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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> Big food corporations profit from ultra-processed foods that manipulate our natural systems.

I've just never bought this.

Does grandma manipulate you when she adds sugar to her cherry pie? Does she manipulate you when she adds salt to her mashed potatoes?

Foods -- "ultra-processed" or not -- don't "manipulate" you. They literally just either taste better or taste worse. Grandma, and her grandma before her, used sugar, fat, and salt, and thank goodness they did. These are normal ingredients. It's not like they're nicotine or heroin or something.

I mean, is a fig tree "manipulating" you when its figs ripen with sugar so they'll be eaten?

You're not being manipulated. You're just choosing to eat what you choose to eat based on what you like.

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No matter how I look at it 60g of sugar in small bottle of coke is criminal. My wife bakes cakes for 10 people with less added sugar.

Junk food definitely is designed to abuse our natural instincts and needs, from packaging to ingredients. Go one year without processed food, you won't physically be able to drink coke or eat fastfood

> No matter how I look at it 60g of sugar in small bottle of coke is criminal.

I hate to tell you how much sugar grandma put in her lemonade, and in her sweet tea...

> My wife bakes cakes for 10 people with less added sugar.

That's extremely unusual. Different types of cakes take different amounts of sugar, but it's generally somewhere between 150g and 300g for an average-sized cake that might give 10 slices. That's between 3/4 and 1.5 cups of sugar. And that's without frosting or anything extra.

A cake with less than 60 grams of sugar... I don't even know what you'd call that. I mean, you'd never make a sponge cake or chocolate cake with such little sugar. It wouldn't even taste like cake. It would be more like a slightly sweet... bread?

I guess it's a cultural thing, we always reduce American recipes sugar by 75% or so

I'm very curious what one of your cake recipes is!

Because sugar also greatly affects the texture of cake -- it retains moisture, prevents gluten formation, incorporates air... reducing sugar by 75% is going to make for a very dry, tough, and dense cake.

I can't even imagine how you're going to make a cake recipe work with 75% less sugar. And it's not an American thing -- it's not like European cakes are any different. Also, cakes don't work with 4x sugar either. Americans aren't overloading sugar that you need to compensate for, because that doesn't work for cakes either.

Are you sure you haven't confused it with just simply less frosting or something? Because a 10-slice cake with less than 60 grams of sugar just isn't really going to work, with everything I know about baking.

In that specific case it was a cheese cake. But I've made made fruit cakes with virtually no added sugar, just fruits, and sometimes even that is quite sweet

I can't eat cakes from coffee shops &co because they taste waaaaay too sweet.

Ah, I see. Those aren't really cakes at all, despite the names. Thanks, that makes more sense.

You're just extremely sensitive to sugar. The average person is not.

But also, that's not necessarily an adaptation. I went for an entire year once without sugar. Once I went back (after finishing losing weight), nothing tasted overly sweet. It still tasted exactly as I remembered. I could (and can) still drink a Coke and it tastes great.

I mean, especially when I work out, I wind up ingesting a lot of glucose. It's just what my body needs to fuel itself, to keep my blood sugar from getting too low.

>You're just extremely sensitive to sugar.

Then I must be extremely sensitive to sugar, too.

Many foods and beverages include ingredients whose sole purpose is to hide how sweet it is because otherwise it would be unbearable in your mouth. Gives you a stronger high once it reaches your stomach though.

I don't know where you got that information, but no they don't. That's not a thing. You were misinformed.

What do you mean no? This is a widely known and commonly used approach. Citric acid, salt and bitter compounds are some of the most prevalent options. This isn't even remotely close to a controversial opinion.

I mean no. All those compounds are used for flavor. They aren't used to mask sweetness.

Manufacturers design foods to taste good, not for some secondary effect of sugar in the stomach.

The idea that the sweetness would be "unbearable in your mouth" is just plain silly. People suck on lollipops which are pure sugar -- are those "unbearably" sweet? What you're saying doesn't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.

Manufacturers aren't going to waste money on additional sugar and then try to undo the taste with other ingredients. That's not a thing.

No, you're the one in denial. Just have a look at the decade old book "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" to see the flaw in your assumptions.

It details many Concrete examples of exactly how the companies are manipulating everything about food for profit.

Kessler, further FDA head has written about this topic extensively as well.

Do you go to grandma every day to eat calory packed food? Does grandma deploy dozens of scientists who design food so that it has an addicting effect? Dozens of marketing experts who confront you with images to consume the junk? Lobbyists who try to convince that sugar is not causing health problems? Your analogy does not work. These corporations are creating products that cause massive health issues that cost society billions.

You should visit a food processing plant sometime. What they are doing with food is not what your grandma does when she cooks it from ingredients you can buy at the grocery store. And I bet your grandma doesn’t have a food chemistry lab to fine tune her recipes.

Similarly, fig trees don’t make Fig Newtons. They make figs.

I've watched plenty of how its made. The ingredients look the same it just comes in huge quantities.

Oh, I'm familiar with it. And you know what? They mostly are doing what grandma does. Just in vastly larger ovens etc. Even if you want to talk about corn syrup, what do you think grandma made her pecan pie with?

And the things that are different -- emulsifiers, stabilizers, natural/artifical flavors, etc. -- aren't actually making the product unhealthy, at least not in any way that causes weight gain. Those aren't sugars, fats, or salt. They're just making it last longer on the shelf, and have more flavor. But it's not changing the nutrition, and it's not making us eat more of it.

You really think Chips Ahoy is making you fat in a way that grandma's chocolate chip cookies don't?

