My friends, my family, think I'm obsessed with this.
I mean, they're right. I am.
Look at this.
So this - this is, what we're walking through, is the food environment.
We could be anywhere in the UK.
It's all industrially processed food.
It's extremely convenient...
..it's very cheap...
..and it's so appealing.
And yet we know that this food environment
is driving a catastrophe.
The evidence is increasingly clear that pre-prepared, packaged,
highly processed food is linked to weight gain, obesity, some cancers,
dementia, type 2 diabetes,
and early death from all causes.
We're in the middle of a food crisis, but we can't stop eating.
And if you want to understand why, you have to go and speak
to people who have worked inside the food industry.
We've worked with Heinz, Cadbury's, Pringles.
Bird's Custard. Campbell's Soup.
Unilever. PepsiCo.
Kellogg. Dr Pepper.
These foods are engineered to be addictive.
How have we sleepwalked into this situation?
What is the food we eat today doing to our minds?
And how has it become so irresistible?
Britain will be left a sick and impoverished nation,
according to former government food tsar,
if we don't do something about our junk food habit.
My name is Chris van Tulleken.
I'm an NHS doctor, I'm a scientist,
and I'm part of a growing group of doctors and academics
who are increasingly worried about the effect that
the global food system is having on all of us.
When it comes to obesity, the way that we've understood the problem
is it's a failure of willpower.
People are just making bad choices.
They're somewhat lazy.
It's basically their fault.
This is American government data for men and women of all different ages -
the different lines are different ages - for obesity.
What you see is between 1960 and 1975,
there's a fairly steady percentage of obesity in the population.
But in the mid-1970s, obesity starts going up
in all of the groups simultaneously.
Now, if you're saying willpower is responsible,
what you're proposing is that all of these groups of people simultaneously
lost moral responsibility, and that's not plausible.
Something else happened to our food in the mid-1970s
to make it irresistible to people.
Good afternoon. How are you?
My name is Howard Moskowitz.
I'm an experimental psychologist.
And in the 1970s, people think that I revolutionised
the food industry.
I'd like to talk to you about the way the science came about.
You know, you read all the time in the newspapers -
it's a sinister plot, generally by one or two scientists
in a laboratory, like Ming the Magnificent, saying,
"How should we make the people of the world fat?"
Well, let me tell you my own history.
I was called by the vice chairman of Campbell's Soup,
and they said to me,
"We're competing against a company which manufactures ragu."
They used to make it out of Contadina tomato paste and water,
like my mother did in the '50s.
I said, "I think you can make a better pasta sauce."
And they said, "How?"
And I said, "Let's figure out the actual food ingredients
"that you can blend, and let's make different combinations,
"and we'll test them."
And we ended up creating 45 dishes,
and we got people to taste them and rate how much they liked them.
I realised very simply that if you systematically
varied the ingredients and you tested them,
nature would reveal itself in stunning clarity.
So this is the origin of the bliss point with which I am identified.
The easiest way to demonstrate a bliss point
is add sugar to coffee.
As you add more and more sugar,
you like it more and more up to a certain point,
and then you like it less and less.
The highest level is where you like it most.
That's the bliss point...
..where you have the bliss.
And that became the basis
of a multi-billion dollar 30-year run.
I found that I could consult with companies like Unilever,
Pepsi Cola, Tropicana,
Dr Pepper, and Spam.
Sales almost always go up
because you're making a delicious product
and you know that people love it.
Very simple.
But over the years,
products became more complicated and more artificial.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
From the 1970s, food companies started to realise
that if they used proper scientific development processes,
they could sell us a lot more food.
My name is John Ruff, and I've spent 40 years in the food industry
across seven different countries.
Companies spend a lot of time optimising all aspects
of their product - the flavour, the taste, the texture.
People want their product to be as good,
if not better, than the competitor, so it will sell more.
In research and development, we used to use a phrase called the funnel.
And the funnel was the product development funnel.
You need 100 products to be in what's called advanced development.
