In 2019, then top-tier ad agency Leo Burnett produced a Cheez-It commercial for its client Kellogg’s called “Taste Test,” revealing much more about the product than intended.
The 15-second spot shows a group of hysterical tasters who, once they bite into the Cheez-It crackers, can’t stop and continue to compulsively eat them.
“What have we done,” asks the crazed-looking scientist in the white lab coat, watching the frenzy.
That very question may now come before a jury.
In mid-December 2024, Big Food producers, including Nestle, Pepsico, General Mills, and Kellanova (the Kellogg’s spin-off that makes Cheez-It) were hit with a lawsuit (Bryce Martinez v. Kraft Heinz Co., et al.) claiming, “… Production of ultra-processed foods is intended to be addictive and “aggressively marketed to children and minorities.”
According to the lawsuit, “UPF (ultra-processed foods) formulation strategies were guided by the same tobacco company scientists and the same kind of brain research on sensory perceptions, physiological psychology, and chemical senses that were used to increase the addictiveness of cigarettes.”
Although tobacco companies, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris have since exited the food business, they left behind a legacy for Big Food, described in the complaint as, “… Taking a very well-evolved marketing strategy to sell things that make people sick and applying it from one substance, cigarettes, to another: UPF.”
The “storylines” of today, however, aimed at reassuring consumers that UPFs and the additives they contain are nothing to fear or avoid, are reaching even more shoppers.
For example, dietitian Jessica Wilson frequently writes and claims in speaking engagements that ultra-processed foods make life nutritionally and mentally enjoyable. Wislon’s last commentary appeared in Slate.com a few weeks after the lawsuit was filed.
What makes food ultra-processed?
To better understand the argument for or against ultra processed foods, it’s important to learn what they are aren’t. Investigations by Dr. Carlos Monteiro, a professor of Nutrition and Public Health at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, along with other researchers there, led a first-of-its-kind classification of processed foods called Nova in 2010.
In 2019, using Nova, Monterio and others published a paper defining what constitutes ultra-processed food:
Ingredients characteristic of ultra-processed foods are either food substances of no or rare culinary use, or else classes of additives whose function is to make the final product sellable, palatable and often hyper-palatable.
The presence of manufactured flavoring agents, such as MSG and dozens of other additives containing brain-damaging free glutamate, are other ways to identify ultra-processed foods. And all these additives that make a non-food look and taste like real food are given free rein by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ultra processed foods today
The lawsuit goes on to state, “The purpose of all this research on brain waves and nerve conduction was not to determine how to make UPF more flavorful,” the lawsuit states. “Big Tobacco conducted this research to understand how to hack the physiological structures of the human brain…”
More than just repositories for salt, fat, and sugar (or artificial substitutes), UPFs as the complaint calls them, “Are fundamentally different than the foods that make up traditional diets.” It summarizes UPFs as “industrially-produced edible substances that are imitations of food.”
Citing the unprecedented rise in type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease in kids, which was “formerly a disease exclusive to the elderly and alcoholics,” the lawsuit claims in detail how the, “defendants got rich by robbing the health of American children.”
Read A Consumer’s Guide to Toxic Food Additives: How to Avoid Synthetic Sweeteners, Artificial Colors, MSG, and More, co-authored by Linda Bonvie, to learn more about food additives or read more on her Substack – Badditives.
