Very interesting. In the early 80s as public health campaigns attacked the dangers of tobacco, those same tobacco companies bought up food company’s and applied what they learned flavouring cigarettes to increase consumption to foods. Boom UPFs were born.
“these kinds of additives have now become one of the defining characteristics of what makes a food ultra-processed. Her study looks at the development of Lunchables, and how Philip Morris applied the same flavor technologies used to make lower-nicotine cigarettes more palatable to creating lower-fat cheeses and processed meats.”
…
“Schmidt found a quote from a former Philip Morris CEO who said that ultra-processed foods and cigarettes were really similar businesses. He said they were both low-cost consumer packaged goods with a huge market.”
The parallels are interesting, but the claim feels like a bit of a stretch to link the general strategy to tobacco. Chemical flavouring compounds that have been deemed safe for consumption have broad uses. If you want to flavor something like a cigarette, your options are limited to things that are going to have a very strong flavor that can be soaked into components and survive into the smoke itself. Once that is developed, you can put that same compound in just about anything. It’s just reuse into a similar industry. It’s similar to the things that NASA has developed over the decades that became part of consumer goods that have nothing to do with space travel.
And now they’re trying to figure out how to ultra process even harder so they can defeat Ozempic (which apparently can make junk food taste gross)