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Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
- stuaxo 5mo agoAmazing - is there anything they didn't do. The same law firms seem to back tobacco and fossil fuel companies as well - a true axis of evil.
- gostsamo 5mo agoThere is a nice old comedy called "Thank You for Smoking". Worth watching if you haven't.
- AngryData 5mo agoAnd this is different from all other marketing how? If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
- shrubby 5mo agoBill Hicks had a good advice to the marketing guys: "kill yourself" so I you're onto something here!
- cm2012 5mo agoI know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.
- bandofthehawk 5mo agoI don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
- cm2012 5mo agoComedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception. Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc. And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing. All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
- margalabargala 5mo agoThat's performing, not marketing. The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
- cm2012 5mo agoPerforming is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful. He aggressively promoted and marketed himself! Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly) He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
- red-iron-pine 5mo agohe's a comedian; his entire job is standing up in front of people and saying shit and having a message. thats... the point. it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.
- cm2012 5mo agoI promised you every single individual business could say the same thing. No product has any value if people don't know about it.
- newaccountman2 5mo ago> having a message I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job
- picofarad 5mo agoYes, people who have worked with Paul Feig are not comedians, that's possibly where you're having contextual issues.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoThen I don’t think you really understand comedy to be honest. That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you. Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.
- gaiagraphia 5mo agoThere's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'. There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting. If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him. Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives. The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.
- cm2012 5mo agoI didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.
- rayiner 5mo agoMost marketing these days is that kind of pernicious Mad Men style feelings-based marketing. If ads were informational, like “here is a new product you might like from the makers of this other product you already use,” that would be different.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- thesmtsolver2 5mo agoYou are doing a bait and switch now comparing all ads to bait and switch.
- thinkingtoilet 5mo agoHe didn't take out ads or anything. He lived his life the way he wanted to and spoke his mind. That's not 'marketing'.
- cm2012 5mo agoIf you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoI respect the hell out of Bill Hicks but the dude absolutely sat around thinking about marketing and getting his name out there. You have to if you want to be a working comic. Hell it’s not like he didn’t have an agent.
- JButtermilk 5mo agoI think marketing is fine until it turns into lies. Reaching people to sell them your product should not be an issue. That, with misrepresentation and misleading claims is an issue.
- francisofascii 5mo ago"Men of America smoke Chesterfields" Is that a lie?
- iririririr 5mo agono true Scotch would fall for that
- ilovetux 5mo agoI would agree with you if we were just talking about the abstract idea of marketing. But like everything else, the devil is in the details. The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market. With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete. If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.
- nradov 5mo agoReally? How much did Tesla spend on marketing?
- ilovetux 5mo agoFair enough, I suppose. While Tesla has (in some years) avoided traditional marketing, the ceo is known for spending ridiculous amounts of money on publicity stunts like having a submarine shipped to a cave and buying Twitter to boost public perception of his companies. I think this is the exception that proves the rule.
- somenameforme 5mo ago
- cluckindan 5mo agoIt’s more than marketing, they’re applying cigarette processing principles to food processing: choosing specific flavor chemicals and additives to produce maximum addiction within the varied neurophysiological profiles of different consumer cohorts They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.
- AngryData 5mo agoI mean that would seem to apply to nearly all packaged foods that aren't plain bagged fruits and vegetables. If you sell food, you want it to taste good and want people to want to eat more of it. Whether its doritos, chili dogs, apple pie, bread, jam, or whatever else. Nobody makes a mix of peanut butter, finds it bland and unappealing, but then doesn't change either the ingredient proportions, ingredient sources, or add in other flavors or spices or sugars to make it more appealing.
- cluckindan 5mo agoFood being made appealing is one thing and adding behaviorally reinforcing drugs into foods is another. Especially when the latter are not just one product, but a spectrum of products, each one engineered to produce addiction in a different group of people (nationality, ethnicity, genetics)
- geye1234 5mo agoIt's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.
- cm2012 5mo agoI don't know if you know this, but all Facebook ads as well as TikTok ads and so on are public on the internet. You can go to Facebook Ads Library. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&ad_type=all&country=US&is_targeted_country=false&media_type=all&search_type=page&sort_data[direction]=desc&sort_data[mode]=total_impressions&view_all_page_id=820882001277849 https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a... And in doing so you can see that what you're saying is actually not true. Look up any random advertiser and you'll see that it's pretty uncommon for ads to be based around insecurity. Almost always it's on banal product features. The insecurity-focused ads do exist but they tend to be focused on a few broad lowest hanging fruit ad categories.
