When you put out an ad for someone to decide what everyone in a country will spend billions of dollars on, you don't get fair-minded public servants, you get the most compelling villain moneyed interests can afford.

That's also a pretty trivial truth in psychology.

Those who claim that people are rational agents probably spend too much time interacting with computers, and then make unwarranted (and, I should say, spectacularly naive) generalizations.

What's the best toothpaste to buy if I want white teeth? Will it hurt my enamel? What about gingivitis? What about tooth brush hardness? What about flossing? What's the proper technique? Should I do it before or after I brush?

And that's just dental hygiene.

So yes, while this libertarian ideal of "the free market solves everything" and "fuck the consumer if they won't educate themselves" is nice in theory, in practice it's not effective public policy. It simply isn't possible to be completely informed on everything that goes into every part of our lives -- if you actually want to live, that is.

The problem with leaping to grand conclusions on that basis is that you must first establish that whatever putative replacement you want to propose is actually better than what people are already doing in the aggregate, and not merely theoretically better. Given that you have the same raw material to work with as the economy as a whole (irrational agents), this is a great deal harder than people are willing to admit. For instance, the very popular "regulate it" answer generally completely ignores the high likelihood that the irrational regulators will simply rigidly lock in some irrational answer; "regulators" or "government" are simply assumed or asserted to be somehow rational, even though it consists of the same irrational agents as anything else. (Bearing in mind that we are generally talking about sorts of irrationality that are difficult or impossible to eliminate with "education", education itself coming from other irrational agents, and with incentive structures in place to embrace irrationality if it suits an agenda.)

I'm a libertarian primarily because I believe letting people choose, then experience the consequences, then communicate with each other in a free society about those consequences, is the fastest way for both the individual and the society to learn about what works and does not. Anything else extends the feedback loop, impeding its functionality, and in many cases, such as the regulated irrationality, actively destroys it entirely.

I'm not a libertarian "despite" the irrationality of the public, I'm a libertarian because of it. If people could be counted on to be perfectly rational and logical, that's when the whole "regulate everything" would be logical and correct; we could assume the regulators were cold and rational in their choices and therefore it's rational to offload judgment to them, because we'd come to the same decisions they would anyhow. But that's not the world we live in.

Getting back to the original topic, I currently consider it highly likely that nutrition is precisely one of those cases, and if it does turn out that nutrition has been grossly wrong, the damage done by it is literally one of the top five crimes against humanity in the 20th century in terms of death and destruction. And to emphasize, yes, I mean fully literally; millions upon millions upon millions of cases of preventable "metabolic syndrome", a passionless name for a horrific, life-altering and life-destroying disease, even before it kills you decades before your time. I'm still waiting to see how it all plays out but someday this is likely to be considered one of the greatest failings of irrational agents being allowed to regulate individuals in the history of mankind. In the meantime, I strongly commend to everyone to read up on all sides of these issues and come to their own conclusions; your life depends on it.

From earlier in the week, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279307

Junk food is designed to be addictive. Furthermore, there's no truth in advertising, the fact is that people are being manipulated en messe. In the article they full admit to it.

Finally, it is marketed at kids. (Besides, I've been to the US - I know what passes for cheese over there! Heh)

Personal responsibility is all well and good but surely you can't expect the general population to watch the lectures of Dr. Lustig or even know what HFCS is to begin with, never mind that it is bad for you and why.

Once upon a time doctors recommended smoking. What's obvious to you in the present is not necessarily 'common' sense.

Have big warning labels, skull and bones, the works, just like cigarette packs. And ban them from marketing it at kids at least. "If you eat more than one pack of these a week, you will gain weight and increase your risk of diabetes" - I bet you MOST Americans have yet to connect those dots.

And here it comes: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01...

This is a backhanded attack on "Big Grocery." Wal-Mart is being "responsible" with an initiative "to offer more healthful foods and push its suppliers to do the same."

Of course, Wal-Mart's competitors can't afford to manhandle their suppliers at the same scale.

Here in China, I witnessed a commercial, western-style, pre-packaged apple juice drink yesterday that was sold for 6元 (just under 1USD) for 500mL. On further inspection, it contained 10% 'real' apple juice (which could mean anything...), some artificial flavoring and colouring, glucose syrup, aspartame, and preservatives. They must be making a killing: it was 90% water. Health impact? People used to drink tea - you be the judge.

http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/why-does-a-...

