From ConscienHealth:

Using Mendelian randomization they found evidence for a causal relationship between hyper-palatable foods and the rising risk of obesity.

Well, whilst I grudgingly understand that this is an April Fool’s joke, it doesn’t mean that the conclusion is wrong!

A recent episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “Our Brains Weren’t Designed for This Kind of Food” interviewed Stephan Guyenet who argued that the huge rise in rates of obesity in recent times is not a product of everyone suddenly magically losing all reason and will-power overnight and making “bad” individual choices. This of course should not come as a surprise to anyone who has read anything reputable over the past few decades on the subject (or simply engaged their common sense).

He argues that instead the main driver is that we’ve created ourselves a food environment to live within which is entirely strange and unsuited to the way our brains and genetics have come to work through evolutionary history.

When someone told me about the existence of tasteGPT - a LLM AI that sucks up a pile of data and then informs food companies what sorts of foods they should make and market for maximum sales potential via a chatbot - I felt a sense of trepidation.

There’s definitely a world wherein I could get onboard with fake Agatha Hannigan’s comment that:

Now, food marketers have come up with an endless array industrially formulated foods that taste unnaturally good. This is terrible.