Tobacco companies should've just announced that "This new tobacco we made is super good, but too dangerous to release, so we are smoking it ourselves and giving it to only the select C-level smokers"
Now China has invested heavily in their homegrown industry and all of their cigs are currently 10 years ahead of the rest of the world. Chunghwa thins are the new frontier, with their subtle plum aroma.
The newer synthetic nicotine pouches (Zyn, On, Velo) are everywhere in the USA and are being used by kids as young as 13. They are ruining the gut health of an entire generation of kids.
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.
Source for the claim that nicotine use "ruins" gut health?
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.
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.
Unless you do an incredibly painful graft right? I have a buddy who had to do that in college and man it seemed incredibly unpleasant. They harvested the skin from the roof of his mouth IIRC
Edit: yikes sounds like it gets worse and might not even work
My dentist has been peddling this procedure to me for years. It sounds incredibly invasive and painful and they don’t even promise it’ll cover 100% of the recession, nor that it won’t recede again unless one goes for an even more invasive jaw realignment which involves, I shit you not, intentionally fracturing the palate bone to make more space to align the teeth.
That was the “let me stop you right there” moment.
(Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)
What you’re describing sounds terrible in isolation, but usually these measures are only done if truly needed — at least in Europe?
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 had this suggested to me by a locum dentist, and i agree. This is totally off topic and going further so but if you didn't already, you should change your dentist.
Is your problem with them that they're synthetic, or that it's nicotine? Pouched tobacco like that been used for decades in some places in the world, or even without pouches, just making your own ball and sticking the tobacco under your lip. I'm not sure these countries have a higher rate of GI/gut problems than other places, which kind of would invalidate your entire argument here.
My problem is it is an experiment (synthetic nicotine that is socially acceptable) and kids are addicted to it. It's like candy. No one knows or complains because the users are not generating smoke, vapor or spit. They just swallow the synthetic nicotine.
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.
> However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day.
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?
Spitting was necessary because swallowing tobacco represents an immediate, acute food poisoning issue due to the other chemicals present. It's also all sorts of cancerous, including to the mouth, also due to those other chemicals.
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.
> However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day.
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.
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.
Exactly what I'm talking about, just didn't want to name it by name as people have a lot of preconceived notions about it that pops up as soon as you say "snus", for some reason.
I never heard about it causing GI problems, but snus definitely causes major teeth and gum problems. The guy I mentioned had his gums receded completely, he once showed it to me. It was very bizarre.
Also see this other comment on this thread about this issue:
You customarily spit out that saliva that’s been in contact with your dip. Swallowing it is way worse for you. When I framed houses the guys that chewed would leave a little trail of brown spots everywhere.
> You customarily spit out that saliva that’s been in contact with your dip
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 lipid pneumonia outbreak was a thing exclusively associated with THC vapes, which are an illegal but widespread cottage (garage) industry where one summer, one of the thousands of manufacturer-enthusiasts made a forum post about the innovation of maybe using vitamin E acetate as a thickener. Experiments were performed, positive results were obtained, and products went out to distributors. The hazard to heavy users (perhaps for manufacturers with poor blending practices, we don't know) who showed up in the ER, was recognized within a month or two, and everybody immediately stopped using vitamin E acetate as a thickener. It took most of a year of panic for the last of that summer's merchandise to percolate through the supply chain.
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.
Tobacco, wine and fresh bread are usually few of the consumables that in many western countries do not have to disclose their ingredients.
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".
An amusing thought but I mean the potato salad deli stuff. Anything prepared on site (in a store or restaurant) doesn't need to disclose ingredients. There's no special exception for bread.
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that cigarettes are healthy for you. Everyone knows they cause multiple cancers. That's part of the appeal. It shows how 'tough' and 'cool' the user is. No matter what you do, there will always be a reactionary group of people doing the opposite of what they are told.
I know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.
There's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'.
There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting.
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.
I didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.
If you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.
I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
Comedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception.
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.
Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.
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.
I think marketing is fine until it turns into lies. Reaching people to sell them your product should not be an issue. That, with misrepresentation and misleading claims is an issue.
I think manipulating people is a broader surface area to describe the problem. Most people think marketing is about just showing a product, but it's not. Marketing is about psychologically manipulating people and creating subconscious associations within peoples' minds using deeply researched strategies and techniques. See stuff like the Elaboration Likelihood Model. [1]
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.
What about invasion of public and private spaces? Sidewalks in my neighborhood are plastered with dozens of political signs. It’s garish and in some cases hinders traffic visibility. Radio stations near me have started using the album art/song title metadata to display ads on the screen in my car in the middle of a song. Nearly every website tracks you, your phone provider tracks you, stores track you and then they roll up all of this “anonymous” information to target specific ads.
The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.
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.
Tobacco is an addictive product that on average hurts the people who use it as a negative utility. Almost every other product people buy has a positive utility. Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.
It's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.
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.
There are entire categories of ads that operate on insecurity, they just don’t come out and scream “this is because you’re insecure” as that would make for bad copy. E.g. you think adult diapers advertise on anything other than insecurity (even if that insecurity is well-founded)?
