Edit: Both boys and girls are dependent on these things now and they seem socially acceptable (no smoke, no spit, just swallow the chemical nicotine). Get ready for a huge wave of GI problems due to this.
My understanding is that the relationship between nicotine and gut health (indeed, overall health) is much more complex and nuanced than that. I know that nicotine has a positive effect on ulcerative colitis symptoms for many sufferers.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8895249/#s4
A quote:
Of all the diseases summarized here concerning systemic inflammation, especially in sepsis and endotoxemia, nicotine exerted the most pharmaceutical effect and significantly improved the survival. Next, nicotine is also a potential candidate for treating ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, multiple sclerosis, and myocarditis; the in vivo data provided a much better foundation. For local inflammation, the nicotine administration route may be more important to avoid its accumulation in other healthy organs—for example, the effect of nicotine on arthritis will be more pronounced when nicotine is directly injected into the focus of infection. Perhaps that is why, in the early years, tobacco was used to treat enteritis as enemas (4). It is evident that nicotine has a significant pro-inflammatory effect on periodontitis. However, the latest research also found that nicotine positively affects periodontitis at a lower dosage. In this regard, we consider that the effect of nicotine on periodontitis is mainly due to the influence of inevitable and original oral microbes. At present, most studies focus on the cellular level, and in vivo studies may be limited due to the difficulty of model construction. Therefore, we recommend that individuals with poor oral hygiene avoid excessive direct exposure to nicotine for oral diseases.
Yes, people have used tobacco products for a long time. However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day. They spit, exhaled, etc. Chewing tobacco and snuff are not acceptable and they ruin your teeth/gums. Smoking is not acceptable and it ruins your lungs/breathing ability. This stuff is socially OK, because no one can tell you are using it (no spit or smoke).
Check out all the reports of GI issues on reddit (QuittingZyn). This stuff causes all sorts of GI issues from the top of the stomach to the bottom of the bowel.
We developed, in Snus, an apparently cancer-free chewing tobacco. We developed, in Zyn, a cancer-free, hygienic chewing tobacco with fewer GI issues. We developed, in e-cigarettes / vapes, a cancer-free, COPD-free, carbon monoxide free cigarette.
These should be regarded as public health miracles even if there remain some symptoms of partaking. If 80% of the population is addicted to Zyn or vapes but there are no smokers, you get far better health outcomes than a situation where 20% of the population are smoking and 5% are chewing.
Again, maybe not where you are, but there are definitively countries where both adults and children have tabacco under their lip for most of their waking hours, with no spitting or exhalation involved, as they're inside school/offices, can't really just spit there, even the non-synthetic stuff, as that's relatively new.
Zyn is specifically synthetic isn't it? You still seem to be mostly focused on synthetic nicotine, but the same behavior been observed for many, many decades with non-synthetics too.
Swedish Snus has been around a long time, isn't linked to cancer at all, and has no bad effect on your teeth and gums. Snus is actually associated with vast drops in cancer rates, because it usually replaces smoking. Snus is also no-spit - I think the difference between it and chewing tobaccos is that they are roasted and that snus is steamed. Makes a huge difference healthwise.
I don't have anything to say about the synthetic stuff, I'm not familiar. It's a bizarre industry that cropped up during a period where snus was trying to get into the market and the tobacco companies were trying to keep them out.
Somehow, cigarette companies lobbied to get snus caught up in cigarette taxes, even without the actual health risk. They were only even required to put the weakest possible warning on the package, because the health effects of snus have been well-studied and they're not associated with anything serious, except for nicotine addiction itself (which makes it a good substitute for smoking.)
The big US cigarette companies marketed a few horrible "snus" lines, with the marketing and goal that they would be a replacement product for when a smoker couldn't take a smoke break, and they were weak. I assume these synthetic lines developed to avoid taxes in some way by pretending to be a sort of medical product rather than a tobacco product, like a nicotine gum.
