12 ms·

Food companies ‘sweetened the world’ and increased the risk of disease

helph67 3y ago
Some here may be concerned enough to consider this article https://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/tips/a2471/sugar-aging-how-to-fight-glycation-614621/ https://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/tips/a2471/suga... The proteins in skin most prone to glycation are the same ones that make a youthful complexion so plump and springy—collagen and elastin. When those proteins hook up with renegade sugars, they become discolored, weak, and less supple; this shows up on the skin's surface as wrinkles, sagginess, and a loss of radiance.
- SentinelLdnma 3y ago
  I was not familiar with glycation. Thanks for this rabbit hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867518/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867518/
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Plenty of related discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728033
bettercallsalad 3y ago
Let’s not give FDA, NIH and other standard and quality control monitoring agencies pass while food conpanies did this. They also purposely pushed “fat is bad” while the whole diet chart with the carb/milk and dairy was plain misleading. And they knew they were lying, most of their propositions were pushed by one guys research. And of course big pharma always sponsored and benefited these types of research.
- api 3y ago
  When I see populist cranks getting traction in the culture and in politics, I find myself being as angry at the establishment for this as I am at the cranks or perhaps even more. I feel like our main establishment entities like the FDA, NIH, major universities, pharma companies, etc. still aren't willing to take any responsibility for why people don't trust them anymore. Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum.
  - simple-thoughts 3y ago
    It’s always funny to me when I see institutions publish reports in the credibility crisis, because their solution is always to do more media operations. But the lack of trust comes from the behavior of these institutions and their use of the media to cover up their mistakes in the first place!
    - api 3y ago
      They’re stuck in the old broadcast media era. It’ll probably take a generational shift in who is running these things.
  - gsatic 3y ago
    Broadcast transmissions have always been regulated world over, not cuz the Regulators are great or act fast or are trusted, but cuz the Cost to Mass Broadcast, whatever shit occurs to a 3 inch chimp brain, is much greater than 0. The cost to multiply has always been the real barrier to prevent cancer from spreading faster than the immune system can react. Whether it is setting up a printing press and distributing newspapers/books or radio/tv station, movie studio broadcasts, it used to cost a lot. Even with chat/email/phone/sms there is a high cost. The email list of everyone on the planet is easy to assemble these days. But try emailing everyone on the list every few minutes. The whole story breaks down when Youtube/Facebook/TikTok made Cost to Broadcast 0 for everyone.
  - ourmandave 3y ago
    Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum. lol, really? The former president (still lying about the 2020 election), Fox News (paid near $1B settlement for lying), and the Republican party repeatedly saying all the Federal institutions can't be trusted because they're run by the Deep State or crooked liberals. Which cranks didn't create the distrust again?
omginternets 3y ago
They’re now “vegetizing” the world with “plant-based” (read: highly processed) products and lab-grown meats (ditto). The sooner we realize that food industry are engaged in capitalism and not public health, nor ecology, the better. What the food industry pushes is best read through the lens of patentable intellectual property and market disruption in an economic sector with razor-thin margins. I would encourage all conscientious people not to be their useful idiots.
- armatav 3y ago
  This is true - everything along the lines of plant based food has an underlying capital cost transformation driving it, not a cultural or environmental basis. That’s why they need to convince/mandate people to eat it; it tastes worse and is worse for you.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Judging by the responses of surprised enthusiasm I get from meat eaters when I cook vegetarian for them: if it tastes worse, that's the chef's fault rather than the plants'.
    - omginternets 3y ago
      I think the parent post is referring to processed foods, not the cooking of actual, recognizable produce.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        That shouldn't matter, the point remains the same: it's the chef's fault if it doesn't taste good, even if the chef works in corporate and is designing a factory. As a different point: "Processed" feels to me like a slippery word. Bread? Looks nothing like wheat. Beer? Grown in a vat. Beef? Take a wild animal, selectively breed it for hundreds of generations, feed it all kinds of weird things that combine "cheap" (surprise cannibalism leading to BSE) and "encourages weight gain" (we're only recently getting serious about stopping antibiotics being used this way), kill one, after all the main cuts are taken spray the rest of with a high pressure hose, dry off the resulting slurry, ta-dah mechanically recovered "100% beef" you can't use in much else besides mince, and by extension burgers and sausages. The term seems like it's some combination of a complaint more about the long list of ingredients and that these sound new and/or scary, implying no awareness of how much of a mess biochemistry is and where most of the chemicals in question were first isolated from.
adam_arthur 3y ago
