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How Nestlé gets children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries

310 points by henriquenunez 3y ago

ags1905 2y ago
Sugar is bad for human beings, especially for males. And our food contains lots of it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
barrenko 3y ago
Lower income gets kids hooked on sugar.
- gonzalj3 3y ago
  on* sugar
  - barrenko 3y ago
    ^ thanks
- slothtrop 3y ago
  If that were true you'd expect this replicated in everywhere.
  - stuff4ben 3y ago
    It is in the US. Ever hear of food deserts?
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      The US isn't "everywhere".
      - stuff4ben 3y ago
        The original article was about lower-income "countries". I pointing out it's also in the US. So yeah, pretty much everywhere. Unless you have data to prove otherwise, you're wrong.
        slothtrop 3y ago
        The original article was about how Nestle uses more sugar in products sold to certain poor countries, not about consumer trends in those countries. According to this - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sugar-consumption-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sugar-con... , countries trending lowest per-capita consumption of sugar tend to be the poorest. Exceptions are in latin America. Higher inequality does not predict more sugar consumption either.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    It is. Low household income correlates with obesity.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      In the US.
- olliej 3y ago
  Yeah, there’s a real failure to understand that sugar and junk food while unhealthy in the long term remains the most cost effective source of calories. Having little money doesn’t mean your kids don’t magically need fewer calories (and not providing those calories is itself a crime), so if you have an affordable source of calories that’s what you go for, even if those calories come with a side helping of excess calories (stopping hunger requires volume of food so high calorie/volume ratio results in over eating), and often huge amounts of fat as well. I grew up dirt poor in the early 80s in NZ, and the cheapest food then was oatmeal and dried spaghetti, but by the 90s the time people were having to work and the amount being paid for that work and rent, and the super steep drop in price of McDonald’s etc (it went from being an expensive birthday treat when I was a kid to being cheaper than fish&chips) means that the diet switch was likely unavoidable. Luckily for me by that point my parents had been able to start working, so fridge and weekly shopping was an option (bread wouldn’t go stale, we could keep meat and vegetables in a freezer), but I can’t imagine having the same outcome if my families life was shifted ten years later (much higher student loans, even less money while they were students, most non junk food being more expensive while junk food was cheaper). I recognize 80s NZ poverty is not US poverty, but even in NZ I can’t imagine how much harder life would be for a similarly (economically) placed family is today vs for me, everything seems tailored to create obesity and struggles.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    > Yeah, there’s a real failure to understand that sugar and junk ... remains the most cost effective source of calories. This is usually the point where someone interjects some examples of cheap foods that poor people ought to just buy - because everyone, everywhere has trivial access to their middle class shopping experience. But even past that: Being poor also means subject to ceaseless Denial of Resources Attacks. Resources here meaning funds, attention, energy, ability, hope, will and anything one needs to raise one's station. Hacking a meal plan struggles to rise to the top of a priority stack when one has dozens of problems in a critical state. And because of poverty, it requires 10x the steps to solve those issues than non-poor people face. source: decade of hunger-level poverty with kids
    - 3y ago
olliej 3y ago
Nestlé is a truly awful company, and their CEO has historically been a terrible human being, but… this isn’t a nestlé specific activity? As far as I can tell this is standard behaviour from every company involved in snack foods, candy, soda, etc? And they go to great lengths to to hide that’s what they’re doing - most of the “juice” you can buy at US stores are essentially just soda minus the bubbles, growing up in NZ a huge part of childhood was flavored milk (many more and better flavors than in the US - lime was my favorite :) ) than in the US, but those all had absurd amounts of sugar as well, despite being advertised/pushed as healthy milk products for children (I still love them all and try to pretend they’re not functionally soda when they’re available).
- dumbfounder 3y ago
  I think the point is that the offer products that cover a significant portion of the market throughout your entire life, so they are highly incentivized to act in such a way to get you to consume sugary products (theirs) as much as possible. I haven’t seen anyone proposing reasons why these added sugars might be beneficial. Is there a counterargument? Are these countries where calories are very hard to come by, and thus they make the case that they are helping deliver those calories cheaply?
- nemomarx 3y ago
  There's some specific things they're doing, like adding sugar to infant formula and milk, that they don't do in Europe but do in lower income countries apparently. That seems like a very conscious thing targeted at very young children?
- filleduchaos 3y ago
  > this isn’t a nestlé specific activity? As far as I can tell this is standard behaviour from every company involved in snack foods, candy, soda, etc? If you open the article, you might discover that this is about literal baby food for infants as young as six months, not snacks and such for [older] children.
  - olliej 3y ago
mesarvagya 3y ago
