THANK YOU FOR EATING BIG MACS™

[defrog]

ITEM: A new paper  published earlier this year in the health policy journal, the Milbank Quarterly, details how major fast food companies are employing PR tactics to fend off criticisms that their food is unhealthy and contributes to obesity.

Tactics include:

1. Dismissing peer-reviewed studies showing a link between their products and disease as “junk science”
2. Paying scientists to produce pro-industry studies
3. Sowing doubt in the public’s mind about the harm caused by their products
4. Intensive marketing to children and adolescents
5. Frequently rolling out supposedly “safer” products and vowing to regulate their own industries
6. Denying the addictive nature of their products
7. Lobbying with massive resources to thwart regulatory action.

Any of this sound familiar? Tobacco companies used to do the same thing.

One of the authors, psychologist Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, gives details.

DISCLAIMER: Presented for informational purposes only. I’m hardly a poster child for the “Eat Healthy Organic Foods” movement. I just washed down a three-pack of Oreos with a Coke Zero while I was typing this.

But I do find the propaganda parallels interesting – especially when we know how it all worked out for the tobacco industry in the end.

Still, I don’t know if I favor warning labels on Quarter Pounders or anything.

Hazardous to yr health,

This is dF