As a growing number of Americans cite obesity as the most urgent health problem facing the country, the food industry is looking for a way to profit.

Despite playing a critical role in enabling America’s obesity epidemic, fast food chains have recently announced attempts to make their product seem healthier — a number of new menu items that may substitute whole grain for white or turkey for red meat. But for many of these companies, the rebranding is superficial:

Panda Express: Customers at Panda Express will have two rice choices: Steamed white rice or fried brown rice (brown rice has more nutritional value) Chief Marketing Officer Glenn Lunde described how Panda Express hopes to avoid shocking customers. “If you just sell steamed brown rice, you’re not going to sell that much.” He added, “Aren’t we fabulous?”

Taco Bell: The chain that popularized Doritos Locos Tacos announced it would make 20 percent of its meals meet nutritional guidelines, but not before 2020.

Burger King: Burger King’s limited time turkey burger is its attempt at a “game-changer” healthier option. It still weighs in at 530 calories.

McDonalds: McDonalds’ new McWrap uses a green label to trick customers into thinking it’s healthier. Its “healthy” Egg White Delight is 40 calories less than the original and complete with bacon and cheese.

Many executives say they are hesitant to make any major changes, because they expect healthy foods to taste bad and perform poorly. Huffington Post’s Joe Satran described the motivation for the incremental change: Chains add new items “to make consumers think of their restaurants as healthy — or at least not gratuitously unhealthy — and, by extension, OK to visit. In other words, healthy menu items are marketing tools. Like any other new product introduction, they bring attention to the chain; unlike, say, Cool Ranch Doritos Tacos, they shift perception of the brand toward virtue.”

Of course, the problem is not limited to fast food, with sugary drink brands suddenly advertising their nutrition. At least now consumers will have more information to make healthier choices. Obamacare requires chains with more than 20 locations to post calorie counts on their menus.

For the bulk of the 20th century, Big Tobacco reigned supreme in the advertising world. Through aggressive marketing on billboards, magazine covers, television, radio, and corporate and celebrity sponsorship, cigarette manufacturers successfully hooked half of all American males and a quarter of American females in the 1950s and ’60s on cigarettes — a corporate coup whose adverse health effects are being felt to this day.

But just because the tobacco lobby’s stranglehold on Washington has somewhat subsided over the last several decades doesn’t mean that its marketing strategies have been left to the dustbin of history. To the contrary, manufacturers of some of America’s most medically harmful commodities — including processed foods and indoor tanning beds — take their advertising campaigns straight from Big Tobacco’s playbook. Unfortunately for Americans, the combination of these successful marketing strategies and the products’ addictive qualities make it extraordinarily difficult for consumers to change their lifestyles — even when the commodity in question makes them sick. For instance, somewhere between 14 and 20 percent of smokers who develop lung cancer continue to smoke even after being diagnosed with the disease.

Here are three Big Tobacco marketing strategies that food makers and tanning salons mimic in an effort to achieve that level of brand loyalty:

1. Gaining users’ trust through the use of authority figures.

This is perhaps the tobacco industry’s most infamous marketing tactic from the mid-20th century. In numerous television advertisements from the era, cigarette ads prominently featured doctors and nurses winding down from a long day of work with a smoke. Camel even had an ad claiming that “more doctors smoke Camels than any other brand.” The appeal to authority inherent in this tactic is extremely successful, as consumers react by assuming that the product use is medically safe.

Doctors have long ditched the likes of Philip Morris — but food makers and tanning salons use this same appeal to authority in this day and age. According to a landmark 2010 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, researchers compared tanning marketing techniques to those used by tobacco distributors in the 1950s and found striking similarities — specifically, the use of physicians and faulty medical research downplaying health risks in their ads. “The thinking behind these ads is that if physicians do something, then somehow it must be okay,” said study author Dr. David Jones. “However, these ads omit the results of a recent survey indicating that 100 percent of dermatologists and 84 percent of non-dermatologist physicians would discourage UV tanning for non-medical purposes, even in healthy patients.”

While the food industry is a bit more hard-pressed to find doctors willing to peddle products high in salt, sugar, and fat, they compensate through corporate sponsorship with athletes and sports organizations. For instance, McDonald’s alone is affiliated with the National Hockey League, the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and has had a line of athletes ranging from Kobe Bryant to Venus Williams as its spokespeople.

