Why we can't stop eating unhealthy foods

When it comes to processed food and sugar, we're all living in an obstacle course. Habit-forming foods are on every corner in your grocery store. Besides the rising obesity worldwide, what is more concerning is the appearance of adult diseases in children.

• Type-2 diabetes is linked to heavy sugar consumption, especially in sugary drinks.
• There is also the appearance of whole new diseases that seem to come out of nowhere, such as the diagnosis of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease that didn't even exist until 1980.

Educating the public in healthy choices doesn't work. 48% of Americans are still drinking a sugary drink or more a day. 

In a sugar-saturated environment, you'll probably reach for what is within your reach, and if it's a concentrated source of pleasure that is carefully engineered to get you hooked, that puts a huge burden on you all the time to say no. Many of us don't.

• Soda companies intentionally keep their prices down so we'll buy more. If we put a tax on this soda, that raises the price a little and nudges us away.
• Food corporations bombard our children with advertisements for Captain Crunch and Cocoa Puffs. We can take those ads off the air.
• If they pay grocery stores to put candy at eye level for our little children, we can put it a little higher on the shelf.
• If they pay famous sports figures to promote Gatorade, we can pay them to say drink water.