For decades, major tobacco companies have succeeded in promoting cigarettes despite everyone’s knowledge of their dangers, and a recent study revealed that the same companies use the same strategy to attract people to “unhealthy” processed meals.
The Washington Post said that in the early 1980s, the two giant tobacco companies, Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds, acquired major food companies, such as Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco, which allowed them to dominate the global market. Food supply in the United States, generating billions from sales of popular products.
By the turn of the millennium, the two companies had separated from food companies, but according to the Washington Post, “the legacy they left still exists through the foods we eat.”
New research in the scientific journal Addiction focused on the widespread occurrence of “hyper-palatable” foods that contain large amounts of fat, sodium, sugar, and other substances that may lead people to have a strong desire to overeat these foods.
“Two birds with one stone”: foods that are beneficial to the intestines and protect you from chronic diseases
Health studies confirm that the state of the “gut microbiome,” which helps digest the foods that people eat to provide energy to the body and absorb nutrients, is linked to the development of chronic and serious diseases, and therefore it is necessary to obtain healthy and balanced food, according to a report by the “Health Central” medical website.
The study revealed that during the decades in which giant tobacco companies controlled major food companies, the foods they sold “contained larger quantities of the aforementioned substances” compared to other food companies in the markets.
Over the past 30 years, the strategy used by tobacco companies has spread to other food companies.
These unhealthy foods that people are currently eating, according to the researchers in the study, were the product of the tobacco companies’ strategy in marketing their foods, using “substances that are addictive to people and that are attractive to children.”
The researchers revealed that foods produced by factories owned by tobacco companies “were 80 percent more likely to contain a mixture of carbohydrates and sodium that would make them palatable foods, and 29 percent more likely to contain fat and sodium, compared to foods produced by commercial brands.” Other”.
University of Michigan psychology professor Ashley Gerhardt explained to the Washington Post how tobacco companies’ strategy works.
She said that companies have worked to produce foods that target what is known as the “bliss point” in humans, in which they have a strong desire to eat these meals.
She pointed out that these foods “include many substances that can be addicted,” explaining: “Every addictive substance is something that can be obtained from nature, and we introduce modifications to it to obtain benefits from it, and this is what happened with palatable food substances.”
2023-09-20 09:13:19
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