Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills | Hacker News Reader

Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

bloomberg.com

411 pointssergeant3333 comments

The offerings of humongous multinational conglomerations are not coherent. You could generate stories of this type all day, because the offerings of the likes of Nestle, GE, J&J, P&G, Coca-Cola, et. al. are the results of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of employees (for each conglomerate) subdivided into thousands of business units [read sub-companies], each with its own goals, challenges, and many existing within markets that are essentially disjoint from those of other business units under the same parent company.

This sort of story is pure narrative fallacy, because there is no person at Nestle that decided to exacerbate diabetes and then sell diabetes drugs to profit on the other end. Outside of that person existing, there's no story here. If you take away the conflation of a conglomeration with an entity of coherent offerings the premise crumbles.

Of course there are whole divisions at Nestle dedicated exclusively to determining a cohesive path and synergies for "the whole of it". Nestle is highly vertically integrated. It is not at all this loose, random aggregate of business units you're trying to construct here.

Does it rise to the level of exacerbating diabetes and then selling diabetes drugs? Of course not. Are there people very aware of the "irony" in selling what is a main cause for T2 diabetes? Hell yeah.

> This sort of story is pure narrative fallacy

My favorite of these are the articles which criticize health insurers who invest in things like tobacco products.

The point of insurance is to manage risk. Tobacco is indisputably linked to expensive health consequences down the line, so if there is an increase in tobacco consumption, that would generate more claims for health insurers down the line. Capturing some portion of the tobacco industry's profits in this case is an example of smoothing that risk[0]. Health insurers do a lot of really scummy and unethical things, but this is not an example of one.

[0] Of course, that assumes that health insurance is meant to act like insurance, which it by and large is not - health insurance is no longer about insurance at all. That, of course, is a separate matter altogether).

Sugary snacks and diabetes pills are complementary goods though, magnifying risk not managing it. So your example is kind of unrelated.

It may also be that someone who dies early from smoking related disease would otherwise have gone on to cost the insurer even more in treatment for some other longer term problem. I am speculating, but I would imagine insurers have analysed this.

On one level I agree with you, but the whole point of a corporate structure is to give a collective effort the legal identity of an individual so that administrative efficiency and profit can be maximized. It's no coincidence that virtually every stock-based corporation has a strictly hierarchical governance structure culminating in the office of a chief executive, notwithstanding the existence of boards and presidents. these chief executives are paid staggering amounts of money in return for managing the wealth and activities of the corporation productively.

Yet when we find examples of a large corporation creating a vicious circle with easily observable negative externalities, suddenly a corporation is a diffuse network of different products and market actors which is impossible to control, manage, or monitor, and whose activities must not be interfered with at the behest of regulators or the public itself, lest some intangible market equilibrium be disturbed.

It seems to me that this is an example of investors wishing to have their cake and eat it. Either they want the potential of high profits driven by a singular business vision...and which incurs responsibility for outcomes commensurate with the degree of executive authority available to the management, or they want a maximally free market of atomistic competition that is not subject to the whims of trusts, conglomerates and so on. Society cannot afford both options.

I agree that there is a tremendous amount of dissonance in the ideas that executives deserve massive compensation and that they don't have much control over such gargantuan organizations. The way I resolve this dissonance is by not buying into the idea that corporate executives as a class are worth their extreme compensation packages.

Humans seem to have a soft spot for narrativization, and it's easiest to pin a narrative on the chief of an organization. But it's my belief, and I think the evidence doesn't contradict it, that these narratives usually have little to do with the causes of changes in organizational fortunes, particularly in the case of conglomerates.

"But Steve Jobs!"... Well, few CEOs are Steve Jobs. None, actually...

But these things exist because people put money into 401k accounts, IRAs, and buy other "funds". That makes one sort of instrumentation of that corporation work in a certain, sort of negative-externality-prone way. That cross ( as in cross product ) the information-attenuating nature of hierarchy explains a lot.

As a corollary of Brian Kernigan's "debugging is twice as hard as writing programs", it should be clear that regulation is even harder - possibly many orders of magnitude harder - than steering a massive conglomerate.

I don't know how you design a ... non-atomistic corporation - a corporation that depends on governance principles other than those which align with Liberal atomism. If I read the literature right, atomism is sort of an inevitable consequence of Liberalism - as Hendrix said, "I'm the one that has to die when it's my time to die." How do we handle the problem of agency?

And I'm really skeptical of "holism" in general these days. It does not notch easily onto rigorous and empirical methods, and looks somewhat like a backdoor for collectivism. I dunno - maybe collectivism has matured but I'm quite skeptical of it.

You make some good points and it may not be a nefarious overall strategy to push sugar and then sell turn around and sell diabetes pills. They pushed sugary foods first so this is more of a hedge if anything. It's a story though.

A brand is a promise kept. What is Nestle's promise if they continue to expand in this manner? It's confusing and consumers don't like to get squeezed at both ends. Maybe they'll eventually transition over to a "a scientifically driven nutrition, health, and wellness company" as mentioned in the article, but that's a massive branding challenge for a 100 yr old company.

I don't disagree with you at all that there's probably not a scheming executive trying to maliciously mine and sell the spice of Arrakis, but it might be instructive to understand why large conglomerates like this might end up in such a position simply as a matter of emergent behavior.

Nestle is a very big company making all kinds of products, and since ever more people are following the health and fitness craze, there are so many people obsessed with health, they want to profit from it. They want to adjust their company in order to guarantee future profits, that's actually (a) the most normal thing in the world and (b) a form of following consumer's choice and wishes.

I don't see how selling sugary products for those who buy them and selling health products for those who prefer them is any kind of evil moral conflict. No matter if "health product" means low-fat low-sugar foods or pharmaceutical products.

Scepticism is good, control and regulation is good, blind condemnation is not, not sure what the article is representing. For me it actually is healthy scepticism, some of the comments here are more condemnation I presume.

My local drugstore sells both kinds of products too. If it's evil for Nestle, it's arguably even more evil for Walgreens, since that's where the consumer is making their purchasing decision.

You could draw a parallel between this and the tabacco free pharmacy push:

http://cvshealth.com/thought-leadership/cvs-health-perspecti...

First of all, diabetes pills are not really 'health products.' They are more like 'you fucked up your health, now try not to die' products. Even Nestle's low-fat and low-sugar "foods" are a far cry from "health products." You are being disingenuous by conflating the two, or even for suggesting that Nestle is in the business of selling "health products."

Beyond that, however, I see a pretty big flaw in your reasoning here. Given your argument, can you not then extend your theory on guaranteeing future profits to also include the strategy of selling both the problem and the solution? This, too, is a very 'normal' thing for large, multi-national manufacturers of consumer goods to be engaged in.

Nestle, along with Coca Cola and Kroger, is a well-known corporate supporter of programs such as SNAP in the US, and is also one of the largest benefactors from said programs. I am a full-on capitalist, but that does not mean that we ought to give a pass to the morally-flawed existences of companies like Nestle, which leverage its influence in the State to reap greater profits.

How much of the cause of the diabetes endemic is Nestle though? Isn't lack of nutritional education more to blame?

It's easy to come down hard on the smoking industry due to the chemically addictive nature and serious health hazards of the product, but there are many consumers who moderate their fat and sugar intake. And then there are diabetics who don't consume any Nestle products - so why can't they be given treatment manufactured from a conglomerate?

Agreed.

As someone with Type 1 diabetes (look up the difference if you don't know), I'm always interested in this distinction. Sugary foods neither "give people" nor cause Type 2 diabetes. A person consistently consuming too many sugary foods over a long period of time causes themselves to be at higher risk for Type 2 diabetes.

Cigarettes are a different beast, due to the chemically-addictive nature of them (although in this day and age, one could make the argument that people of all ages should know better than to start smoking, and should thus bear responsibility for the outcome - but that's another discussion for another time).

Cigarettes != sugar. End of story.

How are the dopamine hits from a nicotine-delivery product different from the dopamine hits from a glucose-delivery product?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188825/

It is possible one day cigarettes will be considered a minor evil in comparison with sugar. Just you wait.

Only if second-hand sugaring becomes a trend and manages to beat out second-hand smoke in the evil dept.

It's interesting how hyper-aware western and particularly U.S. cultures are of sugar and fat. From the 1990's there's still the stigma that eating any sugar and fat will make you fat.

"Sugary foods neither 'give people' nor cause Type 2 diabetes"

High Sugar Consumption Linked To Type 2 Diabetes http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/257108.php

"For a while the association between sugar consumption and type 2 diabetes was thought to solely relate to weight gain, but new research conducted at UC San Francisco indicates that sugar intake may also be directly linked to diabetes.

...

"This suggests for the first time that not all calories contribute to diabetes risk in the same way.

...

"Diabetes rates increased the longer a population was exposed to excess sugar and it decreased when sugar availability went down.

...

"Mation Nestle, PhD, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said:

'As far as I know, this is the first paper that has had data on the relationship of sugar consumption to diabetes. This has been a source of controversy forever. It's been very, very difficult to separate sugar from the calories it provides. This work is carefully done, it's interesting and it deserves attention.'

...

"A previous study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identified a similar association, revealing that added sugar and high fructose corn syrup may contribute to the development of obesity and diabetes."

The very next sentence they wrote (after what you quoted out of context) is in alignment with the studies you linked.

Their point was that consumption behavior causes Type 2 diabetes, not the substance alone.

I'm not sure this can be much clearer:

"As far as I know, this is the first paper that has had data on the relationship of sugar consumption to diabetes. This has been a source of controversy forever. It's been very, very difficult to separate sugar from the calories it provides. This work is carefully done, it's interesting and it deserves attention."

Here's more on the study:

Quantity of sugar in food supply linked to diabetes rates, researcher says https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/02/quantity-of-s...

"Does eating too much sugar cause diabetes? For years, scientists have said 'not exactly.' Eating too much of any food, including sugar, can cause you to gain weight; it’s the resulting obesity that predisposes people to diabetes, according to the prevailing theory.

"But now the results of a large epidemiological study suggest sugar may also have a direct, independent link to diabetes. Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco examined data on sugar availability and diabetes rates from 175 countries over the past decade. After accounting for obesity and a large array of other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates, independent of obesity rates. Their study was published Feb. 27 in PLOS ONE."

All that says is that obesity isn't the only precursor of diabetes. Mass consumption of simple sugars is shown to be a cause of diabetes and a cause obesity. Mass consumption of sugar is not moderation.

I'm also T1 and I think that sugar definitely plays a role in both T1 and T2. Sugar directly interacts with pancreas, consumption of sugar has skyrocketed, diabetes rates have skyrocketed. The official word on T1D is that we don't know what exactly causes it, it's not "sugar definitely doesn't cause it."

> Isn't lack of nutritional education more to blame?

This is so easy to blame though, it is a cop out. Yes, lets spend more on education, but lets not raise taxes.

What is a "health" product or not is of no value to the discussion here I think, we can debate all day long about what way of eating is correct or not, then let me put it in broader terms: Targeting different groups with different products that actually might have nothing in common or even be antagonists in a way, is nothing immoral or unusual. I used the term "health product" as an antagonist to their sugary products.

I did not in any way say Nestle is not selling the cause and the solution, I was trying to make that point that this in itself is meaningless and in no sense immoral.

As kazinator brilliantly put it:

"Yamaha wants to sell you noise-canceling headphones, and a motorcycle."[1]

We can talk about a tax on sugars, we can talk about a different regulatory framework, but I see nothing wrong with what Nestle is doing here given the current legal and regulatory situation.

And people make their choices, if Nestle wouldn't sell product x, someone else would in some form, they are trying that you choose their product, that's all, that's called competition.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11659815

Out of interest - if a cigarette company started selling lung cancer treatment, would you still hold this stance?

I would hazard to say that the analogy I've chosen aligns more closely with the stance of the article and the posters taking a condemnatory tone than your Yamaha analogy does.

Don't really understand the downvotes here can people explain why they are downvoting?

The parent opinion is that Nestle is a large corporation and they are diversifying their revenue streams as every profit-seeking company is entitled to.

The other opinion elsewhere on this thread is that sugar is the enemy and therefore Nestle should be held accountable for first causing a problem then charging people for offering the solution.

It's probably going to be hard to reconcile either opinion given the subject of sugar in diets is already quite divisive, but is an attempt to illustrate the anti-sugar camp's perspective through an extreme but easily understood example not constructive?

as every profit-seeking company is entitled to.

To be sure, this isn't a natural right. The entitlement is entirely a creation of policy and legislation, both of which can be modified or rescinded.

True, completely agree, but we currently live in a world where the majority of corporations will make profit up until the boundaries of legality.

We are not talking about what is health or not, the sugar they sell is bad, that's it, there's no questioning, there are doctors that agree on that, non biased studies, half the USA is ill with diabetes, etc.

Every company has to have a social responsability, I don't see it here. They are causing harm with their products and they also sell the 'cure'. (actually the best is not to eat any of their products, then you don't need anything they sell, just eat 'real', non processed, food).

About Yamaha, motorcycles shouldn't make that many noise, that is the main problem, not the headphones.

> the sugar they sell is bad, that's it, there's no questioning

I dunno, I think sugar is pretty delicious. Not everything has to be about maximizing your lifespan, you know. A balanced life can include tasty stuff.

