I grew up close to Winston Salem, North Carolina. The city with two cigarette brands named after it. Everyone died of emphysema or lung cancer there. As a 10 year old kid, I could buy cigarettes from stores. In the 6th grade, our class took a tour of the RJ Reynolds factory in Tobaccoville, NC (yes that is an actual place) and we watched as our school teachers were given free sample packs of cigarettes.
I tell that story because it is true.
And I wonder... is there a town named Twinkieville in the USA where everyone dies of obesity and/or diabetes and kids can buy pounds of candy at the store without an ID? Or, is every town in America Twinkieville?
Twinkies are just a simple yellow spongecake filled with cream. They are so unhealthy because in the quest to keep the price something that people can afford (or for greed in profits) companies are forced to turn it into processed zombie garbage but if you break it down, a Twinkie was only just originally a simple yellow spongecake with some cream. A treat served to guests during coffeetime.
Its financialization of everything including food, government tipping the scales against peoples well being and a declining purchasing power of the average american that has resulted in this awful reality where food isn't food.
> They are so unhealthy because in the quest to keep the price something that people can afford (or for greed in profits) companies are forced to turn it into processed zombie garbage
Well, sort of. That processing is generally there not so much specifically to keep the price down as to prolong the shelf life. But it's true that without the preservatives you'd be paying higher prices.
"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
The idea behind that phrase is not that is necessarily easy... but to decomplicate the other extreme where you are choosing this superfood and avoiding that other veg because it is "bad for you". It gives a simple heuristic for healthy living. It helps make it less daunting.
For example what do I have for breakfast? Oh let's boil and egg amd grab a carrot and corn on the cob. Or whatever.
What do I do in the supermarket? Meats, veg, bit of fruit maybe bit of dairy. Am I obessing over avacado vs. pear. Nope. Chicken vs. beef? No. Chocolate bar vs carrot? easy choice.
Now probably once you get thay square you can do harder stuff like food reaction / allergy testing and so on.
Premature optimization is a thing in life AND in programming. Many folks make it far more complicated than it needs to be.
I regularly see folks agonizing about every decision and new study, but the thing is.... the tips on OP's very basic list are responsible for like 80% of the value one gets from "living healthy".
All the rest of the organic whole grain horseshit and panicking about microplastics MIGHT net you another 10%, but at double the cost to your happiness.
The last 10% is basically impossible to achieve without completely sacrificing your quality of life.
But then why work? Lets assume everyone will follow your advice, then we all could work less, may be just 4 a day. If so, then why do not we change the work day to 4 h? It is not like all bad food, tobacco, etc will be gone, but we will not produce all that in such huge quantities.
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?" - Douglas Adams
Folks on HN are very much in the "Where" stage of life. No one here works 4 out of 8 hours just to pay for their food. Nobody should.
That said, you very much seem to be missing the point. Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods. That is one reason they are more popular.
For example, it would cost me more just to buy the ingredients to make tacos at home than it does to go through a Taco Bell drive through and buy enough for the family already prepared.
We're not going to be moving to four hour workdays by feeding people food that costs twice as much and takes longer to prepare.
My brother and his wife began cooking pretty much every meal at home a couple years ago. Prior to that they ate out very regularly, especially once they had kids.
They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
There may have been a time where fast food was cheaper, but it seems we're past that.
As far as Taco Bell goes, a single crunchy taco is $2.19 and their fancier ones are closer to $5. When I used to eat there I'd usually get 3 tacos and a drink, so I'd be into that today for something like $10-$11. I cook tacos at home regularly for cheaper, and with homemade tortillas and grass fed beef no less.
You are right, I stand corrected. It's been about 10 years since I last did the math and it's changed dramatically since then.
I'm sure it varies by region, but my grubhub app and the 12 pack of tacos (hard or soft) is $24.99 here so about the same as the $2.19 you found.
I had perplexity pro figure out the cost of purchasing the ingredients for comparable homemade tacos. With great value (Walmart store brand) ingredients it came to $20.04. $6.49 of that would be "left over" ingredients you don't use (mostly half a pound of beef you could use for something else later).
So you save $0.96 cents per taco by doing all the work yourself and using generic ingredients. Plus you get an extra half pound of beef for later.
So if your time is worth less than $12/hr it's a net gain.
> They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
How much would they eat from McDonald’s? And what size appetite are the kids?
Fast food has definitely gone up in price, but if you’re spending $80 at McDonalds you’re either a glutton or you don’t know what to order.
A “Big Mac Bundle Box” is $15-20 depending on region. It has two Big Macs, two Cheeseburgers, two fries, and a 10-piece nuggets.
If three of the five are kids (vs say 16+ boys lifting weights), I’d be curious how two of those wouldn’t feed the entire family for $30-40.
I’m not suggesting cooking at home is a bad thing nor that eating McD is a good one. But the details matter when you’re spending 2x more than it could be.
> Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods.
I think this is mostly true in the US and a cultural thing.
In EU and SA for example I can buy “whole” food - just called food here - for a fraction of the price it would cost me to buy a bunch of cheeseburgers or some other junk food every day.
But but but the influencers are telling me to put nothing but cheeseburgers and testosterone in my body and that just coincidentally reinforces with what I want to do anyway!
I love how this gets presented as obvious advice, yet explains nothing and introduces an even less well defined thing it will do: "be maximally healthy".
It's just a dietary heuristic, why would it have to explain everything? If you want that, just go and look at the literature on overweight and obesity or, say, substitution of animal protein for plant protein. It's all there.
It isn't a dietary heuristic, because there's little advice provided. The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
By heuristic, I just mean “a rule used in decision making”.
Under that usage, the fact that the rule doesn’t provide fine-grained advice doesn’t disqualify it from being a heuristic. Eating mostly plants is a rule used in decision making when considering what to eat.
