Tobacco companies spent decades honing marketing strategies, flavor engineering and processing technologies that helped addict consumers to cigarettes. Then, in the 1980s, they started buying up large food firms and deployed these same strategies to sell more ultra-processed foods.
So says Laura Schmidt, a professor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been studying old tobacco company archives.
She’s one of dozens of researchers who contributed to a new series of papers published June 3 in a special section of the American Journal of Public Health. Together, many of them make the case that the fight to curb our over-consumption of ultra-processed foods should become the new war on tobacco.
Litigation could … be an important strategy against the ultra-processed food industry, Jennifer Pomeranz, an expert on food policy and law at New York University, argues in an editorial. In other words, state attorneys general could file suit against food companies alleging damage to the public health, not unlike the lawsuits filed against tobacco companies in the 1990s.
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