You need 1,000 in early development.
You need 10,000 ideas.
Often those ideas don't get off the drawing board,
don't get off the paper,
or they'll make some early prototypes or mock-ups.
OK, seats numbers 1 to 14, you'll be now testing the Midget Gems.
We use trained sensory panels to give us ratings.
Is it squishy? Is it hard?
Is it soft? Is it crunchy?
That's very much how the food industry operates.
The food company really almost has to sort of provide products
that consumers want, otherwise they will go out of business.
I've spoken to lots of people who work at food companies,
and they've told me about these tasting panels.
Two of the most important things that are measured
are how quickly do people eat,
and how much of the food do people eat?
Because that's what drives sales.
But these tasting panels have a subjective element,
so some companies started taking it much further.
One of my remits when I first joined the company
was the way that they would get information,
and that would be always word of mouth.
It would be focus groups, it would be questionnaires,
and I just railed against that stuff.
I'm a neuroscientist.
I introduced brain scanning to Unilever.
I'm not interested in talking to a consumer.
I want to find out what they like by digging deeper,
because we're not really aware of why we like what we like.
And one way to get that is with the neuroimaging capabilities.
What we would do is basically lie someone in a brain scanner
and feed food into their mouth.
And we looked at the activity that was coming into that brain.
And one study that we did was feeding people
in one of these brain scanners different types of ice cream.
And what we found is that this area right at the front
of the brain here - it's called the orbitofrontal cortex,
and it's a reward system area,
and it was glowing like a furnace.
You're looking at what the brain is telling you.
You can't fudge it.
And it's grown and grown and grown as a way to predict
what product is going to be successful and what isn't.
And the ice cream business used that brain imaging data
to basically make the claim that ice cream makes you happy.
And this is the article that was in the newspapers.
Slightly unfortunate that it's got an obesity thing.
Yes. HE LAUGHS
This is contrast, isn't it?
Yeah.
You can edit that out, can't you?
The brain scans predicted
which foods people would like or which ones they'd love,
but they also helped to show something about those foods
that would be really crucial for the food industry.
If you want to sell a lot of food, texture is massively important.
One thing many people don't realise is that factory processing
changes the textural properties of that food.
Now, that makes the food much softer.
And an interesting fact about soft food
is you're not chewing it as much.
That actually short-circuits the normal satiety mechanisms
that you would have if you were actually chewing food properly.
So a food which you have to actually put some work into chewing -
so a crunchy carrot - is having that benefit in terms of the fact
you're spending a lot more time chewing it.
With a soft food, you don't do that.
So you're bypassing a normal mechanism
that tells you that you're full.
Once you've worked out that playing around with the texture of a food,
making it softer, tricks that normal satiety or fullness mechanism,
clearly there's an opportunity there
for some kind of scurrilous behaviour
in making food softer so that people will eat more,
and therefore you sell more of your product.
So there is an opportunity there, of course, you know, to basically...
..not do the right thing, shall I say?
So much of the packaged food that we eat is incredibly soft.
My kids love these.
You don't typically think of this as being a soft food,
because it's a bit crunchy,
but actually, after that initial crunch,
you can just crush it with your tongue, right?
It's got no resistance at all.
But in terms of the calories per gram,
it's got way more calories than even a very fatty burger.
So the softness and the energy density
mean that you consume it incredibly quickly.
And there's a food industry term for these
very light, puffy foods that melt in the mouth.
It's called vanishing caloric density.
Gone.
The thing that makes us eat a lot isn't just what we do to the food.
It's also about logos, marketing,
branding, the box the food comes in.
Here we've got a very crinkly packet of crisps.
The noise is quite loud.
Extraordinary.
Of course that's going to make you think, "Fresh, fresh, fresh."
I'm Professor Barry Smith.
I work on sensory science with neuroscientists and psychologists.
Pringles are often irresistible.
It's in their slogan.