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In a new study published in the online edition of the British Medical Journal, researchers write that a 50 percent reduction in daily salt intake “could prevent approximately 100,000 deaths from heart attack and stroke in the United States every year.” Curbing salt intake by that high a margin is certainly a mean feat — but not because Americans are saturating their food with sodium. Rather, study authors suggest that the real culprits are food makers who douse their products with harmful levels of salt.

Results from the controlled study — which measured the blood pressures of 3,000 adults who dramatically curbed their salt intake over the course of a month — indicated an average five point drop in systolic blood pressure, confirming similar findings previously published in the Journal. Last month, Harvard researchers conducting a separate study also found that excess sodium was linked to one in ten American deaths. Since high blood pressure is the number one risk factor associated with heart disease and stroke, the findings suggest that U.S. public health would benefit substantially from lower salt consumption.

But actually achieving a substantial change in sodium intake could be difficult considering that Americans aren’t the ones pumping their meals full of salt — food corporations are. “Eighty percent of the salt that we eat is added by the food industry,” study author and professor of cardiovascular medicine Graham MacGregor told FoxNews.com. Those numbers are borne out by CDC data showing that the vast majority of salt consumption derives from processed foods:

Excess fat, sugar, and salt in cheap and readily available processed foods has put 80 percent of all U.S. teens on track to developing heart disease, increasing national health care expenditures. But food makers use their powerful advertising and lobbying arms to convince politicians not to pass public health initiatives that crack down on the addictive substances in their products.

Not all efforts to curb sodium in processed foods have failed, however. New York City recently ran a successful public health campaign convincing 21 major food companies to voluntarily reduce their use of salt. Still, as this latest study’s findings show, there’s a long way to go before making a dent in Americans’ blood pressures, suggesting that a more efficient route would be for the FDA to crack down on permissible sodium content in mass-produced products. “Many, many thousands of people could be prevented from dying prematurely from strokes and heart attacks, if the food industry acted more responsibly,” MacGregor said.

A celebrity-driven PSA that’s been making the rounds on television and subscription services like Hulu urges Americans to stuff Easter baskets this Sunday with toys — rather than the traditional high-sugar, high-fat candies like chocolate bunnies. The ad presents itself as a campaign to “save the bunny” while encouraging parents to shift away from giving kids the unhealthy treats.

Watch it:

It’s worth noting that the project is sponsored by Mattel, Fisher-Price, and various other toy-makers, and the campaign’s webpage directs visitors to retailers that sell their products, so there is an obvious financial motive at play here.

However, while candy consumed on one day out of the year is a mere drop in the bucket compared to other factors feeding into America’s obesity crisis, such as the over-consumption of fast foods and unhealthy school lunches, the empirical data suggests that there is some merit to the movement. Figures compiled by online retailers and the National Confectioners’ Association show that Americans purchase 120 million pounds of Easter candy annually — and the vast majority of it is particularly unhealthy foods like chocolate:

Holidays in general are a gold mine for chocolate makers — particularly for corporate giants Hershey and Mars, the two companies that produce 70 percent of all chocolate. Hershey’s webpage is currently pushing chocolate products such as the aforementioned bunnies, Cadbury cream eggs, and a variety of other sugary concoctions for Easter Sunday. Most chocolate products in the U.S. are actually made up mostly of Monsanto-produced corn.

On factory farms across the country, where animals tend to live in close quarters and diseases can spread quickly, the meat industry pumps its livestock full of antibiotics to fight the spread of bacteria. In fact, livestock consume four times the amount of antibiotics as sick Americans do — and even though the food industry maintains the practice is safe, new scientific research could definitively prove that wrong.

According to a new study published by researchers in Britain and Denmark, drug-resistant bacteria in animals can be transferred to humans. Researchers used genetic sequencing to study an outbreak of a bacterial disease on different farms in Denmark, and they were able to prove that the strain of bacteria that was sickening people actually originated in animals. The findings suggest that the meat industry’s practices could be directly exacerbating a growing global health threat, as an increasing number of diseases around the world — including whooping cough, tuberculosis, and gonorrhea — are beginning to develop a resistance to common antibiotics, signaling a future when even common infections may not be able to be treated.

