What if I told you these ridiculous ads... Did you say I’ll feel better smoking Philip Morris? [Narrator]
Yes, you’ll feel better! ...are not all that different from these ads? Now, every box of Kellogg's Rice Krispies
cereal has antioxidants and nutrients that help support your child's immune system. For decades, massive food conglomerates like
Kraft and Kellogg's have made over $1 trillion through the manipulation of
food science and food scientists, and ultimately us. And their goal is much like big tobacco's: to do and say whatever they can to get people
to buy their product over and over and over again until their product is no longer a want, but a need. until their product is no longer a want, but a need. To whose advantage is it to keep the
public confused about what to eat? Well, obviously it's the food industry's advantage. Ultra-processed foods
make up over half of the American diet, and do so with little scrutiny from
health experts or government officials. And the food industry is terrified. Even if Americans skip one
ultra-processed snack or meal a day, sales would plummet by 7%. Every five years, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory
Committee meets to review the relevant research and give the American public advice
about the latest nutrition science, a process food conglomerates
are attempting to sabotage as we speak. I mean in every possible way in which they can use their money and political power to encourage people to think their products are good
and are willing to help them sell their products, they're going to do that. The evidence is grim. Ultra-processed foods are being linked in study after study
to things like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Researchers are beginning to understand that
many of them are functionally addictive. So who will win in this battle
between big food and science? We set out to investigate, and in the
process learned the disturbing truth about how Big Tobacco's lies
continue to make Americans sick. So what exactly are ultra-processed foods? We asked molecular biologist and
nutritionist Marion Nestle. These are foods that are
industrially produced. They require machinery and they require
ingredients that you don't have access to. So industrially produced,
designed to be irresistibly delicious— that's their purpose. Corn on the cob is unprocessed. Canned corn, frozen corn are processed. Doritos are ultra-processed. It's not just junk food, to be clear. Many breakfast cereals, granola and protein bars,
diet foods, frozen dinners sauces, and yogurt fit the ultra-processed
label and are implicated in causing disease. A few years ago, I was writing about salt,
and I went to the biggest companies and I said, look, you know, salt has become like this
public enemy number one because of its links to heart disease and—why aren't you,
like, cutting back on your use of salt? And Kellogg's, you know, said to me,
hey, come on in, we'll show you. That's Michael Moss, journalist and author of <i>Hooked</i>, a book about how food giants
exploit our addictions. And we put some saltless corn flakes in the bowl. I didn’t even know corn flakes had salt, but they do. But these saltless corn flakes went in a bowl,
we put some milk on it, took a bite, and before I could say anything, the chief
spokeswoman for Kellogg's was sitting there with me, and she gets this look of horror on her face, and she swallows and she blurts out,
"Metal! I taste metal! M-e-t-a-l!" And I was kind of thinking the same thing,
which was one of my fillings had come out and was sloshing around. And the Chief Technical Officer was sitting there too,
and he's kind of in charge of all things scientific, he laughs and he goes, "You know, not all people taste it, but one of the beautiful things about salt for us is that it will mask," cover up, "some of the off-notes," bad taste, “that are inherent to kind of the manufacturing process.” And so the reason you see so much salt, sugar, fat
and other sort of problematic ingredients in these products is that the companies are using
those ingredients as part of the industrial process for the manufacturing, for the shelf life, things you don't need to worry about as a home cook. While our food environment is saturated with the
salty and sugary goodness of ultra-processed food, something else is happening. We are constantly bombarded with nutritional
advice about how to stay healthy, what foods can ward off cancer or diabetes,
and which ones are slowly killing us. And these two realities are actually deeply related. Let's go back to 2015,
when Kraft successfully marketed their singles, which cannot legally be called
cheese, as a health food. Kraft American Singles have double the calcium of many other American slices,
plus vitamin D to help grow strong bones. In 2015, Kraft teamed up with the
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, it's a professional group of nutritionists and
dietitians, in a campaign called <i>Kids Eat Right</i>. [Jon Stewart]
What if a company wants the positive PR of going healthy but doesn’t want the hassle of
actually improving their product? Well, there’s a solution for them too. We do want to move now to a new “Kids Eat Right” label
that will soon be appearing on Kraft Singles. One of the things that food companies do is
they partner with health organizations: the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association,
the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. And the idea is, if you can donate to those
organizations and support those organizations, then the organizations
will thank you on their products and they will say, you know, “a partner of,” or whatever, and this makes it look like it's
an endorsement of the product. As researchers begin to understand the real
effects of ultra-processed food on our health, food companies continue to exhaust every option to make sure the science of their foods
doesn't hurt their bottom line. Sound familiar? Tobacco companies had a big problem. You know, 50—more than 50—70 years ago, there was research coming out that
linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer. So the first thing they did was
to cast doubt on the research. Not enough people in the trial,
wasn't adequately controlled, could have been due to other problems. When it comes to ultra-processed food,
the industry is stacking panels and writing op-eds doing just that: Ultra-processed foods are too broad a category, they say. People might accidentally forgo
a healthy food that fits the bill. And listen, there's good scientific questions
