Sugar, Salt, Fat

Great Debates
1

Thought of putting this in Cafe Society due to the recent popularity of this book, but I’d appreciate some GD-style discussion/debate concerning the subject matter. The premise is essentially that food producers manipulate their products to take advantage of our brains’/bodies’ cravings for sugar, salt, and fat. We are not readily satiated by such products, leading us to consume more than is good for us. The food producers’ desire to maximize profits contributes to some pretty significant societal health issues.

I’m not done with the book yet, but this seems nothing too terribly different from much else that has recently been written/filmed. Also relevant to recent issues such as lawsuits against McDonalds, or attempts to ban large soft drinks in NY. A few of my thoughts:
-I’m not sure certain food processing methods are all that different from cigarette manufacturers, in that their legal products impose significant externalities on society as a whole.
-I appreciate personal freedom, but I’m not entirely sure it is a “fair fight” when pitting an uneducated consumer who might live in a “food desert” against a wealthy corporation trying to manipulate the customer’s biology.
-And I’ve got no problem with a person eating/drinking/smoking whatever they wish - but I do have a problem when that person expects someone else to cover the costs of their expected health problems that result.
-I think one factor that could be added to the title could be “convenience.” Our desire for immediate shopping and preparation convenience likely bears some longterm consequences.

Is this a problem? Ought anything be done? What forms of education might be effective? Can we “ration” health care reflecting personal lifestyle choices such as diet?

2

Link to book in question.

3

I see it as 90% awareness, maybe 5% regulation. Despite the grudging victory of nutrition labels - which are still too “small” and too dissociating - most food consumers are ignorant of the real content of what they eat, day in and day out. I’ve been snarked and howled at in several threads for pointing out, for example, that Nutella is basically food garbage in a jar… but the forward labeling (“Hazelnut Spread”) and increasing positioning next to foods like peanut butter overwhelm the of-course-accurate nutrition and ingredients panel. The people who stomped on me are all “smart enough” to “know” that Nutella is a jar of spreadable candy; I maintain that they are a minority, and that Nutella’s entire marketing campaign presents it as some kind of healthy alternative when it is worse than most candy bars or tins of chocolate frosting.

I had an experience two weeks ago that confirmed my impressions: I saw a young-ish woman pick up a jar, look at it, and put it in the basket with her maybe 3-year old daughter. I smiled pleasantly and asked if she usually bought that, and what did she think of it? She said no, it was her first purchase, and it looked better for her daughter than peanut butter. I just suggested she read the back panel. The jar was back on the shelf fifteen seconds later and I got a very, very heartfelt thank you.

Books like this one have an uphill fight against the tsunami of food marketing that, even this late in the 21st century, is still almost as deceptive as what Sinclair railed about a hundred years ago. Clearly, we are past the point where regulation and laws can do much, because of immense lobbying efforts, limits on what we can restrict, and a reluctance of people to be nanny-stated. It’s important for people to really understand what food is and where it comes from, and that, for example, irradiation is a positive step while dumping HFCS and salt into everything is not.

Awareness is the method. And, oddly, it’s two-pronged: that a huge amount of food in the grocery is poisonous garbage, and that a lot of fairly extreme processing is not necessarily a bad thing in providing reasonably healthy, cost-efficient food.

4

It isn’t a fair fight when you consider how widespread processed foods are. Once you move away from the organic produce aisle, you’re pretty much throwing yourself to the whims of the food industrial complex.

The insidiousness of advertising cannot be overlooked, and I hope the book covered this. I think a lot of people are resistant to the villification of certain foods not because of anything rational, but because we have been indoctrinated from early childhood to view these foods as wholesome, fun, and sources of happiness. Take breakfast cereals. I can’t think of Frosted Flakes without thinking of Tony the Tiger and watching Saturday morning cartoons in my PJs as a kid. They’re gggggreat! You can tell me that they are so overloaded with sugar that I might as well be eating pop rocks in milk. As long as I’ve got Tony the Tiger telling me they’re ggggreat in the back of my mind, all your sciency facts and figures will fall on deaf ears.

5

If I may interject a slightly side comment early in the thread: Advertising is not the problem, and focusing on it (as do groups like AdBusters) is a huge tactical mistake.

Marketing is the problem. Advertising is just one sock puppet of marketing, and as much a distraction and a false target as anything else.