# Potato crisps in a tube
# Pop it up and get in the mood
# Once you pop
# You can't stop. #
When I worked for Pringles,
they were really worried about the competition from Doritos,
and they were trying to think of ways to innovate.
And one idea was, "Let's make the tube bigger
"so that we can get our whole hand in there."
And I said, "No, no, no, no, don't do that."
People like struggling to get their hand in.
They're like foraging bears.
They're trying to extract the food
and that searching out something to eat,
that's increasing your desire.
CRUNCHING
Eating is a multi-sensory experience.
There's the look of the food.
There's the smell of the food.
There's the feeling of the food on your fingers.
Even the sound of food matters.
When you open a fizzy soda, you've got two noises.
You've got the click and the tear.
Sound engineers and manufacturers
work really hard to get that sound just right.
And that's sonic branding.
Many companies have asked me to work on sonic branding for them,
and I think I can mention when I was working with Kellogg,
they said, "Ooh, what's sonic branding?"
And I said, "You invented this!"
Most people will remember, as children,
the experience of lifting a bowl to their ear.
And what are they listening for?
Snap, Crackle, and Pop.
That's sonic branding at its best,
and that's the original.
# It's fun to put Snap, Crackle, Pop into your morning. #
Look at all this.
The food companies are using branding to grab our attention.
It's salt, fat, sugar wrapped up in appealing packages.
We've got cartoon characters.
There are tigers. There are monkeys.
There are bright colours everywhere.
But to sell even more food, industry had to change
the culture of how we eat, the number of times a day we eat,
and this is called snackification.
I am currently a research associate at the University of Cambridge.
I trained as a food engineer in Mexico and I worked for Cargill.
It's a company that makes most of the raw ingredients
that go into processed foods.
Name it - flour, sugar, oil,
high-fructose corn syrup, cocoa.
In the last several years, I started to see an influx
of packaged products from the USA into Mexico.
I started to see my peers getting bigger.
I started to hear about diseases like type 2 diabetes,
cancer in younger people.
I started to ask questions about,
what is our impact as a food company in the health of our nation?
And that's why I changed careers.
There's a lot of competition out there,
and food companies make their money
by the amount of products we consume from them.
So there's a stomach share that they're fighting for,
and there are hours in the day
in between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
What happens between those hours?
They want us to snack.
ALARM BEEPS
You wake up and this is what you have.
Snack number one -
breakfast shake, ultra-processed.
This is heavily marketed for you to have on the go -
do not sit down, do not take time to crunch through something.
Snack number two of the day.
It's empty calories.
Energy-dense, nutrient-poor.
Midday, you're starting to get a little bit peckish,
and what do you have?
Veggie straws.
This is a good example of a health claim snacking product.
Whereas before we would have had food, actual food,
now we are marketed into believing
that this is actually a healthy replacement.
Some snacking products have now been made to be linked
with being physically active.
So after the gym, I have a high-protein, low-sugar bar
instead of having a healthier option.
You finish having dinner and you have these snacks
that are sold to you as "more to share,"
where, in fact, you can just finish them watching the TV by yourself.
I do like them and I cannot stop eating them.
SHE LAUGHS And I literally can't.
Oh, God.
If you're a food company,
there are two main ways you can make more money.
You can sell more food, so you can grab more stomach share,
or you can use cheaper ingredients.
I'm Suzy Glaskie, and I used to work for the food industry
for nearly 20 years.
And now I really want to
lift the lid on how food industry marketing
is robbing us of our health.
The first time I really started to feel differently
about the food industry was when Sunny Delight came out.
Sunny Delight...
It was sold as great for all the family.
Any more? Coming right up.
Thanks, Mum.
So when can we move in, then?
On your bike!
And when I looked at the ingredients,
I realised this was a really cheap product
which had been dressed up to be something healthy.
And I think that's where I drew the line.
So the main thing that I worked on were modified starches,
and these were really, really clever.
They can make snack foods crunchy and crispy,
and they can make yoghurts creamy
and smoothies glossy.
When we eat starch in a whole food,
it's digested slowly.
