Whenever ultra-processed food is compared to tobacco, the reaction is predictable.
That’s an exaggeration, food isn’t cigarettes.
Emotionally, that feels true. Structurally, it misses the point. The comparison isn’t about morality or outcomes.
It’s about how systems behave once certain conditions are met.
Tobacco didn’t become a public crisis because smoking was unhealthy. That was known for decades. It became a crisis when evidence showed that products were engineered, optimized, and distributed in ways that reliably produced harm at population scale – and when that behavior could be demonstrated, not just argued.
Food followed a similar arc.
In both cases, the underlying pattern wasn’t accidental. Products were refined to deliver a strong reward signal. Feedback loops rewarded increased consumption. Distribution systems amplified exposure. Over time, those dynamics reshaped the environment people lived in.
The parallel isn’t nicotine versus sugar.
It’s optimization versus biology.
Once an industry begins tuning products against a single success metric – consumption, retention, repeat use – outcomes stop being random. They become predictable system effects. That’s what made tobacco legally vulnerable.
The same shift is now happening in food.
Ultra-processed products didn’t dominate because of one bad ingredient or one misleading label. They dominated because industrial systems were optimized for scale, stability, and ease of consumption – and because those optimizations compounded over decades.
When critics invoke tobacco, they’re not saying food and cigarettes are identical. They’re pointing out that the same structural conditions now exist:
- Engineered reward signals
- Feedback loops that reinforce consumption
- Environments saturated with optimized products
- Long-term health effects that emerge at scale
That’s why the comparison keeps resurfacing.
History shows that when systems reach this stage, debates about individual choice give way to questions about design, incentives, and responsibility. The issue stops being what people should do and becomes what environments are built to produce.
The tobacco parallel isn’t about panic, it’s about pattern recognition. And once patterns are visible, ignoring them becomes harder than acknowledging them.