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FILE 033 · VOL V · You Already Ate It
The Men Who Made Cigarettes Addictive Also Made Your Favorite Snacks
They did not make it delicious. They made it impossible to stop.
Based on: Big Tobacco and Snack Foods
Intake record
| Recovered from | Corporate flavor laboratory, New Jersey, during a building sale; one sealed sample jar |
|---|---|
| Contents | Lab notebook (Formula 11), sensory test data, a one-way mirror's maintenance log |
| Finder | Facilities contractor |
| Status | The sample jar was destroyed by the facilities contractor. He says he does not remember eating any of it. |
Recovered file
In 1985, the tobacco company Philip Morris bought General Foods. Three years later it bought Kraft. That same year, 1985, R. J. Reynolds merged with Nabisco. For the better part of two decades, the companies that had spent half a century perfecting the most addictive consumer product in history owned some of the most popular food brands in America: the cookies, the crackers, the boxed dinners, the powdered drinks that filled the center aisles of every grocery store. [1]
In 2023, researchers at the University of Kansas compared the foods those tobacco companies owned to the foods they did not. Between 1988 and 2001, the tobacco-owned foods were twenty-nine percent more likely to be engineered to hit a specific, overwhelming combination of fat and salt, and eighty percent more likely to hit an overwhelming combination of carbohydrates and salt. Researchers call these foods hyperpalatable. Today, they make up most of what Americans eat. [2]
The food industry has a term for the exact point of sweetness at which pleasure peaks and a person wants more. It is called the bliss point. Engineers find it the way you find a radio station, by testing until the signal is strongest. They also have a name for snacks that melt so quickly in the mouth that the brain never registers how much was eaten. They call it vanishing caloric density. [3]
In 2019, scientists at the National Institutes of Health locked twenty adults in a research ward for a month. For two weeks, they could eat as much as they wanted of ultra-processed food. For two weeks, as much as they wanted of minimally processed food, matched for sugar, fat, salt, and fiber. On the ultra-processed diet, people ate about five hundred more calories a day, without noticing, and gained weight. [4]
They did not choose to eat more. Their bodies chose for them. That is the product.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
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