Today’s Tin Foil Talk:
#BigTobacco #BigFood #Addictive
Did Big Tobacco teach America how to eat?
What if the modern American obsession with ultra-processed food wasn’t just companies trying to make food taste better?
What if the companies that spent decades figuring out how to make cigarettes appealing, habit-forming, and commercially irresistible brought those same skills into the food industry?
And here’s where the tin foil gets REALLY close to the evidence.
First: YES, they actually owned the food companies.
Philip Morris bought General Foods and Kraft and created Kraft General Foods.
R.J. Reynolds merged with Nabisco.
Two massive tobacco companies were now sitting inside the American food system.
And research into internal tobacco documents found evidence that marketing expertise, personnel, strategies, and even research moved from tobacco into food.
That’s the first big piece of the puzzle.
Then ask… What was Big Tobacco REALLY good at?
Understanding people.
What makes them buy?
What makes them come back?
What emotional associations sell a product?
How do you turn a product into part of someone’s lifestyle?
And apparently, some of that knowledge followed the money into food.
NOW HERE’S THE PART THAT MADE ME GO… “Wait. WHAT?”
A 2024 study found that between 1988 and 2001, tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be packed with combinations of fat, salt, and other ingredients that make foods especially hard to resist.
And they were 80% more likely to fall into another category of foods designed to be extremely appealing and easy to keep eating.
The researchers concluded tobacco companies may have selectively pushed these highly craveable foods into the U.S. food system.
Now… THAT DOES NOT PROVE: “Philip Morris deliberately made Oreos addictive.”
We can’t honestly say that.
But it DOES raise a pretty damn interesting question…
Why were tobacco-owned foods disproportionately likely to be engineered to be so damn hard to stop eating?
And then there’s the marketing.
Bright colors.
Characters.
Games.
Collectibles.
Fun shapes.
Lunchables.
Sugary cereal.
Snack cakes.
The food isn’t presented as: “Here are some calories.” 
It’s presented as: FUN.
And Big Tobacco understood psychological marketing VERY well.
So did that expertise transfer into food?
Yes… there’s documentation for that.
Did tobacco companies invent ultra-processed food? No.
Did they single-handedly create America’s food problems? Absolutely not.
But did they potentially help shape the development and marketing of highly craveable processed foods?
That’s no longer just tin foil.
So maybe the question isn’t: “Did Big Tobacco secretly make food addictive?”
Maybe it’s: How much of our modern food environment was designed by people who already knew exactly how to sell us a habit?
— Katie
Word & Weekdays
Come find me in the places where I’m usually writing, making, photographing, or going down a rabbit hole.
📸 Instagram: @katie.wordandweekdays
📘 Facebook: @katie.wordandweekdayss
📌 Pinterest: @wordandweekdays