6

More to the point, Marketing in all its aspects can only tell people what they want to hear. Nutella, for example, never claims health benefits; they rely on the fact that most people want it to be nice and healthy and won’t check.

Companies ultimately make what people ask for and buy. And a lot of people simply don’t want to know.

7

It’s a bit of a tangent from the OP, but not a very wide one, so…

Of course Nutella doesn’t make any overt health claims; that would be flatly illegal. But look at a jar of it: with the nutrition and ingredients panel removed, it presents as some kind of ground-hazelnut product - fresh and tasty and from the description and little green sprig, healthy as all get-out. That’s precisely the problem: there is next to no regulation, nor reasonable way to regulate, the “image” a product projects. Look at beer, liquor and tobacco ads; all legal, all deceptive in countless ways except for the little black-bordered box.

Marketing is not and almost never has been a “reactive” effort of finding out what people want and then delivering it, because most such things are low-profit - not patentable or otherwise profit-controllable, and subject to highly competitive market forces. Maybe in some past era there was a “find out what they want so we can sell them just that” focus, but Don Draper never heard of it. Maybe Bert Cooper did.

Marketing, since WWII, has been about creating products that maximize revenue, even when it means creating the entire product niche in the first place and then hammering the want/need into the the buying population. Certainly, there’s a small degree of traditional marketing in selling products everyone has to buy (or for which there is otherwise a nearly universal market) - food, clothes, shoes, cars, gas, etc. But everything else, the great majority of what marketing works on, begins with “how can we separate more dollars more efficiently from more people?” - and any answer that’s legal (mostly) is a good one, no matter what its downside in individual, community, national or global cost.

Nutella was a niche product a few years ago, found only on the bottom shelf amid the footage between candy and things like dessert toppings. A behemothic marketing campaign has put it on the shelves next to foods that may have their issues, but come nowhere near the trash toxicity of palm oil plus sugar plus flavorings. Nutella is not something “people wanted”; it’s something they’ve been bitch-slapped and bamboozled into wanting.

Nutella is just one of a thousand products that delivers almost no value to the consumer but for which a demand, and a market, was created from thin air with the express purpose of generating revenue for the maker. And no, I don’t think that’s a “duh” relationship or goal, unless you choose to defend *caveat emptor *to the extreme limit and maintain that profits are not subject to ethical considerations.

8

I buy very little organic food and find it extrenely easy to avoid most processes food. Buy stuff the way it comes out of the ground mostly.

Michael Palin’s new book is an interesting read. He claims that the average family spends more time preparing processes, supposedly easy to prpare foods than a family that cooks a healthy meal.
Eat real food. It’s not rocket science.

9

What’s even worse, companies also market these things as healthy foods, to the parents, which is a rather dubious claim. Sometimes this is indirect: Note how Post emphasizes things like vitamins and being low-fat on its nutrition page for Fruity Pebbles, and Kellogg’s wants you to know that Smorz is a “good source of Vitamin D”. Or they can be more direct: Trix, for instance, is “a fun and healthy way to start the day”. Is it healthy? Well, it’s better for you than a chocolate glazed donut, I’d guess. And it’s certainly possible to eat Trix and have a healthy diet. But the way these things are marketed, “healthy” is a checkbox that they can check because they’re low-fat, or they use whole grains, or they’re enriched with vitamins. In reality, “healthy” is an awful lot more vague and nuanced—but marketing doesn’t really go in for vague and nuanced, so they wink at you and say “these sugary things are healthy!” And, like smiling bandit said, people want to believe that, because the kid probably is going to whine and complain if fed oatmeal porridge and fresh fruit instead of Trix. So the cereal company convinces both parent and child that Sugary Sugar Bits is desirable, for different reasons, and that’s why they sell.

10

Do you just eat nuts, fruits, and vegetables that you grow yourself? No bread, meat, dairy? No frozen foods?

Do you not go to restaurants?

Because if you buy anything that comes in a wrapper or box, it’s likely been processed. If you ever eat out, you’re likely eating foods that have been processed.

Just curious what you have been able to find so “extremely” easily, since people who actually do buy organic foods have a tough time with this.

Here’s you link you may find educating: What is a processed food?

11

I forget who said this: “Don’t eat anything containing ingredients your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

12

So you’re saying that people don’t really want, say, beer - they buy & drink it only because an artificial desire for it has been hammered into them?

13

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a grade or high school but don’t they teach simple nutrition in health anymore?

