We are entering Big Food’s Big Tobacco moment. The fight to hold tobacco companies responsible for the deadly health effects and associated health-care costs of their products took decades, culminating in the 1998 $206 billion settlement with 46 states and reforms like a ban on marketing cigarettes to young people. In the ’60s, when free sampler packs of cigarettes were given out to high schoolers, 42% of American adults smoked. Today that number is 12%.
Is that where Big Food is headed with ultra-processed foods, artificial dyes, and sugary beverages? We’re actually further along in that process than many might think. Forces for change are converging across the political, legal, and cultural landscape—and we have the example of the fight against Big Tobacco to draw on.
In December, a landmark, first-of-its-kind lawsuit was filed in Philadelphia on behalf of a teenager alleging that consuming ultra-processed foods led to him developing fatty liver disease and Type 2 diabetes. Among the 11 companies named in the lawsuit are General Mills, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Kellogg’s. Ultra-processed foods “are alien to prior human experience,” the 148-page complaint reads. “They are inventions of modern industrial technology and contain little to no whole food…The explosion and ensuing rise in UPFs in the 1980s was accompanied by an explosion in obesity, diabetes, and other life-changing chronic illnesses.”
The lawsuit goes on to make an explicit tie between Big Food and the rise of UPFs and Big Tobacco, arguing that food manufacturers are “using the same master playbook.”
The connection is more than metaphorical. In the 1980s, tobacco companies Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds bought Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco. In the early 2000s, the food companies were spun off, “but not before leaving a lasting legacy on the foods that we eat,” as Anahad O’Connor put it in The Washington Post.
That’s because, as the complaint notes, “UPF formulation strategies were guided by the same tobacco company scientists and the same kind of brain research on sensory perceptions, physiological psychology, and chemical senses that were used to increase the addictiveness of cigarettes.”
This was confirmed by a 2023 study published in the journal Addiction, which found that the decades when Big Tobacco owned Big Food corresponded to the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which are ultra-processed foods engineered to have a combination of fat, sugar, sodium, and carbohydrates that trigger the brain to encourage excessive eating. In the study, foods from tobacco-controlled brands were 80% more likely to contain powerful combinations of sodium and carbs that made them hyper-palatable and 29% more likely to have similar combinations of sodium and fat.
The study notes that by 2018, the differences between food from the tobacco-owned brands and foods from other companies had disappeared—not because any of the foods became less unhealthy, but because other companies saw that ultra-processed foods sold well and simply copied them.
“Every addictive substance is something that we take from nature and we alter it, process it, and refine it in a way that makes it more rewarding—and that is very clearly what happened with these hyper-palatable food substances,” said Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies food addiction. “We treat these foods like they come from nature. Instead, they’re foods that come from Big Tobacco.”
Read the full article on Fortune.
