As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2024/04/03/diet-culture-nutrition-influencers-general-mills-processed-food/

by Animats • 2 years ago

55 32 2 years ago

washingtonpost.com

ungreased06752• 2 years ago

Any chance this marketing campaign is related to the increasing popularity of semaglutide weight loss drugs?

ClassyJacket• 2 years ago

Maybe, but regardless, that shit markets itself. It works.

K0balt• 2 years ago

-a phrase that I first came into contact with in a marketing piece, ironically.

JumpCrisscross• 2 years ago

Why would junk food manufacturers be pushing semaglutide?

nicman23• 2 years ago

so you can eat more for less consequences probably, although iirc ozempic also lowers how much you want to eat

ungreased06752• 2 years ago

When people are taking semaglutide, they aren’t buying as much junk food. Therefore, junk food makers want to replace that lost demand.

jerlam• 2 years ago

I feel like food advice has always been a lie. It's just meeting us where we are now, on social media.

Sugary cereal has always been advertised as "part of a balanced breakfast", but if we had time to prepare the other parts of that balanced breakfast, no one would eat cereal.

Orange juice was advertised as a healthy drink, when it's got as much sugar as a can of soda.

The original food pyramid was introduced in 1992 by the US Government, heavy on breads and rice and pasta. Obesity increased even more dramatically afterwards.

throwaway-blaze• 2 years ago

A lot earlier than 1992.

IntelMiner• 2 years ago

Michelle Obama flew under the radar a lot when she originally pledged to tackle childhood obesity

Then the sugar lobby waded in

Suddenly her tune changed from "eat less candy!/drink less soda!" to "exercise more, kids!"

As an immigrant to the US it's downright bewildering that the only fields on nutritional labels without daily intake percentages seem to be Sugar and Trans Fats [1]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/US_Nutri...

tredre3• 2 years ago

I agree with your general point but on your own screenshot:

- The recommended amount of trans fat is 0, a percentage would make no sense

- There is a total carbs percentage, so I'm going to guess again that the recommended "sugars" subcategory is likely unknown or trending towards 0

- There is no percentage for proteins and yet nobody would argue that it's a trick from big food so clearly there must be a reason why some rows have no percentage?

NPC822• 2 years ago

I believe you have linked the older nutrition facts label here's a link to the newer one which includes a category called "added sugars" with its own daily intake %.

https://www.fda.gov/media/135197/download?attachment

The reason it's only for added sugar is because "sugar" can be ambiguous, and sugars can be both metabolized differently (eg: fruit sugar/fructose) and is the primary source of energy for the brain (with few exceptions).

Since the "Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010" schools really do serve a lot more variety and the nutritional standards are much better. Any issues that made it to the media have had to do with the "last mile"(as they say in telco) as school districts have to have functional operations to implement them, and that includes class A drivers and dietitian(s) on staff.

snvzz3• 2 years ago

People eat their sugar-rich meals 10 times a day and are surprised by becoming fat.

Of course Big Food prefers this to be the norm.

Lest people put the fork down. Practice fasting. Discover that eating so much per day, or so frequently, is actually bad for them.

yurishimo• 2 years ago

Until the US learns to effectively legislate, I feel this will continue to be a problem. Of course food companies want you to follow "anti-diet" advice because they want to sell you more food. Junk food is ultra palettable and super cheap to manufacture.

At the end of the day, food companies and citizens treat the effects of sugar as an entirely unavoidable externality. Tax the crap out of junk food, subsidize the cost of vegetables, and watch how usage goes down.

Sure, people won't like it, but people also don't like it when their neighbor gets a new car in a color they think is ugly.

reify• 2 years ago

In my local supermarket there are aisles and aisles of food squirted out of machines in factories.

Anti-diet, Big-food corps most probably, used millions to lobby government so the general public still eat food squirted out of machines. The status quo of excess carbohydrates.

In my lifetime have seen the world get fatter and fatter.

I have never seen a slim weight watchers customer. Why? because they promote carbohydrates, even their own low fat food has the fats removed and refilled with carbohydrates.

Just like Alcoholics Annonymous, fat people are only ever in recovery.

No profits from those who have recovered from overeating carboydrates.

Low fat = higher calories.

When thinking about fat people I am always reminded of Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom.

