Big tobacco hooked us on ultra-processed foods. It might teach us how to cut back

Ultra-processed foods often have added sugar and artificial flavorings, similar to how cigarettes were developed. Shana Novak/Digital Vision/Getty Images hide caption

Tobacco companies spent decades honing marketing strategies, flavor engineering and processing technologies that helped addict consumers to cigarettes. Then, in the 1980s, they started buying up large food firms and deployed these same strategies to sell more ultra-processed foods.

So says Laura Schmidt, a professor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who has been studying old tobacco company archives.

She's one of dozens of researchers who contributed to a new series of papers published June 3 in a special section of the American Journal of Public Health . Together, many of them make the case that the fight to curb our over-consumption of ultra-processed foods should become the new war on tobacco.

The researchers say these foods – things like salty chips, sugary sodas and prepackaged meals – which now dominate the American diet, have become major drivers of poor health, and the time to act is now.

The new research "adds to a growing body of evidence that these [food] products are associated with chronic disease, that they have addictive characteristics, and that they were also intentionally developed by tobacco and food companies," says Nicholas Chartres , an associate editor of the journal and one of the authors of the new papers.

He and other researchers say the same sort of public health strategies that were sharpened during the war on tobacco could help Americans cut back on these foods.

Back in the 1980s, tobacco giants began aggressively expanding into manufactured foods, buying up some of the biggest food firms. For example, Philip Morris used to own Kraft General Foods and RJ Reynolds owned Nabisco. This was the era when ultra-processed food production really ramped up in the U.S., Schmidt says.