We Asked Starbucks Why Their 'Sugar-Free' Drinks Have Sugar
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> 19 states had an obesity prevalence between 30% and less than 35%. > 21 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico had an obesity prevalence between 35% and less than 40%.
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data-and-statistics/adult-obesit...
I just briefly scanned their 50 page-long nutrition PDF and I don't see one around 200g of sugar, even in the largest size - which product are you referring to?
For marketing and labeling purposes, if you are below a certain threshold, then your product is "free" of that ingredient. That is "gluten-free wheat".
Wheat is inherently glutinous. Without gluten it ceases to be wheat. You can ask the Catholic Church about this. We have examined the issue for 2,000 years and we are quite opinionated on what is, and is not, valid.
There is now a sub-industry where altar bread is made with very low gluten. This can be offered to celiacs and allergic people, as the Eucharist. However, some churches actually advertise as "gluten-free". This is a grave mistake on their part. There are truly "gluten-free" altar breads that are nothing but potato or rice. These can't be Eucharist. But "VLG" very-low-gluten can be marketed and sold commercially as "gluten-free". It engenders much confusion, a lot of mistakes, and a lot of hurt feelings, like the above post. Well, more than feelings apparently.
I'm not sure how anyone can argue that isn't clearly breaking FDA guidance of containing less than 0.5g of sugar:
https://www.fda.gov/regulatory-information/search-fda-guidan...
Either way wouldn't the greatest satisfaction of a habit-forming desire come from those who are having a little metabolic shortage at the time for one reason or another?
Starbucks has always been completely dependent on habit-forming behavior in response to significantly powerful substances.
That's what dependency can do.
My carton of regular milk says 11g or sugar per 240ml. So seems like simple milk could get there.
Products actually using erythritol, mannitol, or xylitol instead are a rarity.
"Sugar free" usually implies that it uses sweeteners instead of sugar.
These are nutrition claims and they are regulated [0]
https://food.ec.europa.eu/food-safety/labelling-and-nutritio...
i’m on a no (added) sugar diet most of the time, so the effects of sugar are very noticeable when i do have it. when i have stuff with added sugar, at first it seems gross and too much and then i mysteriously have cravings for more sugar. things like milk with naturally occurring sugar don’t have that effect
Not adding sugar also greatly limits how much you have. Coke has well over double the sugar per 100ml as whole milk, and you can chug down a lot more of it in one go.
https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/252207566
https://www.coca-cola.com/gb/en/brands/coca-cola-original-ta...
I’m confused why this type of thing is so reliably a surprise to us as a community. It’s the same ethical model that HN’s own industry operates under, so I’ve assumed we’d all be well familiar with it by now? Especially given how many of our salaries that exact same amorality has paid. I’m sure that’s exactly what’s happening at Starbucks, too: a bunch of people want to succeed and found a way to sweeten sugar free drinks with milk concentrate, which is a pretty genius move in a business context. I mean, this story could outright be an opening hook for a Better Off Ted episode for how cliché it is:
Veronica: “Ted, we need a smoothie that can be legally labeled sugar-free while tasting as sweet as tears of a crying young child after I’ve taken her ice cream and eaten it all up.”
Ted: “We can do that! Uh, was that a simile?”
Veronica: “No, it was vanilla.”
The business side of Better Off Ted was an accurate representation of the default state of a business’s ethics: Not Applicable. Fines and penalties for the rare case of being held accountable for impersonal malice towards customers are budgeted for in the same way that one budgets for bribes: have enough liquid assets to cover the immediate threats and delay any court proceedings long enough for the market to forget the risk while you reserve interest earned to pay it without disrupting operating profits. It externalizes ethical responsibilities onto the courts the same way Amazon externalizes packaging waste onto municipal waste streams worldwide, and outsourcing problems is Good Business 101.
I recognize one this probably seems morally bankrupt, but I’m not endorsing their behavior — I, a high-functioning sociopath, think that they’re a parasitic malignancy, and certainly I am well able to recognize sociopathy and amorality, given how often I see it in the mirror. Cancers such as theirs should be irradiated with changes to incorporation laws to be prosocial while their profits are permanently capped, with copyleft-style clauses to ensure that anyone who buys or operates their assets is then bound by those same requirements, They have done grievous harms to human labor and will clearly lie at the drop of a penny in their register, and should be used as a lesson to the other antisocial businesses on why they need to fake giving a shit through actions rather than just platitudes lest they be forced to wither to a husk of their former valuation while still operating technically profitably but in a way that’s utterly useless for financial engineering. But my opinion about how we ought to apply morality isn’t relevant here, helping others comprehend that we’re facing corporate sociopathy is — I’m only mentioning it to contrast the difference between “describe the sociopath” and “judge the sociopath” :)