Food companies ‘sweetened the world’ and increased the risk of disease
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Vegetables tasted so good. Vanilla added to our Starbucks coffee started to taste awful. It felt like a world of taste opening up. Food started to satisfy so much more. It was easier to identify when I was full and avoid overeating.
The sugar industry has so evil and has done so much damage to this country and to the world.
In any case, I stopped drinking soda entirely because it was too unpleasant. Then I discovered how easy it is to make my own and started doing that. That way, I can make it to my preferred sweetness level.
[1] I realize that soda is literally candy, but it's too sweet for me anyway. I've never understood why it's different than, say, a hard candy that is 98% sugar.
When I experience aspartame, the host product tastes "wrong", and if I consume more than a wee bit, my stomach gets a bit upset. So, let me ignore that sweetener…
When I use most artificial sweeteners, at first they can seem enjoyable and freeing. A 50:50 blend of Stevia-in-the-Raw and Splenda can seem more like real sugar to me. But with repeated frequent use (say, daily in a mug of tea), I gradually come to feel not an anticipation of something good and satisfying but an expectation of doing something 'empty'. Sweetness in general becomes increasingly distasteful.
Perhaps the distaste is due to lack of metabolic reward. However, after a few days of not wanting sweetness, a little bit of real sugar can reset me to enjoying sugary things. Takes longer to again enjoy an artificial sweetener.
I've done strict keto off and on for 10+ years and drank Diet Coke like it was going off the market. When I cut out carbs (we're talking < 30g per day), it becomes obvious that it's real sugar that triggers the cravings for me. Never did a diet soda make me crave a candy bar. Instead, it was generally something like a bite of a real hamburger bun, or a couple french fries.
It's really hard to isolate the effects of things like artificial sweeteners when "real" sugar is absolutely everywhere.
The proteins in skin most prone to glycation are the same ones that make a youthful complexion so plump and springy—collagen and elastin. When those proteins hook up with renegade sugars, they become discolored, weak, and less supple; this shows up on the skin's surface as wrinkles, sagginess, and a loss of radiance.
Food addiction is real and just as harmful as other addictions like smoking and alcohol. But for some reason we still laugh about it like it doesn't exist. We even welcome with open arms new products that will try to make us addicted.
Next time you see a fat person, frame it as food addiction. You think they want to exist as a useless, grotesque blob? You think they don't know they have an embarrassing body and their oversized clothes don't really hide it? You think they are happy feeling uncomfortable and incapable all the time? They know it's the food, but they can't stop.
Next time you go out, start mentally replacing junk food with cigarettes. Replace the "golden arches" with Benson and Hedges. That waft of carefully engineered and pumped out Subway smell with cigarette smoke. The advertising, the vending machines, all of it. Then ask yourself why people are obese. It's an addiction with no escape.
The single best read out there on the topic, for the layman like myself, is probably this series of articles: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... It does a really good job of laying out all the contradictory information out there in a normal-human readable format while referencing studies to keep it real.
Imagine confronting a recovering alcoholic with a glass of beer. Not just offering it but tempting him, wafting it in front of his nose, holding it up to the light to show the bubbles. And then saying "well it's your fault for drinking it" when he can't resist any longer.
We're all susceptible to addiction. Some more than others, of course. When it comes to food we're all descended from animals that evolved with food scarcity. We didn't evolve with refined sugars. What we're seeing in obesity figures is simply the susceptibility of people and ability to cope with their addictions. More than a quarter of all people are obese in France, a country once thought to be the prime example of healthy eating. And, guess what? McDonalds is very popular in France. Maybe it wasn't their genetics, maybe it was just the lack of McDonalds?
To the contrary, there is evidence that we were eating more calories in the past than we are today, and that general levels of exercise are actually greater today than they were in the past as an average across the populace.
Honestly, read the articles. There is a ton of information in there challenging what we “know” that no summary will do justice.
Here’s an excerpt:
> A popular theory of obesity is that it’s simply a question of calories in versus calories out (CICO). You eat a certain number of calories every day, and you expend some number of calories based on your metabolic needs and physical activity. If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess as fat and gain weight, and if you expend more than you eat, you burn fat and lose weight.
> This perspective assumes that the body stores every extra calorie you eat as body fat, and that it doesn’t have any tools for using more or less energy as the need arises. But this isn’t the case. Your body has the ability to regulate things like its temperature, and it has similar tools to regulate body fatness. When we look closely, it turns out that “calories in, calories out” doesn’t match the actual facts of consumption and weight gain.
> “This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug,” writes Stephen Guyenet, “since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.”
You have to partake in your addiction and food producers are doing their best to give you the most gratifying foods.
However, it's not like everyone has to occasionally consume McDonalds. You can (and should) completely abstain from that. You can also completely abstain from buying any ready made food at all (as wisely suggested in other comments in this discussion).
The problem is you can't avoid the advertising and seeing the junk in the supermarkets when you go. I find that I don't have to exercise any moderation at home, but I do have to at the supermarket. We could all abstain from the advertising if we as a society choose to.
I find it very helpful to buy all the groceries online (here this is being offered by supermarkets for a very small delivery fee, but the order needs to be substantial: between 1-2 weeks worth of groceries). Or, if i need to go in the supermarket, i have a shopping list prepared in advance. This means I’m not browsing; i go in, get the specific items i want, and leave. I pay no attention to the anything else. Also, i don’t go in a supermarket if I’m hungry.
There is hope through sheer willpower and lifestyle changes. Similar to stopping smoking. And it isn't easy. It is simple to do (CICO), however. I used to be 130kg. Now I'm sitting around 85kg (and would be better around 80kg), but the addiction never really goes away. I am forever aware of my calorie intake and expenditure. It's so easy to eat out of boredom and to eat more than I should. I have to police my behavior and preempt it. Can't eat junk food if you never buy any. But even then each one of those choices takes mental effort and will power to the point where to help ensure I continue fighting my addiction I've had to completely rethink my view point on food and purposefully try not to enjoy it. Food is not a reward. It is not a treat. It is fuel that I need to be active. And once I've had enough fuel for my current activity level, I don't need any more.
