Thanks for articulating this. I've had a problem over the past 20 years with terms like "screen time" and "ultra-processed foods" because there's a kernel of something that really matters somewhere in the argument, but the use of overly broad terms sort of kills things. I appreciate you calling out the nuance, and I agree with you that hyperpalatability is the main issue -- like applying the principles of TikTok to food.

▲

pessimizer an hour ago | parent [-]

> hyperpalatability is the main issue

Hyperpalatability is a different issue. The main issue is that our foods are chemical factories. Turning it into a "food is too good" problem is just a trick to blame the consumer for not being mature enough to forgo pleasure.

Food being good is not a crisis. Xylitol giving people heart attacks might be. Ingredients concocted in a lab never being studied at all until someone sues is a problem. Shifting the argument to "cheeseburgers are bad because they're good" is a really obvious distraction.

There is literally no profit in making foods "hyperpalatable." Food companies would be just as happy selling you food that tastes like shit. If anything, in actuality commercial food has become worse and less palatable over time due to substitutions of cheaper ingredients. The argument is being shifted from an important one about power to a dumb moral panic. The people who love this are orthorexics who love telling people how their health is their own fault because they are self-indulgent. There is nothing more self-indulgent and self-praising than this discourse.

That argument is hyperpalatable to orthorexics.

	▲	tptacek 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is like the Mexican coke argument all over again. Everybody wants there to be an industrial bogeyman to blame for American nutritional health problems. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could fix problems for people simply by replacing industrial corn syrup with wholesome cane sugar? Of course, there is literally no difference healthwise between the two products. But that's hard to hear. It means you have to accept that sweetened soft drinks are just bad for you, full stop, and you have to treat them the same way you'd treat alcohol (I said, as an enthusiastic social drinker). So it goes with UPFs writ large. Wouldn't it be great if we could just make our foods wholesome and pure and not "chemical factories"? In fact: it would make essentially no difference to our health; in fact it would be a health problem if it led people to believe that bakery outputs were healthful and stabilized unsweetened skyr was dangerous. The entire problem here is that we've gotten incredibly good at engineering food for hyperpalatability, which leads people to make truly bad choices about what to eat habitually. You could reasonably regulate that practice! But you'd want to find a way to do it without doing Mercola science and taking healthful, affordable shelf-stable products off the shelves for no reason. Your "no profit in hyperpalatable foods" thing, I don't get at all. Maybe if you tried to explain it again. Sounds like the opposite of the truth.