The Food System That Promises Happiness but Delivers Disease
- 14 hours ago
- 9 min read
Written by Kellie Warne, Diet and Lifestyle Advisor
Kellie Warne is a certified Diet and Lifestyle Advisor, trained at the Institute of Optimum Nutrition, and a full member of the FHT. She supports busy individuals and families to improve energy, digestion, and resiliency through simple, sustainable food and lifestyle habits.
How marketing, convenience, and our modern food environment have quietly reshaped our relationship with food, and why it’s time to stop blaming individuals for a system that makes healthy choices harder.
Most of us don’t think about health when we’re thinking about happiness. We think about time with the people we love, experiences we enjoy, freedom to do the things that matter to us, and having the energy to actually enjoy them.
But there’s an important distinction between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is immediate. It’s the chocolate bar after a difficult day, the takeaway when we’re too tired to cook, or the glass of wine at the end of a stressful week. These things can make us feel good in the moment.
Happiness is something deeper. It comes from feeling well enough to participate in our lives, to play with our children, nurture relationships, pursue the things we care about, and look forward to the years ahead. Underneath so much of that is something we often take for granted: our health.
Yet the food environment we’ve created increasingly blurs the line between the two. It sells us pleasure as though it were happiness and surrounds us with products designed to make that pleasure convenient, accessible, and repeatable.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply, “What are we choosing to eat?” Perhaps we should also be asking, “What are we being encouraged to choose, and what is that environment ultimately costing us?”
We have more nutritional knowledge, technology, and access to food than at almost any point in human history. Yet, diet-related ill health remains one of the defining public health challenges of our time. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other metabolic conditions affect millions of people.
If people don’t choose these diseases, why are so many people developing them? Perhaps it’s time we stopped asking what’s wrong with people and started asking what’s wrong with the environment we’ve created around them.
What has happened to our relationship with food?
Walk into almost any supermarket, and you’re surrounded by colour, clever packaging, promotions, and products designed to catch your attention. Food isn’t simply being sold to us. An idea is being sold alongside it.
The idea that a chocolate bar can make a difficult day better. That a takeaway is something we’ve earned. That sweets are a reward. That dessert is an expected part of dinner. That sharing food, celebrating, and even relaxing somehow require a particular product. The message is subtle but relentless, "Buy this, and you’ll feel better."
Of course, food can make us feel good. Eating is pleasurable. Sharing food is social. Certain foods can evoke memories, comfort, and connection. But pleasure isn’t the same thing as happiness.
When highly palatable, heavily marketed foods become a routine part of everyday life, something important can get lost: the distinction between food we occasionally enjoy and food we consume by default.
When did treats become everyday foods?
Many of us grew up understanding that sweets, crisps, fizzy drinks, and desserts were treats. Birthday parties. Christmas. Holidays. Special occasions. They weren’t necessarily forbidden. They simply weren’t everywhere, all the time.
Today, many of these foods have become woven into the fabric of everyday eating. Multipacks sit in kitchen cupboards. Snacks are carried everywhere. Sugary drinks are commonplace. Desserts are routinely expected after meals. Food is offered as entertainment, reward, comfort, and distraction.
The shift has been gradual enough that many of us barely noticed it happening. But our environment has changed dramatically. When the exceptional becomes ordinary, our perception of what constitutes a normal diet changes with it.
Convenience has become king
We’re busy. Parents are juggling work and childcare. Professionals are dealing with long hours and constant connectivity. Many households are simply exhausted. So convenience matters.
When we’re stressed and exhausted, food choices can become even harder. I explored the relationship between stress, nutrition, and the body’s ability to use food effectively in How Stress Blocks Your Body From Using Food and How Nervous System Nutrition Can Change Everything.
The problem isn’t that convenience exists. The problem is that our food environment has made the most convenient options disproportionately likely to be highly processed, heavily marketed, and designed for immediate consumption.
A meal that requires no planning, chopping, or washing up is understandably attractive after a long day. But when the quickest option is also the most aggressively promoted option, the choice isn’t quite as straightforward as “just eat better.”
