That rather spurious line of argument makes every half-way competent cook or chef effectively a drug peddler. Food is not addictive. The behaviour of eating too much or too much of the wrong thing is - this is not something which the food industry sells. They sell individual items of food which, of course, are designed to taste good. This is not sinister, it is exactly how our grandparents and ancestors ate - they prepared food ingredients to make something tasty. There was never a time where we just ate handfuls of flour, or ate raw potatoes.
If you're presenting an argument which says that it's partly somebody else's thought, the direct effect of that argument is that individuals aren't completely responsible for their behaviour
4. Ultraprocessed Food Is the Cause of NCDs
Rather,
the quality of the food is the cause. Ultraprocessed food, defined as industrial formulations typically with 5 or more ingredients [
24], is the category of food that drives NCDs [
25], such as obesity [
26,
27], diabetes [
28], heart disease [
29], and cancer [
30]. In particular, added sugar (i.e., any fructose-containing sweetener; sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, maple syrup, honey, agave) is the prevalent, insidious, and egregious component of ultraprocessed food that drives that risk.
In this article, using scientific and legal evidence, I will elaborate three related arguments. F
irst, I will demonstrate that ultraprocessed food is addictive because of the sugar that is added to it, and that the food industry specifically adds sugar because of its addictive properties. Second, I will highlight the specific mechanisms by which sugar is toxic to the liver, which leads to NCDs. Lastly, I will argue that added sugar is more appropriately defined as a
food additive rather than as a
food. In so doing, I will argue that added sugar, and by extension the entire ultraprocessed food category, meets these criteria established by the public health community for regulation of a substance (abuse, toxicity, ubiquity, externalities) [
9]. [my emphasis].
from here, i am sure there are others around
Past public health crises (e.g., tobacco, alcohol, opioids, cholera, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), lead, pollution, venereal disease, even coronavirus (COVID-19) have been met with interventions targeted both at the individual and all of ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Next youl'l tell me that cigarettes and alcohol are not addictive either!