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The Food Industry Problem

Neonmoon

By Neonmoon
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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38130

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They are as bad or worse than big pharma. Someone needs to take on these motherfuckers. They have been pushing sugar into foods for decades. They have been using money to control laws and alter reports that say sugar is bad and shouldn’t be in our food. They make kids sugar addicts. Sugar affects the brain just like cocaine. 

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EuroHorn

EuroHorn 3271

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17 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

They are as bad or worse than big pharma. Someone needs to take on these motherfuckers. They have been pushing sugar into foods for decades. They have been using money to control laws and alter reports that say sugar is bad and shouldn’t be in our food. They make kids sugar addicts. Sugar affects the brain just like cocaine. 

Lol...

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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38130

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50 years ago, Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard Scientist to point blame at Fat content and not sugar. 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat

Coca-Cola doing the same still 

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=1&mtrref=undefined&gwh=04764961D7BA1E4CDA157427A7FA6090&gwt=pay

WHO recommends only 10% daily. Sugar Lobby goes nuts and threatens to pull funding. 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food

Sugar and Obesity 

https://www.who.int/elena/titles/ssbs_childhood_obesity/en/

 

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Gengs1

Gengs1 2583

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I am sure the republicans will favor in voting for 

-food labeling such as country of orgin

-sugar content 

-regulation of safety of animals 

I am sure they ready to bring them up for vote 

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Incredulity

Incredulity 11683

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9 minutes ago, Gengs1 said:

I am sure the republicans will favor in voting for 

-food labeling such as country of orgin

-sugar content 

-regulation of safety of animals 

I am sure they ready to bring them up for vote 

Suger content is clearly labeled on all food products by federally mandated nutritional labeling.

 What more do you want?

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Bullneck

Bullneck 19215

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1 hour ago, Gengs1 said:

I am sure the republicans will favor in voting for 

-food labeling such as country of orgin

-sugar content 

-regulation of safety of animals 

I am sure they ready to bring them up for vote 

Republicans aren't in favor of anything sensible.  "First they regulate sugary drinks, then they come for your AR-15."

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F250

F250 28826

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1 hour ago, Incredulity said:

Suger content is clearly labeled on all food products by federally mandated nutritional labeling.

 What more do you want?

It's passed time the commodity subsidization policies be dismantled. As I recall, the sugar industry gets several billion a year in subsidies. Then you have corn, soybeans, wheat and the others which ultimately results in cheaper ingredients for processed foods. Not to mention the wealth transfer to agriculture corporations.

The corporations get rich off of the U.S. taxpayers and the people get shittier food and a health crisis.

 

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Guest

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4 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

I’m sure the free markets will sort it out.  Nothing to worry about at all.

"Government should regulate what people eat because the government is paying for their healthcare."

 

LOLz.

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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38130

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1 minute ago, Parliament said:

If you need to read a food label to know if it's healthy or not, you deserve to be fat.

This is the type of thinking that continues the problem in my opinion because most people don't know. Even with added sugars being added to the label, people don't know how bad sugar is for the body. People think Fruit Juice is good for you. It wasn't a coke, it was fruit juice, totally healthy right? When they are basically the same amount of sugar being injested. 

The first pivot from the food industry is always "people need to exercise more". While true in a general sense, no amount of exercise will be able to burn off the 4000% daily sugar Americans injest. 

But they keep using it and people believe it. 

The Great American Workout (1991) 

https://www.apnews.com/65d8fd231441906b236daef7552f3ba2

Quote

WASHINGTON (AP) _ President Bush, encouraging Americans to get in shape, today led the way by joining muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger and other celebrities in ″The Great American Workout″ on the White House grounds.

 

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WBT

WBT 20672

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1 hour ago, horncyclist said:

If there's any reason to hope the slow food/local movement in the last 10 years has been great. Unfortunately, it's inequitable as fuck and the industry wants to keep it that way.