* one of the reasons HFCS is so prevalent in the US is because it's effectively government subsidized? * which is also why the worst foods are often the cheapest? * that HFCS is in all kinds of food you'd never expect, like "grilled" chicken in the salads at mid-level (or worse yet, fast food) restaurants?

If you're a label reader, you will find HFCS in a million places it oughtn't be. Since nobody expects their grilled chicken strips to stuffed with sugar, they are being tricked -- an angry person might say "force-fed."

"Big Food" may be inflammatory but it's also true, in this case. Agribusiness is an enormous industry and in the top 10 lobbyist groups in the US.

Other countries have outlawed HFCS. There's no reason that our government shouldn't.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2991323/ Health implications of fructose consumption: A review of recent data (2010)

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup_and_he...

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/inde...

Not saying one two-part study alone is everything, but it's also not nothing.

And who's to say additional weight gain is bad for those mice? Mammals in a cold climate might appreciate the additional weight gain.

So, they did indeed count the calories and the result seems to indicate something about HFCS encourages rats to gain weight in a way that standard table sugar does not.

More importantly, you are just repeating the line that high fructose corn syrup causes more weight gain. So what? There is no indication that this is a bad thing.

There are negative forces attempting to gain a maximum of profit by producing unhealthy food. No doubt. Fact. You can also never buy any of their products. Also a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is essentially choosing their short term pleasure over their long term health. That decision is 100% made by the individual. If your health is important to you, you make time and money for it. If it isn't, then that's fine, but don't go blaming other people for your misallocation of personal resources.

No they don't. You know that and I know that, but we're reasonably well-educated, with a general grasp of economics nutrition and so forth. There are a lot of people - I'd guess up to half the country - that don't understand that stuff and have difficulty understanding the 'nutrition facts' labels on food. I do think people ought to be more responsible for their own diets, but consider the impact of poor diet upon brain development. If you grew up being fed low quality food, you're less likely to appreciate how bad for you it actually is.

For some people, McDonalds is cheaper than the healthy alternatives and they simply can't avoid it even though they'd like to. I know that's hard to believe but there you go.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/junk-food-expen...

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/24/opinion/sunda...

People can eat more and healthier by purchasing and preparing their own food.

Assume you have no car, have to rely on public transport, and work multiple jobs in geographically spread out locations. Nipping across town and back to stock your fridge with some healthy goodies doesn't sound so trivial now, does it?

The McDonalds is probably a lot closer and thus indeed cheaper even if the bill for groceries is a few bucks less.

Good food preparation equipment is far from cheap. Bad food prep equipment makes it a lot harder to do.

And learning to cook healthy food, particularly when it has to be tasty enough to compete with the draw of processed meals, isn't easy either.

I did some looking into this problem a few years ago when I was fronting a Web cooking show, and it's far more complex than it appears. Saying "They should just cook healthy food!" is a lot like saying "They should just install configure Linux to be as good as Windows" circa 2003 or so. It might make the speaker feel good, but actually the problems are more complex and more real than that.

That is very much not my experience.

I actually like to cook. It's fun and the food is perfectly suited to my tastes. But when I'm pressed for time, I'll still just stop by a fast-food restaurant because it's faster. And I have better access to fresh food and good cooking implements than many poor people, so cooking is even more of a decision for them.

A bigger group than these are kids who grow up only ever seeing processed, pre-cooked foods. Many of these kids do not watch TV. What they see in their immediate family/friend group is all they know.

There are reasons the obesity rates in the US are worst amongst poor, and especially urban, people. Many privileged, educated people would say it's a moral issue, but it's often an environmental issue.

And probably more than a few "cavemen" died of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to cook over open fires in their "caves".

I've been really poor. On non-consecutive occasions.

Many of these kids do not watch TV

No offense, but you're just making shit up. You'd have to go to the most rural area of Mongolia before you find kids without ready access to television. That said, I'm not blaming children for anything--rather, most adults understand that a 99 cent can of pork and beans (available at any convenience mart) is healthier than fast food...and willingly ignore that fact.

One of the avenues of "normalizing" is TV. Recently I've been talking with a friend who mentors a teenaged boy who just got himself hooked on meth. I couldn't understand how that could even happen, because "everybody knows that meth is the worst of the worst." My friend explained that he did not realize it's not normal for the aunt who's on meth to be the "stable" one in their family (dad is such a drunk he never eats or buys food… Auntie Meth feeds the boy, somehow). Unfortunately, that poor kid is now fucked.