Obligatory r/fucknestle. Nestle has a long history of doing lots of fucked up things. I try to use as few Nestle products as possible. I don't get why government can't regulate these companies which has a monopoly on everything you eat or drink[1] [1] https://wyomingllcattorney.com/images/nestle-list.png https://wyomingllcattorney.com/images/nestle-list.png
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Lio 3y ago
  It's depressing as hell that a company like Nestle was allowed to buy a company like Roundtree. It's a reminder that no matter what a company's founder's principles are as soon as it goes public it's a target to have all that reversed by people with no principles at all. At least Roundtree's foundation survives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rowntree_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rowntree_Foundation
  - Anthony-G 3y ago
    Upvoted your comment because it’s so true. The Quakers have a great tradition of setting up ethical enterprises. I mostly know Rowntree because of the chocolate but I also remember the family came to Ireland during the Great Famine to provide relief to the victims of racist British “laissez faire” economics. By the way, the name is spelled “Rowntree” (I also used to think the first syllable was “round”).
- tptacek 3y ago
  In what sense does Nestle have a monopoly on everything you eat or drink?
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    GP exaggerated but I have experiences looking say for a bottle of water or ice cream cone that is not Nestle and failing (not in US)
sebmellen 3y ago
It's hard to imagine a more evil company. [0]: https://youtu.be/MRWWK-iW_zU https://youtu.be/MRWWK-iW_zU [1]: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/culture/culture-society/nestle-company-pollution-children/ https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/culture/culture-soci...
- nickff 3y ago
  I'm not a Nestle fan, but I'm not sure they're evil and they're nowhere close to the most evil company. One well-documented prime example would be Krupp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp
  - margalabargala 3y ago
    They're up there for most evil currently-extant Western company. Certainly near the top for most evil company that a median HN user might directly interact with the products of (unlike, say, arms manufacturers). I would argue they are much more evil than any oil company.
    - tstrimple 3y ago
      > Certainly near the top for most evil company that a median HN user might directly buy the product of. And a lot of folks don't really know just how many bands Nestle owns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands They have over 50 brands of water alone. Avoiding their products requires home work and diligence.
      - timeon 3y ago
        Seems like it is mostly junk-food. Not hard to avoid.
        tstrimple 2y ago
        Ah yes. The well known categories of junk food being bottled water and coffee. Maybe you're one of the weirdos who categorize pizza as "junk food", but no reasonable person would expect that California Pizza Kitchen, DiGiorno, Delissio , Jacks and Tombstone (which are all sold next to each other on the same shelves) are all owned by the same company. That accounts for 80%+ of the chains in major grocery stores. The "competition" is entirely fabricated.
dfxm12 3y ago
Tangentially related, but I take a look at the amount of sugar in a regular cola (39g of added sugar in a 12oz can of Coke!!), and I wonder how much damage that has done to my body (and taste buds) over the years (let alone society as a whole). I always wondered what a Coke with just half the sugar would taste like. I think I would enjoy it. Well, recently, my grocery store has been stocking De la Calle Tepache. It's not cola, but still, it's a carbonated soft drink with just 8g of sugar in a 12 oz can. It's got less than a quarter of the sugar of Coke and it's still plenty sweet! How many people could have avoided diabetes or other health problems if coca-cola just set the standard that 8g of sugar is enough?
- windowsrookie 3y ago
  Looking at the ingredients of "De la Calle Tepache" it contains ERYTHRITOL, which is a sugar alcohol/artificial sweetener but does not count as "sugar" on the nutrition facts label. This is why it tastes "plenty sweet". So similar to Coke Zero/Diet Coke.
  - jbandela1 3y ago
    And Erythritol is linked to heart attacks and strokes via enhanced platelet activity. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9
    - oarfish 3y ago
      Did they control for the fact that most non-nutritive sweeteners get consumed in a diet of highly processed foods, which are more likely to be causative of CVD than just the sweetener?
  - vector_spaces 3y ago
    It's not correct to say that it's an artificial sweetener -- not all non-caloric sweeteners are artificial, and not all processed additives are synthetic. That is to say, erythritol occurs in the environment in all kinds of settings, where e.g. sucralose is artificial because it needs to be synthesized by humans in a laboratory. To be clear, that is the only sense in which I distinguish artificial/synthetic and natural substances -- those words are heavily loaded now and carry with them all kinds of connotations to the point of not even being particularly useful, but if we're going to use them we should at least be correct!
nerdjon 3y ago
Not trying to give Nestle a pass here since they have done some really bad things. But something I could not find in the article, are there any other differences between the formulas? So it's focused on added sugar, but do the base ingredients have less sugar? So what is the difference after looking at the numbers? Are they using cheaper ingredients in the low to mid income places? No doubt they are doing bad things here, but it feels like I am missing some details.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
WalterBright 3y ago
Everybody loves sugar. It's in our genes. Some just are able to resist it more than others.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  It's also aquired taste: after enough time on a 0-added-sugar diet, you don't miss the sugar anymore. But it's a kind of "fast attack, slow decay" thing: you get hooked in no time, but it takes ages too lose that craving for sweetness. No doubt food companies are very aware of this. Get 'em young, and... who cares if it ruins people's health, as long as it's legal & makes nice profit.
