The same argument is used in the US to thwart limitations on sugary beverage purchases and other junk food with SNAP -- these compose 10-20% of purchases, 50% of which goes to Wal-Mart, alongside 2-5x greater premature mortality from cardiac arrest and diabetic related complications.
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.3...
Incentivizing the poor to hock Nestle timed according to Brazilian food assistance checks is clever. Reminds me of Herbalife, and Betting on Zero -- Hispanic populations, eager to succeed in entrepreneurship, here too are victims of pyramid schemes preying on ill health.
Those living under the poverty line don't like being hit with condescending statements coming from those who are supposedly trying to help them, either. Conservatives/Republicans at least call the poor lazy. Liberals/Democrats who want to restrict sugar/luxury items from EBT/SNAP often make ridiculous statements about "knowing better for them," which you can imagine plays real well in their population.
I've collected EBT with a family and been under the poverty line. I know very well how people think and feel about those above them. Sometimes the single father or mother of two kids who struggles with daycare and a tough job 10 hours a day with 2 hours of commute time would like to buy their kids some ice cream and "bad" food to escape from the terrible life they have, rather than eat some broccoli or toasted kale. Let's have some sympathy.
Few Republicans have the candor to accuse the poor of sloth outright, instead indirectly consigning them to the oblivion of work requirements and the cheap food products low wages can buy.
I do sympathize with the mothers I see on the L fobbing off screaming children with high fructose corn syrup -- and I seek a betterment of their condition, and my own, not by leaving them solely to their own devices, but by assigning responsibility to the more powerful actors here and seeking state restraint as the remedy with sufficient scale and force to succeed.
Advertising can conceal the entire toolbox of dissimulation, hence the coordinated efforts to undermine regulation limiting the hocking of known toxicities. The market drive to eat will find and create food within the bounds of law, as it does, to such horrifying effect in Brazil as the United States.
So what? leave corporations feed them with junk food and ruin their health?
When I was a kid, we drank Coke at every meal and I'm literally paying for it as an adult - and it certainly didn't make me an happier kid. I wish our government had done something to avoid the damage (whether through taxation or information).
> Sometimes the single father or mother of two kids who struggles with daycare and a tough job 10 hours a day with 2 hours of commute time would like to buy their kids some ice cream and "bad" food to escape from the terrible life they have, rather than eat some broccoli or toasted kale.
There is a middle ground between ice cream and broccoli. And believe it or not, eating healthy food would make their life much better, regardless their commute time.
But then on the flip side, we'll also spin the blame around on whoever else is available too. So maybe it's just that it's easier to blame than to fix. "Big business" got Brazil hooked on junk food -- not like good ol' America, where we got hooked on junk food back when it was still small business!
Not the ones I read. Could you cite some mainstream examples?
A typical Brazilian lunch is a piece of meat with beans, sides of rice, french fries, and fried flour (farofa) -- that's right, 3 carbs of empty calories (2 fried) and no real vegetables -- all washed down with mostly-added-sugar "fruit juice concentrate" (cashew apple is really common). Bar snacks are 100% deep-fried, or "pizza" with copious amounts of sugary ketchup (don't ask). Desserts are the sweetest things your tongue has ever touched -- brigadeiros, pudim, essentially all just super-sweet condensed milk.
It's not like the traditional Brazilian diet is full of fresh veggies or nutritional variety at all. I mean, I thought us Americans loved our french fries... but the Brazilians have got us beat!
First of all, the juice concentrates are a newish thing, 20 years ago it was still common to make fruit juice from scratch at home every day. Also, farofa is fried (more like sauteed, it doesn't need that much oil) yucca flour, which is a world away from refined white flour. Growing up, lunch was a large salad along with rice, beans, a cooked vegetable and some kind of meat or fish.
I fully admit that Brazil really took to fast food and it's just as terrible as it is anywhere, but your analysis of "traditional" Brazilian food is quite myopic and probably influenced by your own white-collar professional tendencies towards convenience foods.
But the issue with fruit juice is just how much fruit you need to make it. One glass of apple juice is 3-4 apples. An apple is 60-80 calories. That makes that glass about 300 calories, which is ridiculous.
It's a bit less bad with orange juice, although like lemon juice it has other problems (they're very acidic, at least as bad as coke).
So one glass of juice should be somewhere between 20-25% of your total meal calorie intake. As in, if you drink (one glass) of juice, 2 loaves of bread is now your limit. With water, you can do 3.
