Inception

In 2010 the film Inceptionwas released by Warner Brothers. Directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the skilled thief (Dominique Cobb), the film descends into a multi-layered dream-world where information is stolen from the minds of unsuspecting targets. Set to the backdrop of corporate espionage, the film takes shape when Cobb is asked to achieve “inception”, which involves planting an idea in the mind, verses the extraction of information.

When presented with the task, Cobb devises a plan to achieve inception by planting a seed of an idea that could organically grow into the intended result. In this case, leaving the heir of an energy conglomerate breaking up the the family business in order to build something of his own.

A recent viewing of Inception left me wondering how much of our world view is really shaped by true inspiration from our mind, and how much may have been coercively grown from the seed of an idea?

If the film is viewed as an allegory for questioning what ideas are our own, then it’s not much of a leap to see the barrage of marketing and ads we all endure as a method of inception. And while marketing is wrought with mind-exploiting science, there is, at some level, an understandable competition that is happening between companies. But what if the marketing is less about which product you should buy, and is instead meant to sew doubt in your mind as to whether a product is going to kill you? These are the very types of seeds that Big Tobacco perfected, and Big Food (amongst others) adopted.

If the idea of comparing the tobacco industry to the food industry seems dramatic, let’s go back in time to an event that sparked a seventy-year tradition of lying to, and harming the general populace, in order to make a buck…

Cancer by the Carton (Readers Digest)

During the early 1950s an abundance of evidence began to mount regarding the relationship of smoking and lung cancer. Something that the majority of us probably look back on and wonder why it took so long to connect the dots. Although Americans understood that tobacco use came with a certain health aggravations, they simply hadn’t connected smoking to lung cancer.

While many publications began trickling information about the correlation of smoking and lung cancer, the most historically popular seems to be one from Readers Digest, which was published in December of 1952. The article, titled “Cancer by the Carton”, opened with a straight-forward message reading,

“For three decades the medical controversy over the part played by smoking in the rise of bronchogenic carcinoma, better known as cancer of the lung, has largely been kept from the public notice. More than 26 years ago the late Dr. James Ewing, distinguished pathologist and leading spirit in the the organization of the American Association for Cancer Research (now the American Cancer Society), pleaded for a public educational campaign.”

An important part of the article’s opening is an acknowledgment that there had been, for more than a quarter century, experts calling for public education about the dangers of tobacco. Sound familiar? Compare this dynamic with any of today’s looming crises (health epidemics, pandemics, climate change, dying oceans) and the experts painted as alarmists by some. Unfortunately, truth ends up being nothing more than a weak inconvenience against the juggernaut of societal norms, especially those laced with seeming enjoyment and addiction.

So while the medical community was connecting the dots of smoking and lung cancer, Americans were smoking and using more tobacco, while dying (according to “Cancer by the Carton”) at a rate of about 24,000 people annually. Thankfully articles like “Cancer by the Carton” did get through to the general populace and, at long last, placed the correlation of smoking and lung cancer in the public’s eye.

Of course, we all know what happened next: Big Tobacco earnestly, and with a great deal of shame, apologized to the public for producing a product that kills, and simply closed up shop. Wait, that didn’t happen at all!

A Frank Statement To Cigarette Smokers

If you were the CEO of a corporation, embedded within one of the most lucrative industries in the world, and your customers found out that your product kills them, what would you do? The answer is fairly obvious: you get out of your coffin, avoid the sun (traveling by the cover of night) and huddle up with the other blood-sucking vampires to develop a game plan. The simple goal of the game plan would be to create doubt… doubt that the research was conclusive, doubt that there was consensus amongst the scientific community, and doubt that the tobacco industry would ever do anything to jeopardize public health.

Just two years after “Cancer by the Carton”, Big Tobacco released its counter to the damning scientific evidence mounting against their product in the form of an advertisement titled, “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers”. The article opens,

“Recent Reports on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.

Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However, we do not believe that any serious medical research, even though its results are inconclusive should be disregarded or lightly dismissed.

