[skissane]

> Alcohol and sugary foods are also engineered to keep people addicted and mess with their mental and physical states

Humans have been drinking alcohol and eating sugary foods for thousands of years. They weren’t “engineered” to do anything. They are just natural substances which humans stumbled upon and found inherently attractive (due to our biological predispositions).

Both are very energy-dense. In a premodern / early modern society in which most people engage in hard physical labour every day, that energy-density is valuable. In a late modern society in which most people are sedentary, it becomes much more harmful.

Many of the negative health consequences of both have only become known in recent decades. And several of those long-term health consequences are only apparent due to increased longevity, in centuries prior many people would have perished due to other causes long beforehand, and even deaths directly attributable to these substances would have seemed less significant against the background of generally higher mortality.