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

Key points

• 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 –...