Regulation through voluntary goodwill never works in aggregate. Blaming actors rather than regulators will always be futile in the end as players in a system will almost always trend towards self interest in the long run, as has been proven time and time again Of course many would argue there's no need to regulate at all, and that's a fair position to hold too. There's nothing inherently wrong with providing products that offer a tradeoff between health and enjoyment. As long as consumers are aware of the longer term costs
- mahmoudhossam 3y ago
  Regulatory capture prevents regulators from doing their jobs, and I'm not sure any amount of regulator blaming will change that. Naming and shaming companies, however, can make them change their strategy.
  - wilg 3y ago
    I’m not so sure. Placing the blame at regulators would encourage people to vote for politicians that will regulate more effectively. That’s a direct link, versus hoping corporate shame trickles through to regulation.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      No it won't. Nobody is going to make something like this the center of their platform, and most voters don't do nuanced appraisals of a candidate's whole platform because it's a waste of time, they go with their gut feeling about 2 or 3 big issues and whether the politician has an appealing personality. If this wasn't true then height wouldn't be so strongly correlated with political success. Furthermore, look at a recent example of a pro-strong regulation policy: the Obama admin believed in a well run regulatory state, and the first lady led a public health campaign promoting healthier school lunches with more fruits and vegetables as well as exercise. You'd think encouraging kids to eat unprocessed food and exercise would be wholly inoffensive, but the other political party and its media surrogates treated it like the imposition of communism and complained endlessly about 'freedom' and 'waste'. Your version is how things ought to work, and how it was more or less assumed it does work for many years, but it's based on an obsolete understanding of political markets. Ubiquitous networking has made it easy for like-minded people to find and coordinate with each other, and some people favor perverse outcomes. Approximately 30% of people are willing to suffer an economic loss in order to inflict a greater loss on their opponents, and that personality type now controls one of the country's two major political parties.
tayo42 3y ago
Seems like a headline that's going to get people riled up, while its discussing misleading and lies in marketing of food towards uneducated people in developing parts of India. tough country to deal with problems in, idk how you reach everyone to educate them.
grecy 3y ago
There is a really, really easy way to avoid all of this. In the supermarket, only buy things that have one ingredient. Only eat and drink things that have one ingredient. As Michael Pollan says: "Eat FOOD, mostly greens, not too much."
- andersrs 3y ago
  Even fruit/vegetables have become sweeter over the decades with selective breeding.
  - notyourwork 3y ago
    That’s the least of societies concerns. Corn syrup and sugar infused everything is a massive problem.
  - shlant 3y ago
    no they haven't[1][2]. Please stop perpetuating this myth 1. https://twitter.com/Botanygeek/status/1149968041964396545 https://twitter.com/Botanygeek/status/1149968041964396545 2. https://deniseminger.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/ https://deniseminger.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/
    - NotGMan 3y ago
      It's not a myth. You're both kinda right: 1) The fruit that we eat today is hyper-sugarized and available 24/7 all the time. Eg European ancestors NEVER had access to this amount of fruit. Apples, bananas, (water)melons, sweet grapes, ...these things didn't exist 150 years ago in the form we know today. People eat these sugar bombs all the time. 2) There does exist high sugar natural fruit.
      - MandieD 3y ago
        Even your modern European cousins don’t have quite the same level of access to super-sugary fruits year-round, or at least we see some blatant price differences. Cherries right now (mid-July) in northern Bavaria: $3/lb at the grocery store, cheaper if you buy direct from farmers just outside the towns. Various small plums are free for the taking from trees along trails and rivers. I’m planning some serious jam-making over the next few weekends. Cherries in January: if available at all, approximately $20/lb, import from South Africa or Chile. Plums are also available, about $8/lb, but not very flavorful.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Interesting tragedy of the commons.
- dehrmann 3y ago
  Not really. Excess sugar consumption has a direct negative impact on the consumer. The only commons here is health care.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    Sounds like a tragedy of the commons …
    - dehrmann 3y ago
      Not in America.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    The Commons here is the 'market for healthy food'. The first entity that adds extra sugar to their food to gain mind share inevitably causes the rest of the competitors to all add more sugar, bringing them back to parity while also destroying 'the market for healthy food'. This race towards everyone being worse off because of economic incentives not to be left behind is a tragedy of the commons in the market sense.
noduerme 3y ago