Affordability matters too. UK government data acknowledges that healthier diets can cost more, while the Food Foundation has reported that healthier foods are more than twice as expensive per calorie as less healthy foods.
For a family trying to make every pound stretch, this isn’t simply a question of nutritional knowledge. It’s economics.
We are not making choices in a vacuum
We often talk about food as though every meal begins with a completely rational individual standing in front of an infinite number of equally accessible choices. It doesn’t.
Our choices are influenced by price, availability, time, habit, stress, culture, advertising, social expectations, and what happens to be within reach when we’re hungry. Increasingly, we are surrounded by products deliberately formulated to be highly palatable and easy to consume.
Blood sugar regulation is another piece of the puzzle when we think about food, energy, mood, and appetite. I explored this connection in How Blood Sugar Shapes Mood, Focus and Emotional Regulation.
This doesn’t mean that everyone who eats ultra-processed food will become unwell. Nor does it mean that every processed food is inherently harmful. The science is more nuanced than that.
But the evidence linking higher consumption of ultra-processed foods with poorer health outcomes is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. A large 2024 BMJ umbrella review, covering almost 9.9 million people across pooled analyses, found associations between greater exposure to ultra-processed foods and a range of adverse health outcomes, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mortality. The authors also acknowledged important limitations in the quality of the underlying evidence.
The point isn’t that a packet of biscuits is poisonous. The point is that the overall food environment matters.
The hidden pressure to fit in
Food is about far more than nutrition. It’s culture. It’s celebration. It’s connection. This is precisely why changing our eating habits can be difficult.
Decline the office cake, and you’re “being good.” Skip the alcohol, and you’re “boring.” Pass on the takeaway, and you’re “no fun.” Choose a salad, and someone may joke that you’re dieting.
Somehow, choosing not to consume something has become something we often feel compelled to explain. We’ve normalised overconsumption while sometimes treating moderation as unusual.
Children are growing up inside this culture too. They don’t simply learn about food from their parents. They learn from television, social media, influencers, packaging, supermarkets, restaurants, and the people around them.
I explored how dramatically this food environment has changed childhood in my article How 40 Years of Food Changed Childhood and Why Our Children Deserve Better.
The UK government’s decision to introduce restrictions on advertising less healthy food and drink on television before 9 p.m. and on paid online advertising from January 2026 reflects evidence that exposure to this advertising can influence what and when children eat and shape food preferences from a young age. That tells us something important.
If advertising didn’t influence behaviour, there would be little reason for companies to spend billions trying to influence it.
Are we really free to choose?
Personal responsibility matters. Of course it does. We all have choices to make, and learning how to nourish ourselves well is enormously empowering. But personal responsibility and personal blame are not the same thing.
We can encourage people to make healthier choices while simultaneously acknowledging that those choices are shaped by the world around them.
A person who walks into a supermarket hungry, tired, and stressed isn’t making choices in the same environment as someone with unlimited time, money, cooking facilities, and nutritional knowledge. A parent working two jobs doesn’t have the same resources as a family with a flexible schedule. A teenager surrounded by social media advertising doesn’t have the same decision-making capacity as an adult. Context matters.
So when we reduce complex dietary patterns to “people just need more willpower,” we miss much of the picture. Willpower was never designed to compete with an environment engineered to maximise attention, convenience, and consumption.
Follow the money
This isn’t about demonising every food company. Businesses exist to make money. That’s how markets work. Many companies produce perfectly legitimate foods that can form part of a healthy diet. But we shouldn’t confuse commercial success with public health.
The food industry is also enormously important to the UK economy. In 2024, the UK agriculture and food sector contributed £162.3 billion to the economy, equivalent to 6.2% of national Gross Value Added. The sector employed 4.1 million people in Great Britain in 2025.
So what would happen if we genuinely changed the food environment? There would inevitably be winners and losers.
Companies whose business models depend heavily on selling highly processed, highly profitable products might need to adapt. They could face pressure to reformulate products, change marketing strategies, or develop new ranges that better support public health.
That could be disruptive. But disruption isn’t necessarily the same as economic damage. The money people spend on food doesn’t simply disappear when their diets change. It moves.