Snus is actually a better Nicorette, I suspected that the nicotene replacement industry had something to do with the sabotage of snus. Snus is cheap, free of health consequences, and doesn't lead you to associate something as addictive as chewing with nicotine consumption. Snus just quietly sits behind your lip, the minis are undetectable by the people you're interacting with, and they smell nice so they don't ruin your breath. Why would you choose a more expensive synthetic alternative?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snus
It is basically the same thing but not synthetic. Supposedly nicotin pouches are not as harmful because they do not have tobacco leaves.
I am a bit ambivalent about it, on one hand people don't smoke as much because snus which means I don't get as much second hand smoke.
On the other hand it is WAY easier for kids to get started on it as they don't need to hide it after they put it in their mouths. I know a few people who are heavily addicted to it (one even keeps one in when he is sleeping) and they all started in their early teens.
Also see this other comment on this thread about this issue:
I don't think this is necessarily true everywhere/for everyone, it's really not common in Sweden to walk around spitting just because you have tobacco under your lip, as people sit in offices and stuff with this in their mouth, can't really go around a spit indoors.
The Snus saliva (actual snus) just gets swallowed. Same with Zyn and others.
BTW, colon cancer is rising among men in their 40s, and there is no known reason why.
IE, e-cigarettes used to be promoted as safe, until the popcorn lung incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#E-cig... (TLDR, some e-cigarettes used diacetyl as a flavoring, which is safe to eat but very toxic to inhale.)
(Kinda stinks because nicotine is a cool drug.)
The outbreak was initially hard for users to trace in particular because of how brands worked in that (again, moderately illegal) industry - a "brand" was basically a paper label/bag production line shipped in the clear from a printer, to hundreds of individual manufacturers, who negotiated their own distribution. Conclusions like "Mellow Mallow Blurple is a safe brand, I tested it" ended up being invalid.
Not true, see the above link.
Edit: yikes sounds like it gets worse and might not even work
That was the “let me stop you right there” moment.
(Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)
I passed on the jaw realignment surgery, knowing that the consequences are more bone wear over time and that I’ll never fully recover usage on the left side of my mouth.
None of the dentists/orthos/surgeons involved said I *had* to do it, there is a trade off. Breaking your jaw might weaken it down the line, but bone wear along the tooth line isn’t great either. It’s a tough call.
Grafting is another thing I’ve been postponing, but now the proximity to my roots is getting painful as sensitivity piles up.
Again: this is all optional and full of trade-offs. Sibling comment suggesting you change dentists is not doing a fair assessment of the situation.
People with bad teeth, on average, die younger and have worse diets.
I’m not in Europe :)
Nah my dude, my dentist peddles all sorts of ridiculous unnecessary treatments. Invisalign? I’m 50, I don’t give a shit about how my teeth look, just want them not to fall off all at once. Invisalign is a subscription for your teeth. No thanks.
I stay with this dentist because they are friendly, technically competent and a 5-minute walk from home. Literally the only downside is the FUD to get me to go for those treatments but it’s just steeling myself to say “no thanks” every 6 months.
We get along great and I find that’s both hard to find and super important - no better way of putting off dentist visits than having a dentist you dread seeing every 6 months.
The recovery period sucked, I needed antibiotics and couldn’t eat anything solid for two weeks.
If you can behaviourally prevent needing gum grafts you should.
Why do we allow this? Just behave like all others.
Now we want to push for smoke-free societies: but non of ways to achieve this even dares to talk about "just make tobacco giants list all the ingredients/additives".
So you get for a banana:
Ingredients: banana, <a list of chemicals you cannot pronounce longer than the fist two chapters of the Bible>
Ingredients: banana Servings: 1 Serving Size: 1 banana
Personally, I prefer my bread to not have plastic labels on it. Besides on the bread itself, where would you even put such a label? The sleve-bags for bread are used for more than just one specific bread, so can't put them there either...
But never: just force them to transparently list the junk they --currently secretly-- put in.
If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.
Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.
The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.
If ads were informational, like “here is a new product you might like from the makers of this other product you already use,” that would be different.
it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.
I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job
That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you.
Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.
Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.
And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.
All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!
Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)
He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
The next time you're watching a commercial from some company renowned for marketing success (Apple, Coke, etc) pay attention to how much time in the ad the product is in any way mentioned, and how much is... 'other stuff.' That other stuff is the point of the ad, the actual product is largely irrelevant. The world would be vastly better without large scale marketing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model
The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.