Not everyone can do this kind of introspection, lifestyle modification. It is a continual struggle where I've had to optimize my life around knowing just how much mental effort I'm capable of to manage my addiction. And western society doesn't make it any easier where you are shamed and called grotesque blobs for making poor choices in a system geared toward exploiting your weaknesses for profit. The most insidious aspect is that unlike smoking tobacco, you can't simply quit food. You need it to survive. Food should be regulated much like gambling is regulated or smoking for that matter. Otherwise, the sociopaths in our society will prey on people that literally can't help themselves.
One of the very best examples is sugar added to applesauce.
It's particularly nefarious because many consumers may be attempting to avoid sugary food and provide healthy foods for children ... only to unknowingly buy, essentially, candy.
And, in any case, you don't need to put sugar in for yeast. The best bread has nothing of the sort. Just flour, yeast, salt and water.
I prefer to not include salt in bread, but I add the required daily amount of salt to other kinds of food, where the added salt really improves the taste.
When used “correctly” as part of a charcuterie plate and/or along with salty stews and meats, this works.
However, many tend to use this bread like they would any other, and frankly it’s well known for how horrible it tastes.
Bread without salt does not taste good at all, unless you’re a highly partisan Tuscan.
Have you personally tried it? I cook for a relative who can't eat salt for health reasons and I make bread for them too, without salt. It tastes from bland to quite-decent=actually, depending on the amount of wholemeal flours I use. For example, 1/3 each of strong white flour, wholemeal wheat and wholemeal dark rye tastes good and smells divine as it bakes.
I think when people say that saltless bread tastes bad they mean plain white bread.
Bread certainly tastes a whole lot better with salt, which is why it's used, but that doesn't make it mandatory.
For home-made bread, I have never used sugar and I have never had a case when the dough failed to grow. I make a bread every day.
It is much faster and more reproducible than in a traditional oven and this allows me to bake a bread every morning, for my breakfast.
The baking time should be determined experimentally. In my microwave oven, the dough made of 500 g wheat flour is baked well in a glass vessel covered with a glass lid in a time of 14 minutes at 1000 W. One minute less or one minute more make little difference. The baking vessel must be large, to allow for expansion.
A basic bread can be made by putting 500 g wheat flour in a hemispherical glass bowl of suitable size (e.g. about 20 cm/8 inches in diameter), adding instant dry yeast (here sold in 7 g bags suited for 500 g flour) to the flour, mixing the yeast with the flour, adding water about 75% of the flour weight, and then kneading the dough.
For this amount, kneading needs about 6 to 7 minutes. I knead with one hand, keeping the bowl in the other hand. In this way, one hand remains clean, free of sticky dough. You need to keep around a pie spatula (or a spoon, if you do not have a pie server), to be able to remove the sticky dough from your kneading hand, when you finish. The kneading should stop when the dough becomes homogeneous, elastic and cohesive. After you do it a few times, it becomes easy to recognize when it is ready.
Then you can transfer the dough from the bowl into the baking vessel and leave it to rest and grow. For maximum growing, you may let the dough rest for an hour, but if in a hurry you can bake it earlier without much difference in the final product.
For the best growing, the dough should stay in a warm place. While I knead the dough, I boil water for tea in the microwave oven. Then, when the dough is ready, I take out the glass teapot and I put the baking vessel on the now warm plate of the microwave oven. I close the oven and one hour later I press the button to start the baking.
It is also possible to make unleavened bread (by not adding yeast), which still grows in a microwave oven much more than traditional unleavened bread. Its main advantage is that it can be ready faster. To make the bread fast, one can also use baking powder instead of yeast, which allows skipping over the resting time. The bread made with baking powder grows well, but it has a more compact and much finer structure than the bread made with yeast.
To the basic bread, there are a myriad possible additions. Most people want salted bread, so salt should be added to the flour, together with the yeast. You can add various spices, seeds or ground seeds. Some spices are best combined with sugar, but this should not be done everyday. With the exception of salt, I prefer to not add anything else uniformly but to lay flat and thin the dough, deposit on it layers of spices, seeds, sugar etc., then roll the dough to incorporate the additions and form it in the baking vessel. In this way, the bread will have alternate layers of plain bread with spices or seeds, so that a smaller quantity of those will produce a taste as intense as a greater quantity that would have been dispersed uniformly in the bread.
I make an 80% hydration dough with strong white, wholemeal wheat and wholemeal rye and give it a few good pulls every 15 minutes. I wet my fingers first and I get almost no dough sticking on them, even in the first few pulls when the dough is the most mushy. I shape it after a couple of hours (depending on how it's going), let it proof for a half-hour and bake it. I get a very healthy oven spring that way especially for a 2/3s wholemeal bread. All thanks to our little fungal friends who essentially do the kneading for me.
I need to figure out the baking though, or perhaps the hydration, because it ends up a bit too humid inside even after 35 minutes baking at close to the oven's max (which should be around 250 C).
I do also see bread on the shelf at the store that contains no sugar at all, so industrial production without sugar is possible.
In actual bread dough, yeast finds all it needs to activate in the flour itself.
I am actually not sure if a candy has enough sugar to cause a spike in an adult, but I imagine the threshold would be lower in a child. Not to mention, children don't understand the meaning of addiction: they just want (more) candies and you had better oblige or else!
Really, fruits should be viewed very much like candy.
A fruit is a complex matrix of sugars, fiber, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals which undergo a type of metabolism that our bodies are principally adapted for and which allows us to assimilate the various components at a relatively optimal rate and quantity, with many self-limiting reactions along the way.
Candy is highly distilled; impacts the GI tract, liver, and pancreas fast and hard; has no nutritional value outside of calories; and is generally a food that the human body has no biological intelligence for assimilating.