Scientists have long suspected there may be a link between antibiotic resistance in animals and humans, but previous research hasn’t demonstrated it in quite as much detail before. Now that this study has been made public, however, policymakers are pointing to it as evidence that the FDA needs more regulatory oversight in this area of the meat industry. According to Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) — who recently introduced a measure to require food producers to disclose how often they’re feeding antibiotics to their animals, as well as to allow the FDA to collect more detailed information from drug companies — this new study “ends any debate” about whether giving antibiotics to livestock poses a health risk to humans.

Public opinion is on Slaughter’s side. The majority of Americans believe that antibiotics in food represent a health threat, and more than 60 percent of people say they would be willing to pay at least an additional five cents per pound for meat raised without antibiotics.

In the vast majority of popular U.S. restaurant chains, the menu items geared toward kids aren’t meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutritional recommendations, according to a new study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Instead, most meals on the kids’ menus contain too many calories, too much salt or fat, and not enough nutrients from fruits and vegetables.

CSPI surveyed almost 3,500 combinations of menu items at the top 50 restaurant chains in the country — including Chipotle Mexican Grill, Dairy Queen, Hardee’s, McDonald’s, Subway, and Panda Express — and found that kids’ meals fall short of the USDA’s standards a staggering 97 percent of the time. That’s only a very slight improvement from 2008, when the organization found that 99 percent of kids’ menus weren’t meeting the recommended nutritional standards.

About one-third of U.S. children are currently considered overweight, and 17 percent are considered obese. The childhood obesity rate in this country has tripled since 1980 — and some nutrition experts at least partially fault the food and beverage industries for resisting regulation efforts and continuing to market their unhealthy products specifically to appeal to children. According to CSPI, some of the responsibility to encourage healthy eating habits among American youth also rests with popular restaurants.

“Most chains seem stuck in a time warp, serving up the same old meals based on chicken nuggets, burgers, macaroni and cheese, fries, and soda,” Margo Wootan, CSPI’s nutrition policy director, told Reuters. “It’s like the restaurant industry didn’t get the memo that there’s a childhood obesity crisis.”

The one exception that CSPI found was Subway. All eight of Subway’s kids’ meals, which offer children smaller portions, apple slices, and low-fat milk or bottled water, met CSPI’s nutrition criteria. And that emphasis on healthier options certainly isn’t hurting the company’s bottom line. The sandwich chain now has more stores in the U.S. than McDonald’s does — and in order to catch up, the McDonald’s corporation is scrambling to recast its own products as healthy, too.

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control confirmed that children are still consuming too many of their calories from fatty foods, even as American adults have begun to cut back on their own calorie intake. But there’s some hope. Cities with aggressive nutrition policies have seen significant drops in their childhood obesity rates, suggesting that there are some concrete policy solutions — like holding school cafeterias to nutrition standards, launching anti-obesity marketing campaigns, or even limiting the portion sizes of unhealthy options like sugary drinks — that could help reverse the national trend.

McDonald’s will make its ‘McWrap’ a permanent menu item with the launch of a big ad campaign starting April 1, and it’s clear the company is working to make sure the new product looks like a ‘healthier option’ on the menu.

On Monday, a leaked internal memo showed that McDonald’s believes it would lose 22 percent of its 18-34 year old customers to what’s perceived as the healthier option, sandwich chain Subway, without adding the wrap onto its menu. McDonald’s is also looking to alter its unhealthy image with its green label. Just last week, researchers at Cornell University released a study showing that consumers view green labeling as a shorthand for healthier food:

People tend to think a candy bar with a green calorie label is healthier than ones with red or white labels, even when the number of calories is the same, a Cornell University researcher found.[...]

“Our research suggests that the color of calorie labels may have an effect on whether people perceive the food as healthy, over and above the actual nutritional information conveyed by the label, such as calorie content,” [a Cornell news release] said.

