[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

They aren't talking about bans, but other controls. Cigarettes are not banned outright, but cigarette companies are banned from advertising in a lot of mediums and cigarette cartons have a warning label about the harmful effects of smoking them. For a long time there were PSAs about how bad they were for you too, to counteract the damage already done by the tobacco industry's marketing. And we tax them pretty harshly. People still smoke, it is still legal to smoke. We could do similar things for food and social media without outright banning it.

[thebean11]

Yeah that's fair. Like I alluded to in a sibling comment thread, though, I think doing the same thing for food is pretty dangerous given our still pretty limited understanding of what foods are actually bad for you. Eggs are still oscillating between healthy and unhealthy every few years (although I think we're settling on healthy? Who knows!). Cigarettes aren't needed to sustain life so there's not as much risk to meddling like that.

The only thing I can really get behind is stricter controls on individual ingredients that are very clearly unhealthy and obviously don't need to be part of your diet (BPAs, trans fats, etc). Once you start messing with society's macros though it's fraught territory and very easy to do harm IMO.