I don't use any sugar in any of my recipes (a part from pastry) and they are tasty. More than all this processed food. Just using whole foods. Maybe it's the mediterranean diet, we eat too good here in Spain ;P

At the end it is all about balance as you say, but I really prefer to be balancing between meals that are too caloric than processed foods which we don't even know which ingredients contain.

> "the sugar they sell is bad, that's it, there's no questioning"

I question it.

There appears to be little-to-no scientific evidence that there are "bad" sugars and "good" sugars. From what I understand (I'm no doctor, just a person who reads a lot) the main problem is the volume of consumption, not "good" vs "bad" sugars. There's nothing wrong with a normal, healthy person having sugar in any of the forms Nestle sells, only with having too much of it.

Now, you could argue that they sell it in quantities that make it easy to have too much, but that's different from saying the sugar itself is bad.

Sugar they sell you is bad, period. Every gram of their nutritionally empty sugar takes away from the caloric input that you could have got from real food with many other nutrients than pure energy. This in the long run makes a difference. And all this beside other bad effects of processed sugar like insulin spikes, etc.

> Sugar they sell you is bad, period. Every gram of their nutritionally empty sugar takes away from the caloric input that you could have got from real food with many other nutrients than pure energy.

Again, is Nestle's sugar somehow chemically different than ordinary sugar?

You're absolutely right! I'm going to tell my 4 year old she's done having chocolate. Period. No sense in taking way from the caloric input she could have gotten from real food. Ice cream, jellybeans, and cake is out too. She'll get a tofu slab for her birthdays and a cold, crisp glass of water for her desserts.

Actually, just switching to non-sweetened water can mean no obesity. There are also studies that show heavily mechanically processed food is more caloric than expected - because it is ground so fine that there is real difference in energy required to break it down.

It's not only the dosage that does you in, but also the processing... which i think is what others are alluding to.

Meaning a can of soda has a whacky amount of sugar to begin with, but also, if compared to say an orange, has no fiber/roughage (which helps the insulin spike supposedly, plus orange will have good micro-nutrients and antioxidants).

I think people should be much more mindful of these manufactured processed foods and drinks, and why sticking to whole foods just makes sense.

> "It's not only the dosage that does you in, but also the processing"

but not the sugar itself -- it's the same chemical. (There are those who believe certain types of sugar are processed differently in your body, which is actually not true, at least based on the large body of scientific evidence available thus far.)

I don't believe different sugars are processed differently. I do thing that release mechanisms are different in, for example, corn vs corn syrup. The "extra stuff" you get with corn mediates how fast a body can absorb the sugar, the container needs to be broken down. So, in some sense, yes, all sugars are the same. The delivery system can change the rate of absorption though. *

* I have no proof of this. I'm making an uneducated guess that the insulin spikes aren't as steep or high with sweet fruits and vegetables compared with a spoon full of sugar.

> First of all, diabetes pills are not really 'health products.' They are more like 'you fucked up your health, now try not to die' products

You can make the same argument about low cost sugary foods that originated from the same conglomerates - trade lower prices & time to avoid starving... if you can't afford to eat healthy you eat what's fast, affordable and tastes good.

You can have your cake and eat it too, you just won't live very long...

I agree there isn't a 'sickle' marketing department where in the company creates the problem and caters at every stopping point until your ultimate demise - unless of course Nestle owns a collection of funeral homes...

Hanlons razor: never assume bad intentions when assuming stupidity is enough

In Spain we say "Pan para hoy, hambre para mañana". Which literally translated would mean "Bread for today, hunger tomorrow". Eat cheap and in the future your health will be paying for that, and it will be more expensive than eating healthy during your life.

One argument I read is that when you take profits from the food industry and subtract health care costs due to industrial diets we're (just the US) 1.4 trillion a year in the red.

This is the kind of advice the rich can follow. For the poor, it's not a choice between cheap/bad and expensive/good, it's the choice between cheap/bad and death from starvation right now.

Death from starvation isn't exactly a widespread problem in the developed world. Homelessness is the more realistic outcome.

You're right. It doesn't change the calculation much though - especially when we're thinking about poor families; feeding yourself or your children badly is suboptimal, but it beats the hell out of raising them on the street or giving up to the foster care.

There's no conflict in being a capitalist and thinking that Nestle shouldn't get a pass. They are recipients of government welfare in the form of those SNAP subsidies, since the crap they sell is the only thing people on SNAP can afford to buy in bulk. That's not capitalism, it's just theft.

I think you sort of have to look at how SNAP evolved. It was the result of what was deemed to be an iterative series of improvements. Way too low-res, the sequence was "commodities" to food stamps to SNAP, with generics and store brands also evolving out of the same ferment.

SFAIK, the principal ... principle driving this was administrative cost reduction on the government side - reuse existing buildings and people.

And then it ties into the crop subsidy system, which is generally awesome in that it prices risk from shortage almost to zero at a cost in mild to "OMG!" overproduction.

But they don't sell "problems" they make and sell food, some of which is good for you and some not so much.

The reason why they exist at the level they do is because of the economies of scale you gain from being able to order millions of tons of grain, sugar, milk, etc., then processing them in huge factories, then distributing them to other huge companies that own grocery stores and vending machines, etc. It doesn't strike me as morally questionable to include other products, including medicine (OTC or not) in that process. In fact, if it makes the medicines more affordable it can be more beneficial for the people who need it than not.

The reason why activists keep going after them and other large corporations is because getting them to change their behavior, when they're one of the largest purchasers or creators of something, can make more difference than lobbying the government to make every corporation follow suit. Which is why we should try to encourage them to do better about issues that matter, including changing packaging and contents of "junk" food.

You know, people say the same kinds of things about Sony, but it's obvious to everybody that Sony Pictures has screwed up Sony Electronics, and badly.

The other day I went to buy some canned refried beans. When I read the label, I noticed that it contained refined sugar. WTF?!? There should be no need for sugar in refried beans! After recovering from the shock, I went to another grocery store, where I found refried beans without sugar.

Why does this happen? Obviously, sugar tastes good. That has to be why companies add it to all sorts of things. However, if most people were like me, they would read the label and refuse to buy anything that unnecessarily contained sugar. The companies doing this would lose money, and soon stop doing it. But the opposite has happened. Why?

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb. However, when you read about stuff like this in the mainstream media, it's always framed as if "big evil corporations" is the whole problem. That "average Joe" has a low intelligence is never mentioned. Of course, the media wants as many consumers as possible, too, so calling most of their potential readers/viewers stupid is probably a bad strategy, even though it's the truth.

A bit harsh to make a blanket statement about intelligence; people just need information which isn't being readily provided or is being drowned out with too much information. The collective actions seem counterintuitive to people paying attention, but paying attention requires time - which doesn't come easily if a swath of the population is busy with two part-time jobs and recovering with reality TV in the meantime.

If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

As for working two part-time jobs etc., many of the people doing this buy status symbols like SUVs, iPhones, big houses etc. If they didn't buy so much unnecessary stuff, they wouldn't need to work so much.

I need that stuff to get laid though.

Good point. I admit that I'm not very good at getting laid myself. However, if you eat healthily, you will look much better than if you eat unhealthily. We know that men are attracted to good looking women. However, women seem to be attracted to high-status men, and put less value good looks.

I wish there were some studies that compared how much success healthy and good looking but relatively poor men would have with women, compared to unhealthy and bad looking but relatively rich ones.

I hope I did not get too off topic here, but I think maybe it's possible that this is part of the explanation. That people want status symbols in order to get laid, and thus have less time for health. So maybe I was wrong about the Average Joe having a low intelligence...

Find a lady that likes debt free men and try to make her happy.

> If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

Totally true, I myself went thru an over use of refined sugar and non-healthy fast food choices. It was a truly terrible experience that thankfully I caught at a young age before it progressed to thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands in medical care.

Essentially I ended up having tears in my throat and ulcers at the same time causing and obscene amount of blood to, well for sake of the conversation, come back out of the body reverse style. It was due to the amount of sugar intake and "fast food" that caused me to experience this horrible scenario. I feel as though a lot of people who experience this just go, "oh I'll take some pills and I can get right back into it" which in it self will cause the problem to worsen but the general populous has for some reason come to believe that the magic pill solves all and we can rely on future technology to keep us "safe from tipping the edge"..."until it all collapses into a mess".

I honestly believe it's the fact that our culture is now bred to have things handed to them so easily. As an application/web designer I often have to create "dumbed" down interfaces that to me seem illogical and a waste of precious coding time.

While yes it sucks they don't put it in bright high contrast words on the labels, but at the same time they are putting it on the label and if we just took the time we could curb this silly notion of the big corporation is evil - even creating a core class required for students to take at various stages of school would make a phenomenal difference (in theory).

Essentially while a company may be evil, they are only evil because it's making a profit. We the people of the world need to make the change for big industry to make change because at the root of it they only do it because we keep paying!

Nutrition is no longer taught in school, so you cannot demand that people know this.

Also, the acknowledgement that sugar is unhealthy beyond children's teeth is relatively new. I don't think you'll find it in nutrition books from over 15 years ago.

> iPhones

Yep, buying a nice phone for half the price of phone service is why poor people are poor. How stupid of them. If they had just saved an extra $10 a month, they wouldn't need that second job.

"people just need information which isn't being readily provided" The breakdown of the nutritional value of every food stuff is literally right in front of the consumer's face. I'm not sure information availability is a core issue there. It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook.

If I had to guess I would say prioritization and budgeting are core issues here. It really is a very similar problem to financial budgeting. In this view we are balancing a calorie budget against time, money, emotional state, and health so the categories are different but the question is still the same as in finance. This could also be a likely culprit since we do not tend to teach this topic well and Average Joe seems to be about as bad at personal finance as he is with personal wellness.

Perhaps more training on prioritization, goal setting, and delayed gratification is part of the solution?

"It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook"

That's a pretty ridiculous counter. Multiply that by the dozens to hundreds of items a person buys in a single grocery trip, and you might have a valid comparison. It's true that this would be mostly a one time cost, as you would start to learn what is good and what is not, but the fact still stands that it is not as quick as checking a text message.

That's great, people can observe the contents. And now they just need to interpret it, which requires research. What's this "HFCS", and is it good or bad for you?

It's like asking a nonprogrammer to read the source code. Sure, it's right there in front of them, but that doesn't make it useful. The obvious solution - let's require everyone to become a programmer! /s

> Why does this happen?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

> There can be only one explanation

Why/how have you arrived at this conclusion?

> it's always framed as if "big evil corporations" is the whole problem

So, you have evidence of food that shouldn't have sugar in it but does in fact have sugar anyway. And you conclude that it's the consumer's fault, because they're stupid, and not the company that puts the sugar in?

Humans have lots of biological and mental weaknesses that can be exploited for profit. Preferring highly caloric food is one of them. It seems fairly pessimistic to call that "dumb". Before the invention of mass produced food, preferring sweet things was an evolutionary advantage. That fact is now being used against you, and all of us, in a big conspiracy called "marketing".

Do you feel that a consumer is responsible for what they put in their body?

If they never tasted the food, they would miss out on this "marketing." The fact remains, if those manufacturers have always produced their beans with sugar, then they should not be at fault. If those companies changed their recipe to contain sugar after they found people grey addicted to it, there should be a label to warn the consumer that a change has suddenly been made.

>Do you feel that a consumer is responsible for what they put in their body?

Of course. But the average consumer is not only at a disadvantage, they are regularly deceived into believing that unhealthy foods are in fact healthy. In reality, culpability is a complex calculation that passes through the farmer, the food processor, the manufacturer, the ad firm, the grocer, the consumer, and any other party involved in the transaction. All share some part of the blame.

However, the blame game is rarely productive. When something is having a serious negative impact on 50%+ of the population, it's time to stop pushing blame around and start focusing on finding a workable solution. If 50%+ of your website's users were getting lost on your page and having a hard time finding an efficient way to do things, would you spend all your time blaming them for their idiocy, or would you up the ante for your UX people and make it work? (hint for the n00bs out there: in this situation you should up the ante, not sit around and blame your customers)

It's society's problem to figure out how to fix this public health crisis, because regardless of our beliefs about whether someone should be able to carefully select healthy foods, the evident reality is that people aren't able to do so, and we have to accept that and adjust our processes and habits to accommodate.

The goal is not to admonish or uphold anyone, not to protect or liquidate profit, not to see one brand or flavor triumph over others. The goal is simply to cause the obesity rate to rapidly decline and stay declined. That's what we should focus on making happen at the macro level.

The blame also rests with regulators like the FDA, who for decades promoted a food pyramid that was basically upside-down in terms of what was healthy; who for decades promoted that partially-hydroginated oils (trans-fats) were preferable to natural saturated fats; who encouraged a "low fat" diet that prompted food producers to substitute sugar for fat to make foods tasty and consumers to consume an unhealthy high-starch, high-sugar diet and a nearly manic avoidance of fat.

... while being funded under the threat of force (taxation).

There are many ways the government could raise money for a small program like designing the food pyramid. It's really not relevant which one they picked.

Although the food pyramid as originally designed was modified at the request of food industry lobbyists out of fear it would hurt sales.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/invented-foo...

Remember the FDA is part of the Department of Agriculture and that the Ag department's responsibility is to simultaneously protect the food supply (i.e. make sure it happens, take the farmers' side etc), manage food safety and support public health. Any surprise these objectives are at odds, and which side has more profit attached?