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.
That's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise?
(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.)
It’s more than marketing, they’re applying cigarette processing principles to food processing: choosing specific flavor chemicals and additives to produce maximum addiction within the varied neurophysiological profiles of different consumer cohorts
They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.
I'm only going by the abstract but this bit stuck out to me:
> 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.
Yes it seems like the authors of this article are implying this is bad? I mean ultra-processed is a meaningless term but generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
Yeah, it kinda made me laugh too. I'm glad you could pull something out. I'd never heard of that Nova classification system. I'll have to read some more on it. The whole doctor thing, the more processed the food is, the less work your body has to do, which means the more available the calories are, which generally means the worse it is for you.
And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.
Most technical and scientific terms absolutely are meaningless outside of related technical and scientific communities. All terms have at least one person who sees it as meaningful else it could not fundamentally exist as a term, but clearly the context is about trying use it in contexts where the audience is the general population. There is no shared understanding of what it means in that setting, thus it is meaningless (to that audience).
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 ?
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.
Oh there is a very well defined and accepted definition in science, but for some reasons geniuses on this forum, and online in general, like to pull their best "ackchyually" broscience definitions.
btw feel free to open a dictionary and discover that a lot of words have multiple definitions, it doesn't mean they're meaningless...
"Meaningless" doesn't mean everyone fails to find meaning, it means that there is no general consensus on what it means. As you pointed out before, everyone holds their own pet definition. It means something to most everyone, but there isn't a shared understanding of what it means across the general population.
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.
I wonder about the folks who work for tobacco and industrial food conglomerates. Are they not aware of the part they play? Do they rationalize it somehow? Do they just not care? Did they end up there through mergers?
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.
This. And military contractors. And predatory financial companies including high-interest credit cards. US Health insurance. Oil and Gas.
--
"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
These two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people.
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 agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad.
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.
Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty.
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.
Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world".
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".
Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.
By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them.
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.
My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself.
Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
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.
>People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category.
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.
How will the directories get their names out and compete if they're not allowed to promote themselves?
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.
I don't know man. I just think somehow we'll manage. For example if a group of friends all feel a desperate need to find out about new products they could start a non-profit organization that will search out the new products and directories detective style. And public business directories exist in most places because they are required by law.
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.
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.
idk about tobacco but the vast majority of normal people see no great problem with industrially produced food. By my reckoning if you say at a party you work for Unilever or something the most you'll get is an "oh that's cool I guess".
People are not (yet) aware what has been making everyone fat, but ozempic is making it harder to ignore that ultraprocessed foods are the culprit. So hopefully this will change.
We exist in a world where the exchange of goods and services is inherently oppressive. Some people draw the line at working for Northrup Grumman, some at RJR, some at Meta, some at Starbucks, and some at the local farm. I'm not one to judge where the line should be - I'm not even sure if there is a moral or ethical line that exists in the system.
A significant number of people just do not care, not only do they not care, they don't even consider whether or not they should care. It's easy to live your entire life disconnected from anyone that would care, for many people they don't even have to intentionally do it. From their perspective they're just doing their job, collecting a paycheck, and living their lives the same as anyone else.
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.
How? The banality of evil, cognitive dissonance and violence.
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?
Hmm. So when a large corporation comes to buy your company with a significantly higher price, they obviously have figured out something about how to make money that you didn’t, and probably never would agree to in the first place. But when seeing the $$$, who would care to ask such a silly question?
"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.
The idea that you could buy any food that doesn’t fit that definition is silly, all foods have additives that’s why you can buy them and they last for more than 60 seconds on a shelf, all foods are processed because we don’t eat raw seeds as the majority of our staple diet. You have to come up with a definition of what “process” is good and bad, and what about them is “bad” before making statements like that.
That's not a clear distinction at all, since now you have to define "industrial". Why would mixing with an industrial blender lead to unhealthier food than a kitchen blender? Why would flour made with a gristmill be less healthy than a mortar and pestle? There's no theoretical basis.
Any good faith reply would take, as clear, that the issue is not with using a big mixer and that that is not what anyone, on earth, means when they talk about "industrial processing" or "using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc.".
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.
If you have a clear definition, one that an informed reader could apply to some random product on their grocery store shelf to distinguish between "processed" (almost everything) and "ultra processed" (?), then you should post that definition.
Otherwise you're just playing the same game of Humpty Dumpty.
It’s basically a wildcard, “ultra processed food” is a classification of nothing and everything. There’s nothing inherently bad about processing food, lots of food is terrible for you but that’s unrelated entirely.
> Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention.
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
Weight gain has basically happened across the whole developed world because cost per calorie has gotten so low that people just eat more calories on average. This is why semi-glutides are the first thing ever to reduce weight gain and actually make people lose weight because they encourage reduced consumption.
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.
Yes not gonna pull it but there's data that shows calories got meaningfully cheaper and easier to access in the United States and more plentiful from the 1980s to the 2020s.
