Living in the US, my takeaway is this:

Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor.

But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they would stop making them. But their snack cakes are designed to make you want to eat the whole package and sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix, making the consumer's choice almost a moot point since consumers tend to trade their own best interests for convenience and "saving" money.

And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.

But I do hate it. I have to put a stupid amount of effort into eating healthy because I don't have room for a garden and healthier alternatives are often more expensive. I can see why most people just reach for the snack cakes and call it done.

> And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.

It's not this simple.

Marketing isn't just about making an existing product attractive to consumers - it's also about creating new products and even new product categories, and then creating a desire amongst consumers leading to purchases.

Where do you think all of the ultra-processed food has come from in the past decade? It didn't always exist...

This game theory problem, where consumers are buying unhealthier options because they're cheaper, and companies are producing unhealthier options because they're more profitable, is exactly what regulation is for. I don't understand why we've all collectively forgotten why regulation exists and become so cynical that it can actually work! Actually I do understand: it's industry interests spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intentional misinformation and government capture for a half century.

A reasonable counter-argument is "but the science is extremely muddy here, so effective regulation is especially difficult", which is unfortunately true, but I'd point out that the science is extremely muddy largely because of industry efforts to intentionally poison our understanding of nutrition.

It's not in the food industry's interest to harm us beyond pursing profit margin, but it is in the health and pharmaceutical industry's interest to harm us — treatable chronic disease is recurring revenue. The more chronic disease, the more revenue. Pharma companies are making fistfuls of money from GLP1 agonists.

This incentive to harm is translated into the food system when captured groups like the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association help write dietary guidelines (for school systems for example) that look good optically but actually create disease and future recurring revenue for the health industrial complex. Groups like the ADA and AHA are also captured by major funding from the food industry, so that cheap high margin food products fit into their dietary guidelines.

The incentives are synergistic and exactly aligned to push food products with a veneer of health that cause long term disease.

A side effect of maximizing profit is harming our health. Doesn't really matter to me whether it's malicious intent or in the pursuit of shareholder value.

In retrospect, I realize the food industry probably took a page out of the cigarette industry's playbook. Or was it the other way around?

> sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix

Sorry for sniping, but the alternative is to not buy a snack. You don't have to eat snacks.