There's also no way it can feed 7.5 billion people 

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Jiggy-Z

Jiggy-Z 3437

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1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

This is the type of thinking that continues the problem in my opinion because most people don't know. Even with added sugars being added to the label, people don't know how bad sugar is for the body. People think Fruit Juice is good for you. It wasn't a coke, it was fruit juice, totally healthy right? When they are basically the same amount of sugar being injested. 

The first pivot from the food industry is always "people need to exercise more". While true in a general sense, no amount of exercise will be able to burn off the 4000% daily sugar Americans injest. 

But they keep using it and people believe it. 

The Great American Workout (1991) 

https://www.apnews.com/65d8fd231441906b236daef7552f3ba2

 

I watched the documentary "Fed Up" last week, mostly because I had read its praises over on the Netflix recommendation board.  Also, because I kind of dabble in diet optimization and a food industry muck raking.  For me there was no new information here, but it was good to be reminded of a few things:

Kids and their families are taking a lot of blame for their conditions, some ,if not >50% ,of which they deserve, but there is no doubt that many are the victims of bad information and past practices which are no longer sustainable due to sugar proliferation.

You can't exercise your way out of a bad diet.

We should all listen when Michael Pollan speaks, especially when he is interviewed.  He manages to tersely distill things and say a lot with few words, which is good given limited sound byte opportunities.  I have read most of his works, but in "Fed Up" he basically says the only way you are going to beat the cycle of sugar is by cooking with real food.

Fed Up also hit on the continuing decades old cycle of food industry push back on sugar guidelines and labeling with personal responsibility, exercise etc.  Politically it has been a both sides issue.

I found the documentary a little heavy on the victimization and human interest, but I think it is a great starter kit for parents and kids facing health issues-it can lead you places if you want.

 

 

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SmokeyTheBear

SmokeyTheBear 5568

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2 minutes ago, Jiggy-Z said:

 

We should all listen when Michael Pollan speaks, especially when he is interviewed.  He manages to tersely distill things and say a lot with few words, which is good given limited sound byte opportunities.  I have read most of his works, but in "Fed Up" he basically says the only way you are going to beat the cycle of sugar is by cooking with real food.

 

 

His books had a profound impact on my life. Changed the view of food as purely sustenance at a basic level to something that should be a priority of buying quality and learning how to cook.  

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Doc Sam Beckett

Doc Sam Beckett 5797

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5 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

His books had a profound impact on my life. Changed the view of food as purely sustenance at a basic level to something that should be a priority of buying quality and learning how to cook.  

Which books of his most profoundly impacted your life? I would like to check it out..  

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Parliament

Parliament 14334

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1 hour ago, Neonmoon said:

This is the type of thinking that continues the problem in my opinion because most people don't know. Even with added sugars being added to the label, people don't know how bad sugar is for the body. People think Fruit Juice is good for you. It wasn't a coke, it was fruit juice, totally healthy right? When they are basically the same amount of sugar being injested. 

The first pivot from the food industry is always "people need to exercise more". While true in a general sense, no amount of exercise will be able to burn off the 4000% daily sugar Americans injest. 

But they keep using it and people believe it. 

The Great American Workout (1991) 

https://www.apnews.com/65d8fd231441906b236daef7552f3ba2

 

Yeah I was too harsh with that, and your fruit juice example is proof.  Orange juice is far healthier than Mountain Dew of course, but it's calorie/sugar content isn't much different.  If you assume it's totally healthy and drink 32 oz a day, you'll have trouble.

They've been slow to come around, and they have a way to go, but the food industry is definitely getting better.  Coke and Pepsi are scouring the world looking for natural ingredients for new, kickass "natural" drinks to replace sugar pop.  Seed companies are breeding fruit and vegetable varieties that are more nutritious and have a longer shelf life.

Regarding the "local food" comment above, yeah.  Local food is a great option, and we need more of it.  But we'll need large-scale agriculture and food distribution for the vast majority of the Humanity.

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SmokeyTheBear

SmokeyTheBear 5568

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15 minutes ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

Which books of his most profoundly impacted your life? I would like to check it out..  

Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food were my main two. 

He had a show on Netflix called Cooked that is really good but not near as impactful as his books. 