The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market.
With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete.
If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.
While Tesla has (in some years) avoided traditional marketing, the ceo is known for spending ridiculous amounts of money on publicity stunts like having a submarine shipped to a cave and buying Twitter to boost public perception of his companies.
I think this is the exception that proves the rule.
How can it be "uniquely bad" if it's "along with other drugs"?
Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.
And in doing so you can see that what you're saying is actually not true. Look up any random advertiser and you'll see that it's pretty uncommon for ads to be based around insecurity. Almost always it's on banal product features. The insecurity-focused ads do exist but they tend to be focused on a few broad lowest hanging fruit ad categories.
(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)
Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.
They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.
> Regulation of the multiple addictive products that tobacco companies have disseminated to markets globally may be needed to protect public health.
That seems less about logistics and more about manipulating the content of food, perhaps to encourage some low-level of dependence. People eventually came to expect this from tobacco products, I think many would be surprised to see this kind of thing from Oreos or potato chips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
And regarding health risks, please ask your doctor about your consumption. You may be surprised.
And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.
Seems like playing semantics, to not say disingenuous, using "meaningless" to mean "unknown", when the former clearly has a negative connotation.
You'd find plenty of definitions if you looked for them
> generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
Go ahead and list the negatives too lmao... what do you think the additives meant to prevent living organism from developing on the food do in your gut for example ?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11901572/
Ultra processed food benefit companies more than they benefit you
Having a greater number of competing definitions does not generally make a term more meaningful. (Take "art" for example.)
Exactly. Terms that are meaningful have one generally accepted definition. When everyone and their brother are coming up with their own pet definitions, that is when a term is considered meaningless.
btw feel free to open a dictionary and discover that a lot of words have multiple definitions, it doesn't mean they're meaningless...
While it is true that words often have multiple meanings while remaining meaningful, they do not have multiple meanings within the same context as is the case here. I am surprised that wasn't obvious to you. Hey, on the bright side, at least you got to learn something new today.
What is this singular, well-defined, and widely accepted definition in science for "ultra-processed food"?
Are glazed donuts ultra-processed foods?
Cynical arguments are facile. I'm not interested in hearing that people are dumb or evil. I am genuinely curious how these companies attract talent.
Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
I also agree that people have choices.
I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.
Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery.
And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.
And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food".
I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat.
But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me.
Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".
But the availability of these options when you're say, doing lunch break in a particular city, is not unlimited.
I explicitly said that I'm not for a government dictate on what food should be made.
I did not add any suggestion on how to deal with the problem, but my statement said that maximizing profits on food can be exploitative.
All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.
If you remove approved commercial options for promoting yourself, like advertisements, then most of the other options left for promotion are essentially spam.
If your answer is word of mouth, that's naïve. I've worked with over 100 startups at very various stages of marketing in the last 15 years. Word of mouth is fire in a pan. It is very industry dependent, context dependent, and company dependent.
The deeper point is that pro-advertising people always frame it like advertising is something people want and that benefits them, but this is just a fig-leaf for the underlying ideology that businesses have the fundamental right to buy peoples' attention for money. The directories idea is mostly just a way to call this bluff, essentially saying "if people wanted to be advertised to they'd go out of their way to get it". Then the underlying ideology comes out.
This kind of situation is win-win-win.
The plumbing website makes money from the ad - supporting their operations so plumbers can keep a good source of plumbing educational content.
The SaaS company gets to put their product in front of users to look at and consider buying.
The users get to see a potential product with no obligation that they may have not ever heard of before.
Ah yes, the capitalist trick of blaming the consumer for structural failings.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-... - food desert map.
Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.
Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.
Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.
The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well stocked stores as food deserts.
Now, those are just methodological problems. Pretending they were resolved, physical access to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].
For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in certain areas where elevated crime would otherwise make them unviable to operate — are conspicuously under-discussed in favor of the more heavy handed "socialist"-type solutions you raise here.
This exemplifies the typical failure mode of many socialist policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.
But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.