But if that same starch is highly processed,
then it's broken down very quickly by the body,
and it spikes our blood sugar.
And that then leads to a whole host of health problems
and also to our body storing fat.
One of the starches that I worked on,
you could add it to a jam, for example,
and it would give the sensory experience of having a strawberry
without it actually being a strawberry.
Fruit is expensive.
It's difficult to handle.
It spoils quickly. It's expensive to transport.
So it's kind of padding out products with stuff that's just cheap,
but which mimics the real stuff.
We develop food and beverage products for companies of all sizes,
so we've worked with Heinz, Cadbury's, Pringles,
Green & Black's Chocolate.
Cost is such a big focus when we're developing products -
from the ingredients, the manufacturing, the shipping,
and then from distributors to retailers.
Everybody wants to make a profit. They want to make a margin.
Here are the ingredients that you need to make
a home-made lemon cake.
We've got lemons, unsurprisingly,
flour, sugar, butter, eggs,
some bicarbonate of soda, and some salt.
But if you're going to make it in a factory,
we've got quite a few things that we need to consider.
And so I have here a slightly longer list of ingredients...
More than double. ..that you might see in a cake from a supermarket.
One of the main considerations has to be the shelf life.
Of course, yeah. Because your lovely home-made recipe,
you're talking days... Exactly.
..before it starts to go mouldy and just frankly, stale. Yeah.
Whereas something in the supermarket
is going to need months of shelf life. Exactly.
You'll see here, we've got potassium sorbate as one of the preservatives,
and that is to inhibit the growth of mould and yeasts
so that your cake doesn't go off.
It's quite bitter, a bit like biting on a paracetamol or something.
And so some of the ways that you might mask some of these
bitter tastes might be with the flavouring, for one, the salt.
And then something else that you can't ignore
with an ingredient list like this is how much cheaper it will be.
Across the board, we're substituting
rich ingredients like eggs and butter with cheaper ones,
but also some of the ingredients from stabilisers and starches.
Yeah. It's all allowing you to use cheaper ingredients.
If you sit in my clinic, if you work in this hospital,
you see the toll that diet-related diseases takes on our patients.
There's incredibly strong evidence that the cause of the pandemic
of obesity and diet-related disease that's sweeping the globe
is industrially processed, packaged foods.
Previously, describing these goods was really hard scientifically.
We called it junk food or fast food.
And then a little while ago, a friend gave me this paper.
It's published in an obscure Brazilian public health journal.
It says, "A new classification of foods
"based on the extent and purpose of their processing."
Not an appealing read, so I ignored it,
left it on the desk for weeks.
But I eventually got around to reading it.
And I thought, if it's true, this might be the most important
scientific paper published so far this century.
Carlos Monteiro was proposing something really radical.
Previously, we'd focused on sugar, saturated fat, and salt
as being the problem.
And he said, "Well, maybe it's the industrial processing
"that is making us all eat a lot of these
"and having maybe other effects as well."
We've been doing food processing for thousands,
probably hundreds of thousands of years,
without significant health problems, where we take whole food
and we smoke it, we salt it, we preserve it, we ferment it.
It's essential for human life.
Ultra-processed food is entirely different.
And the full definition is very long,
but if you're wondering if something you're eating is ultra-processed,
look at the ingredients list.
And if you see things that you wouldn't expect to find
in a home kitchen, then it's probably an ultra-processed food.
When I first read this paper, it seemed really important,
but I had some doubts, and I wasn't the only one.
Lots of people were very sceptical about it.
My name is Dr Kevin Hall.
I'm a senior investigator here at the National Institute of Health.
I first heard about this idea of ultra-processed foods,
which basically says that nutrients aren't important at all.
It's really about the extent and purpose of processing,
and it seemed a little crazy to me because we have
a whole history of nutrition science, focusing on nutrients.
And then along comes Carlos and says, you know,
"You've been focusing on the wrong thing for the past several decades."
