Below is an overview of the audio content of this video: Watch the video above to see graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes from Dr. Greger.
I talk a lot about the power of taking personal responsibility for your own health and the health of your family. But there are forces at work that influence what we eat. Check it.
In the 1970s, the U.S. government shifted from subsidizing the worst foods to paying companies to produce more food. The 1970s farm bill overturned the long-standing policy of limiting production to protect prices and instead began making payments proportional to production. Additional calories are starting to pour into our food supply.
Then Jack Welch gave his speech. In 1981, General Electric's CEO effectively launched the “shareholder value movement,” redirecting the company's primary goal toward maximizing short-term returns for investors. This has put enormous pressure on Wall Street food companies to increase profit growth every quarter to boost their stock prices. There was already a calorie surplus on the market, and now we needed to sell more.
This puts food and beverage CEOs in an impossible bind. It's not like I'm rubbing my sticky hands together with the intention of luring more Hansels and Gretels to their doom in their candy houses. Big food companies can't do the right thing if they want to. They are beholden to their investors. If you stop marketing to children, sell healthier foods, or try anything that could jeopardize quarterly profit growth, Wall Street will demand a change in management. Eating healthy is bad for business. It's not a huge conspiracy. It's no one's fault. That's how the system works.
With the constant need for corporate growth and rapid profits in an already oversaturated market, the food industry needed to help people eat more. Like the tobacco industry before them, they turned to advertising men. The food industry spends about $10 billion a year on advertising and about $20 billion on other forms of marketing, such as exhibitions, incentives, consumer promotions and supermarket “slot fees.” Food and beverage companies buy shelf space in supermarkets to prominently display their most profitable products. They pay money to the supermarket. This practice is apparently also known as “cliffing.” This is because companies have to compete with each other to place shelves at eye level, and the losers are pushed “over the cliff.” With slot fees of up to $20,000 per item, per retailer, per city, you can imagine what kind of products get special treatment. Hint: It's not broccoli.
Look no further than the checkout counter to see what types of products are suitable for high-end shelves. An industry publication on “Best Practices for Good Checkout Merchandising” states, “It is important to merchandize the power category at all paths.” They were referring to candy bars and drinks. Clearly, just a 1% increase in power category sales could earn a store an additional $15,000 per year. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't care about their customers' health. Like most major grocery store chains, the publicly traded company is said to have a fiduciary duty to increase profits over other considerations.
Tens of millions of dollars are spent each year advertising a single brand of candy bar. McDonald's alone can spend billions of dollars a year. The food industry now spends more on advertising than any other sector of the economy.
Reagan-era deregulation removed restrictions on promoting food products on television to children. The average child can now see more than 10,000 TV food adverts a year, adding to marketing everywhere: online, in print, at school, on mobile phones and in movies. Almost everything is about unhealthy products.
In addition to massive initial exposure and ubiquity, food marketing has become very sophisticated. With the help of child psychologists, companies learn how to best influence children to manipulate their parents. The packaging is designed to best appeal to children and then placed at their eye level within the store. You know those bubbles that are reflected like mirrors on supermarket ceilings? It's not just about stealing. Closed-circuit cameras and GPS-like devices in shopping carts are used to strategize how best to direct shoppers to the most profitable products. Behavioral psychology is widely applied to increase impulse buying. Eye movement tracking technology is utilized.
The unprecedented increase in the power, scope, and sophistication of food marketing since about 1980 coincides well with the explosive slope of the obesity epidemic. Some skills, such as product placement, on-campus advertising, and event sponsorship, have skyrocketed from essentially zero to multi-billion dollar industries since the 80s. This led one prominent economist to conclude that “the single most convincing interpretation of the admittedly imperfect data we have is that the large increase in obesity is due to marketing.” That's right. Manufacturing innovations and political maneuvering have blown up our food supply to the tune of nearly 4,000 calories a day for all of us. But it is the advancement of marketing manipulation that is used to put that surplus in our mouths.
“Marketing works,” was the preface to an Institute of Medicine report on the potential threats posed by food advertising. Yes, there are many well-conducted randomized studies that show that advertising exposure and other marketing methods can change our eating habits and make us eat more. But what do you need to know other than the fact that the industry costs tens of dollars? Does it cost billions of dollars per year? Do you think Coca-Cola will spend more money than they thought to get people to drink brown sugar water? It's like a medical colleague of mine receiving a “drug lunch box” from a pharmaceutical company representative and getting upset when I suggested it could influence their prescribing practices. Do they really think pharmaceutical companies are in the business of giving away free money? If it doesn't work, they won't do it.
But to help you understand the insidious nature of marketing, let me share the results of an interesting study published in one of the world's leading scientific journals. “In-store music influences product selection,” records the experiment with French accordion or German Bierkeller music. It was played every other day in the wine section of the grocery store. On days when French music was played, people were three times more likely to purchase French wine, and on days when German music was played, shoppers were about three times more likely to purchase German wine. When approached later, despite the dramatic effect (not just a few percent difference, but a complete triple reversal), the majority of shoppers denied that the music influenced their choices.
We all like to think that we make important life decisions, such as what to eat, consciously and rationally. But if that were the case, we wouldn't be in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Most of our everyday actions do not seem to be based on careful deliberation. Rather, we tend to make more automatic, impulsive decisions triggered by unconscious signals or habitual patterns, especially when we are tired, stressed or preoccupied. The unconscious part of our brain is thought to guide human behavior 95% of the time. This is the area where marketing manipulation does most of the dirty work.
The part of our brain responsible for conscious perception can only process about 50 bits of information per second, roughly equivalent to a short tweet. On the other hand, our total cognitive capacity is estimated to exceed 10 million bits per second. Because we can only intentionally process a limited amount of information at a time, being distracted or unable to focus can make our decisions more impulsive. An experiment involving fruit salad and chocolate cake provided an elegant example of this “cognitive overload” effect.
Before you could make a call by pressing a button or using your voice, the seven-digit range of a phone number was based in part on the longest sequence that most people could remember on the fly. It seems that we can only store about seven chunks of information (plus or minus two) in our immediate short-term memory. great. The settings are as follows: Have people remember a random 7-digit number or a 2-digit number so they can retrieve it from another room down the hall. Opt for a fruit salad or a slice of chocolate cake along the way. Memorizing two-digit numbers is easy and probably requires very few cognitive resources. In the two-digit condition, most people chose fruit salad. Most people faced with the same decision and trying to keep a seven-figure number in their head just went out and had their cake.
This can manifest itself in the real world by enhancing advertising effectiveness. When you have people watch TV shows advertising unhealthy snacks, surprisingly, they eat more unhealthy snacks (compared to people exposed to non-food ads). Or maybe you will be surprised. We all like to think that we are in control and not easily manipulated. But the point is that the less careful we are, the more vulnerable we can be. During the broadcast, the same two-digit and seven-digit memorization tasks were randomly assigned to people, amplifying the snack attack effect among those who were more immersed. How many of us leave the TV on in the background or multitask during commercial breaks? This study suggests it may make us more susceptible to subverting our better judgment.
There is an irony in all of this. Calls for marketing restrictions are often resisted under the banner of freedom. What does this mean in a context where research shows how easily our free choices can be influenced without our conscious control? A senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation even wrote that given the dire health consequences of our unhealthy eating habits, insidious marketing manipulation “should be viewed in the same light as invisible carcinogens and toxins in our air and water.” He even suggested it. “It can poison us without us knowing.”
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