E295: Food engineering is fueling preventable disease

Transcript

Paper: Gearhardt AN, Brownell KD, Brandt AM. From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease. Milbank Q. 2026;104(1):0202.https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0009.70066

https://www.milbank.org/quarterly/articles/from-tobacco-to-ultraprocessed-food-how-industry-engineering-fuels-the-epidemic-of-preventable-disease/

Ashley, let's talk a little bit about, just set the stage for what this paper was all about, and since it was your brainchild, you approached Allan and me about being involved. Tell us what you set out to do and why you thought these issues were worth digging into.

Ashley - You know, I've just been so struck that when we think of cigarettes, they were something that's so common, so normal that we kind of think, oh, they've always just sort of been there. But truly, they're just taking a natural plant from the ground and through advancements and corporate engineering and technology and knowhow, they took a poisonous plant and made it into the most deadly and addictive drug in human history. And yet that was, you know, just accompanied by tons of debate. It didn't look like other addictive substances. And I just really felt like, man, we're reliving this history right now when it comes to how we've altered our food supply. I wanted to really bring you all together and see if we could really lay that story out of the, the parallels of these two public health crises.

We'll get in a minute into the issue of what you discovered, but tell us what you covered, what the paper was meant to do.

Ashley - The paper really goes back from how you take the tobacco plant in the field, or the corn in the field, and walks essentially through all the kind of levers that are being pulled to transform it in very specific ways. And through specific technologies and corporate practices that are being shared by modern cigarettes and ultra processed foods. These products maybe look harmless on their face initially, or don't look like they're just maybe pleasurable or craveable. But truly, I would argue that they've crossed thresholds into things that are addictive and clearly damaging many people's lives.

Okay, so several decades ago, I don't know who came up with a term, but there was a lot of discussion about similarities between tobacco industry behavior and food industry behavior. And the press started publishing cover pieces that would say food is the next tobacco. And it was a term that the food indu