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by ethanbond 917 days ago
Surely food companies will just stand idly by as their revenues drop 20-30%

Surely they wouldn’t figure out a way to produce even less nutritious, less satiating, more flavorful (and therefore calorically dense) foods, would they?
2 comments
wholinator2 917 days ago
Well i feel like that's only good up to a point right? We can legislate the extremely unhealthy stuff like we have started already. Public information campaigns are making more and more people vegetarian and vegan or at least some reduced-shit diet, healthy at every size and the fat acceptance movement fell flat on its face and was replaced with the much more healthy imaged body positivity movement. And what are they gonna do, make our chips literally dripping in bacon grease? Honestly might be better for us than the insane amounts of sugar they put in things these days. I hesitate to say this but, how much worse can it really get?
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Jensson 917 days ago
Removing food stamps and just giving people money instead is a good start. Poor people without food stamps are healthier than poor people with food stamps, so I don't see any reason to keep that system, it seems to just encourage poor people to buy too much junk food.
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ethanbond 917 days ago
With hundreds of billions of dollars per year on the line? I’m certainly open to arguments as to how it can’t get worse, but that’s a pretty obscene incentive to make it worse.
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matwood 917 days ago
No, but at some point there will be a reckoning just like with cigarettes and alcohol. Garbage food won't go away, but the individual and societal costs will eventually be recognized.
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ethanbond 917 days ago
If we had pills you could take that would mitigate most of the downsides of cigarettes and alcohol, then no we wouldn’t. Then the question would be whether cigarette and alcohol manufacturers could innovate their way around those mitigations. I don’t know that’s possible with cigarettes, alcohol, or food, but food especially it seems very possible.

Also cigarettes and alcohol don’t crowd out healthier alternatives on retail shelves the way that unhealthy foods crowd out healthier ones.

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