At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.”

Other quotes in the article do not age well considering what we now about the industry, including:

“We accept an interest in people’s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.”

“We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.”

“We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health.”

The advertisement concludes with a commitment from the industry to fund their own research regarding health and tobacco use, creating the Tobacco Industry Research Committee. The research would be lead by, “…scientists of unimpeachable integrity and national repute.” So while they’re calling into question the decades of research conducted by the world’s leading experts, and finding some other scientists of unimpeachable integrity, the general public should sleep easy knowing that the tobacco industry would objectively conduct it’s own research.

It’s hard to believe that an industry would objectively produce research that results in its’ own demise, and of course the tobacco industry didn’t. Instead, they spent the next fifty years denying and obscuring truth from everyone, which is nicely summarized in an article by The Atlantic titled, “Contesting the Science of Smoking”.

Fast forwarding through the years of lies and deceit, we find the law finally catching up to Big Tobacco in 2006, when a landmark ruling was issued by Judge Gladys Kessler . The ruling indicated that the tobacco industry had engaged in racketeering efforts to hide the truth about the dangers of smoking from the public. An excerpt from the 1600+ page ruling provides a sobering picture of the tobacco industry…

“It is about an industry, and in particular these Defendants, that survives, and profits, from selling a highly addictive product which causes diseases that lead to a staggering number of deaths per year, an immeasurable amount of human suffering and economic loss, and a profound burden on our national health care system. Defendants have known many of these facts for at least 50 years or more. Despite that knowledge, they have consistently, repeatedly, and with enormous skill and sophistication, denied these facts to the public, to the Government, and to the public health community.”

From a historical perspective, “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” isn’t just about cigarettes. It’s an important moment that marks a tactical approach in the development of doubt in consumer’s minds - doubt that is meant to suppress knowledge and truth in order to make profit. What’s the cost of this practice?

Today, and per the CDC…

“Cigarette smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year. In addition, smoking-related illness in the United States costs more than $300 billion a year, including nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and $156 billion in lost productivity.”

Keep in mind that this is the cost of smoking today, in a world where there seems to be a general consensus that smoking can kill you. But what about all the people who lived through the deceit, and paid the ultimate price of death because they chose to believe the lies of Big Tobacco? And what if general consensus was never achieved? Would we be burying 3 million people a year unnecessarily?

A Frank Statement to Food Eaters

If we’re tempted to look back on the epidemic of lung cancer and wonder why common sense didn’t connect it to smoking, to critically judge the generations before us, then we must ask ourselves why we disregard our own common sense in the face of today’s epidemics and crises. We must ask ourselves if it will take another 50 years to conclude that Big Food is actively manufacturing doubt in our minds about what to eat, and if their products are contributing to the deterioration of our health, much as smoking did.

Before drawing parallels between the practices of Big Tobacco and Big Food, it may be helpful to anchor our point of view in some simple economics:

First, the more you eat, the more you spend, the more a food corporation makes. If you’re a food corporation, you want every mouth on this planet testing the elasticity of their body. It’s simple dollars and cents: the more we eat, the more they make.

Second, a food corporation can make even more money if what they’re selling you is cheap and addictive. Not only will you be inclined to buy more of it, but it’s cheap for you because it’s cheap for them to make. Things like High Fructose Corn Syrup end up making their way into so many products because it’s produced from inexpensive government-subsidized corn.

Third, packaged food goods can be sent around the world, sit on shelves, and then sit in a pantry for a long time. You know that spinach you bought two days ago? It’s already gone bad. If you think about food as a product, it makes sense to develop something that has a long shelf life.

All of this is to say that food corporations want to make cheap products, which last a long time, and are eaten in abundance. This formula seems to work well - Grand View Research estimated the US packaged food market size at $806.3 billion in 2016, with projected year-after-year growth to follow. We could dig into many statistics on the segmentation of Big Food, but the main takeaway is that there’s an astronomical amount of money at stake for these corporations.

