My concern is that if we can't trust the government to create a healthy recommended diet, how can we trust them to ban the correct foods? Their incentives seem to be more in line with propping up producers of large scale cheap pseudo foods with big lobbies than finding an actual healthy diet.
It doesn't even need to be tax, even mandating that packaged foods' ingredients labeled in easily human-relatable units (table spoons, etc. instead of grams and joules) may help people make better decisions.