That shift might have been plausible if it happened in the 40s or 50s when the economy switched from war to consumption - but in the 80s? What kind of massive breakthrough in food production happened there that we mysteriously never heard of?
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.
People are pissed because they don't want to accept that a) most of supermarkets food is bad and b) you need to cook yourself in order to eat properly.
We call it shopping around the outside of the supermarket, and it's how you find the food that won't kill you I'm 46. I'm obese, but in otherwise perfect health by every biological marker and test that they can run. Blood pressure is normal. Cholesterol is great. Glucose is great. A1c test is fine. Liver and kidney functions are fine. Everything's fine.
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.
The scientifically measurable problem is the amount of calories people are eating, with low exercise, not that there are toxic ingredients or “bad foods”.
This is primarily a marketing distinction which appeals to natural sensibilities.
This may shock you, but Hacker News isn't a scientific journal. The focus is on communicating useful information and being understood, not necessarily scientific rigorous terminology.
This is akin to pitbulls and porn: You know it when you see it, despite the existence of ambiguous cases. I bring this up because your call to specifics is useuful in general. In this case: There are gray areas, but in most cases, it's a useful heuristic. If your food comes in a bright-colored box, advertises as containing "Real [cheese|fruit|etc]" and or is branded with the word "flavor", "Ultra-processed" is a useful categorization.
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.
It may be useful to you as a consumer as a way of avoiding sugar, fat, or whatever it is you think is unhealthy. Even that is dubious. But it's completely useless scientifically. There's no theoretical link between brightly colored boxes and weight gain. As you just admitted, that's only a proxy for something else you care about.
> 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 genuinely not understand the difference between "tends to be unhealthy" and "is always 100% unhealthy"? Do you not understand how the classification is useful even if it contains exceptions?
Of course it's incomplete. Any explanation of nutrition that doesn't include mention of at least calories, macronutrients and micronutrients isn't useful for understanding what's actually going on or being able to make an effective nutrition plan.
There are hundreds and hundreds of studies linking ultra processed food to all kind of health issues, and not a single one linking ultra processed food to any kind of benefits, not a single one praising their nutritious values.
The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience, better margins for the producers, etc.
The state of physics for most human bodies is "avoid things that are too hot/cold, electricity and heavy things requiere more energy to move, things fall when thrown up"
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
Most of the packaged pre-sliced bread in the bread aisle (as opposed to the bakery area) of American supermarkets is full of ingredients not traditionally used in bread, or used in food at all until recent decades. Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.
Some bread is! Check the ingredient list. When I bake at home, I use whole wheat flour, water, yeast, a tiny bit of salt and oil.
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.
Shorter ingredient lists can be a good rule of thumb, but things like E-XXXX can just be regulator names for regular things.
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
It's horrifying to see the state of bread in some nations.
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.
Is it really that baffling? People expect their bread to last more than two days, and it has to stay on the supermarket shelves longer than that. Of course you can cook your own bread and eat it quickly, but it's not very practical for a lot of people.
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.
You could make your own bread so you know what is in it, and how much should be in it, and that way you’d know the difference, and probably be better off knowing you don’t have to forage twigs and berries, or be so dramatic…
> ackchyually everything is made of things, checkmate
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
Whatever people were eating even 200 years ago have literally nothing to do with fruits and veggies we have now after selection and artificial evolution usually via radioactive exposure because GM is baaad.
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.
Chemical composition have nothing to do with it. Too much of sugar or salt or some other things is the problem though.
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.
>We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem
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.
Most US made bread contains hundred additives and a good dose of sugar on top of them. Just check the list of ingredients on your supermarket bread, you'll think again about eating twigs. For comparison, my bread I get in my village (but also in the local supermarket) has exactly three ingredients (usually, unless it's some specialty).
I've heard this objection a lot, even from folks I respect. Its ubiquity makes me wonder it is astroturfed.
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.
How should using processes not used at home make something harmful? If we make the same processes commonly available to use at home, will these foods become less harmful?
I know there is science around it, but the very concept looks very unscientific, it's almost like talking about "unnatural food"
The idea is that you could ban any set of "unhealthy" inputs and give the big food companies some time and they'll come out with something just as unhealthy that complies with your rules.
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!
>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.
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.
>How should using processes not used at home make something harmful?
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.
Yes, you got me, I get paid $50 Soros bucks for every snarky post. It couldn't possibly be that "not commonly used in the home" is a vague and unhelpful definition, which varies across time and cultures. Or that these researchers still haven't explained the theoretical basis linking all these wildly different "UPF"s to the negative health consequences they're supposed to explain.
the one is a result of the other; but thats because nutrition seems like it should have objective measures but ultimately has a lot of sources and sinks that only on the fringes is it obvious when things are bad.
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
We'd probably be in a very different world if everyone who worked in management or held a large stock holding in addictive cancer industries was jailed.
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?
You can look at these kind of foods like illegal drugs. Not biggie in moderation but if you overdo it then here come serious health problems.
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 ?
I wonder if they go at it from that angle ("let's make these kids addicts for money!"), or if they gaslit themselves into something else. It's probably the latter, just like the tech companies did - they looked at just the numbers and analytics, did some tests, saw that if they do X then numbers Y and Z go up, rinse and repeat across decades.