I read the Guardian's top articles every morning, and then listen to either BBC, NYT or a Vox podcast and a couple of never-Trump "center right" podcasts on economics and foreign policy. Once in awhile I'll read something on a Murdoch-owned property. Of all of these, I find the Guardian to be the most viscerally alarming and the most consistently hysterical on every subject. Every Guardian article about a pollutant, about the climate , or about any judicial decision thay goes against what they believe is given the same treatment of elevating it to the level of apocalyptic clickbait and then doubling down with four paragraphs of boilerplate about how it disproportionately affects marginalized communities. I've stopped reading the last four paragraphs, because they're always the same regardless of the subject matter... this saves me some time in the morning. I used to think it was only the crazy far right who preyed on people's fears... but now it's just alarmist clickbait left right and center. I just got done being extremely annoyed with John Podhoretz on a podcast claiming that aspartame can't cause cancer because he needs to imbibe it and because other artificial sweeteners were prematurely vilified and banned, which is a reductionist, reactionary, emotional and stupid argument. Personally, I still believe saccharine causes cancer, I've always assumed aspartame did, and I never eat or drink anything with artificial sweeteners. But I'm so sick of the hyperbolic screeching on both sides of every single fucking thing from gas stoves to coke baggies in the white house to abortion rights to Disney and Target and Bud Light to how climate change will kill us all to PFAS in my dental floss to how nuclear war or AI Holocaust is imminent... I just wish they would all shut up. Stop. Just stop finding new things to for me to fucking worry about. Go away.
- BenFranklin100 3y ago
  The Guardian is regarded as a joke. About a third of their of their journalist/editors are nincompoops who sole function is to throw read meat to the rabid Left. I still donate $50/yr to the Guardian because about 5% of their reporting provides a useful counter perspective.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    Absolutely agree they are a useful counter perspective... that's why I read them daily. I just wish they would dial down the rhetorical hysteria in whatever attempt it is to counterbalance the hysteria on the other side. [edit] I'm also of a time where the concept of 'throwing red meat to the left' raises serious cognitive dissonance for me, because prior to Twitter, or at least through the 90s and 00s, red meat style feasting and crowing behavior was exclusively for the right. For awhile it seemed almost axiomatic to me that the left didn't need to resort to fear mongering or hyperbole in communicating their points, because objective truth and logic was on their side. I don't think that was just my own blind bias; it was a major selling point of the left to rid these issues of religious-type appeals to emption, and drill into facts in a way that made the opposition look hypocritical at best or mendacious at worst. By adopting the hysterical and emotive tactics of the right, I feel that the Guardian, et. al, have ceded the high ground.
rsync 3y ago
"Sweetened the World" is a good phrase and fits well the situation. One of the very best examples is sugar added to applesauce. It's particularly nefarious because many consumers may be attempting to avoid sugary food and provide healthy foods for children ... only to unknowingly buy, essentially, candy.
- parineum 3y ago
  Applesauce isn't avoiding sugary or unhealthy food. It already is, essentially, candy before adding more sugar. An apple and a snickers bar have similar sugar content. Fruit is "healthy" because of the fiber and the way it's processed by your body in the whole fruit form. It is, however, very sugary. Really, fruits should be viewed very much like candy.
  - ramblenode 3y ago
    Fruits are nothing like candy, and it's sad that diet science has gone so backwards as to make this type of statement seem reasonable--that all of diet can be boiled down to carbs, fiber, protein, and fat. A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way. Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating. Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
    - esperent 3y ago
      While you're not wrong, this needs a couple of qualifications: 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents. 2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit. 3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added. I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.
paulpauper 3y ago
first it was cigarettes that were bad, understandably enough, so graphic warnings labels were put on the packages. and now with cigarettes having been conquered , time for warnings on vaping and sugary dinks ,too. maybe people just want bad stuff?
stakhanov 3y ago
I used to live in Britain in 2005-2012. And, while the British "nanny state" had gotten on my nerves even back then, I was truly shocked when I returned for a short vacation this year. I made a point of seeking out various sweet treats I remembered from back in the day that I can't buy where I live now, and discovered they all taste like shit now, having replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. I went to a pub and ordered "a coke", and the bartender gave me something that vaguely looked like coke. I took a sip and discovered that it tasted like shit. I said "This is not coke. What is this?" He replied "This is Pepsi Max". "Well, Pepsi Max was not what I ordered!" -- I'm assuming that all of this is related to the sugar tax they introduced in the mean time [1]. When they discover the health implication of artifical sweeteners (many of them are already known, but I'm sure we will discover more and more as time goes by) Britain will probably be the country worst hit, and they will have their government to thank for it. I think it's high time that we start acknowledging that people want access to some kind of a quick/easy/cheap source of gratification, and the nanny state can't just wage war on all of them: There's a tax now on alcohol, on tobacco, and on sugar. But sugar is the odd one out in this