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.

The word "captured" was very apt, as food companies make donations to the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association in return for their stamps of approval. This is not a conspiracy theory, but has been documented:

ADA takes money to promote Splenda: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ex-director-accuses...

AHA takes money to promote foods like ham which raise heart disease risk: https://huffpost.com/entry/health-news_b_4398304

AHA advisory cherry picks trials to reference, on the back of funding from Procter & Gamble (Crisco) and Bayer (soybean oil): https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-saturated-...

I think you're wrong about the food industry not slowly harming people, for two reasons.

1) For "unhealthy" food (i.e. not something that's acutely poisonous) the link between ingestion and harm is in the long-term; it would be very difficult to blame harm on a particular group of foods, let alone a specific product. Maybe in a couple of decades there will be hand-wringing and governmental investigations, but in the short term, there's no negative incentive for food companies.

2) Most executives are directly incentivised to think in the short term - this bonus cycle, this year's results, the two-three years until LTIs vest, or a next promotion or change of job. Short of something catastrophic, there will almost never be a comeback for those individuals, meaning they have all of the positive incentives to chase profit, and it's very unlikely that they'll ever personally experience anything negative from their decisions.

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Also, I don't really want to engage with quasi-conspiracy theories, but if you think that pharma companies have a hand in influencing dietary advice to be unhealthy so they can sell more drugs, IME you're vastly overestimating the competence of the pharma industry.