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.
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.
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.”
It seems similar to just regular marketing. Previously, beverages and drugs companies have used the same playbook, and data analysis just got better. Social sites are just the next step with even more behavioural data.
If Americans only knew that "natural flavors", "artificial flavors", and "spices" are specialized, opaque, secret designer ingredients engineered by third-party companies from unknown substances used to addict people to the foods.
All this shit should be subject to massive negative externality taxes. The cost of awful diets on society is absolutely huge. Big corpos are absolutely taking the piss. Extract, extract, extract.
If you proposed global harmonisation of food to equalise costs and ensure equitable access to food, apart from "but that's socialism!" complaints nobody would mind. Wastage in food production and distribution is huge. Economies of scale are real.
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"?
Tobacco companies should've just announced that "This new tobacco we made is super good, but too dangerous to release, so we are smoking it ourselves and giving it to only the select C-level smokers"
I heard this new tobacco is a national security threat. You don't want China to be making it, do you?
Now China has invested heavily in their homegrown industry and all of their cigs are currently 10 years ahead of the rest of the world. Chunghwa thins are the new frontier, with their subtle plum aroma.
They did that! They called it iQos!
The newer synthetic nicotine pouches (Zyn, On, Velo) are everywhere in the USA and are being used by kids as young as 13. They are ruining the gut health of an entire generation of kids.
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.
Source for the claim that nicotine use "ruins" gut health?
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.
And teeth. This stuff will do nasty things to your gums. And receded gums never recover.
Unless you do an incredibly painful graft right? I have a buddy who had to do that in college and man it seemed incredibly unpleasant. They harvested the skin from the roof of his mouth IIRC
Edit: yikes sounds like it gets worse and might not even work
My dentist has been peddling this procedure to me for years. It sounds incredibly invasive and painful and they don’t even promise it’ll cover 100% of the recession, nor that it won’t recede again unless one goes for an even more invasive jaw realignment which involves, I shit you not, intentionally fracturing the palate bone to make more space to align the teeth.
That was the “let me stop you right there” moment.
(Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)
What you’re describing sounds terrible in isolation, but usually these measures are only done if truly needed — at least in Europe?
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 had this suggested to me by a locum dentist, and i agree. This is totally off topic and going further so but if you didn't already, you should change your dentist.
I had to do a graft and it wasn’t especially painful. I got painkillers but only used them on the first day.
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.
Is your problem with them that they're synthetic, or that it's nicotine? Pouched tobacco like that been used for decades in some places in the world, or even without pouches, just making your own ball and sticking the tobacco under your lip. I'm not sure these countries have a higher rate of GI/gut problems than other places, which kind of would invalidate your entire argument here.
My problem is it is an experiment (synthetic nicotine that is socially acceptable) and kids are addicted to it. It's like candy. No one knows or complains because the users are not generating smoke, vapor or spit. They just swallow the synthetic nicotine.
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.
> However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day.
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?
Spitting was necessary because swallowing tobacco represents an immediate, acute food poisoning issue due to the other chemicals present. It's also all sorts of cancerous, including to the mouth, also due to those other chemicals.
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.
> However, they have not sucked on them like candy and swallowed the contents 16 hours a day.
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.
Zyn has been around for well over 10 years. We would be seeing this gut thing you talk of by now I would think.
Snus (tobacco pouches you put under your gums) is super popular in Sweden:
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.
Exactly what I'm talking about, just didn't want to name it by name as people have a lot of preconceived notions about it that pops up as soon as you say "snus", for some reason.
I never heard about it causing GI problems, but snus definitely causes major teeth and gum problems. The guy I mentioned had his gums receded completely, he once showed it to me. It was very bizarre.
Also see this other comment on this thread about this issue:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411778
You customarily spit out that saliva that’s been in contact with your dip. Swallowing it is way worse for you. When I framed houses the guys that chewed would leave a little trail of brown spots everywhere.
> You customarily spit out that saliva that’s been in contact with your dip
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 problems with chewing tobacco are well-known.
BTW, colon cancer is rising among men in their 40s, and there is no known reason why.
Those problems are because of the tobacco. Zyn packets et al are just nicotine, and nicotine itself has not been shown to be a carcinogen.
At this point, I wouldn't assume that any nicotine delivery system is safe.
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 lipid pneumonia outbreak was a thing exclusively associated with THC vapes, which are an illegal but widespread cottage (garage) industry where one summer, one of the thousands of manufacturer-enthusiasts made a forum post about the innovation of maybe using vitamin E acetate as a thickener. Experiments were performed, positive results were obtained, and products went out to distributors. The hazard to heavy users (perhaps for manufacturers with poor blending practices, we don't know) who showed up in the ER, was recognized within a month or two, and everybody immediately stopped using vitamin E acetate as a thickener. It took most of a year of panic for the last of that summer's merchandise to percolate through the supply chain.
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.
Tobacco, wine and fresh bread are usually few of the consumables that in many western countries do not have to disclose their ingredients.
