “is not a failure of (personal ) will-power,”
said the Director-General of the World Health Organization.
“It is a failure of political will to take on
the powerful food and soda industries.”
She ended her keynote address before the National Academy of Medicine
entitled “Obesity and diabetes: the slow-motion disaster” with these words:
“The interests of the public must be prioritized over those of corporations.”