> The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
The whole article, if actually read, explains a lot. Not the least how we came from talking about "food" to talk about single ingredients instead. Which then are hailed as the "solution" for all of today's problems with nutrition. Until the next big thing comes along.
What country are you reporting from? It seems to be absolutely booming in the UK. A brief internet search suggests it's growing and predicted to boom in the US as well.
That could be due to increasing competition? They had high brand awareness during the 2010s but (in the UK at least) we're seeing competitors like This and Alt, as well as cheap own-brand versions, coming onto the shelves in a big way.
There is no definition of “predatory business model” that isn’t simply a reflection of the majority’s values, so there absolutely is a conflict between the two.
Are churches a predatory business? If the answer is no, then why are sugar manufacturers? If the answer is tradition etc., then that basically proves my point.
the institution that invented Tithes? The institution that if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people? Which will take old women aside and talk about getting into heaven and helping missions in poor countries full of poor little children?
That institution might have a predatory business model?
The threat of hell is certainly very uncoercive yeah
While I don't disagree with the assertion that churches are somewhat "predatory" with the threat of hell etc., this statement isn't really supporting that thesis:
> if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people
So basically you're paying for a service? Your argument would be much better if they didn't actually help people with important stuff.
Creating a hierarchy in lets say a small town, were people who pay in can have a funeral early/better date/better priest while people who dont pay get a wednesday mid work and no one can attend so the family has to say goodbye to their loved one without people creates the kind of environment where participating is not optional.
That is the kind of situation the funeral thing was highlighting, not the provision of a service, but the creation of a coercive incentive for social hierarchy and emotional support around a very difficult moment.
Its the same reason predatory loans are predatory, not because loans are bad but because you find people at their lowest and provide a service where they are incentivised to make reckless financial choices
I mean, there's a limited number of dates and priests. Are you suggesting there should be a fixed fee for funerals, which dates and priests being allocated randomly? That's certainly analogous to state-funded healthcare as compared to private healthcare, but unless you want the government to interfere in the church, I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd implement that. And I mean, all cultural things are "manipulation" in some sense, take the case of going to see the latest superhero movie on the release day. Of course the tickets would be more pricey, is that also coercive?
> I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd implement that.
Similar to shark loans, creating alternatives will always come with compromises. either we have public lenders that will lend money that will never be returned, or we leave a strata of society without access to capital.
But diagnosing the predatory nature of shark loans does not mean the proposal of an alternative.
I think the church model is coercive, specially when threats are existencial. Hell is beyond any threat you could make to someone who believes in it. Does not mean that I can come up witha. universal, generalisable model for providing adequate funeral rites, emotional support and remove social status from society.
> We have banned heroin so we should be able to ban anything else that's toxic
Except banning heroin clearly didn't work so well! There's still a lot of people using it. And the profits from selling it go to criminal gangs. And the people using it often die due to inconsistent dosing.
How do you define "manipulative potential"? If you ban sugar in drinks, do you ban fruit juice too? Where do we draw the line for "acceptable harm"? Personally I don't want to live in a society which bans huge numbers of things.
What's the difference between a big company and a criminal gang if not for the law? If it wasn't for the big companies, more dangerous things would be illegal, just like Heroin and other hard drugs.
I mean, it's not often you hear about tobacco dealers shooting each other in a crowded mall, or alcohol bosses getting their house blown up (or sometimes their neighbors house). So there might be a few small differences between companies and criminal gangs.
Yeah, in my country oat milk is now taxed as a juice, of course milk isn't. So the plant based alternative is now 2x the price of cow milk. Thanx Milk industry.
It’s considered an Ultraproceed food item. Just look up how it’s made and what’s added to it (oils, emulsifiers, fortified with minerals). It’s basically liquid cereal, but maybe worse.
It didn't seem to go too well last time it was attempted with one other drug. Namely ethanol. It might be time to try again as there doesn't seem to be any safe consumption level.
Our bodies interact with extremely large amounts of elements in the environment and behavior that act beyond our conscious comprehension.
Sometimes in our favour and some others against us.
Banning everything that at some point worked against us is just establishing human life full of total deprivation. Worse than living in jail. Good luck maintaining a society in those conditions.
The individual and the society should instead focus on educating and teaching how to navigate an environment full of those elements.
That would be fine, if countries like the USA weren't actively turning their backs on logic and facts, and returning to a period that history refers to as the "dark ages"
Sure, but all successful capitalist economies revolve around supporting commercial interests which prop up the tax revenue which then hold up the welfare state and public infrastructure, QoL and freedoms we enjoy.
THe big challenge is separating the good from the bad commercial interests. It's not a challenge because differentiating the good from the harmful is difficult, but because bad actor industries also make A LOT of money that buys a lot of political power and also employ a lot of people, so removing them from economy would have negative economic and political consequences.
Basically it's like a dead man's switch in a mutually assured destruction weapon.
Notice something curious. The correlation with discussions around regulating businesses, freedom, and social media attention.
There is a strong correlation between someone making money and someone arguing that people being able to make money is about freedom.
And here we are a few centuries into capitalism and people say that they are conflicted because personal freedom = making money off people. Effectively.
Yet there are many freedoms that are not profitable. We just have to sit down in a chair and think it through for ten minutes. Preferably without the corrupting influence of a scren.
What's your point? We regulated cigarettes and now they have a tiny fraction of their former customer base, saving millions of lives. These are solvable problems.
Cigarretes are an interesting example. Its way more about general society attitude, without doing a full baning. And that's likely what we need for other stuff.
We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.
Regulated but did not ban and the trick is to keep the availability far enough above the profitability of the criminal enterprise versus demand and your law enforcement potential.
Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!