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".
Tangential but similar nonsensical secrecy for consumables: alcohol not requiring a nutrition label always irks me.
One beer company tried to do it. But because beer has vitamins in it, they were prohibited from doing it as it might have made the beer seem healthy.
That sounds like a made-up Internet fact or urban legend.
Can you provide a citation? Plenty of beers have nutrition information labels.
Guinness is good for you!
Ingredeant lists != nutrition chart
Don’t buy it then?
All fresh food does not have to disclose ingredients
I'm picturing a banana with a label on it that says:
Ingredients: banana Servings: 1 Serving Size: 1 banana
An amusing thought but I mean the potato salad deli stuff. Anything prepared on site (in a store or restaurant) doesn't need to disclose ingredients. There's no special exception for bread.
Sounds dumb, but then also if something unexpectedly had a list of 20 ingredients you might reconsider buying it
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that cigarettes are healthy for you. Everyone knows they cause multiple cancers. That's part of the appeal. It shows how 'tough' and 'cool' the user is. No matter what you do, there will always be a reactionary group of people doing the opposite of what they are told.
And this is different from all other marketing how?
If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
> 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
I could get behind this.
Bill Hicks had a good advice to the marketing guys: "kill yourself" so I you're onto something here!
I know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.
There's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'. There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting.
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.
I didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.
Most marketing these days is that kind of pernicious Mad Men style feelings-based marketing.
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.
You are doing a bait and switch now comparing all ads to bait and switch.
he's a comedian; his entire job is standing up in front of people and saying shit and having a message. thats... the point.
it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.
I promised you every single individual business could say the same thing. No product has any value if people don't know about it.
> having a message
I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job
Yes, people who have worked with Paul Feig are not comedians, that's possibly where you're having contextual issues.
He didn't take out ads or anything. He lived his life the way he wanted to and spoke his mind. That's not 'marketing'.
If you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.
I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
Comedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception.
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.
That's performing, not marketing.
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.
Performing is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful.
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.
I think marketing is fine until it turns into lies. Reaching people to sell them your product should not be an issue. That, with misrepresentation and misleading claims is an issue.
I think manipulating people is a broader surface area to describe the problem. Most people think marketing is about just showing a product, but it's not. Marketing is about psychologically manipulating people and creating subconscious associations within peoples' minds using deeply researched strategies and techniques. See stuff like the Elaboration Likelihood Model. [1]
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
What about invasion of public and private spaces? Sidewalks in my neighborhood are plastered with dozens of political signs. It’s garish and in some cases hinders traffic visibility. Radio stations near me have started using the album art/song title metadata to display ads on the screen in my car in the middle of a song. Nearly every website tracks you, your phone provider tracks you, stores track you and then they roll up all of this “anonymous” information to target specific ads.
The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.
"Men of America smoke Chesterfields" Is that a lie?
no true Scotch would fall for that
I would agree with you if we were just talking about the abstract idea of marketing. But like everything else, the devil is in the details.
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.
Really? How much did Tesla spend on marketing?
Fair enough, I suppose.
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.
Tobacco is an addictive product that on average hurts the people who use it as a negative utility. Almost every other product people buy has a positive utility. Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.
> Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.
How can it be "uniquely bad" if it's "along with other drugs"?
I took that to mean "addictive drugs are uniquely bad compared to the general category of 'consumer goods'"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational...
Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.
Not every drug has the same effects and side effects. For example, marijuana is much less dangerous than heroin.
It's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.
I don't know if you know this, but all Facebook ads as well as TikTok ads and so on are public on the internet. You can go to Facebook Ads Library. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...
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.
There are entire categories of ads that operate on insecurity, they just don’t come out and scream “this is because you’re insecure” as that would make for bad copy. E.g. you think adult diapers advertise on anything other than insecurity (even if that insecurity is well-founded)?
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.
That's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise?
(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.)
Who said anything about insecurity? "I like this thing" (which I don't need) is also an emotion.
The story is an embroidered myth based on a sprinkling of facts. This is my understanding and I eat no processed food!
It’s more than marketing, they’re applying cigarette processing principles to food processing: choosing specific flavor chemicals and additives to produce maximum addiction within the varied neurophysiological profiles of different consumer cohorts
They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.
Logistics is logistics, the expeeience should be pretty transferrable, especially if no cold chain is involved. So good for them I guess?
I'm only going by the abstract but this bit stuck out to me:
> 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.
Yes it seems like the authors of this article are implying this is bad? I mean ultra-processed is a meaningless term but generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
It's absolutely not a meaningless term, it's a classification in the Nova standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
And regarding health risks, please ask your doctor about your consumption. You may be surprised.
Yeah, it kinda made me laugh too. I'm glad you could pull something out. I'd never heard of that Nova classification system. I'll have to read some more on it. The whole doctor thing, the more processed the food is, the less work your body has to do, which means the more available the calories are, which generally means the worse it is for you.
And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.
It is meaningless to the general population. No term is meaningless to an individual or small groups of people, obviously. That goes without saying.
