Dear Dr. Boli: I was watching some nutrition expert on YouTube, and I mean he must have been an expert or he wouldn’t have been on YouTube, but he left me confused. He was talking about how Americans’ health problems are caused by “hyperpalatable” foods, but as an example of a “hyperpalatable” food he mentioned Pop-Tarts. Insert question mark in parentheses. So I was thinking that maybe “hyperpalatable” doesn’t mean what I think it means, and I was wondering whether you could explain it. —Sincerely, A Big Fan of Food, but Not Really of Pop-Tarts.

Dear Sir or Madam: To understand what “hyperpalatable” means, you must keep in mind the Mencken dictum that no one ever went broke by underestimating the taste of the American people.

First of all, the word “hyperpalatable” is itself a sin against good taste. It is a middlebrow coinage at home among middlebrow YouTube pundits; it mashes Greek and Latin together, which seldom produces euphonious results. “Superpalatable” would be better and identical in meaning, combining a Latin prefix with a Latin root and suffix; but because “super” is readily understood even by uneducated English-speakers, the middlebrow prefers to say “hyper,” which sounds scientific because it is less usual.

But even if the YouTubist had used the proper term, we are still left with the necessity of explaining why he thought Pop-Tarts were more than usually delicious. The only explanation Dr. Boli can think of is that your YouTube personality was an American consumer.

It is true that an ordinary human being of ordinary tastes, confronted by a choice between Pop-Tarts from the convenience store and paczki from the local bakery, would not pick the Pop-Tarts as the more palatable of the two. But American commerce has bred a community of consumers who do not have ordinary tastes. Many of them have never set foot in a local bakery. Although Pop-Tarts are made by a process originally designed for dog food, they bring together dough and sugar, thus making a first step toward deliciousness.

In Dr. Boli’s opinion, the loose talk about “hyperpalatable” foods is missing what makes these foods ubiquitous and successful. Even the word “superpalatable” would be wrong, for obvious reasons. They are not superpalatable; but they are superconvenient—especially for the peddlers of snacks. It is difficult to make paczki that will survive distribution to local supermarkets for sale even the next day; but it is easy to make foil-packed dehydrated toaster pastries that will sit on a shelf for months or possibly years with no obvious chemical change. For the consumer who trusts only national brands and who buys snacks at a convenience store, the manufactured foods are the ones that are always available; and for many consumers they are the only foods they ever experience.

What is to be done? Dr. Boli is often suspicious of massive government interventions, but there is a war to be won here. The public welfare is at stake. The obvious solution is a government program to make sure that the average citizen is no more than two blocks’ walk from a bakery selling fresh pastries of the most delicious sorts. Will that make Americans healthier? Almost certainly not; in fact, they might die even younger. But they will die praising God, and thus their eternal welfare will be assured.