listing, because there's no such thing as "passive consumption" of sugar (like there is on tobacco), and people "high on sugar" don't endanger others (as is sometimes the case with alcohol). The normal rationale when governments limit peoples freedoms is that they limit some people's freedoms, if that serves as a means to preserve other people's freedoms. But with sugar, I just don't see the harm that accrues to anyone except the person consuming the sugar, and so, a government trying to limit people's freedoms to enjoy sugar, is precisely crossing a line that no government of any free people should ever cross. Also, by taxing alcohol, tobacco, and sugar, you've now weirdly "levelled the playing field". While sugar is clearly the "least bad" of the three, you now no longer have a tax incentive to prefer a Coke Classic to a beer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdo...
- chillacy 3y ago
  Hmm to what extent is there harm done to others in the form of increased future healthcare expenses if this is the UK we’re talking about?
  - 3y ago
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
The psychological aspect is the biggest one. Even using artificial sweeteners that might have no effect on the body, you are still accustoming people to a completely skewed level of sweetness in foods. Someone who drinks Coke Zero every day might not get diabetes, but will sure crave more sweets outside the beverage itself and will probably get its sugar from somewhere else.
- Cwizard 3y ago
  Why is there something in Coke Zero that makes you crave sweets more?
  - bigfudge 3y ago
    Because it tastes sweet which changes your palette to prefer sweeter things generally. Some of these will likely contain sugar. So you’ll eat more sugar than if you drank water.
  - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
    Because your palate gets saturated by sweet and as such many things that have a low sugar content are not appealing to you anymore. For example, when I was younger I was the only one in the family who drank soft drinks. Every time my mother made an apple pie it almost tasted sour to my mouth even though the rest of the family found it very sweet and pleasant. Wouldn't you know it, when I stopped with the sweet soft drinks my palate adjusted and I could finally enjoy my mother's low sugar pie
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  Contrary n=1 anecdata: When I experience aspartame, the host product tastes "wrong", and if I consume more than a wee bit, my stomach gets a bit upset. So, let me ignore that sweetener… When I use most artificial sweeteners, at first they can seem enjoyable and freeing. A 50:50 blend of Stevia-in-the-Raw and Splenda can seem more like real sugar to me. But with repeated frequent use (say, daily in a mug of tea), I gradually come to feel not an anticipation of something good and satisfying but an expectation of doing something 'empty'. Sweetness in general becomes increasingly distasteful. Perhaps the distaste is due to lack of metabolic reward. However, after a few days of not wanting sweetness, a little bit of real sugar can reset me to enjoying sugary things. Takes longer to again enjoy an artificial sweetener.
globular-toast 3y ago
Something I still don't see generally acknowledged by society is that obesity, type 2 diabetes etc are all symptoms of one thing: food addiction. Food addiction is real and just as harmful as other addictions like smoking and alcohol. But for some reason we still laugh about it like it doesn't exist. We even welcome with open arms new products that will try to make us addicted. Next time you see a fat person, frame it as food addiction. You think they want to exist as a useless, grotesque blob? You think they don't know they have an embarrassing body and their oversized clothes don't really hide it? You think they are happy feeling uncomfortable and incapable all the time? They know it's the food, but they can't stop. Next time you go out, start mentally replacing junk food with cigarettes. Replace the "golden arches" with Benson and Hedges. That waft of carefully engineered and pumped out Subway smell with cigarette smoke. The advertising, the vending machines, all of it. Then ask yourself why people are obese. It's an addiction with no escape.
- tsuujin 3y ago
  Food addiction is for sure one reason for obesity, but the last few decades or so of research has really challenged the “you’re fat because of personal accountability” assertion. The single best read out there on the topic, for the layman like myself, is probably this series of articles: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... It does a really good job of laying out all the contradictory information out there in a normal-human readable format while referencing studies to keep it real.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    You're completely missing my point. It is not down to personal accountability. It is due to certain sectors of our society leveraging the strong addictive potential of food. Imagine confronting a recovering alcoholic with a glass of beer. Not just offering it but tempting him, wafting it in front of his nose, holding it up to the light to show the bubbles. And then saying "well it's your fault for drinking it" when he can't resist any longer. We're all susceptible to addiction. Some more than others, of course. When it comes to food we're all descended from animals that evolved with food scarcity. We didn't evolve with refined sugars. What we're seeing in obesity figures is simply the susceptibility of people and ability to cope with their addictions. More than a quarter of all people are obese in France, a country once thought to be the prime example of healthy eating. And, guess what? McDonalds is very popular in France. Maybe it wasn't their genetics, maybe it was just the lack of McDonalds?