 

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Jiggy-Z

Jiggy-Z 3437

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12 hours ago, Incredulity said:

Suger content is clearly labeled on all food products by federally mandated nutritional labeling.

 What more do you want?

The content is labeled but if you look closely, there is no % calculated for part of the daily recommended allowance.  This has been a point of contention over the decades.  Calculations have put average American consumption of sugar at up to 10 times what it should be and some of those calculations do not even account for the near instantaneous conversion to sugar of simple carbohydrates in the stomach.

With the added information on sugar labeling, the thought is we would attempt to limit its consumption.

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Jiggy-Z

Jiggy-Z 3437

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17 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food were my main two. 

He had a show on Netflix called Cooked that is really good but not near as impactful as his books. 

 

One of the most astounding revelations mentioned in these two books was the citing of world diet studies which indicated that there are many indigenous and culturally unique diets out there, all of which work for near optimal health, except of course for the industrial food diet or Standard American Diet (SAD).

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Parliament

Parliament 14334

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5 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:

It’s not sugar, it’s corn syrup. 

I think the science is still out on that.

17 minutes ago, Nivek said:

 

We have undergone a change in our diets, food ingredients, bombardment of advertisement, and shift away from manual labor.

 

 

 

 

I recently toured Lower Fort Garry in Winnipeg.  "Portage workers," who drug cargo through the wilderness at 6000 calories a day.  And I bet they were not fat.

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Guest Lobo

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Tens of millions of people for decades would buy a product that clearly said it was made out of tar, they would light the product on fire, and then suck on it until all 20 were gone. 

The product said it had tar in it.  Everybody knows what tar is, it's not some complicated poly-syllabic latin name with lots science suffixes.  And then to get the product to work, you had to light it on fire on your face.  And if you left the product in the forest accidentally, it would burn the forest down.  Tens of millions of Americans still use this product. 

And you think some more labeling about sugar on food is gonna save us money on health care and climate change?  

Food packaging has easy to read numbers about how much sugar the product contains, let's just be happy with that.  

And before we save the world, watch just here in Texas---how many people put salt on food that has already salt in it.  That's gonna do just as much damage as sugar, alcohol, or drugs.  Salt isn't a spice, it's a mineral.  I saw a kid pour sugar packets into his coca-cola out of the fountain because it didn't taste as sweet as the canned ones at home.  His mother was mortified.  Didn't stop her from dumping half the salt shaker into the basket of chips that had already been salted within an inch of its life.  

Slow food/local movement/Farm to Market is another one of those phenomenons that used to be for the bottom 20% who couldn't afford not to grow their own food and now it's for the top 20%.  The middle 60% needs it the most based on their rather generous blouse sizes.  

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tantric superman

tantric superman 4668

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Did a corporate weight loss program called Naturally Slim.  Basically it was three rules and a little asterisk.

1) Eat when you are hungry, fatass.  Not when you are craving something.  But when you are actually, physically hungry.

2) Eat whatever you want (except see below).  But eat slowly.  Eat slowly for 10 minutes.  Then stop eating for five minutes.  Then finish up until you aren't hungry. 

3) No sweets.  You go to a wedding, have a piece of cake.  Your 10th anniversary, have the bread pudding.   But other than that, sorry.

*) Alcohol is okay but it will make you sloppy and snacky.

It was kind of interesting observing people after this and you really do see how people shove food in their mouths and eat out of habit. 

 

To me the solution is tax policy (tax on bad foods, tax breaks for gym membership, etc.) and creating some avenues for low cost or free mental health care/counseling.   Overeating is mostly mental.  

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bad_teammate

bad_teammate 13225

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Taxing "bad foods" has to come with a concerted effort via government spending to eliminate food deserts, otherwise all you're going to do is raise the prices of the only food that's available to the poorest Americans.

I'd rather see a Metabolic Syndrome Tax on corporations that produce unhealthy food (determined by a panel of independent nutritional experts in concert with an open and transparent House subcommittee). These companies (PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, et al) make billions per quarter. Just take it from them and use that to fund the single-payer healthcare treatments we're going to need to address the downstream impact of their products' consumption. Do the same for alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (marijuana, etc...) depending on the projected costs of treating the downstream effects.