My caveman brain was psyched out by the idea of stopping my coke drinking habit. I thought I had a soda addiction. Turns out I didnt, I just didnt drink enough water. After I pulled water bottles instead of coke cans from the fridge, the cravings went away.
Sometimes we don't need cold baths or extreme regimens to fix all the messed up things we're doing to our bodies. Simple changes go far to heal the damage.
I think what you experienced was behavioral addiction, tends to be a lot easier to overcome than chemical/physical addiction, often enough by just replacing the habit/behavior with something else.
Most people fighting addiction and having a hard time is fighting a chemical dependency, which is a lot harder and when people start looking beyond "Just do X instead".
You're probably right. It seems like there's not a hard line between behavior and chemical addiction, because of how the chemicals create reward signals to reinforce certain behavior.
From the article:
> Basic science models show that liquid sugar concentrations around 10% by weight—comparable with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew—can reliably trigger addictive behaviors in animals, including bingelike consumption, withdrawal, and dopamine system alterations.
But yeah, it's obviously nothing close to a nicotine.
"UPFs share key engineering strategies adopted from the tobacco industry, such as dose optimization and hedonic manipulation. These parallels should inform how we classify and regulate UPFs."
------------
There was a "Nature of Things" episode on this titled, "Foodspiracy". The reason why UPF's have been designed and marketed with many of the same strategies as tobacco is because several big tobacco companies diversified into food. They literally transferred their expertise from marketing cigarettes to marketing junk food.
Companies like Joe Camel started out using cute/cool animal mascots to condition kids so they'd buy Joe Camel cigarettes when they were old enough to smoke (if not sooner). There was a lot of competition for adult smokers, so hooking kids on their brand before any other company got to them was a winning strategy. When they pivoted into UPF's, they immediately put animal mascots and cartoon characters on cereal boxes. They no longer had to wait for their target audience to grow up a bit.
It's sobering to find out that companies specializing in unhealthy addiction have literally gone from cigarettes to potato chips and breakfast cereals without missing a step, and kids are their preferred demographic.
As someone who adds several of those by himself (instead of buying products with them already included), the stomach irritating effects of too much of those (with "too much", as usual, varying from person to person) are well known. That does make me wonder (Sorry, not watching videos) how much she consumed with sugar alcohols, or if she is just extraordinarily sensitive.
Seems to me that it would require quite a lot of sweets, frequently.
A substantial percentage of the population (10% to 15%) has IBS-like symptoms, and would be sensitive to even small amounts of polyols (another name for sugar alcohols).
Hence why they are excluded in a low-FODMAP diet (the P stands for polyols).
Wow, WP has 10-15 in the developed world and 15-45% globally. I never knew it was such a widespread thing. Crazy, yeah, that would certainly change it for them.
So is tobacco ok if it's local? I eat mostly local food and once in a while someone offers me some locally farmed tobacco and I try it. That's not "industry" but it's also probably not great for me.
It's definitely "not great" for you. But there is also not an entire industry spending big bucks trying to get you addicted (and it sounds you do it every now and then, so that's not so bad). So there is a difference imho.
If you were to grow, dry, and roll your own tobacco it absolutely would be better for you than cigarettes. "Ok" is a judgment call so that's up to you.
The problem is when someone makes a profit from your use of that tobacco, especially if they aren't covering the enormous costs of your premature illness or death
Plain tobacco leaves are much less dangerous for your health than the highly engineered commercial cigarettes that have additives that increase addictiveness, inhibit coughing, "improve taste", improve shelf life, etc.
> The overwhelming majority of independent research shows that filters do not reduce the harms associated with smoking - a fact understood by tobacco industry scientists in the 1960s. In fact, filters may increase the harms caused by smoking by enabling smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into their lungs.
Also, plain common sense will tell you that inhaling toxic smoke through a small piece of paper is not much healthier than inhaling toxic smoke directly.
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
This area is very interesting and lots of this is on the money. That said, I think there are some places where it overreaches and possibly verges on fear mongering based on pretty weak evidence.
I'm not sure NSS are necessarily "healthwashing" - they are genuinely a healthier alternative, at least in SSBs. Pointing to some very speculative research about "gut microbiome disruption" as if that somehow means NSS are something we should be concerned about in our diet doesn't seem to reflect the body of evidence on the subject. On balance they seem to be either a neutral or beneficial product, depending on what they replace in the diet.
I think one important distinction between UPF and cigarettes is that we have lots of examples of healthy UPFs. Are there any such examples for cigarettes? Even those researchers who voice concerns about the health impacts of UPFs (Kevin Hall, Samuel Dicken) seem to be largely interested in identifying _which_ UPFs might drive poor health outcomes and why, so we can regulate industry to make their products more health promoting.
My concern with this analogy between cigarettes and UPFs is that we end up with a movement to completely ban UPFs when they have lots of useful properties (can be stored at ambient temperature, long shelf life, reliable quality) that make them very important for people with limited means. The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
> The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
Isn't that basically vapes? A nicotine delivery mechanism without the most harmful properties, created by regulation on tobacco.
The thing with tobacco is it doesn't really have any benefit. It isn't a social lubricant like alcohol and doesn't have medical use like opiates. Old World societies managed fine before tobacco.
Fair point! I’m not that woke on the relative health impacts of vaping but agree that the positive impact of vaping is not akin to that of actual food, no matter how processed.
What a load of crock! People have agency. Free will. So what if McDonalds puts out a cool new toy in their adult happy meal or some special sauce loaded with glutamates. Fuck em! Say that to them right now, in your head or out loud: fuck em!
You can stop this addiction right now by merely doing nothing and not eating "UPFs". You have the power. When you get stressed and want to burn time and energy eating because it's at least eating, how about doing a different thing? Each one of us is powered by a soul that can defy these behavior loops with some self-reflection.
