Like cigarettes, junk food should come with a warning: ‘Can kill’

The 1970s was a confusing decade in which to be a smoker. People knew, of course, that smoking was bad for them: the evidence linking it to lung cancer had been incontrovertible since 1956. But despite government education programmes, hiked taxes and restrictions in selling to children, these warnings hadn’t fully permeated the atmosphere.

How could they? Daily life bathed the brain in the idea that smoking was fine. Cigarettes were advertised in magazines, on billboards and at sporting events; they dangled from the mouths of the suave or rebellious in film and on TV; and a nicotine fug enveloped offices, bars and public transport. Could something that everyone was doing, and which suffused the culture, really be that shockingly dangerous?

It was a confusing time, also, to be a tobacco company. You could no longer claim that smoking was supported by doctors, as you did in the 50s – but you were not yet forced to admit on every packet that your product actually killed people. It was only in the 80s and 90s that, festooned with obligatory warnings, cigarette ads started to flirt openly with death: one advert for Silk Cut referenced the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, another for Benson & Hedges featured a dead fish on a coffinlike piano. (If you’re going to die, die with us.)

But in the 70s these companies were still making the uneasy transition between denial and nihilistic acceptance. The idea that you could make cigarettes healthier, that you could acknowledge the warnings but claim they did not apply to your own product, became a central defence and marketing ploy. New “filter” cigarettes (themselves sometimes tainted with dangerous chemicals) flooded the market, falsely claiming to protect against the worst harms of smoking. Thousands switched to “low-tar” cigarettes in an effort to make a healthy choice.

“Considering all I’d heard, I decided to either quit or smoke True. I smoke True” ran one advert in 1976, featuring a sporty-looking girl at a tennis net – “The low-tar, low-nicotine cigarette”.

And this is where we are, I think, in 2024, with what used to be called junk food, and which is now beginning to be called ultra-processed food. UPF is food that has at some stage been ground into unrecognisable pulp and bathed in additives, a definition that is gaining acceptance among experts. But it is nothing too new. We are now, and have been for years, talking about the kind of food that encourages us to eat vast quantities of salt, sugar and fat in one