Consider the half of the US population that doesn't vote, not only do they not vote... but most of the time it's not even a system that they think about at all. There are a number of people who barely even know who the candidates in any given election are. You can live your entire life within a very narrow line of sight.
The "banality of evil" [1] is term coined by Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann who killed over a million Jews in the HOlocaust. She described Eichmann as an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who was (in his mind) advancing himself in the Nazi Party. The term has been exapnded to describe how disconnected most jobs are from their outcomes through complexity. You might be working on an AI feature that just identifies from external phone activity when someone is home or not. Sounds harmless right? What if you knew it was used by militaries to assassinate journalists while they were home so they got their families as well?
This also feeds into the concept of "social murder" [2].
Cognitive dissonance was best described by Upton Sinclair [3]:
> It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
Even if you, as a tobacco employee, realized the connection between what you were doing and selling more cigarettes, you'd find people rationalizing it by saying things like "I'm selling to willing buyers" or you'd couch it in terms of personal freedom.
Lastly, violence, specifically state violence. We (generally) have a skewed view of what constitutes "violence". We all understand that if you get attacked by someone in the street it's violence. Where it gets more contentious is for something like eviction. Many will say "well that's protecting somebody's asset". Others will argue that putting people out on the street, particularly in a wealthy country, is state violence [4].
I bring this up because we live in a society that doesn't guarantee basic necessities. So you need a job to pay for those things. Well, that's putting a proverbial gun to people's heads. If someone is selling tobacco, are you going to tell them they should risk homeless for that moral stance? Would you? I don't mean that as a provocation. It's a thought experiment. How much would you give up for a moral stance personally? What if it impacted your spouse? Your children? There was a time when certain jobs exempted you from the draft. What if you had one of those jobs and it was immoral? Would you go to Vietnam instead?
[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
[3]: https://rowansimpson.com/quotes/salary/
[4]: https://hnmcp.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp/news/evictions-can-kill-...
dried bananas chips as a snack? fine. potato chips cooked mostly in palm oil? not so great.
both "snacks"
Canned fruit is packaged in syrup. It has more sugar than candy.
"Processed" means that ingredients had to be manipulated to produce the food (e.g. most recipes). Most of what you make at home is "processed".
"Ultra-processed" means food produced using industrial processing, using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc. That's a clear distinction.
Whether or not that means anything for the nutritional value and health outcomes from consumption of the food is a different question, but it can clearly be studied.
If you really think Oreos, Pringles, and Lunchables aren't ultra-processed and extremely unhealthy, there's no point in having a discussion.
Otherwise you're just playing the same game of Humpty Dumpty.
1. Ultra processed food is a media hype -> totally dismiss it
2. Ultra processed food is often used without proper classification and would be more useful to have well defined sub categories
> 1. Ultra processed food is a media hype -> totally dismiss it
Don't let the media decide what you think, whether you want to go against them or you want to support them. Your faith or distrust in some media organization or segment has no effect on the truth value of some statement being made. They are adding commentary.
> 2. Ultra processed food is often used without proper classification and would be more useful to have well defined sub categories
Don't come up with words and then struggle to define them, or worse, argue with people about their definitions. Language is a tool. Discuss actual things, and use words to label those actual things. If they do not offer a definition for "ulta-processed food," do not help them. It is not up to you to come up with categories of food to fit the case they are making about "ultra-processed food." It is up to them to associate their health theories with the food they are trying to classify within them, both statistically and with guesses about the mechanisms.
Don't feel like because one can have a discussion that it makes sense to have one. If I make up a word, you shouldn't waste time debating its meaning, you should just ask me to give you a clear definition of how I'm using it.
Parsing words seems super intellectual when you're 12 years old arguing with your mom about bed time, but it gets pretty boring pretty quickly after that. Something to consider.
Yes, and cigarettes cure cancer amirite ?
We all know what they mean by ultra processed food, it's 75% of your supermarkets. 45% of the US is obese, the rest is overweight, food is one of the main factor in the top 2 leading causes of death in the US, if you can't see the problem you're blind
There is a very good definition on wikipedia btw, and yes not all ultra processed things are bad, but the vast majority of them are
Don't need ultra-processed food to be unhealthy. Rich guys in the 1800s would get fat and get gout and all these issues from overconsumption. It's just they were the only ones who could back then.
