Chemically created Food Addiction: The push to turn Big Food into Big Tobacco/ Stat News

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

https://www.statnews.com/2026/02/06/maha-movement-using-anti-tobacco-playbook-against-big-food/

Camille MacMillin/STAT

By Sarah Todd

Feb. 6, 2026

So you’re a bear in the forest, and you’re hungry. When you trundle toward a raspberry bush and get your first taste of ripe, sweet fruit, dopamine floods your brain, pleasure as a form of instruction: More of this. Faithful to your body’s signals, you’ll be back to these same bushes throughout the summer, and every summer after that.

The dopamine hits that a tasty meal provides help animals — people included — survive. But ultra-processed food manufacturers have perverted the brain’s built-in reward system, according to researchers, nutrition advocates, and leaders across the political spectrum, keeping people coming back for the Cheetos and Chips Ahoy! that wreak havoc on their health.

Now the question is whether the food industry will change. 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 products and to aggressively sell those products to children,” the lawsuit says. The case is the first time the U.S. government has taken on the industry and may pave the way for future complaints, much in the way tobacco litigation had state attorneys general teaming up to land major settlements, according to Harvard Law School professor Emily Broad Leib.

Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. struck a similar note in a radio interview in late January, explaining how R.J. Reynolds and Altria Group (then known as Philip Morris) steered food giants like Nabisco and Kraft through the 1980s and 1990s. “They moved all of these thousands of scientists who were for years making tobacco more addictive, and they moved them to figure out ways to make food addictive,” said Kennedy, whose recently released U.S. dietary guidelines urge Americans to stay away from ultra-processed foods.

“We’ve forgotten what real nourishment and satisfaction feels like,” said Ashley Gearhardt, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who’s part of the push to treat Big Food through the lens of tobacco. Her most recent paper, published this week in The Milbank Quarterly journal with co-authors from Harvard and Duke universities, argues that because cigarettes and ultra-processed foods are both industrially engineered to be addictive, anti-tobacco strategies offer a roadmap for future public health efforts. Just as cigarette companies titrated the precise amount of nicotine and additives in their products to deliver the quick rush that smokers craved, she said, food companies calculated combinations of salt, sugar, fat, and flavor in “just the right dose, so people are stimulated but not satisfied.”

The food industry rejects the association with tobacco. “Comparisons between food and tobacco are inaccurate and risk oversimplifying complex nutrition challenges,” Rocco Renaldi, secretary-general of the International Food and Beverage Alliance, said in a statement. “Tobacco is inherently harmful and unsafe at any level of use. Food, by contrast, is essential to life, and many foods that are labeled ‘ultra-processed’ — including whole grain breads, fortified cereals, and shelf-stable staples — contribute important nutrients.”

Gearhardt sees her work as part of a broader movement to highlight all the ways innate human drives for pleasure and connection have been “hijacked and wired toward corporate profits.”

“We’re caught in the cycle, whether it’s cigarettes or ultra-processed foods and beverages or social media or sports betting — all of these things are like the junk-food equivalents of trying to feel rewarded,” Gearhardt said. “And I think, in our bones, we know that this isn’t what life is supposed to feel like. I’m not supposed to feel this frantic and constantly unsettled, and like my mind’s always looking for the next fix.”

The grocery aisles that tobacco built

Gearhardt grew up on a 100-acre farm in rural Ohio. Her family grew corn for ethanol, soy for soybean oil, and hay for cattle, encouraged by agricultural policies that favored those crops. “There honestly wasn’t a single thing on our farm that we could eat directly,” she said.

In addition to working the farm, Gearhardt’s parents were attorneys, which meant they had enough money for nutritious food. But they didn’t have a lot of time to cook, so her family relied heavily on frozen meals and ultra-processed foods that they all perceived as healthy. Because fat was the big dietary villain at the time, Gearhardt said, her pantry was stocked with foods like caramel-flavored rice cakes, low-fat bagels with I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray, and Special K strawberry cereal. “We had very few fruits and vegetables in the house,” she said.

Many Americans still live much the same way. Certain elements come in and out of vogue — these days fat’s back in, while seed oils and artificial ingredients are out. But overall, more than half the calories American adults consume in a day come from ultra-processed foods. For kids, it’s 62%.

These foods became omnipresent in our diets not by accident, but by design.

R.J. Reynolds got an early start in the ultra-processed food and beverage business, purchasing Hawaiian Punch and Penick & Ford, which made starches and gums used in processed food, in the 1960s. Under Reynolds, Hawaiian Punch went from a cocktail mixer to a brightly colored children’s drink in innovative packaging now known as the juice box. It was not merely a tobacco company, its manager of biochemical research declared back in 1962, but “in the flavour business.”

By the end of the 1980s, Reynolds had snapped up Nabisco, maker of Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers; Del Monte; Planters Lifesavers; and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Not to be outdone, Philip Morris controlled General Foods, maker of Kool-Aid and Jell-O, as well as Kraft, purveyor of Oscar Mayer wieners and Velveeta cheese, and 7Up. Later, it would acquire Nabisco.

Both tobacco titans also owned alcohol companies. One Philip Morris executive said the goal was to control “all the pleasure drugs that are not regulated.”

Tobacco scientists took what they’d learned about how to make their products irresistible and passed those lessons onto food companies, internal documents show. (The benefits flowed both ways — Philip Morris developed a low-nicotine cigarette with extraction technology that General Foods used for coffee beans.) A Chicago Tribune investigation, for example, found that a leading Philip Morris nicotine researcher shared his work on how the brain processes smell and taste with Kraft food scientists.

