Few people snack on baby carrots. Most prefer the sweet, fat, high-calorie fare colloquially known as junk food.

This is strange. Health is so self-evidently wonderful, disease so patently miserable that you'd think we'd all do everything in our power to nurture the former and repel the latter. Some of us, an increasing number, do. Not enough of us, though, to dethrone junk food as the king of snacks.

The question naturally arises: Is it possible to change that?