This is like the Department of the Interior whose mission is to protect the environment and to encourage mining. In their case it means oil company employees had did drugs with and had sex with their government regulators (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html?...)

I am beyond considering this corrupt and simply shake my head that it's fundamentally mis-architected.

And parents. We learn many of our bad food habits when we're under the care of an adult.

That's the great thing about marketing a habit forming product. The parents end up doing your advertising for you!

>someone should be able to carefully select healthy foods, the evident reality is that people aren't able to do so

You are conflating people's ability to select healthy foods with their desire to do so. There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy, at least here in the U.S.

It's just that people frequently eat what they like and, then, too much of it.

> There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy

There's a very high noise-to-signal ratio in information purporting to be about eating healthy, with considerable investment in misinformation by commercially interested parties. So, while it is in one sense true that there is not a lack of information, that should not be taken to mean that it is simple for laypeople to get and identify accurate information on which to make healthy eating decisions.

That's a bit of a red herring. Sure, misinformation and even disinformation exists, but many people knowingly make choices that are widely and irrefutably known to be poor: fast food, high sugar content, fried and overtly fatty items, processed foods, gross overeating, and on and on.

This is overwhelmingly the problem versus health-conscious people being consistently duped into making poor choices.

Given this, there's little reason to believe that resolving controversy over "finer points" of misinformation to which you refer would be significantly impactful.

No, I disagree. Foods are regularly marketed as healthy when they are in fact unhealthy. Labeling is frequently deceptive. Foods that are well-known to be healthy, like fruits and vegetables, are modified to accommodate preferred taste profiles.

Go to Walmart and look at the maple syrup section. You'll see about 8 SKUs that claim to be "Syrup", meaning they're just a viscuous fluid, but cleverly omit the actual term "maple" (while showing pictures of things usually associated with maple syrup). These products are called "syrup" but they're not related to real syrup in any way. They are literally dyed sugar water. If you look in the rightmost corner of the topmost aisle, you'll find a glass bottle that costs like $8 and contains real maple syrup. The rest is crap that costs $3-4. The people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets. But they're not.

Now, repeat this for every type of food at Walmart.

We need to admit there is a real systemic problem here that is not as simple as individual gluttony. It is not at all true that obese people eat 40 Snickers a day, which is what many fat-person-hate types seem to believe.

If Aunt Jamima's is unhealthy due to its sugar content, actual maple syrup is going to be unhealthy too. The authentic stuff might taste better, but it's still basically just sugar.

I happen to have a glass bottle of pure Canadian maple syrup in my fridge. It contains 53g of sugar per 60mL. That's apparently 18% of your recommended daily intake of sugar. It contains 4% of your daily intake of Calcium and is 'not a significant source of other nutrients'.

Though, to your point, I do have a second bottle of pure maple syrup that is labelled emphasising it's nutritional value. It has a bit of calcium, iron and manganese, but there's way too much sugar that goes with it for it to be a significant part of a healthy diet.

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to single out maple syrup as an ideal "healthy food". It's just a particularly egregious example of deceptive labeling, inasmuch as most people who think they're buying it are, in reality, buying a 100% synthetic imitation. There are people who will tell you they love maple syrup, unaware that they've never actually even had maple syrup.

A more widely known example is "juice" that is 0% juice.

The same thing occurs with varying degrees of severity for all the food offered at major grocers, including healthier options like loaves of bread (most off-the-shelf breads at Walmart contain large quantities of either sugar or brown sugar) and canned fruits (the "standard" version is usually canned in "heavy syrup", i.e., sugar water).

Now I'm curious how many people are really confused about it.

I've helped collect and boil sap, so I'm pretty sure I've had the real thing, but still, I don't think I was ever confused about there being syrup products manufactured from other sugars.

To be fair, canning fluid has to have a certain osmotic pressure to inhibit mold and bacteria growth, and most people prefer their canned fruit to be packed in some variety of sugary water rather than salty or acetic water.

Even the fruit packed with fruit juice is often packed in a different kind of juice (excepting pineapple). You could have peaches packed in genuine grade-B maple syrup, but it won't be able to compete on price on a shelf next to peaches in heavy sucrose syrup.

(You can also make pruno from the syrup in fruit cans that doesn't taste entirely like moldy garbage. But I wouldn't pour any for my friends, or at least not the ones I wanted to keep.)

As for the bread, you shouldn't be surprised that many "whole wheat" breads are still primarily made with the same enriched white flour as white breads. They just have a fraction of the wheat kernel added back in so that the bread looks brown when it's baked. Deceptive labeling.

Even if a type of food is ostensibly healthy when prepared at home using a traditional recipe from pure, wholesome ingredients, as a pre-packaged, ready-to-eat product in the grocery store, it is most likely already reduced to complete crap. For me, it has almost gone past the point where it isn't just a matter of carefully reading the ingredients list and avoiding certain entries. Now I prefer buying only the foods that themselves qualify as a single ingredient. But even then, cans of "extra virgin olive oil" are almost certainly lying, upselling the "3 or 4 extractions too late for virgin" olive oil , mixed with hazelnut oil.

But what else is a consumer to do?

> people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets.

The fetishization of "natural" (and related terms like "naturally occurring") is, I would argue, one of the major areas of health misinformation when it comes to foods. (In any case, maple syrup isn't naturally occurring, its a processed foodstuff -- the process may not require particularly modern technology, but its still processed; there's a considerable difference between unprocessed maple sap and maple syrup.)

Yeah, like I said in another comment, I didn't use the example of maple syrup because it was a particularly healthy food, but because it's a particularly egregious instance of deceptive labeling. The consumer is being tricked into buying a completely different product than he or she intended to buy -- no part of Aunt Jemima's or other major syrup brands has any relation or origination point inside a maple tree -- and most never realize it.

"a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed"

I think there's some problems there with the definition of ancestors as in just the last one or two for an extremely small subset of ethnic groups. And that microscopic subset is being compared to a diet consisting primarily of corn syrup for 2/5th of a billion people.

The idea of eating grains is recent in evolution. Unsurprisingly farmers use grains as a tool to fatten up livestock. Works pretty well on humans too. Pancakes and syrup are in no way natural or healthy.

The condiment industry is interesting. Maple syrup in particular is advertised as the breakfast itself, with the pancake merely as sponge to soak as much as possible. Consumed as a meal, 60 mL isn't much. As an occasional condiment 60 mL is a multiple of a reasonable amount. Consider an analogy with hot pepper flakes. A tiny subculture that uses a fraction of a teaspoon to flavor chili once in awhile while its in season will have different medical issues than a culture where basically everyone eats two cups per day, every day.

I don't think anyone or very few people believe that Aunt Jemima's is real maple syrup. Its popular number one because its cheap.

I'm probably in the minority but I can afford real maple syrup and buy Aunt Jemima's because I actually prefer the taste of it over maple syrup, not because I'm misinformed.

A better example of deceptive marketing would be Breyer's "ice cream" in the US having half of their flavors not legally allowed to be called ice cream anymore sold next to the real ice cream and their few remaining flavors that are actually ice cream with the same packaging.

I'll admit that I don't have any real source for the claim that most people think "maple syrup" is maple syrup. I only have anecdotes and assumptions. It is certainly possible that most people already understand that "maple syrup" is not really maple syrup in the same way that it's understood things labeled "juice" are not really juice unless there's some additional indicator of authenticity.

My personal intuition is that people probably assume some sweeteners and preservatives are added but that somewhere in there, there is an actual base of maple syrup, meaning some product that is derived from the sap of a maple tree. In fact, however, there is not.

To be totally honest, I don't think any hard study on this subject would be any more useful than my anecdotes, assumptions, and intuitions because I think the chance that it would be manipulated by people with an interest in one outcome or another is too high.

But, it's all right there on the label. The problem is that many people just don't care.

Sure, not every obese person eats 40 Snickers a day. But, short of glandular or other medical reasons, they are surely aware that their diet and lifestyle are unhealthy. You don't get to 400 lbs without realizing that it may be something you're doing. So, It's a little misdirection to suggest that people are consciously attempting to make healthy choices, but are tricked into the exact opposite without once questioning it during their journey to obesity.

Add to this the fact that messages about calories, sugar, exercise, etc. are copious and inescapable.

Yes, marketing and even labeling can be deceptive, but it's not the root of the problem by a longshot.

> Do you feel that a consumer is responsible for what they put in their body?

Of course, but nobody has the time to become a domain expert on every subject (consider this a low pass filtering problem). It's reasonable for there to be food safety standards (who has time to investigate the meat packing plant, the mill, etc etc), building codes etc as baseline rules.

> That fact is now being used against you, and all of us, in a big conspiracy called "marketing".

addiction would be a better term IMO.

Marketing is spot on. It's funny how people seem to know this, and yet don't realize it in practice - most of marketing is actively malicious. It's not like a law of physics which you can understand and then learn to work around; marketing is done by humans who have decades of psychological research, hundreds of years of honed best practices and many billions of dollars of budget annually within the industry; you can't expect an average person to stand a chance against focused effort of so many people who don't care (or don't even think about) they may harm other people as long as they get their paychecks.

I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.

I think it's inappropriate to say that most marketing is actively malicious. I will agree that much of it is uncomfortable. I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.

The system is actively malicious - maybe not in the sense that it goes out of its way to be evil, but definitely in a sense that it's not a static system. It's not like gravity that always points you down and that you can learn to work around; it's constantly adapting, evolving and adjusting to be more effective at exploiting your weak sides. When we invented aeroplanes, the force of gravity did not suddenly triple. But marketing does react to people learning to work around its influence.

> I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.

Sure, in many cases it is true, and in some cases the product in fact has a lot of valuable properties and marketing may do a fair work of informing about them. But more often than not it is not the case.

My experience of working alongside marketing people (as a programmer who got transferred to a sales&marketing company) is that quite often they tune out the "irrelevant" issues like "is this product actually useful at all?" and focus on technicalities - on how to get people to buy it. So they may expound various features of the product and construct elaborate use cases, while conveniently ignoring that compared to the competition, the product is crap, or that the whole product idea is something the customer is better off staying away from.

(Oh and BTW, the amount of bullshiting I saw in social media marketing is beyond belief; I think I'll have to write a post about it one day. My experiences led me to believe that a lot of business happening in Internet marketing is people who understand absolutely nothing about maths & statistics using complex tools to bullshit themselves as well as their customers, who don't understand squat about statistics either, so the money flows, everyone is happy, but nothing of actual substance is happening for anyone.)

> I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.

Yeah, I understand. It's something you have to engage in - because everyone else does too, and those who refrain from it get outcompeted by those who don't. Personally, I value what you call "finesse and decency", as well as honesty, and try to gravitate towards people and companies not afraid to tell me their product may not be a best fit for my current use case.

Reousrces for this include anything you can get on Bernays ( the Adam Curtis "Century of the Self' is a decent survey ) and "The Hidden Persuaders." Also maybe Marshall MacLuhan.

Really, media/advertising literacy is pretty important. If you don't know who the sucker at the table is...

This being said, it may or may not be actively malicious per se but it certainly tries to hack your unconscious thinking to affect your behavior. I'm just not quite ready to broadly label that "malicious" just yet - although some of the anti smoking propaganda now makes me wonder that I should.

I'm really having a hard time with the cognitive dissonance in our society that says that optimizing to the Bliss Point is okay, but putting additives in cigarettes to make them more addictive is bad.

They are motivated by the exact same desire and goal. If we're gonna rake Phillip Morris for it we should be doing the same to Kraft, Nabisco and Nestle.

So which corporations aren't subject to the RJR v. United States treatment then? Is that really what we want?

"Damn you, you gave us what we wanted. Now pay up, sucker."

I suspect the only additive put in cigarettes to make them more addictive was nicotine itself. And that was probably an engineering decision so they could use a broader spectrum of tobacco leaf.

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

Or other people have different tradeoffs between short-term pleasure and statistical long-term health. You can define that as "stupid" if you want, but I'm guessing there are plenty of things that you do because you enjoy them that you would not do if maximizing health were your sole priority.

Nothing beats being healthy, which is why I'm not one of these idiots who doesn't read labels. I've put in the work to optimize my purchasing habits, so I know that the average grocery store contains about 38,718 items. It only takes me around 15 seconds to skim a label for nutritional content and add a mental note of it's contribution to my dietary needs, so I can finish shopping in a new store in just over 161 hours. I have a special exercise routine I do during that time to maximize the experience.

You only have to read every label in the store if you want to make the optimal decision. But a healty diet can still be achieved by only reading labels of products you are most interested in, but not purchasing the unhealthy ones.

You're right, of course, but I have to do something to break up all the time I spend reading EULAs and terms of service for all the websites I visit.

I think this "stupid" and choice discussion that comes up quite often for this subject is somewhat of a distraction. There's plenty of people who eat relativly healthy not because they are "smart" about it, but because that's how they grew up. They are just "dumb" in the right direction. I doubt people were more knowledgeable about food when everyone smoked and there was lead in everything.

This is the equivalent of RTFM or the 15 page terms of service documents that no one can possibly read. Sure it makes sense in some cases but you can't use it as an excuse to shift the burden to the consumer however you like.

15 page terms of service document versus an easy to read table that lists sugar, salt and fat content of a product?

It is my view that companies have the obligation to make information available about their products and do so in an easy-to-read manner, everything else is consumer's choice. Your comparison lacks relevance in my opinion.

