I prefer the inverse view: it's not the "bad" food that is unhealthy, it's the lack of "good" food when too much of it is displaced by the "bad". Once the deman

I prefer the inverse view: it's not the "bad" food that is unhealthy, it's the lack of "good" food when too much of it is displaced by the "bad". Once the demand for all the required non-energy food components is satisfied it should be perfectly fine to fill the remaining energy balance with whatever junk food available. As I see it, the basic problem is that our "animal brain" food autopilot, which serves us incredibly well with natural food, is easily fooled by state of the art food preparation tricks. If we lack some random nutrient, let's call it foomium, then the autopilot will make foomium-rich food taste good. And food that is engineered to be very tasty to people who are in "acquire foomium" mode (amongst many others), despite not containing any of it. If we have a candy bar completely devoid of foomium, but that successfully tricks the foomium-deprived body to trigger the "this gives me foomium" heuristic, then we will eat quite a lot of it before giving in to overeating. Repeat this a few times and you will see that industrially processed food is unhealthy. Not because of what it contains, but because of what is missing (but what is cleverly pretended to be there, as a side effect of successful engineering for tastyness)