Some here may be concerned enough to consider this article https://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/tips/a2471/sugar-aging-how-to-fight-glycation-614621/ https://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/tips/a2471/suga... The proteins in skin most prone to glycation are the same ones that make a youthful complexion so plump and springy—collagen and elastin. When those proteins hook up with renegade sugars, they become discolored, weak, and less supple; this shows up on the skin's surface as wrinkles, sagginess, and a loss of radiance.

SentinelLdnma 3y ago
I was not familiar with glycation. Thanks for this rabbit hole... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-product https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867518/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867518/

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Plenty of related discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728033

bettercallsalad 3y ago

Let’s not give FDA, NIH and other standard and quality control monitoring agencies pass while food conpanies did this. They also purposely pushed “fat is bad” while the whole diet chart with the carb/milk and dairy was plain misleading. And they knew they were lying, most of their propositions were pushed by one guys research. And of course big pharma always sponsored and benefited these types of research.

api 3y ago
When I see populist cranks getting traction in the culture and in politics, I find myself being as angry at the establishment for this as I am at the cranks or perhaps even more. I feel like our main establishment entities like the FDA, NIH, major universities, pharma companies, etc. still aren't willing to take any responsibility for why people don't trust them anymore. Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum.
- simple-thoughts 3y ago
  It’s always funny to me when I see institutions publish reports in the credibility crisis, because their solution is always to do more media operations. But the lack of trust comes from the behavior of these institutions and their use of the media to cover up their mistakes in the first place!
  - api 3y ago
    They’re stuck in the old broadcast media era. It’ll probably take a generational shift in who is running these things.
- gsatic 3y ago
  Broadcast transmissions have always been regulated world over, not cuz the Regulators are great or act fast or are trusted, but cuz the Cost to Mass Broadcast, whatever shit occurs to a 3 inch chimp brain, is much greater than 0. The cost to multiply has always been the real barrier to prevent cancer from spreading faster than the immune system can react. Whether it is setting up a printing press and distributing newspapers/books or radio/tv station, movie studio broadcasts, it used to cost a lot. Even with chat/email/phone/sms there is a high cost. The email list of everyone on the planet is easy to assemble these days. But try emailing everyone on the list every few minutes. The whole story breaks down when Youtube/Facebook/TikTok made Cost to Broadcast 0 for everyone.
- ourmandave 3y ago
  Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum. lol, really? The former president (still lying about the 2020 election), Fox News (paid near $1B settlement for lying), and the Republican party repeatedly saying all the Federal institutions can't be trusted because they're run by the Deep State or crooked liberals. Which cranks didn't create the distrust again?

omginternets 3y ago

They’re now “vegetizing” the world with “plant-based” (read: highly processed) products and lab-grown meats (ditto). The sooner we realize that food industry are engaged in capitalism and not public health, nor ecology, the better. What the food industry pushes is best read through the lens of patentable intellectual property and market disruption in an economic sector with razor-thin margins. I would encourage all conscientious people not to be their useful idiots.

armatav 3y ago
This is true - everything along the lines of plant based food has an underlying capital cost transformation driving it, not a cultural or environmental basis. That’s why they need to convince/mandate people to eat it; it tastes worse and is worse for you.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Judging by the responses of surprised enthusiasm I get from meat eaters when I cook vegetarian for them: if it tastes worse, that's the chef's fault rather than the plants'.
  - omginternets 3y ago
    I think the parent post is referring to processed foods, not the cooking of actual, recognizable produce.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      That shouldn't matter, the point remains the same: it's the chef's fault if it doesn't taste good, even if the chef works in corporate and is designing a factory. As a different point: "Processed" feels to me like a slippery word. Bread? Looks nothing like wheat. Beer? Grown in a vat. Beef? Take a wild animal, selectively breed it for hundreds of generations, feed it all kinds of weird things that combine "cheap" (surprise cannibalism leading to BSE) and "encourages weight gain" (we're only recently getting serious about stopping antibiotics being used this way), kill one, after all the main cuts are taken spray the rest of with a high pressure hose, dry off the resulting slurry, ta-dah mechanically recovered "100% beef" you can't use in much else besides mince, and by extension burgers and sausages. The term seems like it's some combination of a complaint more about the long list of ingredients and that these sound new and/or scary, implying no awareness of how much of a mess biochemistry is and where most of the chemicals in question were first isolated from.