Contrast that to fruit, which is the oldest source of nutrition for hominids. We like sweet things and have color vision because fruit has been such a valuable source of nutrition.
1. Modern fruit (last 50ish years in particular) is nothing like wild fruit and is being bred to have higher and higher sugar content. I'm failing to find a decent source for this but what my memory says is that sugar content has gone up 50% or more in most modern fruit varieties compared to heirloom equivalents.
2. Apple sauce is stewed for a long time and doesn't have the same nutritional qualities at a molecular level as raw fruit.
3. Store bought apple sauce always has a least sugar and often a load of other crap added.
I would say apple sauce is somewhere between candy and fresh fruit on the health scale.
Thankfully there are other goals than increasing sugar. Almonds were bred to a lower cyanide content to make em edible. Bet there are plenty other examples.
Vegetables and don't want to be eaten and protect themselves with mild "poison" or a strong shell. Fruit does and can be eaten raw. Vegetables need to be cooked to destroy antinutrients and help digestion. Egg and meat protein can be digested easier after denaturing the proteins through heat. Milk becomes digestible through the enzymes in Rennet. Cheese would make sense to me, no clue about fermented milk products.
The common banana we have today, the Cavendish, is actually a bit less sweet than the common banana before the 1960s.
Back then, it was the Gros Michel, which was sweeter and more flavorful[1]. But these bananas are all a monoculture, clones, and the Gros Michel was wiped out by a disease. The Cavendish is currently in the process of being devastated by a new disease as well, so it's very possible that future generations will be eating a different banana than we are.
[1] One of the reasons why a lot of banana-flavored candy only roughly resembles banana is because it tastes like a Gros Michel, not a Cavendish. Candymakers don't change it because that's the flavor that people have come to expect and want from that candy.
I keep reading that, but I experienced (and also heard) the opposite. Store-bought fruit are engineered for maximum shelf-life, size, and looks, primarily. At expense of taste, including sweetness. Organic produce or just garden grown fruits are smaller and uglier, but far sweeter.
Organic produce doesn't have an appreciably better taste in my experience, nor is it necessarily smaller, but garden-grown definitely wins for flavor - you can optimize the time of picking for the sometimes incredibly narrow window of ripeness. I haven't grown them in several years, but I used to plant strawberries every year. I'd get 2-3 perfectly ripe strawberries a day, and they were delicious.
Raspberries are another fruit that has a very, very short shelf life. Even the commercial varieties are only good for about a week after picking, and I've read that the very best varieties for flavor are only good for about one day.
If you're doing anything with berries where flavor is paramount, and whole-fruit texture is not (anything made from a puree), farm-fresh is best and frozen is a very close second. Flash-frozen fruits and vegetables lose the texture of fresh, but they are picked at peak ripeness and typically frozen within an hour or two.
Interesting. Also of note, fruits and the fruits of vegetables world wide seem to be increasing in size and caloric content while decreasing in nutritional content, correlated with rising atmospheric CO2.
That is not to say that a diet should not contain fruits, it probably should and fruits are most definetly more nutritious than candy, but its not that black and white.
Most cultivated fruits have a sugar content of around 10%, while only a few have a sugar content slightly above 15%, e.g. grapes and (raw) figs.
Only the dried fruits have a sugar content similar to chocolate and candy, i.e. starting from around 60% to much more.
So dried fruits should be avoided, but fresh or defrosted fruits up to a few hundred grams per day should be OK (when no other sweets are eaten).
Calories alone are measured by burning things but it maters if your body has to do work to access those calories.
The more processed or broken down an ingredient is the more available those calories are to the body vs the same amount in its raw form.
I suspect, but don’t know, that liquid sugar in sodas is far worse than in fruit form because your digestive system isn’t processing fibre to get to it.
Think sweetcorn vs cornbread. They could have the same calories but processing cornflour means you’re unlikely to see it again in undigested form. That same can’t be said for raw sweetcorn.
Of course many would argue there's no need to regulate at all, and that's a fair position to hold too.
There's nothing inherently wrong with providing products that offer a tradeoff between health and enjoyment. As long as consumers are aware of the longer term costs
>Early warning signals of the coronary heart disease (CHD) risk of sugar (sucrose) emerged in the 1950s. We examined Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) internal documents, historical reports, and statements relevant to early debates about the dietary causes of CHD and assembled findings chronologically into a narrative case study. The SRF sponsored its first CHD research project in 1965, a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and downplayed evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor. The SRF set the review’s objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts. The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed. Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960s and 1970s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD. Policymaking committees should consider giving less weight to food industry–funded studies and include mechanistic and animal studies as well as studies appraising the effect of added sugars on multiple CHD biomarkers and disease development.
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
> The SRF’s funding and role was not disclosed.
LOL!
Here's a good essay on the broad topic "Fight Back with Real Tomato Sauce": https://sue.coulstock.id.au/fight-back-with-real-tomato-sauc...
Like the article says, the glass jar stuff is loaded with sugar.
Of course I still enjoy fresh tomatoes from my garden every summer, but am not too disappointed if I don't get enough to freeze or can.
It’s not a lack of choices; it’s either consumers are unaware or (more likely) knowingly prefer sweeter options. Unless you are of the position those in charge should dictate food choices, the only option is greater consumer education.
I agree with your assertion that consumer education is a much more effective and reasonable long term solution than government intervention (I used my own words, please correct me if I've misinterpreted). Likewise, I agree with the commenter whose comment you can't relate with: it really isn't helping that so much food is "fortified" with sugar (used my own words again).
I am totally guessing (as in I could be completely wrong) that the reason this viewpoint doesn't resonate with you is because you are one of the people who has educated themselves about nutrition, and imo even more importantly, it sounds like you may have been introduced to healthy eating (and food preparation) habits early on. I apologize if any of these assumptions are flat out incorrect regarding your upbringing, but I don't think they are too far fetched in any case (i.e. while it may not be true for you, it is reasonable that it may be true for others).