FooBarBizBazz4• 2 years ago

Low fat = higher calories

I don't think this is literally true, but I agree with the gist: Eat whole, full-fat foods, but pay attention to the quantity you eat. If you're getting more of your calories from fat and have more dietary fiber, you'll be surprised at how far what you do eat goes. You don't actually have to eat that much. But again, if it's real food, it'll be delicious when you do eat.

scotty793• 2 years ago

In theory factory food has wvwry reason to be good for you. They have processes, they have quality control, they have scientists. What's missing are the correct incentives.

As a condition to access the market I'd force them to reveal full production process and ingredients to the last minute detail. Then it would need to be reviewed by scietists and only of review was correct they'd be allowed to sell it. They'd get one year of exclusivity for the new recipe.

smileysteve• 2 years ago

Imagine if cereal companies spent this same money on raising fiber in sugar, or adding protein, or reducing sugar with a stevia hybrid.

Even imagine most milk switching to ultra filtered (lactose converted to sucrose, 50% more protein).

"Small" changes like these would make our food actually better for us.

FooBarBizBazz4• 2 years ago

Just don't eat cereal. William Kellogg is to the American's body as Thomas Midgley Jr. was to the environment. The dead man is still fucking us up.

Have no time? Eat some plain yogurt; put blueberries on top. Not cereal.

Have five minutes to cook? (I'm sure your phone steals more from you every hour; it does me.) Fry/scramble an egg. It cooks in like two minutes. Not cereal.

scotty793• 2 years ago

Muesli is 1 to 1 replacement for cereal.

snvzz3• 2 years ago

And routine enemas. Do not forget these.

FooBarBizBazz4• 2 years ago

Corrections:

1. Some of the insanity may be due more to William Keith Kellogg's brother John Harvey Kellogg than to W. K. himself. They appear to have been close and shared ideas though.

2. Wikipedia argues that John Harvey is not really responsible for the sins popularly attributed to him. Perhaps others like Richard Francis Burton are as much to blame. Orientalists and imperialists who, envious of Islamic devotion and having a congenital anxiety of inferiority to their Jewish forebears, sought to import practices that had previously been filtered out in the reform process that had created Christianity. Thus we had colonial boosters declaring that the English were a tribe of Israel (like a white version of some Rasta-adjacent beliefs), and other things that seem silly to us today. Though, all identities are imagined, of course.

3. The diet emphasized by John Harvey does not necessarily sound awful, if you focus on the emphasis on fiber. But Corn Flakes are not a high fiber food, so they are not consistent with that idea. The brothers would have done better to popularize beans.

Mappleton• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/1Na1K

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

At least 85% of the edible products in a supermarket are actually not.

afpx• 2 years ago

Data point of one, but lost 20% of my weight (235 lb to 180 lb) over six months just by cutting out all sugar, alcohol, and anything that came from a factory. I didn’t even have to cut back on volume. That came naturally since I no longer craved snacks, and my appetite decreased. the only part that was difficult was stopping which took a while.

wrigglingworm• 2 years ago

If you want to lose weight then consume less calories than your body burns. It really is that simple. Yeah, you probably won't be comfortable, but that's the trick to losing weight. You could do it eating nothing but Twinkies, you won't be healthy, but your weight will drop.

Surprised to see that this article mentioned "portion" or "serving" a total of zero times. That's the trick with cereal. Taking cocoa puffs as an example, 50g of them is 200 calories. 50g is probably 4 spoonful's (no source just my opinion).. very little, if you just pour an amount that looks good to you into your bowl, yeah it's going to easily add up to an 800 calorie meal when you add milk.

I would agree that it's deceptive, but you can't blame them for making you fat. All the information you need is right there on the label. This is just for managing weight, getting proper micro and macro nutrients takes a little more research.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

GLP-1 agonists (Wegovy, Ozempic, semaglutide), help people who have a brain chemistry preventing calorie reduction success naturally (willpower or whatever you want to call it).

The gene therapy trials should be done soon. At that point, the flywheel comes up to speed and starts enabling susceptible populations with the genetic bug to fix it, in order to have agency against a system designed to shovel them garbage for profit. Obesity at this scale is a system failure, so you have to fix the system (and it’s clearly not going to be done at the regulatory or corp level).

(You can absolutely blame them for making people fat; some people cannot control it, and you cannot blame someone for their brain chemistry)

snvzz3• 2 years ago

There's two problems: Lack of knowledge, and lack of discipline.

I am not comfortable with the idea of mass-medicating to try to solve these societal issues through a brain chemistry strategy.

As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice

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