I also used to live in a part of Baltimore City in the midst of gentrification and shared my block with people who'd lived in the same house for generations and people on welfare. Two of my neighbors on welfare didn't have a TV at all, or radio. Two, from a tiny block of 10 houses. Those happened to be 100% of my neighbors on welfare.

(How did they entertain themselves all day? Well, they didn't. For whatever reason, they had zero curiosity and zero boredom. They did basically nothing. This is not a criticism. They were nice to me, I was nice to them, and given my interactions with their kids, their kids seem to have a better life ahead of them. But the parents were terminally incurious, to the point of not knowing street names just a couple blocks away… because they never went anywhere, not on foot or any other way. It's a given that they could not read, but you don't have to read to pick up a couple street names over 15+ years living in the same place. But I'm not sure that would have made a difference.)

Or salmonella, e coli, lysteria, botulinus, cholera, etc, etc...

Secondly, there are just as many - if not more - studies that show that junk food is, in fact, cheaper. Because weight is an obvious, but subtly wrong, measurement to compare by:

"Healthy eating really does cost more. That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation…"

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

A factory farmed fryer-sized chicken costs $8-$15, and feeds four adults. You'd need two to get 8-9 meals. Best case, that leaves you $4 for everything else.

Maybe you can do better in rural America, but roughly half of the population doesn't live there.

You can argue that it's cheaper to feed a family with careful shopping than to go out for fast food every night, but there's no way that you can get that many of the meals described for $20. You could maybe do half that.

It's incredible how easily we overlook everything it takes to do what you said.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who recently had a baby. He's an educated, employed, white, probably wealthy, smart, guy who loves good food and knows how to cook and lives in wealthy suburbs. What he said yesterday was along the lines of "I totally understand why people eat fast food so much. I drive by Jack in the box on the way home and, while I haven't done it yet, the idea is compelling."

So here's a guy who "knows" that it's bad to eat fast food. and doesn't want too. But he's tired from his 9-5 desk job, doesn't sleep as well as he wants to do to the newborn), and doesn't want to cook at the end of the day.

What if he was a high school graduate with a physical job making $35k a year with 2 kids who doesn't live near a grocery store and never had any exposure to cooking, food saving, and all the other things you have? What is the chance that person, on their own, is going to discover their horrible diet, learn how to prepare and save their food, break the habit of sugary foods, etc.

Just because you can do it doesn't mean it's easy, or common sense, or even possible for a huge swath of the population.

Thanks for having empathy. Hopefully comments like yours will help other people see what they're lacking.

So basically, the numbers only work out if you're living somewhere cheap (i.e. not urban). Where I live, a chicken that feeds four costs $8-$15 (roughly $2 a pound). Eight meals means two birds, plus the cost of everything else.

[0] As the grandparent points out, I mean veggies, whole grains, etc, etc, not necessarily organic or boutique.

There's not much need for skepticism here. Pay even the tiniest amount of attention to prices at the supermarket, and you'll know that it's true. I can buy a can of beef stew for $5. Buying the raw ingredients to make the same quantity of beef stew would cost me at least $10.

Make friends with your freezer. Meat production, like everything else, goes in cycles so at regular intervals producers (and thus) supermarkets will find themselves with excess stock of this or that. The obvious example is buying turkey after Thanksgiving, but I see cycles in things like the price of pork every 4-6 weeks. So about every other month I buy a whole boneless pork loin (a single piece of meat about as long as your forearm) for about $25 instead of the usual cost of around $50. I spend about 20 minutes at home slicing it into pork steaks and freezing most of them, and get 20+ nice thick steaks out of it, so that's about $1.05 each. Add in the cost of the vegetables, other ingredients, energy to cool and cook, and the price of a good size meal is still only $2.50 at most.

That's a particularly good deal (which is why I buy it so regularly) but if you can cook and don't mind forward planning your food a bit, you save a lot of money. Menu planning probably cuts your cost by 50% vs. buying your ingredients on a per-meal basis.

And this isn't surprising: $5 is remarkably cheap for a beef-based product. They do it by using remnant beef, which you can't really get in stores. Grocery store stew meat is probably 2-3x more expensive than the stuff they're using. Mine will taste better and be higher quality, but it won't be cheaper.

I can't understand how you come to this conclusion. I definitely save money by buying larger cuts or bulk packs. Maybe you should come over for dinner :-)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/a-high-price-for-he...

"Healthy eating really does cost more.

