Big Food = Big Tobacco?

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The push to turn Big Food into the new Big Tobacco

Tobacco companies shaped ultra-processed foods. Now critics trying to reform the food landscape are working from the anti-tobacco playbook

By Sarah Todd, Stat, Feb. 6, 2026

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Critics are intensifying a public relations war against ultra-processed food by highlighting its history with the widely distrusted tobacco industry — and exploring how strategies against Big Tobacco might be applied to food. Meanwhile, the food industry is fighting for its reputation with a new seven-figure ad campaign from the trade group Consumer Brands Association that emphasizes the manufacturing jobs it creates and the benefits of “everyday essentials that are convenient, affordable, and above all, safe.”

One of the biggest recent developments was the city of San Francisco’s groundbreaking lawsuit against 10 ultra-processed food manufacturers, filed late last year. “Big Food was, and still is, using the deceitful tactics it inherited from the Big Tobacco industry to flood the market with harmful UPF [ultra-processed food] products and to aggressively sell those products to children,” the lawsuit says…

Overall, more than half the calories American adults consume in a day come from ultra-processed foods. For kids, it’s 62%…

A 2022 paper, co-authored by Gearhardt, argues that addiction to ultra-processed foods meet the scientific criteria used to classify tobacco products as addictive in the 1988 Surgeon General’s report. People keep eating ultra-processed foods even when they want to stop. They have a mood-altering effect on the brain, increasing “dopamine in the striatum at a similar magnitude as nicotine,” by 150% to 200%. They’re so appealing that people keep eating them, and craving them, even when they’re full…[end quote]

This is a fascinating and well-written article. There are many articles and books about addictive foods but this is the first that points out that cigarette companies bought food companies which subsequently shifted their formulations to become more addictive.

I personally can’t eat a single product made by Coke or Pepsi. They are all poison for me.

Changing the way Americans eat would truly have a Macroeconomic impact. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

According to this excellent research, about 5/6ths (83%) of U.S. counties have obesity rates over 25%.

Wendy

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Just as poisonous!

The Captain

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I don’t know if your brother is a label reader. If he is, I’m sure he’s noted the generally much better ingredients in food available in markets overseas. Stuff we allow routinely is actually banned in many countries. Their foods are “clean”. We allow dyes and flavors, HFCS, and other junk because it’s cheaper for Big Food to poison us with that crap, and they own several congress-people.

In Europe, you almost don’t have to read the labels because the products are already clean. And many of them taste better than our stuff. My personal policy is that if I need a degree in chemistry to understand the ingredients, I don’t buy it. I agree that if everyone did that, it would have a huge economic impact. Or if we banned several ingredients, like Europe or Japan does, that also would have a huge impact.

Just HFCS, for example, would affect corn and sugar producers. This one is a government subsidy side effect that makes corn cheap, and sugar expensive, so manufacturers use the corn to make HFCS instead of sugar. If the Farm Bill eliminated those subsidies, that would reverse pretty quickly.

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A lot of “clean” ingredients are harmful, like the multiple versions of sugars, farm grown salmon, and seed oils. Read the labels!

The Captain

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Certainly, sugar is NOT a health food. But it is natural. It doesn’t really matter if it’s cane or beet sugar, it’s still sucrose.

We do not buy farmed fish anymore. It’s wild-caught, or nothing. And we started emphasizing meats that have no hormones or antibiotics. You pretty much don’t have to worry about that with chicken (for some reason, those are banned with chicken), but you do have to worry about beef.

We were clued-in about seed oils sometime last year. I think they are still researching it, but we’ve already switched to avocado oil (for neutral), and olive oil for flavored (and low temperatures since it has a low smoke point).

If it has artificial anything, we don’t buy it. Flavors, colorings…no dice. Yes, we read the labels.**

**As an aside, it’s probably funny watching us in a shop in Japan using our Google Translate to try to read the ingredients on a Japanese label. :slight_smile:

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Better yet, eat food that doesn’t have a “label".

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