Ignorance of a concept does not make it meaningless.
By that logic all sorts of technical and scientific terms would be "meaningless".
Seems like playing semantics, to not say disingenuous, using "meaningless" to mean "unknown", when the former clearly has a negative connotation.
Most technical and scientific terms absolutely are meaningless outside of related technical and scientific communities. All terms have at least one person who sees it as meaningful else it could not fundamentally exist as a term, but clearly the context is about trying use it in contexts where the audience is the general population. There is no shared understanding of what it means in that setting, thus it is meaningless (to that audience).
> ultra-processed is a meaningless
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
> You'd find plenty of definitions if you looked for them
Having a greater number of competing definitions does not generally make a term more meaningful. (Take "art" for example.)
Who says they're competing?
> You'd find plenty of definitions
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.
Oh there is a very well defined and accepted definition in science, but for some reasons geniuses on this forum, and online in general, like to pull their best "ackchyually" broscience definitions.
btw feel free to open a dictionary and discover that a lot of words have multiple definitions, it doesn't mean they're meaningless...
"Meaningless" doesn't mean everyone fails to find meaning, it means that there is no general consensus on what it means. As you pointed out before, everyone holds their own pet definition. It means something to most everyone, but there isn't a shared understanding of what it means across the general population.
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.
I wonder about the folks who work for tobacco and industrial food conglomerates. Are they not aware of the part they play? Do they rationalize it somehow? Do they just not care? Did they end up there through mergers?
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.
Same as the people on this every forum who work for meta, palantir, &co
This. And military contractors. And predatory financial companies including high-interest credit cards. US Health insurance. Oil and Gas. -- "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
These two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people.
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 agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad.
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.
Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty.
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.
Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world".
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".
Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.
By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them.
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.
My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself. Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
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.
>People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category.
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.
How will the directories get their names out and compete if they're not allowed to promote themselves?
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.
I don't know man. I just think somehow we'll manage. For example if a group of friends all feel a desperate need to find out about new products they could start a non-profit organization that will search out the new products and directories detective style. And public business directories exist in most places because they are required by law.
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.
Yes, but why do they choose it?
> When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
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.
idk about tobacco but the vast majority of normal people see no great problem with industrially produced food. By my reckoning if you say at a party you work for Unilever or something the most you'll get is an "oh that's cool I guess".
People are not (yet) aware what has been making everyone fat, but ozempic is making it harder to ignore that ultraprocessed foods are the culprit. So hopefully this will change.
We exist in a world where the exchange of goods and services is inherently oppressive. Some people draw the line at working for Northrup Grumman, some at RJR, some at Meta, some at Starbucks, and some at the local farm. I'm not one to judge where the line should be - I'm not even sure if there is a moral or ethical line that exists in the system.
People who work at McDonalds generally aren't there because they turned down a high paying job at the UN.
McDonalds hate is forced. I bet they (corporate) do it because they grew up eating it and had a good time.
A significant number of people just do not care, not only do they not care, they don't even consider whether or not they should care. It's easy to live your entire life disconnected from anyone that would care, for many people they don't even have to intentionally do it. From their perspective they're just doing their job, collecting a paycheck, and living their lives the same as anyone else.
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.
How? The banality of evil, cognitive dissonance and violence.
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-...
What's so wrong to produce snacks and canned fruits?
"snacks" is so broad of a term as to be useless for discussion
dried bananas chips as a snack? fine. potato chips cooked mostly in palm oil? not so great.
both "snacks"
Why? What’s better? I see only branding differences.
The health effects on consumers.
Canned fruit is packaged in syrup. It has more sugar than candy.
Hmm. So when a large corporation comes to buy your company with a significantly higher price, they obviously have figured out something about how to make money that you didn’t, and probably never would agree to in the first place. But when seeing the $$$, who would care to ask such a silly question?
Kudos for sharing, I've known about this for a while but this is hopefully going to introduce a lot of people to the information.
Amazing - is there anything they didn't do.
The same law firms seem to back tobacco and fossil fuel companies as well - a true axis of evil.
There is a nice old comedy called "Thank You for Smoking". Worth watching if you haven't.
Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention. The state of nutrition science is abysmal.
It's not meaningless.
"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.
The idea that you could buy any food that doesn’t fit that definition is silly, all foods have additives that’s why you can buy them and they last for more than 60 seconds on a shelf, all foods are processed because we don’t eat raw seeds as the majority of our staple diet. You have to come up with a definition of what “process” is good and bad, and what about them is “bad” before making statements like that.
That's not a clear distinction at all, since now you have to define "industrial". Why would mixing with an industrial blender lead to unhealthier food than a kitchen blender? Why would flour made with a gristmill be less healthy than a mortar and pestle? There's no theoretical basis.
Any good faith reply would take, as clear, that the issue is not with using a big mixer and that that is not what anyone, on earth, means when they talk about "industrial processing" or "using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc.".
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.
"Science is boring and for babies." You thought that one was gonna be a banger when you typed it huh?
You're just playing the semantics game for the sake of being contrarian.
