Asklemmy

This is the answer. High fructose corn syrup is over-used because it's dirt cheap to produce, and it's only dirt cheap to produce because corn is subsidized.

As much as I love my bourbon whiskey, I'll accept the fact that prices will go up if corn stops being subsidized, but that's what's desperately needed in this country.

Came here to say this. HFCS is used so much because it's so cheap for companies to use it. Get rid of the corn subsides, which have long outlived their purpose, and there's not much incentive for using HFCS anymore and you solve the problem without a ban.

Pet food

The public perception got murdered with the name... Should have called it something like Sucrose type Corn Syrup.

When people hear High Fructose Corn Syrup, they usually stop listening at the word "High" if you're luck, maybe Fructose, but never the full term. The term isn't comparing it to other sources of Fructose, but just simply to regular Corn syrup, which is almost 100% glucose. HFCS just turns some of the glucose to fructose to make something equivalent to sucrose.

Sugar is unhealthy, but it doesn't really matter where it comes from.

Instead, tax it enough. And maybe do that with sugar/fat/etc in general, so that inherently sweeter and fattier foods can't be sold as cheap. It works in some countries already.

From a practical perspective, cane sugar just tastes better.

They enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags here two years ago to eliminate all the extras being blown across fields. Didn't help, I still see them blowing down the streets, and lots of people re-using their bags because they're so much more convenient (plus a lot of people would rather just pay the small tax to use the plastic bags). Who knows, maybe in twenty years all of the bags will be gone, but it's been a huge hassle for everyone both as consumers and for the stores to re-work their checkout lines because it takes so much more time to use these bags.

We also have a nearby town where they started taxing people for sugary drinks like sodas. Last I heard, it hasn't changed the amount of purchases by any noticeable amount. People just do their shopping in another town and local stores miss out on the profits.

I imagine for the high fructose, the same thing will happen. People will just pay the tax and not care. This really comes down to being just another tax on the poor which doesn't have any affect on people who make more money. These bans are slowly taking away every option that poor people can afford, when if anyone really cared about changing people's habits they would make healthier choices the same price or cheaper than the unhealthy ones. Since I make a decent wage, my wife and I tried eating healthy for a couple months. It nearly broke us because good foods cost so much more. I'm not talking about buying all organic, rather just trying to change the type of foods we ate. My wife did a ton of research to find things that we both thought sounded tasty, and they really were good, but we had no money left over to do anything fun so we spent the whole time sitting at home watching TV.

tl;dr -- Real change comes from making healthy choices cheaper, NOT by making unhealthy choices more expensive.

I'm fairly certain cigarette usage is at historic lows. However, we could go after DUIs a lot more aggressively by bolstering public transit and then applying a much more German-style approach to DUIs.

Incentivizing a company to do anything besides turn a profit is impossible. You must beat them into submission so that the only choice they have is to conform with the overall public health policy. Removing subsidies on Corn would be a good idea to specifically address HFCS in everything. An even better idea would be to just socialize food production and remove the profit from it and instead prioritize healthy affordable food for the citizenry.

Because being poor takes all your time. It's way quicker to let everyone get a bowl of cereal versus making food for an hour to find that nobody ate half their plate anyway.

It's not as bad as all that, I've cut it out of my diet for about fifteen years. It involves A LOT of reading ingredient labels but for just about everything it's in, there is an alternative without. Sometimes it does come at a premium, though. In the past ten years or so a lot of food manufacturers realized there was a market for foods without it and often advertise it on the label (breads especially). With some things like soda, you can get real sugar, glass bottled sodas which are expensive, but another alternative is drinking water which you should be doing anyway.