Tobacco companies also applied marketing strategies that had worked with cigarettes to foods explicitly marketed to children and low-income demographics. When Philip Morris introduced Kool-Aid points redeemable for swag, one executive wrote that it was “our version of the Marlboro Country Store,” a cigarette loyalty program. Kraft used Philip Morris’s tobacco database to persuade corner stores in low-income neighborhoods to carry their sugary drinks, journalist Michael Moss reports in his 2013 book “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.”

Though tobacco companies divested from the food industry in the 2000s, the aisles of American grocery stores are still stocked with the products they helped create.

Understanding ultra-processed food addiction

Given the tobacco industry’s influence, it’s fitting that a growing body of research supports the idea that, like nicotine, ultra-processed foods are addictive.

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.

Gearhardt also sees similarities in how the food and tobacco industries use flavor to mask what she calls “low-quality products.” Cigarettes add sweeteners and flavors like synthetic chocolate to what she says are essentially gelatinized tobacco strips that also contain additives like ammonia. Food companies, meanwhile, put additives in the base of blitzed starches like corn and potato that make up so many savory snacks and breakfast cereals.

Because blitzing of the “starch slurry” makes molecules in the starches smaller and more porous, they break down more rapidly, producing that melt-in-your-mouth quality that makes it so easy to plow through an entire bag of cheese puffs without even noticing. “That’s so similar to the core mechanism of how you create cigarettes, where you’re trying to increase the speed of absorption in the body,” Gearhardt said. And in both cigarettes and ultra-processed food, she said, flavoring agents and additives provide bursts of flavor not found in nature.

Research shows the companies’ shift toward hyper-palatability. Comparing foods on the shelves in 1988 and 2001, a recent paper found that products that had been owned by tobacco companies were 29% more likely to combine higher levels of fat and sodium, and 80% more likely to combine carbohydrates and sodium.

“I think that what we’re learning about the cigarette addiction model and how it got applied to food is going to revolutionize how we think about addiction,” said Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California San Francisco who studies how companies shape our health.

Getting ultra-processed food addiction formally recognized as a medical diagnosis, supporters say, would promote research on potential treatments and encourage policies and regulation that focus on the food industry’s culpability. But Schmidt says the groups responsible for creating official diagnoses — expert committees at the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association — are “excruciatingly conservative.”

It’s possible that GLP-1 drugs will speed that process along. The weight loss drugs seem to muffle cravings for substances like tobacco and alcohol as well as food. “The idea that they are working on that mechanism in the brain highlights the addictive nature of ultra-processed foods,” said Diana Winters, who researches food and health law at the University of California Los Angeles.

Lessons from the tobacco playbook

There are, of course, ways that the comparisons between cigarettes and ultra-processed foods fall short. Writing in The Atlantic, Nick Florko noted that food is a more complicated issue for public health campaigns than tobacco: “To push Americans away from cigarettes, public-health advocates had a simple message: Don’t smoke. There is no equivalent slogan for food.” (Perhaps the dietary guidelines’ newly launched mandate to “eat real food” will catch on.)

Some other strategies from the anti-tobacco playbook may not translate so well to ultra-processed foods. Higher taxes on cigarettes were another important factor in helping the U.S. adult smoking rate fall dramatically over the past few decades, said Winters. She’s not sure if taxing ultra-processed foods the same way would be viable: “They make up such a large part of the American diet.”

A more selective approach could work. After five U.S. cities introduced higher taxes on soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages, one study found that consumption fell. Eight cities now have such taxes. (Some were passed with help from donations by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which also supports STAT’s chronic disease coverage as well as many anti-smoking efforts. Bloomberg Philanthropies does not have any editorial input on STAT’s articles.)

Litigation may also prove more complicated than it was with tobacco. While diet is a major factor in chronic illnesses like cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, there’s not yet consensus on what ultra-processed foods are, and research is still evolving on whether, and how, their health effects may be distinct from foods that are generally higher in fat, sugar, and sodium.

There is, however, evidence that food industry leaders have long been aware of the health concerns. Geoffrey Bible, who led Philip Morris from 1994 to 2002, told Moss that the company knew during his tenure that people were criticizing their foods for being too high in salt, fat, and sugar. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it,” he said of the logic at the time. “If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market.”

Breaking out of the doom loop

Besides advertising campaigns, there are a lot of ways that the food industry may push back against comparisons to tobacco as well as efforts to control its offerings. “I think the biggest threat is reformulation,” said Gearhardt, as with when tobacco companies rolled out “better for you” features like filters. Evidence suggests the filters were no safer than the alternatives, and possibly more harmful. Altria Group and Reynolds American did not respond to requests for comment.

But Gearhardt also sees promise in the fact that healthier alternatives to ultra-processed foods are already abundant. “We just have to reacclimate our tastes and our brain to that, and demand that our government officials start funneling money toward making real food affordable and convenient and accessible,” she said.

When people quit smoking, they don’t just lower their risks of illnesses like lung cancer and heart disease. Studies show people who quit have lower rates of anxiety and depression and more positive outlooks on life overall. Gearhardt sees the potential knock-on effects of giving up ultra-processed foods as perhaps even more vast — perhaps opening up a way to escape the contemporary doom loop of tech-enabled anxiety and isolation.

On an average day, you might eat a bag of chips, “which makes you feel low-energy and sluggish,” Gearhardt said. “Then you don’t have the energy to go see your friends, so you cancel, and then you’re binge-watching Netflix while scrolling social media on your phone, which makes you not sleep well,” she said. “It’s this nasty cycle.” Breaking free of the ultra-processed foods designed to keep us chasing pleasure, she thinks, could help us all do more of what actually feels good.