This has not worked out so well for other products. I live in Canada where cigarettes are enormously expensive due to taxes. Yet I know people who continue to smoke.
They're a lot poorer now, and so they have less money to spend on healthy food. So not only are they destroying their health by smoking, they're stuck eating crappy food as well.
I would not expect a higher price to stop every single person from buying the item immediately, especially not at at a price that is still obviously affordable.
Yes, GP is absolutely correct, all the people in the developing world who can't afford food are much healthier than those of us in the West, that live long enough and eat enough to deal with diseases of obesity that primarily affect one after 60 years of age. /s
You put /s, but that to an extent is sort of true. Diseases can't be cured as effectively where remedies or mitigations are too expensive, but the same first world locations where medicine and care is most available also have a litany of factors working against health.
I don't believe though that this is inevitable, and I hope that the first world will continue to improve its situation, and that less well-equipped areas will somehow avoid making the mistakes and leapfrog these uncomfortable middle periods. We see this for instance with the Industrial Revolution, where those that can be credited with facilitating it generally did pretty poorly for themselves, but those who industrialised later were substantially better off.
> Around 2.3 billion people in the world (29.3%) were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021
It’s easy to talk on a forum like this, where the median salary is massive compared to global/country median, that poor people shouldn’t be able to afford as much bad food. I think when you do so you’ve lost touch with the average person who is affected by things like shrinkflation.
What wonder, we've nearly conquered hunger if obesity has finally become more prevalent than starvation. I stand corrected. Nonetheless, starvation is more directly harmful/deadly. Obesity may kill you eventually, starvation will kill you in relatively short order.