4 ms·

>someone should be able to carefully select healthy foods, the evident reality is that people aren't able to do so You are conflating people's ability to selec

>someone should be able to carefully select healthy foods, the evident reality is that people aren't able to do so You are conflating people's ability to select healthy foods with their desire to do so. There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy, at least here in the U.S. It's just that people frequently eat what they like and, then, too much of it.

dragonwriter 11y ago
> There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy There's a very high noise-to-signal ratio in information purporting to be about eating healthy, with considerable investment in misinformation by commercially interested parties. So, while it is in one sense true that there is not a lack of information, that should not be taken to mean that it is simple for laypeople to get and identify accurate information on which to make healthy eating decisions.
- unclebucknasty 11y ago
  That's a bit of a red herring. Sure, misinformation and even disinformation exists, but many people knowingly make choices that are widely and irrefutably known to be poor: fast food, high sugar content, fried and overtly fatty items, processed foods, gross overeating, and on and on. This is overwhelmingly the problem versus health-conscious people being consistently duped into making poor choices. Given this, there's little reason to believe that resolving controversy over "finer points" of misinformation to which you refer would be significantly impactful.
cookiecaper 11y ago
No, I disagree. Foods are regularly marketed as healthy when they are in fact unhealthy. Labeling is frequently deceptive. Foods that are well-known to be healthy, like fruits and vegetables, are modified to accommodate preferred taste profiles. Go to Walmart and look at the maple syrup section. You'll see about 8 SKUs that claim to be "Syrup", meaning they're just a viscuous fluid, but cleverly omit the actual term "maple" (while showing pictures of things usually associated with maple syrup). These products are called "syrup" but they're not related to real syrup in any way. They are literally dyed sugar water. If you look in the rightmost corner of the topmost aisle, you'll find a glass bottle that costs like $8 and contains real maple syrup. The rest is crap that costs $3-4. The people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets. But they're not. Now, repeat this for every type of food at Walmart. We need to admit there is a real systemic problem here that is not as simple as individual gluttony. It is not at all true that obese people eat 40 Snickers a day, which is what many fat-person-hate types seem to believe.
- slavik81 11y ago
  If Aunt Jamima's is unhealthy due to its sugar content, actual maple syrup is going to be unhealthy too. The authentic stuff might taste better, but it's still basically just sugar. I happen to have a glass bottle of pure Canadian maple syrup in my fridge. It contains 53g of sugar per 60mL. That's apparently 18% of your recommended daily intake of sugar. It contains 4% of your daily intake of Calcium and is 'not a significant source of other nutrients'. Though, to your point, I do have a second bottle of pure maple syrup that is labelled emphasising it's nutritional value. It has a bit of calcium, iron and manganese, but there's way too much sugar that goes with it for it to be a significant part of a healthy diet.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Yeah, I wasn't really trying to single out maple syrup as an ideal "healthy food". It's just a particularly egregious example of deceptive labeling, inasmuch as most people who think they're buying it are, in reality, buying a 100% synthetic imitation. There are people who will tell you they love maple syrup, unaware that they've never actually even had maple syrup. A more widely known example is "juice" that is 0% juice. The same thing occurs with varying degrees of severity for all the food offered at major grocers, including healthier options like loaves of bread (most off-the-shelf breads at Walmart contain large quantities of either sugar or brown sugar) and canned fruits (the "standard" version is usually canned in "heavy syrup", i.e., sugar water).
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Now I'm curious how many people are really confused about it. I've helped collect and boil sap, so I'm pretty sure I've had the real thing, but still, I don't think I was ever confused about there being syrup products manufactured from other sugars.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      To be fair, canning fluid has to have a certain osmotic pressure to inhibit mold and bacteria growth, and most people prefer their canned fruit to be packed in some variety of sugary water rather than salty or acetic water. Even the fruit packed with fruit juice is often packed in a different kind of juice (excepting pineapple). You could have peaches packed in genuine grade-B maple syrup, but it won't be able to compete on price on a shelf next to peaches in heavy sucrose syrup. (You can also make pruno from the syrup in fruit cans that doesn't taste entirely like moldy garbage. But I wouldn't pour any for my friends, or at least not the ones I wanted to keep.) As for the bread, you shouldn't be surprised that many "whole wheat" breads are still primarily made with the same enriched white flour as white breads. They just have a fraction of the wheat kernel added back in so that the bread looks brown when it's baked. Deceptive labeling. Even if a type of food is ostensibly healthy when prepared at home using a traditional recipe from pure, wholesome ingredients, as a pre-packaged, ready-to-eat product in the grocery store, it is most likely already reduced to complete crap. For me, it has almost gone past the point where it isn't just a matter of carefully reading the ingredients list and avoiding certain entries. Now I prefer buying only the foods that themselves qualify as a single ingredient. But even then, cans of "extra virgin olive oil" are almost certainly lying, upselling the "3 or 4 extractions too late for virgin" olive oil , mixed with hazelnut oil. But what else is a consumer to do?