It's not just education about food that makes a difference, it also matters a lot being exposed to healthy eating and food preparation habits.
Both of you can be right in this case without any actual disagreement.
This IS what humans in aggregate are choosing / have chosen.
Naming and shaming companies, however, can make them change their strategy.
Furthermore, look at a recent example of a pro-strong regulation policy: the Obama admin believed in a well run regulatory state, and the first lady led a public health campaign promoting healthier school lunches with more fruits and vegetables as well as exercise. You'd think encouraging kids to eat unprocessed food and exercise would be wholly inoffensive, but the other political party and its media surrogates treated it like the imposition of communism and complained endlessly about 'freedom' and 'waste'.
Your version is how things ought to work, and how it was more or less assumed it does work for many years, but it's based on an obsolete understanding of political markets. Ubiquitous networking has made it easy for like-minded people to find and coordinate with each other, and some people favor perverse outcomes. Approximately 30% of people are willing to suffer an economic loss in order to inflict a greater loss on their opponents, and that personality type now controls one of the country's two major political parties.
Thoughtful arguments about public health policy, corporate greed, agricultural subsidies, etc. etc. were dismissed with bullshit rhetoric about people's right to enjoy their favorite soda flavor. It was organic too, in the sense of not being astroturfed - I knew the people on the forums quite well, but they just dumped all their regular principles once they felt they were affected b¥ an issue that hit their taste buds.
If restricting sugary foods is a good idea then let the elected politicians do so directly and take the heat for it. Don't allow them to escape responsibility by delegating their authority to bureaucrats.
I'm not sure where the idea comes from that it that some government regulator should or even can micromanage the diet of ordinary citizens.
The idea that it is possible for them to control the nutritional composition of food and the balance consumed is absurd at face value.
Do some people actually want to live in a world where some bureaucrat manages their diet?
For example, corn subsidies inevitably lowers the price of sugar, which means — on a micro level - some food engineer might replace some fat with sugar to reduce costs but keep appeal - which, in a macro level, encourages higher sugar content in processed foods.
It can be argued that subsidies are for national security by ensuring there will always be US farmers in case some country cuts imports to us.
But as for heightened sugar problem, you can’t exactly blame the company, food engineer, industry, farmers, Congress or consumers directly. No one intended this side effect — it just kinda happened.
It’s like it’s a complex problem and there’s 1000 angles and you just have to look at these micro-issues individually. You can’t just say “regulate it” or “consumers should be responsible.”
Regulators and middle managers provide me with limited options for each of those thousand choices, and I, without having to think much, can pick one of them safely.
For each of my choices, various regulators and managers have all gotten many says already.
Some bureaucrat does manage my diet, and your diet too, but they don't micromanage it, and nobody is saying they should micromanage it
It's perfectly feasible for regulators to identify when companies are adding sugars - look at the recipe, inspect the factory, put things in bomb calorimeters. Thats not at all absurd, and there's already standards maintained for basically everything, including foods like peanut butter (see: https://youtu.be/esQyYGezS7c )
If it was absurd, it would be impossible to do food safety regulation, like ensuring that food doesn't contain toxins or heavy metals
If you look at the other responses, you'll see a number of people who want food pulled from the shelves and their options limited so they don't have to exercise self-control and take responsibility for what they consume or don't consume.
There our hosts calling for a bureaucrats to micromanage diets so that they are more healthy.
There are post claiming that people our powerless to resist advertising, therefore the government should be making the choices for those people
And I know the overall topic is about dietary choices, but I'm responding to your blanket anti-regulation statement.
If your society has an agrarian model, where you locally produce, distribute, and serve all the food you need to subsist, and these chains are small-scale and numerous, then there is more trust inherent in that model, and less pressure for profit or growth. Therefore, many of the motives are removed for adulteration or poor-quality food. These can be relatively self-regulating industries as described.
In an industrial, developed first-world country, you have massive factory farms scaling up, you have ginormous distribution networks on rail, water, tarmac, and asphalt, and they all run with help from the massive oil industry, and finally you have large-scale food service operations and restaurant chains and mega-groceries all over town. So yeah! There's gonna be a lot of motive to mess with food, and there's gonna be a lack of trust in the Big City, because these supply chains are so long and deep, spanning oceans and borders, that it's very impersonal. So those are ripe conditions for adulteration, reductions in quality, false labeling, and all those things the FDA/USDA/FTC have striven to eliminate on the behalf of the consumer, I guess.
Some producers are becoming so large they can afford to bribe the scientists and regulators. Smaller players are struggling to compete without resorting to adding sugars themselves.
For all these reasons we collectively develop laws and regulations to keep things within some reasonable limits. Considering the obesity epidemic, despite few wanting to be obese, I think tightening the reigns a bit is warranted.
Nutrition isn't rocket surgery. If you can read numbers, you can discern the calories and sugar content. You even get a recommended daily percent.
If some people feel like they can't control their lives, maybe there should be an option for those people to give the state parental controls over them, telling them what they can and cannot eat. As for myself, I think what foods I choose to consume are none of the government's business
Is it not regulation that forced the display of this information?
There is a difference though: it's not about choice as much as it is about "good defaults". As a state you should want your folk to have better food, but if some person wants the choice of micromanaging their diet then sure, go ahead.
I shouldn't be struggling to find non-processed food in a supermarket. This is often the case right now, which is why I would very much welcome some more regulation on this.
What supermarkets do you go to that don't have a produce section and a meat section? Is there some other form of unprocessed food you expect?
Even something like pasta and bread are technically processed (but maybe not ultraprocessed unless its wonderbread)
I wonder if the term 'micromanaging [their diet]' is a touch perjorative. Given the prevalence of serious chronic diseases which are reported to be strongly linked to what you eat, shouldn't everyone be encouraged to take a serious look at how to 'macro' manage their diet, an action which is almost certainly likely to improve quality of life and maybe life span?
