I am striving to help our population access and live a healthier life

University of Kansas faculty are striving to advance knowledge, interpret our world, solve problems, spark innovation, create beauty and catalyze imagination through their research, scholarship and creative activity. Through the “I Am Striving” series, we’ll learn more about what inspires KU researchers, as well as the goals and impact of their work. 

Q&A with Tera Fazzino, associate director of the Cofrin Logan Center of Addiction Research and Treatment & associate professor of psychology

Explain your research as you would explain it to someone outside your field, such as your grandparents. 

My research is focused on substances that are widely available in our environment — so alcohol and hyperpalatable foods — and the ways that those can influence our health behavior and potentially lead to health consequences.  

What does your research look like? What methods do you use? 

My research falls along two different lines. For one area of research, I'm focused on using prevention approaches and interventions to help avoid the escalation of various health risk behaviors. That involves clinical trials-related methodology, working with participants directly. Another area of my work is focused on characterizing the addictive qualities of hyperpalatable foods, which have combinations of nutrients that occur at thresholds that make consuming this type of food particularly, or excessively, rewarding. In doing so, we've used a wide combination of strategies from behavioral lab-focused work all the way through using big data sets that represent our food system.

Hyperpalatable foods are foods that have combinations of palatability-inducing nutrients at thresholds that do not typically occur in nature — for example, moderate to high levels of fat and sodium, fat and sugar, or carbohydrates and sodium. These nutrients can have synergistic effects on the ways that we experience the eating occasion and can make them excessively or artificially rewarding to consume. This is distinct from foods that occur that are kind of whole or fresh in nature, which typically only have a single palatability-related nutrient and don't provide an excessively rewarding eating experience.  

What inspires your research? Why are you passionate about this work? 

I find it very interesting and fun to identify novel or creative solutions to long-standing research questions or problems in the field. Also, my work has really revealed the extent to which our food environment does not promote our health and is quite obesogenic. I'm really interested and invested in doing work that can help shift our environment in a manner that better supports public health. 

How does your research directly impact your field, society, Kansas and the world? 

My research impacts people who eat food in our food environment. I think my research has pretty broad applications. Overall, my work has found that hyperpalatable foods are just absolutely saturating our food supply. Anyone who lives in the U.S. on a regular basis probably encounters these foods at every single meal, so it's very hard to get away from them. As such, we see the consequences of this at the population level in terms of our obesity prevalence rates. I'm hoping that my work can help to disrupt this food environment in a manner that promotes people's health. 

What is a recent study/example of work you’d like to share? 

In a recent study, we found that U.S. tobacco companies actually appear to have been influential in shifting our food system towards greater hyperpalatability, unbeknownst to the general population and most scientists. We found that U.S. tobacco companies in the mid ’80s, invested very heavily in the food supply and dominated our food system and sales for over 20 years, and the foods they owned, and the companies, were more likely to produce and sell foods that had elevated fat and sodium or elevated carbohydrates and sodium — all of which were hyperpalatable relative to the same types of foods sold by competitor brands that were not owned by a parent tobacco company. Their influence seems to have resulted in our current food supply of having wide saturation, likely because competitor brands observed their successes and reformulated to try to retain a competitive advantage in the market.

We used the Industry Documents Library at the University of California in San Francisco, which is a massive inventory and repository that is publicly available, that houses documents from any industry-related activity that can influence public health. For our work, we looked at files from the Truth Tobacco archive, which contains a lot of information from the litigation years in the tobacco industry, as well as some documents from the food industry. What we were able to determine from reviewing those documents in detail was the ownership of specific food brands at various times, their sales volumes and all kinds of company-related data that could help us identify what they owned, what they didn't own, through competitor brands, and tracking those, and identifying those in the U.S. Department of Agriculture data sets to conduct our analyses. 

What do you hope are some of the outcomes of your research and work? 

I hope my work will be used in the future to promote regulation of hyperpalatable food products to protect public health. Given that my recent work has found that tobacco industry involvement was likely in shifting the profile towards hyperpalatability in the U.S. food system, there's already a precedent set for how to address substances that the tobacco companies have put into our environment in the tobacco epidemic of the ’50s. Eventually, it came out that tobacco companies were maximizing the addictive quality of their cigarettes. They incurred federal regulation as a result, and so the precedent is set. We can do the same thing with hyperpalatable foods. I think a positive note is that this would be very feasible in our current food supply because the hyperpalatable food definition has explicit quantitative cut points and thresholds that classify a food as hyperpalatable or not. Food companies can be required federally or at the state level to reduce the nutrients in their food to be below the threshold of what induces hyperpalatability. As such, the onus would be largely on the food companies to adjust their ingredients, but it would retain all of the food in the food supply and make options for individual shopping and eating in our current environment and all kinds of circumstances much more in line with promoting health.