Exactly. I have stopped eating out almost completely because it is addictive.
Forget McDonalds, almost any Italian or Thai restaurant to me is like a drug dealer.
There is no amount of chicken alfredo that is satisfying to me. It doesn't matter how it is made, the poison is in the dosage and I am going to eat way too much.
A lot of these UPFs are targeted at young people who don't have the same ability to think of long term consequences. If you start young, it's a much harder habit to break later in life.
And in many places UPFs are cheaper and more widely available than unprocessed food. If you're worried about paying rent, you're not questioning cheap calories for your family.
Even if we can agree that people should exercise more willpower, isn't there something wrong with companies weaponizing science to make food as addictive as possible?
Awesome! Let me introduce you to our latest menu item! Heroin chips with meth dipping sauce. One bite and your agency will have you coming back for seconds, then minutes, then a lifetime (however short).
I hope you enjoy spending all of your mental energy self-reflecting to kick the addiction.
Great analysis, let's also solve smoking and alcohol over-consumption by some self-reflection. No need for any regulations, people are always perfectly rational and have perfect information about any health implications of what they consume. Addicted to gambling? Just stop it.
There's also no proven causal link between UPFs and ill health.
By country the largest consumers of UPFs are also on average the longest lived. They are a by-product of wealth, as is obesity, what people are trying to pin on UPFs is much more likely to be a symptom of excess.
If you trace all countries by causes and incidences of death or morbidity there is nothing unusual or unexpected in the countries that consume the most UPFs, in some cases they even have lower figures.
Unprocessed food is usually a sign of quality, that is all.
Most food in supermarkets is now just slop. Foam for bread, veggies that have been grown as fast as possible and packaged as fresh despite being weeks or months old, sprayed with chemicals and shipped halfway around the world, meat raised in a shed and fed one food, which is then injected with water to increase it's weight, freerange eggs that were laid 6 weeks ago and have had their protective layer washed off so must be refrigerated...and on it goes.
I grew up close to Winston Salem, North Carolina. The city with two cigarette brands named after it. Everyone died of emphysema or lung cancer there. As a 10 year old kid, I could buy cigarettes from stores. In the 6th grade, our class took a tour of the RJ Reynolds factory in Tobaccoville, NC (yes that is an actual place) and we watched as our school teachers were given free sample packs of cigarettes.
I tell that story because it is true.
And I wonder... is there a town named Twinkieville in the USA where everyone dies of obesity and/or diabetes and kids can buy pounds of candy at the store without an ID? Or, is every town in America Twinkieville?
Twinkies are just a simple yellow spongecake filled with cream. They are so unhealthy because in the quest to keep the price something that people can afford (or for greed in profits) companies are forced to turn it into processed zombie garbage but if you break it down, a Twinkie was only just originally a simple yellow spongecake with some cream. A treat served to guests during coffeetime.
Its financialization of everything including food, government tipping the scales against peoples well being and a declining purchasing power of the average american that has resulted in this awful reality where food isn't food.
I read there was an actual original Hostess bakery. Imagine a fresh all-natural Twinkie. Mmmmm
> They are so unhealthy because in the quest to keep the price something that people can afford (or for greed in profits) companies are forced to turn it into processed zombie garbage
Well, sort of. That processing is generally there not so much specifically to keep the price down as to prolong the shelf life. But it's true that without the preservatives you'd be paying higher prices.
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/
Advice like this is right, in theory.
Just like: Don't smoke, don't drink, work-out, take walks, spend time with your family and friends, don't work too much. Also, don't worry too much!
All the real problems come in practice.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to have a solid basis.
However, 80% of success comes from applying these things in your messy life.
The idea behind that phrase is not that is necessarily easy... but to decomplicate the other extreme where you are choosing this superfood and avoiding that other veg because it is "bad for you". It gives a simple heuristic for healthy living. It helps make it less daunting.
For example what do I have for breakfast? Oh let's boil and egg amd grab a carrot and corn on the cob. Or whatever.
What do I do in the supermarket? Meats, veg, bit of fruit maybe bit of dairy. Am I obessing over avacado vs. pear. Nope. Chicken vs. beef? No. Chocolate bar vs carrot? easy choice.
Now probably once you get thay square you can do harder stuff like food reaction / allergy testing and so on.
Premature optimization is a thing in life AND in programming. Many folks make it far more complicated than it needs to be.
I regularly see folks agonizing about every decision and new study, but the thing is.... the tips on OP's very basic list are responsible for like 80% of the value one gets from "living healthy".
All the rest of the organic whole grain horseshit and panicking about microplastics MIGHT net you another 10%, but at double the cost to your happiness.
The last 10% is basically impossible to achieve without completely sacrificing your quality of life.
Realistically who is avoiding a vegetable because “it is bad for you”? Never heard of that.
Everyone knows that vegetables are good for you basically always.
Superfoods are just the latest marketing fad
Google “plants are trying to kill you”
The latest social media brain rot is that vegetables are bad for you.
Grifters in this space include Paul Saladino and Anthony Chaffee.
But then why work? Lets assume everyone will follow your advice, then we all could work less, may be just 4 a day. If so, then why do not we change the work day to 4 h? It is not like all bad food, tobacco, etc will be gone, but we will not produce all that in such huge quantities.
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?" - Douglas Adams
Folks on HN are very much in the "Where" stage of life. No one here works 4 out of 8 hours just to pay for their food. Nobody should.
That said, you very much seem to be missing the point. Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods. That is one reason they are more popular.
For example, it would cost me more just to buy the ingredients to make tacos at home than it does to go through a Taco Bell drive through and buy enough for the family already prepared.