I would like to live in a world where me and maybe a person i trust, could together limit of the foods i can buy, and than program that into my credit card.
I would like to live in a world, where instead of scienticts and engineersand businessmen working on optimizing the addictiveness of food, which isn't a good social goal, would work on optimizing the long term happiness derived from food.
And sure, while I would lose some freedom and fun in this process, given the role food plays in mood and health, over the long term i would likely be happier, much happier.
It doesn't seem that absurd to me. If the government banned the production and import of potato chips, you could still make them at home, but people would probably make a lot less of them. Unlike drugs, food is not conveniently hidden and the value is too low per unit volume to justify illicit production. Therefore food which is banned generally will not be produced at scale.
If the government did set out to materially improve the dietary habits of the citizenry, it would definitely be possible. It would be politically infeasible and possibly tyranny, but it would be very doable.
I agree that if you ignore the constraints it would be trivial. There are so many brutal and oppressive solutions it isn't even worth listing examples.
Such a program could be done as a rachet, similarly to how tobacco use was driven to the margins.
Yes I do want a bureaucrat back by the best nutritional science available to nudge the market to provide me with better, healthier options.
The danger is, of course, that the agency gets captured by the AG industry. Such as the old "food pyramid" that suggested a quarter of your diet should be straight carbs. Or the "fat free" movement that was really just replacing fats with sugars.
While I wouldn’t dispute the undue influence of corporate interests on lawmakers, I would bet that the bigger factor is the tax revenue that the government collects from increased corporate profits. It is int eg government’s interest for companies to thrive because then it gets more funds via taxation.
In an ideal world that would be the case. But in an era of mass media, consumers really aren't making the choice. The choice is being made for them by ads.
> I'm not sure where the idea comes from that it that some government regulator should or even can micromanage the diet of ordinary citizens.
Pretty much everything a supermarket, restaurant, etc sells is regulated by the government. Whether you like it or not, government is involved in our diets.
> Do some people actually want to live in a world where some bureaucrat manages their diet?
A geniunely independent bureacrat? Maybe. On the other hand, do you want a world where corporations with their ads control your diet? It's a complex question.
Advertising doesn’t replace human agency, only—at most—informs the choices that people make.
The choices others make that inform (but do not decide) someone’s diet are the following:
1. Congress or an agency empowered by Congress choosing to prohibit certain crops. Note: not choosing to allow, unless they previously prohibited it.
2. Private farms and businesses choosing which crops to farm and livestock to raise.
2b. Controls on the handling and raising of crops and livestock may have an effect on the profitability of those choices, so legislation can also inform this choice at this level, but again, doesn’t decide it.
3. What farm products distributors and manufacturers choose to purchase for resell.
4. What stores and supermarkets choose to purchase for sale.
5. What the customer chooses to purchase for their own consumption, which is the ultimate test for the market viability of crops and livestock if there is no other commercial use for them.
It sucks that this is the dichotomy, but yes, absolutely, a bureaucrat will probably end up getting better food to you than corporate interests.
Blaming Regulators or industry almost never works.
It literally worked for tobacco
Sounds like a nightmare to me though, even though theoretically one massively reduce diabetes, heart disease, obesity, etc. with such a system.
Absolutely. My direct personal life and the world around me would be better if there were less sugar available (especially for children and teens, as with alcohol and tobacco for example), it were more expensive, and/or it were better labeled.
It's all of this, all at once, millions of times over.
We're an ant colony solving a problem we don't really grok as individuals.
It's even bigger than just these choices. Sugar subsidies. You know what else sugar is used for? Ethanol. Fuel. Transportation. Trade. National defense. You name it, these decisions are intertwined at scale.
If some negative externality grows to great, the system will rebalance. It does so almost thermodynamically.
The (very unfortunate) answer is 'yes'. The people who say 'no' are in the minority.
I'm OK as long as consumers rather than society are expected to bear the longer term costs. There is nothing worse than hearing "legalize hard drugs!" followed by "let's sink billions of dollars into treatment for those poor drug addicts!"
Thomas Hobbes talks about this a good amount in The Leviathan
Regulation was needed 60 years ago, and now we are the ones left holding the bag.
tough country to deal with problems in, idk how you reach everyone to educate them.
I feel like our main establishment entities like the FDA, NIH, major universities, pharma companies, etc. still aren't willing to take any responsibility for why people don't trust them anymore.
Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum.
The cost to multiply has always been the real barrier to prevent cancer from spreading faster than the immune system can react.
Whether it is setting up a printing press and distributing newspapers/books or radio/tv station, movie studio broadcasts, it used to cost a lot. Even with chat/email/phone/sms there is a high cost. The email list of everyone on the planet is easy to assemble these days. But try emailing everyone on the list every few minutes.
The whole story breaks down when Youtube/Facebook/TikTok made Cost to Broadcast 0 for everyone.
lol, really? The former president (still lying about the 2020 election), Fox News (paid near $1B settlement for lying), and the Republican party repeatedly saying all the Federal institutions can't be trusted because they're run by the Deep State or crooked liberals.
Which cranks didn't create the distrust again?
Populist demagoguery is an opportunistic infection. It’s taking hold because the host is weak.
I still maintain that Bush II was the worst president of the last hundred years. Trump may look superficially worse, but Bush caused Trump.
But Trump is still lying about the 2020 election.
And before leaving office installed Barry Myers (a climate change denier) to run NOAA because he got all butthurt from sharpie gate.
And clowns are running on "defund the <insert fed dept here>", because reasons.
It sounds very much more pro-active than ever.
And Iraq played a large roll in causing it to happen.
People looking back if 9/11 didn't happen towards Bush administration would've been a lot more positive due to no incentive to form war on terror.
