How similar is ... MOLD...JUNK SCIENCE

February 13, 2010

The perils of ignoring history: Big Tobacco played dirty and millions

died. How similar is Big Food?

_Brownell KD_

tem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstract)

, _Warner KE_

m2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVAbstract)

..

Rudd Center for Food Policy andObesity, Yale University, 309

Street, New Haven, CT06520-8369, USA. kelly.brownell@...

CONTEXT: In 1954 the tobacco industry paid to publish the " Statement

to Cigarette Smokers " in hundreds of U.S. newspapers. It stated that the

public's health was the industry's concern above all others and promised a

variety of good-faith changes. What followed were decades of deceit and

actions that cost millions of lives. In the hope that the food history will be

written differently, this article both highlights important lessons that can

be learned from the tobacco experience and recommends actions for the food

industry. METHODS: A review and analysis of empirical and historical

evidence pertaining to tobacco and food industry practices, messages, and

strategies to influence public opinion, legislation and regulation, litigation,

and the conduct of science. FINDINGS: The tobacco industry had a playbook,

a script, that emphasized personal responsibility, paying scientists who

delivered research that instilled doubt, criticizing the " junk " science that

found harms associated with smoking, making self-regulatory pledges,

lobbying with massive resources to stifle government action, introducing

" safer "

products, and simultaneously manipulating and denying both the addictive

nature of their products and their marketing to children. The script of the

food industry is both similar to and different from the tobacco industry

script. CONCLUSIONS: Food is obviously different from tobacco, and the food

industry differs from tobacco companies in important ways, but there also are

significant similarities in the actions that these industries have taken in

response to concern that their products cause harm. Because obesity is now

a major global problem, the world cannot afford a repeat of the tobacco

history, in which industry talks about the moral high ground but does not

occupy it.

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