Mexican states are moving to ban the sale of junk food to children
This is a good idea, and the people in the comments are rightly pointing out sugar's problems. But just as problematic as sugar are vegetable oils which are in almost every packaged product you can buy at the grocery store. They cause all sorts of health problems because the vegetable oils are extremely reactive (due to being unsaturated fats and so having double bonds that can react with other molecules inside your body). These are not called out as a health risk because the American agriculture industry makes an enormous amount of money exporting them and selling them to companies that make packaged/processed foods.<p>Edit: just to clarify it is the poly-unsaturated fatty acids that are the problem, not fats in general. Fats like butter (saturated) or olive oil (mono-unsaturated) do not have these problems, while canola oil, soybean oil, etc. are poly-unsaturated and highly-reactive.<p>Edit 2: research for these claims:<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223779598_Lipid_oxidation_in_aging_and_age-dependent_disease" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223779598_Lipid_oxi...</a><p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12013175_Peroxidation_of_linoleic_acid_and_its_relation_to_aging_and_age_dependent_diseases" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12013175_Peroxidati...</a><p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5931176_The_Important_Role_of_Lipid_Peroxidation_Processes_in_Aging_and_Age_Dependent_Diseases" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5931176_The_Importa...</a><p>These are from a lipid scientist rather than from nutrition scientists, so they are focusing on internal biological processes rather than health outcomes. I have not seen good nutrition studies on poly-unsaturated fats. However, studies of fat consumption that break out fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fat categories generally show worse health outcomes for people consuming high intakes of poly-unsaturated fats. I will try to find a good study.<p>These ingredients are not well studied, which is surprising when you consider how rapidly they've been added to the food supply (basically not at all present 100 years ago, to in every processed food today).