The Pesky Truth

In the 1950s, Big Tobacco knew that it stood to lose staggering amounts of money if the truth got out about its product, which is why it went to such great lengths to suppress it. Big Food has been in a similar situation for a while. Google “link of processed food and health” and you’ll find many studies and articles from institutions detailing the nasty relationship. Just one example from BMJ concluded that a high consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a 62% increased hazard for all cause mortality. Another study from them showed a causal relationship between ultra-processed foods and higher risks of cardiovascular, coronary heart, and cerebrovascular diseases.

In case you’re wondering what qualifies as “ultra-processed”, it’s mostly staples of the American diet and includes things like: ice cream, reconstituted meat or fish products, packaged baked goods and snacks, sugary cereals, ham, hamburger, potato chips, and carbonated drinks. The list goes one, but we’re talking about foods containing high levels of added sugar, fat, and/or salt, but lacking in vitamins and fiber. BMJ includes a breakdown of unprocessed to ultra-processed here.

Considering that we largely have a nation of people eating ultra-processed foods filled with added sugar, salt, and fat, the levels of cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, shortened life expectancy, and rising health-care needs shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the worst case scenario, the general populace doesn’t have any negative connotations associated with processed food, and if they do, they may only revolve around unwanted weight-gain and physical appearance. The pesky truth is that, much like smoking and it’s eventual association with lung cancer, a diet composed of ultra-processed foods seems to be more about disease and death, than a few unwanted pounds.

Adopting the Tobacco Playbook

Using Big Tobacco as precedence for what an industry will do to suppress truth and foster doubt in the name of profit, and having laid out the colossal amount of money wrapped up in our food industry, along with the mounting scientific evidence against their products, let’s take a look at the strategies being used by Big Food to plant seeds of doubt in our minds through just one of many topics - sugar consumption…

To start with, just like Big Tobacco, Big Food funds it’s own scientific research that often times debunks, or at least muddies the waters of truth regarding its products and adverse health affects. NPR ran a story on one example, which showed up in the Annals of Internal Medicine, titled, “The Scientific Basis of Guideline Recommendations on Sugar Intake”. The study concludes that,

“Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low-quality evidence.”

In other words, the recommendations being made that you consume less sugar, are based upon junk science. So, keep eating sugar.

Now at face value, you would probably assume that an article published in the Annals of Internal Medicine is unbiased. And in the case of this particular study, even if you decided to see who funded the research, you would see that it was the Technical Committee on Dietary Carbohydrates of the North American branch of the International Life Sciences Institute. That’s a mouthful, and based on name alone, sounds like a completely unbiased organization that is just trying to get the truth out.

If you decide to look up the Internal Life Sciences Institute, you’ll find that it’s a non-profit, headquartered in Washington, D.C., was founded by a former Coca-Cola executive, and is financed by the likes of Coca-Cola, Nestle, McDonalds, and other similar companies. How tricky is that, and what chance does the average consumer have of following the paper trail to see who paid for a study? In this case, the companies that sell you sugary products, funded the research that says you shouldn’t pay attention to the recommendations to consume less.

If you distill this sort of industry funded research down to its practical use, it can be a talking point for a cable news pundit who’s lobbying on behalf of the industry they represent. They get to say something like, “The Annals of Internal Medicine published an article saying that the recommendations to lower sugar consumption are based on junk science.” For most people, that’s a pretty compelling statement to hear, and if you’re already consuming a lot of sugary drinks, it confirms to you that you don’t need to worry about the adverse health affects.

Another way that you control the narrative around your products, is to shape public policy through lobbying efforts. As we know, Big Food is flush with cash, which means it has an army of lobbyists who translate government policy into a vehicle of ensured economic security. Just one example is the American Beverage Association. As you might guess, it’s board includes Coca-Cola and Pepsi executives.

