The tobacco companies seemed to care quite a bit in Australia, judging by the legal bullshit they tried here when the government made their packaging unappealing.
Yup, Australia is just one of the few places where it succeeded, since it's big and rich enough not to be easily bullied with "international law". The Philippines lost in trade tribunals - apparently the commercial interests of these companies are easily found to trump public health.
War over labels is the "showing initiative" for middle managers at Kellogs. Wait till GLP-1 is going to have widespread effects. Apparently it is already been cited as risk in earnings calls for public companies[0].
"Companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz have begun designing their products so that their packages don’t have a true front or back, but rather two nearly identical labels — except for the fact that only one side has the required warning. As a result, supermarket clerks often place the products with the warning facing inward, effectively hiding it."
lol. This isn't the kind of innovation we want market capitalism to deliver, but it's exactly the kind it is best at sometimes.
A supermarket who'd care for their customers, would defeat such shenanigans by instructing their personnel to always put the warning-side visible on the shelves. Such that their customers can't overlook it if present.
Of course, most supermarkets are more interested in profit margins, and whatever helps to increase them.
I try to avoid buying anything from all such companies but the concentration of power in the international food and drink business makes it quite difficult.
Nice to have an update on Nestlé corporate culture. Looks like I'll keep boycotting them (which is quite hard when also boycotting Lactalis, but well, what can you do).
I've seen one suggestion, regarding closing loopholes in general but it has it's own issues. The idea is that you define the intention of a law and violate the intention of the law then you're punished as well.
So in this case the intention is to make people eat healthy and Kellogg is violating that intention by replacing sugar with an ingredient that they know isn't covered, because they specifically lobbied for it not to be. Similarly Coca-Cola by designing their labels to only have the warning on one side and asking the supermarket to place the items so that the warning isn't visible.
There's no real way that these companies come out of this looking good. Either they label correctly and people can see that their product is a lot more unhealthy than they might have realized or they go to court to protect their "right" to knowingly damage the healthy of their customers for profit. I fail to understand how you can have so little moral integrity. Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products.
> Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products.
Not to disagree, but this is probably the same kind of thinking that means websites have popovers saying "we respect your privacy click here so we can share your behaviour with an unfeeling AI designed to manipulate you into obsessively returning to this site at best, and at worst also with advertisers who will use their own unfeeling AI to manipulate you into buying stuff you don't need and can't afford for the highest price they can squeeze out of your overburdened wallet"…
instead of just not having analytics and advertising tracking.
Junk food manufacturers depend on the addictive nature of the sugar and fat they cram into their products. I don't see how this is any different than cigarette warning labels.
Sometimes I buy sugar free corn flakes and although they should be cheaper theoretically, in reality they cost a multiple of the super sugary flakes. It would be great if we could get more products that aren’t sweetened when you buy them. Like corn flakes, cereal, bread, chocolate milk and lot of others.
This is a grocery store and grocery distribution consolidation/duopoly/monopoly problem, which is a separate issue than the food that is sold.
This is actually one reason I love FBA - I can buy all sorts of small brand specialty health foods from Amazon, bypassing what the local stores choose to stock (or, more often, not stock).
Amazon's anticompetitive practices mean this will become harder in the future however, as they will use this sales and pricing and customer data directly against any mom and pop product that becomes sufficiently successful.
We really need better protections for small businesses that sell via giant online platforms. There is no shortage of healthy, tasty food, people who want to sell it, or people who want to buy it.
Corn flakes and chocolate milk (I'm so confused by the mention of this) are junk food products made with sugar. It makes no sense to have them sugar free. As for cereal and bread, it should be trivially easy to find these without added sugar. I don't know where you live but I'm confident you can find these.
Hehe, a while ago I embarked on a quest to find the lowest-added-sugar corn flakes.
6 or 7 supermarket chains further, sometimes a dozen products in same category, end result: not one (0) without added sugars. Anywhere. And all in a similar range, iirc.
So basically the same product everywhere. Just minor tweaks (or with/without chocolate, eg.) + packaging, brands & pricing differences.
