---
description: Market incentives drive food companies to maximize addictiveness through armies of food scientists and psychologists while government subsidizes the resulting health crisis -- chronic disease now kills more than famine infectious disease and war combined
type: claim
domain: health
source: "Architectural Investing, Ch. Dark Side of Specialization; Moss (Salt Sugar Fat); Perlmutter (Brainwash)"
confidence: proven
created: 2026-02-28
---

# Big Food companies engineer addictive products by hacking evolutionary reward pathways creating a noncommunicable disease epidemic more deadly than the famines specialization eliminated

The same specialization that ended famine now drives a health crisis that exceeds it. Big Food companies employ armies of food scientists, psychologists, and marketing experts who engineer products to be maximally addictive by exploiting evolutionary neurological wiring -- "powerfully addictive evolutionary reward pathways." As Michael Moss explains in Salt Sugar Fat: "the manufacturers of processed food argue that they have allowed us to become the people we want to be, fast and busy, no longer slaves to the stove. But in their hands, the salt, sugar and fat they have used to propel this social transformation are not nutrients as much as weapons -- weapons they deploy, certainly to defeat their competitors but also to keep us coming back for more."

The results are catastrophic:
- Chronic disease accounts for 70 percent of American deaths
- Half of Americans suffer from at least one chronic illness including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease
- The WHO ranks chronic degenerative diseases as collectively the number one cause of death on the planet, ahead of famine, infectious disease, and war combined
- Research from Tufts University indicates poor eating habits cause nearly 1,000 deaths each day in the US from diabetes, stroke, or heart disease
- A 2019 JAMA study found increased consumption of processed food is associated with a 14 percent increase in "all-cause mortality"
- A 2017 Lancet study found one in five deaths globally were associated with poor diet

The feedback loop is structural: companies compete for food dollars, creating incentives to make products maximally addictive. Americans have nearly doubled the share of food budget spent on processed foods and sweets from 11.6 percent to 22.9 percent over 30 years. Meanwhile, 75 percent of US healthcare dollars go to preventable diseases while the government subsidizes high fructose corn syrup and mandates poor diets for food stamp recipients and military families.

The problem is compounded by Western allopathic medicine's reductionist approach -- treating the body as separable silos where gut has nothing to do with brain or heart. This methodology, which mirrors the clockwork-universe thinking of scientific management, prescribes statins instead of lifestyle changes, postponing rather than treating disease. Since [[the clockwork universe paradigm built effective industrial systems by assuming stability and reducibility but fails when interdependence makes small causes produce disproportionate effects]], the reductionist medical model is another clockwork-era approach applied to an irreducibly complex system (the human body).

This is not an American problem alone. The American diet and lifestyle are spreading globally through fast food chains. In China, childhood stunted growth from malnourishment fell from 16 percent to 2 percent between 1985 and 2014, but obesity rose from 1 percent to 20 percent over the same period. The global obesity epidemic has been largely fuelled by the spread of American-style processed food. Since [[the epidemiological transition marks the shift from material scarcity to social disadvantage as the primary driver of health outcomes in developed nations]], noncommunicable diseases are not just a health problem but a psychosocial one -- addictive food is one pathway through which social disadvantage and stress manifest as disease.

The four major risk factors behind the highest burden of noncommunicable disease -- tobacco use, harmful use of alcohol, unhealthy diets, and physical inactivity -- are all lifestyle factors that simple interventions could address. The gap between what science knows works (lifestyle modification) and what the system delivers (pharmaceutical symptom management) represents one of the largest misalignments in the modern economy.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[the epidemiological transition marks the shift from material scarcity to social disadvantage as the primary driver of health outcomes in developed nations]] -- the transition created the conditions under which noncommunicable diseases could eclipse infectious ones
- [[Americas declining life expectancy is driven by deaths of despair concentrated in populations and regions most damaged by economic restructuring since the 1980s]] -- deaths of despair and diet-driven chronic disease are parallel products of the same economic forces
- healthcare costs threaten to crowd out investment in humanitys future if the system is not restructured -- 75 percent of healthcare spending goes to preventable diseases, many diet-related
- US healthcare incentives are fundamentally misaligned because every participant profits from sickness not health -- the pharmaceutical approach to diet-driven disease is the epitome of treating symptoms not causes
- [[the clockwork universe paradigm built effective industrial systems by assuming stability and reducibility but fails when interdependence makes small causes produce disproportionate effects]] -- reductionist medicine treats the body as separable clockwork rather than an interdependent complex system
- specialization and value form an autocatalytic feedback loop where each amplifies the other exponentially -- the same autocatalytic specialization that ended famine now drives the chronic disease epidemic

Topics:
- health and wellness
- livingip overview
