Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists
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I'd post the link to the source but of course all attribution has been scratched off the video and the first level of overlays.
https://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/ing...
Are they? I don't know the German movement, but the talking points I hear coming from US BARF people seem to mostly be a mix of FUD, naturalistic fallacy, anti-vax, and misunderstanding of biology.
Both are likely correct. Highly processed foods are likely as bad for dogs as they are for humans, AND the people who lean hard into those claims tend to be nutters who are coincidentally correct about this alongside the antivax, anti seed oil, naturalistic bullshit that they use as virtue signaling.
Cures all diseases.
> I have a 11 year old Tervuren that outruns and outperforms 3-4 year old working Malinois.
Backed by anecdote.
I wonder how long until we have a tiktok.com post on the front page.
Times are changing. I'm having nostalgia for the decades we were only worried about turning into reddit.
So far I thought it was mostly AI companies and users pushing their products here, but maybe there's a shift in userbase as well?
Reminiscent of something like Eternal September possibly, but with bots this time? Maybe my interests have simply grown beyond what is typically found here.
I don't think there's "we" anymore. A large population of HN readers got to hate the combination of tech and capitalism that HN stands for because its effects on society are horrible. Techno-optimism is dead.
Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.
This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.
It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
I suppose to be fair, whole pressed juices are incredibly expensive. But I think they should be forced to be more upfront about what these "juices" actually are - mostly apple juice powder with a few other fruit powders sprinkled in and then mixed with water to the desired sweetness level.
Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China. Priced dropped entirely, to the point where it would mostly be considered a net negative. You have to store it before you can send a batch, and that takes a lot space. Not only that, but it has to stay dry. Then, consider you want to have a basic sort already done, because you don't want the whole batch to be paid little because it would be considered the lowest grade. So Bags should be consistent; they also have to be dense enough to avoid taking too much space (typical bags are around 1 cubic meter / 100kg). Most of these operation require quite a lot of very tiring human labor, which also require some skills, a problem pervasive with the sheep industry.
So yes, in the end it's too cheap to produce but too expensive to buy.
One of the problem here is that while yes, you have to shear sheep raised for meat, the wool is going to be of an exceptionally low quality, because (a) you generally aren't raising a wool breed for meat, and (b) you aren't keeping your sheep in a manner that minimised damage to the wool.
We receive a fair bit of free by-product wool from meat herds, the processing cost is roughly double that of wool from a proper wool herd, and the end result is inferior.
The best use of by-product wool is often quality-insensitive bulk applications, like wool pellets for roof insulation, at which point there is very little money in the whole value chain
Not sheep raised for meat, bred to be low wool volume producers, and regularly (two or three times a year) run through a defoliating spray.
See, for example: https://farmtable.com.au/ag-library/ag-business-resources/se...
FWiW, in the actual sheep for wool trade there's still a high demand in China for ultrafine low micron merino wool for modern high end breathable suits. So:
> Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China.
really depends on the grade and quality of the wool - a lot is low grade rag fibre for stuffing and insulation, some (many tonnes per annum) is for quality tailoring.
I can't believe how common this erroneous view is. Sheep reared for wool were bred specifically for the quality of their wool. Those that produce the best wool are not used for their meat. Wool is not a free by-product of anything, it is the product.
50 years ago, the wool sold for more than the meat.
Being too bulky to engage in overseas shipping shenanigans probably helps it.
Your hangup on dehydrated juice is weird. Like, yea, they removed all the water from the juice so all you need to do is add water and it ships better and keeps longer....
you can do this also without any concentrate using regular apple juice
A company called Botanic Tonics makes a product called Feel Free. These are shots containing extract of kava root, and kratom leaf.
When it was launched, there was no mention of the kratom at all. It was advertised as kava (which it isn't, it's kava extract) and pushed hard on college campuses and gas stations.
After thousands of people got addicted to the kratom, they were sued and the label has slightly improved, but the kratom is still only on the hard to read ingredient list on the back of the label. Their website, and all their social media marketing only mentions kava.