Just goes to show how powerful food conglomerates destroy consumer choice.
I assume a lot of food is produced like toothpaste. I used to know a guy whose dad had a factory that produced toothpaste and shampoo for almost all big brands. They did R&D for them and just put slightly different recipes into the branded boxes. That means that a lot of shampoos and toothpaste (and probably) are basically only slight variations of the same thing.
It's still compelled speech. It's possible that you think commercial communications are a special case, but I and many others do not, and find it just as reprehensible as any other form of compelled speech.
What other sorts of solutions are possible other than forcing people to put things on their packaging that they don't want there?
(1) it's not speech. (2) it's not political. (3) it is essential information for consumers that manufacturers have routinely lied about in the past. (4) it is already a compromise between what manufacturers would like and what 'the people' (you know, those pesky voters and their representatives) actually need. And finally (5) corporations already have outsized power, to carry their water to the point that you believe that documents a few hundred years old should be interpreted in the most literal way possible so that they can have even more power is not rational.
A ton of court decisions say it is in the US. Here is an article that cites a plethora of them [1]. Note: I have no idea who gfi.org is or whose agenda they are pushing or what side they are on. They just happened to have an article with a nice list of relevant cases.
Corporations are people, writing is speech and right is wrong. I actually don't care about what convoluted reasoning US courts use to reach their conclusions, they seem to be far more involved in seeing how they can kick the camel through the eye of the needle than with what was originally intended. Such incredibly narrow (and often narrowminded) views as well as all kinds of myopic rulings have done a lot of damage to the United States and to the world at large either by example or by osmosis.
So if you want to argue that being required to label the ingredients and other required prose on the outside of your packaging is 'speech' then you are effectively siding with the corporations against humanity. You can probably find some justification for that in your own mind but it isn't going to convince me that you have it right, no matter how many silly arguments you can find to back it up. There is such a thing as common sense and courts risk their own legacy as well as ridicule if they lose that very important element. And in the United States the supposedly independent supreme courts vote o n just about any subject that is even mildly politically tinted can be guessed with an accuracy that borders on certainty, something that should never ever happen if the court were independent.
This sort of reasoning is what got you 'the United States vs $50,000' and other elegant bits of bullshit. And don't get me started on the political nature of the US supreme court, which seems to be visible to all but a handful.
A significant amount of the article is about efforts to bring similar regulations to the US, and the likely challenges that will face, including a specific mention of the US approach to speech.
It is perfectly legal for compelled speech to exist in business activity, and is well within the interstate commerce clause.
As one of those evil American conservatives, I'm perfectly okay with targeted compelled speech in business activities, such as requiring marketing to be truthful.
But if they say nothing on the package, they're truthful, no? And it's more power to the FDA, a big government agency. Also, it's regulations. Those are bad for free markets, no? That's my understanding of the US culture (both liberals and conservative btw, I don't see meaningful difference between the two economically).
It's a very shallow understanding of US culture, but that's fair enough because CNN/Fox/MSM and other political outlets are a very shallow display of US culture.
Very few conservatives would be upset with the FDA being focused on "truth in packaging" as opposed to "FDA-approved" translating to "force employers/schools to force this on everyone" (aka experimental COVID shots).
Very few conservatives want to remove all regulation - many I know like the safety of the banking system as opposed the scam-heavy crypto market. However, we don't like over-zealous political enforcement of regulations (aka IRS doing targeted audits on conservative leaning institutions) or every transaction being reported to the government.
You are correct there isn't a meaningful economic difference between Democrats and Republicans right now. Both parties are letting inflation run rampant, have done little to fight taxes, deficits, or debts, and have no sense of financial responsibility to their taxpayers or voters, even though they both scream it when they are the minority party.
However, most Conservatives care about the federal debt/deficit, even if all the Republicans in the House don't. That's why Congress's approval rating is crap.
Mexico’s big black hexagons warning across excess fat/sugar/calories are kind of ridiculous. I don’t think they are serving to dissuade consumers, and even foreigners stop noticing the labels after just a couple of weeks in the country. The problem seems to be a wider one: Mexico is importing the convenience-store junk-food culture of its northern neighbor. People are often eating crap because there isn’t much else available from an Oxxo.