  - sevagh 3y ago
    Sugar is normal and delicious. There's a whole world of pastries, cakes, desserts eaten in every culture in the world. Fruits are sugary and delicious. Not all sugary treats are an addiction conspiracy. I don't understand 0-sugar people, as if there is a "default state" of being where 0 sugar must be consumed? According to whom?
    - twosdai 3y ago
      To me it's more of a response to how sugar has been added and is available too easily in people's diets in the current year, it's simpler for the cognitive load to cut it out entirely than to moderate it. I can see it the same way on how drug abusers will quit it entirely and rather than trying to have a moderate take on using since it's too much work to be moderate. Although, sugar is not the same as a drug, the response of cutting the substance out entirely has some parallels to drug recovery. So the movement makes conceptual sense to me at least, and it's not like cutting it out is actively unhealthy. So I don't think it's a big deal to be a "zero sugar" person
    - SamPatt 3y ago
      Alcohol is also consumed in all cultures. It's still bad for you. I'm not a zero sugar person, but close - I'll eat fruit, or some foods with minimal sugar added (peanut butter). It's been way better for my health than my former daily ice cream diet. I've no doubt many can walk the tightrope, but it's much better for me to leave behind the sweets entirely. Stick with it long enough and it's not so hard to maintain, and it keeps maintaining weight much easier.
autoexec 3y ago
Nestlé is a corporate serial killer who should have been given the death penalty years ago. The fact that we know what they've done before, but still have to watch them continue to intentionally hurt children over and over again across decades while nothing is done about it just shows how our society has been shaped to make us powerless. If we had any ability at all to impose meaningful consequences against Nestlé we'd clearly have done it by now. If the literal millions of infants they murdered weren't enough to make that happen, and the millions of child slaves harvesting their cocoa hasn't, I very much doubt that added sugar is going to be the thing that finally does.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Fun fact, their internal slogan was (is?) > Von der Wiege bis ins Kästle – alles Nestlé! which roughly translates to > From the cradle to the casket - everything Nestle!
spondylosaurus 3y ago
A recent piece from ProPublica taps into the related "toddler milk" phenomenon and how, in essence, it's a way for formula manufacturers to capture the market in areas where they legally can't advertise baby formula. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-campaign-against-baby-formula-regulation-thailand https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-...
fuzzfactor 3y ago
>children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries The children in higher-income countries were already spoken for by much more well-established multinationals. It started centuries ago after moving tonnes of raw cargo from plantations in tropical agricultural colonies. The crop was not commercialized internationally like the crystals were. The syrup was extracted, crystallized, and accumulated for most efficient transportation as a fungible commodity in bulk. The highly concentrated active ingredient of an agricultural product, at a landed cost very low among the digestible alternatives in so many markets. Tropical oils come to mind as another concentrated active ingredient from other crops. Low cost alone can make some things fly off the shelf by themselves, but when you've got bulk, and trading, you get more surplus than lots of other times. And when the cost of some parcel of excess drops to effectively zero or even negative, it can fly off the shelf with much greater momentum, even if it is temporary while it lasts. But occasional stimulus effects like that over the centuries could outlast a market upset like few other things, sugar (and fat) are widely regarded as habit-forming. No stronger supply-chain to support the habit than to deal with the pure material. Looks like Nestle is a multinational re-exporting a highly value-added commodity in bulk (at its own scale), and to some tropical countries which have great agricultural potential themselves. No wonder it seems to have been accomplished in a deceptive way.
mncharity 3y ago
> Parents looking for information on infant nutrition may be directed to this platform and be exposed to content that steers them towards Nestlé products. [...] recipes Perhaps steered in more ways than one. Baby digestive comfort with breast milk varies with maternal diet. Some foods cause substantial infant distress. So there's an exploratory debugging process around material diet expansion, with backing off to a known-good bland diet, and experimental (re)introduction of foods. A friend was very systematic, and ended up with a list of problematic foods. Nothing singular, there are lots of similar lists out there. Now you get a lot of mail around pregnancy and birth - it's a prime advertising window with new habits being formed. One bit of mail was a substantial booklet of recipes for new moms. Oddly substantial, with no ads. Also oddly, the recipe overlap with her breast-feeding distress list was massive. "WTF?" - a puzzle. How could someone manage to write a recipe booklet for new moms where every recipe harms breast feeding?? Until on the back page, in small print, "(c) Nestlé". Then not a puzzle at all.
bhaskara2 3y ago
Nestle is an evil company, it has caused deaths of thousands of babies and continues to add to that body count shamelessly. Countries should unite in fighting this evil and prosecute it’s executives with death penalty. Hopefully indian government bans this company
mzs 3y ago
Have the authors considered this is to help fight malnutrition?
- henriquenunez 3y ago
