Big Tobacco’s Legacy: Pushing Hyperpalatable Foods in America

I think the quick & easy presumption is that lightly poisoned humans tend to keep on less weight, in addition to some appetite-suppressive effect of tobacco.

But now these markets are much more saturated with smokers than the us market, so why aren’t those markets similarly saturated with salty and sweet foods?

My German friend said that the first time they tried bread in the US they thought it was cake.

Ok, but smoking rates are far higher in Europe and Asia.

So the correlation is inverse to the theory.

Conventional restaurants in the West tend to abuse food with excessive salt, cream, oil, and/or sugar. The more health conscious nouveau (as opposed to health-washed pseudo-healthy dining) have somewhat reversed this trend with more raw and simpler ingredients. To be fair, mainland PRC (non-Cantonese) traditional restaurant food is bland by overall world-average standards. Cantonese food tends to be arguably a notch or 2 richer like Vietnamese food, but not as much as Westernized Thai, Indian, or Korean food which tend to be very strong.

General advice is: ask for the toppings or dressing on the side rather than smothered with 1k kcal of ranch dressing. No wonder Westerners have weight problems.

There's almost nothing on the planet that's less palatable than American chocolate.