If someone eats froot loops and can't see by themselves that they are too sugary do they even have the intelligence to make decisions based on those black hexagons?
The point of food labels is help consumers make more informed decisions on what food they consume, especially when the food industry works to make food as addictive as possible. Lets not forget that the messaging behind many (most?) products, especially the unhealthy ones, is one of health and nutrition. When the only message about a food is it's health benefits it's not too farfetched that people may consider Froot Loops part of a healthy breakfast.
Froot Loops is an extreme example, in most cases it's more subtle, like granola.
It's easier for kids. 'No mama, we already have one sugar point today, a second is too much', 'beurk, sugar, fat and salt!'.
I'm joking (sightly), but it's easy accounting. Give yourself X sugar point, Y fat points, and Z salt point, per day/per week, and you can still eat unhealthy food while making some effort. Small steps etc.
Going even further from that, to many mexicans having those labels is now considered similarly to a badge of honors. The more labels you have, the more the average mexican expect the product to taste well.
This song from Fito Olivares is quite old and is still a hit in most parties. You'll also encounter it in many tiktoks and instagram reels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-RV8ZbMcdQ
Mexican people also jokingly say stupid shit like you have to act gay 5 mins to avoid it the gayness to accumulate. I put the joke about black labels being a taste rank on the same “stupid things people say” bucket.
The same policy was applied in Chile and it had an impact on the consumption of sugary drinks and most importantly sugary breakfast cereals which all ran on a "we are so healthy and the best way to start the day" platform; while actually being full of sugar and fats.
So I would say if what you want is for people to eat less of a certain food, it works. It's not ridiculous.
Second hand anecdata, but one of my camp counselor friend went to Chile (in remote villages on the 'bad' sides of the Andes to bring them books and teach I guess) and told me that a part of the curriculum for children is nutrition and how to use the labels: basically, moderation (I don't have the details). What's funny is that it seems the children guide the parents in the supermarkets.
It's very easy to judge, at first, from these labels. In Chile they are "high in saturated fats", "high in sugar", "high in sodium" and "high in calories". So even a child can see "okay 3 seals... probably not very healthy".
Only problem with these sort of policies is a phenomenon called "complexification" [1] where in order to get rid of the seals you introduce complexity into the product itself to escape it (for example by replacing certain chemicals with derivatives that are not quite but very similar).
It's difficult to escape the race, but for a while, these policies do work.
I believe the much more contentious problem is the prohibition of using mascots on packaging when these warnings are applied. That is bound to hurt sales much more, especially for the lucrative childhood obesity market.
> Mexico’s big black hexagons warning across excess fat/sugar/calories are kind of ridiculous. I don’t think they are serving to dissuade consumers, and even foreigners stop noticing the labels after just a couple of weeks in the country.
How ridiculous is it if big corporations take them seriously? In fact, if we look at how tobacco laws worked, this kind of messaging works extremely well in shifting perception of people about it in the long run. Sure, people may still drink it, but maybe they won't give some to their kids, or introduce them to it later, or they won't make jokes about people not joining them in that habit at social gatherings, etc.
Oh, it's that stupid demonizing thing with the black octagones? We have it for a year or two in Argentina, they don't make sense at all. Why would you ever normalize against calories? You would never get all your calories from only one food, so you wouldn't get the "excess" in fats, carbs or whatever. I believe that european nutriscore does better by normalizing against serving.
While that makes sense, I still think it would be more effective than having big multinational companies manipulate their way out of a well intended law.
Perhaps supermarkets should be required to divide the floor area into two with all the stuff that is bad for you further from the entrance than the good stuff.
Nutrition Labels in India are strange. Many drinks (like refrigerated shakes etc.) have nutritional information per 100 millilitres, whereas the actual bottle is say 330 millilitres, and the "serving size" will be defined as 250 millilters.