adam_arthur 3y ago

Regulation through voluntary goodwill never works in aggregate. Blaming actors rather than regulators will always be futile in the end as players in a system will almost always trend towards self interest in the long run, as has been proven time and time again Of course many would argue there's no need to regulate at all, and that's a fair position to hold too. There's nothing inherently wrong with providing products that offer a tradeoff between health and enjoyment. As long as consumers are aware of the longer term costs

mahmoudhossam 3y ago
Regulatory capture prevents regulators from doing their jobs, and I'm not sure any amount of regulator blaming will change that. Naming and shaming companies, however, can make them change their strategy.
- wilg 3y ago
  I’m not so sure. Placing the blame at regulators would encourage people to vote for politicians that will regulate more effectively. That’s a direct link, versus hoping corporate shame trickles through to regulation.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    No it won't. Nobody is going to make something like this the center of their platform, and most voters don't do nuanced appraisals of a candidate's whole platform because it's a waste of time, they go with their gut feeling about 2 or 3 big issues and whether the politician has an appealing personality. If this wasn't true then height wouldn't be so strongly correlated with political success. Furthermore, look at a recent example of a pro-strong regulation policy: the Obama admin believed in a well run regulatory state, and the first lady led a public health campaign promoting healthier school lunches with more fruits and vegetables as well as exercise. You'd think encouraging kids to eat unprocessed food and exercise would be wholly inoffensive, but the other political party and its media surrogates treated it like the imposition of communism and complained endlessly about 'freedom' and 'waste'. Your version is how things ought to work, and how it was more or less assumed it does work for many years, but it's based on an obsolete understanding of political markets. Ubiquitous networking has made it easy for like-minded people to find and coordinate with each other, and some people favor perverse outcomes. Approximately 30% of people are willing to suffer an economic loss in order to inflict a greater loss on their opponents, and that personality type now controls one of the country's two major political parties.

tayo42 3y ago

Seems like a headline that's going to get people riled up, while its discussing misleading and lies in marketing of food towards uneducated people in developing parts of India. tough country to deal with problems in, idk how you reach everyone to educate them.

grecy 3y ago

There is a really, really easy way to avoid all of this. In the supermarket, only buy things that have one ingredient. Only eat and drink things that have one ingredient. As Michael Pollan says: "Eat FOOD, mostly greens, not too much."

andersrs 3y ago
Even fruit/vegetables have become sweeter over the decades with selective breeding.
- notyourwork 3y ago
  That’s the least of societies concerns. Corn syrup and sugar infused everything is a massive problem.
- shlant 3y ago
  no they haven't[1][2]. Please stop perpetuating this myth 1. https://twitter.com/Botanygeek/status/1149968041964396545 https://twitter.com/Botanygeek/status/1149968041964396545 2. https://deniseminger.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/ https://deniseminger.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/
  - NotGMan 3y ago
    It's not a myth. You're both kinda right: 1) The fruit that we eat today is hyper-sugarized and available 24/7 all the time. Eg European ancestors NEVER had access to this amount of fruit. Apples, bananas, (water)melons, sweet grapes, ...these things didn't exist 150 years ago in the form we know today. People eat these sugar bombs all the time. 2) There does exist high sugar natural fruit.
    - MandieD 3y ago
      Even your modern European cousins don’t have quite the same level of access to super-sugary fruits year-round, or at least we see some blatant price differences. Cherries right now (mid-July) in northern Bavaria: $3/lb at the grocery store, cheaper if you buy direct from farmers just outside the towns. Various small plums are free for the taking from trees along trails and rivers. I’m planning some serious jam-making over the next few weekends. Cherries in January: if available at all, approximately $20/lb, import from South Africa or Chile. Plums are also available, about $8/lb, but not very flavorful.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Interesting tragedy of the commons.

dehrmann 3y ago
Not really. Excess sugar consumption has a direct negative impact on the consumer. The only commons here is health care.
- omginternets 3y ago
  Sounds like a tragedy of the commons …
  - dehrmann 3y ago
    Not in America.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  The Commons here is the 'market for healthy food'. The first entity that adds extra sugar to their food to gain mind share inevitably causes the rest of the competitors to all add more sugar, bringing them back to parity while also destroying 'the market for healthy food'. This race towards everyone being worse off because of economic incentives not to be left behind is a tragedy of the commons in the market sense.

