Once You Pop

How cigarette companies weaponized food

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I call processed food—or, rather, ultraprocessed food—“weaponized food” with good reason. Ultraprocessed food is weaponized food, because it is specifically designed to assault and overpower the senses, brute-forcing the body’s natural mechanisms of satiety, inhibition and moderation. The end result: You can’t stop eating it—with all that entails, like obesity, diabetes and pretty much every other form of chronic disease you can think of, from Alzheimer’s to ass-cancer. (Yes, I said Alzheimer’s: A new study shows over-50s who eat the most ultraprocessed food have a 56% greater chance of developing dementia over a period of a decade than those who eat the least. That’s a significantly increased risk.)

The weaponization of processed food is different from any other kind of fiendish design that’s ever been applied to food. Yes, cakes and desserts are designed to be delicious and make you want to eat more, and they always have been, but that design was primitive and utilized none of the sophisticated techniques of modern science, neurobiology and advertising. The dude who invented key lime pie or crème caramel—Spanish flan to you Americans—did not do so wearing a white coat in a multimillion-dollar laboratory, surrounded by other dudes in white coats, applying knowledge he learned as a PhD student at Cornell. He did it in a kitchen, with the knowledge of his palate and training as a chef

You could say, quite justifiably, that the design of delicious food was once an art, and had a kind of heroic human element to it that the design of spray cheese, Dr Pepper and Hot Pockets lacks.

The industry euphemism for this new devilish design is “hyperpalatability.” Huge food makers pay big money to armies of scientists who experiment on their products, twiddling knobs and altering sensations like sweetness, saltiness, crunch and chew until consumers reach the so-called “bliss point,” a crescendo of pleasure that makes them eat more, faster. A famous study by Hall et al. showed we eat processed foods 30% quicker than normal foods. The body’s normal mechanisms to signal hunter and fullness, reliant mostly on the release of hormonal signals, don’t have a chance.

Once you pop, you just can’t stop. Really.

That means when we eat ultraprocessed foods, we overeat. And when we eat ultraprocessed foods most or all of the time, we overeat most or all of the time. Which is not good.

The dramatic effects of consuming this food were illustrated in a documentary that aired during the pandemic, in the UK. In “What Are We Feeding Our Kids?”, Dr Chris Van Tulleken spent a month eating a diet of about 80% ultraprocessed food. This is the diet of at least a fifth of the adult population of the UK. Children aged between two and five in the UK not get two-thirds of their daily calories from ultraprocessed food, and children of the same age in the US and Australia aren’t far behind them.

At the start of the experiment, Van Tulleken was by all metrics a normal chap, probably a bit on the skinny-fat side, but still not someone you’d consider unhealthy or chronically ill by modern standards. That changed dramatically by the end of the experiment. After just four weeks, he had gained a significant amount of weight. He suffered constipation and hemorrhoids. He couldn’t sleep, either, and began raiding the fridge in the middle of the night, despite by his own admission not being hungry. His libido disappeared. He developed anxiety and severe mood swings.

Even more shocking, though, were the changes that took place in his brain, as revealed by MRI scans. Areas of the brain associated with reward signals and automatic behavior were rewired in the manner typical of a drug addict. What’s more, they persisted long after the experiment ended and his diet returned to normal. Almost half a year later, when he was able to sit down without wincing because the hemorrhoids were gone, and the excess weight and anxiety had been shed, his brain was still sending him signals to go out and score some crack… I mean, ultraprocessed food. Sorry.

The rewiring, it seems, could be permanent.

There’s no doubt, in my mind, that the transformation of our diets over the last century, from locally produced whole foods to factory-made ultraprocessed food, has been a disaster for our health, and it’s getting worse. Secretary of Health and Human Service Robert F. Kennedy Jr. feels the same way too.

How did we arrive at this juncture?

A big part of answering that question involves looking at the food companies themselves: how they created these new products, and how they stimulated demand, since the products didn’t exist and therefore nobody wanted them not so long ago.

It’s becoming clearer now that a key time period in the transition was the 1980s, when ultraprocessed food as we would now recognize it began to be developed and sold in large quantities, thanks to aggressive marketing with a particular focus on children and parents who might otherwise be hesitant to feed it to them. A central role was played by tobacco corporations, which acquired food companies and then used decades of expertise in hooking consumers on cigarettes to create a whole new market of captive eaters.

The latest edition of the American Journal of Public Health focuses on ultraprocessed foods, and features an extremely illuminating article on the role of one tobacco company, Philip Morris, in marketing the Lunchables brand of kids’ food.

Philip Morris Companies, the conglomerate behind Marlboro, bought General Foods in 1985, when the Lunchables product was still in development. Two years later, it bought Kraft and merged Kraft with General Foods to create the second-largest food corporation in the world. Lunchables were brought to market in 1988, and the brand continued to be developed by Philip Morris until it sold Kraft in 2007.

During that 23-year period, there was essentially no division among Morris’s cigarette, food and alcohol divisions: The same know-how, the same techniques of development and marketing, were applied across all its products. The company called these shared techniques “technical synergies,” and the development of Lunchables was, in a real sense, a model case.

The documents weren’t intended to be seen by the general public. They aren’t flattering. They had to be extracted from Philip Morris through litigation; although the litigation was actually focused on its cigarette products. This shows how inseparable the development of all its products was.

Here’s some of what happened.