Back in 2009, a lot of chatter began to develop around taxing sugary drinks because of public health concerns and their links to things like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. NCBI published a manuscript from the New England Journal of Medicine detailing the links and benefits of taxation. The policy idea, of taxing sugary drinks as method to lower consumption, has precedence for working and brings us back to the parallels of smoking. Coincidentally, that same year the estimated lobbying efforts of the American Beverage Association (as reported by OpenSecrets.Org) spiked, approaching $19 million.

As states consider bringing sugar taxes to the ballot box, they’re met with formidable opposition from the beverage industry. As NPR reported,

“In California, where four cities have soda taxes, the beverage industry pressured lawmakers this summer into accepting a 12-year moratorium on local taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks.”

It’s simple calculus that a tax on sugary drinks would cost corporations like Coca-Cola and Pepsi a pretty penny. In addition to the lobbying efforts, it’s no surprise to see organizations like the American Beverage Association publishing article after article speaking out against the soda tax, and with headlines that read, “The Bottom Line - Soda Taxes Don’t Work”. Well, if they don’t work, why do you care so much? What they want you to believe is that they’re standing firmly with the American public to keep grocery costs down, but they’re clearly scrambling to stop progress, slow change, and keep folks guzzling sugar so that they make their money.

Corporations purporting a firm stance against things like the soda tax, because of supposed concern for everyone’s grocery bill, ties nicely into one final tactic that Big Food uses to distract us. Instead of everyone rising up and demanding that our food industry give us, well, food that doesn’t make us sick, they want to frame the issue around personal choice and responsibility. They want to seem as though they’re protecting us from government tyranny (like the soda tax), by ensuring everyone’s American right to eat themselves into oblivion, even if that means more sickness, death, rising healthcare costs, and economic burden on the government.

A beautifully shameful example of industry-funded science, mixed with the tactic of personal responsibility, comes in the form of Coca-Cola and their relationship with the now defunct Global Energy Balance Network. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit formed more than 50 years ago by MIT students and scientists, published an article in 2017 detailing the nefarious relationship. The article exposes Coca-Cola funding a research institute, picking the executives, choosing academics who previously received their funding, and even drafting the organizations mission statement.

What you see in this example, is a corporation lining everything up to produce a result. In this case, they wanted studies that supported the idea that weight gain could be reduced, or prevented through exercise verses lowered calorie consumption. In other words, keep drinking our products, and if you find your rear-end infinitely expanding, just move it more. While we all know exercise is important, the problem with the argument, and why Coca-Cola felt the need to fund research to strengthen it, is that their products are extremely calorie dense and can be consumed in minutes. You couldn’t come up with a better recipe for obesity.

Extraction

In Christopher Nolan’s film, implanting an idea (inception) was the difficult task, but in our world, extracting one is the real challenge. As children we were endlessly infatuated with the idea of getting a toy in our McDonald’s Happy Meal, and we loved the cartoon character’s practically jumping off the front of cereal boxes to play with us. From the “Be Like Mike” Jordan/McDonald’s campaign, to Coca-Cola sponsoring the pinnacle of athletic completion in the Olympics…our most treasured athletes and supposed role-models are associated with brands that deliver us unhealthy food options. How does one extract the false association of fast food as a viable option for what you should eat?

In full disclosure, I write all of this as someone wanting to reap the benefits of a largely unprocessed, plant-based diet, yet I can’t seem to shake the overwhelming urge I periodically have to hit up a drive-through and cram hot garbage down my throat. It’s cheap, fast, addicting, and difficult to avoid in its abundance.

When it comes to food, we might not be able to just unlearn a lifetime of what is considered normal, but we might do well to remember the Dr. James Ewing’s of the world, crying out for public education about the dangers of smoking 25+ years before it entered the mainstream. We might do well to consider the idea of today’s “health nut” as the equivalent of someone in 1950, who’s telling a friend that they read a concerning article on the dangers of smoking. We might do well to consider that the alarming number of health issues Americans face, are just not normal. If we can change how we view our food system in this country, and the corporations delivering it to us, perhaps a new seed can be planted - one that grows into something much more powerful than the obligatory piece of knowledge that processed foods are bad for you. Perhaps then, inception is possible.