We're talking 1980s, not 1880s by the way
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
There were a ton of programs after WWII to improve the nutrition of the country. This largely meant raising calories to prevent malnutrition. And the 80s are as good a point as any other to where that succeeded.
Could it be that maybe, maybe, there is a link to this and the subject of the paper being discussed?
The key is, eat things from the outside ring of the store, not the middle cookie sections.
I haven't gotten that "not too much" part down yet.
This is primarily a marketing distinction which appeals to natural sensibilities.
Very scientific!
The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.
> The Nova definition of ultra-processed food does not comment on the nutritional content of food and is not intended to be used for nutrient profiling.
> Nutrient profiling: also nutritional profiling, is the science of classifying or ranking foods by their nutritional composition in order to promote health and prevent disease.
So it looks like this classification doesn't mean what you think it means.
Do you understand that the classification is not based on healthy/unhealthy but based on how much “processing” was done to the food?
All you're missing is "and quantity of processing is correlated with being unhealthy, making it a useful metric".
How is the food unhealthy? By having lots of fats? Or high salt? Or high sugar? Is it perhaps the ingredients that make it unhealthy?
What other people are saying is that this communicates almost nothing. What it does is allow people who are doing very bizarre things to food to hide among people who are doing pretty well known, well-tested, and ancient things to food. It's literally an argument to ignore the specifics, it's an argument for ignorance.
That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.
If the state of physics was "stuff falls, heat sticks around, light goes fast" I think it'd be fair to describe that as "abysmal".
Health/nutrition is a spectrum but no one will tell you to eat a bag of chips a day and rinse your mouth with coke
The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience, better margins for the producers, etc.
If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.
Availability is the most important value of nutrition, above all else. I expect your comment was made having more nuance, but that just highlights the importance of a clear definition. Without it we are left to guess at what it is you mean.
With those kind of basic ideas you can mostly survive and figure your way around. No one needs to check spin on electrons when living their day to day. Or the mass of a neutron star versus a blackhole
Similarly, nutrition science can be extremely specific about gut microbiome compositions and its effect in regulating specific hormones and so on. But most humans just need the guidelines of dont over eat, have mostly fish/legumes and veggies and be active (strength training and regular walks) to have a healthy life.
no one needs to know the exact frequency and voltage of your plug to be taught to not stick your giners on the wall, and no one needs to know the exact victamin C and iron content of spinach to know its healthier than ultraprocessed chips
If your food is something like "Chicken breast", "whole wheat flour" or "Green onions", it's not.
You will be able to find many ambiguous cases, at which point the categorization ceases to become useful. I do not believe this means categorization isn't useful in general.
Oh, you don't have unlimited money? Some people don't have unlimited time or capability to prepare home-cooked meals constantly. It would behoove anti-UPF advocates to design a system that more accurately describes nutritional value of "UPFs" so people can make informed decisions within the constraints of their life.
while it is quite funny how you turned around my "just spend way more money" advice as an actual suggestion, it really isn't particularly helpful because UPFs are a much, much broader category than "flavor-blasted" type products. A huge number of low/no-prep options are UPF, you just don't think so because they don't scan as unhealthy. It gets us back to the main problem that it's all basically just vibes, which is why you don't see the issue that your honest-to-god advice was to just buy good stuff instead of buying bad stuff. Why not just cut to the chase and have an Ultra-Bad Foods categorization?
> I think this is misleading and dishonest, which is why I am being direct.
Good save, everyone reading this totally thinks that's what you were doing and not just showing your whole ass while making my point for me.
Cake and cookies are bread and made with the same ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, salt, herbs.
Things I do not include when I bake at home, which I found from the first hit I got by searching for "bread" in a local Norwegian store's web site: E 472e emulgator, E 471 emulgator, margarine, dextrose, E 300 flour treatment, amylase enzymes, xylanase enzymes.
And that's a fairly short list compared to Walmart bread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411980
E-330 is citric acid which is lemon juice
E-621 is MSG which is just more meaty tasting salt from seaweed sources instead of rock.