  Yes, giving sugary stuff instead of lowering the surplus margin on high quality food wolf in sheep's skin
erfgh 3y ago
I know I will burn karma for this but what the heck: If you don't like it, don't buy it. That their sugar-added products are not sold in Switzerland or Germany is simply because people there would not buy them enough to make profit. There is nothing unethical about adding sugar to a food.
- henriquenunez 3y ago
  clearly someone here is probably coming from a wealthy country and never had food insecurity in their vicinity. I do not mean to give you a "woke" lesson or whatever, but the reality where I come from is that people do not have the instruction level to know that this product is harmful to the health. The child will just ask for it, and if they are lucky/hard working enough to afford it, parents will buy it.
- archi42 3y ago
  Around here people don't buy it because some people successfully campaigned to get the stuff banned. That's all there is to it. They're pretending that it's good for the kids and prey on the uninformed or those who can't afford better alternatives. That's unethical to me.
manuel_w 3y ago
I've got no idea about finances and would like to invest a meaningful part of my money in ETFs. Because I'm so clueless I assume I cannot really go wrong with a ETF that is tracking the MSCI Developed World Index. My problem: I really really really hate Nestlé and don't want to invest even a single penny in them. What can I do? I assume they're in the included in the index. There are ESG-weighted alternatives, but Nestlé managed to get quite good ESG ratings, so I presume they're included there as well.
- addaon 3y ago
  If it's worth it to you, tell your investment manager that you want to track MSCI Developed World minus Nestlé. You'll get charged a fee for a manually-managed brokerage compared to just dumping everything into an ETF, but this type of detailed preference is literally what active investment management is for.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  If you have enough money for it to be worthwhile, you can essentially approach a financial advisor with exactly your needs and they will manage your money to ignore Nestlé (though check their actual qualifications and whether they're a fiduciary). The pro of this approach: you don't have to think about or manage that task. The cons: you'll need enough money for that to be worthwhile, you might not see as good a return as you would simply parking your money in an ETF, you will likely face higher fees than normal for active management. You could save money by actively managing your investments yourself, but that would be quite time consuming and generally requires you to have more upfront capital to invest.
- alecco 3y ago
  All the major ETFs are gamed. Remember the scandal a couple of years ago when Exxon was considered green and major banks were considered ethical. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, etc. They are all the same.
- namdnay 3y ago
  Nestle is about 0.5% of the MSCI World, the simplest is probably to buy 0.5% by value of Nestle shorts on the side?
rqtwteye 3y ago
It’s ok to hate on Nestle but let’s not forget that most of the food industry is basically leading a war on the world’s health in search of profits. The amount of terrible ingredients and misleading information they are putting on the market is just stunning. And the cost in terms of people’s health and the cost is enormous. It’s kind of hard to understand that we let them get away with this.
- SamPatt 3y ago
  Who is "we"? I don't eat the junk. I'd rather other people didn't either, and you probably agree, but should we force our preferences on everyone else?
  - creatonez 3y ago
    > but should we force our preferences on everyone else? Absolutely, to a certain extent at least. The food industry and mass-marketing complex has to be stopped, it is harming the health of humanity. We need a higher quality food supply, and we need a ban on most food marketing because it is a uniquely psychologically damaging form of propaganda. This is not some problem with the character or individual discipline of people living in certain countries, it is the problem with production decisions and a powerful industry that has gone too far.
erfgh 3y ago
Without any exaggeration the article claims that Nestle is the most evil entity possible because some of its products contain added sugar.
sydbarrett74 3y ago
I just think it's hilarious that the Swiss founder, Heinrich Nestle, legally changed his very German name to Henri Nestlé because he thought it sounded more posh and bourgeois, thus masking his family's modest origins.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Germans changing their name after coming to the US used to be pretty popular.
camelboy 3y ago
I think sugar consumption is not unique to Lower-income countries. A study showed that a US kids consumes more than 49 pounds of sugar a year. All these are the processed food from the big box grocery stores. I suspect the sugar consumption is way less over in those countries where as a large segment of the population is unable to purchase processed food from the expensive grocery stores. Also sugary drinks are consumed by the kids at school to get some energy, many are unable to afford a breakfast and opt for that sugary syrup sold at the school canteen.
- creatonez 3y ago
  The damning thing here is that they are trying to introduce sugar overconsumption in markets not already exposed to it. They will sell two baby food products that are labelled exactly the same, with the only difference being higher sugar content in the version sold in the 3rd world. What the science tells us is that sugar addiction at young age means sugar addiction in adulthood, which is something Nestle has plenty of products to cater towards. They are aware of rich educated markets having some degree of education to avoid giving their children sugary products (and that these markets already have plenty of adult sugar addiction), and are relying on every other market to have no option but Nestle.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