That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups."

http://nutrition.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/nutritionfacts.p...

Second, I wasn't able to find the page for nuggets specifically, but I doubt their preparation of the chicken meat in nuggets is better than their non-breaded, grilled breast filets:

Grilled Chicken Fillet Allergens: SOY LECITHIN Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning (rice starch, salt, sugar, yeast extract, canola oil, onion powder, maltodextrin, chicken skin, paprika, flavor, sunflower oil, chicken, garlic powder, chicken fat, spices), sodium phosphates.

Prepared with Liquid Margarine: Liquid soybean oil and hydrogenated cottonseed and soybean oils, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, salt, soy lecithin, mono-and diglycerides, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), artificial flavor, citric acid, vitamin A palmitate, beta carotene (color).

CONTAINS: SOY LECITHIN.

SOURCE: http://www.mcdonalds.com/getnutrition/itemDetailInfo.do?item...

Maltodextrin isn't HFCS but it is a (no doubt corn-)derived sugar. And I highly doubt even most reasonable people would look at a plain grilled chicken patty and assume it has 18 ingredients, including TWO types of sugar (and possibly three — "flavor" is enigmatically opaque).

Time and time again has shown that every health (or financial…) crisis starts with moralizing. Which never works. Only when reform and legislation occur do things get better. But it's an appealing strategy because it feels good to the moralizer, and doesn't take any work.

The food industry knows what it's doing, does it on purpose [1], with government dollars. Government subsidies to individuals go to processed foods (because natural ingredients are more expensive), then those government dollars also end up in the pockets of corporations using government money to undercut prices thanks to industry corn subsidies.

Even if everyone were suddenly to start cooking all their meals and never eating out or buying any premade ingredients, that raw chicken at your local grocery store is also a lot less benign that you think. Most whole chickens are injected with all kinds of things.[2] At Whole Foods in NYC, I once bought a (very small) organic chicken that cost $16.

Of course, cooking home meals requires A) living in a place where you can cook, B) growing up understanding cooking is an option, C) understanding that food can even be dangerous, D) not living in one of America's many, very large food deserts [3]. And that's assuming you're not relying on government assistance to feed your baby… or should we say, feed your baby corn syrup? [4] And let's not forget school breakfasts and lunches for poor kids.[5]

Oh sure, in a perfect world, everybody has perfect information and the ability to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about their food. Not to mention access to grocery stores with healthy food. But in THIS world, you've got an ouroboros of government money funding and institutionalizing a crisis: from government subsidies to produce HFCS lowering the cost of very unhealthy and addictive foods, to government money paying for baby formula laced with HFCS made by the companies that benefit from the government subsidies for growing corn (a delicious double dip). Government cheese is even more addictive than HFCS. Hence, legislation.

[1] Certainly not the canonical reporting on the problem, but this NYT article about the intentional design of addictive food just came out yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...

[2] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/04/opinion/la-ed-chicke...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

[4] http://wicwoes.com/2011/corn-syrup-for-babies

[5] http://foodidentitytheft.com/vegetable-or-not-school-lunch-p...

EDIT: One last thing. Not only is HFCS/CS a major ingredient in such seemingly trustworthy, reputable foods such as Mott's Apple Sauce, and probiotic yogurt, it's also found in pet food. Yes, pet food. I recently adopted a cat with an autoimmune problem and I ended up researching pet health issues. Pet diabetes is increasing terribly.[6] Cats have other health problems caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to get pet food, no matter how expensive, without biologically unnecessary sugars and starches -- which cats, pure carnivores, not only don't need, but suffer from. Dogs don't need corn syrup, either.

[6] http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/05/04/new-pet-health-report...

Nothing in your post appears to justify a ban on HFCS. Are "it gets used in foods you wouldn't expect" and "other countries ban it" justification enough? I'm not trying to defend HFCS, but if you're going to call for something to be banned, you need to provide better reasoning.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fresh-fruit...

So yes, lopsided subsidies indeed shape what some people eat.

It's better to remove all subsidies though, or subsidize things like spinach and broccoli. If they want to extract something from those and add it, I guess I am fine.

CSPI (mentioned in the article) campaigned hard in the 80s for fast food restaurants to switch from lard to cholesterol-free 100% vegetable oil. After all, back then, cholesterol and saturated fat were considered evil. They complied and switched to partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, which was laden with trans fat... which is now widely thought to be worse than saturated fat and is itself being phased out (again at CSPI's urging).