noduerme 3y ago

I read the Guardian's top articles every morning, and then listen to either BBC, NYT or a Vox podcast and a couple of never-Trump "center right" podcasts on economics and foreign policy. Once in awhile I'll read something on a Murdoch-owned property. Of all of these, I find the Guardian to be the most viscerally alarming and the most consistently hysterical on every subject. Every Guardian article about a pollutant, about the climate , or about any judicial decision thay goes against what they believe is given the same treatment of elevating it to the level of apocalyptic clickbait and then doubling down with four paragraphs of boilerplate about how it disproportionately affects marginalized communities. I've stopped reading the last four paragraphs, because they're always the same regardless of the subject matter... this saves me some time in the morning. I used to think it was only the crazy far right who preyed on people's fears... but now it's just alarmist clickbait left right and center. I just got done being extremely annoyed with John Podhoretz on a podcast claiming that aspartame can't cause cancer because he needs to imbibe it and because other artificial sweeteners were prematurely vilified and banned, which is a reductionist, reactionary, emotional and stupid argument. Personally, I still believe saccharine causes cancer, I've always assumed aspartame did, and I never eat or drink anything with artificial sweeteners. But I'm so sick of the hyperbolic screeching on both sides of every single fucking thing from gas stoves to coke baggies in the white house to abortion rights to Disney and Target and Bud Light to how climate change will kill us all to PFAS in my dental floss to how nuclear war or AI Holocaust is imminent... I just wish they would all shut up. Stop. Just stop finding new things to for me to fucking worry about. Go away.

BenFranklin100 3y ago
The Guardian is regarded as a joke. About a third of their of their journalist/editors are nincompoops who sole function is to throw read meat to the rabid Left. I still donate $50/yr to the Guardian because about 5% of their reporting provides a useful counter perspective.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Absolutely agree they are a useful counter perspective... that's why I read them daily. I just wish they would dial down the rhetorical hysteria in whatever attempt it is to counterbalance the hysteria on the other side. [edit] I'm also of a time where the concept of 'throwing red meat to the left' raises serious cognitive dissonance for me, because prior to Twitter, or at least through the 90s and 00s, red meat style feasting and crowing behavior was exclusively for the right. For awhile it seemed almost axiomatic to me that the left didn't need to resort to fear mongering or hyperbole in communicating their points, because objective truth and logic was on their side. I don't think that was just my own blind bias; it was a major selling point of the left to rid these issues of religious-type appeals to emption, and drill into facts in a way that made the opposition look hypocritical at best or mendacious at worst. By adopting the hysterical and emotive tactics of the right, I feel that the Guardian, et. al, have ceded the high ground.

rsync 3y ago

"Sweetened the World" is a good phrase and fits well the situation. One of the very best examples is sugar added to applesauce. It's particularly nefarious because many consumers may be attempting to avoid sugary food and provide healthy foods for children ... only to unknowingly buy, essentially, candy.

parineum 3y ago
Applesauce isn't avoiding sugary or unhealthy food. It already is, essentially, candy before adding more sugar. An apple and a snickers bar have similar sugar content. Fruit is "healthy" because of the fiber and the way it's processed by your body in the whole fruit form. It is, however, very sugary. Really, fruits should be viewed very much like candy.
- ramblenode 3y ago
  Fruits are nothing like candy, and it's sad that diet science has gone so backwards as to make this type of statement seem reasonable--that all of diet can be boiled down to carbs, fiber, protein, and fat. A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way. Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating. Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
  - esperent 3y ago
    While you're not wrong, this needs a couple of qualifications: 1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents. 2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit. 3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added. I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.

paulpauper 3y ago

first it was cigarettes that were bad, understandably enough, so graphic warnings labels were put on the packages. and now with cigarettes having been conquered , time for warnings on vaping and sugary dinks ,too. maybe people just want bad stuff?

stakhanov 3y ago

I used to live in Britain in 2005-2012. And, while the British "nanny state" had gotten on my nerves even back then, I was truly shocked when I returned for a short vacation this year. I made a point of seeking out various sweet treats I remembered from back in the day that I can't buy where I live now, and discovered they all taste like shit now, having replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. I went to a pub and ordered "a coke", and the bartender gave me something that vaguely looked like coke. I took a sip and discovered that it tasted like shit. I said "This is not coke. What is this?" He replied "This is Pepsi Max". "Well, Pepsi Max was not what I ordered!" -- I'm assuming that all of this is related to the sugar tax they introduced in the mean time [1]. When they discover the health implication of artifical sweeteners (many of them are already known, but I'm sure we will discover more and more as time goes by) Britain will probably be the country worst hit, and they will have their government to thank for it. I think it's high time that we start acknowledging that people want access to some kind of a quick/easy/cheap source of gratification, and the nanny state can't just wage war on all of them: There's a tax now on alcohol, on tobacco, and on sugar. But sugar is the odd one out in this listing, because there's no such thing as "passive consumption" of sugar (like there is on tobacco), and people "high on sugar" don't endanger others (as is sometimes the case with alcohol). The normal rationale when governments limit peoples freedoms is that they limit some people's freedoms, if that serves as a means to preserve other people's freedoms. But with sugar, I just don't see the harm that accrues to anyone except the person consuming the sugar, and so, a government trying to limit people's freedoms to enjoy sugar, is precisely crossing a line that no government of any free people should ever cross. Also, by taxing alcohol, tobacco, and sugar, you've now weirdly "levelled the playing field". While sugar is clearly the "least bad" of the three, you now no longer have a tax incentive to prefer a Coke Classic to a beer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdo...

