I'm not saying McDonald's is healthy but there's clearly a difference between eating a cheeseburger and smoking a cigarette.

Heart disease kills way more people than lung cancer. So the only difference that I can see is that the Cheeseburger is more deadly.

You seem all too happy to tell everyone what they can and can't do and ready with all of the exceptions for the things you personally like.

> So the only difference that I can see is that the Cheeseburger is more deadly.

Eating is a requirement for life, and there is no meaningful way to make a nutritionally complete diet available (especially at "feeding society without devoting your entire GDP to food production and distribution" scales) while making it impossible for people to gain unhealthy amounts of weight. It is fully a sliding scale.

Even the most pro-nicotine people can't argue that smoking is a necessary component of human survival.

Eating junk food isn't

Breathing is a requirement for life and smoking is a category of breathing in the same way that eating soda and candy bars is a category of eating.

I'm not arguing that in good faith. I'm pointing out that your argument doesn't hold up either.

You don’t have to make it impossible to gain weight, but don’t make gaining weight the default choice like it is today.

Reduce the insane amount of sugar, empty carbs, and saturated fats in the food available to an average American, and subsidize vegetables and fruits and whole grains. Incentivize the mass-producing manufacturers to use healthier ingredients.

Yes, just as there's clearly a difference between smoking and vaping. In a sane regulatory world as soon as e-cigarettes became widely available we would have banned legacy cigarettes. Instead we're doing the opposite on the basis of logic-free moralizing.