Similar vibe to “you claim to be vegan and yet you eat bread, and some field mice probably got killed when harvesting the wheat to make it. Checkmate, I’ve just invalidated your entire belief. Why aren’t you ordering the steak now?”

You mean I don’t have to drive to the gym anymore if I cycle to work?

You do you, but I’m happy to enjoy an ice cream once in a while.

So the UK has exactly the kind of labelling you’re talking about and they’re one of the fattest countries in Europe. Guess what, they also eat one of the highest proportions of UPF.

What food are you actually talking about that gets falsely flagged as unhealthy?

Because it’s too complicated. It would be too long of a list for people to remember and its too difficult to prove the harm of individual ingredients and they’re probably almost all fine in moderation.

Look at where we are now with saturated fats: Every major health organisation in the world says they’re linked to cardiovascular disease and should be limited in diets, and meanwhile hordes of people who’ve read a pop science book or watched a YouTube video think they know better and can eat all the fat they want.

We’ve tried going against fat, we’ve tried putting the sugar, fat and calories and packaging, people know about calories in, calories out, and yet obesity never stops growing.

UPF is about the manufacturing process. The idea is that it isn’t going to include the things that you make in your kitchen from whole and processed ingredients, but it does include the cheap easy to overeat stuff cooked up by food manufacturers.

Also I’m not aware of anyone who says you should eat no UPF whatsoever. It just shouldn’t be a huge part of your diet.

You’re right, if homeowners downsize they’ll lose out with lower prices. People don’t downsize very often.

But what policies are you talking about? How can the answer be anything other than increasing the supply of housing (or decreasing the demand i.e. the population)? Prices are only as high as they are because people pay them because they don’t have any other options. Rent is high because demand is high relative to supply.

The only thing I can think of would be higher taxes specifically in places with high house prices in order to fund huge investment in poorer areas to make them more attractive to people and businesses.

I think you’re kind of missing the point of the classification. It’s not supposed to be a perfect identifier of unhealthy foods, its supposed be more useful than stuff like “red meat consumption linked to colon cancer” (when actually the steak is broadly okay, but the stuff that’s been ripped apart and reformed together with a bunch of additives and eaten multiple times per week is not).

The UPF classification is an attempt to group together all the different kinds of foods that are formulated by food scientists using ingredients you wouldn’t have at home, often waste or byproducts chosen for their low cost, that’s been iterated over to produce the most shelf stable product which their testing shows people eat the most of while keeping profit margins high. It is almost always very easy to eat quickly and therefore overeat, while being devoid of fibre and high in sugar/salt/fat.

On the topic of fruit juice, even when the ingredients list sounds fairly innocuous, fruit juice extracts are a great way to cram sugar into a product, so you can e.g. consume an entire apples worth of sugar in one bite with none of the fibre. Thats why they count as UPF.

There’s a distinction between processed and ultra processed. Normal bread made from flour, water, yeast and salt is processed, not ultra processed. If its got emulsifiers, preservatives, and sugar added then its UPF.

Olives, cheese, traditionally made sausages are processed. That slab of competely uniform reconstituted meat is UPF. The cheese from a can is UPF.

Processed foods are broadly fine. We’ve been eating them since the dawn of civilisation.

They might be the biggest group of home owners, but they’re not themselves the issue. The optimal situation would more or less be every family owning a single home.

If house prices go down equally across the market, single home owners don’t really lose out because people typically sell houses when they want to buy a different house. People who recently took out big mortgages will complain about negative equity and some idiots are happy to see a number go up but by and large single home owners will be fine and won’t even complain a lot - they know from their children or other sources that its too damn expensive to buy a house.

The real losers would be people who own property as an investment, and developers. And those two groups have powerful lobbies and the majority of politicians are in the first group.

The single home owner NIMBYs are a problem in cases where prices will be affected but only locally. Then they really stand to lose out. So you basically need to have a massive nationwide house building program, either done by the state or through strong legal incentives to force developers to build a lot more of the right kind of homes and prevent them from sitting on land waiting for the price to go up. Or probably both.

If you get all your info from Lemmy you’d probably think that AI is a worthless hype bubble that can’t do anything right and will collapse and go away in a few years.

You can make the same argument against public transport though. People who live in rural areas with no viable public transport options tend to be against subsidies for public transport which they themselves can’t use.

A tax on mileage/big cars is more or less already achieved through fuel duty.

The problem is that its a very unpopular tax and chancellors have a habit of using a fuel duty cut as a carrot in a budget where they’re cutting other things and/or raising other taxes.

IMO there should absolutely be a large hike in fuel duty to discourage driving ICEs. And bigger cars should have higher duties in general. I don’t really have any faith that the red tories will do anything like that however.

In the UK at least tolls have been a way to get private companies to finance the infrastructure (e.g. a bridge) in the first place, and then they collect the tolls for some decades until they’ve made back their investment + X% and then the tolls are removed.