around the ultra-processed label, fringe cases and exceptions
to the rule, for instance. But food companies aren't trying
to further the science. They're trying to torpedo it. So, number one, cast doubt on the research. Number two, cast doubt on the researchers. Then you buy your own researchers. You recruit researchers to do their own studies,
and you give them a lot of money to do that. And here lies the tactic behind
not just the fight over ultra-processed food, but all of the confusing nutritional advice
we get exposed to through the media. Is the problem with childhood nutrition
that they don't receive enough vitamin D or calcium? Kraft sure thinks so. Is exercise more important than diet for weight loss? I sure don't know, but Coca-Cola
funded a bunch of studies that say so, just in case you thought about cutting back on soda. Food companies and their trade associations
literally flood the academic space with money. Ever heard that people who eat breakfast
are healthier than those that don't? Those were studies sponsored by Kellogg's
and other breakfast food manufacturers. It's the food industry's advantage
to keep the public confused. We can actually quantify how corrupt
funding from corporations and trade groups can be. One review looked at industry-funded studies and found that [almost] 60% showed results favorable to the sponsor. That doesn’t seem so bad, except that only
3% came to an unfavorable conclusion. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee should,
in theory, cut through all of that noise and give the American public good scientific information
so that they can make their own decisions. But nine of the 20 members of the
committee had some conflict of interest with food, pharmaceutical or weight loss companies. The food industry doesn't want any suggestion
in dietary guidelines of eating less of their products. It's really simple. Remember those oddly similar ads
we played a few minutes ago? It turns out that some of the biggest food companies
were owned by tobacco companies until the mid-2000s. Philip Morris owned Kraft and General Foods, R.J. Reynolds owned Nabisco until
Philip Morris eventually bought that too. So it's no wonder why the same
misinformation playbook is being used. What I really wanted to know was,
how far did the similarities go? Did the execs at Philip Morris coach Kraft on how
to hide the health consequences of their products? Did they go even further and actively
try to get people hooked on their products? My name is Tera Fazzino. I'm an assistant professor of psychology
at the University of Kansas. For a number of years now, I've studied
what are called hyper-palatable foods, For a number of years now, I've studied
what are called hyper-palatable foods, and they have combinations of nutrients
that typically don't occur in nature, and they have combinations of nutrients
that typically don't occur in nature, and so they tend to be really rewarding
to consume in kind of an unnatural way. So we may find ourselves, like,
continuing to eat these foods even though, like, we're getting physiological signals telling
us, oh, please stop, we've had enough. So peanut butter, which is almost
all fat, is not hyper-palatable. But if you add the right amount of salt or sugar, it is. Like if this jar had a bunch of added sodium or we had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. We conducted some analyses and found that the foods We conducted some analyses and found that the foods that were produced by tobacco-owned food
companies were 29% more likely to be classified as being hyper-palatable foods relative
to the same types of foods that were sold during the same period of time by
companies that were not tobacco-owned. Michael Moss described to me
the moment during his research when his perspective
on the addictive nature of these foods flipped. It took place during a meeting
with a former Philip Morris lawyer. Steve Parrish, the general counsel,
we were sitting and chatting. And he said to me, “You know, Michael, I'm one of those lucky people who could smoke one cigarette a day, put the pack away and not have
any compulsion to pull it out again until the next business meeting,
or the next day or whatever. But I couldn't go near a bag of our Oreo cookies for fear of losing control
and eating half the bag in one setting.” And it was, like, so revealing to me
because it reinforced to me that they know. I mean, the heads of these companies
don't eat their own products. While the tobacco industry got out of the food
business for the most part in the 2000s, other companies took a lesson from their
success in selling these addictive foods. They accounted for roughly
50% of the food supply in '88, and by 2018, they were, you know,
almost 69% of the food supply. So we had like a 14 percentage point increase,
which was pretty dramatic. The non-tobacco-owned food companies observed
the successes of the tobacco-based food companies in the market and reformulated to keep up. As someone who studies addiction, I think a
lot of the rhetoric is, well, you know, if you open a sleeve of Oreos and
eat the whole thing, it's on you. It's your lack of self-control. I mean, what is your sort of take on that? I think that narrative serves the
food companies and not us as people. These foods are designed this way and they maximize,
you know, they can maximize company profits. These are the current stakes
for the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. What will the federal government
come out and tell the American public about the health effects of ultra-processed foods? The Food and Beverage Issue Alliance, a mega trade group of other trade groups
like the Sugar Association and the American Beverage Association,
have already given this statement: Another trade organization has urged the committee
to discontinue using the term “ultra-processed” until there is consensus on an evidence-based definition. I'm not going to tell you what to eat or even how to eat, but I think it's a reasonable expectation for anyone
to have access to good scientific information, to have dietary guidelines that reflect
evidence rather than industry funding. Ultimately, this is a first step in a long process. One of the first studies
linking tobacco to cancer was done in 1950. It wasn't until 1998 that the tobacco companies conceded and struck a deal to pay states for the medical damage they'd done and stop their aggressive
and deceptive marketing practices. If we don't start now, we won't get another chance
to set the record straight until 2029.