Of course, Subway uses green packaging, along with the tagline “Think Fresh” to convey nutrition. But its sandwiches are not significantly healthier by any means; they contain an average of 608 calories, and the highest calorie sandwich checks in at 570 calories for a six-inch, translating to about 1,140 for the chain’s signature ‘footlong.’ The sandwich chain does offer lower fat content options, however, and some of its options have “Heart Check” approval from the American Heart Association. That perception is paying off; Subway now has more stores in the U.S. than McDonald’s does.

High-calorie, high-salt, high-fat foods that fast food chains serve pose a huge health risk, causing damage to organs including the heart and liver, and obesity. The perception about fast food might be different when it comes to something like a wrap, but the effect is the same. The McWrap pictured above is 590 calories and contains 44 percent (PDF) of a person’s daily fat intake.

Just days after a study linked sugary drink consumption to 180,000 worldwide deaths per year, a study by the same team of Harvard researchers has found salt to be even more deadly.

The preliminary study found a diet high in sodium contributed to 2.3 million cardiovascular deaths worldwide in 2010, and was responsible for one in 10 U.S. deaths. The researchers, who presented the study Thursday at the annual American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans, said 40 percent of those deaths are premature — affecting people 69 years old or younger.

Dariush Mozaffarian, one of the study’s researchers and associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News that salt is more dangerous than sugar largely because of its pervasiveness in the American diet — it’s everywhere, especially in processed, packaged foods:

MOZAFFARIAN: Sugar-sweetened beverages are just one type of food that people can avoid, whereas sodium is in everything. [...] It’s really amazing how pervasive it is. For the average person, it’s very hard to avoid salt — you have to be incredibly motivated, incredibly educated, have access to a range of foods and do all the cooking yourself.

It may take motivation and education, but cutting salt may be exactly what Americans need to do to curb the country’s rising obesity epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Pervention, the human body needs only 180 – 500 milligrams of salt per day to function, and the Institute of Medicne recommends 1,500 milligrams as an adequate salt intake level. But 75 percent of people worldwide consume twice that much, with Americans averaging 3,600 milligrams per day. One study found that cutting “hidden” salt — the kinds in packaged and restaurant foods — could result in 11.1 million fewer cases of high blood pressure each year.

And the threat of salt starts at a young age. A recent study found that 75 percent of pre-packaged meals and snacks for toddlers are high in sodium, and some contain as much as 630 milligrams of sodium — more than half of the U.S. Institute of Medicine’s reccommended 1,000 milligrams daily intake for children aged 1 through 3. In a statement, the study’s researchers explained that high salt intake as a toddler could not only lead to childhood obesity or early cases of high blood pressure; it could also hardwire children to crave saltier foods throughout their lives. “The less sodium in an infant’s or toddler’s diet, the less he or she may want it when older,” said Joyce Maalouf, the study’s lead author and fellow at the CDC.

In 2010, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) spearheaded an initiative to encourage food companies such as Kraft, Heinz, Subway and Starbucks to lower the sodium content in their packaged and restaurant food, and it’s starting to work. But so far, the U.S. government hasn’t taken any similar steps to regulate sodium in packaged or restaurant foods — in 2010, it appeared as though the FDA was going to limit the amount of salt in food products, but that rumor was quickly squashed by the agency.

On Wednesday, Montana’s state Senate advanced legislation that “would allow people to salvage roadkill for food,” arguing that preventing the practice would mean throwing away a perfectly acceptable nutritional source. As bill supporter Sen. Larry Jent (D) put it, “It really is a sin to waste good meat.” But setting aside the inevitable jokes over the proposed “finders, eaters” law, the debate surrounding the measure’s public health implications provides a lens into America’s food safety regulatory scheme — and it’s more complicated than you might think.

Montana is hardly the first state to propose something like this. In fact, there are already roadkill-salvaging laws on the books in at least seven states — including Alaska, Illinois, Georgia, Kentucky, and West Virginia — with varying degrees of regulatory requirements. Most of these laws either require the would-be roadkill consumer to carry a permit that allows them to salvage the kill, or report the salvaging to law enforcement and state wildlife departments. While there are guidelines for how to safely consume the “smooshed meat” — for instance, almost all such laws are limited to run-over game such as elk and deer, which should be “bled, gutted, and quartered” as quickly as possible to cool off the carcass and prevent infections — there isn’t really an enforcement mechanism for them, so the consumer takes on some individual risk.