(and in cases where someone asks stupid questions, which can be easily answered by looking in the manual page, yes... please read it...)

If you're willing to completely upend your diet, then you might only look at the nutrition table and buy the things with the lowest sugar.

If you're trying to make a normal diet healthier, then the amount of unnecessarily added sugar becomes much more relevant. It tells you when you need to find a better brand, improving the health of your food without disrupting your diet.

And to do that, you need to read and decode the ingredient list. Doing this for every single food you buy is slow.

When it comes to RTFM: Sure, read before asking, but if something was confusing in the first place it's often the fault of the design. Don't let yourself forget that.

> If you're willing to completely upend your diet, then you might only look at the nutrition table and buy the things with the lowest sugar.

Which would reduce sugar, and quite likely be unhealthy for all kinds of other reasons. Overreliance on sugar may be the most common problem in modern US diet, but that doesn't mean that a naïve and monomaniacal effort to reduce sugar won't result in some worse problem.

I feel like shifting the blame towards consumers only shirks the responsibility that companies have to act responsibly. How much longer are we gonna excuse companies that only act in their self interest just so we don't have to do anything about it?

EDIT: Whether people like it or not, free market forces don't always offer the best outcome. We stopped depending solely on free market forces when we put in place anti-monopoly laws. We've identified that regulation is needed in some cases. Lets use it damnit.

Sugar removes acidity. I would add some sugar to home made tomato sauce sometimes.

Sugar is bad, but it's got some qualities as well. The same could be said about many things we still eat/drink/breath, but the problem with sugar is that we just use too much of it.

sugar does not reduce acidity, it masks it.

Bicarbonate of Soda reduces it, and brings the sugar already present to the fore.

a micro pinch in the tomato sauce makes it bite less and reduces digestive acidity reflux from eating a tomato based meal(spag.sauce)

jrjr

Thanks for the tip!

The more you know!

I totally used the wrong word (as I really wanted to say that masks it - I've got zero chemistry knowledge), but I'll try your tip next time.

Thank you!

I don't know if dumb is the right word. Ignorant is probably most apt.

I want you to think about all of the food that's in your house. Eliminate anything that you would consider intentionally sugary like candy, confection, soda, etc. Now how much of a time consuming task would it be to scrutinize every label for needlessly added sugar? Consider how many people would be willing to do that to check for some extra sugar?

And that's why, I believe, companies can throw extra sugar in their products without most of the public being none the wiser. Not only would you have to check your current inventory, you'd have to stay abreast of the issue every time you went shopping. If you went shopping for the entire month like me, you'd spend an extra hour in the store reading labels to check for newly added sugar.

Most of the time is about ignorance, but even if you know Sugar is not good (Parent wrongly assumes just refined sugar is the problem) it will be very difficult to see where is contained. There are many names for "Sugar" and hidden in different ingredients, like HFCS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

It's easier than someone might think. If you avoid food that contains ingredient list as a general rule scrutinizing the rest would be not such a hard work

Time consuming? I read the label of every product I buy when I go to the supermarket. If I do it often enough, I keep track of what's got added sugar and I just don't buy those anymore. It isn't that hard.

The solution is to have the FDA mandate big bold warning labels stating that long-term consumption of high quantities of sugar has been linked to diabetes and other health problems. Give consumers some information to help make an informative decision.

Really? You're surprised that people in general don't make the most healthy dietary choices? Given the almost epidemic rise of obesity and related issues in the West and particularly in the US?

Your conclusion is arrogant, unfair, unhelpful, and unactionable. To be fair, the "corporations are evil" conclusion is similarly unhelpful.

This is actually a prime example of a coordination problem [1]. We're going to have to do better than just pushing the blame around if we're going to do something about it. For instance, obesity is a bigger problem among the poor than the well-to-do. Why? One of the most trivial reasons is the fact that unhealthy food is also inexpensive!

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

There are many other explanations.

On a vaguely related note, Mars Foods is planning on changing its labeling to indicate approx how often you should eat their products [1].

This was most likely a preemptive move on their part, presumably to counter the anti-sugar law being mooted in the UK.

My guess is that their argument will be that people should have the choice to eat unhealthily as long as they do it in moderation. If so, I would tend to agree but I think I'm inclined to moan about a lack of personal responsibility so I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36051333

> However, if most people were like me, ...

My teacher always said: Imagine the most average american citizen. Then realize that half of the american population is dumber that.

Really brings things in perspective.

He must've been a Carlin fan (American stand up comedian).

Really brings things in perspective.

It does, doesnt it? I mean, you'd think a math teacher of all people would know not to use "average" when they really mean "median". I always wondered whether Carlin was being ironic when he told the joke.

> you'd think a math teacher of all people would know not to use "average" when they really mean "median".

I think a math teacher would be well aware that "average" can be used for "median", "mode", "arithmetic mean", or any of the other means (geometric, harmonic, etc.), as well as other computed values that are somewhere in the space bounded by the extremes of a data set, and would likewise be aware that, while in a formal context "average" should -- for that reason -- be avoided in favor of identifying the specific measure more precisely, it was acceptable and unambiguous to use "average" for any of those, including the median, where context made it clear which was intended.

I like this comment so much that I reposted it to facebook. "Average" is, in fact, a generic term which we shouldn't freak out about too much.

Wherever the baseline intelligence quotient of John Q. Public sits on an absolute scale, when we're discussing something as critical and universal as food distribution, it should be pretty easy to accept that, at a minimum, the median IQ should be accommodated. It should be easy for the consumer to understand what's in the food he's going to eat. Manually picking up every food item and reviewing the list of ingredients by hand in the middle of grocery store does not comport with this; this is a matter of efficiency more than a lack of the intellectual faculty to process a list of ingredients (though when half of those ingredients are impenetrable chemical names that only commercial food chemists understand, it makes even more sense to skip it).

Lament the average consumer's lack of gross intelligence all you want, but the fact is that it's irrelevant in this circumstance. Food distribution should be accessible and understandable by nearly all adults, and if it's not, it's a systemic failure, not an individual one.

This is especially true now that all of the food for sale in a typical grocery store is altered by chemists. This artificial manipulation should cause us to be more careful about food, not less.

It is absolutely true that nearly every food item in the mainstream grocery store contains superfluous sugar, including foods that you wouldn't expect or think about. While many stores will carry one or two SKUs of a particular product without sugar, you have to be really careful to pick out the right one. For instance, canned pears come "in heavy syrup" (i.e., drenched in sugar) by default. They also offer pears in "light syrup" (i.e., sugar added). There are various combinations of heavy/light syrup canned pear offerings, and then, at the very back, you may luck out and find one can of pears "in water".

These aren't Oreos -- people are buying canned fruits and vegetables because they are trying to be healthy, and the corporate grocers are pulling a fast one on them by dumping large helpings of sugar into everything to try to make the food more addictive (and thereby, increase sales).

Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic. Discounting that is playing into their hands at the peril of public health.

Median means it's okay to trick nearly half of the population. I think we can do a little better than that.

Aren't there laws on the books that define what the minimum mental faculty is to be an independent adult? And below that point a relative can assert power of attorney/legal guardianship over you?

> Manually picking up every food item and reviewing the list of ingredients by hand in the middle of grocery store does not comport with [accomodating the median IQ]

I don't know how the situation looks in the US, but in Europe, there's compulsory, standardized labels listing ingredients on every non-whole item. Whole foods are marked with the country/ies where it was produced, treated and packaged.

If it's considered too much effort to read a clearly laid-out sticker, the problem is definitely with people reaching an extreme kind of intellectual lazyness, which is why I don't understand the need to teach nutrition mentioned in other comments. Just read what's in the thing, dammit! If somebody doesn't understand that sugar has absolutely nothing to do in canned beans, well... I'm lost for words.

This means the actual problem is the complete disfunctionality of our educational systems. As you rightly point out,

> Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic.

and is easily countered by buying a tad more consciously than "I probably don't need this, but I'll buy it anyway just in case" or "I like the look of that" or "I've seen this in an ad, must be awesome", and then proceeding to throwing a quarter of your purchases away. As you might have guessed, I was not raised like that, and it utterly boggles my mind how some people can function that way. Apart from the food, it's a massive waste of money!

So yeah, the problem is, as always, education, because I don't see how foods could be marked any clearer than black-on-white stickers that take ten seconds to scan thouroughly for any unwanted ingredients.

if most people were like me, they would read the label and refuse to buy

Well, obvious conclusion is obvious: people are not like you. Especially since you said earlier:

WTF?!? There should be no need for sugar in refried beans!

So why would you expect people to read the label for a product that clearly names what it should contain?

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

In light of the above, I can offer another explanation: most consumers are too trusting. Distrust takes mental effort, so people pick their battles. I would not have read the label for a can of refried beans either.

(as an aside: I believe this is where many Europeans would say that this is what food standards are for, to which many Americans would respond: wtf regulation)

I read the label for unfamiliar brands of re-fried beans to make sure they're vegetarian.

Adding to the varieties of other explanations countering your "one explanation:"

1.) Time. Although I'm (perhaps overly) sensitive to which foods are healthy and which aren't, I often find myself eating sub-optimally simply because I can't muster the time/energy to make something healthy, do the resulting dishes, etc... And veggies can be some of the most labor intensive. Or, you want a quick snack that's also really healthy? Here's $5 for a small bag of kale chips (see "Cost," below.)

2.) Skill. It's taken me a while to learn to cook well enough that much of what I make is at least on par with (non-gourmet) restaurant food.

3.) Cost. Compare the beans with sugar to higher end -- organic, in particular -- varieties.

The truth is you can add enough corn syrup, fat and salt to pretty much any cheap low quality ingredient to make palatable. Often, the available or cheaper option is not the healthiest. I don't blame consumers for having to make that trade off.

Personally, to find products that I enjoy that aren't loaded with sugar beyond reason (29g vs an equally enjoyable 6g per serving?), I had to visit four shops. That's not something you should have to do for each food product you purchase.

Someone that doesn't go to those lengths certainly isn't stupid either.

See also: food desert

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

> There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

Incidentally, this also shows why democracy is flawed.

Well, there is one question you have forgotten to ask. How many people have YOU educated about this? If everyone spread the word and spent time educating others, the companies would lose money, and soon stop doing it.

It's easy to blame others.

Right on. The masses that can't be bothered to willingly switch on a couple neurons every now and again are the real problem.

We "the People" have unbelievable power once we unite behind an issue. Only problem is, the vast majority can't be bothered to unhinge their eyeballs from their newsfeeds for a moment and try and understand the world.

Capitalist corps are only happy to feed that behaviour with more happy-hormone-releasing crap.

Another explanation: EVERY can of beans at a mass supermarket like Safeway has the same ingredients. You have to go to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods to avoid the national brands. Many people don't have that option or choose to use it.

"Why does this happen? Obviously, sugar tastes good. That has to be why companies add it to all sorts of things."

There are more reasons. Googling "uses of sugar":

"Although the main reason for the use of sugar is its sweet taste, sugar has many other functions in food technology. The most important among these are that added sugar in foods acts as a sweetener, preservative, texture modifier, fermentation substrate, flavouring and colouring agent, bulking agent."

Ditto for pasta sauce. Difficult to find ones that don't have sugar. Only one at my grocery store despite a shelf full of various brands.

I make my own - start with a tin of decent quality tomatoes and go from there. No sugar needed.

Preferably tomatoes grown in volcanic soil, like San Marzanos.

It is well worth buying one can of several different brands of tomato sold in your locale, and making experimental taste-test batches with all other variables held constant. With good quality inputs, you can beat the pre-made jarred marinaras every single time, using nothing more than a very basic recipe and a minimum of cooking skill.

Exercise caution. Once you know how to make a good sauce, you will never be able to stand eating at Olive Garden again.

Bingo.

I've come to realise myself, cooking something very edible is not hard. Buy a physical cook book so as to not get distracted on the internet, and just try some things. The first couple tries at a new recipe might turn out slightly weird, so what? You'll still get the satisfaction of having produced something yourself, it won't kill you, and it'll be a whole lot healthier than ordering or microwaving fast food. Plus you'll know exactly what's in it because you put it there.

Should you ever not have time to stand around in the kitchen, a loaf of bread, some jam and ham should do it. Add in some bacon, spread, whatever, and you've got dinner ready to go in the time it takes to take all of that out of the fridge. Heck, slice a couple pickles! There's so many ways to eat well and tasty if you just try for a moment.

Though of course, not getting fucked over by your ingredients requires you to look at them before buying. Hoo-hah.

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

You know how that makes you sound? Like a 9/11-was-an-inside-job, "we never went to the moon" conspiracy theorist. "There can be only explanation: the majority people aren't as enlightened as I; wake up sheeple!"

But let's go with that: people are dumb. Assuming that to be true, are you arguing for or against regulating what goes into a can of refried beans? As you've already proven, people are not capable of making sense of nutritional labels, therefore it is not fair to put the onus on those who are incapable, I see no other option than to regulate the industry with heavy oversight for the good of those who are not as enlightened as you.

Just thinking out loud here, but what options open up to us if we don't assume we're smarter than everyone else?

The Reinheitsgebot Bavarian beer purity law [0] restricted the allowable ingredients for "beer" to water, barley, hops, and yeast.

