Kelly Garton

And evidence has shown that many ultra processed food companies, particularly in the US, borrowed strategies they learned from the tobacco industry to engineer these products to optimize the doses of those elements and optimize the speed of delivery to drive an addictive response.

Yeah, I would say it's these combinations, but then it's also these sensory related additives.

So these are what are used to, you know, enhance the look, the texture, the smell and, you know, even the sound of eating a food.

The sound of the crunch that you get from biting into a potato chip, that has actually been heavily researched by a company and sort of optimized to get a sound that really gives us sort of a dopamine hit or reward hit of what we're expecting to consume.

And depending on the chip, it might also have other artificial flavorings that are made to sort of intensify the sensory appeal of

of the of that chip and maybe it has colorings that are giving it a bright color so essentially

Our sense receptors are telling our body to expect one thing, which it thinks is probably nutritious.

And what ends up in our gut is something quite different.

And so this sort of separates our taste receptors from the nutrition we get.

And it tends to override our natural, our body's natural feedback systems.

And it leads to more compulsive eating and intake.

I'm sure it has.

There's not a whole lot of academic literature on this.

It's something that's really come into the limelight more in the last five or 10 years, as certain researchers have really started to dig into the history of ultra processed foods and even looking at the links with tobacco industry.

So one of the papers that we reviewed talked about how

In the 90s, several ultra-processed food companies in the U.S.

were acquired by large tobacco firms.

And, you know, over the next decade, they really learned from those tobacco companies what kind of techniques could be adapted to food to really drive more addictiveness.

And the same learning was done here.

in the marketing strategies as well that tobacco companies were using, particularly to target kids.