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Study shows food from tobacco-owned brands more ‘hyperpalatable’ than competitors’ food
LAWRENCE — An investigator at the University of Kansas has conducted research showing food brands owned by tobacco companies — which invested heavily into the U.S. food industry in the 1980s — appear to have “selectively disseminated hyperpalatable foods” to American consumers. “Hyperpalatable” foods are those featuring purposely tempting combinations of salts, fats and sugars. The study was published today in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction.
Reliance on student punishment in schools needs reconsideration, article argues
LAWRENCE — Schools and prisons share many similarities: authoritarian structure, emphasis on silence and order, schedules to follow, rules not to break. The parallels are the subject of a University of Kansas scholar’s new article published in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. “Teachers and administrators need to discontinue the relationship between punishment and education and begin to create environments where students can thrive in nonpunitive ways,” said author Nikia Robert, assistant professor of religious studies.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Study shows food from tobacco-owned brands more ‘hyperpalatable’ than competitors’ food
LAWRENCE — Many of us know all too well the addictive nature of a big portion of food in the United States — most call it “junk food.” In fact, this kind of salty, sweet and high-fat fare makes up the lion’s share of what’s marketed to Americans.
Researchers employ a more scholarly term for food items featuring purposely tempting combinations of salts, fats and sugars: They’re “hyperpalatable.”
Now, an investigator at the University of Kansas has conducted research showing food brands owned by tobacco companies — which invested heavily into the U.S. food industry in the 1980s — appear to have “selectively disseminated hyperpalatable foods” to American consumers.
The study was published today in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction.
“We used multiple sources of data to examine the question, ‘In what ways were U.S. tobacco companies involved in the promotion and spread of hyperpalatable food into our food system?’” said lead author Tera Fazzino, assistant professor of psychology at KU and associate director of the Cofrin Logan Center for Addiction Research and Treatment at the KU Life Span Institute. “Hyperpalatable foods can be irresistible and difficult to stop eating. They have combinations of palatability-related nutrients, specifically fat, sugar, sodium or other carbohydrates that occur in combinations together.”
Fazzino’s previous work has shown today that 68% of the American food supply is hyperpalatable.
“These combinations of nutrients provide a really enhanced eating experience and make them difficult to stop eating,” she said. “These effects are different than if you just had something high in fat but had no sugar, salt or other type of refined carbohydrate.”
Fazzino and her co-authors found between 1988 and 2001, tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be classified as fat-and-sodium hyperpalatable and 80% more likely to be classified as carbohydrate-and-sodium hyperpalatable than foods that were not tobacco-owned.
The KU researchers used data from a public repository of internal tobacco industry documents to determine ownership of food companies, then combed nutrition data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in longitudinal analyses to estimate how much foods were “formulated to be hyperpalatable, based on tobacco ownership.”
“The question about their intent —we can’t really say from this data,” Fazzino said. “But what we can say is there’s evidence to indicate tobacco companies were consistently involved with owning and developing hyperpalatable foods during the time that they were leading our food system. Their involvement was selective in nature and different from the companies that didn’t have a parent tobacco-company ownership.”
Fazzino’s co-authors were KU doctoral students Daiil Jun and Kayla Bjorlie, along with Lynn Chollet Hinton, assistant professor of biostatistics and data science at KU Medical Center.
The KU researchers said they built their investigation inspired by earlier work by Laura Schmidt at the University of California-San Francisco.
“She and her team established that the same tobacco companies were involved in the development and heavy marketing of sugary drinks to kids — that was R.J. Reynolds — and that Philip Morris was involved in the direct transfer of tobacco marketing strategies targeting racial and ethnic minority communities in the U.S. to sell their food products,” Fazzino said.
While tobacco companies divested from the U.S. food system between the early to mid-2000s, perhaps the shadow of Big Tobacco has remained. The new KU study finds the availability of fat-and-sodium hyperpalatable foods (more than 57%) and carbohydrate-and-sodium hyperpalatable foods (more than 17%) was still high in 2018, regardless of prior tobacco ownership, showing these foods have become mainstays of the American diet.
“The majority of what’s out there in our food supply falls under the hyperpalatable category,” Fazzino said. “It’s actually a bit difficult to track down food that’s not hyperpalatable. In our day-to-day lives, the foods we’re surrounded by and can easily grab are mostly the hyperpalatable ones. And foods that are not hyperpalatable, such as fresh fruits and vegetables – they’re not just hard to find, they’re also more expensive. We don’t really have many choices when it comes to picking between foods that are fresh and enjoyable to eat (e.g., a crisp apple) and foods that you just can’t stop eating.”