310 points by henriquenunez 3y ago

ags1905 2y ago

Sugar is bad for human beings, especially for males. And our food contains lots of it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

barrenko 3y ago

Lower income gets kids hooked on sugar.

gonzalj3 3y ago
on* sugar
- barrenko 3y ago
  ^ thanks
slothtrop 3y ago
If that were true you'd expect this replicated in everywhere.
- stuff4ben 3y ago
  It is in the US. Ever hear of food deserts?
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    The US isn't "everywhere".
    - stuff4ben 3y ago
      The original article was about lower-income "countries". I pointing out it's also in the US. So yeah, pretty much everywhere. Unless you have data to prove otherwise, you're wrong.
      - slothtrop 3y ago
        The original article was about how Nestle uses more sugar in products sold to certain poor countries, not about consumer trends in those countries. According to this - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sugar-consumption-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sugar-con... , countries trending lowest per-capita consumption of sugar tend to be the poorest. Exceptions are in latin America. Higher inequality does not predict more sugar consumption either.
- Tade0 3y ago
  It is. Low household income correlates with obesity.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    In the US.
olliej 3y ago
Yeah, there’s a real failure to understand that sugar and junk food while unhealthy in the long term remains the most cost effective source of calories. Having little money doesn’t mean your kids don’t magically need fewer calories (and not providing those calories is itself a crime), so if you have an affordable source of calories that’s what you go for, even if those calories come with a side helping of excess calories (stopping hunger requires volume of food so high calorie/volume ratio results in over eating), and often huge amounts of fat as well. I grew up dirt poor in the early 80s in NZ, and the cheapest food then was oatmeal and dried spaghetti, but by the 90s the time people were having to work and the amount being paid for that work and rent, and the super steep drop in price of McDonald’s etc (it went from being an expensive birthday treat when I was a kid to being cheaper than fish&chips) means that the diet switch was likely unavoidable. Luckily for me by that point my parents had been able to start working, so fridge and weekly shopping was an option (bread wouldn’t go stale, we could keep meat and vegetables in a freezer), but I can’t imagine having the same outcome if my families life was shifted ten years later (much higher student loans, even less money while they were students, most non junk food being more expensive while junk food was cheaper). I recognize 80s NZ poverty is not US poverty, but even in NZ I can’t imagine how much harder life would be for a similarly (economically) placed family is today vs for me, everything seems tailored to create obesity and struggles.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  > Yeah, there’s a real failure to understand that sugar and junk ... remains the most cost effective source of calories. This is usually the point where someone interjects some examples of cheap foods that poor people ought to just buy - because everyone, everywhere has trivial access to their middle class shopping experience. But even past that: Being poor also means subject to ceaseless Denial of Resources Attacks. Resources here meaning funds, attention, energy, ability, hope, will and anything one needs to raise one's station. Hacking a meal plan struggles to rise to the top of a priority stack when one has dozens of problems in a critical state. And because of poverty, it requires 10x the steps to solve those issues than non-poor people face. source: decade of hunger-level poverty with kids
  - 3y ago

olliej 3y ago

Nestlé is a truly awful company, and their CEO has historically been a terrible human being, but… this isn’t a nestlé specific activity? As far as I can tell this is standard behaviour from every company involved in snack foods, candy, soda, etc? And they go to great lengths to to hide that’s what they’re doing - most of the “juice” you can buy at US stores are essentially just soda minus the bubbles, growing up in NZ a huge part of childhood was flavored milk (many more and better flavors than in the US - lime was my favorite :) ) than in the US, but those all had absurd amounts of sugar as well, despite being advertised/pushed as healthy milk products for children (I still love them all and try to pretend they’re not functionally soda when they’re available).

dumbfounder 3y ago
I think the point is that the offer products that cover a significant portion of the market throughout your entire life, so they are highly incentivized to act in such a way to get you to consume sugary products (theirs) as much as possible. I haven’t seen anyone proposing reasons why these added sugars might be beneficial. Is there a counterargument? Are these countries where calories are very hard to come by, and thus they make the case that they are helping deliver those calories cheaply?
nemomarx 3y ago
There's some specific things they're doing, like adding sugar to infant formula and milk, that they don't do in Europe but do in lower income countries apparently. That seems like a very conscious thing targeted at very young children?
filleduchaos 3y ago
> this isn’t a nestlé specific activity? As far as I can tell this is standard behaviour from every company involved in snack foods, candy, soda, etc? If you open the article, you might discover that this is about literal baby food for infants as young as six months, not snacks and such for [older] children.
- olliej 3y ago

mesarvagya 3y ago

Obligatory r/fucknestle. Nestle has a long history of doing lots of fucked up things. I try to use as few Nestle products as possible. I don't get why government can't regulate these companies which has a monopoly on everything you eat or drink[1] [1] https://wyomingllcattorney.com/images/nestle-list.png https://wyomingllcattorney.com/images/nestle-list.png