I don’t know if it’s the nature of the products themselves, or if it’s because they’re vastly cheaper and more accessible. There’s a natural limit to the number of cookies to be had from Grandma before she says “that’s enough,” vs being able to get 64 at the local market anytime you want for a pittance.

Really just feels to me like youre blaming the wrong entity here. Why is it too much to expect adults to act like adults and make decisions for themselves? If the companies were selling directly to kids sure but why is it their fault that people cant control themselves?

> Why is it too much to expect adults to act like adults and make decisions for themselves?

Because people don't act rationally. The model of a human as a rational actor who deeply considers all of the potential impacts of their decisions is a fiction that has been proven flawed by countless studies. Those actions can have externalities and consequences for which the public bears the cost, not just the actor.

> why is it their fault that people cant control themselves

Nobody's ascribing fault here; rather, we're trying to understand the bigger picture.

> Those actions can have externalities

I dont believe that people who eat unhealthy food have any doubts about the effect of the food. They just dont care that its unhealthy, that isnt an externality.

> Nobody's ascribing fault here; rather, we're trying to understand the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that more products that people enjoy is a good thing, and if some people cant handle that its not societys fault.

The externality is increased public health care cost. Obesity leads to increased risks of heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, etc. And there’s a strong between poverty and obesity, making it more likely the public will pay the cost of treatment.

There are other externalities as well; for example, we still haven’t really solved the problems created by all the plastic packaging used with processed foods.

> I don’t know if it’s the nature of the products themselves

Isn't this what you were just arguing it was not 10 minutes earlier?

I’m wondering if it’s a little of both. I’m not a nutritionist, but one operating theory I’ve read is that many processed foods are manufactured in such a way that they make you feel less full than a homemade equivalent would.

See, now we're talking.

That's my point. It's got nothing to with supposed "manipulation" of ingredients.

It's about other stuff -- whether it's price or accessibility or someone telling you "that's enough".

Yeah, I agree. People really seem desperate to believe it all comes down to boogeyman adulterants, but it's a huge red herring and completely unnecessary for ending up with a culture of junk food, obesity, and calorie surplus.

Drop dough into frying oil and then roll it in powdered sugar.

Drop potato slices into frying oil and then salt them.

You don't need boogeyman R&D chemicals to make food that you can't stop eating. What changed is the accessibility of these things. You can go to 7-11 and buy thousands of calories of packaged donuts for dollars. Combined with there only being junk food in US quickmarts compared to, say, cheap bento boxes in Japanese 7-11.

It is far more likely that the obesity crisis is a combination of a lack of healthy food culture combine with industrial revolution of mass produced food capacity. Since you don't want to drop your industrial capability, the only other option is to change societal food culture and their relationship to food. Or just take drugs. That works too

Does grandma have a profit motive? Does grandma care about your wellbeing? Is grandma a vast conglomerate of strangers who couldn't give two flying fucks about you on a good day?

Is plain old sugar, animal fat, and salt unhealthy in large quantities? Of course, but eating grandma's mashed potatoes and cherry pie once a week will not materially affect your health. Meanwhile you pass 8 taco bells on your way home from her house, not to mention the 3 fast food ads you heard on youtube or the radio. Come on.

Right. But that's my whole point, you're agreeing with me.

It's not the food itself. The food isn't being "manipulated" in some sinister, unnatural way. It's not about supposedly addictive "dopamine pathways".

It's other things, whether convenience or advertising or whatever.

No, I don't think I am.

> > Big food corporations profit from ultra-processed foods that manipulate our natural systems.

> I've just never bought this

Yours is a rather strange reading if you truly mean to absolve the food of sinister intent. Clearly it has none.

Nor must the corporate entity producing it. That's the nature of moloch. You get bad outcomes even without outright villainy on anyone's part.

The food is being "manipulated" in the same way Grandma manipulates it, sure. Grandma bakes a pie from whole ingredients, sourced perhaps from an area farm or maybe even her backyard, with her bare hands. Show me how a Twinkie is made. The naturalistic fallacy is irrelevant.

It is simply wrong, not to mention naive, to think companies do not optimize their products to maximize impulse/repeat consumption. They are most certainly aware of dopamine pathways. This is one, and indeed a big one, of those

> other things

you mention. Convenience and advertising are big ones too. Why do we need so much convenience, and see so much advertising? Perhaps it has to do with the ordering of our lives around the very sort of institutions that sell us ultra-processed foods.

Food companies maximizing the utility we get from eating their food is a good thing actaully. Im very grateful for all the delicious food on the market. Not the companies fault that some people never learned to consume in moderation.

> Does grandma manipulate you when she adds sugar to her cherry pie?

Manipulation implies a purpose, so I’d say no. Does grandma have an ulterior motive? She adds sugar to express herself through the art of baking or does she need a favor?

> I mean, is a fig tree "manipulating" you when its figs ripen with sugar so they'll be eaten?

..Yes?

Yeah it's anti-capitalist rants at every turn around here. Capitalism is the best system we have to make people happy in a fair way. It's not a system to teach people the benefits of moderation or charity. You're supposed to bring that to the table yourself. There's no economic system in the world that can fix character flaws.

Yeah, lets sell cigarettes and blame consumers for health issues because, you know, capitalism is the best system we have and the burden is on the consumers.

The burden IS on consumers though. Tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and even bottled water can be harmful in excess. How about video games and porn? I don't think it's the government's job to tell you that you can't have basic things like that just because it might make your health worse in some way if you go crazy with it. Capitalism isn't there to teach you moderation, it's to get you what you want or need efficiently.

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