If you're going to produce junk to send out into the world, you're going to help pay for the mess you're making. Mom can bake all the cookies she wants, of course.

Another thing I'd like to see is front yard and community gardens be legally protected from deed restrictions and the like. Our turfed front lawns waste an insane amount of water and would be way better used as places to grow crops that we eat and share as local communities. (Same for community gardens on easements and the like.)

There are a thousand smart things we could do.

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JimmyHoffa

JimmyHoffa 1188

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1 hour ago, Jiggy-Z said:

The content is labeled but if you look closely, there is no % calculated for part of the daily recommended allowance.  This has been a point of contention over the decades.  Calculations have put average American consumption of sugar at up to 10 times what it should be and some of those calculations do not even account for the near instantaneous conversion to sugar of simple carbohydrates in the stomach.

With the added information on sugar labeling, the thought is we would attempt to limit its consumption.

 

giphy.gif

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Jiggy-Z

Jiggy-Z 3437

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59 minutes ago, Lobo said:

Tens of millions of people for decades would buy a product that clearly said it was made out of tar, they would light the product on fire, and then suck on it until all 20 were gone. 

The product said it had tar in it.  Everybody knows what tar is, it's not some complicated poly-syllabic latin name with lots science suffixes.  And then to get the product to work, you had to light it on fire on your face.  And if you left the product in the forest accidentally, it would burn the forest down.  Tens of millions of Americans still use this product. 

And you think some more labeling about sugar on food is gonna save us money on health care and climate change?  

Food packaging has easy to read numbers about how much sugar the product contains, let's just be happy with that.  

And before we save the world, watch just here in Texas---how many people put salt on food that has already salt in it.  That's gonna do just as much damage as sugar, alcohol, or drugs.  Salt isn't a spice, it's a mineral.  I saw a kid pour sugar packets into his coca-cola out of the fountain because it didn't taste as sweet as the canned ones at home.  His mother was mortified.  Didn't stop her from dumping half the salt shaker into the basket of chips that had already been salted within an inch of its life.  

Slow food/local movement/Farm to Market is another one of those phenomenons that used to be for the bottom 20% who couldn't afford not to grow their own food and now it's for the top 20%.  The middle 60% needs it the most based on their rather generous blouse sizes.  

Where to begin:

True millions smoked, but because of the demonization of nicotine (and warning labels), millions quit or never started.  Sugar needs to be treated the same way.

Sugar should be treated the same as protein and carbs and salt and all the other items on a food label.  Will it solve the problem, no.  But it will for some people.  I don't see why sugar gets a pass or that the people we hire to deal with this won't do their jobs.

We don't have a major heath crisis because of salt.  Is it a problem, yes, but these are not the same.

This is not about slow food or organic food.  Is about about food and the time to prepare it and educate yourself on what is good and what is not.  I get tired of the same old talking points.

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elfenix

elfenix 34338

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sugar is already treated the same as protein with its own entry and grams, with no % of daily value calculation.

i'd be in favor of products that slap "8G PROTEIN!" on the front of the packaging also having to put "15G SUGAR!" with the same prominence

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31554

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1 minute ago, DCA_HORN said:

Sugar is a subset of carbs on food labels. I'm not sure where you are going with this specific point.

Food labels have %age DV for protein, fat, and carbs, broadly.  Sugar should not be hidden as a carb, but reported separately, I believe is his point.

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31554

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1 minute ago, elfenix said:

sugar is already treated the same as protein with its own entry and grams, with no % of daily value calculation.

i'd be in favor of products that slap "8G PROTEIN!" on the front of the packaging also having to put "15G SUGAR!" with the same prominence

It's funny as shit.  When medicine told us fat was bad, everything was LOW FAT!  Now that protein is good, everything is "HIGH PROTEIN" or 10g!  

My Mom was a "home economics" major in college, which really meant nutrition.  She was rightly pro-protein, anti-carb (starch was the word o the day), fat-indifferent and fresh food all her adult life.  My diet has only recently begun to approach the quality Mom gave us.

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