Yeah sure, lets allow companies to make highly attractive poison, advertise it using whatever tricks they can think up short of pornography, allow supermarkets to place this shit wherever they think people are most vulnerable and at eye level, allow sales and promotions promoting consumption.
Who could forsee that people would overindulge? What could be the solution? SIN TAXES
farque awffff. Can you imagine if we let companies poor waste into a river and taxed you if you swam in it? Fucking deranged proposal. This stupid political system that can’t see a government as anything except a way of distributing financial penalties has absolutely cooked us.
Can you imagine if we let companies poor waste into a river and taxed you if you swam in it?
I get your point, but we can regulate against dumping waste into a river without anyone except the polluters cracking the shits about it.
What would the equivalent look like for junk food? Regulation where they set a maximum sugar level for every category of product? That could maybe work, but it’d be a big and contested undertaking, and I’m guessing some portion of the voting population would crack the shits about not being able to get exactly what they used to get, and how the limits in place are arbitrary and unfair in some way.
The UK tax on sugar content in soft drinks did result in manufacturers reformulating drinks to have less sugar (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11156274/), so that’s an example where a tax reduced the ‘dumping waste into the river’.
Or are you just suggesting banning advertising of junk food? I agree that seems totally viable and should be pursued.
Personally, I think the first priority should be fixing the Health Star Rating system. It was ruined by the liberals making it a relative rating within each category of product, not an absolute rating that actually helps people make healthier choices overall (e.g. it might encourage people to buy a healthier variety of biscuits, but it doesn’t encourage them to not buy biscuits at all). They should also make it mandatory.
I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention the Health Star Rating, actually. The first step for consumers making good choices is to give consumers good information. I get the article is trying to highlight economic and geographic factors, but still.
The health star rating is under reform! Good news!
And I think regulating the content of food based on nutritional guidelines is quite difficult, a bit joyless, and likely to backfire and entrench established food products and production while hampering stuff like plant based alternatives which may represent healther and more ethical ways to produce hyper palatable treats.
I think it’s easier to place restrictions (at least now) and what can represent itself as good and normal parts of a human diet as opposed to what is essentially a starch or fat based lolly.
Marketing definitely plays a part, don’t get me wrong - but unhealthy food is cheap, and we are still in a cost of living crisis here in Australia.
These foods are pumped to the gills with simple starches, sugars and fats to make them hyper-palatable - short-circuiting our brain impulses, leading to addiction - and play havoc with our leptin/ghrelin hormones levels leaving us hungry shortly thereafter, leading to over-eating.
Sure but the idea that humans are silly automatons that follow price exclusively dies in first year econ classrooms. Canned beans are extremely cheap and much closer to a food you can sustain yourself on, yet marketing promotes the idea that fish fingers and a side of chips is a more reasonable meal than baked potato and a side of beans with sauce, which doesn’t feel reasonable. Palatability is also not the most significant factor because people also aren’t serving fish fingers and a side of gummy worms despite gummy worms being extremely cheap per calorie and hyper palatable.
We’re a long way from being able to restrict the sale of junk food legislatively but not that far from being able to prevent things like showing hot chips on a dinner plate as something reasonable to serve.
Hyper-palatability, and convenience are the two factors that fill in the blanks.
An individual person can be a rational, thinking actor - but when we are discussing macro-modelling, we begin to fall towards the mean/median of whatever takes the least amount of work to trick our brains to release the most happy chemicals.
Again, I say this as someone who has been on a ketogenic diet for over 7 years now - because I know I am someone hyper-susceptible to sugar addiction, it only took the slightest nudge (tired, tipsy, stressed) to push me towards the lazier, less healthy option - even knowing the long-term implications.
Sigh, read what I wrote re gummy worms.
Also sugar isn’t addictive, not in any meaningful way. It is pleasureable but labelling it as an addiction is a health crank position.
But you can’t just pair two entirely unrelated hyper-palatable things as some kind of gotcha. No one pairs fish fingers with gummy worms because that’s an absurd idea, but plenty of people will pair fish fingers with potato gems, because they’re delicious separately as well as together.
No one is saying that marketing isn’t a factor here. But to ignore the combination of cheap, easy, and tasty misses a big part of the puzzle, and if we’re going to fix the problem, you need to consider all aspects.
What people think of as absurd or not is informed by culture which marketing attempts to shape. There are absolutely dishes and combinations enjoyed in other cultures that would turn your stomach.
Something like potato gems needs to be understood to be in the same category as gummy worms. Not a normal meal food, a treat which is absurdly rich.
Price per calorie is obviously not the major concern, and I put to you most people probably have no idea about how much energy is in what they eat or what its nutritional merit is. They make decisions based on their impression of what is a reasonable food in whatever category.
Potatoes and fish are meal foods in our culture, and culturally they retain this after being deep fried and battered. However bread which is a meal food does not retain meal food status if battered and fried. See what I’m getting at?
If you can buy battered potatoes in the frozen veg isle, next to the peas, and it has pictures on it informing you that this is an entirely reasonable food to put on a plate with peas then you might easily grab some for that purpose.
A business would likely retort: “But there’s demand for it!”
That’s also the rationale I’ve heard from cocaine dealers, but at least they had the high ground to say “and I can make sure they get the safer pure stuff”.
Look I am a straight up commie, my pipe dream is humans working together with mutual consideration in mind (an idea that makes you nearly unspeakably radical lmao). Do you know how fucking elated I would be if we could just like ban advertising on “junk food” and idk have it be plain packaged?
Chips are nice, I like chips, I just don’t think companies should be free to try hijack our biological drives to maximise destructive pleasure habits.
We can have a little vice, as a treat.
It’s a tradition: penal colony food.
