Why would a guy who wants to be carried to his final resting place in a section of the buffet table from his favorite restaurant also have a beef with the American food industry whose products he clearly loves? Because in the debates over how to fight the obesity epidemic in America, the food industry is acting a lot like the tobacco industry did in the tobacco wars.

The parallels between the two industries are striking. Both spend billions of dollars trying to get us to use more of their products and then deny any responsibility for any ill effects caused by the use or overuse of their products. Both have spent billions advertising directly to children, then denied responsibility for our children eating too much high fat and high sugar foods, or smoking.

The two industries have said it is our job to be smart about what we put in its mouths, and then resisted efforts to get us the information we need to be smart. There is a deadly parallel too; both smoking and obesity each now kill almost 400,000 Americans each year. Finally, both industries are now getting sued for contributing to ill health; this is America, after all.

In its defense the food industry is obviously selling us product we all have to have, unlike the tobacco industry, but the food industry has systematically supported our overindulgence in high-fat, high-sugar, high-calorie foods.

What’s the evidence? Watch cartoons on television some Saturday morning and see a piece of the $13 billion spent advertising food to children. The average child in America now sees more than 10,000 food commercials a year on television. The bulk of food advertised to children is high in fat or high in carbohydrates, and too high in calories, whether served in fast food restaurants or at home.

Experts on marketing to children say the purpose of the ads is specifically to go past parents to the child, get children to identify the food product, and then nag parents for it. The marketing to our children works; one-third of children eat out each day, the majority eat too much high-fat/high-sugar food, 15 percent are obese, and another 15 percent are overweight.

A recent study found that children who frequently eat out eat more fat, more sugar, fewer vegetables, and 187 more calories a day than children who eat at home. Those extra calories equal about six pounds of extra weight a year, or 60 extra pounds from age 6 to 16. One popular supermarket lunch pack for children has half the daily calories and 40 percent of the daily fat recommended for children, all in just one meal.

Nondiet soda is loaded with sugar. A 20-ounce Pepsi or Coke has about 20 teaspoons of sugar, eight more than the 12-teaspoon maximum recommended by the federal government for a person eating 2,200 calories a day. It takes about two miles of running to burn off those calories from that one soda, part of the reason why daily consumption of more than one nondiet soda markedly increases a child’s risk of obesity.

The food industry has often resisted efforts to inform the American public about how its food contributes to its obesity, just as the tobacco industry resisted efforts to inform the public about the hazards of smoking. Collectively, the food industry has resisted clear and useful nutritional information in food labeling, and failed on its own initiative to label responsibly. Nowhere on soda labels or in soda industry marketing, for example, does it suggest that our children limit themselves to one nondiet soda a day in order to avoid becoming obese.

Some in the industry use marketing that is at best confusing and at worst misleading. Frito-Lay has marketed its Munchies Kids Mix of Cheetos, Doritos, Rold Gold Pretzels, SmartFood Popcorn, Cap’n Crunch Cereal, and M&Ms saying “Mom and Dad, you’ll feel great about offering it to your kids because [it] is a good source of 8 essential vitamins and minerals.” Right, so is pet food kibble, but that does not make it a proper part of a good diet for a child.

A recent article in Time magazine said 70 percent of children ages 6 to 8 think fast food from restaurants is healthier than home food, a belief unlikely to be the result of parents marketing fast food to children.

It gets worse. According to a recent article in The New York Times the World Health Organization recently recommended in its draft report on the worldwide obesity epidemic that we all eat less sugar. In response, the sugar industry’s trade group, The Sugar Association, successfully lobbied the United States government to pressure the World Health Organization to remove that suggestion. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services pressured the WHO on the issue in spite of the near-universal consensus among nutrition and obesity experts that we eat too much sugar.

That kind of effort on the part of the food industry to change the information the government and health organizations produce for the public has become commonplace. According to Time magazine the food industry has resisted the U.S. government giving any message that Americans should eat less food, despite the fact that overeating is the principal reason 60 percent of Americans are overweight.

The tactic of an industry telling us to act responsibly in the use of their product and then obstructing dissemination of the information we need to act responsibly is familiar; the tobacco industry used similar tactics for decades to limit public understanding of the unhealthy effects of cigarette smoking. Both industries have bludgeoned the federal government when it tried to advocate more effectively for the consumer. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed limits on food marketing to children several years ago the U.S. Congress removed the FDA’s authority to do so. The tobacco industry has also had some success in limiting FDA authority over its product.

An industry that will not act responsibly in the face of a public health crisis is begging to be regulated, and the food industry’s insistence that it has no role in the prevention of the fattening of America is abandonment of its responsibility. That leaves us with no alternative but to regulate its marketing practices to our children, force its soda out of our schools, force full disclosure on restaurant menus, and force the industry to the dinner table of our national conversation about obesity. It begs the return of the snack tax, perhaps to fund a campaign to educate us about the fattening effects of high-fat, high- sugar, high-calorie snacks so we can all eat snacks as responsibly as the industry says it wants us to.

The food industry can step up to the dinner plate and eat its piece of the pie of responsibility or it can continue to fight our personal and national interests in the war on obesity. If it chooses the latter option, the food industry will end up with more similarities to the tobacco industry; its reputation will go up in smoke, Americans will hate the hand that feeds them, and class action lawyers will begin circling in the water. The industry that feeds us should choose a different path.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.