Fazzino said using metrics of hyperpalatability could be one way to regulate formulations of food that are engineered to induce sustained eating.
“These foods have combinations of ingredients that create effects you don’t get when you eat those ingredients separately,” the KU researcher said. “And guess what? These combinations don’t really exist in nature, so our bodies aren’t ready to handle them. They can excessively trigger our brain’s reward system and disrupt our fullness signals, which is why they’re difficult to resist.”
As a result, consumers of hyperpalatable foods are more prone to obesity and related health consequences, even when they don’t intend to overeat.
“These foods may be designed to make you eat more than you planned,” Fazzino said. “It’s not just about personal choice and watching what you eat – they can kind of trick your body into eating more than you actually want.”
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Reliance on student punishment in schools needs reconsideration, article argues
LAWRENCE — Schools and prisons share many similarities: authoritarian structure, emphasis on silence and order, schedules to follow, rules not to break.
“Teachers and administrators need to discontinue the relationship between punishment and education and begin to create environments where students can thrive in nonpunitive ways,” said Nikia Robert, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas.
Her article titled “An Ethic of Abolition: Becoming Educational Sanctuaries” addresses the uncanny resemblance between the educational/industrial complex and the U.S. carceral state. Both employ policies, pedagogies and practices to respond punitively to com¬munal transgressions. In response, Robert offers an abolitionist theological ethic to create educational sanctuaries. It appears in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics.
“We use punishment to scare people into obedience,” Robert said. “But what you produce are robots, not sentient beings with critical thinking who are accountable and aware of how their actions may harm others. As a professor, I’m always looking for transformative ways to build work ethic and curiosity, so students aren’t motivated to produce simply based on their fear of being punished.”
Robert also argues how students in underrepresented groups — ranging from pre-K to postsecondary institutions — become particularly vulnerable when punishment is used to “perpetuate anti-Blackness, patriarchy and other social inequities.” This in many ways mirrors the carceral system, she said.
The educator became further mindful of the similarities found in schools and prisons when teaching an Inside-Out course at a state prison.
“When you look at the yard versus a college campus, it appears very similar,” she said.
Her course was called “Prisons, Punishment and Redemption,” taught at the California Institution for Women in Chino.
“A lot of the women there were lifers,” she said. “It was a really meaningful course for them and for me. I hope to bring something like it here to Kansas — we certainly have plenty of prisons.”
Robert said that schools are not doing enough to make a distinction between a classroom and a jail cell.
“We’re here as educators wanting to create sanctuaries so that students can thrive as whole beings. We don’t want these kinds of docile, empty people who are afraid of consequences,” she said.
“We can start by looking at more equitable grading strategies. Using rubrics, using more marginal comments, allowing students to have retakes. So in other words, moving away from this rigid and punitive model and doing more to cultivate the whole student.”
As her article notes, Robert maintains a personal connection to this topic. Her daughter currently attends a K-8 private school in California.
“She’s been so deeply affected by the detention system,” Robert said. “So much so that if it was cold and she didn’t have a hat or coat that conform to their uniform policy, she would risk her own health rather than violate the policy out of fear of getting detention. I could not convince her otherwise because my daughter is a rule-follower.”
Since that situation emerged, Robert has been working with the school to put an end to detention.
“Why would an educational institution have detention? That’s something you find in a prison,” she said. “Surely, we can be more creative and spend more effort to think of ways to respond to harms, other than just saying, ‘Go to detention!’”
A New York native, Robert just began her first semester at KU. She is also executive director of Abolitionist Sanctuary, a “national faith-based coalition united against the moral crisis of mass incarceration and the criminalization of impoverished Black motherhood.” Her research focuses on ethics.
Robert continues to explore ways of replacing punishment in educational settings with something more effective and humane. Noting KU’s “rich legacy of racial integration in sports that coincides with an impactful history in the town of Lawrence and abolitionist movements,” she hopes to build a course, and possibly a conference, which connects the university with local community organizers in order to double-down on the commitment to building abolitionist sanctuaries in education.
“Punishment is just the easy way out. But to get to the root problem requires creativity. It requires community. How do we come together and think about solutions so that we can repair the harms, restore the relationships and rebuild a more just and equitable system where everyone can thrive?” she said.
“I don’t think prisons are fixable, but I hope schools are.”
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