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Lio 3y ago
It's depressing as hell that a company like Nestle was allowed to buy a company like Roundtree. It's a reminder that no matter what a company's founder's principles are as soon as it goes public it's a target to have all that reversed by people with no principles at all. At least Roundtree's foundation survives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rowntree_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Rowntree_Foundation
- Anthony-G 3y ago
  Upvoted your comment because it’s so true. The Quakers have a great tradition of setting up ethical enterprises. I mostly know Rowntree because of the chocolate but I also remember the family came to Ireland during the Great Famine to provide relief to the victims of racist British “laissez faire” economics. By the way, the name is spelled “Rowntree” (I also used to think the first syllable was “round”).
tptacek 3y ago
In what sense does Nestle have a monopoly on everything you eat or drink?
- throwaway290 3y ago
  GP exaggerated but I have experiences looking say for a bottle of water or ice cream cone that is not Nestle and failing (not in US)

sebmellen 3y ago

It's hard to imagine a more evil company. [0]: https://youtu.be/MRWWK-iW_zU https://youtu.be/MRWWK-iW_zU [1]: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/culture/culture-society/nestle-company-pollution-children/ https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/culture/culture-soci...

nickff 3y ago
I'm not a Nestle fan, but I'm not sure they're evil and they're nowhere close to the most evil company. One well-documented prime example would be Krupp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp
- margalabargala 3y ago
  They're up there for most evil currently-extant Western company. Certainly near the top for most evil company that a median HN user might directly interact with the products of (unlike, say, arms manufacturers). I would argue they are much more evil than any oil company.
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    > Certainly near the top for most evil company that a median HN user might directly buy the product of. And a lot of folks don't really know just how many bands Nestle owns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nestl%C3%A9_brands They have over 50 brands of water alone. Avoiding their products requires home work and diligence.
    - timeon 3y ago
      Seems like it is mostly junk-food. Not hard to avoid.
      - tstrimple 2y ago
        Ah yes. The well known categories of junk food being bottled water and coffee. Maybe you're one of the weirdos who categorize pizza as "junk food", but no reasonable person would expect that California Pizza Kitchen, DiGiorno, Delissio , Jacks and Tombstone (which are all sold next to each other on the same shelves) are all owned by the same company. That accounts for 80%+ of the chains in major grocery stores. The "competition" is entirely fabricated.

dfxm12 3y ago

Tangentially related, but I take a look at the amount of sugar in a regular cola (39g of added sugar in a 12oz can of Coke!!), and I wonder how much damage that has done to my body (and taste buds) over the years (let alone society as a whole). I always wondered what a Coke with just half the sugar would taste like. I think I would enjoy it. Well, recently, my grocery store has been stocking De la Calle Tepache. It's not cola, but still, it's a carbonated soft drink with just 8g of sugar in a 12 oz can. It's got less than a quarter of the sugar of Coke and it's still plenty sweet! How many people could have avoided diabetes or other health problems if coca-cola just set the standard that 8g of sugar is enough?

windowsrookie 3y ago
Looking at the ingredients of "De la Calle Tepache" it contains ERYTHRITOL, which is a sugar alcohol/artificial sweetener but does not count as "sugar" on the nutrition facts label. This is why it tastes "plenty sweet". So similar to Coke Zero/Diet Coke.
- jbandela1 3y ago
  And Erythritol is linked to heart attacks and strokes via enhanced platelet activity. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02223-9
  - oarfish 3y ago
    Did they control for the fact that most non-nutritive sweeteners get consumed in a diet of highly processed foods, which are more likely to be causative of CVD than just the sweetener?
- vector_spaces 3y ago
  It's not correct to say that it's an artificial sweetener -- not all non-caloric sweeteners are artificial, and not all processed additives are synthetic. That is to say, erythritol occurs in the environment in all kinds of settings, where e.g. sucralose is artificial because it needs to be synthesized by humans in a laboratory. To be clear, that is the only sense in which I distinguish artificial/synthetic and natural substances -- those words are heavily loaded now and carry with them all kinds of connotations to the point of not even being particularly useful, but if we're going to use them we should at least be correct!

nerdjon 3y ago

Not trying to give Nestle a pass here since they have done some really bad things. But something I could not find in the article, are there any other differences between the formulas? So it's focused on added sugar, but do the base ingredients have less sugar? So what is the difference after looking at the numbers? Are they using cheaper ingredients in the low to mid income places? No doubt they are doing bad things here, but it feels like I am missing some details.

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WalterBright 3y ago

Everybody loves sugar. It's in our genes. Some just are able to resist it more than others.