The E classification is for regulation testing, not a label of how processed something is.
Another rule of thumb other than ingredient list is who made it. Your local baker will probably have a less processed method than a mega factory like Bimbo Hovis or any other macro manufacturer that can put 1000 loaves in every supermarket in the country every day
These terms have actual definitions.
Bread can be ultra-processed depending on how it’s prepared.
Better question is why you don’t think a packaged bread product with HFCS and preservatives designed for a long shelf life would be considered ultra-processed.
> Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Yeast, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Soybean Oil, Dough Conditioners (Contains One or More of the Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- and Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, DATEM, Ethoxylated Mono- and Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Monocalcium Phosphate, Soy Lecithin, Calcium Propionate (to Retard Spoilage).
A good rule of thumb is that if your grandpa would have needed a PhD in chemistry to identify 80% of the ingredients it probably is ultra processed.
The same type of bread in France:
> Wheat flour 63%, water, sugar, rapeseed oil, salt, vinegar, yeast, broad bean flour, WHEAT gluten, flavouring (contains alcohol), acerola extract.
this is the chemical composition of a strawberry
my phd-less grandfather will have to now avoid his favourite dessert :(
ok, well continue eating dog shit products designed by megacorps for the sole purpose of profit maximisation then, what do you want me to tell you? We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem but 4 decades of processed food skyrocketed all of our lifestyle related health issues.
> We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem
Also people wasn't all that much healthier and neither they lived so long.
> but 4 decades of processed food skyrocketed all of our lifestyle related health issues.
But you can as well get the same health problems from eating too much fruits. E.g grapes and mangoes have more sugar than coca cola.
That you will try and educate yourself in the nuances of a complicated topic like nutrition and wont advocate for anti intellectual and anti scientific shorthand doomerism that makes people less educated and capable of distinguishing healthy habits?
> We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem but 4 decades of processed food skyrocketed all of our lifestyle related health issues.
None of this is true. We have been dying of starvation, food borne illnesses and nutricional deficits for millenia, industrilisation and post war economies have replaced that with hyper caloric ultra processed food that hand in hand with more sedentary lifestyles have skyrocketed a limited amount of health issues like cardiovascular problems.
We dont die of iodine deficiencies because we added it to salt, we dont die of scurvy because citric acid is common and citrus fruits plentiful, varied diets and better agriculture means locusts, bad weather, insects and specific harvest destroying pathogens happen less often and dont kill all our crops.
Btw in our modern world places like italy, the basque country, japan still have incredibly healthy populations. They mostly eat veggies, fish, fatty oils and walk alot. Their portions are also smaller than in places like america. And its not like ultra processed food doesnt exist there, or that they dont use chemicals in their food production.
That's impressive considering humans have existed for about 300,000 years. Also famine and starvation was a fact of life for much of the population until recently, but I guess that's not a real problem.
NileRed - Turning paint thinner into cherry soda:
I really don't get why/how one of the simplest processes known to civilization needs a stock ticker and a Hogwarts-worth of chemicals thrown into it. It's really quite baffling.
The state of some of the processed packs of 'bread' I've seen/tasted shouldn't be allowed to trade using the name, tbh.
The definition I have heard is "food made with ingredients or processes not commonly used in ghome Unfortunately, when I looked to leading scientific orgs, they are dithering on releasing formal definitions, but all say something like what I'd heard.
Conflicting information doesn't mean an abysmal situation. I'd argue the opposite. Everyone "knew" the sun orbited Earth.
I know there is science around it, but the very concept looks very unscientific, it's almost like talking about "unnatural food"
The underlying issue is some mix of what industrial processes make possible combined with food scientist working with taste test panels to hyper optimize food. When you spend all this time and effort trying to create a snack where people are always left craving just a bit more you end up with the kinds of junk food that we have.
We want there to be some simple answer of "it's these ingredients, or this specific combination" but the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.
Food health science has always had difficulties with just how complicated the actual processing of food in our bodies is and the more we look the more complex it gets. But the "ultra-processed foods" test seems to be working out as a successful heuristic to identify especially unhealthy foods. Given the issues health science has had with coming up with exact answers a heuristic that's pretty reliable (even if imperfect) is a pretty big win!