The point being, the added sugars will probably come to 20-25 percent of the daily allowance if you drink a single bottle of beverage. At the same time, it will not be seen as "high in sugar" because, hey, the serving size is only 250/330 of a bottle, so the sugar level is below 20 percent. [Sophisticated level of duplicity]
Most people are not that careful anyway - they might glance at the nutritional label, and see that the sugars are only 7.5% and think: that's pretty good, I'll have one, not seeing the 100 ml gotcha. [Basic level duplicity]
The only thing that will alert you is the cloying sweetness of the drink which will cause you to pull out a calculator and see what that small bottle is going to really cause.
Processed foods (snacks and beverages) in India seem to be very high in sugars, sodium and fat, more so than the same brands available elsewhere.
>Nutrition Labels in India are strange. Many drinks (like refrigerated shakes etc.) have nutritional information per 100 millilitres, whereas the actual bottle is say 330 millilitres, and the "serving size" will be defined as 250 millilters.
Why is it strange? The metric system? It's exactly the same in Europe. Nutritional information is per 100ml/g, so that you can easily understand compare nutritional values.
>Most people are not that careful anyway - they might glance at the nutritional label, and see that the sugars are only 7.5% and think: that's pretty good, I'll have one, not seeing the 100 ml gotcha.
No mate, people in India and in EU are used to looking at the nutritional information per 100g/l as that lets you easily compare nutritional value between foodstuffs packaged in different weights, and figure out what's healthy/unhealthy, for example I saw Coca-Cola and most soft drinks are about 10g/100ml sugar, meaning that 10% of the product is sugar, so that's my yardstick of unhealthiness, or that most chips/crisps have around 30g/100g fats, aka 30% fats, so I seek out variants that have much less.
Having only the nutritional value listed per random serving size or the entire product like in the US is confusing because I can't easily compare sugar/fat percentage content of different products of different weights.
As someone who lives in the US and reads every nutrition label to determine how much sugar / carbohydrate I'm taking in, my intuition is that it would be much harder in practice to do so if it were per 100 ml/g or by oz or something. Sure it would be easier to compare products, but the math would be come much harder to determine what you actually consumed, wouldn't it?
I mean, it's annoying that they do things like '3.5 servings per container', but at least you only have to multiply by 3.5 (I would just prefer a total on each container). If it were 'there are 5g of carbs/sugar per 100g of material,' it would end up being an extra step to determine total grams, divide it by a potentially wonky number or round and divide, then multiply the 5g times the resulting number. Sure it's not that much harder, but it would really add up throughout the day if you were tracking your diet. And IME that's a much more common use case than comparing nutritional value of different products by comparing the macronutrient makeup in grams from the labels, which I've actually never done once
One thing I find wild in EU is that apparently adding alcohol to a drink obviates the need for a nutrition label. A can of coke needs to declare its sugar content but no need for the precanned Jack&Coke from the same supermarket fridge.
Yeah, that's indeed a stupid loop-hole in the EU. Although i suppose most people wishing to get wasted don't care much about the nutritional value same how smokers don't acare about the cancer warnings with gross diseased pictures on them.
> they might glance at the nutritional label, and see that the sugars are only 7.5% and think: that's pretty good, I'll have one, not seeing the 100 ml gotcha. [Basic level duplicity]
> The only thing that will alert you is the cloying sweetness of the drink which will cause you to pull out a calculator and see what that small bottle is going to really cause.
Not sure I understand this point. Something that is 7.5% sugar will taste the same whether you drink 100ml of it or 2l. There are definitely problems with the concept that a serving from a 330ml bottle is 250ml - that is clearly meant to deceive. But if you have some concept of how much sugar is too much for your taste, the 7.5% sugar figure is enough.
I would propose a regulation that if a food package somehow mentions there is not something (sugar, fat, artificial sweeteners etc) in the food, but the food contains some other element of the same list, the thing that is contained should be mentioned with at least as visible labeling than the one that is missing.
Nutritional labelling is such a cesspit of lies. My pet hate is the 'portion' or 'serving' sizes which are blatantly wrong just so the companies can lie about how much sugar they are selling to you.
