Ultra-processed foods didn't become craveable by accident: tobacco companies once owned major food firms and transferred their flavor and mouthfeel engineering to make them hard to stop eating — a documented historical fact, not a conspiracy theory.
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Stripped of the advocacy framing ("the new war on tobacco" is a public-health position, not itself a scientific fact), the historical claim holds up well: Philip Morris acquired General Foods in 1985 and Kraft in 1988, R.J. Reynolds owned Nabisco and Del Monte, and a 2026 UCSF study (Laura Schmidt, drawing on previously undisclosed internal documents) shows Philip Morris explicitly applied its cigarette research — flavor engineering, EEG sensory-pleasure testing — to developing Lunchables. Tobacco companies divested their food holdings by around 2007 under regulatory pressure, but the rise of hyper-palatable ultra-processed food continued after they left. The full "UPF is the new tobacco" analogy remains a public-health advocacy frame (as seen in the cited American Journal of Public Health papers) rather than a point-by-point established fact, but the technical knowledge transfer itself is well documented.
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