Started by ex-con Jerry Cash aka JW Ross (a good friend an donor of RFK Jnr), the company is also part owned by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, so the Feds turn a blind eye while going after competitors to Feel Free, like 7oH manufacturers.
Read the horror stories on r/quittingfeelfree.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/a-herbal-product-sold-...
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FJFJQsc42/
https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2026/09/23/arizona-ag-sues-o...
Never heard of liver connection, wonder if thats actually true of standard powder kratom. With extracts obviously anything goes.
Same difference as coca > cocaine
not-from-concentrate or freshly pressed juice is also mostly water
It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.
There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.
Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
When I look at an ingredients labels I assume it’s listed by order of quantity, but it tells you nothing about the total amount.
You could have two ingredients listed but you don’t know if it’s 99% first ingredient, 1% second or 50.1% first and 49.9% second.
That’s why you look at the nutritional label
E.g. "strawberry yogurt" must list the amount of strawberries because that is displayed in the name/label.
Still important to look at the nutritional label too.
Mine is more dictionary based, meaning "intention to deceive". And prominently putting strawberries or merino on the label while not mentioning what constitutes most of it would fit it. It's especially egregious when nutrition facts are printed in low contrast with tiny print I have difficulty reading even with my glasses.
As an aside, around here traditional jam has more fruit than sugar (per weight and volume). Otherwise you are really just eating flavoured sugar.
Nutrition facts are printed in black and white at a readable size when there is room for the full panel, this is by law. It's not up to food manufacturers.
And I don't know what you mean by "around here". Traditional jam has equal amounts of fruit and sugar. Like the kind your great-grandmother made. Of course it is essentially eating flavored sugar. That's literally what jam is and why you spread it thin rather than eating whole spoonfuls of it.
Obviously there is no official recipe, but "Doña Petrona" is very close to that. She was very famous in 1930-1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do%C3%B1a_Petrona I just looked at her book and it says "1000g Strawberry and 600g Sugar". Here is a webpage that says that they lifted the recipe from the book https://anis-estrellado.blogspot.com/2011/12/mermelada-de-fr... and says "2200g Strawberry, 1000g Sugar + 100ml lemon juice (optional)"
The closest modern version is "Paulina Cocina" https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulina_Cocina that always have good, easy and tasty recipes. She says https://www.paulinacocina.net/mermelada-de-frutilla/40082#:~... "1000g Strawberry, 500g Sugar + 1 lemon juice"
So at least here it's like 2 to 1 by weight. From my memory, I remember the 1 to 1 rule, but I think it was "by volume" instead of "by weight". But note that strawberry have a lot of water inside them, so it's also misleading to think that they have more strawberry than sugar.
Anyway, I agree with you that traditional jam was already "flavored sugar". In particular they used a lot of sugar to prevents the grow of bacteria, so the jam can be store without a refrigerator.
Aboute intent I guess we'll have to disagree.
I dont buy or keep jam stocked but I'll admit i go a little nuts whenever im in reaching distance of those little Smuckers packets. Yumbo!
Completely unrelated topic, but Lord I wish cookie popups were standardized the same way nutrition facts are.
How does one reward the "good guys" when one can't tell the difference between a gamed metric and an honest one?
I can't speak to dog food, I haven't researched that -- just the multiple sugar types. And also that when ice cream lists skim milk as an ingredient along with heavy cream, this isn't to make it appear healthier either -- it's to control the overall milkfat levels.
But if you're looking for nutritional information, that's literally on the label next to the ingredients. If you want to judge the protein or the sugar, then just look at that. If you're trying to judge those amounts by looking at the order of ingredients, that's your mistake to begin with.
If you think the second item there does not get consideration by these companies, you are dead wrong.
To add to this, I recall an actual marketing campaign from one of the big US cereal manufacturers (I forget which) about the first listed ingredient in some of their cereals being whole grain, explicitly selling their product on the fact that the plurality ingredient of it is healthy.
Granted, that by itself doesn't mean much, but if they also split sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, their claim of "more whole grain than any other ingredient" could easily fall under technically-correct-but-misleading. Of course, a shopper can get more useful information from the nutritional facts but most people shop by the pretty picture on the front of the box (and the friendly message on their screen) rather than the technical label on the back.