So you get 500 ml bottle with nutritional info shown for every 100 ml and 250ml because that's the 'serving size'. No-one has ever drunk 250ml (8 ounces) and then left the rest for later.
It does make sense to have the same "serving size" for a beverage across 0.33, 0.5 and 1.5L bottles though, regardless of whether no one actually shares the smaller ones. If anything, the "what's the sugar content of this whole package" should perhaps be declared separately.
No it does not make sense. We know that larger container sizes alone can increase intake (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22306436/) and the purpose of nutrition facts is not to tell you what an arbitrary amount of something contains in a vacuum, it's to inform you on the contents of what you're about to ingest.
"Servings" are just a convenient way to capture the fact that there are some cases where you're not expected to ingest the entire container: that's why a packet of mayonnaise and a jar of mayonnaise have near identical serving sizes, and same for packets of sugar vs boxes of sugar.
I do that all the time... I never buy sugary drinks, but sometimes they come for free in a takeout menu. I can keep it for guests, but even then it piles up in my cupboard, so I drink it in 2 or 3 sittings.
It's crazy that Coca-Cola is paying restaurants to only offer their poison (no still or sparkling water). These companies are literally making us sick.
Yes, there's 20 servings in this package if by a serving you mean 1/5th of what you average adult eats in one sitting.
The one exception here is when a portion actually equates to a portion, eg. '80 calories per cookie'. Those are wonderful, and probably what the original motivation for that type of labeling was; tangible.
EU's per 100g standard makes it easy to compare products. One product 22g sugars / 100g, the other 27g sugars / 100g. Read that on the labels, then choose.
And %: say, peanuts 51g fats/100g -> ah, product is roughly 1/2 fat.
Personally I ignore "Serving size" as meaningless bs.
As for whole packaging: say 22g sugar / 100gr, and there's 350g in the package. 3.5x22 is too difficult to calculate in one's head? (roughly!)
That's why there need to be strict rules on that. In the EU, serving sizes make sense (1 cookie or 2 slices of bread) (probably because they have to), and there always has to be the normalised by 100ml / 100g too, so you can compare even if serving sizes are lying.
The nutrition label is based on serving sizes which don't make sense in the real world making the whole label and wasted space nonsense.
Like: The box says score A but when you check the 100g list you realize that you are eating a complete meal calorie wise as snack using a realistic serving size. With little to zero nutrition value. Why A?
nutrition labels are a lobbied-for scam. it compares products within _the same category_ against each other. Like, cereals against cereals, and boom: doesn't look too bad! The reality (cereals are pure carbs and not healthy whatsoever) is labelled over and simple-minded consumers think its better than it actually is and buy it.
Perhaps, but America has am obesity problem due to lack of exercise and unhealthy food. The war on fat meant we just eat various forms of sugar to avoid fat.
not an american here. but pure carbs with nothing else (no fiber, vitamins, proteins, fats, ...) is just pure calories without nutrition value... except you're starving.
I'm from the EU and not even aware of nutrition labels and serving sizes. Everything mentions nutrition values per 100g. That's the thing that matters and it's very easy to check.
Similar when checking prices, I compare the price per 100g, not the price per randomly sized package...
If it's actually per 100g I am heavily surprised how 20g sugar and 79g carbs with some artificial vitamins can be considered A. I guess it's not about being healthy then, just about being not soooo bad
I agree that Nutriscore is bullshit that was designed to make stuff seem healthier than it is, and it is quite controversial in the EU.
The only good thing about EU labels is that they always have precise values per 100g or 100ml, which allows accurate calorie tracking vs. US labels with ridiculous serving sizes (eg. serving size is half a cookie. Who the fuck eats half a cookie)
Europeans are also quite good at that exoteric branch of maths that is base 10 arithmetics and at that weird practice of weighting food with food scales instead of filling spoons and cups. So most people just ignore serving size and look at the 100g nutritional values.