US Federal Standards of Identity for bourbon restricts ingredients to at least 51% corn (Zea mays) in the mash, new charred oak barrels, and mandates alcohol content in the final product.

The specific type of bourbon traded as Tennessee Whiskey has additional requirements for charcoal filtering and geographical origin.

There is ample precedent for regulating the ingredients, processes, and geographic origins of food or beverage products using a particular product name.

It doesn't even need to have the force of regulatory law behind it. You could invent a trademark for frijoles refritos, and license it as a marketing aid to any manufacturer willing to meet your requirements.

Specify that the ingredients must be specific types of beans without their skins, chicken stock, onion, garlic, pork fat, salt, and a consistent spice mix which may include any herb from a pre-approved list. You could require different qualifiers for pinto beans (no qualifier, or "norteño"), black beans ("negro"), kidney beans ("rojo"), or subbing vegetable oil and vegetable stock for chicken broth and pork fat ("vegetariano").

And there you are. Just look for the trademarked logo on cans, and you can be assured that you are eating "real" refrito beans. In theory, this is no different from putting the UL logo on a tested appliance, or a Kosher-certifying logo on compliant foods. An independent food certification company can operate entirely on quality control inspectors, marketers, public relations flacks, and trademark lawyers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot

> Of course, the media wants as many consumers as possible, too, so calling most of their potential readers/viewers stupid is probably a bad strategy, even though it's the truth.

And this is where state sponsored media excels.

So many people concerned about imaginary covered up human rights abuses to see how all the other news gets reported in a much more informative way.

A person doesn't necessarily have to be dumb to fall for these traps. Consider if you had been at the grocery store, particularly exhausted from the day, and just wanted to grab some ingredients. Maybe today you don't notice the added sugar. Today your brain was just spent. Does that make you a dumb consumer all of a sudden?

Most of us average Joe's and Jane's have a lot to juggle in our heads at any given moment. Can I please be excused for not scrounging several stores for sugar free beans, palm oil free chocolate, free range chicken, ethically sourced coffee, etc.? I'm not dumb, it just happens to be that the beans with the sugar are right here in front of me, I have other things to do, and I value my time considerably more than I value this one ethical preference, at the moment.

Default and convenient choices are what consumers respond to. Producers responded to basic biological facts like needing sugar and salt and fat, and so now we're in a place where I can get a Big Mac more cheaply and easily than I can get a cold veggie sandwich. I'm not dumb, I'm busy.

Your explanation seems flawed.

Why do people play games with microtransactions?

Why are casino games mind-numbingly bland?

Companies do things that generate profit. Profit is generated by manipulating consumer behavior. Consumers aren't necessarily stupid for being exploited.

In fact, that's the whole point: their instinctive behavior is being exploited.

Why not both? If you're big and don't care about your consumer beyond their role as a source of money, maybe a stupid consumer is desirable? I think it just happens to be that almost anyone in a position of entrenched power, in government or industry, thinks they benefit from a stupid populace.

> most consumers are dumb

If only all consumers could be as smart as jensen123. Sigh.

Yamaha wants to sell you noise-canceling headphones, and a motorcycle.

But both of those things are good for you!

Although most people know Yamaha as a manufacturer of motor bikes and possibly electronics its origins are in manufacturing music instruments.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_Corporation

"Yamaha was established in 1887 as a piano and reed organ manufacturer by Torakusu Yamaha as Nippon Gakki Company, Limited (日本楽器製造株式会社 Nippon Gakki Seizō Kabushiki Kaisha?) (literally Japan Musical Instrument Manufacturing Corporation) in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture and was incorporated on October 12, 1897. The company's origins as a musical instrument manufacturer are still reflected today in the group's logo—a trio of interlocking tuning forks"

Today it's the world's largest manufacturer of music instruments. The range covers just about anything on which you can play a tune.

Branching into motorcycles and electronics happened only after WWII.

So, yeah, they probably know a thing or two about acoustics.

Edit : Better legibility

Those instruments are consistently good. I wouldn't have any apprehensions about picking up a Yamaha guitar.

Motor bikes can be musical instruments too. There is some yatsu in the Noda city area in Chiba, Japan who likes to ride his motorcycle down the Tsutsumidai road at wee hours in the morning, revving the throttle in neutral to play rhythmic, somewhat tuneful patterns with the engine.

I had a Yamaha piano and a Yamaha motorcycle growing up. I always thought that was really cool.

Microsoft sells productivity tools and videogames.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ7oht6TD9c

"let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories" Mickey Mouse

Diabetes is not always a byproduct of over consuming sugar and a company producing sugary snacks and diabetes pills does not force or even encourage over consumption of sugar.

I don't see what the actual problem is.

The leading cause of diabetes is poor diet. Nestle is selling you foods that if consumed in large quantities will absolutely result in you becoming a diabetic.

It's called vertical integration and it's not accidental.

That's their job - to sell legal products to those who want them. What happens to the purchased products is a matter for people's own assessment and capacity for self-control. What was it a McDonalds' guy told folk? Something along the lines "It's not my job to teach your kids to eat vegetables".

> if consumed in large quantities

And when consumed in moderation, has no adverse affect. Poor diet is you, not a company.

Nestle is simply going where the money is. If you need diabetes pills because of your poor decisions though, that is your fault.

You're right that responsibility ultimately lies in the individual, but people aren't silos. If advertising didn't work, people wouldn't do it. Some responsibility must be given to those who try to convince others to do unhealthy things.

Nestle also sells water, which if consumed in large quantities, will absolutely result in you being dead.

They also advertise it like crazy.

How are these two things meaningfully different?

Actually, they do encourage exactly that. Stating the obvious, the choices people make are a function of the choices available to them.

So people didn't over eat sugar until there were diabetes pills?

He's saying that people didn't overeat sugar until they were given sufficiently easy access to significant quantities of sugar to make it easy to overeat it.

So we should remove all choice that isn't considered safe? Who decides what is safe?

Safety is something you can actually measure.

Really, you don't see any problem here?

You said it yourself. It's not _always_ a (direct) byproduct of over consuming sugar. However, it often is.

No, diabetes is often a byproduct of choosing to over consume sugar. Nestle didn't make them diabetic, they did that to themselves.

There is no direct cause and effect, producing sugary snacks does not cause diabetes. People choose to over consume to the point they develop diabetes.

People's lack of self control created a market, Nestle wants to be one of the companies in that market.

Honest question: do you see nothing wrong with someone monetising other people's lack of self control?

Devil's advocate: why shoud they not do it? Unless every other food producer does the same, sugary foods will still be available but Nestle would lose out on the profits.

Perhaps we should create and enforce regulations to prevent all companies from preying on the very human lack of self control.

That's a good point, from a purely economics point of view it doesn't make sense to stop. Having said that, Nestle pulling out of selling sugary products entirely would dent the market hugely, but someone else would eventually fill the gap. The moral aspect is a whole other question...

If every food producer were to follow that dictum, no one would have to take responsibility. So everyone would be incentivized to break the rules.

And if anyone wanted to begin new a behavior harmful to others, they would only have to ensure others also do it.

Decisions have to made on values, not whether someone else is already doing it. If someone's getting away with a crime, it doesn't mean you get to do it, too. It still means neither of you should be doing it.

We don't accept that sort of rationale for anything else. I'll go shoplift some stuff (maybe steal some Nestlé products); other people are still going to steal whether I do or not, so I might as well not lose out on the profits.

There is a deep difference of power and control between the average consumer and a multinational food processing corporation. The argument of the burden being on individual responsibility you are trying to make can only be made if the consumer is not being aggressively misinformed about the limited choices of products available to them for the prices they can afford. The company in question has the resources to make their relationship with the target consumer a very asymmetrical one, and they are always positioned with more information and more leverage.

Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.

This almost implies that some people are born with a lack of self control? You can't just simplify it like that.

From birth, everything we process with our senses adds to our understanding of the world and our ability to navigate it. If Nestle has enough money to flood the market with information supporting themselves, how can you expect people to make the right choices? And remember, not everyone has the fortune of growing up in a balanced environment that allows them to evolve a rational way of thinking, so they aren't just gonna jump on HN and start doing some research.

You can't just take the first order approximation. You gotta do the full expansion, man.

Diabetes is a product of genetics. If you have the bad genes, and you overeat sugar, you will get diabetes. If you don't have the genes, overeating the sugar will still have bad longterm effects (fatty liver, etc) but you will most likely not get diabetes.

"does not force or even encourage over consumption of sugar."

Actually they do encourage you to eat a lot of sugar. Specially children. Their marketing campaigns are specially tailored to that objective. Just look at the cereal advertisements, most of their cereal brands have a lot of sugar in them.

If that is not encouraging over consumption of sugar I don't know what is...

Their marketing is designed to sell cereal. People unfortunately are happiest (short term) to consume sugary cereal. They really are.

I met a breakfast food operative in the supermarket once. I told him I thought his company should offer a low sugar version. He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell.

People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.

...extra tax for high-sugar products?

We tried a tax on fatty foods in Denmark and it was a huge mess. People would just drive to Germany to get the stuff, and managing it was an administrative nightmare: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/business/global/fat-tax-in...

That's like taxing it only in Idaho. Of course it must be done in an economic block, like the US or the EU or China.

Interesting anecdote, but

1. It's quite possible (though it's a huge rabbit hole we shouldn't plumb here) that they were taxing the wrong macronutrient entirely, that is to say, that fat on the body is more a factor of sugar going in than fat going in. So in addition to imposing costs it may have failed to give benefits (whereas had it worked to improve health outcomes maybe it would have been worth the costs of enforcement etc.)

2. The Danes taxing butter?!? That seems extremely odd given the dairy industry and culture. But I suppose major kudos for being able to overcome such prior biases to even run the experiment.

So they're not encouraging people to consume sugary stuff, they're encouraging people to consume a category of food where people prefer sugary stuff?

This is about as sensible as saying that Krispy Kreme isn't pushing sugary foods, people just happen to prefer donuts with lots of sugar in them.

What would you have Krispy Kreme do? Pivot to Kimchi Kombucha?

I don't know. I just think that if we're going to talk about what companies encourage customers to do through their marketing, we should be straight about it.

The market forces companies to peddle garbage to children who generally lack the capacity to make a healthy informed decision in the face of multimillion dollar campaigns designed to get them to consume sugary cereal?

> He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell. People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.

This sounds a little too just-so.

> peddle garbage to children who generally lack the capacity to make a healthy informed decision

I don't know many kids that do the shopping :)

It's parents that choose the sugary breakfast cereals for their children. I think many have the capacity to make a healthy, informed decision, but for some reason they do not. Marketing is likely at least part of the reason.

How many cereal advertisements do you see marketing towards parents vs their children?

Companies know they influence purchasing decisions through the manipulation of children.

"Look, we're not encouraging over-consumption of sugar. It's just that we know that people will over-consume sugar, and we make food packed with sugar, and we market it to those people."

I'm sure they'd say something like that, but it is false. People were not eating gobs of sugar for breakfast until someone came up with sweetened breakfast cereal and marketed it.

I used to eat a lot of sweets when I was young. Not for breakfast, because that's not the customary here, but at all other times. I liked that stuff. As I grew older, I lost my taste for all that. I have seen this pattern in so many other people too. Kids like sweet stuff. As long as they are active and are in the normal weight range, I don't see any reason to discourage it either, except at night, after brushing teeth.

Children like sweets more than adults, sure, but the amount of sugar in the average diet is extremely high compared to like a century ago.

> As long as they are active and are in the normal weight range, I don't see any reason to discourage it either

Diabetes is a pretty good reason.

Where is the research linking T2DM to sugar consumption in active, normal-weight people?

Hardly. Sugar has been made the scapegoat. Many things contribute to diabetes, sugar is but one among them. Meat has been shown to contribute significantly[0]. If you dig into it further, you'll see study after study blaming "normal" amounts of meat consumption as a factor for an increased risk of diabetes. And yet, few people want to give it any thought.

[0] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/9/2108.full

Did that study control for refined carb intake?

People who eat a lot of processed meat also tend to eat a lot of refined carbs...

Didn't see anything mentioned in the results:

> These results remained significant after further adjustment for intakes of dietary fiber, magnesium, glycemic load, and total fat. Intakes of total cholesterol, animal protein, and heme iron were also significantly associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.

Quoting from their results

> Furthermore, total red meat intake was positively associated with total energy intake, intakes of all fatty acids, cholesterol, and protein but inversely associated with dietary carbohydrate, fiber, magnesium intakes, and glycemic load. Similar associations were observed for total meat and processed meat.

and also

> In the age- and energy-adjusted models, total red meat and processed meat were significantly associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes

This study does not go into refined carbs, but it does adjust for total energy. Don't focus on just this one paper. They this is just one of many such papers. The link between meat and diabetes is well established at this point.

Here's a meta analysis for example: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/121/21/2271.full

> Red meat intake was not associated with CHD (n=4 studies; relative risk per 100-g serving per day=1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.81 to 1.23; P for heterogeneity=0.36) or diabetes mellitus (n=5; relative risk=1.16; 95% confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.46; P=0.25). Conversely, processed meat intake was associated with 42% higher risk of CHD (n=5; relative risk per 50-g serving per day=1.42; 95% confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.89; P=0.04) and 19% higher risk of diabetes mellitus (n=7; relative risk=1.19; 95% confidence interval, 1.11 to 1.27; P<0.001). Associations were intermediate for total meat intake.