If you really think Oreos, Pringles, and Lunchables aren't ultra-processed and extremely unhealthy, there's no point in having a discussion.
If you have a clear definition, one that an informed reader could apply to some random product on their grocery store shelf to distinguish between "processed" (almost everything) and "ultra processed" (?), then you should post that definition.
Otherwise you're just playing the same game of Humpty Dumpty.
Immediately backing off to "I know it when I see it" really doesn't help your case that UPF is the right way to categorize unhealthy foods
It’s basically a wildcard, “ultra processed food” is a classification of nothing and everything. There’s nothing inherently bad about processing food, lots of food is terrible for you but that’s unrelated entirely.
There is 2 ways to have that discussion:
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
> Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention.
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
Weight gain has basically happened across the whole developed world because cost per calorie has gotten so low that people just eat more calories on average. This is why semi-glutides are the first thing ever to reduce weight gain and actually make people lose weight because they encourage reduced consumption.
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.
Yeah right... so obesity, diabetes, etc. skyrocketed in the US from the mid 80s because before the 80s americans were calorie constrained ? Really ?
We're talking 1980s, not 1880s by the way
Yes not gonna pull it but there's data that shows calories got meaningfully cheaper and easier to access in the United States and more plentiful from the 1980s to the 2020s.
That shift might have been plausible if it happened in the 40s or 50s when the economy switched from war to consumption - but in the 80s? What kind of massive breakthrough in food production happened there that we mysteriously never heard of?
Food as a % of income declined dramatically. This chart has it at 18% in 1960 declining to ~10% today.
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.
Aspartame
Oh yeah, the same exact period during which ultra processed food was introduced to the mass... interesting...
> Weight gain has basically happened across the whole developed world
Could it be that maybe, maybe, there is a link to this and the subject of the paper being discussed?
People are pissed because they don't want to accept that a) most of supermarkets food is bad and b) you need to cook yourself in order to eat properly.
We call it shopping around the outside of the supermarket, and it's how you find the food that won't kill you I'm 46. I'm obese, but in otherwise perfect health by every biological marker and test that they can run. Blood pressure is normal. Cholesterol is great. Glucose is great. A1c test is fine. Liver and kidney functions are fine. Everything's fine.
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.
The scientifically measurable problem is the amount of calories people are eating, with low exercise, not that there are toxic ingredients or “bad foods”.
This is primarily a marketing distinction which appeals to natural sensibilities.
>We all know what they mean by ultra processed food
Very scientific!
This may shock you, but Hacker News isn't a scientific journal. The focus is on communicating useful information and being understood, not necessarily scientific rigorous terminology.
Open wikipedia, or literally any study on the topic... we're on a tech related shit posting forum, not in a peer reviewed paper lmao
This is akin to pitbulls and porn: You know it when you see it, despite the existence of ambiguous cases. I bring this up because your call to specifics is useuful in general. In this case: There are gray areas, but in most cases, it's a useful heuristic. If your food comes in a bright-colored box, advertises as containing "Real [cheese|fruit|etc]" and or is branded with the word "flavor", "Ultra-processed" is a useful categorization.
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.
It may be useful to you as a consumer as a way of avoiding sugar, fat, or whatever it is you think is unhealthy. Even that is dubious. But it's completely useless scientifically. There's no theoretical link between brightly colored boxes and weight gain. As you just admitted, that's only a proxy for something else you care about.
It isn't a meaningless word, and like my sibling poster I do wonder if that sentence is astroturfed by the junk food corpos.
The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.
From the wikipedia page:
> 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 genuinely not understand the difference between "tends to be unhealthy" and "is always 100% unhealthy"? Do you not understand how the classification is useful even if it contains exceptions?
I understand the difference.
Do you understand that the classification is not based on healthy/unhealthy but based on how much “processing” was done to the food?
You're so close.
All you're missing is "and quantity of processing is correlated with being unhealthy, making it a useful metric".
No it isn’t. The advice on nutrition is abundantly clear and has been for a long time: eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.
> eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
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".
Something being simple doesn't mean it's incomplete or wrong.
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
Of course it's incomplete. Any explanation of nutrition that doesn't include mention of at least calories, macronutrients and micronutrients isn't useful for understanding what's actually going on or being able to make an effective nutrition plan.
There are hundreds and hundreds of studies linking ultra processed food to all kind of health issues, and not a single one linking ultra processed food to any kind of benefits, not a single one praising their nutritious values.
The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience, better margins for the producers, etc.
The state of physics for most human bodies is "avoid things that are too hot/cold, electricity and heavy things requiere more energy to move, things fall when thrown up"
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
that's a quote from a journalist so it really drives home the point
Why plants?
I've heard people say that even bread is ultra processed... I guess we're supposed to go back to eating twigs and berries.
Most of the packaged pre-sliced bread in the bread aisle (as opposed to the bakery area) of American supermarkets is full of ingredients not traditionally used in bread, or used in food at all until recent decades. Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.
Some bread is! Check the ingredient list. When I bake at home, I use whole wheat flour, water, yeast, a tiny bit of salt and oil.