RetroTechie 3y ago
It's also aquired taste: after enough time on a 0-added-sugar diet, you don't miss the sugar anymore. But it's a kind of "fast attack, slow decay" thing: you get hooked in no time, but it takes ages too lose that craving for sweetness. No doubt food companies are very aware of this. Get 'em young, and... who cares if it ruins people's health, as long as it's legal & makes nice profit.
- sevagh 3y ago
  Sugar is normal and delicious. There's a whole world of pastries, cakes, desserts eaten in every culture in the world. Fruits are sugary and delicious. Not all sugary treats are an addiction conspiracy. I don't understand 0-sugar people, as if there is a "default state" of being where 0 sugar must be consumed? According to whom?
  - twosdai 3y ago
    To me it's more of a response to how sugar has been added and is available too easily in people's diets in the current year, it's simpler for the cognitive load to cut it out entirely than to moderate it. I can see it the same way on how drug abusers will quit it entirely and rather than trying to have a moderate take on using since it's too much work to be moderate. Although, sugar is not the same as a drug, the response of cutting the substance out entirely has some parallels to drug recovery. So the movement makes conceptual sense to me at least, and it's not like cutting it out is actively unhealthy. So I don't think it's a big deal to be a "zero sugar" person
  - SamPatt 3y ago
    Alcohol is also consumed in all cultures. It's still bad for you. I'm not a zero sugar person, but close - I'll eat fruit, or some foods with minimal sugar added (peanut butter). It's been way better for my health than my former daily ice cream diet. I've no doubt many can walk the tightrope, but it's much better for me to leave behind the sweets entirely. Stick with it long enough and it's not so hard to maintain, and it keeps maintaining weight much easier.

autoexec 3y ago

Nestlé is a corporate serial killer who should have been given the death penalty years ago. The fact that we know what they've done before, but still have to watch them continue to intentionally hurt children over and over again across decades while nothing is done about it just shows how our society has been shaped to make us powerless. If we had any ability at all to impose meaningful consequences against Nestlé we'd clearly have done it by now. If the literal millions of infants they murdered weren't enough to make that happen, and the millions of child slaves harvesting their cocoa hasn't, I very much doubt that added sugar is going to be the thing that finally does.

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barbazoo 3y ago
Fun fact, their internal slogan was (is?) > Von der Wiege bis ins Kästle – alles Nestlé! which roughly translates to > From the cradle to the casket - everything Nestle!

spondylosaurus 3y ago

A recent piece from ProPublica taps into the related "toddler milk" phenomenon and how, in essence, it's a way for formula manufacturers to capture the market in areas where they legally can't advertise baby formula. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-campaign-against-baby-formula-regulation-thailand https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-...

fuzzfactor 3y ago

>children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries The children in higher-income countries were already spoken for by much more well-established multinationals. It started centuries ago after moving tonnes of raw cargo from plantations in tropical agricultural colonies. The crop was not commercialized internationally like the crystals were. The syrup was extracted, crystallized, and accumulated for most efficient transportation as a fungible commodity in bulk. The highly concentrated active ingredient of an agricultural product, at a landed cost very low among the digestible alternatives in so many markets. Tropical oils come to mind as another concentrated active ingredient from other crops. Low cost alone can make some things fly off the shelf by themselves, but when you've got bulk, and trading, you get more surplus than lots of other times. And when the cost of some parcel of excess drops to effectively zero or even negative, it can fly off the shelf with much greater momentum, even if it is temporary while it lasts. But occasional stimulus effects like that over the centuries could outlast a market upset like few other things, sugar (and fat) are widely regarded as habit-forming. No stronger supply-chain to support the habit than to deal with the pure material. Looks like Nestle is a multinational re-exporting a highly value-added commodity in bulk (at its own scale), and to some tropical countries which have great agricultural potential themselves. No wonder it seems to have been accomplished in a deceptive way.

mncharity 3y ago

> Parents looking for information on infant nutrition may be directed to this platform and be exposed to content that steers them towards Nestlé products. [...] recipes Perhaps steered in more ways than one. Baby digestive comfort with breast milk varies with maternal diet. Some foods cause substantial infant distress. So there's an exploratory debugging process around material diet expansion, with backing off to a known-good bland diet, and experimental (re)introduction of foods. A friend was very systematic, and ended up with a list of problematic foods. Nothing singular, there are lots of similar lists out there. Now you get a lot of mail around pregnancy and birth - it's a prime advertising window with new habits being formed. One bit of mail was a substantial booklet of recipes for new moms. Oddly substantial, with no ads. Also oddly, the recipe overlap with her breast-feeding distress list was massive. "WTF?" - a puzzle. How could someone manage to write a recipe booklet for new moms where every recipe harms breast feeding?? Until on the back page, in small print, "(c) Nestlé". Then not a puzzle at all.

bhaskara2 3y ago

Nestle is an evil company, it has caused deaths of thousands of babies and continues to add to that body count shamelessly. Countries should unite in fighting this evil and prosecute it’s executives with death penalty. Hopefully indian government bans this company

mzs 3y ago

Have the authors considered this is to help fight malnutrition?

