For example, corn subsidies inevitably lowers the price of sugar, which means — on a micro level - some food engineer might replace some fat with sugar to reduce costs but keep appeal - which, in a macro level, encourages higher sugar content in processed foods.

It can be argued that subsidies are for national security by ensuring there will always be US farmers in case some country cuts imports to us.

But as for heightened sugar problem, you can’t exactly blame the company, food engineer, industry, farmers, Congress or consumers directly. No one intended this side effect — it just kinda happened.

It’s like it’s a complex problem and there’s 1000 angles and you just have to look at these micro-issues individually. You can’t just say “regulate it” or “consumers should be responsible.”

Regulators and middle managers provide me with limited options for each of those thousand choices, and I, without having to think much, can pick one of them safely.

For each of my choices, various regulators and managers have all gotten many says already.

Some bureaucrat does manage my diet, and your diet too, but they don't micromanage it, and nobody is saying they should micromanage it

It's perfectly feasible for regulators to identify when companies are adding sugars - look at the recipe, inspect the factory, put things in bomb calorimeters. Thats not at all absurd, and there's already standards maintained for basically everything, including foods like peanut butter (see: https://youtu.be/esQyYGezS7c )

If it was absurd, it would be impossible to do food safety regulation, like ensuring that food doesn't contain toxins or heavy metals

If you look at the other responses, you'll see a number of people who want food pulled from the shelves and their options limited so they don't have to exercise self-control and take responsibility for what they consume or don't consume.

There our hosts calling for a bureaucrats to micromanage diets so that they are more healthy.

There are post claiming that people our powerless to resist advertising, therefore the government should be making the choices for those people

And I know the overall topic is about dietary choices, but I'm responding to your blanket anti-regulation statement.

If your society has an agrarian model, where you locally produce, distribute, and serve all the food you need to subsist, and these chains are small-scale and numerous, then there is more trust inherent in that model, and less pressure for profit or growth. Therefore, many of the motives are removed for adulteration or poor-quality food. These can be relatively self-regulating industries as described.

In an industrial, developed first-world country, you have massive factory farms scaling up, you have ginormous distribution networks on rail, water, tarmac, and asphalt, and they all run with help from the massive oil industry, and finally you have large-scale food service operations and restaurant chains and mega-groceries all over town. So yeah! There's gonna be a lot of motive to mess with food, and there's gonna be a lack of trust in the Big City, because these supply chains are so long and deep, spanning oceans and borders, that it's very impersonal. So those are ripe conditions for adulteration, reductions in quality, false labeling, and all those things the FDA/USDA/FTC have striven to eliminate on the behalf of the consumer, I guess.

Some producers are becoming so large they can afford to bribe the scientists and regulators. Smaller players are struggling to compete without resorting to adding sugars themselves.

For all these reasons we collectively develop laws and regulations to keep things within some reasonable limits. Considering the obesity epidemic, despite few wanting to be obese, I think tightening the reigns a bit is warranted.

Is it not regulation that forced the display of this information?

There is a difference though: it's not about choice as much as it is about "good defaults". As a state you should want your folk to have better food, but if some person wants the choice of micromanaging their diet then sure, go ahead.

I shouldn't be struggling to find non-processed food in a supermarket. This is often the case right now, which is why I would very much welcome some more regulation on this.

What supermarkets do you go to that don't have a produce section and a meat section? Is there some other form of unprocessed food you expect?

Even something like pasta and bread are technically processed (but maybe not ultraprocessed unless its wonderbread)

I wonder if the term 'micromanaging [their diet]' is a touch perjorative. Given the prevalence of serious chronic diseases which are reported to be strongly linked to what you eat, shouldn't everyone be encouraged to take a serious look at how to 'macro' manage their diet, an action which is almost certainly likely to improve quality of life and maybe life span?

I would like to live in a world where me and maybe a person i trust, could together limit of the foods i can buy, and than program that into my credit card.

I would like to live in a world, where instead of scienticts and engineersand businessmen working on optimizing the addictiveness of food, which isn't a good social goal, would work on optimizing the long term happiness derived from food.

And sure, while I would lose some freedom and fun in this process, given the role food plays in mood and health, over the long term i would likely be happier, much happier.

It doesn't seem that absurd to me. If the government banned the production and import of potato chips, you could still make them at home, but people would probably make a lot less of them. Unlike drugs, food is not conveniently hidden and the value is too low per unit volume to justify illicit production. Therefore food which is banned generally will not be produced at scale.

If the government did set out to materially improve the dietary habits of the citizenry, it would definitely be possible. It would be politically infeasible and possibly tyranny, but it would be very doable.

I agree that if you ignore the constraints it would be trivial. There are so many brutal and oppressive solutions it isn't even worth listing examples.

Such a program could be done as a rachet, similarly to how tobacco use was driven to the margins.

Yes I do want a bureaucrat back by the best nutritional science available to nudge the market to provide me with better, healthier options.

The danger is, of course, that the agency gets captured by the AG industry. Such as the old "food pyramid" that suggested a quarter of your diet should be straight carbs. Or the "fat free" movement that was really just replacing fats with sugars.

While I wouldn’t dispute the undue influence of corporate interests on lawmakers, I would bet that the bigger factor is the tax revenue that the government collects from increased corporate profits. It is int eg government’s interest for companies to thrive because then it gets more funds via taxation.

In an ideal world that would be the case. But in an era of mass media, consumers really aren't making the choice. The choice is being made for them by ads.

> I'm not sure where the idea comes from that it that some government regulator should or even can micromanage the diet of ordinary citizens.

Pretty much everything a supermarket, restaurant, etc sells is regulated by the government. Whether you like it or not, government is involved in our diets.

> Do some people actually want to live in a world where some bureaucrat manages their diet?

A geniunely independent bureacrat? Maybe. On the other hand, do you want a world where corporations with their ads control your diet? It's a complex question.

Advertising doesn’t replace human agency, only—at most—informs the choices that people make.

The choices others make that inform (but do not decide) someone’s diet are the following:

1. Congress or an agency empowered by Congress choosing to prohibit certain crops. Note: not choosing to allow, unless they previously prohibited it.

2. Private farms and businesses choosing which crops to farm and livestock to raise.

2b. Controls on the handling and raising of crops and livestock may have an effect on the profitability of those choices, so legislation can also inform this choice at this level, but again, doesn’t decide it.

3. What farm products distributors and manufacturers choose to purchase for resell.

4. What stores and supermarkets choose to purchase for sale.

5. What the customer chooses to purchase for their own consumption, which is the ultimate test for the market viability of crops and livestock if there is no other commercial use for them.

It sucks that this is the dichotomy, but yes, absolutely, a bureaucrat will probably end up getting better food to you than corporate interests.

Blaming Regulators or industry almost never works.

It literally worked for tobacco

Sounds like a nightmare to me though, even though theoretically one massively reduce diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc. with such a system.

Absolutely. My direct personal life and the world around me would be better if there were less sugar available (especially for children and teens, as with alcohol and tobacco for example), it were more expensive, and/or it were better labeled.

It's all of this, all at once, millions of times over.

We're an ant colony solving a problem we don't really grok as individuals.

It's even bigger than just these choices. Sugar subsidies. You know what else sugar is used for? Ethanol. Fuel. Transportation. Trade. National defense. You name it, these decisions are intertwined at scale.

If some negative externality grows to great, the system will rebalance. It does so almost thermodynamically.

The (very unfortunate) answer is 'yes'. The people who say 'no' are in the minority.