Living in the US, my takeaway is this:
Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor.
But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they would stop making them. But their snack cakes are designed to make you want to eat the whole package and sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix, making the consumer's choice almost a moot point since consumers tend to trade their own best interests for convenience and "saving" money.
And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.
But I do hate it. I have to put a stupid amount of effort into eating healthy because I don't have room for a garden and healthier alternatives are often more expensive. I can see why most people just reach for the snack cakes and call it done.
> And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.
It's not this simple.
Marketing isn't just about making an existing product attractive to consumers - it's also about creating new products and even new product categories, and then creating a desire amongst consumers leading to purchases.
Where do you think all of the ultra-processed food has come from in the past decade? It didn't always exist...
This game theory problem, where consumers are buying unhealthier options because they're cheaper, and companies are producing unhealthier options because they're more profitable, is exactly what regulation is for. I don't understand why we've all collectively forgotten why regulation exists and become so cynical that it can actually work! Actually I do understand: it's industry interests spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intentional misinformation and government capture for a half century.
A reasonable counter-argument is "but the science is extremely muddy here, so effective regulation is especially difficult", which is unfortunately true, but I'd point out that the science is extremely muddy largely because of industry efforts to intentionally poison our understanding of nutrition.
It's even (often) in company's selfish interest to have regulation so that they aren't forced into a race to the bottom.
this is why I'm always very astonished when European regulation is frowned upon by reflex
Yes and: "regulations" is just a scary words for "rules".
Yes and: Policy proceeds rule making. Rules try to encode incentives and disincentives to achieve those policies. For better or worse.
Yes and: Surplus, and therefore overuse of, unhealthy foodstuffs (eg HFCS) is the result of pro Big Ag policies. Which are often in opposition to public health interests. So we (taxpayers) are paying to create lifestyle diseases at the same time we're paying to mitigate those same diseases.
I know you know all this. I hate to go meta on the UPF debate; but there really is an easily identified root cause.
The very first priority to mitigating lifestyle diseases should be:
Stop making it worse.
/rant
It's not in the food industry's interest to harm us beyond pursing profit margin, but it is in the health and pharmaceutical industry's interest to harm us — treatable chronic disease is recurring revenue. The more chronic disease, the more revenue. Pharma companies are making fistfuls of money from GLP1 agonists.
This incentive to harm is translated into the food system when captured groups like the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association help write dietary guidelines (for school systems for example) that look good optically but actually create disease and future recurring revenue for the health industrial complex. Groups like the ADA and AHA are also captured by major funding from the food industry, so that cheap high margin food products fit into their dietary guidelines.
The incentives are synergistic and exactly aligned to push food products with a veneer of health that cause long term disease.
The word "captured" was very apt, as food companies make donations to the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association in return for their stamps of approval. This is not a conspiracy theory, but has been documented:
ADA takes money to promote Splenda: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ex-director-accuses...
AHA takes money to promote foods like ham which raise heart disease risk: https://huffpost.com/entry/health-news_b_4398304
AHA advisory cherry picks trials to reference, on the back of funding from Procter & Gamble (Crisco) and Bayer (soybean oil): https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-saturated-...
I think you're wrong about the food industry not slowly harming people, for two reasons.
1) For "unhealthy" food (i.e. not something that's acutely poisonous) the link between ingestion and harm is in the long-term; it would be very difficult to blame harm on a particular group of foods, let alone a specific product. Maybe in a couple of decades there will be hand-wringing and governmental investigations, but in the short term, there's no negative incentive for food companies.
2) Most executives are directly incentivised to think in the short term - this bonus cycle, this year's results, the two-three years until LTIs vest, or a next promotion or change of job. Short of something catastrophic, there will almost never be a comeback for those individuals, meaning they have all of the positive incentives to chase profit, and it's very unlikely that they'll ever personally experience anything negative from their decisions.
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Also, I don't really want to engage with quasi-conspiracy theories, but if you think that pharma companies have a hand in influencing dietary advice to be unhealthy so they can sell more drugs, IME you're vastly overestimating the competence of the pharma industry.
A side effect of maximizing profit is harming our health. Doesn't really matter to me whether it's malicious intent or in the pursuit of shareholder value.
In retrospect, I realize the food industry probably took a page out of the cigarette industry's playbook. Or was it the other way around?
There is a clear link between the two industries: https://neurosciencenews.com/hyperpalatable-foods-big-tobacc...
> sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix
Sorry for sniping, but the alternative is to not buy a snack. You don't have to eat snacks.