Profs & Pints Alameda: Unhealthy Diets by Design

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Unhealthy Diets by Design,” on how cigarette science made us crave food that’s bad for us, with Laura Schmidt, professor of health policy and emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco and scholar of the relationship between marketing and chronic disease.

[Tickets available only online, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/unhealthy-by-design .]

It’s no accident that kids everywhere gobble down Lunchables, many of us can’t eat just one Oreo, and warnings by health experts and our own physicians often fail to deter us from loading our shopping carts with ultra-processed foods or pulling up to fast-food restaurants.

The truth is that our cravings for unhealthy foods are the product of extensive research, as well as deliberate manufacturing and marketing decisions, informed by lessons learned by Big Tobacco.

Get the inside skinny on how we’ve been manipulated into eating what makes many of us fat with Laura Schmidt, a highly respected sociologist and public health expert dedicated to understanding how modern lifestyles and economic pressures have driven the rise of chronic disease around the world.

Dr. Schmidt was one of several authors of a recent series of articles in the American Journal of Public Health examining how ultra-processed foods became a huge part of American diets. She exposed how the U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds got into the food business during the mid-20th century and applied tobacco-industry research to the manufacturing and marketing ultra-processed foods. They used brain-wave sensing tests on consumers to measure how the brain processed flavors and to determine what motivates consumers at the deepest levels. Based on what they learned, they heightened our desire for products by tweaking how foods were processed and loading them with flavor additives.

The tobacco companies have since largely divested themselves from food companies, but their impact on the industry remains. The documents that Dr. Schmidt relied on, produced in response to lawsuits, are now part of UCSF’s Industry Documents Library, a digital archive of 29 million records that includes collections from the opioid, chemical, food, and fossil fuel industries.

Dr. Schmidt will tell the story of precisely how the cigarette giants used tobacco research and development to design some of America’s most iconic food brands, including Lunchables, Oreos, KFC, and 7-Up. Her talk will leave you with a newfound appreciation of just how risky one bite of something can be. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Junk food in a Walmart. (Photo by Thayne Tuason / Creative Commons.)