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.