We're not going to be moving to four hour workdays by feeding people food that costs twice as much and takes longer to prepare.
My brother and his wife began cooking pretty much every meal at home a couple years ago. Prior to that they ate out very regularly, especially once they had kids.
They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
There may have been a time where fast food was cheaper, but it seems we're past that.
As far as Taco Bell goes, a single crunchy taco is $2.19 and their fancier ones are closer to $5. When I used to eat there I'd usually get 3 tacos and a drink, so I'd be into that today for something like $10-$11. I cook tacos at home regularly for cheaper, and with homemade tortillas and grass fed beef no less.
You are right, I stand corrected. It's been about 10 years since I last did the math and it's changed dramatically since then.
I'm sure it varies by region, but my grubhub app and the 12 pack of tacos (hard or soft) is $24.99 here so about the same as the $2.19 you found.
I had perplexity pro figure out the cost of purchasing the ingredients for comparable homemade tacos. With great value (Walmart store brand) ingredients it came to $20.04. $6.49 of that would be "left over" ingredients you don't use (mostly half a pound of beef you could use for something else later).
So you save $0.96 cents per taco by doing all the work yourself and using generic ingredients. Plus you get an extra half pound of beef for later.
So if your time is worth less than $12/hr it's a net gain.
> They started cooking because feeding the family of 5 at McDonalds cost close to $80.
How much would they eat from McDonald’s? And what size appetite are the kids?
Fast food has definitely gone up in price, but if you’re spending $80 at McDonalds you’re either a glutton or you don’t know what to order.
A “Big Mac Bundle Box” is $15-20 depending on region. It has two Big Macs, two Cheeseburgers, two fries, and a 10-piece nuggets.
If three of the five are kids (vs say 16+ boys lifting weights), I’d be curious how two of those wouldn’t feed the entire family for $30-40.
I’m not suggesting cooking at home is a bad thing nor that eating McD is a good one. But the details matter when you’re spending 2x more than it could be.
> Ultra processed food is far, far cheaper than whole foods.
I think this is mostly true in the US and a cultural thing.
In EU and SA for example I can buy “whole” food - just called food here - for a fraction of the price it would cost me to buy a bunch of cheeseburgers or some other junk food every day.
Also, drink a lot of water or tea.
And if you're British, tea on its own might do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTocYVghimE
And enjoy protein deficiency?
Vegetarian India literally suffers from one of the highest rates of protein deficiency and stunted growth worldwide.
Are you ignoring the "mostly" in mostly plants?
That isn’t because of being vegetarian but because of poverty.
Then eat protein-dense plant foods like tempeh and tofu.
Source?
Us Westerners could cut down on the starch, add more salad and greens and pretty easily meet this requirement I think.
I don’t know if we need as much animal foodstuff as we consume but just doing that should be enough.
But but but the influencers are telling me to put nothing but cheeseburgers and testosterone in my body and that just coincidentally reinforces with what I want to do anyway!
I love how this gets presented as obvious advice, yet explains nothing and introduces an even less well defined thing it will do: "be maximally healthy".
It's just a dietary heuristic, why would it have to explain everything? If you want that, just go and look at the literature on overweight and obesity or, say, substitution of animal protein for plant protein. It's all there.
It isn't a dietary heuristic, because there's little advice provided. The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
By heuristic, I just mean “a rule used in decision making”.
Under that usage, the fact that the rule doesn’t provide fine-grained advice doesn’t disqualify it from being a heuristic. Eating mostly plants is a rule used in decision making when considering what to eat.
> The extreme is that it is advising people to seek treatment if they suffer from pica or bulimia.
How is that entailed?
> "be maximally healthy".
It's the bare minimum if you care about aging well, maximally healthy is a whole other thing
The whole article, if actually read, explains a lot. Not the least how we came from talking about "food" to talk about single ingredients instead. Which then are hailed as the "solution" for all of today's problems with nutrition. Until the next big thing comes along.
I am not sure we can take a slogan from 2007 as a state of the art understanding.
But I am biased. I‘ve seen this slogan everywhere to promote UPFs that claim to be healthy because they are „vegan“.
Now that the market for meat alternatives has collapsed I don’t see this reasoning anymore. What a strange coincidence.
> the market for meat alternatives has collapsed
What country are you reporting from? It seems to be absolutely booming in the UK. A brief internet search suggests it's growing and predicted to boom in the US as well.
Yeah, though my Beyond Meat shares beg to differ on that. Down 95%!
That could be due to increasing competition? They had high brand awareness during the 2010s but (in the UK at least) we're seeing competitors like This and Alt, as well as cheap own-brand versions, coming onto the shelves in a big way.
There is no escaping the fact that feeding addictions is a great business model.
It's a real challenge for a society based around personal freedom. Same goes for addictive apps. I feel the conflict within me.
Regulating predatory business models is not in conflict with personal freedom
There is no definition of “predatory business model” that isn’t simply a reflection of the majority’s values, so there absolutely is a conflict between the two.
Are churches a predatory business? If the answer is no, then why are sugar manufacturers? If the answer is tradition etc., then that basically proves my point.
> Are churches a predatory business?
the institution that invented Tithes? The institution that if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people? Which will take old women aside and talk about getting into heaven and helping missions in poor countries full of poor little children?
That institution might have a predatory business model?
The threat of hell is certainly very uncoercive yeah
While I don't disagree with the assertion that churches are somewhat "predatory" with the threat of hell etc., this statement isn't really supporting that thesis:
> if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people
So basically you're paying for a service? Your argument would be much better if they didn't actually help people with important stuff.
Creating a hierarchy in lets say a small town, were people who pay in can have a funeral early/better date/better priest while people who dont pay get a wednesday mid work and no one can attend so the family has to say goodbye to their loved one without people creates the kind of environment where participating is not optional.