- jnovek 5mo agoThere are entire categories of ads that operate on insecurity, they just don’t come out and scream “this is because you’re insecure” as that would make for bad copy. E.g. you think adult diapers advertise on anything other than insecurity (even if that insecurity is well-founded)? Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.
- 3form 5mo agoWho said anything about insecurity? "I like this thing" (which I don't need) is also an emotion.
- bondarchuk 5mo agoThat's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise? (anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)
- cm2012 5mo agoTobacco is an addictive product that on average hurts the people who use it as a negative utility. Almost every other product people buy has a positive utility. Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.
- bandofthehawk 5mo ago> Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad. How can it be "uniquely bad" if it's "along with other drugs"?
- harimau777 5mo agoNot every drug has the same effects and side effects. For example, marijuana is much less dangerous than heroin.
- bandofthehawk 5mo agoYes, that was kind of my point. Either tobacco is uniquely bad or it can be grouped "along with other drugs". It can't be both.
- throwaway173738 5mo agoI don’t think Marijuana is likely to land you in the ED in quite the same way but the habitual smokers I’ve met tended to way underestimate how impaired they are by it and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them drive and operate equipment while suffering those effects. Even the framing of Marijuana as a non-addictive substance seems to be a marketing framing.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- toasty228 5mo agohttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_%28mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence%29.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational... Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.
- BigTTYGothGF 5mo ago> 95% of marketing needs to be banned. I could get behind this.
- singularity2001 5mo agosome of the greatest ideas are proposed in a ridiculed manner first
- Theodores 5mo agoThe story is an embroidered myth based on a sprinkling of facts. This is my understanding and I eat no processed food!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- woliveirajr 5mo agoIt seems similar to just regular marketing. Previously, beverages and drugs companies have used the same playbook, and data analysis just got better. Social sites are just the next step with even more behavioural data.
- breezybottom 5mo agoUltra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention. The state of nutrition science is abysmal.
- cyanydeez 5mo agothe one is a result of the other; but thats because nutrition seems like it should have objective measures but ultimately has a lot of sources and sinks that only on the fringes is it obvious when things are bad. but then theres RFK nuttery, so its not that stupid. but yeah, ultra processes has no functional science behind it even though we still know cheap food is typically unhealthy and addictive
- naveen99 5mo agoIn the space age, its x-processed.
- baybal2 5mo ago[dead]
- mapotofu 5mo agoNo it isn’t. The advice on nutrition is abundantly clear and has been for a long time: eat food, mostly plants, not too much. That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.
- mjdv 5mo ago> eat food, mostly plants, not too much. If the state of physics was "stuff falls, heat sticks around, light goes fast" I think it'd be fair to describe that as "abysmal".
- toasty228 5mo agoSomething being simple doesn't mean it's incomplete or wrong. Health/nutrition is a spectrum but no one will tell you to eat a bag of chips a day and rinse your mouth with coke
- spacebacon 5mo agoThey learned addiction and exploited sugar, fat, and salt with the rest of them.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoI wonder if they go at it from that angle ("let's make these kids addicts for money!"), or if they gaslit themselves into something else. It's probably the latter, just like the tech companies did - they looked at just the numbers and analytics, did some tests, saw that if they do X then numbers Y and Z go up, rinse and repeat across decades. This is why Google no longer has just some unobtrusive text ads to the side. At the time it was great because it wasn't annoying, but then the analytics came in and showed that more prominent and better camouflaged ads had higher conversion and revenue. And people grumbling aside, their revenue multiplied over and over again.
- spacebacon 5mo agoI imagine the latter as well. They have to sleep at night. That is the nature of these unaccountable justification machines.
- stef25 5mo agoYou can look at these kind of foods like illegal drugs. Not biggie in moderation but if you overdo it then here come serious health problems. I'm 100% convinced that people who are morbidly obese not getting a second serving or not getting those extra nuggets is as hard as a drug addict not picking up a needle or straw or a lighter. You fucked up. EDIT take the cost on society and obesity must be more expensive than that of all drugs combined. Something like half of the US now ?
