I still remember the time many years ago, when the symbol of machismo was The Marlboro Man. Mounted on his handsome horse, the brooding cowboy was smoking his favorite brand of cigarette as he was riding off alone into the sunset, the powerful image symbolizing individual freedom and masculine power. There was the feminine equivalent too with another popular brand, and the imagery was no less eye-catching to the public.
Thinking back to those days now makes most people cringe. How could we ever have permitted consumer advertising to seduce us into using a product that would likely cause us to die an untimely death? How could we have become so enamored by a figure that may as well have been named The Lung Cancer Man? Never again will we be so stupid about something so harmful, right?
Right? Or wrong?
Right in that The Marlboro Man has permanently ridden off into the sunset, never to come back. In 1971, the US Congress passed a law banning all tobacco advertising in all forms of broadcast media. It also required labels to be placed on all cigarette packs, warning of the dangers of cigarette smoke. The Philippines came late into the tobacco advertising ban bandwagon, only doing so by law in 2003. Better late than never, that today advertising to gullible young teenagers is at least a thing of the past.
But wrong in that advertising for other products that are potentially harmful to us is still going on unabated, and attracting especially vulnerable young people into consuming these products that will eventually make their health outcomes that much worse.
But the advertising of tobacco and tobacco products has stopped, right? What harm are we still talking about then?
While the Marlboro Man may be no more, we — and especially our children — are now seduced by another bogeyman, or rather bogeymen who go by much friendlier names. One bears the moniker of a clown, and the other has the likeness of an insect. I will not name them here, but I am sure our readers will readily know who they are.
And it’s not just these two charismatic characters that are now peddling their unhealthy products to unsuspecting consumers, there are many more of their kind adorning the ubiquitous products sitting on our supermarket shelves, ensuring that consumers are lured to buy more and more of the products they endorse.
The challenge with regulating unhealthy food — if we even get there at all — is that it is inextricably woven into our social fabric that doing so would not be a very popular move. And in a country where the ones who make policy are very dependent on public goodwill, who would want to alienate the people who put them in positions of power in the first place?
The thing is though, how long can the problem be ignored? Let’s turn to the Marlboro Man for some guidance. Remember that for so many years, smoking was not only a socially acceptable practice, it was a glamorous pursuit.
It is immortalized in our historical events, such as the famous Leyte Landing, where Gen. Douglas McArthur is shown with his iconic pipe in his mouth, as his landing group is shown wading towards the shores of Leyte. “It took more than 100 years of research, discussion and debate to reach our current knowledge of the risk.” (Imran Lorgat writing on how long it took to regulate smoking, RGA, May 2020).
A century is a long time to learn our lessons from something as obviously harmful as smoking. It was, in large part, due to the power of big business.
Companies like Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. and others like them not only had influence over politicians who were influential in formulating health policy, they were also engaging the support of the scientific community by funding studies that showed the impact of tobacco smoking in a more favorable light.
In fact, it was not unanimously accepted in the medical world until the 1970s that smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer, even as in the 1950s, it was already implicated in many scientific studies looking at the origin of the disease.
Fast food exploded in popularity in the US just as smoking was reaching its peak in the decade following the end of the last world war. The popularity of ultra processed food that now dominates our diet also skyrocketed in America around the same time.
This is probably part of the reason that it was exonerated from the blame for the rise in metabolic diseases because most of the culpability was blamed on smoking. As luck would have it, smoking was the perfect smoke screen (no pun intended) that fast and ultra-processed food could hide behind, so as not to be blamed for the impending health crisis that was soon to explode before our very eyes.
You will remember in our previous column that today, overweight and obesity rates are fast increasing. Two in three Americans are over their normal weight, with one in three being considered obese. According to Word Health Organization guidelines, these are people whose Body Mass Index (BMI) is above 30. By 2030, 50 percent of all adults in the US will be obese. And the Philippines is not that far behind either. Close to 40 percent of our countrymen are now overweight or obese, and the trend is rising unabated.
Especially alarming is the proportion of children and young adults who are affected, as they are the ones riding the crest of the junk food wave.
But is food regulation even possible?
Apparently so. In 2014, Mexico slapped a one Mexican-peso tax per liter of sugary beverages. As a country facing one of the highest incidence of overweight and obesity in the world, it had to do something, and the tax was seen as a deterrent that would discourage the excess consumption of sugary sweet beverages. And what was the impact of the move? In a 2018 study looking at the consequence of the tax on consumers, researchers discovered the following trends.
“The researchers found that after the implementation of the tax, the probability of becoming a non-consumer increased by 4.7 percentage points, and the probability of being a low consumer increased by 8.3 percentage points.
What’s more, the probability of being in the medium and high levels of soft drink consumption decreased by 6.8 percentage points for medium consumers and 6.1 percentage points for high consumers.” (BMJ, 5 June 2020).
So is the tide turning against the junk food juggernaut? Early shoots yet at the moment, but to use a symbolism from the war against tobacco, it is going to be a long slog ahead, one puff at a time.