That is the kind of situation the funeral thing was highlighting, not the provision of a service, but the creation of a coercive incentive for social hierarchy and emotional support around a very difficult moment.
Its the same reason predatory loans are predatory, not because loans are bad but because you find people at their lowest and provide a service where they are incentivised to make reckless financial choices
I mean, there's a limited number of dates and priests. Are you suggesting there should be a fixed fee for funerals, which dates and priests being allocated randomly? That's certainly analogous to state-funded healthcare as compared to private healthcare, but unless you want the government to interfere in the church, I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd implement that. And I mean, all cultural things are "manipulation" in some sense, take the case of going to see the latest superhero movie on the release day. Of course the tickets would be more pricey, is that also coercive?
> I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd implement that.
Similar to shark loans, creating alternatives will always come with compromises. either we have public lenders that will lend money that will never be returned, or we leave a strata of society without access to capital.
But diagnosing the predatory nature of shark loans does not mean the proposal of an alternative.
I think the church model is coercive, specially when threats are existencial. Hell is beyond any threat you could make to someone who believes in it. Does not mean that I can come up witha. universal, generalisable model for providing adequate funeral rites, emotional support and remove social status from society.
We have banned heroin so we should be able to ban anything else that's toxic. For us, close ones or even the generations to come.
Algorithm, food, intoxicants, anything that has manipulative potential.
> We have banned heroin so we should be able to ban anything else that's toxic
Except banning heroin clearly didn't work so well! There's still a lot of people using it. And the profits from selling it go to criminal gangs. And the people using it often die due to inconsistent dosing.
How do you define "manipulative potential"? If you ban sugar in drinks, do you ban fruit juice too? Where do we draw the line for "acceptable harm"? Personally I don't want to live in a society which bans huge numbers of things.
I agree. Maybe one would need to ban the misinformative marketing (although I know that opens another can of worms).
What's the difference between a big company and a criminal gang if not for the law? If it wasn't for the big companies, more dangerous things would be illegal, just like Heroin and other hard drugs.
I mean, it's not often you hear about tobacco dealers shooting each other in a crowded mall, or alcohol bosses getting their house blown up (or sometimes their neighbors house). So there might be a few small differences between companies and criminal gangs.
You can tax drinks based on the amount of sugar they contain. Yes, including juices.
Yeah, in my country oat milk is now taxed as a juice, of course milk isn't. So the plant based alternative is now 2x the price of cow milk. Thanx Milk industry.
Milk is an order of magnitude healthier than the highly processed sludge called oak “milk”.
Source?
It’s considered an Ultraproceed food item. Just look up how it’s made and what’s added to it (oils, emulsifiers, fortified with minerals). It’s basically liquid cereal, but maybe worse.
> It’s considered an Ultraproceed food item
By whom? Oils are not necessarily bad for you.
Animal fat/milk with the hormones of a different mammal seem to be causing a lot of problems. Planetary and health related.
And the low fat milk in the carton is pretty far from natural, where oat milk in example seems to be pretty simple process based on quick googling:
https://www.loveandlemons.com/oat-milk/
Of course any industry can make anything ultra processed, like oat milk, but the generalization was wee bit hefty here.
It didn't seem to go too well last time it was attempted with one other drug. Namely ethanol. It might be time to try again as there doesn't seem to be any safe consumption level.
Well, yeah, but who are you to decide what I do with my body? I'm not hurting anyone. (Nice to meet you, I'm the advocate of the Devil.)
If I would look onto you as my obedient slavish worker I would like you to not kill yourself.
Shall we ban sex too?
Our bodies interact with extremely large amounts of elements in the environment and behavior that act beyond our conscious comprehension.
Sometimes in our favour and some others against us.
Banning everything that at some point worked against us is just establishing human life full of total deprivation. Worse than living in jail. Good luck maintaining a society in those conditions.
The individual and the society should instead focus on educating and teaching how to navigate an environment full of those elements.
I'm having a hard time seeing a valid comparison between the act of keeping the species alive and the act of consuming poisonous chemicals.
That would be fine, if countries like the USA weren't actively turning their backs on logic and facts, and returning to a period that history refers to as the "dark ages"
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Personal freedom includes not being manipulated by commercial interests.
Personal freedom only works when someone is educated enough to make their own choices imho.
Most people know being fat, smoking and so on are bad. Its mostly not an education issue. But an outlook on live issue.
Sure, but all successful capitalist economies revolve around supporting commercial interests which prop up the tax revenue which then hold up the welfare state and public infrastructure, QoL and freedoms we enjoy.
THe big challenge is separating the good from the bad commercial interests. It's not a challenge because differentiating the good from the harmful is difficult, but because bad actor industries also make A LOT of money that buys a lot of political power and also employ a lot of people, so removing them from economy would have negative economic and political consequences.
Basically it's like a dead man's switch in a mutually assured destruction weapon.
Just because they employ a lot of people does not mean that removing them from economy would have negative economic consequences.
Killing the tobacco industry for example would have incredibly positive economic consequences, despite the job loss.
>Killing the tobacco industry for example would have incredibly positive economic consequences, despite the job loss.
Yeah but both tobacco industry employees and smokers vote. If they make up a large enough voter base, then this is political suicide in any democracy.
Hence how it took until 2019 to ban indoor smoking in my EU country, even though it was known for a long time it's a public health issue.
And the addictive algorithm is not far away from violence.
The power asymmetry behind and in the front of the six inch screen is immense.
Notice something curious. The correlation with discussions around regulating businesses, freedom, and social media attention.
There is a strong correlation between someone making money and someone arguing that people being able to make money is about freedom.
And here we are a few centuries into capitalism and people say that they are conflicted because personal freedom = making money off people. Effectively.