In any case, Trump still led to an order of magnitude less deaths than Bush. As a non American (and a Muslim) that's all that matters. Everything else is irrelevant outside of the US. And arguing that lying is worse than killing is again, quite extreme partisanship.
It's weird to see the rhetoric shifting to "well the Iraq war was acshually not that bad because... We need to rehabilitate bush and we need Trump to be the worse like, ever!". No, Iraq did not deserve an invasion based on lies. No matter how bad Saddam was, the most affected were the Iraqis.
Syria was still trying to do pan-arabism by destabilizing any country it deemed going against this ambition.
Lebanon had JUST stopped it's 25 year civil war, countless terrorist organizations springing up and the list goes on and on.
I never stated it justified the invasion, I'm just pointing out that proclaiming that the USA with 1 war caused the entire middle east to implode is not true.
The only truth to the instability of the middle east is a mixture of the Cold war and political movement such as pan-arabism and Islamism, these caused the biggest political instability and thus decadent and stagnant power structure in those countries (effectively that of typical power over everything).
You said it yourself, as a non-american, of course, I never said "globally speaking", I specifically said for Americans.
The Iraq war would have been a different story if there was an actual understand by the Bush administration of what actually was the fundamental issues with Iraq beyond the maniac decision making of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that the Bush administration in it's arrogance believed the naive belief of bringing democracy & freedom to Iraqis was all would be required to ensure stability in the region was and still is a painful lesson for the western world on how to create stability in an unstable nation.
From what I know people are nostalgic towards Bush because he seems more diplomatic, compromising and composed than what Trump does - while defiantly not true while Bush was in office, people like putting on rose tinted glasses when presented with the bleak present.
Perhaps putting the efforts into education, teaching what is what and more importantly why? And who wants to influence/manipulate you for their own benefit while causing you harm?
I ate lots of sugar as a child slowly steered away by good advice, avoiding it by the time became young adult and since (decades).
Informed self reliance is much more reliable than relying on a regulatory 'father figure'.
In the supermarket, only buy things that have one ingredient. Only eat and drink things that have one ingredient.
As Michael Pollan says: "Eat FOOD, mostly greens, not too much."
The problem is, back in the day people learnt the skills to prepare food out of necessity. Now you have to want to do it. I suggest a good book on a favourite cuisine. Convince yourself that what you cook at home is nicer than the shit you can buy in shops and you won't want it any more. Don't forget to give your own food a chance and put just as much salt in it as they do, though. I see this mistake a lot. People think prepared/processed food is nicer just because it has more salt. Use salt.
And no, not everything can go in the dishwasher.
1. https://twitter.com/Botanygeek/status/1149968041964396545
2. https://deniseminger.com/2011/05/31/wild-and-ancient-fruit/
1) The fruit that we eat today is hyper-sugarized and available 24/7 all the time. Eg European ancestors NEVER had access to this amount of fruit. Apples, bananas, (water)melons, sweet grapes, ...these things didn't exist 150 years ago in the form we know today. People eat these sugar bombs all the time.
2) There does exist high sugar natural fruit.
Cherries right now (mid-July) in northern Bavaria: $3/lb at the grocery store, cheaper if you buy direct from farmers just outside the towns. Various small plums are free for the taking from trees along trails and rivers. I’m planning some serious jam-making over the next few weekends.
Cherries in January: if available at all, approximately $20/lb, import from South Africa or Chile. Plums are also available, about $8/lb, but not very flavorful.
Steak, chicken breast, cabbage, carrots, mushrooms, turkey thighs, spinach, corn on the cob, some organic peanut butters, flour, salt, zucchini, eggplant, pork chops, tomatoes, potatoes, yams, vinegar, olive oil, bok choi, broccoli, asparagus, beef liver, canned tuna fish (are we really going to split hairs over the salt brine?), ground beef, garlic, onion, shallots, spring onion, iceberg lettuce, watermelon, peaches, bananas, apples, eggs, mahi mahi, chives, cod, romaine, gem lettuce, kale, walnuts, almonds, leek, etc.
Even if you don’t apply common sense to this heuristic and include milk, cheese, bread, good quality bacon, etc., there is a veritable cornucopia of strictly single-ingredient foods available.
But yeah, you’re gonna have to buy ingredients and cook actual meals to be healthy. No way around it, I’m afraid…
You're not putting anything on the chicken or turkey? You're going to have ground beef by itself? Are you biting into that onion like an apple? And the garlic? Iceberg lettuce by itself sucks. What do you mean "flour", what do you mean "salt"?
I also have a hard time believing this is a genuine source of confusion…
I'm not confused by minimizing processing via home cooking, I'm confused by how your list was supposed to be relevant to the comment you replied to. That comment had a very specific objection.
(And yes, I see that the OP has now replied saying you can combine ingredients at home. But I think the skepticism toward the original phrasing was valid.)
"Buy things with one ingredient" is one idea. "Only eat things with one ingredient" is a very different and much more narrow idea.
And don't say it was obvious what they meant. I've seen people claim much wilder things about healthy eating than "don't combine ingredients".
Every single vegetable. Every single fruit. Water (I get it from the tap), rice, pasta, noodles. Meat. Eggs. Fish.
The first entity that adds extra sugar to their food to gain mind share inevitably causes the rest of the competitors to all add more sugar, bringing them back to parity while also destroying 'the market for healthy food'.
This race towards everyone being worse off because of economic incentives not to be left behind is a tragedy of the commons in the market sense.
The sooner we realize that food industry are engaged in capitalism and not public health, nor ecology, the better. What the food industry pushes is best read through the lens of patentable intellectual property and market disruption in an economic sector with razor-thin margins. I would encourage all conscientious people not to be their useful idiots.
Insofar as it isn't recognizably an ingredient that is picked from a field and marketed as a plant or animal part, it's part of what's causing all of us to be really unhealthy in the US.
If you want to eat less meat for other reasons then go ahead. But there is no legitimate scientific consensus on this point in the medical profession.