- spacebacon 5mo agoIt’s a convincing argument.
- burnt-resistor 5mo agoIf Americans only knew that "natural flavors", "artificial flavors", and "spices" are specialized, opaque, secret designer ingredients engineered by third-party companies from unknown substances used to addict people to the foods.
- ggm 5mo agoIf you proposed global harmonisation of food to equalise costs and ensure equitable access to food, apart from "but that's socialism!" complaints nobody would mind. Wastage in food production and distribution is huge. Economies of scale are real. What people object to here isn't the efficiency, it's the motivation and the profit. I don't think US tobacco firms diversifying is bad, personally. I'd rather they sold food than cigarettes. But, they want to sell high fat, high sugar, high salt PROFITABLE foods to people worldwide, not actual nutritionally balanced good food (good as in healthy, not moral). Ultra processed foods have a long shelf life. That's part of why they are efficient. If they applied the same logic to shipping soy protein, vitamin rich fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy produce, would that be wrong just because they're called "Philip Morris"?
- oytis 5mo agoLogistics is logistics, the expeeience should be pretty transferrable, especially if no cold chain is involved. So good for them I guess?
- cm2012 5mo agoYes it seems like the authors of this article are implying this is bad? I mean ultra-processed is a meaningless term but generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
- toasty228 5mo ago> ultra-processed is a meaningless You'd find plenty of definitions if you looked for them > generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc. Go ahead and list the negatives too lmao... what do you think the additives meant to prevent living organism from developing on the food do in your gut for example ? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11901572/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11901572/ Ultra processed food benefit companies more than they benefit you
- SauntSolaire 5mo ago> You'd find plenty of definitions if you looked for them Having a greater number of competing definitions does not generally make a term more meaningful. (Take "art" for example.)
- toasty228 5mo agoWho says they're competing?
- SauntSolaire 5mo agoThen it just has one definition, rather than plenty. You could have said that it's defined in many places. If you want to say that's what you meant, I won't argue semantics.
- Hnrobert42 5mo agoI wonder about the folks who work for tobacco and industrial food conglomerates. Are they not aware of the part they play? Do they rationalize it somehow? Do they just not care? Did they end up there through mergers? Cynical arguments are facile. I'm not interested in hearing that people are dumb or evil. I am genuinely curious how these companies attract talent.
- breezybottom 5mo agoPeople who work at McDonalds generally aren't there because they turned down a high paying job at the UN.
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoMcDonalds hate is forced. I bet they (corporate) do it because they grew up eating it and had a good time.
- cm2012 5mo agoThese two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people. Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
- Hnrobert42 5mo agoI agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad. I also agree that people have choices. I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.
- cm2012 5mo ago
- 4rtem 5mo agoWhat's so wrong to produce snacks and canned fruits?
- red-iron-pine 5mo ago"snacks" is so broad of a term as to be useless for discussion dried bananas chips as a snack? fine. potato chips cooked mostly in palm oil? not so great. both "snacks"
- groundzeros2015 5mo agoWhy? What’s better? I see only branding differences.
- margalabargala 5mo agoThe health effects on consumers. Canned fruit is packaged in syrup. It has more sugar than candy.
- flossly 5mo agoTobacco, wine and fresh bread are usually few of the consumables that in many western countries do not have to disclose their ingredients. Why do we allow this? Just behave like all others. Now we want to push for smoke-free societies: but non of ways to achieve this even dares to talk about "just make tobacco giants list all the ingredients/additives".
- jjice 5mo agoTangential but similar nonsensical secrecy for consumables: alcohol not requiring a nutrition label always irks me.
- mpalczewski 5mo agoOne beer company tried to do it. But because beer has vitamins in it, they were prohibited from doing it as it might have made the beer seem healthy.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo agoGuinness is good for you!
- malfist 5mo agoCan you provide a citation? Plenty of beers have nutrition information labels.
- seethishat 5mo agoThe newer synthetic nicotine pouches (Zyn, On, Velo) are everywhere in the USA and are being used by kids as young as 13. They are ruining the gut health of an entire generation of kids. Edit: Both boys and girls are dependent on these things now and they seem socially acceptable (no smoke, no spit, just swallow the chemical nicotine). Get ready for a huge wave of GI problems due to this.
