What's frightening is the conservative/libertarian view:
"Government has no business telling me what to eat."
Which is just nonsense, and not only because the decision on what to eat is driven by genetics that did not evolve in the presence of modern processed foods. Government isn't telling you what to eat if it keeps companies from selling the worst junk food. If you want to make junk food yourself, you're welcome to (and it will probably be a lot healthier than what you buy, too, and taste better, subjectively, because you made it), but the problem with junk food is the economy of scale. Companies can cheaply make stuff that tastes great without being healthy, so why would you bother with more expensive or healthier food, or anything you have to spend time making yourself? It's about shifting incentives, not banning anything. They counter that freedom applies to corporations too, and you're banning corporations from doing things, which leads to the "do corporations deserve the same freedoms?" argument.
The conservatives' position goes beyond unwise and into the realm of hypocrisy, because conservatives have no problem when government wants to tell me I can't grow salvia divinorum (yes, in my state it's banned), or poppies, or marijuana plants, but forbid a company from distributing disgustingly unhealthy lunchables or soda and they lose their minds.
(I should add that another part of the problem is that both conservatives and libertarians pretend the costs of eating badly only affect the people making the choice, which isn't true. Particularly with the changes to healthcare, everyone buying their own insurance during open enrollment, and maybe everyone (I don't know, are there any plans where premiums are segmented by behavior other than tobacco use?), is in a gigantic pool where no separation by diet is allowed, even if it were practical which it's not. And if everything were privatized and pools segmented by diet, there would still be costs to others, because people in those pools have more health problems that negatively affect not only their own, but their relatives' and friends', happiness and productivity. Which works if their friends in turn exert influence back to eat healthier, but that)
For me, the problem isn't about libertarian/conservative views on the matter, but the fact that both forget that institutional norms can offset any economic disincentive for any good or service. One example for me would be the overuse of cars in cities which is the product of both private and public institutional norms which require nearly everyone to own a car to get around a city in a timely fashion.
I don't consider myself a conservative or libertarian, but I find it annoying when besserwissers in the government are telling me how to live my life, even when they are offering good advice. For example, if some government besserwisser is yammering about not eating sugar, it almost becomes more tempting for me to eat sugar, even if I agree that eating lots of refined sugar is unhealthy.
However, if I figure out on my own that eating lots of refined sugar is unhealthy, then cutting down on my intake is easy enough.
The government is not capable of 'shifting incentives' through the use of force. Attempts made for a small group to dictate what others want and what's best for them will, and have, ended in failure.
Governments have very effectively reduced tobacco use through advertising, restrictions on where smoking is legal (backed by force), and taxation (backed by force). Making something expensive and inconvient can make it unpopular while avoiding potentially counterproductive bans. The same principles could be applied to unnaturally delicious processed foods.
I would hazard a guess that the decline in celebrity endorsement of tobacco products had a larger influence on the total decline of smoking at least in the adult population. Mind you, this wasn't uniform as the rate of smoking has not declined at the same rate for poorer populations despite the absence of both advertisements or celebrity endorsements.
Free market capitalism works really efficiently, except when externalities are present, at which point it efficiently exploits them to everyone's detriment. Your health is an externality to the corporations that make your food.
Food companies spend a significant amount on R&D to maximize the taste and attractiveness, but not necessarily the nutrition, of their pre-packaged foods.
It is not that simple thought. The simple $1 McDonalds burger has one of the best value/price ratio in the history of the human nutrition.
"The double cheeseburger provides 390 calories, 23 grams of protein – half a daily serving – seven per cent of daily fibre, 19 grams of fat and 20 per cent of daily calcium, all for between $1 and $2, or 65p and £1.30, The Times reported."
I think this topic is similar to 'how many life-years have been lost due the pollution caused by industrial revolution' -- many, of course. And many have been saved as well. Here we can surely say that many life years have been saved by the mass/junk food industry as it has provided the masses reliable, usually not infected/spoiled food.
I usually bring up a similar point when people criticize modern agriculture and food production.
Right now someone can buy a pound of ground beef for around $3-4. After tax that represents around 30 minutes of labor for a minimum waged employee.
It is absolutely remarkable that our lowest skilled, lowest productivity workers, can afford a pound of beef for 1/2 an hour of work.
Obviously there are clear environmental issues here, and we are not taking into account all the externalities associated with meat production. But that figure above, and what it represents in terms of human nutrition, should be breathtaking.
That's only because we're exploiting other living species, which are much less able to defend themselves than we are.
A society should be judged by how it treats its weakest members, and if you ask me, that's the battery hens and mass-farmed pigs in their crowded "flats". The atrociously low price of meat is actually not at all a mark of civilisation, but rather of barbarism towards animals. Animals which, might i add, consistently turn out to be more intelligent that we originally thought.
Everybody should read Eating Animals by J.S. Foer, it's surprisingly level-headed and non-ranty, but even so, it's hard to ignore what goes on in the food industry.
If you accept that raw/unprocessed food is healthier than processed, and that vegetables are healthier than meat, then this must be true, because processing food requires
energy and raising livestock requires feeding the livestock.
If this is not true in practice, it will be due to perverse taxes and subsidies.
> Raw/unprocessed food is healthier than processed
> Vegetables are healthier than meat
But neither of those claims are true. Raw meat isn't healthier than cooked meat because you'll poison yourself, and if you go and try to live on a vegetarian diet without careful attention to modern scientific knowledge about nutrition, you'll end up with all kinds of things like vitamin B-12 deficiency.
You need a mix of raw and cooked foods because some nutrients are not bioavailable with or without it, but not because raw foods are more "natural".
> "if you go and try to live on a vegetarian diet without careful attention to modern scientific knowledge about nutrition, you'll end up with all kinds of things like vitamin B-12 deficiency."
That is true. However, if you go and try to live on a meat-eating diet without careful attention to modern scientific knowledge about nutrition, you'll end up with all kinds of things like obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and stroke.
"Government has no business telling me what to eat."
Which is just nonsense, and not only because the decision on what to eat is driven by genetics that did not evolve in the presence of modern processed foods. Government isn't telling you what to eat if it keeps companies from selling the worst junk food. If you want to make junk food yourself, you're welcome to (and it will probably be a lot healthier than what you buy, too, and taste better, subjectively, because you made it), but the problem with junk food is the economy of scale. Companies can cheaply make stuff that tastes great without being healthy, so why would you bother with more expensive or healthier food, or anything you have to spend time making yourself? It's about shifting incentives, not banning anything. They counter that freedom applies to corporations too, and you're banning corporations from doing things, which leads to the "do corporations deserve the same freedoms?" argument.
The conservatives' position goes beyond unwise and into the realm of hypocrisy, because conservatives have no problem when government wants to tell me I can't grow salvia divinorum (yes, in my state it's banned), or poppies, or marijuana plants, but forbid a company from distributing disgustingly unhealthy lunchables or soda and they lose their minds.
(I should add that another part of the problem is that both conservatives and libertarians pretend the costs of eating badly only affect the people making the choice, which isn't true. Particularly with the changes to healthcare, everyone buying their own insurance during open enrollment, and maybe everyone (I don't know, are there any plans where premiums are segmented by behavior other than tobacco use?), is in a gigantic pool where no separation by diet is allowed, even if it were practical which it's not. And if everything were privatized and pools segmented by diet, there would still be costs to others, because people in those pools have more health problems that negatively affect not only their own, but their relatives' and friends', happiness and productivity. Which works if their friends in turn exert influence back to eat healthier, but that)