But the sugar. Well, the sugar takes the 250-300 calorie glass to 300-350. Not good, but ... not going to make the difference. That's like taking a bit more jam on the sandwich.
The typical average Brazilian lunch is loaded with overcooked dishes - read: wasted nutrients, dripping with vegetable oil and sugar (fructose and others), occasionally covered with a couple of lettuce leaves and freshly sliced tomatoes.
Only in Rio.
honestly i think the healthiest restaurant food i saw in brazil was the appetizer salad bar at the churrascaria, which is of course the kind of place where you eat until you literally can eat no more.
and, i'm fairly certain brazil was an extreme early adopter of pay-by-the-kilo buffets, if not the birthplace.
the traditional non-european food (apart from churr.) is basically modernized slave food - huge amounts of carb-based calories and deep fried food, for cheap, usually in the form of dense stews with starchy sides. southern/cajun food is very similar.
luckily, brazilians are an incredibly active people whose entertainment culture is centered around outdoor activities, and most of them do not indulge in meals out very often, but as with all other societies that become more affluent over time, the modern less-active lifestyle mixed with the traditional diet is not good.
That sounds like hell.
Mostly the company handing out free step counters to those who wanted it. There might have been some very modest financial incentives given out as well.
I am utterly shocked they have not moved into Africa yet.
I've just driven tens of thousands of miles through 17 countries without a single Mcdonalds. Between Morocco and South Africa, there were none [1]. I am shocked they are not in at least Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ghana, etc.
I wonder if that's the longest distance in the world that can be driven without one. Or at least the most consecutive countries.
(checkout the map) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonal...
Africa's (generalizing) median income has just begun to climb high enough in the last 10-15 years, to be financially interesting to the US fast-food companies.
Nigeria's GDP in 1999 was... $35 billion, for a population of 119 million people, or roughly $300 per capita. That leaves very little money in the bottom 2/3 for buying fast-food. Today Nigeria's GDP is closer to ~$400 billion for 186 million people (call it $2,000 per capita), a tremendous leap in economic capability.
Many other nations in Africa have seen similar results.
Consider that Kenya's GDP at a low point in 1993, was just $5 or $6 billion.... It's $70 billion today.
Or Ethiopia, from $7.x billion in 2002, to $72 billion today and still climbing rapidly.
Most likely these nations become appealing business opportunities for all sorts of foreign companies (whether US or European or Chinese etc), with the rapidly rising disposable incomes.
Recently I was in Johannesburg and I can confess that KFC, McDonald's was almost in every corner I passed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_KFC_fra...
Another very important thing to keep in mind which this article fails to mention is the influence of all the free trade agreements which were signed by countries like Colombia and Perú in recent years. Now it's become more affordable than ever to export "goods" from the U.S into these emerging markets without paying any import duties. That is why you now find supermarkets in emerging nations that bare a strikingly resemblance to their american counterparts. A quick glance through the frozen food section will reveal items that weren't even part of the local diet just a few years ago such as pot pies and tater tots.
Not only that, but Nestle has been in Brazil for almost a century now.
I have heard, though cannot confirm myself, that Japan had one of the healthiest societies in the world until fast food expanded there a couple decades ago, causing many problems common in the States, like obesity and diabetes and blood pressure issues, to significantly increase in frequency there.
Until recently in medium-sized Brazilian cities, the only fast food chains an American would recognize are McDonald's and Subway. This changed since the last two years. In a short span of time I saw new franchises of KFC, Pizza Hut, Domino's and Burger King.
...but well, those companies increasing presence explain why the corrupt coup government rushing to sell the country just passed laws removing low-wage workers protection.
This is why our markets are saturated with processed corn and corn syrup.
In other words the US gov spends ~3x the ISS cost to subsidize obesity so already-rich farmers can get richer (still not as egregious as banking is here, though).
For the majority of Americans, the last thing they have to worry about is the cost of vegetables.
Even the "junk" foods you mention are still considerably better than empty corporate garbage like cheetos and soda pop.
I'm not denying the role of Coke, Nestle, McDonalds, etc in amplifying an existing problem into a full blown catastrophe however.
Even though there use pie charts (no pun intended), I liked this visualization.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/what-the-world-eats/
https://fstoppers.com/food/what-week-groceries-looks-around-...