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
Shorter ingredient lists can be a good rule of thumb, but things like E-XXXX can just be regulator names for regular things.
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
It's horrifying to see the state of bread in some nations.
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.
Is it really that baffling? People expect their bread to last more than two days, and it has to stay on the supermarket shelves longer than that. Of course you can cook your own bread and eat it quickly, but it's not very practical for a lot of people.
Some bread stays good for 2 weeks, some is moldy after 2 days. There's a reason why.
> I've heard people say
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.
You could make your own bread so you know what is in it, and how much should be in it, and that way you’d know the difference, and probably be better off knowing you don’t have to forage twigs and berries, or be so dramatic…
Supermarket breads are trash, the first thing I found in wallmart's website:
> 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.
https://preview.redd.it/yodjulpnhclf1.jpeg?width=1240&format...
this is the chemical composition of a strawberry
my phd-less grandfather will have to now avoid his favourite dessert :(
Btw, related video that I always send when someone worrying about chemical composition of foods.
NileRed - Turning paint thinner into cherry soda:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIVkBs7oWDI
> ackchyually everything is made of things, checkmate
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.
Also people wasn't all that much healthier and neither they lived so long.
Chemical composition have nothing to do with it. Too much of sugar or salt or some other things is the problem though.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.
>We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem
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.
Most US made bread contains hundred additives and a good dose of sugar on top of them. Just check the list of ingredients on your supermarket bread, you'll think again about eating twigs. For comparison, my bread I get in my village (but also in the local supermarket) has exactly three ingredients (usually, unless it's some specialty).
I've heard this objection a lot, even from folks I respect. Its ubiquity makes me wonder it is astroturfed.
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.
How should using processes not used at home make something harmful? If we make the same processes commonly available to use at home, will these foods become less harmful?
I know there is science around it, but the very concept looks very unscientific, it's almost like talking about "unnatural food"
The idea is that you could ban any set of "unhealthy" inputs and give the big food companies some time and they'll come out with something just as unhealthy that complies with your rules.
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!
>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.
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.
>How should using processes not used at home make something harmful?
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.
So the actual content of the food then? Why not say that?
Yes, you got me, I get paid $50 Soros bucks for every snarky post. It couldn't possibly be that "not commonly used in the home" is a vague and unhelpful definition, which varies across time and cultures. Or that these researchers still haven't explained the theoretical basis linking all these wildly different "UPF"s to the negative health consequences they're supposed to explain.
Soros bucks? You're spouting a right wing position, not a progressive one.
I didn't know right-wing means rejecting bad science and progressive means accepting it.
It doesn't, so there's something you're correct about!
But certainly pro-processed-foods stuff gets pushed by the right, and Soros is on the left, so there's the contradiction.
Huh? You're on the side of RFK Jr and the MAHA nutjobs. This is the kind of "science" they believe in.
Sometimes among large groups of people there are varying opinions, you'll see this more as you grow up. The american right wing is one such group.
So it's not as simple as "questioning bad science makes you a conservative". Glad we agree.
the one is a result of the other; but thats because nutrition seems like it should have objective measures but ultimately has a lot of sources and sinks that only on the fringes is it obvious when things are bad.
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
In the space age, its x-processed.
We'd probably be in a very different world if everyone who worked in management or held a large stock holding in addictive cancer industries was jailed.
Instead the executives went in front of Congress in 1994 and swore under oath that they believe nicotine was not addictive:
https://youtu.be/A6B1q22R438
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?
They learned addiction and exploited sugar, fat, and salt with the rest of them.
You can look at these kind of foods like illegal drugs. Not biggie in moderation but if you overdo it then here come serious health problems.
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 ?
I wonder if they go at it from that angle ("let's make these kids addicts for money!"), or if they gaslit themselves into something else. It's probably the latter, just like the tech companies did - they looked at just the numbers and analytics, did some tests, saw that if they do X then numbers Y and Z go up, rinse and repeat across decades.
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.
I imagine the latter as well. They have to sleep at night. That is the nature of these unaccountable justification machines.
There are two driving factors behind ultra-processed food tech: shelf life and addictive potential. Shelf life extension is easier to understand:
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.”
Nice, new list to boycott.
It seems similar to just regular marketing. Previously, beverages and drugs companies have used the same playbook, and data analysis just got better. Social sites are just the next step with even more behavioural data.
If Americans only knew that "natural flavors", "artificial flavors", and "spices" are specialized, opaque, secret designer ingredients engineered by third-party companies from unknown substances used to addict people to the foods.
All this shit should be subject to massive negative externality taxes. The cost of awful diets on society is absolutely huge. Big corpos are absolutely taking the piss. Extract, extract, extract.
If you proposed global harmonisation of food to equalise costs and ensure equitable access to food, apart from "but that's socialism!" complaints nobody would mind. Wastage in food production and distribution is huge. Economies of scale are real.
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"?
Pretty scary reading the comments where the majority are DEFENDING Big Food and the poisoning of the humans. You are all despicable people!
The death penalty absolutely solves some problems. We just apply it to the wrong cases