Skyrocketing rates of obesity and diabetes in the U.S. raise questions about what we’re eating, whether today’s food acts more like a drug and how Big Pharma benefits from our industrial food diet,

“Big Pharma’s profit streams are necessarily predicated on the existence of sick patients,” Li said, so there’s a “certain economic benefit” for “normalizing” obesity.

Indeed, the American Academy of Pediatrics on Jan. 9 issued new clinical guidelines for treating childhood obesity that included recommendations for physicians to offer weight-loss drugs and surgery to obese children.

Big Tobacco companies took over Big Food companies, including R.J. Reynolds’ $4.9 billion acquisition of Nabisco in 1985 and Philip Morris’ $5.75 billion acquisition of General Foods the same year.

Having spent decades optimizing the speed with which their products delivered nicotine to the brain, Li said, Big Tobacco then “continued to harness that science in their food products” by turning food into “another addictive drug.”

With little to no protein, fiber or water content to slow them down, , highly-processed foods are engineered to “hit your taste buds and light up your reward and motivation centers in the brain immediately” — and that’s followed by “a secondary hit of dopamine when it gets absorbed into the body.”

“That doesn’t even sound like they’re talking about food anymore — it’s like they’re describing some kind of super drug that they genetically modified to hack our brains.”