Not always unfortunately. 2 examples I have in mind:
- biscuits are sometimes « individually » packaged by 4 or 6 (ie you buy a box containing 2 or 3 smaller packages inside) and the serving size is 2 biscuits. Real serving should be 1 package for it to make sense
- there’s a brand of fresh ravioli which I buy, the package makes 2 servings, but if you do that you have a ridiculously small serving. 1 package makes a normal plate
There’s no way to get a « serving » unit that makes sense. I always rely on the /100g instead
> So you get 500 ml bottle with nutritional info shown for every 100 ml and 250ml because that's the 'serving size'. No-one has ever drunk 250ml (8 ounces) and then left the rest for later.
Actually I had a coworker who would in fact drink 250 ml of a 500 ml bottle and leave the rest for later, although usually he would never get around to finishing it because he drank carbonated beverages and by the time he was next thirsty they had gone flat.
The odd thing was he did this for all size bottles and cups. E.g., if I went to get lunch and he was too busy for a break then and I offered to bring something back for him no matter what sized drink I got for him he drank half.
> Nutritional labelling is such a cesspit of lies. My pet hate is the 'portion' or 'serving' sizes which are blatantly wrong just so the companies can lie about how much sugar they are selling to you.
"Per serving/portion" seems like an American quick, like "tablespoons" or "cups" as units in recipes. The EU the labeling standard is per 100g or 100ml.
> So you get 500 ml bottle with nutritional info shown for every 100 ml and 250ml because that's the 'serving size'. No-one has ever drunk 250ml (8 ounces) and then left the rest for later.
Definitely, the info should be for the unit size/volume. Also alcohol should have the label as well. People should know how many calories are in their drinks.
The serving size can be relevant (whos going to drink an entire large bottle of V8 all at one time?) but there's no reason they can't do a side-by-side comparitive thing, similar to how cereal boxes compare the stats for the cereal by itself (dry) and with milk.
Oreo cookies are 160 calories per serving but double stuff Oreo cookies are only 150 calories per serving. How is this possible? The serving size for regular Oreo cookies is 3 cookies, for double stuff it is 2. Tricky.
Many years ago, the FDA tried to pass a rule that that nutrition labels should have either a red, yellow or green border.
The idea being, you could eg. tell your kid that they can have any cereal as long as the border is yellow, and have to mix it with one whose label is green.
The black "BAD" labels are not as effective, they desensitize to BAD, and if all sweets are BAD you just ignore the label (though they do help some, according to data from Israel which implemented such labels a few years ago).
The color codes (not as direct, but even more universally recognized) and the chance for a middle level is a better system. And they could put Allulose in that level, for a compromise that has a better chance of passing.
Well I'd rather pressure them from both angles: reduce sugar and reduce artificial sweetener usage. Optimally everything could stand to be less sweet as the default.
I've been on a campaign of cutting sugar down as much as I can: even in nominally "sweet" things it's incredible how much sugar standard recipes will call for then you can 1/3rd to 1/4 as much and get a superior result.
i read somewhere that artificial sweeteners cause the body to make you eat more because sweet taste signals sugar incoming and then there is no sugar so the body craves more to make up for that. not sure if thats true.
my main concern is that many artificial sweeteners are suspected to cause cancer
This is getting a huge issue. While more and more producers 'reduce' sugar the list of normal food items I simply can't eat is just growing.
I get stomach problems from nearly all common sweeteners, especially at the dosages they throw them in. Assumingly because I never really ate them before this all started.
There are now whole categories of items in the supermarket where no product is digestible for me.
This is a drink[1] which millions of Indian kids drink while growing up. Just see the amount of added sugar. And parents wonder why is the kid addicted to sugar growing up. Out of 100grams, added sugar = 32.2 grams. 32% of the drink is just pure sugar. People wonder why kids have rotten teeth growing up.
This is the Australian equivalent we had when I was growing up[1]. Someone worked it out and basically realized it manages to give you more sugar per volume then actual sugar.
Go Mexico! Unregulated markets often don't produce great outcomes for society. Regulate them for the public good.
I live in Australia, this reminds me of our tobacco plain packaging legislation [1]. A post implementation review was conducted a few years afterward [2]. Some interesting bits from the PIR conclusion:
> Applying the government’s RBM framework, the regulatory burden was estimated as $73.87 million across
the entire industry (including manufacturers, importers, wholesalers and retailers).