Note that "processed meat" means any method of extending shelf-life like smoking, curing, adding salt or preservatives, etc. but excludes freezing. None of the the meat-eaters I have known (including myself) really differentiate between processed and unprocessed meat when it comes to their diet.

Edit: All these studies blame just processed meat at the moment. But keep in mind that all we were discussing so far was diabetes. There are more than enough good reasons to avoid all animal-based food, including dairy. I will not go into that now. My intention was to show that sugar has been made the scapegoat for diabetes. There are plenty of other diseases that sugar does not contribute to, but meat does.

Marketing potentially harmful products to children should simply not be allowed. It is well-accepted that children lack the experience and power of judgement to properly evaluate marketing claims.

A product sold as breakfast, that consists of 25% sugar, absolutely qualifies as harmful.

I dislike the idea of solving this via more regulation. Children don't decide what they eat, their parents do. So either the parents don't care about the health of their children (hard to believe), or they're not properly educated about healthy nutrition.

Or they are exhausted from working all hours because the banks create credit from thin air to maximize rent extraction and lack the willpower to argue with their children every shopping trip.

I have kids, it's a constant battle even though we have no TV and I'm fortunate enough to have enough time to educate them. I'm constantly fighting with a whole room of people who are disgusting scumbags with access to millions of advertising spend.

Most likely the latter, as well as advertising to children to use them as emotional leverage against the parents.

The amount of discipline a parent (limited by the time and willpower a parent can input into the process) can impose is finite. Once we accept this hypothesis, we can see how usual norms are imposed by parental discipline plus non-parental discipline. A parent going against a norm will have to use an extraordinary amount of time and willpower to impose his unconventional norm, as he will lack the enforcement of the non-parent actors. Eating sugary cereal is a societal norm in today's developed countries. Therefore, a parent wishing to diverge from this norm would have to expend an extraordinary effort.

He's also going against the professionals who already succeeded in imposing the norm and simply have to maintain it today.

Raising children is hard enough without segments of society actively fighting against you.

As a parent I would agree that there is little education. Health professionals (in the UK) don't seem to care. Products you think are safe are then found out to be harmful in other ways.

I don't think education is the silver bullet, but habit forming is. For example, what is the habit you resort to when deprived of sleep, late for work and kids are throwing a tantrum? Sometimes that habit lies in preparation, something most of are are not very good at.

Do you also think all marketing for alcohol should be banned? It is "well-accepted" that many adults lack the judgement necessary to prevent over-consumption of alcohol.

A product designed to impair judgement absolutely qualifies as harmful.

How about McDonalds? Or Coca-Cola? Should we just ban all marketing because we're no longer adept at making responsible decisions for ourselves and our children?

As a CEO in the US you're legally obligated to maximize profits. In that sense I don't see this as a problem with Nestle, more so the greater system in which Nestle sits.

Is this really true?

Over here (EU), the purpose of a corporation does not have to be maximising profit (although that is the default) and CEO does not have to use every legal method to maximize profit, at all costs.

Even in the US, it is not really true. The CEO is not allowed to unreasonably undermine the company's profitability, but they are allowed nearly unlimited business judgement. As long as they can come up with any remotely plausible business justification for their actions, no court in the US will stop them.

The CEO of Nestle could say something as simple as "acting in this manner will be perceived negatively and will harm our future sales" and they would be safe from legal action.

That's not true, you're legally obligated not to defraud the company but beyond that you can do whatever the board lets you do.

Nestlé is Swiss.

When do you draw the line of "encouraging" and "this is what people actually want." I know that sugary cereals are bad for me, no one is encouraging me to eat them, but sometimes I really want Fruity Pebbles. The fact is that kids like sugary cereals, adults like sugary cereals, and a company is there to provide that product. I see nothing wrong with that.

But let's also point out that fact that diabetes is -not- caused by sugar consumption itself. There is a genetic strain, and there is a strain caused by obesity. Does sugar lead to obesity? Yes, it can, but it does not directly cause diabetes. This is an important distinction.

> a company producing sugary snacks and diabetes pills does not force or even encourage over consumption of sugar

First of all, it is going a bit far to say they don't encourage over consumption of sugar. Nestle dropped a couple of billion on advertising last year [1], and that is primarily sugary food, or at least food that's broadly unhealthy.

Secondly, what about the tobacco companies? They did not force anyone to consume their products either; but with strict limiting of their marketing, especially to young children, the rate of smoking has gone down a lot in the States.

Studies show that willpower is a limited resource [2]. If you are being assaulted on all sides by a barrage of advertising, cheap snacks on display, and have been marketed to from your childhood, you are going to have a much harder time abstaining from these products.

I understand, or at least guess that you are putting forth a point of personal responsibility here – "Hey, don't eat those Hot Pockets, and you will be all good". But there are a ton of obstacles to that. These large food companies have pretty much ensured that most "convenience" stores carry only their products, and have little to no fresh produce or what you would consider "healthy" food. If you live in a poor neighborhood, a lot of times the only place that sells produce is located really far away, like 5 or 10 miles.

Thus, for some people it is clearly easier to eat healthy, and maybe some of that is on account of their socioeconomic class, current health, etc. But extrapolating that to all people should be a bit more nuanced, and maybe these companies' marketing should be a bit more regulated.

------------------

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/286531/nestle-advertising...

[2] https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/willpower-limited-resource.pd...

Even considerung a possible connection I don't see a problem. That's how business works.

"I don't see a problem with the status quo. That's just how the world works."

The foods that Nestle sells are unprecedented in history, they are engineered to be much more palatable than normal whole foods. It's not surprising that people have a hard time eating them moderately.

> Diabetes is not always a byproduct of over consuming sugar

Refined carbs in general are the big issue, but sugar in particular is a very large part of the problem. It's difficult to buy any processed food that doesn't contain sugar these days.

> or even encourage over consumption of sugar

They market sugar-laden foods to children, such as sickly-sweet breakfast cereals - IMO they do encourage over consumption of sugar.

> I don't see what the actual problem is

I think the problem with Nestle doing both of these things is that it creates a pretty clear conflict of interest - to maximise revenue, they need to sell as many sugar laden products as they can, so they can sell more much diabetes medication.

> Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

...and they want to "own" the water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_pb6r8VNWk

Of course water is not a "human right" - else whom can I sue for being thirsty?

This is the worst offense. The iPodization of water is real. I try to avoid buying water whenever I can. If people like us who have a voice will just quietly switch to bottled water or very expensive home filtration, then we will have failed our civic duty.

Almost everywhere I travel outside of NYC the question pops up: is tap water safe to drink? New York is notoriously proud of and vocal about this local amenity. Achieving a universal standard in this area would go a long way towards putting a significant dent in the bottled water scam.

> is tap water safe to drink?

As someone who lives across the pond, it never ceases to amaze me that this question needs to be asked at all. Is tap water safe to drink? I wouldn't take "no" as an answer unless I'm in some remote third-world country that has known issues with the availability of drinking water. And yet...

Not saying tap water here tastes great everywhere (far from that), but you can be pretty sure it won't cause you any physical harm.

Good for you, but this is what the International Association for Medical Assistance to Travellers has to say about Italy:

> Drinking water is chlorinated and has no ill effect on the local population. However, some strains of e. coli (naturally occurring bacteria found in your gastro-intestinal system) may be present in very small concentrations in the local water supply. Some local strains are different than those that you may be used to, and may cause diarrhea in travellers since immunity is not developed as a result of short-term exposure. Using bottled water for the first few weeks will help you adjust and decrease the chance of traveller's diarrhea.

https://www.iamat.org/country/italy/risk/food-water-safety-o...

Poking around, the same warning is in place for Spain and Portugal.

I always get bottled water when travelling, although I tend to get the cheap local or store brand water. A few euros is really cheap anti-diarrhea insurance, and it tastes a lot better than chlorinated water, too.

Sure, that's the same pretty much anywhere - the water is safe when you're used to it, when moving you're better off giving yourself a couple of weeks to adjust.

This is not a case of "good for you", it's just that I find it sad that locals of a developed country have to choose to drink bottled water over tap water because the latter could harm their health.

That being said, for travelers it sure might take a while to adjust to local conditions. I never had such problems when traveling to Spain, Austria, France, Hungary and Slovenia, but I do understand that each body copes differently with things it's not used to.

By outside of NYC do you mean just elsewhere in the USA? I didn't realize the situation was that bad in the USA, outside of places such as Flint.

I'm from the UK, and this question never comes up anywhere in the country (I'm aware of the scale differences we're talking about)- if you travel anywhere, you can drink the tap water.

Yes. I'm ashamed to admit that we don't fluoridate our water across the Hudson river.

While I'll never admit this in person in front of a New Yorker, water does taste better in the city.

This is not to take away from the fact that water here is mostly safe to drink. There was an incident earlier this year with a broken mains flooding Hoboken which left a little bit to be desired in terms of communication. However, overall I'm fairly satisfied with the water here. I imagine it is the same idiot antivaxxers who don't want fluoride in water but I haven't looked into it.

I wouldn't be so quick to call others idiots.

Fluoridation has absolutely nothing to do with taste.

The reason NYC's water tastes better than NJ's is simply that it comes from a different source.

The water is the USA is highly regulated and safe to drink. Flint was a dramatic outlier which resulted in criminal charges for those involved.

Municipal water supply has stricter standards than bottled water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Drinking_Water_Act

@newjersey In the UK we only fouridate a few areas, mostly it's only good old chlorine that we add.

Maps:

http://bfsweb.org/onemillion/09%20One%20in%20a%20Million%20-...

"Brawndo, the thirst mutilator"

That was my first thought when I saw the headline. Water is a human need.

All that out, however, I do actually agree with some of what is being done. I'd seriously prefer to eat a gummy candy than swallow a pill - no matter how small a pill is, I can only swallow one at a time. Patients with dementia get crushed medicines mixed with jelly or another substance here - and a pre-mixed solution of some sort would be easier on everyone. It'd be a bonus if we can have the extended release stuff in edible form. Children wouldn't mind taking medicines so much.

I just wish it weren't what I consider evil people (from the water stuff) doing it.

People in the US already take about 10x too much medicine. Not sure making it easier is a good social goal.

Agreed. Some health problems are reversed by making healthy diet and lifestyle changes.

If your body is unhealthy because you eat too much sugar and refined carbs, and you take a pill for that, you now have two problems.

Like I said before - that is a different problem. People need to have enough money to eat well without sacrificing electricity. Plus they need transportation or nearby grocery stores with affordable prices... in addition to the time and ability to cook at home.

How, exactly, does making needed medications help with any of those issues?

I seriously don't think people that are sick need to suffer to take their medicines, especially since a good number of sicknesses are not because of an unhealthy lifestyle. In the case of children, they have no control over that in any case.

I'm not sure it is that high, but doctors do tend to prescribe more instead of saying "no, you can't have the antibiotic for your cold". Part of this is a regulatory issue as well - I walk into a pharmacy here in Norway and you have to ask for some of the medicines, even though they are available without prescription. In the states it was different - basically no regulation. On top of the fact that medicine in the states is most definitely a consumer good paid for by the individual... in universal coverage, it is a bonus not to over-prescribe medicines and to make sure that those that need medication take care of themselves as they should so that costs don't go up - and people don't need more medication.

Making medicines easier to take doesn't actually address any of this outside of making it slightly easier for those on medication to take it as they should so that their conditions don't get worse.

> Children wouldn't mind taking medicines so much.

This assumes children can only tolerate maximally-sweet foods like fruit juices, soda, cookies and candy. This fundamental assumption that kids won't eat healthy foods is very dangerous.

Not really. I'm assuming most children cannot swallow pills and that most chewables and liquids taste badly.

It is pretty easy to get children to eat healthily - my nieces and nephew does so. But if the medicine actually tastes of a strawberry or carrot or piece of bread rather than a weird chemical taste, some of the struggle would be over with.

Can we stop this "Nestlé thinks water isn't a human right" BS already?

http://www.nestle.com/ask-nestle/human-rights/answers/nestle...

I'm far from being a fan of Nestlé, but there are better arguments against their conduct than a single quote from the CEO years ago, misquoted and out of context.

They do think it is their right to buy publicly owned municipality water and then sell it back to the public.

I mean with soda at least they are putting a few cents per gallon into it.

There should be a truth-in-advertising law they makes the bottle labels say "filtered publicly owned water $1".

In my opinion, the blaming is very one-sided. I mean what kind of municipality sells such rights to a private entity?

The one that believes in trickle down economics!

Aquafina (Pepsi) and Desani (Coke) bottled water are municipal tap water that has been filtered. The source of the water is usually on the label.

The UK sold all it's water companies a while back. It sort of worked out but the bills went up.

There should be a truth-in-advertising law

Aren't there? I'm sure I've seen the source of the water printed on the water bottles.

The location/font-size for the brand and the source need to be switched if it is just water.

Speaking of which, so we know some water sources but it is now legal to not mention food sources on many products.

No one is showing the clip of what he actually said, which is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWkA-uAPXCE#t=2m10s

He does absolutely say that "NGOs bang on about water being declared a human right", at the time when he is relaxed, and even bringing up some Austrian folk song about water. He says absolutely nothing about limits, or just being careful.

The page you linked is a great example of corporate damage control. I tend to trust what people say when they are being candid over what they say on a PR page.

