Research on the global sugar obsession is mounting every year, with activists and international health organizations beating the drum that we must pull back from the dangerous precipice to which our sweet addiction has brought us. Make no mistake: sugar is a wildly addictive substance and exists in such large quantities in our food for precisely that reason. Writers have often made the comparison between sugar and nicotine in describing how, for example, a can of Pepsi can hook you in a way similar to a cigarette. According to new research published in the British Medical Journal, there may be more to that relationship than simple metaphor.1
From one addiction to the next
To begin with, it’s important to know that when cigarette companies were facing federal scrutiny for their habit of marketing deadly products to teens, they looked to branch out into other industries with less impending red tape. That’s when they started buying and developing sugary drink brands, including Hawaiian Punch, Kool-Aid, Capri Sun, and Tang.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco made a series of surprising revelations while sifting through a cache of documents from the tobacco industry. The internal documents showed how, step by step, big tobacco companies used their experience marketing cigarettes to young customers to sell the same kids and teenagers addicting sugary beverages. From mascots and other marketing techniques to the very same flavoring chemicals that went into cigarette tobacco, executives from federally besieged cigarette companies transported their bag of tricks to sweet drinks for kids, transforming the industry.
Peddling sugar to kids
Take, for example, the cigarette company Philip Morris, which launched a 45 million dollar marketing campaign for the “wacky, wild Kool-Aid style” in 1988 with the brand new Kool-Aid man mascot. The marketing team reinvented Kool-Aid as “the drink that’s just for kids,” after discovering just how easy it was to get kids hooked on what is essentially sugar water.
“If kids get used to drinking Kool-Aid instead of water, they’re always going to prefer a sugary beverage,” said Jennifer Harris, who studies corporate marketing strategies at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “And the advertising creates positive associations with these products in the minds of children.”2 Cigarette executives, of course, had learned this lesson long ago. For them, as they turned their attention to sugary drinks, the only difference was the addictive substance they were selling.
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Dr. Rosmy Barrios, MD is an aesthetic medicine specialist whose work focuses on patients who are treated for obesity, metabolic syndrome, and other weight-related issues through nutritional analysis, keto diet programs, and supporting medications.
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