AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Should ultra-processed foods be considered the new war on tobacco? That's the argument that dozens of researchers are making in a series of papers published today in the American Journal of Public Health. They say that these foods - things like packaged chips, snacks and cookies - which dominate the American diet have become major drivers of poor health, and the time to act is now. Here to tell us more is NPR health correspondent Maria Godoy. Hi, Maria.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK. So explain, what is the connection between tobacco and ultra-processed foods here?
GODOY: Well, you know, back in the 1980s, tobacco giants bought up some of the biggest food firms. So, for example, Philip Morris used to own General Foods and Kraft. And R.J. Reynolds owned Nabisco. And then this was the era when ultra-processed food production really ramped up in the U.S.
Laura Schmidt is a researcher at UCSF, and she's been studying old tobacco company archives. She says tobacco firms had amassed a lot of research on how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and addictive with chemical additives. And records show they deliberately applied this knowledge to food.
LAURA SCHMIDT: The very technologies that were used to figure out how to optimize the addictive properties of nicotine using added sugar and artificial flavorings, that core technology was transferred from the tobacco industry to ultra-processed food development.
GODOY: Schmidt says these kinds of additives have now become one of the defining characteristics of what makes a food ultra-processed.
CHANG: That's fascinating. Are there other similarities between, like, the tobacco playbook and the ultra-processed foods playbook?
GODOY: Yeah, marketing strategies. So, for example, take the concept of king size candies, you know, we've all seen these.
CHANG: Yeah.
GODOY: That term, king size, actually originated as a way to market longer cigarettes. Or, you know, for consumers worried about health, tobacco companies used to sell so-called light cigarettes. Well, they made light versions of foods, too. Schmidt found a quote from a former Philip Morris CEO who said that ultra-processed foods and cigarettes were really similar businesses. He said they were both low-cost consumer packaged goods with a huge market.
CHANG: OK, so that's marketing. But ultimately, we are talking about people's health here. And we know that cigarettes are linked to cancer, right? So what does this research say about ultra-processed foods and health?
GODOY: Well, there's already a lot of research linking high consumption of ultra-processed foods to poor health outcomes. So from obesity to diabetes to all-cause mortality. Several of the new papers here add to this body of evidence. For instance, one study followed more than 5,000 older Americans over 10 years. And it found that higher consumption of ultra-processed foods was linked to an increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia.
Another study surveyed a nationally representative group of 2,000 adults about ultra-processed foods. And it found that across party lines, the majority of people who responded said they want the government to regulate them. Here's Lindsey Taillie. She's a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina and an author of one of these papers.
LINDSEY TAILLIE: It feels like we've reached a tipping point between the strength of the science, the public support and then also political will. And those three factors combined, to me, suggests that we might be at a place where we start to see real policy action on this topic the way that we did in tobacco.
GODOY: You know, many policy experts say we are likely to see change at the state level first. We've already seen states pass bans on synthetic dyes in foods, for instance. And some experts say litigation may be next. In other words, state attorneys general filing suit against food companies, alleging damage to the public health, sort of like the lawsuits we saw against tobacco companies in the 1990s.
CHANG: Yeah. That is NPR's Maria Godoy. Thank you, Maria.
GODOY: My pleasure.
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