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Big Tobacco’s Legacy: Pushing Hyperpalatable Foods in America
- avgcorrection 3y agoThis seems surprising. Why wouldn't every food business do the same?
- bsima 3y agoI mean, given the options, I prefer palatable foods to unpalatable foods.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoWell, that might not be the best option for you. Fortunately the article speaks of hyparpalatable ones and this is a bit different category - one we'd better avoid altogether.
- HDThoreaun 3y agolmao who are you to dictate my choices. Telling people what to eat goes against literally everything the US stands for, for better and worse.
- masfuerte 3y agoAll the junk food advertising is literally telling you what to eat. If this goes against everything the US stands for maybe y'all should ban it.
- HDThoreaun 3y agothey probably should ban advertising. That's not the same as "one we'd better avoid altogether". The fact of the matter is that people eat junk food because it tastes good, the advertising just boosts their margins.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago> they probably should ban advertising The people in the advertising industry would probably reply with, "lmao who are you to dictate our choices. Telling people ads should be banned goes against literally everything the US stands for, for better and worse."
- troutwine 3y agoNo one's dictating your choices? If you thought eating glass was tasty it wouldn't be factually inaccurate to tell you that it's bad for you. Same idea for hyperpalatable foods. Strictly speaking, I'm not sure that the US is founded on doing what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law but I do think that's an increasingly common understanding. A nation state does have some stake in maintaining the basic health of its people, whether you agree that's desirable or, if it is, to what degree.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Pet_Ant 3y agoI prefer white bread but conciously choose whole-grains for the extra fibre and lower glicemic index. Often one needs to make the less desirable choice for a global good.
- standardUser 3y agoUnless they are operating outside of the law, I don't fault "Big Tobacco" or any "Big Business" for, you know, operating a business. Yes, it's kind of funny they went from one way of exploiting our brains to another, and I personally wish they had not. But companies don't operate to satisfy our wishes, hopes and desires, they operate to make money. I've said it a million times, but if we don't like the way a company legally operates, the only solution is to change the laws the company operates under. Maybe the occasional boycott or shame campaign can force a corporation's hand, but the vast majority of the time when a company is forced to change the way they operate it is because a law was passed. EDIT: terrible typo that undermined my entire point
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- js8 3y agoMaybe I misunderstand, but isn't your point "the only solution IS to change the laws"?
- unyttigfjelltol 3y agoThis is not entirely accurate. Causing harm to people is not good. If you harm enough people egregiously enough, law enforcement eventually will notice and will figure which law said company broke. If the harm is bad enough, and intent obvious enough, they will find a law. So, it's more true to ask: "Is intentionally manipulating food to cause harm to people-- is this consistent with existing legal norms?" I personally would not bet on it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 3y ago> intentionally manipulating food to cause harm to people I seriously doubt that this has ever been done. Companies "manipulate" food so it tastes good and they'll sell more of it. They don't intentionally do it to "cause harm". At most, that might be an unintended consequence. It turns out that intentionally killing your customers is bad for business. It's like (IIRC) Ozzy Osbourne's comment back in the days when metal was being blamed for teen suicides. "Why would we do that? That would tank sales for the followup album." Or Rob Halford on the same subject "If we were going to put backward-masked subliminal commands in our records, it wouldn't be 'kill yourself', it would be 'buy more of our records'" (probably not exact quotes in either case, but that was the gist)
- badpun 3y agoIt appears that, by their definition, a mere cheese sandwitch is a hyperpalatable food.
- nkingsy 3y agoYes, the most palatable parts of wheat and milk, pre chewed and concentrated. Cheese has a higher carbon footprint than any food but beef, while cow milk is only 4x worse than soy, due to the concentration.
- pestoAioli 3y ago'Big Tobacco's Legacy' sounded so badass I had to go out and smoke a cigarette
- mc32 3y agoI would say the foods coming from the big junkfood brands are not much different from streetfood. Streetfood found in poorer countries are also dripping with fat, sugar and salt. So the main differentiator is marketing because while availability/distribution/volume is an advantage, it's marketing that gets the kids to get the parents to buy the junk.
- the__alchemist 3y agoOr restaurant food in general: Especially re sodium. Anecdotally, a large majority of restaurant food is loaded with salt.
- denton-scratch 3y agoAnd fat; French cuisine in particular involves the liberal use of butter, especially in sauces. "Mounting" a sauce amounts to stirring in a big knob of butter at the end. Bearnaise sauce for steaks is about 70% butter. There's a reason for this; they make food taste good.
- LordShredda 3y agoAnd price. In the middle east 2 dollars can get you a filling but very unhealthy meal. In North America 2 dollars might get you a packet of chips
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoA lot of street food also has quite a bit of protein, something that is largely missing from American junk food.
