Yet while health authorities wring their hands over rising levels of chronic disease, it's OK for supermarkets to flog breakfast foods loaded with added sugar. It's also perfectly fine to mislead consumers by implying a food is healthier than it actually is. The selling point on the front of Only Organic Kindy Yoghurt Rice Cakes is its organic-ness, which looks healthy enough until you read the fine print on the back and see the main ingredient is organic cane sugar - which makes up 30 per cent of a product made for one- to five-year-olds. This load of over-processed food isn't just adding to weight woes - it's also displacing more nutritious whole foods, leaving us short on fibre and important nutrients. How did we let this happen? "Because the food system is now designed for the maximum profit of the food industry and not to nurture good health," says Professor Amanda Lee, Senior Adviser with the Australian Prevention Partnership Centre which works to prevent lifestyle-related disease. "Discretionary food and drink is in our faces all the time. Humans have an innate desire for sweetness and for the mouthfeel of fat and we have a learned response to salt - and the junk food industry has preyed on these preferences."

"Junk food is cheap to produce and demand for it has been created by advertising and pricing," adds Jane Martin from the Obesity Policy Coalition, which has also protested about the McDonalds' burgers and chips for midweek dinner ad. But their complaint that the ad undermines the promotion of healthy balanced diets was dismissed by the Advertising Standards Board last week. Could it be that Australia's lack of a strong traditional food culture has also made us easy pickings for convenience food? Maybe. Countries with strong food cultures and traditions like France, Spain and Italy have done better at holding on to home cooking says Lee. "People talk about the French Paradox but I don't think there is one. The evidence suggests it's because the French have a policy of maintaining their traditional food culture - they have government subsidies for farmer's markets, for instance," she points out. "In Australia we embrace different cuisines from other countries but don't have a strong food culture of our own - and at the beginning of European settlement the food we relied on was cheap and had a long shelf life." Can we improve processed foods by reducing ingredients like salt and sugar, as some manufacturers have done? It's helpful to a point, says Lee, especially with reducing salt - but it still doesn't turn a highly processed food into a nutritious choice. Not only that, but by careful manipulation of ingredients like adding fibre in the form of inulin or more 'fruit' in the form of pear juice, processed food can earn a higher rating in the front of pack star rating system, she points out. "This is the problem with focussing on single ingredients and not the quality of the food as a whole."

Although Australia has been slow to get tough with food manufacturers when it comes to tighter regulations on marketing junk to kids, for instance, there are signs of a shift, says Martin - like the removal of soft drinks from vending machines in NSW hospitals later this year and banishing soft drinks and confectionary from Victorian schools. But it's in poorer countries that can't afford the burden of sickness that comes with junk diets where bigger changes are happening. Mexico has a sugar tax, while Brazil's dietary guidelines strongly urge people to avoid highly processed food and stick with whole or minimally processed food. In Chile, foods high in saturated fat, sugar and salt carry a warning label and aren't allowed to be marketed to children and sugary drinks are taxed, says Jane Martin. "Globally, diet is the number one cause of chronic disease. Wealthy countries like Australia can try to quadruple by-pass themselves out of trouble but the lower and middle income countries can't afford to, so they're investing in prevention," says Amanda Lee. "They're generating evidence that we can use in the west to create more change."