So we enlisted the help of our dieticians
here at the NIH Clinical Center,
and I gave them what I thought was maybe an impossible task -
"Can you design two diets?
"In one case, all of the foods come from minimally processed foods.
"And alternatively, an ultra-processed diet
"that is matched for the salt, the sugar, the fat, the fibre."
And the idea of the study was to bring 20 men and women
into the Clinical Center, where they would live with us for a month.
So you have an hour to finish it, or less.
We'd take complete control over their food environment
and present them with meals and very simple instructions -
"Just eat as much or as little as you'd like."
And what they didn't know was that
at the end of each of the meals, we were measuring their leftovers.
He ate most of the tater tots.
The dieticians downstairs will actually weigh it back,
and we'll know the exact quantity that's left over.
We were measuring their weights every day.
We were measuring how many calories their bodies were burning,
their oxygen consumption, their carbon dioxide production.
My hypothesis going in was that we would see
very, very little difference in the number of calories people ate.
And of course, I was wrong.
It turned out that the people,
when they were on the ultra-processed diet,
they spontaneously overate calories, about 500 calories per day
greater than when they were on the minimally processed diet.
I'm going to take your temperature, if that's all right. Sure.
What we discovered was that the ultra-processed foods,
despite being matched for their nutrient composition,
they tended to have many more calories per bite.
Another thing that we found was that we ended up preparing
and presenting people with foods that were high in sugar and fat.
That's something that's very rare to see in a food in nature.
These are so-called hyperpalatable foods,
and we ended up presenting people with more of those
hyperpalatable foods on the ultra-processed diet.
At the time it was published, Kevin Hall's experiment
was so important because it was really good quality evidence
that ultra-processed food does make you eat too much of it.
Now it's just one scientific paper
in a huge and rapidly growing body of evidence.
I think one of the biggest problems with this kind of food
is that so many of us struggle to stop eating it.
APPLAUSE
Hi, everyone.
I'm so thrilled to be here today to speak with you on my research
that looks at parallels between addictive substances
and ultra-processed food.
I'm Dr Ashley Gearhardt.
I'm a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan
and the director of the Food and Addiction Science and Treatment lab.
Both fat and sugar are converging on the same neural reward centre,
so it really seems to be hyperpalatable food products
that kind of mimic the reward profile
that we see with addictive drugs.
When we look at the sorts of foods
that trigger those key diagnostic indicators of addiction,
it's really clear what it's not.
It's not minimally processed foods,
like fruits or vegetables or beans,
or lean meats, like chicken breasts.
It's really processed foods that deliver high doses
of refined carbohydrates like sugars and starches,
typically alongside high levels of fat.
It's chocolate, it's ice cream, it's pizza.
It's foods that don't exist in nature.
One of the first things that we did was try and understand
how do we identify someone who might actually
be experiencing an addiction?
So we created the Yale Food Addiction Scale,
which is the major tool used
to measure an addiction to ultra-processed food.
We've really looked at the diagnostic criteria
that we use to diagnose somebody with an alcohol addiction,
a tobacco addiction, asking people about their experiences
of losing control over their intake, really intense cravings,
continuing to use even though you're having really negative consequences.
"When I started to eat certain foods,
"I ate much more than planned."
Yes, every day.
I'm Sarita, I'm 48 years old,
and I'm a food addict.
Processed food has this control over me.
I don't want to binge on a bowl of broccoli.
It's the crap food. There's something in it.
And I've struggled with drug and alcohol addiction,
and the parallels are too similar for there not to be a link.
Most people in my position binge in the evenings.
I will start with cereal, and it's always really sweet cereal,
so BLEEP is a good one.
I would pour as much of that into a mixing bowl -
not a normal bowl, a mixing bowl -
and start with that.
You're talking, you are talking a box of cereal
and three or four huge bars of chocolates,
and a couple of packets of biscuits -
way more food than you'd think a person could eat.
Then after that, it's just about how quickly can I purge it?
By purging, I mean making myself sick.