When I was young we had fairly long units early and late. And in those days the way it was presented was fairly complicated. I understand it’s been simplified.

Basically the idea is to eat more fruit and vegetables than the other food stuffs, I understand.
Moderation in all healthy things will take care of most health problems prevention. With the First Lady’s extra emphasis and articles in magazines and news along with education it seems to me that anyone who is in an aware state at all has already gotten the message multiple times.

Perhaps the problem is the mental state that has been introduced into the general public by the influence of marketing?

We should have the best. (Not that it is; just that it’s presented that way.)
We should have it right now.
It’s pretty, hip, nicely packaged.
It will make us________. Fill in the blank. Popular, sexy, energetic, whatever.

And then there is the shopping trance. Have you seen it? I’ve not only seen it, I’ve also fallen prey to it at times. It induces a state of denial about how much money I have to spend, a realistic judgement of what I actually need versus what I suddenly want, and a devil-may-care attitude about the future consequences of my buying/eating habits.

You could easily compare it to an addiction because the behaviors surrounding it are so similar. We have such a high rate of depression in the US right now it’s not surprising that people would seek to self-soothe with consuming. One way to look at it.

However, I’d be more apt to say that the constant need to consume has played a part in the creation of the depression. Hey, no matter how many monster burgers I eat, I can never make that hole in my spirit go away. Materialism just doesn’t cut it and we are reliant on constant growth here or we collapse.

Didn’t know I was gonna go there, but it holds true so I’ll let it stand. If your spirit (or mind, if you prefer) isn’t healthy chances are good you are not going to do a good job of taking care of your body either.

14

You know who else was a vegetarian?

15

Who else besides who?

No vegetarians here.

ETA: “Moderation in all healthy things. . .” as I mentioned. A little of this and a little of that.

But I’d prefer you responded to my post instead of trying to dismiss it by assuming I’m vegetarian as if that in some way discounts it.

16

No, and just because you just watched a Budweiser or Pizza Hut ad and didn’t run out to grab one doesn’t mean that you’re immune to advertising. (That’s the usual companion, so I thought I’d throw it in.)

Beer has been around for thousands of years and was a primary part of diets from the Egyptians to Civil War-era America. The only thing marketing can do is get you to switch brands, a nonevent. The same is true for thousands of consumer good types - at some level, they are either essential, necessary, useful in great proportion to their cost or deeply ingrained into our culture from centuries of use. None of these can be exclusively marketed; they have to be sold on a truly open playing field and are thus usually low-profit, high-effort products. Which is the antithesis of what companies want to sell; they want high profits, exclusivity, and maximum demand from products that cost as little as possible. All ethical considerations stop at the cash register.

I’m thinking of 5-bladed razors. Swiffers. Hot Pockets. Pickup trucks (beginning around 1975). Half the stuff in any grocery store simply didn’t exist until a marketing department - not an engineer, inventor or world-fixer, just a marketing ween - invented not only the product but the whole niche it’s in. It’s a three-step process, and when it’s done, we simply can’t imagine how we lived without disposable floor mops, or 1-ounce energy shots, or whatever. We even find reasons they are an improvement on our lives - but of course that’s sensible and logical and individual choice, and has nothing to do with what P&G’s marketing department has spent billions to hammer into our consciousness.

17

I am making a disparaging reference about your idea that somehow a healthy spirit (or mind) and healthy body are connected. They aren’t, there’s no relationship between the two.

18

I will allow for exceptions at the end of the curve, but I reject your dismissal that there is “no” relationship. Good health goes a long ways towards promoting good spirit; a balanced mindset goes a long ways towards promoting personal health.

A saint with Stage IV cancer and a mass murderer (or Windows programmer) with a Mr. Universe physique are outliers at best.

19

I don’t see that as your initial intent at all. You asked did I know who else was a vegetarian.

It’s difficult to address a false assumption.

So you refute the concept of sound mind in sound body as the optimum state of health? That’s an odd stance.

20

[QUOTE=John Mace;16260579I
Michael Palin’s new book is an interesting read. [/QUOTE]

I suspect you mean.Pollan.

Yes, much of what he says makes sense to me. As well as Food, Inc., The China Study, and much more. But we have dietary guidelines offered by the department of agriculture, rather than public health service or such. And agriculture, food processing and marketing are among America’s strongest industries. Not to mention a for-profit health industry which generates more profits from treatment than prevention.

I don’t see an easy answers. Would be eager to hear varied opinions.