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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is saying that; it's not an either/or, or a dichotomy. The issue, as always, lies in overconsumption.

Part of that is down to manufacturers, who especially in the US put loads of sugar in pretty much everything. Part of that is down to the consumer, which chooses convenience over awareness; part of that is things like take-out or drinking culture, but part of that is also diet culture, a diet telling you "stop eating this, only eat that". That too is convenience.

As is calling certain foods "healthy" vs "unhealthy", because that's no absolute either, and it's a lazy descriptor - as in, "please explain to me why it is healthy / unhealthy". The crux of it is, nothing is healthy or unhealthy unless it's literal poison, it's more about calorific content and quantities.

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You can’t seriously be blaming consumers for this. It’s not consumers’ job to be scientists and understand whether some factory made ultra processed food is good for them or not. This is entirely because the government is bought and paid for by capitalists that lobby it to allow large corporations to sell garbage to people.

The solution is a simple number on food (1-100) that tells a consumer how healthy (or not) a product is and takes into account caloric content, additivies, sugar content, etc. This is something the government should be doing but since the US is governed by radical conservatives that are immensely corrupt it’s likely not going to happen. There is an app I’ve recently started using called Yuka that does this.

I’m also not opposed to banning certain categories of unhealthy products entirely.

Your point about overconsumption is valid but again, I don’t believe this is the fault of consumers, this is just a result of the capitalist system which encourages overconsumption in order to keep the system from falling apart.

>The solution is a simple number on food (1-100) that tells a consumer [...]

What's the evidence on interventions like this? We tried adding calorie counts on packaging and menus, but obesity rates are still going up.

Nutriscore exists since a while in France. It’s rate food from A to F.

Not sure of the utility of that.

But I rely very much on the calorie count!

This makes the demonstrably false assumption that what's good for you, today, is good for everybody, all the time.

Different bodies need different things, and no single dumbed-down number like that can ever take that into account.

What we need is better ways of making clear just what those needs are to people, which ultimately comes down to better education. Is it a quick solution? Absolutely not. But it's the only one that can genuinely help people to improve their own health through nutrition.

That said, we can also improve our regulation around these things based on the best science we have available, to do things like ban or require labeling and appropriate disclosure of substances that are known to be universally or commonly harmful.

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