They aren't. Majority of meat products are also heavily processed and far from being healthy food. Sausages, cutlets, etc. The only good meat is some cut that you cooked yourself.
So from the health perspective there isn't much difference between processed meat and processed vegetables. Both aren't good for our guts. Sadly, buying unprocessed food and/or cooking is often more expensive and not scalable to cover every single individual or family on this planet.
I've heard this line a few times, and people say it as if there will be billions more people starving in Africa if processed foods didn't exist. This simply isn't true though, processed foods are only an issue in highly developed countries.
In developing countries poorer people eat very few processed foods. Why? Because it's cheaper to buy raw foods. People eat what is in season and often what they can grow themselves or some neighbour has grown. Yes they probably eat something similar every day, but so what, it works for them.
I live in a small, not terribly well off, European country where meals are typically prepared from scratch. In the supermarket the most processed food you will find is a chocolate bar or a bag of crisps. We don't have 'ready meals', if you want to eat say a fish pie, you need to buy the raw ingredients and make it yourself from scratch.
Again, food-industry trends are best read through the lens of capitalism, not ecology. We’re not taking about eating a bowl of beans.
I make an omelette for breakfast every day which involves a bunch of preparation, mixing and cooking, but when eating it's easy to identify the ingredients - this is a piece of pork, that's a radish, that's a piece of garlic etc. The closest thing to food product is some ground-up red pepper and other herbs that are there to modulate the flavor, but don't make up the main substance of the dish.
I've thought about buying some of these meat substitute products a few times, but for one thing they're quite expensive and for another when I look at the ingredients I can't easily conceive of what went into the product or how. I know vegetarian and vegan food can be delicious and nutritious thanks to friends who are great cooks, but again when I eat their cooking I can easily identify what I'm putting in my mouth.
I don’t believe for one second that you cannot distinguish between salad and things like Huel.
That’s why they need to convince/mandate people to eat it; it tastes worse and is worse for you.
As a different point: "Processed" feels to me like a slippery word. Bread? Looks nothing like wheat. Beer? Grown in a vat. Beef? Take a wild animal, selectively breed it for hundreds of generations, feed it all kinds of weird things that combine "cheap" (surprise cannibalism leading to BSE) and "encourages weight gain" (we're only recently getting serious about stopping antibiotics being used this way), kill one, after all the main cuts are taken spray the rest of with a high pressure hose, dry off the resulting slurry, ta-dah mechanically recovered "100% beef" you can't use in much else besides mince, and by extension burgers and sausages.
The term seems like it's some combination of a complaint more about the long list of ingredients and that these sound new and/or scary, implying no awareness of how much of a mess biochemistry is and where most of the chemicals in question were first isolated from.
Leavened bread is made by taking some flour, yeast, and water, and letting the yeast grow so the waste it makes turns the dough light and fluffy, and then baking it.
If you don't add a preservative to this, you'd better eat it quickly, because otherwise a fungus that produces a precursor to LSD will quickly grow on it (ergot is all over the place, and it really likes bread), and even if you don't get high, the alkaloids can poison you.
The yeast is a whole complex thing with bajillion chemicals all by itself, because life is like that.
The flour is from taking wheat etc. kernels and grinding them in what is one of our earliest industrial processes.
The wheat etc. have been selectively bred for countless generations and are now different from their wild relatives; and again, like the yeast, being alive they're full of things like "aneurine", "Pyridoxal 5'-phosphate", and "N-(4-{[(2-amino-4-oxo-1,4-dihydropteridin-6-yl)methyl]amino}benzoyl)-L-glutamic acid" and that's more than fine, it's vital, and we'd want to put them in if they were missing.
(Those three chemicals sound a whole lot friendlier when I use their common names; but biochemistry is too complex for every chemical to get an approachable friendly name even when they're vital — a quick search suggests you'd die without the N-Acetylaspartylglutamate in your brain, and that it has no non-systemic name).
And that fresh baked bread smell?
> The most aroma active compounds identified were 3-methylbutanal, (E)-2-nonenal, 3-methyl-1-butanol, and 2,3-butanedione
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002364381...
Quorn is pretty good if you can get it; Tofu needs to be seasoned right to taste good, and when it is it can be fantastic; nut roast is something I've only gotten right once, but that occasion it worked very well.
Tried making some nutritionally balanced cookies a while back; starting with a basic shortbread recipe and modified heavily, the one with banana as the main sugar and added vegan protein power worked pretty well.
Some protein shakes even fail to suck as drinks, but I find them so much faff I just buy milk (soy or cow, I'm vegetarian not vegan) or prepackaged[0] instead.
[0] My "This Is Food" label is leading to many questions answered by the label: https://www.yfood.eu/collections/tasterpacks/products/probie...
Of all of these, I find the Guardian to be the most viscerally alarming and the most consistently hysterical on every subject. Every Guardian article about a pollutant, about the climate , or about any judicial decision thay goes against what they believe is given the same treatment of elevating it to the level of apocalyptic clickbait and then doubling down with four paragraphs of boilerplate about how it disproportionately affects marginalized communities. I've stopped reading the last four paragraphs, because they're always the same regardless of the subject matter... this saves me some time in the morning.
I used to think it was only the crazy far right who preyed on people's fears... but now it's just alarmist clickbait left right and center. I just got done being extremely annoyed with John Podhoretz on a podcast claiming that aspartame can't cause cancer because he needs to imbibe it and because other artificial sweeteners were prematurely vilified and banned, which is a reductionist, reactionary, emotional and stupid argument. Personally, I still believe saccharine causes cancer, I've always assumed aspartame did, and I never eat or drink anything with artificial sweeteners. But I'm so sick of the hyperbolic screeching on both sides of every single fucking thing from gas stoves to coke baggies in the white house to abortion rights to Disney and Target and Bud Light to how climate change will kill us all to PFAS in my dental floss to how nuclear war or AI Holocaust is imminent... I just wish they would all shut up. Stop. Just stop finding new things to for me to fucking worry about. Go away.