Yet there are many freedoms that are not profitable. We just have to sit down in a chair and think it through for ten minutes. Preferably without the corrupting influence of a scren.
If you want to become a billionaire, the best way to do it is invent some new addiction.
No need. Profiting fron gambling will do it.
True, existing addictions are a good bet, but a brand new one with no competition, regulation or recognition? That's you you get Zuckerberg wealthy.
What's your point? We regulated cigarettes and now they have a tiny fraction of their former customer base, saving millions of lives. These are solvable problems.
Cigarretes are an interesting example. Its way more about general society attitude, without doing a full baning. And that's likely what we need for other stuff.
We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.
Perhaps the point is that we need to return to social-democratic(ally inspired) policies of yore. In the current political climate, greed is good.
Regulated but did not ban and the trick is to keep the availability far enough above the profitability of the criminal enterprise versus demand and your law enforcement potential.
Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!
My caveman brain was psyched out by the idea of stopping my coke drinking habit. I thought I had a soda addiction. Turns out I didnt, I just didnt drink enough water. After I pulled water bottles instead of coke cans from the fridge, the cravings went away.
Sometimes we don't need cold baths or extreme regimens to fix all the messed up things we're doing to our bodies. Simple changes go far to heal the damage.
I think what you experienced was behavioral addiction, tends to be a lot easier to overcome than chemical/physical addiction, often enough by just replacing the habit/behavior with something else.
Most people fighting addiction and having a hard time is fighting a chemical dependency, which is a lot harder and when people start looking beyond "Just do X instead".
You're probably right. It seems like there's not a hard line between behavior and chemical addiction, because of how the chemicals create reward signals to reinforce certain behavior.
From the article:
> Basic science models show that liquid sugar concentrations around 10% by weight—comparable with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew—can reliably trigger addictive behaviors in animals, including bingelike consumption, withdrawal, and dopamine system alterations.
But yeah, it's obviously nothing close to a nicotine.
"UPFs share key engineering strategies adopted from the tobacco industry, such as dose optimization and hedonic manipulation. These parallels should inform how we classify and regulate UPFs."
------------
There was a "Nature of Things" episode on this titled, "Foodspiracy". The reason why UPF's have been designed and marketed with many of the same strategies as tobacco is because several big tobacco companies diversified into food. They literally transferred their expertise from marketing cigarettes to marketing junk food.
Companies like Joe Camel started out using cute/cool animal mascots to condition kids so they'd buy Joe Camel cigarettes when they were old enough to smoke (if not sooner). There was a lot of competition for adult smokers, so hooking kids on their brand before any other company got to them was a winning strategy. When they pivoted into UPF's, they immediately put animal mascots and cartoon characters on cereal boxes. They no longer had to wait for their target audience to grow up a bit.
It's sobering to find out that companies specializing in unhealthy addiction have literally gone from cigarettes to potato chips and breakfast cereals without missing a step, and kids are their preferred demographic.
Sabine Hossenfelder has a video on - Sugar Alcohols Ruined My Health: Learn from My Mistakes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4
A list of sugar alcohols including their classification numbers in Europe is:
Sorbitol (E 420)
Mannitol (E 421)
Isomalt (E 954)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Lactitol (E 966)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Xylitol (E 967)
Erythritol (E 967)
As someone who adds several of those by himself (instead of buying products with them already included), the stomach irritating effects of too much of those (with "too much", as usual, varying from person to person) are well known. That does make me wonder (Sorry, not watching videos) how much she consumed with sugar alcohols, or if she is just extraordinarily sensitive.
Seems to me that it would require quite a lot of sweets, frequently.
A substantial percentage of the population (10% to 15%) has IBS-like symptoms, and would be sensitive to even small amounts of polyols (another name for sugar alcohols).
Hence why they are excluded in a low-FODMAP diet (the P stands for polyols).
Wow, WP has 10-15 in the developed world and 15-45% globally. I never knew it was such a widespread thing. Crazy, yeah, that would certainly change it for them.
Xylitol is great for teeth, just make sure you spit it out
Do you have a Youtube link for how I can perform experiments to determine complex biological processes with sample size 1?
So is tobacco ok if it's local? I eat mostly local food and once in a while someone offers me some locally farmed tobacco and I try it. That's not "industry" but it's also probably not great for me.
It's definitely "not great" for you. But there is also not an entire industry spending big bucks trying to get you addicted (and it sounds you do it every now and then, so that's not so bad). So there is a difference imho.
If you were to grow, dry, and roll your own tobacco it absolutely would be better for you than cigarettes. "Ok" is a judgment call so that's up to you.
Yeah, local organic cyanide is good as well.
The problem is when someone makes a profit from your use of that tobacco, especially if they aren't covering the enormous costs of your premature illness or death
Smoking anything is bad for you.
kill this strawman! don't let it hit back at you.
No, the strawman's ok. Anyway he only comes once a month, and I only feed his goods to my goat.
Plain tobacco leaves are much less dangerous for your health than the highly engineered commercial cigarettes that have additives that increase addictiveness, inhibit coughing, "improve taste", improve shelf life, etc.
Citation needed. Cigarettes have one huge advantage: filter.
Here's a citation about filters.
> The overwhelming majority of independent research shows that filters do not reduce the harms associated with smoking - a fact understood by tobacco industry scientists in the 1960s. In fact, filters may increase the harms caused by smoking by enabling smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into their lungs.
Also, plain common sense will tell you that inhaling toxic smoke through a small piece of paper is not much healthier than inhaling toxic smoke directly.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9340047/
This is absolutely wrong[1]. Please don't spread dangerous falsehoods without researching first.
Even American Spirit's website denies that "organic" or natural tobacco is any safer.
1. https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-co...