Invariably when someone says something like "UPF is a pretty reliable heuristic" its because they are massively underestimating what counts as UPF and using a "I know it when I see it" approach, which, yeah of course it seems reliable if you start with the precondition that UPFs are unhealthy.
If it's just guidance and not for regulation, well, you have similar problems in the opposite direction. prepackaged whole grain bread is UPF the same as Wonder Bread w/ 2.5g added sugar per slice. It's easy to say "just buy fresh bread" but when that collides with the reality of a busy schedule then UPF designations become next to useless. The undeniable value that preservatives have for healthy and unhealthy products alike mean that anyone using actual UPF as their heuristic will be completely rudderless.
That's not an answer at all. You need to explain why an industrial mixer would create less healthy food than a kitchen mixer. The scale shouldn't matter.
Well, for starters - the refined sugars, carbohydrates and oils that seem to be the main culprits behind the obesity epidemic are mostly things that wouldn't be efficient (or in some cases, even possible) to create in a home cooking environment.
Sure, you could order some grain milling or oil extraction equipment on Alibaba and DIY it, but 99.999% of households aren't going to do that.
But certainly pro-processed-foods stuff gets pushed by the right, and Soros is on the left, so there's the contradiction.
The only point I'm making is that it's nonsensical for you to claim to be receiving "Soros bucks" for shilling ultra-processed food as healthy. That's not a stance the Soros foundation takes.
but then theres RFK nuttery, so its not that stupid.
but yeah, ultra processes has no functional science behind it even though we still know cheap food is typically unhealthy and addictive
I'm 100% convinced that people who are morbidly obese not getting a second serving or not getting those extra nuggets is as hard as a drug addict not picking up a needle or straw or a lighter. You fucked up.
EDIT take the cost on society and obesity must be more expensive than that of all drugs combined. Something like half of the US now ?
This is why Google no longer has just some unobtrusive text ads to the side. At the time it was great because it wasn't annoying, but then the analytics came in and showed that more prominent and better camouflaged ads had higher conversion and revenue. And people grumbling aside, their revenue multiplied over and over again.
Instead the executives went in front of Congress in 1994 and swore under oath that they believe nicotine was not addictive:
And all profited personally from that law breaking denial of basic facts that directly lead to pain and suffering for their customers.
From that you can see the future we now live in clearly laid out before you.
I wonder if they killed more people with cigarettes or with the anti-science movements they kick-started so they could kill more people with cigarettes?
Preservatives targeting mold/bacteria growth: potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate, calcium propionate, sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, sulfites.
Antioxidants targeting oil and fat rancidness: BHA, BHT, TBHQ, propyl gallate, tocopherols, ascorbic acid.
Water/activity texture systems (practically restricting water availability for chemical and biological processes): glycerin, sorbitol, corn syrup, maltodextrin, modified starch, gums, polyols.
Acidity systems (also flavor, but restricts some microbial growth): citric acid, phosphoric acid, lactic acid, malic acid, fumaric acid, sodium citrate.
Stabilizer/emulsifier systems(physical appearance, prevents oil separation): mono- and diglycerides, polysorbates, lecithin, DATEM, SSL, carrageenan, xanthan gum, cellulose gum, modified food starch.
As far as modern scientific medical knowledge, this impacts your gut microbiome negatively, puts added burdens on your liver and kidneys, and that’s just the obvious immediate effects. This is just the shelf life component - the synthetic flavor/texture modification chemistry designed to enhance addictive potential is equally complicated.
Suggested warning label: “‘Food’ corporations will happily shorten your life and ruin your health if it means more profits.”
What people object to here isn't the efficiency, it's the motivation and the profit.
I don't think US tobacco firms diversifying is bad, personally. I'd rather they sold food than cigarettes. But, they want to sell high fat, high sugar, high salt PROFITABLE foods to people worldwide, not actual nutritionally balanced good food (good as in healthy, not moral).
Ultra processed foods have a long shelf life. That's part of why they are efficient. If they applied the same logic to shipping soy protein, vitamin rich fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy produce, would that be wrong just because they're called "Philip Morris"?