However, whether or not that risk is greater than the risk of eating mass-produced meats is an open question. Animal protection groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have actually advocated for loosening roadkill standards, claiming that “[e]ating roadkill is healthier for the consumer than meat laden with antibiotics, hormones, and growth stimulants, as most meat is today.” The historical data — and recent events — shows that there is something to that argument. American-produced meat tends to exceed acceptable levels of contamination by most countries’ standards, and the consolidation of meat resources by mammoth corporate distributors like Cargill Beef makes it so that just one contaminated batch necessitates nationwide recalls of tens of thousands of pounds of product. Many public health advocates also argue that food regulators are woefully impotent to hold the meat industry accountable for its shortcomings in the face of lax regulatory enforcement and “ag gag laws” that silence whistleblowers who expose facilities violating food safety standards.

And the argument that roadkill-salvaging laws help prevent the waste of good meat actually could be an important point for low-income communities. Some of this type of legislation is intended to address food insecurity in secluded communities. For instance, Alaska’s caribou- and bear-salvaging provisions are meant to help churches and soup kitchens distribute food to the homeless and the poor in a state where access to roads and super markets isn’t always easy to come by. Montana’s proposed law has similar intentions.

Some Montana legislators have raised concerns over law enforcement’s capacity to evaluate whether or not roadkill is safe for consumption, and the ambiguous liability laws governing shelters and food banks that might distribute such meats. “Despite its good intention, it doesn’t pass the smell test for me,” said state Sen. Kendall Van Dyk (D). But considering America’s lackluster record on meat safety and the widespread — and relatively safe — U.S. culture of hunting big game for personal consumption, those concerns might very well be overstated.

On Tuesday, the RAND Corporation published the results of a preliminary study on South Africa’s HealthyFood initiative, a benefit program sponsored through the nation’s largest private insurance company. The program provides some 260,000 South African households with up to a 25 percent rebate on healthy food purchases — “cash for carrots,” if you will — and the encouraging numbers suggest that similar initiatives could work right here in America.

While the study does suffer from some methodological snags — the biggest being that households’ eating habits were self-reported rather than observed — its authors conclude that the right level of rebates can be a strong catalyst for healthier eating habits. For instance, the survey of 350,000 HealthyFood participants and nonparticipants found that “a 10% and 25% discount on healthy food purchases is associated with an increase in daily fruits and vegetables consumption by 0.38 (95% CI: 0.37 – 0.39) and 0.64 (95% CI: 0.62 – 0.65) servings, respectively,” and that rebate participants were more likely to eat three or more servings of wholegrain foods daily while being less likely to eat foods high in sugar, salt, fried foods, processed meats, and fast food.

Admittedly, the report does not find that the healthier eating habits significantly reduced overweight rates or participants’ average BMIs. However, it does see a statistically significant correlation between higher discount rates and lower obesity, suggesting that the right amount of financial motivation can spur enough eating habit changes to make a dent in obesity rates on the macro level.

So could a similar program work in the U.S. — particularly for low-income Americans who struggle with food insecurity, and often have to resort to high-fat and high-calorie diets to get more nutritional “bang-for-the-buck”? There’s not a whole lot of data on the matter yet. But that will soon change, as a 2011 pilot program under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the “Healthy Incentives Pilot” — mimics the HealthyFood initiative, offering inflated discounts of up to 30 percent cash back on healthy food purchases, and its results will be published later this year. If the findings track South Africa’s, then it could be a game changer for low-income communities often beset by unhealthy food habits and high obesity rates. And incentivizing healthy eating with rebates could be a more effective policy than more blunt and restrictive initiatives, like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s (R) controversial push to limit food stamp purchases to healthy items.

Still, the funding element is key, as the study found that higher rebate levels were required to change the eating habits of people who were entrenched in subpar diets. The South African program offers monthly discounts of up to $500 for a family and $250 for individuals — significantly higher than the average monthly SNAP allotment, which is supposed to be a supplemental benefit (although it doesn’t actually work that way in reality). But South Africa’s example suggests that, given sufficient financial backing, cash for carrots could be a worthwhile undertaking throughout America.