It could move towards healthier convenience foods, higher quality ingredients, fresh produce, reformulated products, and businesses that make nutritious food easier and more affordable.
There is another economic consideration we rarely include in this conversation: the cost of poor health. A food system can generate enormous commercial activity while simultaneously contributing to conditions that place pressure on the National Health Service, reduce healthy working years, and increase sickness absence.
The question, then, isn’t whether food should be profitable. It’s whether we can create a food economy that is both commercially successful and aligned with long-term public health.
A company’s responsibility is to its customers and shareholders. Public health is the responsibility of governments, policymakers, and society as a whole.
When a business model rewards selling more products more frequently, there is an obvious tension between commercial incentives and long-term health. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s economics.
When those incentives operate across supermarkets, advertising, online platforms, restaurants, and food delivery services, they create an environment that can make overconsumption feel normal.
Meanwhile, when people’s health suffers, the conversation can still quickly become: Why didn’t they make better choices?
Perhaps that’s the wrong first question. No one chooses chronic disease. I’ve never met anyone who wanted to develop obesity. No one wakes up hoping for a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. No one chooses fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease, or declining metabolic health. Yet these conditions have become increasingly common.
That doesn’t mean individual choices are irrelevant. It means they’re only part of the story. Health is shaped by biology, behaviour, socioeconomic circumstances, environment, culture, and the systems in which we live.
If we genuinely want to change population health, we have to look beyond the individual. We have to look at the environment that surrounds the individual.
What would a healthier food system look like?
Imagine if healthy food was marketed with the same creativity and excitement as confectionery. Imagine if children’s environments were designed to support healthy habits rather than constantly challenge them.
Imagine if nutritious convenience foods were affordable, accessible, and genuinely convenient. Imagine if supermarkets made the healthier choice the easy choice rather than relying on consumers to navigate an endless sea of promotions.
Imagine if a parent could feed their family well without needing extraordinary amounts of time, money, planning, and nutritional knowledge. Imagine if we stopped measuring success purely by whether an individual had enough discipline to resist temptation.
We don’t need to remove choice. We need to improve the choices people are surrounded by because choice doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
A genuinely healthy food environment would still allow us to enjoy chocolate, birthday cake, crisps, takeaway meals, and a glass of wine. The difference would be that these foods could return to being what they were always meant to be: enjoyable parts of life rather than the foundation of everyday eating.
It’s time to change the conversation
Perhaps the question shouldn’t be, “Why can’t people just eat better?” Perhaps it should be, “Why have we created an environment in which eating well requires so much effort?”
Until meaningful changes happen at a societal level, individuals still have to navigate the food environment that exists today. This is where individual support can matter.
We can’t redesign the food system overnight. But we can help people understand their own nutritional needs, recognise the influences shaping their choices, and find realistic ways to nourish themselves within the lives they actually lead.
Perhaps the answer isn’t choosing between personal responsibility and systemic change. Perhaps we need both. We can teach people about nutrition. We can encourage movement. We can support healthier habits.
But if we want meaningful change, we also have to address the environment in which those behaviours take place. Because people don’t live in nutritional textbooks. They live in the real world.
A world of busy mornings, packed lunchboxes, supermarket promotions, birthday parties, office biscuits, takeaway apps, social media, stress, tiredness, and limited time. That’s the world we need to design for.
We don’t need a food system that removes pleasure. We need one that makes nourishing ourselves easier while leaving room for the foods we enjoy. Because health isn’t the reward we receive at the end of life. It’s the foundation that allows us to live it.
Read more from Kellie Warne
Kellie Warne, Diet and Lifestyle Advisor
Kellie Warne is a certified Diet and Lifestyle Advisor (ION) and FHT member who helps busy people and families feel calmer, more energised, and confident in themselves. She believes sustainable health begins with self-compassion, not restriction. Through practical nutrition advice and supportive lifestyle coaching, Kellie empowers clients to build habits that nourish both body and mind. Her mission is to help people thrive, not by chasing perfection, but by creating balance.
