Big tobacco uses cigarette playbook to help sell ultra-processed foods, journal reveals

The new issue of the American Journal of Public Health focuses on ultra-processed foods, and reveals that big tobacco companies used strategies that helped them sell cigarettes to sell ultra-processed food products, including Lunchables, geared toward children. The parallels between ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and cigarettes include not only how UPF products were formulated and marketed to drive excess consumption, but also the growing body of evidence linking UPFs to a variety of health risks. For UPFs, these include cardiovascular diseases , certain cancers and cognitive health decline. During an AJPH press briefing on Tuesday, Cindy Leung, a public health nutrition professor at Harvard, said people whose diet contained high quantities of UPFs “had a 58% higher risk of developing dementia, a 46% higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, and a 47% higher risk of either of those two outcomes”. Leung emphasized that these findings are based on observational studies – clinical trials on nutrition are often impractical – but argued that they are both significant and “biologically plausible”, meaning that there are strong theories about why UPFs might cause these health conditions. Leung and many other experts who contributed work to the AJPH issue spoke about their findings during the press briefing. …