Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by K0balt | Hacker News Reader

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Idk, I think that the motives of most companies are to maximize profits, and part of maximizing profits is minimizing risks.

Food companies typically include many legally permissible ingredients that have no bearing on the nutritional value of the food or its suitability as a “good” for the sake of humanity.

A great example is artificial sweeteners in non-diet beverages. Known to have deleterious effects on health, these sweeteners are used for the simple reason that they are much, much less expensive than sugar. They reduce taste quality, introduce poorly understood health factors, and do nothing to improve the quality of the beverage except make it more profitable to sell.

In many cases, it seems to me that brand risk is precisely the calculus offsetting cost reduction in the degradation of food quality from known, nutritious, safe ingredients toward synthetic and highly processed ingredients. Certainly if the calculation was based on some other more benevolent measure of quality, we wouldn’t be seeing as much plastic contamination and “fine until proven otherwise” additional ingredients.

> A great example is artificial sweeteners in non-diet beverages.

Do you have an example? Every drink I've seen with artificial sweeteners is because their customers (myself included) want the drinks to have less calories. Sugary drinks is a much clearer understood health risk than aspartame or sucralose.

Google "aspartame rumsveld" I haven't fact checked the horror story but makes a good one for the campfire.

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

I don’t know what is happening in the rest of the world, but here in the Dominican Republic (where a major export is sugar, ironically) almost all soft drinks are laced with sucralose. This includes the not-labeled-as-reduced-calorie offerings from Coca Cola, PepsiCo, and nestle.

The Coca Cola labeling specifically appears intentionally deceptive. It is labeled “Coca Cola Sabor Original” with a tiny note near the fluid ounces that says “menos azucar”. On the back, it repeats the large “original flavor” label, with a subtext (larger Than the “less sugar” label) that claims that Coca Cola-less sugar contains 30 percent less sugar than the (big label again) “original flavor”. The upshot is that to understand that what you are buying is not, in fact, “original flavor” Coca Cola you have to be willing to look through the fine print and do some mental gymnastics, since the bottle is clearly labeled “Original Flavor”.

It tastes almost the same as straight up Diet Coke. All of the other local companies have followed suit with no change at all In labeling, which is nominally less dishonest than intentionally deceptive labeling.

Since I have a poor reaction to sucralose, including gut function and headache, I find this incredibly annoying. OTOH it has reduced my intake of soft drinks to nearly zero, so I guess it is indeed healthier XD?

That's really interesting! I have not seen such "less-sugar" drinks here in the US.

I personally find that I can substitute 1/3-1/2 the sugar in various mixed drinks with sucralose without nearly the change in flavor as if I substituted all of the sugar. I'm an occasional drinker of zero sugar sodas though so maybe I am more accustomed to it.

That may sadly be so, but it does not change the plain meaning of the term "food safety".

Agreed.

Its application perhaps pushes the boundaries.

For example if a regulatory body establishes “food safety” limits, they tend to be permissive up to the point of known harm, not a guide to wholesome or healthy food, and that is perhaps a reasonable definition of “food safety” guidelines.

Their goals are not so much to ensure that food is safe, for which we could easily just stick to natural, unprocessed foods, but rather to ensure that most known serious harms are avoided.

Surely it is a grey area at best, since many additives may be in general somewhat deleterious but offer benefits in reducing harmful contamination and aiding shelf life, which actually may introduce more positive outcomes than the negative offset.

The internal application of said guidelines by a food manufacturer, however, may very well be incentivized primarily by the avoidance of brand risk, rather than the actual safety or beneficial nature of their products.

So I suppose it depends on if we are talking about the concept in a vacuum or the concept in application. I’d say in application, brand risk is a serious contender for primary motive. However I’m sure that varies by company and individual managers.

But yeah, the term is unambiguous. Words have meanings, and we should respect them if we are to preserve the commons of accurate and concise communication.

Nuance and connotation are not definitions.

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