henriquenunez 3y ago
Yes, giving sugary stuff instead of lowering the surplus margin on high quality food wolf in sheep's skin

erfgh 3y ago

I know I will burn karma for this but what the heck: If you don't like it, don't buy it. That their sugar-added products are not sold in Switzerland or Germany is simply because people there would not buy them enough to make profit. There is nothing unethical about adding sugar to a food.

henriquenunez 3y ago
clearly someone here is probably coming from a wealthy country and never had food insecurity in their vicinity. I do not mean to give you a "woke" lesson or whatever, but the reality where I come from is that people do not have the instruction level to know that this product is harmful to the health. The child will just ask for it, and if they are lucky/hard working enough to afford it, parents will buy it.
archi42 3y ago
Around here people don't buy it because some people successfully campaigned to get the stuff banned. That's all there is to it. They're pretending that it's good for the kids and prey on the uninformed or those who can't afford better alternatives. That's unethical to me.

manuel_w 3y ago

I've got no idea about finances and would like to invest a meaningful part of my money in ETFs. Because I'm so clueless I assume I cannot really go wrong with a ETF that is tracking the MSCI Developed World Index. My problem: I really really really hate Nestlé and don't want to invest even a single penny in them. What can I do? I assume they're in the included in the index. There are ESG-weighted alternatives, but Nestlé managed to get quite good ESG ratings, so I presume they're included there as well.

addaon 3y ago
If it's worth it to you, tell your investment manager that you want to track MSCI Developed World minus Nestlé. You'll get charged a fee for a manually-managed brokerage compared to just dumping everything into an ETF, but this type of detailed preference is literally what active investment management is for.
beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
If you have enough money for it to be worthwhile, you can essentially approach a financial advisor with exactly your needs and they will manage your money to ignore Nestlé (though check their actual qualifications and whether they're a fiduciary). The pro of this approach: you don't have to think about or manage that task. The cons: you'll need enough money for that to be worthwhile, you might not see as good a return as you would simply parking your money in an ETF, you will likely face higher fees than normal for active management. You could save money by actively managing your investments yourself, but that would be quite time consuming and generally requires you to have more upfront capital to invest.
alecco 3y ago
All the major ETFs are gamed. Remember the scandal a couple of years ago when Exxon was considered green and major banks were considered ethical. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, etc. They are all the same.
namdnay 3y ago
Nestle is about 0.5% of the MSCI World, the simplest is probably to buy 0.5% by value of Nestle shorts on the side?

rqtwteye 3y ago

It’s ok to hate on Nestle but let’s not forget that most of the food industry is basically leading a war on the world’s health in search of profits. The amount of terrible ingredients and misleading information they are putting on the market is just stunning. And the cost in terms of people’s health and the cost is enormous. It’s kind of hard to understand that we let them get away with this.

SamPatt 3y ago
Who is "we"? I don't eat the junk. I'd rather other people didn't either, and you probably agree, but should we force our preferences on everyone else?
- creatonez 3y ago
  > but should we force our preferences on everyone else? Absolutely, to a certain extent at least. The food industry and mass-marketing complex has to be stopped, it is harming the health of humanity. We need a higher quality food supply, and we need a ban on most food marketing because it is a uniquely psychologically damaging form of propaganda. This is not some problem with the character or individual discipline of people living in certain countries, it is the problem with production decisions and a powerful industry that has gone too far.

erfgh 3y ago

Without any exaggeration the article claims that Nestle is the most evil entity possible because some of its products contain added sugar.

sydbarrett74 3y ago

I just think it's hilarious that the Swiss founder, Heinrich Nestle, legally changed his very German name to Henri Nestlé because he thought it sounded more posh and bourgeois, thus masking his family's modest origins.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Germans changing their name after coming to the US used to be pretty popular.

camelboy 3y ago

I think sugar consumption is not unique to Lower-income countries. A study showed that a US kids consumes more than 49 pounds of sugar a year. All these are the processed food from the big box grocery stores. I suspect the sugar consumption is way less over in those countries where as a large segment of the population is unable to purchase processed food from the expensive grocery stores. Also sugary drinks are consumed by the kids at school to get some energy, many are unable to afford a breakfast and opt for that sugary syrup sold at the school canteen.

creatonez 3y ago
The damning thing here is that they are trying to introduce sugar overconsumption in markets not already exposed to it. They will sell two baby food products that are labelled exactly the same, with the only difference being higher sugar content in the version sold in the 3rd world. What the science tells us is that sugar addiction at young age means sugar addiction in adulthood, which is something Nestle has plenty of products to cater towards. They are aware of rich educated markets having some degree of education to avoid giving their children sugary products (and that these markets already have plenty of adult sugar addiction), and are relying on every other market to have no option but Nestle.

aaron695 3y ago

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