I'm an intelligent person.
I'm a fitness fanatic.
I know that my bingeing behaviour is really bad for me
and could end in heart attacks and diabetes and all sorts of stuff.
That's why I know it's an addiction, because I don't seem to care.
I don't care.
So I wanted to give you a bit of a sense of the people
who've come into our lab.
This individual had severe food addiction, and they said,
"I can't even be in the same room as any type of doughnuts,
"because I will finish a dozen all by myself, and I'm a type..."
The potency and the reward power of these ultra-processed foods
can trigger an addictive response that leads them to consume these
in such a compulsive way that, even if they want to cut down,
even if they know it's killing them, they find they can't stop.
We have to eat to live.
So giving up drugs, you just quit completely and that's it.
But how do you stop eating processed food?
It's everywhere you go.
Food addiction is a growing field of study.
There are lots of people who have well-founded concerns
about demonising an entire category of food, and I understand that.
But, personally, I find it really hard to disagree
with the testimony of many of my patients,
who feel that they are addicted to these products.
You have to make products taste palatable,
but what's happened is that palatability has been turned into,
"Well, it's too good. It's addictive. It's too tasty."
I mean, is there a point at which you can make a food taste
good enough that people will eat it,
but not too good that it's going to be called hyper-palatable?
Yeah, but you know what?
If somebody makes the hyper-palatable one,
they'll stop eating the other one anyway.
We have to make products that taste good.
People want that.
We're not going to mandate
that everybody's got to make their food taste bad,
I don't think.
It's not a world I want to be in.
We have a growing body of evidence that, for some people,
this food is addictive.
And that makes me think about the tobacco industry.
Laura Schmidt.
I'm a professor at UC San Francisco in the School of Medicine.
I'd been working on ultra-processed foods for a while,
and one of my colleagues said, "Hey, you know, I've been poking around
"in the tobacco archive, and I know you're interested in food.
"You might want to check these out.
And it turns out that there were hundreds of thousands
of documents in the tobacco archive about food companies.
From the 1960s, RJ Reynolds, the tobacco company,
starts buying up food subsidiaries.
Why would a giant tobacco company buy up a food company?
And the answer was something we did not expect.
The people in the tobacco companies had a bunch of artificial colours
and flavours, developed in their labs, that they were making
to add to cigarettes, flavours and colours like menthol.
Their labs are developing them to put into cigarettes
and create different products to target new consumers.
They call them line extensions.
# You've come a long way, baby
# To get where you got to today... #
Virginia Slims, for women who want to get thin.
Marlboro, for men who are couch potatoes
but actually want to be cowboys.
# Listen while I tell you a story
# The tale of the Marlboro brand... #
They were targeting children.
Joe Camel was a cartoon mascot that RJ Reynolds put on Camel cigarettes
because they really wanted to make kids know the brand
so that, when they became cigarette consumers, they would smoke Camels.
One survey found six-year-olds in the US as familiar with
Joe the Camel as with Mickey Mouse.
The tobacco industry had cultivated this strategy of taking a single,
utterly boring product and making it come alive
with colours, flavours, branding, marketing, cartoon mascots,
to target different consumer markets.
And we found this memo, and this memo was written in 1962,
by the guy who ran the labs, to the CEO of RJ Reynolds.
And he literally says here, "It's easy to characterise RJ Reynolds
"merely as a tobacco company.
"In a broader and much less restricting sense, however,
"RJ Reynolds is in the flavour business."
And here, he's talking about a merger with a company called
Pacific Hawaiian Products Company.
And they only make one thing, and that's Hawaiian Punch.
Hawaiian Punch was one flavour and one colour.
It was bright red, and it was being marketed to adults.
And within a couple of years, they had transformed this product
into a children's beverage.
Hey, how about a nice Hawaiian Punch? Sure!
# What gives Hawaiian Punch its punch?
# Its punch? #
They intuitively understood that getting the kid hooked was the goal,
because that kid is going to be a lifelong consumer.