- nsxwolf 3y agoThey want to force us to eat bland, boring food.
- legitster 3y agoThis is such a bizarrely worded piece. It's like, really trying to milk some sort of controversy. But for the record most of the brands owned by Tobacco-adjacent holding company were acquisitions. Tobacco companies didn't invent Oreos or Kool-Aid or Jello. And in most cases they were barely involved in the companies they invested in. So in just a bizarre way we're really just talking about the marketability of junk foods.
- everybodyknows 3y agoConsider that the researchers are at University of Kansas, a thousand miles from tobacco country. Try searching the text for "corn". Some eager academic in Virginia or Kentucky might want to study the health perils of high-fructose corn syrup -- local support might be generous.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThis article kind of highlights what I despise about the modern economy and technology: tech used to be about solving hard problems that made human life better. I'm extremely grateful for my refrigerator so I can have fresh food on demand, my dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to save me from some drudgery, etc. But I feel like the vast majority of consumer tech these days falls in one of two camps: 1. It's there simply to addict us. Tobacco companies saw they had a gold mine with nicotine, and realized they could make food similarly addictive (and ultimately lethal in the long term). But it's not just tobacco companies: social media, "fast fashion", many types of entertainment, etc., don't do us really any good beyond a quick dopamine fix and are ultimately harmful to us. 2. It exists simply to deal with the complexity of systems we've set up in the first place. I think of all the fin tech and health tech startups that exist because so many of our financial and especially healthcare systems are insanely complex. As someone who was a big techno optimist in the late 90s, I admit it's pretty depressing sometimes to think that the work you do is not ultimately helpful.
- digging 3y ago> 2. It exists simply to deal with the complexity of systems we've set up in the first place. I think of all the fin tech and health tech startups that exist because so many of our financial and especially healthcare systems are insanely complex. This one really bothers me too, having worked in the healthcare industry. There is an entire class of business the "does good" by helping people navigate an intentionally hostile system. And those businesses therefore profit off the hostility of the system. It is an abusive relationship.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> There is an entire class of business the "does good" by helping people navigate an intentionally hostile system. Yeah, I'm currently in this boat, and it hurts a bit when I think about it too much sometimes. That is, I tell myself "OK, you're not curing cancer, but you're helping make a shitty system less shitty for people who need to navigate it." And that is true. But I do acknowledge that a much better solution would just be to fix the underlying problem in the first place, and I admit that my company is just profiting off the unnecessary complexity that exists to begin with.
- drcongo 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37460701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37460701
- analog31 3y agoBig Tobacco also perfected the modern anti-science misinformation campaign.
- jollyllama 3y agoI wonder if this is related to the fact that habitually smoking lots of cigarettes tends to dull one's taste buds.
- binarymax 3y ago"Hyperpalatable" is such an odd word. I suppose it's meant to be more sciency than "junk". But IMO the word does a disservice, because the it carries a positive connotation.
- otikik 3y agoI think it's apt. "Hyper" can mean "highly", which is what got you astray. But it can also mean "excessive". Think hypertension, or hyperthyroidism.
- binarymax 3y agoEven when using “excessive” you can infer the overall meaning to be “excessively tasty food”. Unlike “junk food” the former doesn’t confer negativity - in fact the opposite. Who doesn’t want excessively tasty food? And excessively tasty food isn’t necessarily bad for you. It’s pear season and the fruits are excessively palatable - but they’re not unhealthy.
- otikik 3y agoPerhaps it’s a local thing. Where I live excess is, by definition, bad.
- 99_00 3y agoThis was covered in the book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013). It's featured in the book. Odd that the only way you'd know, other than reading the book is by reading comments users left about the book. Tobacco companies aren't mentioned in any of the mainstream publications that discuss the book which came up in my search.
- crazygringo 3y agoThe whole idea of "hyperpalatable" foods is silly, and it's what journalists were previously calling foods "engineered" to be "addictive" a couple years ago, which was equally silly. In terms of regular everyday food/snacks, nobody has figured out a way to make food tastier that isn't just regular cooking done by home cooks and restaurant chefs. (Leaving expensive techniques like molecular gastronomy aside.) Adding salt, fat and/or sugar doesn't make something "hyperpalatable". It's just making food tasty the way we always have for centuries, in countries everywhere across the world. It isn't new. Grandma added tons of salt to her tomato sauce (as you have to do), donuts and croissants have been full of fat forever, and it's not like sugary desserts are anything new. And it's certainly not like we've suddenly figured out how to jam 5x more sugar in the same candy and that this is rewiring our brains or something. It's just straightforward food ingredients. Any talk of "hyperpalatability" is pure nonsense. It makes as much sense as saying certain artists on Spotify have developed "hypermusicality" to "push you" into listening more. It's silly. (There are more "engineered" food ingredients like preservatives and xanthan gum and similar that grandma didn't use. But they have nothing to do with palatability or taste -- they're about shelf life and texture. There are also things like extrusion and air-puffing that snack makers can do that you can't at home, but these are also texture rather than taste.)
