[jeffreyrogers]

Improving diet would be one of the simplest ways of improving population health. Unfortunately any real changes will cause large, politically powerful corporations (Cargill, ADM, Coca-Cola, etc.) to lose a large amount of money[1], so I'm bearish on the ability to actually create meaningful changes. But just looking at photos on people on beaches from 2019 vs 1970 makes it clear how unhealthy the population is.

[1]: In the US many of these companies are large exporters too, so it is very hard to do anything that hurts them since our exports are generally not very competitive.

[cylon13]

My concern is that if we can't trust the government to create a healthy recommended diet, how can we trust them to ban the correct foods? Their incentives seem to be more in line with propping up producers of large scale cheap pseudo foods with big lobbies than finding an actual healthy diet.

[jules]

I get your point, but it's not hard to tax the correct foods. Just start with the worst, such as sugary drinks.

[abenga]

It doesn't even need to be tax, even mandating that packaged foods' ingredients labeled in easily human-relatable units (table spoons, etc. instead of grams and joules) may help people make better decisions.