What's so brilliant about the marketing strategy
is you can take that tobacco model and apply it to the food industry.
You can make massive numbers of line extensions.
Wasn't that a refreshing commercial?
Very sophisticated advertising campaigns that allow you to kind of
get inside the minds of consumers
and make them want what you have to sell.
We know that people in food companies were putting people
in a brain scan to observe what goes on in the brain when people
are exposed to the food products that they were developing.
Whether or not they intended to make all of these foods addictive,
I don't know.
What we can say is that, if you're eating a brand that was ever
owned by a tobacco company, there's a stronger likelihood
that it has been developed to make you want more.
The biggest cigarette companies in the world were also
the biggest food companies.
They were the same companies.
And of course, over decades, the tobacco industry perfected
the techniques for denying any of their products were addictive.
Hi, I'm Steve Parrish.
Today, we're going to set the record straight.
Cigarettes neither alter a person's mood
nor do they impair an individual's ability to function.
Those people who term smoking an addiction
do so for political and ideological, not scientific reasons.
I retired in 2008 from Altria Group Inc,
formerly known as Philip Morris, the tobacco company,
where I was the senior Vice President of corporate affairs.
In the early 1990s, there was really a sea change in attitudes
about the tobacco industry in the United States,
and it seemed like it was the year of the perfect storm.
In 1994, when there were Congressional hearings...
Please consider yourself to be under oath.
..members of Congress asked the CEOs of the various tobacco companies,
do you believe cigarette smoking is addictive?
Do you believe nicotine is not addictive?
I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.
Cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic
definitions of addiction.
I don't believe that nicotine or our products are addictive.
I believe nicotine is not addictive.
I believe that nicotine is not addictive.
And I too believe that nicotine is not addictive.
At the end of a two-day hearing, the expert committee decided
that, yes, cigarette smoking is addictive.
And then, a few years later, our company, Philip Morris,
decided to change its position and acknowledge the fact
that cigarette smoking is addictive.
When our company made that announcement,
it caused quite a stir, and even a bigger stir
when we announced that we were in favour of
the Food and Drug Administration regulating the tobacco industry.
When Philip Morris companies saw that there was a continual decline,
year over year over year, in cigarette smoking,
it just made sense for the company to look beyond tobacco.
And there were similarities in the products, not in terms
of the products themselves, but where they were bought and sold,
grocery stores, convenience stores, and places like that.
Yeah, you know, I don't know the answer to that question.
I don't know whether specific food products
would meet that definition of addiction.
I would leave that to people who have studied the products
and studied the science there.
I don't know whether any companies would admit addiction
of a particular food product, but I would hope that the companies
would listen to the science and say and do the right thing.
I think right now we are, with ultra-processed food,
a bit like where we were in the '60s with cigarettes.
And, in my opinion, the food industry is using many of the same techniques
that the tobacco industry used to protect their interests,
and lots of scientists have experienced this first-hand.
I'm Dana Small. I'm a neuroscientist.
I'm interested in how the brain and the body work together
to optimise behaviour.
Pepsi came to us and they were interested to know
whether they could reduce the amount of sugar in beverages
to make healthier drinks.
Now, to keep the calories down, you might add some artificial
sweeteners to increase the sweetness,
but without getting the calories.
So we designed this study where we had five different beverages,
and they had different amounts of calories,
but we wanted them to be similarly sweet.
So we used sweetener, which doesn't have any calories.
Yeah, this is not very elegant, but in she goes.
Sorry.
She'll actually be in there receiving little tastes
of the different flavours and then swallowing and then waiting
for the next flavour to come.
When you look at brain responses to these different flavours,
you can see the dopamine and reward system.
And what we found was completely unanticipated.
We actually didn't see a negative impact of just drinking, like,
a diet drink.
But when we had a diet drink and we added calories...
..that's when we saw changes.
So, for example, it's OK to have your diet soda by itself.
But if you have the diet soda with French fries,
you're going to have artificial sweeteners and carbohydrates,
and that's when you're going to get into trouble.