dragonwriter 11y ago

> There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy There's a very high noise-to-signal ratio in information purporting to be about eating healthy, with considerable investment in misinformation by commercially interested parties. So, while it is in one sense true that there is not a lack of information, that should not be taken to mean that it is simple for laypeople to get and identify accurate information on which to make healthy eating decisions.

unclebucknasty 11y ago
That's a bit of a red herring. Sure, misinformation and even disinformation exists, but many people knowingly make choices that are widely and irrefutably known to be poor: fast food, high sugar content, fried and overtly fatty items, processed foods, gross overeating, and on and on. This is overwhelmingly the problem versus health-conscious people being consistently duped into making poor choices. Given this, there's little reason to believe that resolving controversy over "finer points" of misinformation to which you refer would be significantly impactful.

cookiecaper 11y ago

No, I disagree. Foods are regularly marketed as healthy when they are in fact unhealthy. Labeling is frequently deceptive. Foods that are well-known to be healthy, like fruits and vegetables, are modified to accommodate preferred taste profiles. Go to Walmart and look at the maple syrup section. You'll see about 8 SKUs that claim to be "Syrup", meaning they're just a viscuous fluid, but cleverly omit the actual term "maple" (while showing pictures of things usually associated with maple syrup). These products are called "syrup" but they're not related to real syrup in any way. They are literally dyed sugar water. If you look in the rightmost corner of the topmost aisle, you'll find a glass bottle that costs like $8 and contains real maple syrup. The rest is crap that costs $3-4. The people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets. But they're not. Now, repeat this for every type of food at Walmart. We need to admit there is a real systemic problem here that is not as simple as individual gluttony. It is not at all true that obese people eat 40 Snickers a day, which is what many fat-person-hate types seem to believe.

slavik81 11y ago
If Aunt Jamima's is unhealthy due to its sugar content, actual maple syrup is going to be unhealthy too. The authentic stuff might taste better, but it's still basically just sugar. I happen to have a glass bottle of pure Canadian maple syrup in my fridge. It contains 53g of sugar per 60mL. That's apparently 18% of your recommended daily intake of sugar. It contains 4% of your daily intake of Calcium and is 'not a significant source of other nutrients'. Though, to your point, I do have a second bottle of pure maple syrup that is labelled emphasising it's nutritional value. It has a bit of calcium, iron and manganese, but there's way too much sugar that goes with it for it to be a significant part of a healthy diet.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Yeah, I wasn't really trying to single out maple syrup as an ideal "healthy food". It's just a particularly egregious example of deceptive labeling, inasmuch as most people who think they're buying it are, in reality, buying a 100% synthetic imitation. There are people who will tell you they love maple syrup, unaware that they've never actually even had maple syrup. A more widely known example is "juice" that is 0% juice. The same thing occurs with varying degrees of severity for all the food offered at major grocers, including healthier options like loaves of bread (most off-the-shelf breads at Walmart contain large quantities of either sugar or brown sugar) and canned fruits (the "standard" version is usually canned in "heavy syrup", i.e., sugar water).
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Now I'm curious how many people are really confused about it. I've helped collect and boil sap, so I'm pretty sure I've had the real thing, but still, I don't think I was ever confused about there being syrup products manufactured from other sugars.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    To be fair, canning fluid has to have a certain osmotic pressure to inhibit mold and bacteria growth, and most people prefer their canned fruit to be packed in some variety of sugary water rather than salty or acetic water. Even the fruit packed with fruit juice is often packed in a different kind of juice (excepting pineapple). You could have peaches packed in genuine grade-B maple syrup, but it won't be able to compete on price on a shelf next to peaches in heavy sucrose syrup. (You can also make pruno from the syrup in fruit cans that doesn't taste entirely like moldy garbage. But I wouldn't pour any for my friends, or at least not the ones I wanted to keep.) As for the bread, you shouldn't be surprised that many "whole wheat" breads are still primarily made with the same enriched white flour as white breads. They just have a fraction of the wheat kernel added back in so that the bread looks brown when it's baked. Deceptive labeling. Even if a type of food is ostensibly healthy when prepared at home using a traditional recipe from pure, wholesome ingredients, as a pre-packaged, ready-to-eat product in the grocery store, it is most likely already reduced to complete crap. For me, it has almost gone past the point where it isn't just a matter of carefully reading the ingredients list and avoiding certain entries. Now I prefer buying only the foods that themselves qualify as a single ingredient. But even then, cans of "extra virgin olive oil" are almost certainly lying, upselling the "3 or 4 extractions too late for virgin" olive oil , mixed with hazelnut oil. But what else is a consumer to do?