chillacy 3y ago
Hmm to what extent is there harm done to others in the form of increased future healthcare expenses if this is the UK we’re talking about?
- 3y ago

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

The psychological aspect is the biggest one. Even using artificial sweeteners that might have no effect on the body, you are still accustoming people to a completely skewed level of sweetness in foods. Someone who drinks Coke Zero every day might not get diabetes, but will sure crave more sweets outside the beverage itself and will probably get its sugar from somewhere else.

Cwizard 3y ago
Why is there something in Coke Zero that makes you crave sweets more?
- bigfudge 3y ago
  Because it tastes sweet which changes your palette to prefer sweeter things generally. Some of these will likely contain sugar. So you’ll eat more sugar than if you drank water.
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  Because your palate gets saturated by sweet and as such many things that have a low sugar content are not appealing to you anymore. For example, when I was younger I was the only one in the family who drank soft drinks. Every time my mother made an apple pie it almost tasted sour to my mouth even though the rest of the family found it very sweet and pleasant. Wouldn't you know it, when I stopped with the sweet soft drinks my palate adjusted and I could finally enjoy my mother's low sugar pie
IIsi50MHz 3y ago
Contrary n=1 anecdata: When I experience aspartame, the host product tastes "wrong", and if I consume more than a wee bit, my stomach gets a bit upset. So, let me ignore that sweetener… When I use most artificial sweeteners, at first they can seem enjoyable and freeing. A 50:50 blend of Stevia-in-the-Raw and Splenda can seem more like real sugar to me. But with repeated frequent use (say, daily in a mug of tea), I gradually come to feel not an anticipation of something good and satisfying but an expectation of doing something 'empty'. Sweetness in general becomes increasingly distasteful. Perhaps the distaste is due to lack of metabolic reward. However, after a few days of not wanting sweetness, a little bit of real sugar can reset me to enjoying sugary things. Takes longer to again enjoy an artificial sweetener.

globular-toast 3y ago

Something I still don't see generally acknowledged by society is that obesity, type 2 diabetes etc are all symptoms of one thing: food addiction. Food addiction is real and just as harmful as other addictions like smoking and alcohol. But for some reason we still laugh about it like it doesn't exist. We even welcome with open arms new products that will try to make us addicted. Next time you see a fat person, frame it as food addiction. You think they want to exist as a useless, grotesque blob? You think they don't know they have an embarrassing body and their oversized clothes don't really hide it? You think they are happy feeling uncomfortable and incapable all the time? They know it's the food, but they can't stop. Next time you go out, start mentally replacing junk food with cigarettes. Replace the "golden arches" with Benson and Hedges. That waft of carefully engineered and pumped out Subway smell with cigarette smoke. The advertising, the vending machines, all of it. Then ask yourself why people are obese. It's an addiction with no escape.

tsuujin 3y ago
Food addiction is for sure one reason for obesity, but the last few decades or so of research has really challenged the “you’re fat because of personal accountability” assertion. The single best read out there on the topic, for the layman like myself, is probably this series of articles: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... It does a really good job of laying out all the contradictory information out there in a normal-human readable format while referencing studies to keep it real.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  You're completely missing my point. It is not down to personal accountability. It is due to certain sectors of our society leveraging the strong addictive potential of food. Imagine confronting a recovering alcoholic with a glass of beer. Not just offering it but tempting him, wafting it in front of his nose, holding it up to the light to show the bubbles. And then saying "well it's your fault for drinking it" when he can't resist any longer. We're all susceptible to addiction. Some more than others, of course. When it comes to food we're all descended from animals that evolved with food scarcity. We didn't evolve with refined sugars. What we're seeing in obesity figures is simply the susceptibility of people and ability to cope with their addictions. More than a quarter of all people are obese in France, a country once thought to be the prime example of healthy eating. And, guess what? McDonalds is very popular in France. Maybe it wasn't their genetics, maybe it was just the lack of McDonalds?