I came across this piece, ‘The Perils of Ignoring History: Big Tobacco Played Dirty and Millions Died. How Similar is Big Food?’ It aims to draw parallels between the marketing of cigarettes in the 1950s with the current marketing by the food companies – with the covering of the truth by sowing seeds of doubt, paying scientists to do dodgy research. Although the piece was published in 2009, I recently blogged on what the BMJ has to say about the latest set of dietary guidelines issued by the American government: no real change and some of the committe members having financial interests in maintaining the status quo.
I am going to quote from the text:
Devised in the 1950s and ’60s, the tobacco industry’s strategy was embodied in a script written by the lawyers. Every tobacco company executive in the public eye was told to learn the scripts backwards and forwards, no deviation was allowed. The basic premise was simple – smoking had not been proved to cause cancer. Not proven, not proven, not proven – this would be stated insistently and repeatedly. Inject a thin wedge of doubt, create controversy, never deviate from the prepared line. It was a simple plan and it worked. ((The perils of ignoring history: big tobacco played dirty and millions died. How similar is big food? Brownell KD, Warner KE. The Millbank Quarterly, Vol 87, No1, 2009 [pp259-294] ))
I remember watching the film, The King’s Speech and near the beginning, the King is told to smoke and to inhale deeply since this relaxes the vocal chords – or some such tosh – and his Australian voice coach being horrified that he was smoking at all. Which fell on the deaf ears of the King because doctors had told him it was positively good for him.
The main features of the lines pedalled by the food companies are:
- Focus on personal responsibility as the cause of the nation’s unhealthy diet.
- Raise fears that government action usurps personal freedom.
- Vilify critics with totalitarian language, characterizing them as the food police, leaders of a nanny state, and even “food fascists,” and accuse them of desiring to strip people of their civil liberties.
- Criticize studies that hurt industry as”junk science”
- Emphasize physical activity over diet.
- State there are no good or bad foods; hence no food or food type (soft drinks, fast foods, etc) should be targeted for change.
- Plant doubt when concerns are raised about the industry.
Staggering stuff. I’m tempted to leave you to just think about this. However, the first point – focussing on personal responsibility – is so entrenched that I have written six points to help remove that hair shirt:
Learning how to eat properly is cornerstone to losing weight; exercise is a nice add on. If exercise is key to losing weight, what happens when we can’t exercise for a few weeks?
Banging on about our civil liberties is all well and good when it comes to free speech. But as a nation we are getting fatter and fatter and, if the NHS is to survive at all, we must be told the truth: cook it yourself from real food. Pretend sugar, unnatural fats – since when was olive oil anything other than a liquid? Reconstitued proteins eaten in any quantity cannot be good for us. Eat 3 square meals a day with a decent snack late afternoon. Yes, it takes planning……. Convenience foods, be they meals or snacks, are for the odd occasion – they could even be viewed as treats. When and where did that concept disappear to?
The article says Big Food needs to clean up its act. As long as Big Food needs to make a profit, I think this impossible.
Here we are fat and hungry and we need to put petrol in the car; we ate a skimpy breakfast, snarfed down a sandwich for lunch; now our blood sugar is low and our brain needs to raise it quickly for self preservation; therefore we need to eat or drink sugary stuff. Nothing else will do. And there is all is, enticingly laid out and not much money – and after eating the snack bar or some crisps, we feel quite terrific for a little while, if a little guilty. Nevermind, the diet can start again tomorrow. The way we eat these days makes choosing a good food impossible and that is ignoring modern day stress levels – which are, of course, made worse by eating crappy food.
In some ways things show signs of improving: sugar is now being rightly demonised and I’ve even heard someone on Radio 4 say that saturated fats aren’t the enemies we once thought they were. It is much better to roast your potatoes in goose fat or dripping than in sunflower oil – or even olive oil; this is quite simply because saturated fats remain stable at heat. Click on the link to the blog that goes into more details.
Whilst we in the UK view everyday food as a refuelling necessity, Big Food can rub it’s highly profitable hands with glee. Whilst fat people in the UK basically try to avoid food by skipping meals or going on some fad food replacement type diet, Big Food can only make more and more money. Until we all wake up and turn the ‘How To Eat Clock’ back to Grandma’s time, Big Food’s investors can rest easy in the knowledge that they will have a nice, fat pension to retire to, whereas a depressingly large number of us will have a nice fat arse to sit on with a jelly roll tyre flopping over it.