- kritiko 3y agoThe point you're making seems similar to the argument that GMOs have a lot in common with earlier selective breeding techniques. I think the difference is that while historically grandma or restaurant chefs were biased towards repeatable, appetizing products, they weren't using focus groups and industrial/scientific methods to get there. I.e. you can't send your grandma to General Mills and have her create Spaghetti-Os. There seems to be medical consensus that "ultraprocessed" food, as squishy as that term is, is obesogenic. Part of that may be influenced by the marketing and marketing science behind the food as well, but there seem to be human and animal studies that support that our food has changed.
- crazygringo 3y ago> they weren't using focus groups and industrial/scientific methods to get there. I.e. you can't send your grandma to General Mills and have her create Spaghetti-Os. But that's exactly what I'm pushing back against -- you've never needed focus groups or fancy methods to figure out what the tastiest amount of sugar or salt or fat is for a recipe. It's remarkably easy to figure out on your own. Focus groups just serve as objective evidence over the opinion of a single chef, and can reveal that different markets prefer slightly different ratios (e.g. Brazilians prefer sweeter desserts than Americans). And Spaghetti-O's are just spaghetti in tomato sauce in a different shape, for those who prefer their tomato sauce sweeter rather than saltier, like kids do -- and of course grandma made spaghetti. > There seems to be medical consensus that "ultraprocessed" food, as squishy as that term is, is obesogenic. There isn't even remotely consensus on what the causality is here -- it's one of the thorniest problems to untangle. But the idea that tastier food is contributing seems extremely far-fetched. Look at sugary soft drinks first of all, look at decreased physical activity, look at changing cultural norms around portion sizes and body weights, look at the reduction of fats that have raised carbohydrate intakes. Snickers bars have been around since 1930. People in the 1950's were eating every kind of supposed "hyperpalatable food" and obesity was a minor issue. So the idea the flavor is somehow new or responsible for health issues just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI find it interesting that experts in addiction then pivoted and turned that to how to exploit people’s tendencies in food addiction. And then killed millions more people through heart disease, cancer, obesity that they couldn’t reach via cigarettes. I see parallels to social media and tech giants now also. They know how to make the rat hit the lever and get that dopamine hit to the brain. The rat’s health be damned and the free market will not fix it.
- Nasrudith 3y agoI've seen the opposite where ironically going after Big Tobacco left trial lawyers with an addiction to crusading and looking for the next witch to hunt regardless of guilt via downright speculative lawsuits. Look at the cell phones cause cancer pursuit which many desperately wished to be true when the correlation is that cancer causes cellphones.
- unglaublich 3y agoIf all those companies acted within the bounds of law, then is it the companies fault for producing a product that the customer wants? We should stop expecting morality from companies. A company is nothing more than a mechanism that optimizes for profit. We, the customer and the regulatory bodies, create the field in which the company optimizes. If we think that something is wrong with the products created by those companies, then it's up to us to not reward those companies. There are two layers to this: - First: The customer does not buy products and/or services they do not value. - Second: Regulatory bodies protect customers against companies that offer a product that they find hard to decline. Think about gambling, addiction, health effects, etc. The big issue however, is that companies have infiltrated this layer of regulatory bodies, rendering them incapable. We need to find a way to expel corporate interests from regulatory bodies and v.v. They can only function when they are not contaminating each other.
- avgcorrection 3y ago> If all those companies acted within the bounds of law, then is it the companies fault for producing a product that the customer wants? [...] The big issue however, is that companies have infiltrated this layer of regulatory bodies, rendering them incapable. Did you set out to answer your own question?
- willy_k 3y agoWell, that’s what you do with rhetorical questions.
- carlosjobim 3y agoWhen you write "corporate interest", I interpret that as well as "business interest" or "market interest", is that correct? I think the great difficulty is that you'd be hard to find the specialists to write the regulation or approve regulation, that haven't come from the business world and aren't going to the business world. The in-depth knowledge needed to make fair and effective regulations can usually only come from real-life experience from the business side of things. Unless you can find exceptionally interested and honest people - who manage to have interest in an industry without wanting to go into it themselves. Therefore, I think the more simple regulations are, the better. So that honest and intelligent lawmakers without complete industry saturation can make decisions.
- bluedays 3y agoJudging from the comments you’ll have to pry the mountain dew from a neckbeards cold dead hands.