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Ultraprocessed is a counter marketing term from the meat and dairy lobby. It is authored in opposition to things like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Nobody
by an_opabinia 6y ago
Ultraprocessed is a counter marketing term from the meat and dairy lobby. It is authored in opposition to things like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Nobody uses this term organically, look in Google Trends yourself. It is an obvious and conspicuous marker of a campaign, exactly equivalent to something like “drinkability,” an Anheuser Busch marketing term.
This is a market that traditionally derives most of its profits from a close relationship with the government, for subsidies (the #1 source of profit for farms, maybe for the whole agricultural sector) and health guidelines (the cheapest, and therefore highest RoI advertising). Beyond Meat enjoys none of these advantages and its equities wildly outperformed e.g. Tyson.
I am not saying that marketing does not play a role in health outcomes. Just that the nutrition discourse is overwhelmingly marketing budget driven, that actual nutritionists struggle against consumers immensely, and that once you’ve heard one ad campaign you easily become jaded of all of them. Well meaning people get coopted by all of this.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> Ultraprocessed is a counter marketing term from the meat and dairy lobby. This sentence risks framing industrially manufactured food products as equally nutritious to meat and dairy (and fruit and vegetables, beans and pulses, eggs and fish, etc. etc.).
- the-pigeon 6y agoThe point though is that this article decrying the influence on science by industry is itself influenced by industry and shows this by not using neutral terminology.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIt's a true framing! Off the top of my head, cheese, yogurt, tofu, and flour are nutritious and industrially manufactured through chemical processes. And I don't mean this in some tricky "everything is chemicals" way - you can look up pictures of the Chobani factory online, and it's pretty indistinguishable at a glance from any other snack food production line.
- titzer 6y agoYou know, it's completely possible that there are multiple bad guys. There are a lot reasons to hate the meat lobby and factory farming, but sticking up for industrial labs cranking out the most addictive chemicals that they can legally push on us is completely unnecessary.
- octodog 6y agoWhat evidence do you have that this is from opposition to Beyond and Impossible? Yes, it's a new term in the literature, but the fact that it Beyond and Impossible are also newish products is a correlation at best. Most content online I see that refer to 'ultra-processed' are usually referring to items like potato chips, soft drinks or coloured breakfast cereals.