That article ends with "The bottom line: there is no such thing as safe tobacco" which seems to try to answer a different question.
As far as I can tell, that page never actually tries to answer "Are "all-natural" cigarettes less harmful than ones with additives?".
Neither are healthy for you, yes, we get that, but the question is if one is slightly less unhealthy?
Note that it doesn't deny that it's _any safer_. It says it's still not safe
These are not the same thing
It's likely safer but not meaningfully enough to make much difference, as it's still obviously very bad for you
That article suggests that toxic chemicals are sometimes found where tobacco grows, but that would not be the case for my neighbor (I hope).
Well...
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
Can't similar be said for capsaicin?
Addition has always been very profitable, why we allow it to be done out in the open is beyond me.
Are you suggesting pushing it underground (e.g. prohibition or modern marijuana trade in many countries) is better in any way?
I'm glad consumers have a choice. Unlike the ultraprocessed crap they fed us in school.
This area is very interesting and lots of this is on the money. That said, I think there are some places where it overreaches and possibly verges on fear mongering based on pretty weak evidence.
I'm not sure NSS are necessarily "healthwashing" - they are genuinely a healthier alternative, at least in SSBs. Pointing to some very speculative research about "gut microbiome disruption" as if that somehow means NSS are something we should be concerned about in our diet doesn't seem to reflect the body of evidence on the subject. On balance they seem to be either a neutral or beneficial product, depending on what they replace in the diet.
I think one important distinction between UPF and cigarettes is that we have lots of examples of healthy UPFs. Are there any such examples for cigarettes? Even those researchers who voice concerns about the health impacts of UPFs (Kevin Hall, Samuel Dicken) seem to be largely interested in identifying _which_ UPFs might drive poor health outcomes and why, so we can regulate industry to make their products more health promoting.
My concern with this analogy between cigarettes and UPFs is that we end up with a movement to completely ban UPFs when they have lots of useful properties (can be stored at ambient temperature, long shelf life, reliable quality) that make them very important for people with limited means. The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
> The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
Isn't that basically vapes? A nicotine delivery mechanism without the most harmful properties, created by regulation on tobacco.
The thing with tobacco is it doesn't really have any benefit. It isn't a social lubricant like alcohol and doesn't have medical use like opiates. Old World societies managed fine before tobacco.
> It isn't a social lubricant like alcohol
It is, and I'm not a smoker. Ironically mainly because of the indoor smoking bans.
Sounds like the sociability comes from making people stand in an enclosed space together, usually outside a pub, rather than smoking tobacco.
Yup, though outside the workplace is usually the bigger one - might depend on the country. It's just not going to happen without tobacco though.
You can achieve the same by pulling the fire alarm and making everyone stand outside.
Fair point! I’m not that woke on the relative health impacts of vaping but agree that the positive impact of vaping is not akin to that of actual food, no matter how processed.
What a load of crock! People have agency. Free will. So what if McDonalds puts out a cool new toy in their adult happy meal or some special sauce loaded with glutamates. Fuck em! Say that to them right now, in your head or out loud: fuck em!
You can stop this addiction right now by merely doing nothing and not eating "UPFs". You have the power. When you get stressed and want to burn time and energy eating because it's at least eating, how about doing a different thing? Each one of us is powered by a soul that can defy these behavior loops with some self-reflection.
Exactly. I have stopped eating out almost completely because it is addictive.
Forget McDonalds, almost any Italian or Thai restaurant to me is like a drug dealer.
There is no amount of chicken alfredo that is satisfying to me. It doesn't matter how it is made, the poison is in the dosage and I am going to eat way too much.
A lot of these UPFs are targeted at young people who don't have the same ability to think of long term consequences. If you start young, it's a much harder habit to break later in life.
And in many places UPFs are cheaper and more widely available than unprocessed food. If you're worried about paying rent, you're not questioning cheap calories for your family.
Even if we can agree that people should exercise more willpower, isn't there something wrong with companies weaponizing science to make food as addictive as possible?
Awesome! Let me introduce you to our latest menu item! Heroin chips with meth dipping sauce. One bite and your agency will have you coming back for seconds, then minutes, then a lifetime (however short).
I hope you enjoy spending all of your mental energy self-reflecting to kick the addiction.
Great analysis, let's also solve smoking and alcohol over-consumption by some self-reflection. No need for any regulations, people are always perfectly rational and have perfect information about any health implications of what they consume. Addicted to gambling? Just stop it.
(For the record my only vice is coffee.)
There's also no proven causal link between UPFs and ill health.
By country the largest consumers of UPFs are also on average the longest lived. They are a by-product of wealth, as is obesity, what people are trying to pin on UPFs is much more likely to be a symptom of excess.
If you trace all countries by causes and incidences of death or morbidity there is nothing unusual or unexpected in the countries that consume the most UPFs, in some cases they even have lower figures.
Unprocessed food is usually a sign of quality, that is all.
Eat less. Lift more. Run more.
Most food in supermarkets is now just slop. Foam for bread, veggies that have been grown as fast as possible and packaged as fresh despite being weeks or months old, sprayed with chemicals and shipped halfway around the world, meat raised in a shed and fed one food, which is then injected with water to increase it's weight, freerange eggs that were laid 6 weeks ago and have had their protective layer washed off so must be refrigerated...and on it goes.
I don't understand the downvotes. This is an accurate description of the food I get in german supermarkets at least.
This reads less like nutrition science and more like addiction engineering. The tobacco analogy isn’t rhetorical, it’s structural.
Why have people adopted ChatGPt lingo.
Actually, sounds like it’s written entirely by an LLM, and so do their other comments
Someone the other day told me that THC cures cancer so it’s okay to smoke pot indoors. We’re cooked.
Potheads have always said stuff like that. You might have been talking to a pothead.