That video cuts off right before Brabeck states his own view. Thanks for proving my point that his quote is often taken out of context. Here's a longer one

https://youtu.be/7iGj4GpAbTM?t=192

He states that he thinks it would be better to give water a price so that we are aware of its value, and take specific measures to provide access to water to people who can't afford it. Not the worst idea ever to fight water waste.

I doubt people in third-world countries are unaware of the value of clean water.

Oh come on. He is clearly referring to the problem of water being wasted as a valueless common good, mostly in the western world. And indeed, what is happening for instance in California right now can be seen as tragedy of commons problem (see e.g. http://legal-planet.org/2015/07/13/tragedy-of-the-commons-ca...)

But sure, if you need to confirm the BigCo CEO as incarnation of Satan, go ahead...

>valueless common good, mostly in the western world

I have to pay for tap water though.

>But sure, if you need to confirm the BigCo CEO as incarnation of Satan, go ahead...

You don't need Satan when you've got a BigCo CEO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestle_boycott

> Oh come on.

As long as we are using this form of persuasion – come on, this is the company that is trying to say it has rights to collect water from Strawberry Canyon based on a claim from 1865 – http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2016/05/07/n...

How on earth can you think they are a socially responsible company committed to avoiding water wastage?

Thanks for linking a more complete video. However, I don't understand how the extra context absolves him. In fact, it shows more clearly that he is of the "put a price on everything" (implicit: and then we can sell it at that price) worldview.

Notice that he clearly calls water a "foodstuff" before talking about giving it a price. He then follows it up by saying "The biggest social responsibility of any CEO is to maintain and ensure the successful and profitable future of his enterprise".

Somehow I don't think water waste and access for needy people is particularly important to him. At minimum, I would at least say that he is mildly in opposition to access to clean drinking water being declared a fundamental right instead of a product to be sold. This makes perfect sense, because it would eliminate or heavily impact Nestlé's water business if every country in the world had clean drinking water.

That's fascinating. I've been boycotting Nestlé for many years based on documentaries and articles in German-language media. I've just tried to dig up some English articles for the first time, but they are much harder to find.

Compare the German-language version of Nestlé criticism on water:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé#Trinkwasser

...to the English one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé#Bottled_water

There was even a documentary on German public TV recently, pretty cheesy stuff, but starting at 32:49 the journalists are interviewing local politicians in Mexico about a Nestlé selling water from local reserves:

http://www.daserste.de/information/ratgeber-service/montagsc...

So while I can't translate all this content right now, the tl;dr is that in practise, Nestlé does not seem to believe in water as a human right. Otherwise, why sell water from areas where it is already scarce?

> Nestlé does not seem to believe in water as a human right. Otherwise, why sell water from areas where it is already scarce?

Selling is often the best way to manage scarce resources, particularly in the presence of a government that cannot be trusted to effectively ration them.

Most reasonable people don't object to companies selling food or clothing.

If by "manage" you mean "make sure the scarce resource goes to the highest bidder". That's not the same as maximizing overall happiness, because purchasing power ≠ capacity for happiness. In fact it's often the reverse. The person who can get the most happiness from a glass of water might be the least able to afford it.

Of course people object to companies selling food when it is scarce. Many reasonable people (governments included) are trying to stop the overfishing of the oceans or poaching of endangered animals.

Is there an example of a scarce resource that was better off being managed by company than a government?

One thing is that selling water from some place enables the source to be developed. E.g. enable better water treatment technology and eliminate losses. It may very well actually improve availability of water.

Sale of drinking water is not really much of a problem, anywhere; the amounts consumed by drinking are small compared to everything else, and the development of treatment capability may well offset them.

Selling water in bottles is a problem because of the bottles (trash, materials, energy), but that is another thing. Supplying water to other uses (industry, agriculture) is a problem because the amounts are vastly bigger than with drinking water.

To be honest, I trust the English Wikipedia here more than the German...

Why exactly should I believe anything Nestlé's marketing department says?

In the video the CEO says roughly people should have a right to 50-100L of clean water but not the right to fill a swimming pool because there isn't always enough for everyone to do that, which seems not unreasonable.

It's the Wall-e Scenario. If we can find a way to continue to consume cheap, shelf-stable, nutrient-dense food; while at the same time repairing our bodies from the side effects, we can be fat blobs living and consuming and growing the economy.

And whether that's unilaterally a bad thing may not be a settled question. The top 5 drugs in the US[1] are remedies for problems caused by advanced society - a statin, antacid, blood thinner, inhaler and antidepressant. They enable many of the affordances we provide for ourselves.

[1]http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20110420/the-10-mo...

curious why an inhaler is something that is required by an advanced society. I'm asthmatic, but aside from that relatively healthy (not overweight, exercise regularly, eat well-ish, no othe major medical conditions). While my asthma definitely isn't helped if I'm inhaling diesel fumes, I'm far more likely to haven an exercise induced attack.

Likewise I am not effected by my asthma unless exercising and there doesn't seem to be any difference whether I'm living in a polluted city or in the countryside.

Air pollution (outdoor as well as indoor - the offgassing from the myriad synthetic materials found in construction and furnishings these days) is only one trigger of asthma and not the only one exacerbated by modern society.

Many experts have theorized changes in our microbiota are partly responsible for the general rise in asthma over the past decades. That would include things like over-sanitation, increased C sections, antibiotics, gut flora-killing diet, etc. http://www.everydayhealth.com/asthma-pictures/8-expert-theor...

Asthma used to be a lot worse until we figured out how to avoid open fire in living spaces. So arguably, air pollution is currently much less of a problem compared to almost any time since we learned to make fire.

The incidence of asthma has increased dramatically in the last several decades, especially in cities.

It would evidently be bad for people to be blobs of fat, remember that in WALL-E they couldn't even stand up.

That level of physical impairment is awful whether you're mortally ill or not.

There is "The Futurological Congress" scenario for this ;)

Why? If I value eating whatever I like above having a small waist, why would it be bad for me to be a blob of fat? The only reason I should lose weight is for health reasons, but if there's a magic pill that would remove that reason, then why should I care?

I kind of agree with you, but I don't think it's immediately obvious.

For example design / civil engineering. Unless we can adjust literally everything to be supported by arbitrary-width any-direction conveyor belt system, we'll have issues with transport. Unless we can easily sell devices that are adaptable to any body shape/position (this goes from "screen for fat fingers" to "can't reach the panel on the wall"), we'll have issues with interfaces. And so on - this applies to thousands of ideas.

We already see those 2 problems right now: Existing issues about how to handle people who don't fit in economy seat on a plane without disturbing the next person. Smartphone (and previously calculator) design doesn't work for people with bloby fingers.

We barely started to make essential services available to disabled people who don't actually have a choice of moving on their own, or read, or... If we can't handle that special case, I don't think we can easily handle those self-inflicted issues as a norm.

Broadly, your argument sounds like "people shouldn't become voluntarily disabled because society isn't very good at accommodating disabled people".

I feel like we'd become better at accommodating disabled people if there were more of them. And that would be good for people who don't have a choice about their disability.

As an example, "large screens for fat fingers" also sounds good for people with poor motor control.

Sure, we'd adjust - we'd have to. But that can be said about every possible change. The level of oceans raises 5m - we'd also adjust. It doesn't mean it's something that makes sense to prepare for right now.

It's not like we don't accommodate disabled people because we hate them. It's because it needs serious redesign everywhere. If every other person became voluntarily disabled today's cities would become unusable. It would likely have a social split between people moving out to suburbs and flat towns and active people who can use existing dense infrastructure. It would have high impact on taxation to support the change. It would have ripple effect on everything.

Now, would this be a net positive change just because we also improved life for those naturally disabled?

There is no "magic pill" for some of the issues associated with massive obesity. One issue you can get is obstructive sleep apnea where you're so fat your tongue blocks your throat at night, and you can't breathe. This eventually leads to pulmonary hypertension and heart failure. You can "fix" this with a CPAP machine, but it's not pleasant. Another issue is that you can be so fat that your chest muscles aren't strong enough to allow you to breathe. There's no real fix for this other than losing weight.

Joint pain and reduced mobility are also issues with obesity.

Lets assume that all the physical health problems are solvable with a magic pill, even if this is 500 years in the future.

Is there an intrinsic, rather than pragmatic, reason why mass obesity would be a bad thing? To use the given WALL-E example, what would be so bad about living in that world?

WALL-E is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the last few survivors who escape to space become lazy and ignorant. When they return to Earth at the end of the movie, they finally realize how much they had lost, such as the ability to dance.

For such a magic pill to exist would be wonderful and I'd love to have that option, but WALL-E as an example undermines your argument...

Being a blob of fat is a great thing: you're contributing a ton to GDP, you're completely dependent on others for physical tasks, requiring more services, contributing to GDP even further and you'll die before retirement, thus saving society from having to pay you Social Security.

It's not for me, personally, but I'd love if we had more blobs of fat! I'd maybe even start a fat blob washing company!

You probably like breathing too.

Your link didn't work for me. I think this is the one:

http://www.webmd.com/news/20110420/the-10-most-prescribed-dr...

It's also should be noted those top five are "[t]he 10 drugs on which we spent the most..." The most prescribed are for somewhat different but overlapping conditions.

I'm curious how the final to drugs you've listed are for problems caused by advanced society. I can sort of see where you may be coming from regarding asthma but not antidepressants.

Agreed, considering many advanced societies don't take nearly as many drugs as we in the US do.

Regarding asthma: it is currently considered to be an auto-immune disorder. The latest theory I read is that the lungs need to develop their own resistance to infection; more specifically, developing lungs need exposure to hazards to tune the immune system and prevent overreactions of the immune system later [1].

Regarding antidepressants: there exist strong links between depression and stress. Current society is arguably more hectic and stressful than what we've had before, but I'm not sure if that is fixable (it is, however, one of the reasons I use an ad-blocker).

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/06/140606091157.h...

Interesting theory on asthma. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was one of those things that just gets diagnosed a lot more than in the past. For example I've been diagnosed since I was around 10 but despite it being quite bad when I exercise I rarely use medication and have never had an attack. I get out of breath much more easily than a regular person but I'm guessing in the past it just wouldn't have been diagnosed as there was really no episode that led to the diagnosis other than the doctor measuring the strength of my breath during a routine visit I believe.

We will probably become fatter and at the same time remain very unhappy about it. People don't get sexually attracted by fat people.

I know this may come as a shock, but any one person's specific sexual preferences aren't always universal.

And yet he's right - sexual attractiveness of fat/obese people is more of a fetish, then an evolutionary preference.

Another thing is also "that's all I can get".

An evolutionary argument could be made either way:

* overweight/obesity signals access to food or ability to sustain oneself (implying also being able to sustain offspring)

* underweight could act as a handicap (showing off ability to remain on par with more well-fed competitors)

The rational thing to prefer in a mate would obviously be a "healthy body" (i.e. neither underweight nor overweight, with moderate muscle build) but it's also obvious from any good luck at human societies that that isn't always the beauty ideal.

Talking of beauty ideals: on a less than evolutionary timescale we can see shifts in preference of tan or pale skin (e.g. historically fair skin was often considered more beautiful because it signalled wealth and not having to expose your skin to the elements).

There are certainly fetishes for all aspects and variations of the human physique but blanket labelling a preference for overweight/obese body shapes a fetish seems a bit subjective -- especially if you consider that as a technical term a fetish doesn't simply refer to something you like but something you are attracted to instead of a sexual partner (as a whole).

I was writing in a general sense. You don't see many fat models, do you?

> In a 2013 review of published research, scientists affiliated with France’s national scientific institute wrote that sugar and sweets “can not only substitute [for] addictive drugs, like cocaine, but can even be more rewarding and attractive.” Although sugar is “clearly not as behaviorally and psychologically toxic,” cravings for it can be just as intense, they said.

So... how do we measure behavioral and psychological toxicity? What does that actually mean?

Feels like they're trying to escape cognitive dissonance with weasel words here.

i see the following difference here:

craving - how long you can resist consuming the substance giving for example $1K/per minute reward for every minute you resist :) It seems that they are saying that cocaine and sweets are the same.

behavioral and psychological toxicity - the "bad" consequences, internal and external, associated with the habit of consumption of the substance. We do know that these consequences are different between cocaine and sweets.

Thanks for the reply, but this still doesn't clarify anything... what is "behavioral and psychological toxicity"? I was under the impression that the "bad consequences" of these drugs was the risk of damage to the body, but the phrasing implies that they're not talking about physical/physiological toxicity. So what's left? Does using cocaine turn you into an asshole or something? What behavioral/psychological changes are there beyond those associated with the regular consumption of any addictive substance?

> What behavioral/psychological changes are there beyond those associated with the regular consumption of any addictive substance?

Not many, and that's precisely the point: in terms of additivity, the neural receptors involved are essentially the same as those involved in other drugs; and in terms of toxicity, it's metabolized essentially the same as alcohol. Give a fruit juice or a whisky to a 4-year old, and it's about the same (minus the dizzy high of/c).

I agree, which is why I was trying to point out that the authors were using this BS idea of "behavioral/psychological toxicity" to try to explain why sugar wasn't really the same kind of thing as cocaine or other addictive drugs.

