Big tobacco tricked us into eating bad food
For decades, tobacco companies hooked people on cigarettes by making their products more addictive. Now, a new study suggests that tobacco companies may have used a similar strategy to hook people on processed foods.
In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables. By the 2000s, the tobacco giants spun off their food companies and largely exited the food industry, but not before leaving a lasting legacy on the foods that we eat.
Hyper-palatable foods
The new research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. In the past 30 years, hyper-palatable foods have spread rapidly into the food supply, coinciding with a surge in obesity and diet-related diseases.
In the decades the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies. Tobacco- owned foods were 80% more likely to contain potent combinations of carbs and sodium that made them hyper-palatable. Tobacco-owned brands were also 29% more likely to contain similarly potent combinations of fat and sodium.
The study’s findings suggest that tobacco companies engineered processed foods to hit what is known as our “bliss” point and elicit cravings, said Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Hyper-palatable foods have a lot in common with addictive substances, she said. They contain ingredients from naturally occurring plants and foods that have been purified, concentrated and transformed into products that are quickly absorbed into our bloodstreams, which amplifies their ability to light up reward centers in our brains.
“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,” said Gearhardt, who was not involved in the study. “We treat
these foods like they come from nature. Instead, they’re foods that come from Big Tobacco.”
Large financial returns
Tobacco companies got into the food business 60 years ago to diversify their product portfolios. These firms had extensive libraries of colors, flavors and additives that they developed for cigarettes, and executives realized they could use these ingredients to make a variety of processed foods.
In the 1960s, R.J. Reynolds launched a project to develop sugary drinks, which involved market research on children. The research manager noted that many of the flavors the company had developed for cigarettes “would be useful in food, beverage and other products,” leading to “large financial returns.”
The following year, RJR bought the maker of Hawaiian Punch, which at the time was a cocktail mixer available in only two flavors. After conducting dozens of market research studies on children and housewives, RJR expanded Hawaiian Punch to at least 16 flavors, including many preferred by kids.
RJR used a cartoon mascot, Punchy, to market Hawaiian Punch to children. For decades, Punchy appeared in TV commercials, Sunday comics, schoolbook covers, toys and magazines, helping to generate tens of millions of dollars in sales and becoming what RJR called “The best salesman the beverage has ever had.”
Its success with Hawaiian Punch led RJR to expand into other foods, including puddings and maple syrup. Then in 1985 the tobacco giant acquired Nabisco, which catapulted the company into a dominant player in the food industry. The conglomerate went on to launch many successful new processed foods, including Teddy Grahams, a
bite- sized children’s snack that soon became the third best- selling cookie behind Chips Ahoy and Oreo, both also produced by Nabisco.
RJR Nabisco marketed Teddy Grahams as “a delicious yet wholesome snack because they’re made with graham flour and other wholesome ingredients.” Yet the product was predominantly made from white flour and contained just two grams of graham flour in a oneounce serving.
Snackwell effect
The snack was so popular that Nabisco created an adult version of it, Honey Maid Honeycomb Graham Snacks. “Nabisco reasoned that the sweet taste and relatively healthful image could also hook adults,” according to a 1990 New York Times article about the launch of the new snack.
A couple years later, as the low-fat craze was underway, Nabisco introduced its wildly popular SnackWell’s cookies, which reached sales of almost a halfbillion dollars in only three years. SnackWell’s low-fat and fat-free cookies appealed to weight-conscious consumers. But the snacks contained plenty of sugar and calories, and critics pointed out that people would often binge on them because they believed they weren’t fattening — a phenomenon known as the “SnackWell effect.”
By 2018, the differences in previously tobacco- owned foods and other foods had mostly disappeared. It’s not that foods got healthier, but that other companies saw what worked. Many products likely were reformulated to make them just as hyper-palatable as those sold by their competitors.