Like cigarettes, junk food must carry the warning: ‘May be fatal’ | Martha Gill

TThe 1970s were a confusing decade for smoking. People knew, of course, that smoking was bad for them: the evidence linking it to lung cancer was undisputed since 1956. But despite government education programs, increased taxes, and restrictions on sales to children, these warnings had not fully penetrated the atmosphere.

How could they? Everyday life bathed the brain in the idea that smoking was fine. Cigarettes were advertised in magazines, on billboards, and at sporting events; they dangled from the mouths of the friendly or rebellious people in film and on TV; and a nicotine fug enveloped offices, bars and public transport. Could something that everyone did that permeated the culture really be so shockingly dangerous?

It was also a confusing time to be a tobacco manufacturer. You could no longer claim that smoking was supported by doctors, as you did in the 1950s – but you weren’t forced to admit on every packet that your product was actually killing people. It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that cigarette advertisements, adorned with obligatory warnings, began to openly flirt with death: one ad for Silk Cut referred to the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, another for Benson & Hedges with a dead fish on a coffin-like piano. (If you’re going to die, die with us.)

But in the 1970s, these companies were still making the awkward transition between denial and nihilistic acceptance. The idea that you could make cigarettes healthier, that you could acknowledge the warnings but claim they didn’t apply to your own product, became a central defense and marketing ploy. New ‘filter cigarettes’ (sometimes themselves contaminated with dangerous chemicals) flooded the market, falsely claiming to protect against the worst dangers of smoking. Thousands switched to low-tar cigarettes in an attempt to make a healthy choice.

“Given everything I had heard, I decided to quit or smoke True. I smoke True†placed one ad in 1976with a sporty-looking girl at a tennis net – “The cigarette with a low tar and nicotine content”.

And this is where we are, I think, in 2024, with what used to be called junk food, and is now starting to be called ultra-processed food. UPF is food that has at some point been ground into an unrecognizable pulp and immersed in additives, a definition that is gaining acceptance among experts. But it’s nothing new. We talk now, and have done so for years, about the kinds of foods that encourage us to eat copious amounts of salt, sugar, and fat in one barely chewed mouthful. They are burgers, chips, chocolate bars, ice cream, carbonated drinks and poppy processed breakfast cereals.

As with cigarettes in the 1970s, much of the evidence is already known. So is junk food linked to cancer. Two groundbreaking studies last year found UPFs caused heart disease and stroke. It is also undisputed that this type of food causes obesity, a condition that causes 30,000 deaths every year in England alone. One in five children is obese in the last year of primary school and the rate of obesity is also increasing spirally upwards. Unhealthy diets now cause more deaths worldwide than tobacco.

But these warnings have yet to filter into our everyday environment, where junk food is beamed at us from bus stops and TV commercial breaks – presented as an indulgence, a guilty pleasure, but not a plague.

Our brains, designed for scarcity, navigate a world of cheap, easy and delicious dopamine hits on high streets and supermarket aisles. Fast food companies track teens online and use cartoons to sell unhealthy breakfast cereals. Last week an 18-year-old told the newspaper Time that when she got her GCSE results, she was more likely to be congratulated by the pizza chain Domino’s than by her mother.

Last week, the youth activist movement Bite Back published its research Fuel us, don’t fool us, developed in collaboration with researchers at the University of Oxford, reported that Ferrero would earn 100% of its UK sales by 2022 from foods high in saturated fat, salt and sugar (HFSS). In response, a company spokesperson claimed it was “supporting consumers” by “offering our products in small, individually packaged portions,” along with “education on how to enjoy our products as part of a balanced lifestyle.” Should you really stop after a single (packed) Ferrero Rocher?

Unilever, which according to the research had derived 84% of its UK sales from HFSS that same year, highlighted its lower fat options: “Ben & Jerry’s Lighten Up, Carte D’Or Vanilla Light”. The owner of Kellogg’s, which was just behind at 77%, told reporters that he had reduced the sugar in his cereal by 18% and salt by 23%.

Yet these are foods that are saturated with unhealthy substances and designed to make you eat more and more of them. Removing 18% of the sugar will yield very little. There is no such thing as healthy junk food.

We know what needs to happen next: tobacco has given us the blueprint. Foods high in salt, sugar and fat should be more strictly regulated.

And regulation is the only way. Highly processed foods are profitable; the business models of the world’s largest food companies are based on it. Expecting them to fix themselves is like expecting a tired and hungry commuter to resist a hamburger. Good intentions and willpower only go so far.

But the psychological change – the recognition that what everyone is doing is dangerous – is long overdue. Every government in the last thirty years has identified obesity as a problem. Even food companies – some of them – are calling for new legislation: at the moment, they say, retailers who want to do good are being punished.

Labor claims it will ‘steamroll’ the food industry towards a healthier model, by banning online junk food adverts aimed at children and introducing more restrictions on packaging. It would be a start.