Then why do we have a growing obesity epidemic in countries that DON'T have nearly as many problems with ultra-processed food? Southern Europe, Japan, and India are usually held as exemplar countries with very good natural food culture. All of them are struggling with increasing obesity.
I'm not saying that ultra-processed foods are fine. They are bad and very much part of the story. But it is not the whole story either.
> Southern Europe, Japan, and India are usually held as exemplar countries with very good natural food culture. All of them are struggling with increasing obesity.
This is a great way to show you haven't visited those places in over a decade. They lagged behind in the takeover of addictive sugary crap. Now they're catching up in the same way. Korea is another great example that you didn't mention, the exact same has happened there.
The dissonance here is that your view of them being held up as such examples is from 2005, whereas your obesity statistics on them are from 2025. As soon as you update the former view to their situation as of 2025, you'll draw the exact opposite conclusion: an exact match.
What does "very good natural food culture" mean in a numerical sense, over time? Because I could imagine that label being applied to countries that are staying much more natural than average, but still have very significant changes in food makeup.
You haven't been to India, have you? The capitalist push to get every Indian eating addictive junk (most commonly with the use of sugar) is as aggressive as it is anywhere else in the world.
I think it is a bit intellectually lazy to pull the "capitalism bad" at every occasion.
I would blame our monkey brains instead. India has no shortage of traditional sweets that predate capitalism (Indians even knew sugar far before Europeans did), but in the previous crushing poverty that lasted millennia, only a tiny fragment of the Indian population had the opportunity to eat themselves to gout, diabetes, obesity etc. Now, almost every Indian can eat to satiety and beyond, for the first time in history. And the aftereffects show.
Capitalism is fairly efficient at providing people what they want. If our monkey brains crave sugar, sugary treats it will be.
We need to get our monkey brains under control, and not just with regard to sugar. At least some HNers are probably working on digitally addictive products, and then there are the old-fashioned drugs like alcohol and opiates, too.
This is really the worst situation to apply this logic to, as the "counterexample" he mentioned applies to every single one of the regions mentioned by GP.
Capitalism is how all of our shit works, so it’s lacking in specificity but also a pretty accurate thing to say in many situations.
Why is social media shit? Well, “the platforms are incentivized to demonstrate growth in profit to their investors, so they optimize their system for maximal engagement and retention over time, transferring the same incentive to creators, so many creators who would have made better work before desperately churn out poorly made material about whatever is popular and other, more interesting content is ultimately less common on the platform, with the root cause being the constant need for a growth in surplus in all areas of social production” is a better answer, but “it’s capitalism” is still an alright start.
But this is true: the Tragedy of commons (AKA «keep profits, externalize costs») is a common thing in unregulated capitalism. Regulated capitalism tries to solve it with rules, lot of rules. Socialism tries to solve it with bureaucracy, lot of bureaucracy. Communism (no profits) and monarchy (monarch eats the costs) are somewhat immune to this problem.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01143-7