[edit] I'm also of a time where the concept of 'throwing red meat to the left' raises serious cognitive dissonance for me, because prior to Twitter, or at least through the 90s and 00s, red meat style feasting and crowing behavior was exclusively for the right. For awhile it seemed almost axiomatic to me that the left didn't need to resort to fear mongering or hyperbole in communicating their points, because objective truth and logic was on their side. I don't think that was just my own blind bias; it was a major selling point of the left to rid these issues of religious-type appeals to emption, and drill into facts in a way that made the opposition look hypocritical at best or mendacious at worst. By adopting the hysterical and emotive tactics of the right, I feel that the Guardian, et. al, have ceded the high ground.
I made a point of seeking out various sweet treats I remembered from back in the day that I can't buy where I live now, and discovered they all taste like shit now, having replaced sugar with artificial sweeteners. I went to a pub and ordered "a coke", and the bartender gave me something that vaguely looked like coke. I took a sip and discovered that it tasted like shit. I said "This is not coke. What is this?" He replied "This is Pepsi Max". "Well, Pepsi Max was not what I ordered!" -- I'm assuming that all of this is related to the sugar tax they introduced in the mean time [1].
When they discover the health implication of artifical sweeteners (many of them are already known, but I'm sure we will discover more and more as time goes by) Britain will probably be the country worst hit, and they will have their government to thank for it.
I think it's high time that we start acknowledging that people want access to some kind of a quick/easy/cheap source of gratification, and the nanny state can't just wage war on all of them: There's a tax now on alcohol, on tobacco, and on sugar.
But sugar is the odd one out in this listing, because there's no such thing as "passive consumption" of sugar (like there is on tobacco), and people "high on sugar" don't endanger others (as is sometimes the case with alcohol). The normal rationale when governments limit peoples freedoms is that they limit some people's freedoms, if that serves as a means to preserve other people's freedoms. But with sugar, I just don't see the harm that accrues to anyone except the person consuming the sugar, and so, a government trying to limit people's freedoms to enjoy sugar, is precisely crossing a line that no government of any free people should ever cross.
Also, by taxing alcohol, tobacco, and sugar, you've now weirdly "levelled the playing field". While sugar is clearly the "least bad" of the three, you now no longer have a tax incentive to prefer a Coke Classic to a beer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdo...
Tons of well liked foods got bought out by mega corporations who then penny pinched the ingredient list to the point that while visually similar the taste was no where near as good.
And this is coming from the US one of the sugar capitals.
You also talk about taxes as being the same without acknowledging the quantity of tax. Certainly the 20p/liter sugar tax on soda isn't "leveling the playing field" compared to 16.5% of the retail price plus £5.89 on a packet of 20 tax on cigarettes...
I used Wikipedia [1] as a source for the sugar tax and this [2] as a source for alcohol.
According to that, its 18p per litre for a sugary drink above 8g per 100ml (like the Coke Classic I used for the example), and 19p per litre for a beer between 2.8 and 7.5 % ABV. Let's call the one penny a rounding error. Cigarettes can't really be compared, because you can't compare apples to apples quantity-wise.
> Why are you ignoring other changes in ingredients in your story?
Because I don't have savant-level memory and don't remember the entire ingredients list of treats I liked 10 years ago, and the reduced sugar levels were the thing that jumped out at me.
How much research do you expect someone to do, to throw out a quick opinion on something? If you're going to set the bar that high, and are then going to attack an argument on the grounds of "not enough research" without even presenting a counter-argument, you're not really creating an atmosphere that's very conducive to friendly conversation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#United_Kingdo... [2] https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/alcohol-tobacco
The first hit of "why do snacks taste different" would have answered your idea about snacks tasting bad. (While blaming a tax on sugary soda)
Your post was ranting about something you disliked without anything to back it up.
You also threw in the statement "And this is coming from the US one of the sugar capitals" as if that made the weird theory any more credible. The fact that I had been discussing sugary drinks in the UK should make it more questionable whether anything that's happening in the US is even relevant to the discussion.
And my way of forming my belief was to attribute the difference in taste to the blinding obvious, namely that they've replaced the source of sweetness in a drink that's supposed to taste sweet as evidenced by the ingredients list on that particular drink's packaging.
Independent thought can sometimes be correct, and total bullshit can often be stated in a way as to include numbers and references.
If talking about non-drinks a tax on sugar in drinks is always not the answer. I didn't know why you made the leap and missed evaluating your phrasing to see why the expansion of complaint occurred.
I guess I assumed you were following the original post which was talking about sugar in general.
Honestly your independent thought was "I don't like Pepsi Max as much as a different drink" without listing the other drink or mentioning whether the store even offered alternatives.
Fundamentally I saw "I ordered a cola and didn't like that I got a low sugar one by default"
You then expanded on that independent thought to imply a lot of things that are not in fact dependant on that independent thought.
Remember you said "sugar drink = cigarettes" from a taxing standpoint
No matter how bad any artificial sweetener may be found to be in the future, it won't be any worse than having consumed an analogous quantity of sugar. By all means, avoid the choice entirely and just drink water, but if you must choose between one or the other, the artificial sweetener will be the healthier choice in the long run, and it won't even be close.
Opponents of public health care in the U.S. use precisely this as an argument: They say, if we're going to have taxpayer-funded health care, it gives the government a reason to start regulating aspects of our lives which we don't want any government to regulate.
There are only two ways out of that that I can see: The first is to agree with them and say: If we want to be a free people, we can't have taxpayer-funded healthcare.
The second (which I personally subscribe to), is to say that there's some kind of a "bar" that has to be met, and that "increased healthcare costs to the taxpayer" doesn't meet the bar of how much your freedoms need to be impeded by my actions, before it starts to justify government taking away my freedoms.