I looked on the back and after water the second ingredient was “dehydrated cane juice”.
The food system has been gamed forever.
When I visited South America I saw products that would actually more precisely say "sin edulcorante" as opposed to "sin azúcar".
I personally don't get why anyone would volunteer to pay for expensive agave syrup or cane juice when you could just add sugar. Maybe only consume it in moderation (and no sweetened beverages).
I just did a search online and all the Whole Foods soy milk I could fine listed either "organic cane sugar" as an ingredient, or was unsweetened.
oh, and there are some other ones that you might want to avoid.
A low FODMAP diet would cut out not only fructose, but lactose and the -itols like sorbitol, xylitol, and mannitol
There are still some shelf stable goods that you can buy without getting screwed. But it's exceedingly rare now. Peanut butter is a good example. 99% the inventory is JIF with palm oil and added sugar in a plastic container, but on the very top (or bottom) shelf you can often find a glass jar that contains only peanuts and salt. It took me a month to get used to peanut butter like this. The exercise of stirring it almost ruined it for me. I can't imagine going back to the other stuff now. I tried JIF again recently and it tastes like a product you'd buy from Home Depot to do a drywall job.
Are you in the USA? Never seen one of these to the best of my recollection.
Come to think of it, I've never seen a grocery store with a bulk foods section where you can buy grains etc in self serve bags by weight, that didn't have a peanut butter grinder.
Why would you draw conclusions about the EU based on Denmark, a top outlier by any good metric?
You mostly only find the pure peanut stuff in the health food sections of bigger supermarkets.
Pure peanut one is great for cooking if you want a neutral taste but I would never put it on bread it's disgusting.
Stir (very well) once, store in the refridgerator. The colder storing temperature keeps it from seperating, and in small volumes (like the amount you've put on bread) it warms back to a spreadable consistency within a minute or two
Maybe. I've seen cases where the local Farmer's market was reselling produce from grocery stores at higher prices (because Farmer's market).
Farm stores may have similar problems - they might stock things they don't make so they can sell it for convenience. Just because you buy corn from them doesn't mean they made the corn.
Homepage advertising Simply Jif (simply palm oil), for your & orangoutang’s health
Firstly, you've incentivized companies to prevent people from becoming informed. You can already see online that lies spread faster because they don't have the inconvenience of needing to be true. You have one truth, and it has to stand up to countless thousands of lies.
Secondly, nobody can be informed about everything. The whole reason we have experts is because they are the ones informed on their subject, and they devote their entire careers to it. You cannot possibly be well-read and up to speed about everything you buy while still being able to function as a human being.
Thirdly, what happens when the deceptive, shitty product completely out-competes the safer one because it's that much cheaper? Hey, guess what? You can't buy the safe or sustainable version of the product anymore because every business that did went out of business. It's no longer in the market.
From a biological pov, that is wrong on so many levels. It is why labels now have Added Sugars listed separately. Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation, whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
That's why I specifically mentioned the processing part. Sugar in apple might not be comparable to sugar in a coke, but all of that goes out the window when you're comparing the sugar content of jellies.
>whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Healt...
>As of 2026, there is no scientific consensus or regulatory concern that fructose or HFCS impacts cardiometabolic health when substituted for sucrose
This usually pops up around Passover, when Coke switches to an all sugar formulation for reasons I'm unqualified to explain. It's an "oh hey, this Coke tastes different", I'll check the label, and see that it's sweetened with sucrose instead of HFCS.
I'll handwavingly claim that this is close enough to a blind study/anecdote as I'm not Jewish and haven't a clue when Passover falls. As I buy cans, not bottles, it's not the yellow caps giving it away either.
Pepsi tastes much sweeter than Coke and I wouldn't be surprised if corn syrup Coke was sweeter than sugar Coke.
That's not metabolically true. Fructose by definition doesn't have glucose which is present in sucrose. Metabolically, your body absolutely reacts differently.
