An unfortunate idea is gaining traction in food policy circles: to equate food – specifically ultra-processed food – with tobacco. Borrowing the rhetoric, litigation strategies, and moral framing of the anti-smoking movement, activists, influencers, and even policymakers now speak of “Big Food” as the new “Big Tobacco.”

Last night, this idea even reached into the Super Bowl with a MAHA ad featuring Mike Tyson and a blunt message for the audience of 130 million Americans: “Processed food kills.”

The appeal of the cigarette analogy is obvious. It offers a villain, a simple story, and a sense that the complex challenge of obesity and related chronic diseases can be solved by repeating yesterday’s battles.

But the analogy is deeply misguided.

A Business Connection

Recent reporting by STAT News and policy analysis in the Milbank Quarterly highlights how tobacco companies once owned major food brands and transferred marketing and product-engineering know-how to them. That history is real. R.J. Reynolds did own Nabisco. Philip Morris did control Kraft. Food scientists did learn from tobacco scientists. None of that, however, makes food equivalent to cigarettes.

Distinguishing Unsafe Products

Tobacco is inherently unsafe at any dose. Food is not. Even foods labeled “ultra-processed” include items that provide calories, fiber, protein, and other nutrients essential to life. Whole-grain breads, fortified cereals, and shelf-stable staples are some examples. Equating them with a product that kills half of its long-term users at any level of exposure blurs a distinction crucial for public health.

The addiction framing is similarly overstated. Yes, highly palatable foods activate dopamine pathways. So a comparison to nicotine is reasonable. But dopamine is not a pathology – it is how humans learn what to eat to survive. Unlike cigarettes, food cannot be eliminated. The public health challenge is not abstinence, but adequacy, balance, and sustainability across vastly unequal food environments.

Rhetorical Hyperbole

The danger of the tobacco analogy is not merely rhetorical. It pushes policymakers toward blunt tools – taxes, bans, litigation, and stigma—that worked for smoking but risk harming people living with obesity and food insecurity. It also distracts from solutions that actually matter: improving food access, addressing poverty, funding nutrition science, and treating obesity as a chronic disease rather than a moral failure.

People living with obesity are not addicts.

Fewer Slogans, More Science Please

Food policy needs fewer slogans and more science. We’ve learned painful lessons about what happens when ideology outruns evidence. Let’s not repeat that mistake at the dinner table.

Click here for the reporting from Stat News, here, here, here, and here for further perspective. For more on the MAHA Super Bowl ad, click here.

Cigarette, photograph by Oleg Dubyna, licensed under CC BY 3.0