alt Hacker NewsHow the Tobacco Industry Drove the Rise of Ultra-Processed Foods (2025)
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Japan has ultra processed foods and they don't seem to have an obesity epidemic.
They do have a strong education system that teaches cooking and food budgeting and related.
They also don't have a marijuana epidemic.
I recently discovered just how much food engineering goes into products like potato chips and similar items, not only in the flavor, but also in the texture and even the sound it makes.
There's someone at the factory who basically spends their time eating samples from new batches to ensure they're exactly as expected.
Is Huel ultra processed food too? They promote themselves as healthy meals and I am long time subscriber. I keep telling myself that even if it is not like cooking from raw ingredients, it is still far from a greasy junk food at kebab shops and McDonalds.
Companies should be required to provide the full supply-chain of the ingredients. On the packaging. With addresses. And no PO-boxes.
Reading through this and thinking about the problem in a blame-free way leads me to see the tobacco companies as a through-line for product packaging optimization that transcends any specific use. "The first patented cigarette-making machine was invented by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno of Mexico in 1847." [0] This puts high volume manufacture of cigarettes right at the cusp of the second industrial revolution with improvements in "steel-making processes, mass production, assembly lines, electrical grid systems, large-scale manufacture of machine tools, and use of advanced machinery in steam-powered factories." [1]
The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems.
Interesting, but I wouldn't oversimplify this to one cause. Home cooking of meals and making of lemonade/fruit punch used to be a norm. Society chose to move towards taking a lazy way out with microwave dinners and takeouts. On the other hand, Asian countries have healthier fresh made bento boxes in convenience stores so it's not time saving alone. At the end of the day, companies deliver what consumers want and try to discern demand, what else are they supposed to do?
If you're listening to the podcast or video, the presentation starts at 8:58!
some other light reading on this topic:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2026.3085...
> Buying into the food industry also facilitated the tobacco companies in applying the knowledge, skills, and strategies developed from their tobacco businesses to another business domain in ultraprocessed foods and beverages. For example, Philip Morris applied its aggressive marketing tactics developed from its tobacco businesses to market ultraprocessed foods to the US public. Furthermore, US tobacco companies and their food companies were systematically involved with developing hyper-palatable foods, which have elevated addictive properties.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332
>Tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be classified as fat and sodium hyper-palatable foods (HPF) and 80% more likely to be classified as carbohydrate and sodium HPF than foods that were not tobacco-owned between 1988 and 2001 (P-values = 0.005–0.009).
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/cigarette-giants-bought-food-compan...
> Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds led the transition to sweetened beverages in 1963 when it purchased Hawaiian Punch from Pacific Hawaiian Products Company, according to the documents. The beverage previously had been promoted to adults as a cocktail mixer, but R.J. Reynolds sought to beef up the drink’s “Punchy” mascot – a counterpart to the “Joe Camel” cartoon character the company used to promote cigarettes – and featured it on toys, schoolbook covers, comics, tumblers, clothing and TV commercials. Punchy became the “best salesman the beverage ever had,” according to tobacco industry documents.
> In the ’60s and ’70s, the company conducted taste tests with children and mothers to evaluate sweetness, colors and flavors for Hawaiian Punch product line extensions. The children’s preferences were prioritized, the authors noted.
> By 1983, R.J. Reynolds introduced the nation’s first juice box, marketed as a “handy little carton that comes with its very own straw.” This innovation was largely responsible for a 34 percent jump in sales, according to industry documents.
other fun things might include just reading the Wikpedia pages on major food companies like Kraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Foods_Inc.#Financial_exp...
> At the end of 1988, Philip Morris Companies purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion. In 1989, Kraft merged with Philip Morris's General Foods unit—makers of Oscar Mayer meats, Maxwell House coffee, Jell-O gelatin, Budget Gourmet frozen dinners, Entenmann's baked goods, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light and Tang powdered beverage mixes, Post Cereals, Shake 'n Bake flavored coatings and numerous other packaged foods—as Kraft General Foods. Its aggressive product development was reversed after the merger, as it became slow in addressing issues on its product lines due to its size, and also company politics.[4]
> In 2000, Philip Morris (renamed Altria in 2003) acquired Nabisco Holdings for $18.9 billion and merged the company with Kraft Foods the same year.[212][4] Also in 2000, the company acquired Balance Bar.[213] In 2001, Philip Morris sold 280 million Kraft shares via the third-largest IPO of all time, retaining an 88.1% stake in the company.
> In the early 1960s ...
Huh? Ultra processed foods got very popular long before the 1960s. Wonder Bread came out in 1921. Kellogg came out with corn flakes in the 1900s. Etc.
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We eat engineered low-quality material, not real food.
> “About 60% of the calories in Americans’ diets are from ultra-processed foods,” says Schmidt, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event in May. “In the mid-’80s, when we see ultra-processed foods starting to scale up in the American food supply, we also see obesity starting to really rise. That is the moment when some of the largest food companies are owned by tobacco companies.”
A reminder here that while there's an important directional claim behind stuff like this, "ultra-processed food" is an extremely silly category that does violence to the argument.
UPFs include:
* Whole wheat bread (most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health)
* Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
* Literally all baby formula
* Any kind of plant-based meat replacement
* Many supermarket hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers)
You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite).
You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering. Hyperpalatable foods are almost always UPFs, but the other direction doesn't hold at all.