From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Fuels Preventable Disease
by jbotz on 2/3/2026, 8:42:51 AM
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
Comments
by: seethishat
I grew up close to Winston Salem, North Carolina. The city with two cigarette brands named after it. Everyone died of emphysema or lung cancer there. As a 10 year old kid, I could buy cigarettes from stores. In the 6th grade, our class took a tour of the RJ Reynolds factory in Tobaccoville, NC (yes that is an actual place) and we watched as our school teachers were given free sample packs of cigarettes.<p>I tell that story because it is true.<p>And I wonder... is there a town named Twinkieville in the USA where everyone dies of obesity and/or diabetes and kids can buy pounds of candy at the store without an ID? Or, is every town in America Twinkieville?
2/3/2026, 9:48:39 AM
by: jcynix
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."<p>"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."<p>Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan <a href="https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/" rel="nofollow">https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/</a>
2/3/2026, 9:35:26 AM
by: beloch
"UPFs share key engineering strategies adopted from the tobacco industry, such as dose optimization and hedonic manipulation. These parallels should inform how we classify and regulate UPFs."<p>------------<p>There was a "Nature of Things" episode on this titled, "Foodspiracy". The reason why UPF's have been designed and marketed with many of the same strategies as tobacco is because several big tobacco companies diversified into food. They literally transferred their expertise from marketing cigarettes to marketing junk food.<p>Companies like Joe Camel started out using cute/cool animal mascots to condition kids so they'd buy Joe Camel cigarettes when they were old enough to smoke (if not sooner). There was a lot of competition for adult smokers, so hooking kids on their brand before any other company got to them was a winning strategy. When they pivoted into UPF's, they immediately put animal mascots and cartoon characters on cereal boxes. They no longer had to wait for their target audience to grow up a bit.<p>It's sobering to find out that companies specializing in unhealthy addiction have literally gone from cigarettes to potato chips and breakfast cereals without missing a step, and kids are their preferred demographic.
2/3/2026, 11:12:32 AM
by: prodigycorp
My caveman brain was psyched out by the idea of stopping my coke drinking habit. I <i>thought</i> I had a soda addiction. Turns out I didnt, I just didnt drink enough water. After I pulled water bottles instead of coke cans from the fridge, the cravings went away.<p>Sometimes we don't need cold baths or extreme regimens to fix all the messed up things we're doing to our bodies. Simple changes go far to heal the damage.
2/3/2026, 9:43:28 AM
by: blackbear_
There is no escaping the fact that feeding addictions is a great business model.
2/3/2026, 9:23:38 AM
by: michalxnet
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on - Sugar Alcohols Ruined My Health: Learn from My Mistakes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4</a><p>A list of sugar alcohols including their classification numbers in Europe is:<p>Sorbitol (E 420)<p>Mannitol (E 421)<p>Isomalt (E 954)<p>Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)<p>Lactitol (E 966)<p>Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)<p>Xylitol (E 967)<p>Erythritol (E 967)
2/3/2026, 9:32:45 AM
by: h33t-l4x0r
So is tobacco ok if it's local? I eat mostly local food and once in a while someone offers me some locally farmed tobacco and I try it. That's not "industry" but it's also probably not great for me.
2/3/2026, 9:20:55 AM
by: anArbitraryOne
I'm glad consumers have a choice. Unlike the ultraprocessed crap they fed us in school.
2/3/2026, 10:55:00 AM
by: testhest
Addition has always been very profitable, why we allow it to be done out in the open is beyond me.
2/3/2026, 9:35:02 AM
by: KempyKolibri
This area is very interesting and lots of this is on the money. That said, I think there are some places where it overreaches and possibly verges on fear mongering based on pretty weak evidence.<p>I'm not sure NSS are necessarily "healthwashing" - they are genuinely a healthier alternative, at least in SSBs. Pointing to some very speculative research about "gut microbiome disruption" as if that somehow means NSS are something we should be concerned about in our diet doesn't seem to reflect the body of evidence on the subject. On balance they seem to be either a neutral or beneficial product, depending on what they replace in the diet.<p>I think one important distinction between UPF and cigarettes is that we have lots of examples of healthy UPFs. Are there any such examples for cigarettes? Even those researchers who voice concerns about the health impacts of UPFs (Kevin Hall, Samuel Dicken) seem to be largely interested in identifying _which_ UPFs might drive poor health outcomes and why, so we can regulate industry to make their products more health promoting.<p>My concern with this analogy between cigarettes and UPFs is that we end up with a movement to completely ban UPFs when they have lots of useful properties (can be stored at ambient temperature, long shelf life, reliable quality) that make them very important for people with limited means. The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
2/3/2026, 10:02:24 AM
by: midtake
What a load of crock! People have agency. Free will. So what if McDonalds puts out a cool new toy in their adult happy meal or some special sauce loaded with glutamates. Fuck em! Say that to them right now, in your head or out loud: fuck em!<p>You can stop this addiction right now by merely doing nothing and not eating "UPFs". You have the power. When you get stressed and want to burn time and energy eating because it's at least eating, how about doing a different thing? Each one of us is powered by a soul that can defy these behavior loops with some self-reflection.
2/3/2026, 10:10:10 AM
by: fastThinking
This reads less like nutrition science and more like addiction engineering. The tobacco analogy isn’t rhetorical, it’s structural.
2/3/2026, 9:37:26 AM
by:
2/3/2026, 9:18:20 AM
by: slowhadoken
Someone the other day told me that THC cures cancer so it’s okay to smoke pot indoors. We’re cooked.
2/3/2026, 9:33:00 AM
by: CrzyLngPwd
Most food in supermarkets is now just slop. Foam for bread, veggies that have been grown as fast as possible and packaged as fresh despite being weeks or months old, sprayed with chemicals and shipped halfway around the world, meat raised in a shed and fed one food, which is then injected with water to increase it's weight, freerange eggs that were laid 6 weeks ago and have had their protective layer washed off so must be refrigerated...and on it goes.
2/3/2026, 10:13:36 AM