Don't Fuck with Big Sugar | Hacker News Reader

Don't Fuck with Big Sugar

marginalrevolution.com

35 pointsjseliger16 comments

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I lost 70 pounds mostly by not drinking anything but coffee and water for the past few years, eating things that aren’t full of crappy sugar, eating about half of what I used to, and just being hungry more often. It’s only been easy because I work from home now and it’s harder to get crappy food, I have to go out of my way to get it. I don’t want to say it’s easy to do, but if the politicians actually cared to make a difference in our health they would start to add those scary cigarette type warnings to things like coke or sugary cereals to inform people they’re unsafe for common consumption. Honestly, I think the state of corporate food products and the advertising of them are reminiscent of the state of cigarettes and advertising of their health benefits from the 50s. It’s clear to me that the nutrition facts on the back of these crappy products aren’t being honest to the health impacts of such food, no one eats 3/4 of a cup of cereal and suggesting that’s a proper serving is like saying cigarettes help with Covid-19. I’m sure they could technically prevent Covid-19, but clearly it’s not the preferred solution. Corporate greed is robbing us of our life and we don’t even realize it.

The serving sizes used in Nutrition Facts have no basis in reality. They seem to be chosen to make the calorie count appear not so bad.

Obesity is smoking of the 21st century. Only it kills slower, because the constellation of metabolic disease is less aggressive than lung cancer and more manageable with drugs.

This is one of the worst regressions of human civilization. We are, on average, much less fit than in 1970, and the regression is even stronger in the more developed countries.

And there seems to be no one willing to spend political capital on this problem. Too many people feel uncomfortable just voicing their concern. One of the reasons might be that the problem is ubiquitous. Liberals are fat, conservatives are fat, atheists are fat, Islamists are fat, nationalists are fat ... perhaps not to the exact some degree, but aside from the Amish, all kinds of people are fat and this alone makes the topic awkward.

In case you haven't been keeping up with current events, Congress has been wrapped up with a bow, put on the shelf, and sold. Pelosi is not even pretending to hide it, while there are fistfights in the streets for COVID tests two years into this pandemic. Big Sugar (is this the same lobby that puts high-fructose corn syrup into everything?) not being Fuckable With is a relatively luxurious issue. Livelihoods depend on their rent-seeking.

If a top Madison Avenue agency offered to work with the Surgeon General for free to develop a national effort to promote exercise and nutrition education in youth, and fight pandemic depression, I bet that Big Sugar would lobby against it.

It’s not the fatness but rather the corporate greed and dishonest advertising that’s the real issue, because people don’t realize the fatness isn’t natural and caused by diet. This stems, in my opinion, as a lack of general ethics and morals in the face of big cash. I have given up trying to figure out how we can instill ethics and morals into people these days, because cash is king. Maybe a crazy solution would be to limit how much anyone can make to like 50x minimum wage, then most people might not sell their ethics for piles of money? I don’t know but clearly many people would rather sell out their fellow humans for a big payday.

If what you postulate is true in that we can’t instill ethics and enact change due to greed and a focus on self-enrichment then it seems safe to assume that goes for capping limits on earnings as well.

Coca Cola is everywhere just look around. It's cool, it's fresh, it's young, it's energetic, it's tolerant, it's on your way to the cash register. The various drinks from the Coca Cola and Pepsi hydras easily and uselessly occupy maybe 10-20% of shelves of any grocery store?

> maybe 10-20% of shelves of any grocery store?

Maybe not. Not at any grocery store I go to, anyway. I might give you 5%.

They have a full isle of sugared breakfast cereal though.

I have no judgement about people eating junk (in reasonable amounts). I eat it too from time to time.

But a full isle of junk for the "most important meal of the day"?

I wonder how much sugar in everything by weight is actually sitting on the average grocery store's shelves and what percentage by weight that is to everything else, not counting packaging.

in Mexico, and perhaps repeated elsewhere in the world, the dominance of Coca-cola can be traced directly to their policy of providing a free, serviced, high quality refrigerated unit to tens of thousands of tiny mom-n-pop storefronts on the condition that they are kept stocked and in a prominent position in the shop. In many of these shops today, and in all of them back in the 70's and 80's, it is/was the only refrigerated storage in the shop, and sometimes (rarely nowadays) the only source of chilled anything in an entire village.

Sounds like a scene from Parks & Rec.

For sure not. The best drug. And cheap. Stronger than cocaine.

if it were stronger than cocaine then it wouldn't so often come laced with caffeine

I hope for your sake that you are being sarcastic and don't really believe that sugar is the best drug.

That's the science, sorry to disappoint you.

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