There's a lot we don't understand about sweeteners but,
in very simple terms, if you put a sweet taste on the tongue,
it signals to your body that sugar is on the way.
And if sugar doesn't then arrive,
that seems to have several unexpected effects on the body,
and it may even lead to weight gain.
If the effect we've observed generalises, then it follows
that consuming diet food can actually lead to weight gain,
rather than weight loss. Now, that needs to be tested experimentally,
but the logic is straightforward to that prediction.
We were discovering something pretty important
and, rather than being able to continue with this,
PepsiCo dropped us.
We're experimenting.
We're trying to figure things out.
But during this process, you could discover something
that is harmful.
So that leaves them vulnerable to lawsuits,
which is exactly what happened in the tobacco industry.
National surveys fail to show any link between body mass index
and consumption of ultra-processed foods.
Melissa Mialon found that, out of 38 papers questioning the science
around ultra-processed food,
33 of them had authors with connections to the food industry.
So the food industry exerts its influence in a lot of subtle ways,
and I've had personal experience of some of these.
The companies have been very, very keen to get in touch with me,
to invite me to give talks and presentations,
to fly across the Atlantic.
Most of the time, I say no.
In one instance, I thought, "Well, let me get the contract
"and see how all this looks."
Is this a really well-known food company, then?
So this is one of the big...
Yeah, this is a big food company.
So I got a contract, and they offered me about £20,000
for a two-hour meeting.
And I cannot understand why they want to pay me,
so I got a lawyer to help me understand this.
So here's the relevant bit.
It says that I will not make any statement as shall disparage
the food company or its products,
or bring the company name into disrepute.
So for about £20,000, they buy my silence on ultra-processed food.
Their most effective strategy is to fund people who sound credible,
who create confusion and doubt.
That is what the tobacco industry did so beautifully.
The situation seems overwhelming, but there is hope.
First of all, we did control tobacco,
not perfectly, but we did it.
The second thing is,
if you look at countries across South and Central America,
they are bringing in policies that are making a difference.
My name is Juan Castro.
I'm trained as a doctor.
If I look at some of these Colombian warning labels, you know,
it feels quite shocking to have a warning label
on these very sort of everyday products.
You know, you might pause if there was a big black octagon
on your kids' breakfast cereal.
Well, the food industry would say,
"Oh, the definition of ultra-processed food
"includes lots of healthy foods, like wholegrain, ultra-processed bread,
"fish fingers, baked beans."
Now, this makes me incredibly angry.
This is food that I do feed my children, OK?
The fish fingers - very high in salt and fat.
The baked beans - very high in salt and sugar, OK?
The supermarket ultra-processed bread,
even if it's got whole grains - very high in sugar and salt.
So is this the worst food you can buy? Absolutely not.
But is it the foundation of a healthy diet?
It certainly isn't, no.
And in lots of countries,
all of those products would get warning labels for salt, fat, sugar.
For years, the phrase was "everything in moderation."
You know, it's as true today as it was
when whoever first coined it.
We're faced with so many challenges in the world today,
and certainly in providing a food supply.
Some of the discussion that, you know, I hear,
whether it be on chemicals or ultra-processed foods,
seems to be designed to stop us from doing that.
And I don't think that's a very smart place to be.
Researchers say ultra-processed foods now make up 73%
of the US food supply.
Global obesity rates have doubled.
Now they've found ultra-processed food can cause harm
similar to smoking.
..from the University of Oxford highlights the enormous financial
power of unhealthy ultra-processed foods.
Imagine you're trying to cut down on ultra-processed food
or avoid it altogether.
For a start, it might be the only food you can afford,
and that is true for millions of people.
But it's everywhere, and it's engineered and then marketed
by some of the smartest people on Earth to be irresistible.
So if someone is watching this and they are struggling
with their weight, with diet-related disease, I just want to reach out
and grab them and go, "This is not your fault.
"It is not you. It is the food."