I tell that story because it is true.
And I wonder... is there a town named Twinkieville in the USA where everyone dies of obesity and/or diabetes and kids can buy pounds of candy at the store without an ID? Or, is every town in America Twinkieville?
Its financialization of everything including food, government tipping the scales against peoples well being and a declining purchasing power of the average american that has resulted in this awful reality where food isn't food.
Well, sort of. That processing is generally there not so much specifically to keep the price down as to prolong the shelf life. But it's true that without the preservatives you'd be paying higher prices.
I think people sort of miss the forest for the trees with this stuff. Making your own milkshakes, or ice cream, or fried chicken, or Twinkies, will not save you from obesity.
It's not the processing per-se. All these foods are ultra-palatable, readily available, and high in calories/saturated fat.
"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/
Just like: Don't smoke, don't drink, work-out, take walks, spend time with your family and friends, don't work too much. Also, don't worry too much!
All the real problems come in practice.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to have a solid basis.
However, 80% of success comes from applying these things in your messy life.
For example what do I have for breakfast? Oh let's boil and egg amd grab a carrot and corn on the cob. Or whatever.
What do I do in the supermarket? Meats, veg, bit of fruit maybe bit of dairy. Am I obessing over avacado vs. pear. Nope. Chicken vs. beef? No. Chocolate bar vs carrot? easy choice.
Now probably once you get thay square you can do harder stuff like food reaction / allergy testing and so on.
Folks on HN are very much in the "Where" stage of life. No one here works 4 out of 8 hours just to pay for their food. Nobody should.
That said, you very much seem to be missing the point. Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods. That is one reason they are more popular.
For example, it would cost me more just to buy the ingredients to make tacos at home than it does to go through a Taco Bell drive through and buy enough for the family already prepared.
We're not going to be moving to four hour workdays by feeding people food that costs twice as much and takes longer to prepare.
Vegetarian India literally suffers from one of the highest rates of protein deficiency and stunted growth worldwide.
Seitan, tofu, tempeh, TVP, etc etc. All plant based, all high protein.
I don’t know if we need as much animal foodstuff as we consume but just doing that should be enough.
It's the bare minimum if you care about aging well, maximally healthy is a whole other thing
But I am biased. I‘ve seen this slogan everywhere to promote UPFs that claim to be healthy because they are „vegan“.
Now that the market for meat alternatives has collapsed I don’t see this reasoning anymore. What a strange coincidence.
What country are you reporting from? It seems to be absolutely booming in the UK. A brief internet search suggests it's growing and predicted to boom in the US as well.
Me neither, I prefer common knowledge that has stood the test of time for a lot longer, like about 100 years more.
Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote actually.
Sometimes we don't need cold baths or extreme regimens to fix all the messed up things we're doing to our bodies. Simple changes go far to heal the damage.
Most people fighting addiction and having a hard time is fighting a chemical dependency, which is a lot harder and when people start looking beyond "Just do X instead".
From the article:
> Basic science models show that liquid sugar concentrations around 10% by weight—comparable with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew—can reliably trigger addictive behaviors in animals, including bingelike consumption, withdrawal, and dopamine system alterations.
But yeah, it's obviously nothing close to a nicotine.
Algorithm, food, intoxicants, anything that has manipulative potential.
There is a strong correlation between someone making money and someone arguing that people being able to make money is about freedom.
And here we are a few centuries into capitalism and people say that they are conflicted because personal freedom = making money off people. Effectively.
Yet there are many freedoms that are not profitable. We just have to sit down in a chair and think it through for ten minutes. Preferably without the corrupting influence of a scren.
The power asymmetry behind and in the front of the six inch screen is immense.
It wasn't too much like an academic publication, there were plenty of those, but lots of times a breakthrough would be reported anyway, and everything was more commercially oriented by far.
You know how trade publications can be kind of uninteresting for non-insiders, IR could be so boring that college professors wouldn't even read it.
But you could tell when an author had recently left academia and joined industry though because their papers appeared more academic than very seasoned ones.
It's still a challenging transition to make, but I'll never forget how it was addressed one time in the back pages. Where you get the occasional cartoon comic like you would in consumer media.
There's two scientists in lab coats working at their benches, the boss comes on the intercom and they look at each other as he blasts from the overhead speaker:
"Hey you guys in Research, get off your butts and invent something that's habit forming".
Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!
We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.
A list of sugar alcohols including their classification numbers in Europe is:
Sorbitol (E 420)
Mannitol (E 421)
Isomalt (E 954)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Lactitol (E 966)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Xylitol (E 967)
Erythritol (E 967)
Seems to me that it would require quite a lot of sweets, frequently.
Hence why they are excluded in a low-FODMAP diet (the P stands for polyols).
Keeping a healthy diet while avoiding them is extremely difficult, so if they are not causing irritation, avoiding them will likely do more harm than good. Excessive amounts, or a sudden increase in intake, can cause issues for anyone, so changes in diet, especially from an unhealthy diet to one high in fresh fruits and vegetables, may be best done gradually.
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There was a "Nature of Things" episode on this titled, "Foodspiracy". The reason why UPF's have been designed and marketed with many of the same strategies as tobacco is because several big tobacco companies diversified into food. They literally transferred their expertise from marketing cigarettes to marketing junk food.
Companies like Joe Camel started out using cute/cool animal mascots to condition kids so they'd buy Joe Camel cigarettes when they were old enough to smoke (if not sooner). There was a lot of competition for adult smokers, so hooking kids on their brand before any other company got to them was a winning strategy. When they pivoted into UPF's, they immediately put animal mascots and cartoon characters on cereal boxes. They no longer had to wait for their target audience to grow up a bit.
It's sobering to find out that companies specializing in unhealthy addiction have literally gone from cigarettes to potato chips and breakfast cereals without missing a step, and kids are their preferred demographic.
Even American Spirit's website denies that "organic" or natural tobacco is any safer.
1. https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-co...
I'm not sure NSS are necessarily "healthwashing" - they are genuinely a healthier alternative, at least in SSBs. Pointing to some very speculative research about "gut microbiome disruption" as if that somehow means NSS are something we should be concerned about in our diet doesn't seem to reflect the body of evidence on the subject. On balance they seem to be either a neutral or beneficial product, depending on what they replace in the diet.
I think one important distinction between UPF and cigarettes is that we have lots of examples of healthy UPFs. Are there any such examples for cigarettes? Even those researchers who voice concerns about the health impacts of UPFs (Kevin Hall, Samuel Dicken) seem to be largely interested in identifying _which_ UPFs might drive poor health outcomes and why, so we can regulate industry to make their products more health promoting.
My concern with this analogy between cigarettes and UPFs is that we end up with a movement to completely ban UPFs when they have lots of useful properties (can be stored at ambient temperature, long shelf life, reliable quality) that make them very important for people with limited means. The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
Isn't that basically vapes? A nicotine delivery mechanism without the most harmful properties, created by regulation on tobacco.
The thing with tobacco is it doesn't really have any benefit. It isn't a social lubricant like alcohol and doesn't have medical use like opiates. Old World societies managed fine before tobacco.
It is, and I'm not a smoker. Ironically mainly because of the indoor smoking bans.
You can stop this addiction right now by merely doing nothing and not eating "UPFs". You have the power. When you get stressed and want to burn time and energy eating because it's at least eating, how about doing a different thing? Each one of us is powered by a soul that can defy these behavior loops with some self-reflection.
(For the record my only vice is coffee.)
Forget McDonalds, almost any Italian or Thai restaurant to me is like a drug dealer.
There is no amount of chicken alfredo that is satisfying to me. It doesn't matter how it is made, the poison is in the dosage and I am going to eat way too much.
I hope you enjoy spending all of your mental energy self-reflecting to kick the addiction.
And in many places UPFs are cheaper and more widely available than unprocessed food. If you're worried about paying rent, you're not questioning cheap calories for your family.
Even if we can agree that people should exercise more willpower, isn't there something wrong with companies weaponizing science to make food as addictive as possible?
By country the largest consumers of UPFs are also on average the longest lived. They are a by-product of wealth, as is obesity, what people are trying to pin on UPFs is much more likely to be a symptom of excess.
If you trace all countries by causes and incidences of death or morbidity there is nothing unusual or unexpected in the countries that consume the most UPFs, in some cases they even have lower figures.
Unprocessed food is usually a sign of quality, that is all.
Eat less. Lift more. Run more.
Being downvoted for stating the facts is very common on HN.