I'm annoyed that they shied away from this equivalence, but not because I want people to treat sugar like it's an addictive drug... I want people to recognize that being addicted to something (like sugar or cocaine or alcohol or coffee) is not the great evil it's made out to be, and to realize that our drug laws are completely incoherent. The authors use weasel words to avoid equating sugar and cocaine because then people would wonder why one is legal/normalized and the other is illegal/stigmatized. They have to find some way to maintain the distinction.

"On Oct 18 the US company Genzyme announced it had formalised an agreement to acquire Cell Genesys for approximately US$350 million. This move follows an agreement by the pharmaceutical division of Japan Tobacco, the world's third-largest tobacco company, to purchase the rights to therapeutic and preventive lung-cancer vaccines under development by Cell Genesys and another American biotechnology company, Corixa. If the vaccines are approved, Japan Tobacco will find itself in the unusual position of marketing products that cause, prevent, and treat the same disease."

Murray, S. (1999) Kill or cure, confused messages from Japan Tobacco. The Lancet, 354(9188), p.1456.

Why not both? It's an arms race. Why not supply both sides?

What, let a company supply a substance to intentionally harm people so they can sell them a cure?

I can see that going down well in other industries. The automobile industry can engineer metal fatigue into their axle joints and sell you replacements. Microsoft can build bugs into Windows and sell you critical updates to fix the flaw. Chair makers can sell you chairs with legs attached by screws that are slightly too short so they can sell you more screws of the correct size to allow you to remain safely seated...

I guess it would stimulate the economy.

They already do this is a more ethical way. Planned obsolesce and all of that. They know it's going to fail in 10 years when they sell it to you with a 5 year lease. Windows has bugs and they will fix some of them in the next release for sure, every time. You can sue for certain things and also bring the government down on them so I guess that's most likely what keeps them from doing more outrageously nefarious things.

Yeah, I did factor that into consideration. However, planned obsolescence is fairly unethical also and many European nations are legislating to force companies into stating how long they believe their products should last for. And in Australia our consumer law deliberately uses the word "reasonable" to prevent companies from setting arbitrary time limits on product warranty specifically to limit unreasonable attempts at planned obsolescence.

In terms of Windows having bugs - unless you are a dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist who hates everything Microsoft stands for then it's fairly self evident that Microsoft doesn't intentionally introduce bugs into their products.

But a Tobacco company exists solely to hook their customers on their products. There sure is planned obsolescence, but the ones who they plan on becoming obsolete and thus discarded are their customers!

"let a company supply a substance to intentionally harm people"

Isn't that just a loonie interpretation? Making Butterfingers available for sale don't "intentionally harm" anyone. Surely you're not working on an "attractive nuisance" sort of legal theory here.

List me all the positive health qualities of cigarettes and I'll see if I can give you a fuller answer.

P.S. If you are smoking Butterfingers you are doing it wrong.

"What, let a company supply a substance to intentionally harm people so they can sell them a cure?"

Let's not forget our history here, since it wasn't exactly all that long ago. For decades, the consensus has been that the root cause of dietary issues is excessive fat in the diet, not sugar. Sugar was on the top of the food pyramid not because it was "bad" for you, but merely because it displaced other better things. I've been flame-roasted on HN in the last few years for being on the anti-sugar side, because consensus science and official government positions were strongly against the idea. It still isn't even the consensus today that sugar is the problem.

(My read on the current situation is that the evidence strongly indicates that sugar is a major problem, though probably not the only one, and that the government is moving as quickly as it can to adjust its recommendations while never having to admit they were in any way wrong, which is a process that takes many, many years of little slight tweaks so that at every point they have cover to claim this is what they were saying all along. Such moral cowardice where they'd rather let millions of people continue hurting and dying rather than take even a hint of responsibility is why I don't take my scientific cues from the government and recommend against anyone else doing it either.)

Trying to show that Nestle is "deliberately harming" people would require basically claiming that they should have known all nutrition science and government position was wrong and to some extent is wrong, since treating "Sugar is bad" as consensus is still premature!

(The mercy is that nobody has ever said it's good for you, unlike transfats, so nobody really looks at you too weirdly if you drop it out of your diet.)

the root cause of dietary issues is excessive fat in the diet, not sugar.

Anything excessive in the diet will lead to gaining weight and eventually to obesity.

I can not say which will lead to diabetes faster, consuming extra 1000 calories daily in fat or in sugar, but in terms of fat gain results will be similar.

The government recommendations are most unfortunate, as they concentrate on macronutrients. So when *fat is bad" people will start eating sugary snacks, and when eventually it changes to "sugar is bad", fat will be added to everything instead of sugar.

It would be more positive to suggest eating more whole, unprocessed foods, but I'm sure political issues will never allow that.

Do you think you're disagreeing with me somehow? My post was about history. Giving me an example of someone concretely stating some modern opinion doesn't change history. Even if you are totally correct, which I do not stipulate, you're opinions are still recent.

Having made sure to stay focused on my core point, I'm going to point out that you're basically begging the question. The model of diabetes as unrelated to the form of incoming calories is the standard model, and that is specifically what is being questioned. Basically just reiterating the standard model isn't really an argument. And it's not that hard to imagine that sugar really is related when we are discussing the mechanism the body uses to regulate sugar. Specifically sugar, the pancreas is not responsible for regulating some sort of ontological "generic obesity particles".

Do you think you're disagreeing with me somehow?

Probably. I think the following is still controversial:

My read on the current situation is that the evidence strongly indicates that sugar is a major problem

There are multiple possible causes, or a combination of any number of such causes

- Excessive sugar

- Excessive fat

- Combination of fat and sugar

- Excessive calories

What is the root cause? I currently tend to think that the problem started to really accelerate when a lot of processed foods manufactured to be extremely palatable by hitting just the right combination of fat and sugar, entered the market.

For references, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food) and the book "Salt, Sugar, Fat" by Michael Moss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Moss

This whole thing reminds me of a relevant paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Your link reminded me of this tradition,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch

"In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished."

Nestle is trying to avoid the trap Coke and McDonalds fell into: Only offering unhealthy food choices and loosing the young generation of health-conscious consumers. They can't go the Wholefoods way since organic is inherently more expensive and harder to scale. Nestle is a food-tech company that wants to feed the globe. Now they try to do it in a more healthy way. I don't know why Bloomberg is so negative about that.

One of the supplements shown in the article is Deplin, which contains L-methylfolate, and supposedly helps with depression.

Any ideas on how this supplement works? And how many people would benefit from it?

The supplement works best for those with an MTHFR gene defect, where the body does not create enough 5-MTHF (L-methylfolate). I have c677t heterozygous type mutation and I take 5mg of a generic brand. It helps with methylation process which is very complicated, so I won't try to paraphrase. There is a decent amount of information online you could read up on, though. I would not suggest 5-MTHF for people who do not have the genetic defect, though I imagine a very small dose per day may be helpful, but then again I am no doctor.

This is analogous to cigarette companies selling nicotine gums. The largest cigarette company in India -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITC_%28company%29 -- sells nicotine gums[1] too!

[1] http://www.kwiknic.in/

Nestle is generating a ton of money, and periodically invests in unrelated industries sometimes very successfully like with Alcon.

What if the article were "Walmart Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills"? Because, I mean, Walmart does sell both of those in their stores.

People simply do not have time to read the ingredients on every product they buy. Maybe force producers to show amount of sugar lumps on the label.

I think it's time to go either buy simple fresh product or go buy soylent joylent Huel and others. The food industries is only making us fat!

There's a lot of discussion on here about stupid consumers vs evil corporations, etc. As is often the case, the blame lies with just about everyone involved to some extent. The US government choose to promote a low fat diet with it's original nutrition guidelines in the 70s [4] which led the public to demand the food companies to produce low fat everything in the 80s and into the 90s. It's now emerged that there was little evidence to support the health benefits of a low fat diet.

When you remove fat from food it becomes unpalatable unless.... you add sugar. Thus the increase in added sugar in just about everything which has helped to contribute to the rise of obesity and metabolic syndrome and all the diseases that come with it from diabetes to fatty livers, heart disease, etc.

So who's to "blame"?

The government in some ways, even though they seemingly meant well when recommending low fat diets (they're just now beginning to recommend reduced sugar and ease up on fat warnings).

Food companies in some ways who seem to have known about sugar's addictive properties and engineered their food to keep you coming back for more rather than keeping you healthy [3].

Consumers in some ways for not reading labels, exercising more, reducing portions, etc. But who could blame you when the government and the food companies were trying to convince you that what you were eating was good for you? (unless you had time to dive into the research yourself but let's face it, that's not an option for 99% of people)

One of the best explanations I've read of not just why sugar (fructose to be specific) is bad for you (in the quantities Americans but also most of the world eats it at) is the book "Fat Chance" by Robert Lustig [1]. You can also get a glimpse into his arguments via his youtube lectures [2].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Fat-Chance-Beating-Against-Processed/d...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

[3] http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/food-cravings-engineered-by-in...

[4] http://time.com/3702058/dietary-guidelines-fat-wrong/

Any company that sells sugary snacks does its best to get people to consume as many of them as possible, right?

So does almost every pharmacy in the US. (CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, Target, my local independent, etc.)

Who cares?

They're just closing the loop, like an good entrepreneur would do.

While Nestlé's each subsidiaries and brands might have their own business motives to sell / market their own products (a lot of them have long been well-known consumer brands with a long history), the title does sound more troubling than it appears.

A fantastic example of create a problem, solve it, make billions!

This what they mean by "vertical integration" right?

One is for current users. Other is for future users :)

The nature of unbounded capitalism in one sentence.

precisely. Capitalism has no moral compass.

Seems like a sound strategy.

The article was an interesting read until I hit the picture showing Deplin. I want to share my story about this drug. After having a DNA test done and finding out I had an MTHFR gene mutation, my psychiatrist prescribed me that orange pill. She had lots of samples, too, which I was grateful for as it was extraordinarily expensive. i.e. not covered by insurance since it's technically a "medical food". I paid for it anyways, because she sold it to me as "a magical cure" of sorts and I won't lie, that seemed appealing to me. Something new? After all this struggle? Sure, fuck it, let's try it. I will leave out my backstory and detail about my condition for the sake of brevity (something I'm not very good at).

5-MTHF did work for me, albeit at a MUCH lower dose of 5mg. Some people even get relief from 1mg. But... Deplin comes in 7mg and 15mg doses. My new doctors in Seattle (Naturopaths, not psychiatrists) have advised me that even 7mg is quite a bit of extra 5-MTHF. I don't know the scientific details behind this, but I know from experience, 15mg was entirely way too much for my body and I experienced excruciating periods of "overmethlyation" (extremely high anxiety, all sorts of sensory hallucinations, very uncomfortable!).

The doctor that did the DNA test advised 15mg. Not my psychiatrist. It was just a note scribbled on the front of the DNA results packet. I didn't know anything about 5-MTHF at the time so I did not argue and began on the 15mg. Psych didn't say anything, either: i was only her 3rd patient trying Deplin.

I was completely unstable until I titrated the dose 8 months later: I'd been mistaking most of the symptoms for benzodiazapine withdrawal and didn't think to blame the Deplin for being uncomfortable. I was too unstable to properly judge my mental state. at the time, I had subconsciously thought: why would I question the Deplin? My psychiatrist told me that it was made for people like me (who have the genetic defect). No way it could be hurting me.

I wonder how many other mental health patients are being tortured by a similar conundrum right now? (Tortured may seem a bit harsh, but overmethlyation is something I would not wish on my enemies...) Further, I wonder how many people are being suggested Deplin as they were Prozac, in a case where a doctor doesn't know anything about MTHFR gene and thinks it's just a fancy new drug to try out?

I wish there was more information about the supplement's effects and its dosages available for psychiatrists. About a year later, I began ordering 5-MTHF (the main component of the 'drug') from Amazon for 1/3 of the price. You can also get it made at compounding pharmacies for cheaper.

I feel terrible thinking about other people who may think they are locked into paying for Deplin because their psychiatrist does not know any better. I think what Nestle is doing may be good for profits, by making an illusion of a 'unique solution', but at the same time it makes my stomach turn. Thanks for reading.

I wonder if it will ever hit the mainstream that Nestle put plastic filler in jar baby food in order to drive sales as babies would need to eat more baby food because they would simply pass the plastics. If anyone's interested in pursuing the story, they funded research into how much plastic could be added without causing health problems.

Sounds like conspiracy bait to me.

And don't forget Milk based products http://www.diabetes.co.uk/causes-of-type1-diabetes.html#milk

This is the same company whose CEO said water is not a human right... Would we honestly expect anything less from these guys?

Would it make you feel better if they had a subsidiary do it under a different name and you didn't know. Or even a different company do it? It's all the same economy stupid. You have a problem with the basic assumptions and ethics of the economy, nothing more.

The economy is sort of a blind watchmaker, it is optimized to produce profit for the Capitalist class and jobs for the worker class. Everything else does not matter to it. Whether it pollutes the planet, makes fatties, limits the chances of human survival. It knows nothing but to do the two above things. Everything else is someone else's problem.

And at the same time governments in the so-called free world have been advocating to help it do this more freely without any constraints from the would-be control mechanisms like pesky governments which would control this sort of behavior.

ITT: fat people making all sorts of excuse for Nestle

is this reddit?

if you have pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes Or you know someone with this conditions, You need to see this Video http://www.diabeteszone.info/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com