- wossab 5mo agoAnd teeth. This stuff will do nasty things to your gums. And receded gums never recover.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoUnless you do an incredibly painful graft right? I have a buddy who had to do that in college and man it seemed incredibly unpleasant. They harvested the skin from the roof of his mouth IIRC Edit: yikes sounds like it gets worse and might not even work
- loloquwowndueo 5mo agoMy dentist has been peddling this procedure to me for years. It sounds incredibly invasive and painful and they don’t even promise it’ll cover 100% of the recession, nor that it won’t recede again unless one goes for an even more invasive jaw realignment which involves, I shit you not, intentionally fracturing the palate bone to make more space to align the teeth. That was the “let me stop you right there” moment. (Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)
- ptaffs 5mo agoi had this suggested to me by a locum dentist, and i agree. This is totally off topic and going further so but if you didn't already, you should change your dentist.
- 5mo ago
- tornikeo 5mo agoTobacco companies should've just announced that "This new tobacco we made is super good, but too dangerous to release, so we are smoking it ourselves and giving it to only the select C-level smokers"
- picofarad 5mo agoThey did that! They called it iQos!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- moduspol 5mo agoI heard this new tobacco is a national security threat. You don't want China to be making it, do you?
- dluan 5mo agoNow China has invested heavily in their homegrown industry and all of their cigs are currently 10 years ahead of the rest of the world. Chunghwa thins are the new frontier, with their subtle plum aroma.
- gaiagraphia 5mo agoAll this shit should be subject to massive negative externality taxes. The cost of awful diets on society is absolutely huge. Big corpos are absolutely taking the piss. Extract, extract, extract.
- ZeroGravitas 5mo agoWe'd probably be in a very different world if everyone who worked in management or held a large stock holding in addictive cancer industries was jailed. Instead the executives went in front of Congress in 1994 and swore under oath that they believe nicotine was not addictive: https://youtu.be/A6B1q22R438 https://youtu.be/A6B1q22R438 And all profited personally from that law breaking denial of basic facts that directly lead to pain and suffering for their customers. From that you can see the future we now live in clearly laid out before you. I wonder if they killed more people with cigarettes or with the anti-science movements they kick-started so they could kill more people with cigarettes?
- nashashmi 5mo agoHmm. So when a large corporation comes to buy your company with a significantly higher price, they obviously have figured out something about how to make money that you didn’t, and probably never would agree to in the first place. But when seeing the $$$, who would care to ask such a silly question?
- gmerc 5mo agoThe death penalty absolutely solves some problems. We just apply it to the wrong cases
- p1dda 5mo agoPretty scary reading the comments where the majority are DEFENDING Big Food and the poisoning of the humans. You are all despicable people!
- arxari 5mo agoKudos for sharing, I've known about this for a while but this is hopefully going to introduce a lot of people to the information.
- utopiah 5mo agoNice, new list to boycott.
- photochemsyn 5mo agoThere are two driving factors behind ultra-processed food tech: shelf life and addictive potential. Shelf life extension is easier to understand: Preservatives targeting mold/bacteria growth: potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate, calcium propionate, sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, sulfites. Antioxidants targeting oil and fat rancidness: BHA, BHT, TBHQ, propyl gallate, tocopherols, ascorbic acid. Water/activity texture systems (practically restricting water availability for chemical and biological processes): glycerin, sorbitol, corn syrup, maltodextrin, modified starch, gums, polyols. Acidity systems (also flavor, but restricts some microbial growth): citric acid, phosphoric acid, lactic acid, malic acid, fumaric acid, sodium citrate. Stabilizer/emulsifier systems(physical appearance, prevents oil separation): mono- and diglycerides, polysorbates, lecithin, DATEM, SSL, carrageenan, xanthan gum, cellulose gum, modified food starch. As far as modern scientific medical knowledge, this impacts your gut microbiome negatively, puts added burdens on your liver and kidneys, and that’s just the obvious immediate effects. This is just the shelf life component - the synthetic flavor/texture modification chemistry designed to enhance addictive potential is equally complicated. Suggested warning label: “‘Food’ corporations will happily shorten your life and ruin your health if it means more profits.”
- josefritzishere 5mo agoEat your vegetables. If you own any dirt, try to grow some yourself. If that works out, try seed saving.