A core issue is that isolated fructose and its derivatives, e.g. HFCS, don't sufficiently trigger satiety. In contrast, regular sugar and glucose trigger satiety. This has been known for over a decade:
- Dissociable Behavioral, Physiological and Neural Effects of Acute Glucose and Fructose Ingestion: A Pilot Study (2015) (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130280)
- Attenuated hypothalamic response to fructose via a dedicated gut-brain pathway (2026) (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2026.05.013)
For anyone who actually bothers to read:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-fructose-weaker-satie...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-12-brain-reward-circuits...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-06-fructose-brain-reward...
Perhaps it's time for the FDA 2.0 where leadership cannot have any connection whatsoever to the organizations being regulated. If I need years of industry experience and a doctorate to understand why you're adding a chemical to my food, then I don't want it in my food. I don't think that's an unreasonable position. We were far healthier before all of these 'safe' chemicals and additives began being added to food.
I do not know if the Utopian Japanese Food Industry* is so trustworthy and impeccable so as not to mislead customers or engage in malicious compliance. Perhaps they simply abide by the rules and manufacture honest food and inedible leaden paint chips. I don't know; Japan is the place where you can insert your whole rice into a streetside vending machine to have it robbed of nutrients... err, hulled and sifted.
Since I live next-door to a pan-asian market now, I will eventually figure out how they are labeling their sodas and snack foods. Thank you.
* Heartily endorsed/promoted by the sugary, indefatigable punk princess Avril Lavigne: https://youtu.be/LiaYDPRedWQ?si=_ZB7CmKX9RA9C040
God, I miss Tower Records
Rage for views.
Given how often HN trends to the frontpage “rage for views” posts that link to GitHub issues where the submitter dislikes the current outcome, this three-word argument against the post is uniquely unpersuasive here. This US foods practice is a worthwhile topic to rage about given the severity of public health impact of the mislabeling alone, and it’s an easily-solved problem when regulators aren’t captured.
> Scam American companies
... why would I do that?
> Scam American companies are using
... so fake companies?
> Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists
... What?
(reads post)
Oh. "Food companies are splitting up ingredients to manipulate you"
(as a tangent: There's zero percent chance this is only "American" companies. Useless addon word.)
> You must mention the quantity (by percentage) of any ingredients that: appear in the name of the product (example: ‘apple pie') [; or] are emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics (example: ‘with walnuts')[; or] are essential to characterise the food and to distinguish it from other foods[.]
— EU food labeling rules, https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-rules-complian...
Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
If a typical jelly recipe calls for pounds of fruit and a few cups of sugar wouldn't be normal to expect fruit to be the first ingredient? If a company is using more added sugars than fruit that should be obvious without having to look at the nutrition facts
¹https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=classic-strawberry-ja...
²https://www.marthastewart.com/1127955/basic-jelly-recipe
³ ISBN 0-02-604570-2, Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer & Becker, page 832
It really depends on the fruit though—most of the time it works great, but there have been a few fruits that wouldn't set at all (closer to a syrup than a jam) with a low-sugar recipe, but set perfectly when I added more sugar.
> and, more importantly, it tastes so much better.
Agreed 100%.
As you can read on the label:
Ingredients: Strawberries, High Fructose Corn syrup, Corn syrup, Sugar, Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid.
Serving Size 20g
Total Sugars 12g
Total Added Sugars 9g
And that's weighted by share of the output. If you're measuring the input, this recipe is going to take a lot more "fruit" than "sugar", because part of making jam is boiling away a bunch of the water that occurs in fruit, whereas all of the added sugar is retained. (Corn syrup, however, seems to be about 2/3 water, which will make that comparison look worse.)
I'd rather know what I'm eating and not have greedy CEOs pinching their pennies of profit like they're guarding the Krabby Patty formula, because they're scared someone else will learn the generational secret of how to make (checks notes) strawberry jelly. Trust me, the economy will survive if Smuckers tells you how much sugar you're eating.
“Natural flavors.”
I doubt you can’t reverse engineer those fractions from a product and ingredient list anyway.
Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.
The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹
Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.
¹ Here's a make-your-own-jam page with rules of thumb for pectin in jam: https://missvickie.com/jam-pectin-calculator/ .
