Did Big Tobacco make food addictive?

Another myth gathers pace

In the 1980s, two big US tobacco companies diversified into food. Philip Morris (now Altria) bought General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1986. RJ Reynolds bought Nabisco in 1985. With the threat of litigation looming over their cigarette businesses, processed food was considered a safe and wholesome bet. Little did they know that wowsers would one day start going after ‘Big Food’.

But now they have and as the war on food gathers pace, a new narrative is emerging.

“Many other food companies” is pushing it. Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco were the big three. And is it really true that “many of the unhealthy foods you see today were created by Big Tobacco”?

Our man claims to have peer-reviewed evidence…

Let’s take a look at that study (Fazzino et al. 2023). It begins with some bold claims, such as this…

Tobacco companies maximized the addictiveness of their cigarettes by using a specific nicotine content delivery threshold (≥ 0.7 mg) and manipulating the form of nicotine to maximize its delivery upon inhalation [4, 6]. They also added ingredients to increase the palatability and acceptability of cigarettes, such as menthol and sugar [7]. Thus, tobacco companies used product formulation as a key tool in maximizing the addictiveness of their cigarettes.

Menthol cigarettes were invented in the 1920s and the reference the authors give [7] doesn’t even mention sugar. Cigarettes don’t need any tinkering to be addictive, but let’s go with the idea that Big Tobacco was the master of ‘product formulation’ for a moment.

.… companies that specialized in creating addictive tobacco products led the development of the US food system for > 20 years (see Fazzino [18] for a detailed review of industry activities). In this regard, evidence has revealed that RJR and PM directly applied their tobacco product formulation strategies to their food company practices [8, 9].

This is such an important assertion for what follows that we need to check references [8] and [9]. Both of them were co-authored by the Bay Area propagandist Stanton Glantz (as was [7]). The first is about RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris marketing soft drinks to kids. The second is about Kraft marketing food to ethnic minorities. Neither of them shows that tobacco-owned food companies used Big Tobacco ‘strategies’ to reformulate food.

Nevertheless, Fazzino et al. claimed to have found such evidence. Their study - titled ‘US tobacco companies selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the US food system: Empirical evidence and current implications’ - looked at the nutritional make up of food between 1988 and 2001, comparing products made by tobacco-owned companies with those made by other companies. Products with high levels of salt and sugar are assumed to be ‘hyper-palatable food’ (HPF) and therefore dangerous/addictive.

The authors go to great lengths to bury them in the text, but the study’s key findings were:

There was no significant association between tobacco company ownership and the likelihood that food items were HPF overall

And…

No significant interaction effects between tobacco ownership and year were observed for HPF overall (FSOD HPF, FS HPF or CSOD HPF; P-values = 0.088–0.825), suggesting that the likelihood that food items became HPF across years did not vary according to tobacco ownership

And…

… we did not find direct evidence of product reformulation

The authors also looked at data from 2018 and found that there was no significant difference between the nutritional content of food produced by companies that had a history of tobacco ownership and those which did not. HPF made up 75.2% of the portfolio of companies with a history of tobacco ownership whereas the figure was 76.9% for the rest of the market.

The authors cope with these awkward findings by focusing on salt. It turns out that tobacco-owned food companies were significantly less likely to be selling products that were high in sugar between 1988 and 2001, but they were more likely to be selling products high in salt. It is fairly obvious that this is because different companies sell different products, as the authors eventually admit...

The tobacco companies’ food product portfolios were heavily represented by meal-based items such as meats, cheeses and frozen dinners, which typically meet criteria as fat and sodium HPF [20, 26]. Thus, the development of fat and sodium HPF align with their food company portfolios. Additionally, tobacco companies owned leading cookie and cracker brands (e.g. Nabisco) [20], which produced foods that may be carbohydrate and sodium HPF, which is also consistent with our findings.

The key point is that the tobacco-owned companies did not produce more ‘hyper-palatable’ food overall and they did not disproportionately increase their production of such foods during the period in question. Ultimately, the authors resort to criticising the tobacco-owned companies for selling hyper-palatable food at all.

Our study found strong evidence indicating that tobacco companies were consistently involved with HPF products over time; however, we did not find direct evidence of product reformulation, and further work is needed to understand and characterize tobacco company involvement in this area.

This is a really lame conclusion. All they are doing is accusing Kraft and Nabisco of having “selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the US food system”. No kidding! Nabisco stands for the National Biscuit Company, for God’s sake! They were selectively disseminating (whatever that means) tasty biscuits long before RJ Reynolds came along.

As usual with a ‘public health’ study, the authors end with a political call to action…

Despite growing scientific evidence regarding the addictive properties of HPF [19], there are no federal regulations addressing HPF accessibility. The state of the food environment for US consumers bears a striking resemblance to the US environment in the 1950s during the tobacco epidemic, before the US federal government regulated the availability of tobacco products.

No slippery slope there then!

This study was published barely six months ago, but - as the tweets above show - it is already being cited by normies as evidence that ‘many of the unhealthy processed foods you see today were created by the Big Tobacco’ and ‘the same tactics they used to get people addicted to cigarettes are the same methods they used to get people addicted to foods’. It is only a matter of time before this becomes the conventional wisdom, another idiotic factoid of the counter-enlightenment.