The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.
The point of this "article" is that they can break up the sugar ingredients so that it's possible for no single source of sugar to be more than the amount of strawberries, but to still have more sugars than strawberries and yet put strawberries first. I'm not saying that this particular jelly example does that, only that the rules would allow for it.
I found that if I wash my sheets with detergents with it, the first night my sheets make me feel like I'm sleeping with a sunburn.
Apparently toothpaste with SLS might cause canker sores.
It is deliberately hard to determine!
lol, here's a website:
https://namephantom.com/other-names-for-sodium-lauryl-sulfat...
they use different names on purpose.
TIL Canker sores are a specific type of mouth ulcer. Where I am (New Zealand), this would just be called a mouth ulcer.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/canker-sore/s...
also, when I was young I worried I might have herpes or something, but doctor told me canker sores are different from cold sores. Later in life, turns out there might be a chance I have crohns?
if you are not already familiar, you should have your doctor go through https://allbrainsbelong.org/clinician-resources/ (this is a nonprofit's project funded through an HHS grant) and see what actually applies to you
Crohn's, irritable bowel syndrome, regular old heartburn, brain fog, chronic fatigue, depression, sleep apnea, hives, rashes, waking up in the middle of the night, heat sensitivities, Ehler-Danlos, joint issues, vascular issues, dizziness on standing, arthritis, long COVID... it's quite the list!!
(and it's really frustrating when (e.g.) a cheap allergy medication can solve half your problems and you go without it for years because no one's thought to connect those dots)
Just to say, be careful with the diagnosis. They can be rather imprecise.
For example in Europe, it is common to list mayonnaise by the elements required to make it, instead of putting mayonnaise on the ingredients list.
Naturally when we mix eggs, oil and mustard, what comes out?
So when wondering what kind of white sauce is on that salad or sandwich, check the ingredients with care.
Unfortunately most folks don't pay that much attention.
These types of pieces I feel however do more harm than good to that cause.
"All-natural juice" is exempt, and it's defined by whether the sugar is "added". So if you combine 20 gallons of orange juice and evaporate the water away until it's reached the concentration of sugar you want, that's fine; if you get one gallon of juice and add sugar until you've reached the same concentration, you're subject to the tax. Oranges contain enough sugar that this is viable for orange juice. Limes don't, so limeade is taxed very heavily while orange juice that contains the same amount of sugar is exempt.
Milk products (dairy or imitation) are exempt, and they are legally defined by the first ingredient (for milk) or first two ingredients (for imitation milk). Chocolate milk isn't a sugar-added beverage, because it's a milk product. Eggnog is a milk product too.
This second point seems to explain why it's important for companies to manipulate which ingredients are listed first.
There's really no chance of misleading the consumer, because right above the legally-mandated and legally sensitive ingredients list you'll see the legally mandated and not legally sensitive nutrition facts, which will tell you that eggnog is about 17% sugar by weight or that, to use the example here, Smucker's strawberry jam is 60% sugar. ( https://www.smuckers.com/fruit-spreads/jam/strawberry-jam )
For example, the very first recipe for strawberry jelly from some horrible spam recipe site:
2 cups (16 ounces) pure strawberry juice (I used 3 1/2 pounds ripe, fresh strawberries to get this amount of juice) 3 1/3 cups (666 grams) granulated sugar
It's literally more sugar than strawberry juice.
1. adding more sugar
2. cooking it for a longer time
3. adding pectin (either store-bought or from natural sources)
Of course it depends on the kind of fruit, but it’s quite rare to have more sugar than fruit, even without pectin or longer cooking time.
(Submitted title was "scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed 1st". Software rewrote it to "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first". I've since changed it.)
Convenience is killing us and the planet. But the alternative makes life much harder.
False. The wheat sold into the EU is not treated with glyphosate, and is strictly verified to comply with EU regulations. Canadian farmers are happy to do that because they charge more for the EU-compliant wheat than the NA-compliant one, and Italians are happy to buy it.
Of course at the expense of others. In this case, our health.
Is your resume any more truthful than these ingredient labels?