> While it was not possible to complete a full Cost Benefit Analysis for this PIR (due to the limitations on the data available at this time and provided by industry), potential monetised benefits were also analysed including an illustrative example of health benefits. That example estimated that a 0.07 percentage point drop in smoking prevalence would be equivalent to $273 million in monetised health benefits
> Dr Chipty’s modelling also estimated a 0.55 percentage point drop in smoking prevalence in Australia, over 34 months following implementation, attributable to the 2012 packaging changes. This strong result, that is “likely understated”, is expected to grow into the future as the full effects of the 2012
packaging changes are realised over the longer term
So, within 3 years after the introduction of packaging changes, smoking prevalence throughout the population had dropped by at least half a percent (approx 100k people). It cost the tobacco industry less than $100m in one-off transitional costs, and it's estimated to have more than $2b in monetised health benefits over that three year period alone.
It also cost tobacco industry lost revenues & profits, but hey, that's their problem, maybe they can find a different business to invest in.
One way people try to tease out those differences is through methods like "Difference in Differences"[1] which try to estimate causal relationships from observational data. These methods are used in marketing analysis as well.
In my experience, it is easy to break one of the many assumptions inherent in methods like Diff-in-diff. Because of this I have little trust in these techniques in general.
> Isn’t tobacco use trending down anyways? How could you possibly tease out the drop in tobacco use from one change to packaging?
Anything in the real world has many many factors affecting its consumption. What would it matter if it was trending down specifically? Or are you asking what models and statistical tools they use to make analyses like this when there are a complex set of factors at play?
Depends where you live. Visiting the US I don't remember ever seeing anyone smoking, but in Europe it's huge, especially in centra/southern/eastern Europe, including the Balkans where coffee and cigarettes are the staple of any nutritious breakfast.
I see plenty of teenagers smoking, plus on outdoor terraces and outside of offices, clubs, bars, even the balconies in my building, it's full of smokers.
Europe is a few decades behind the US on giving up smoking. Also, now the hipster thing is to switch to these e-cigarettes.
I think it's still has to do with social circle cliques and coolness factor from a young age and wanting to fit in.
I think a lot of people, non smokers mostly, don't see all the bonding, networking, flirting, and general socializing that happens when smokers get together for a fag, which probably explains why this unhealthy habit is still very popular today in many countries. I know many people who met their SOs at smoking breaks or found out about new yet unpublished job opportunities from the chit-chat that happens at smoking breaks.
Could be because it's seen as a socially acceptable addiction to have during daytime, granting you more breaks at work. If someone goes out every 45 minutes to play games on his phone he'll be seen as a lazy slacker, but if he were to go out for a smoke, it would be more likely to be allright, especially if his boss was also a smoker.
There's something about the smoking break gatherings, from a social aspect, like asking for a cigarette, asking for a light, cupping the flame against the wind for someone, which act like natural ice breakers, conversation starters and could help create instant bonds or chit-chat opportunities, that can't be replicated at other kind of gathering during the day such as water-cooler or standings in line.
Meh, even people on unemployment smoke like chimneys in Europe, because even in high-CoL countries you can buy tobacco in bulk, papers and filters and roll your own cigarettes.
You don't need to be wealthy to smoke a lot, just bad with finances.
Tobacco use is going down, but it's not happening on its own.
It's going down because of many measures that have been implemented:
- restriction of billboard advertising
- restriction of tobacco ads in film and tv
- warnings on packaging
- photos on packaging
- banning smoking in public buildings
- banning smoking in restaurants
- banning smoking in public transportation
- banning smoking near entrances
- age restrictions on buying cigarettes
- banning of automatic vending machines
etc.
Each of those have a small effect, but in total the effect is large. It's hard to measure the effectiveness of individual measures, but in aggregate it's clear that these measures significantly reduce smoking. Especially if you compare countries where these measures have not been implemented yet with countries where they were implemented sooner.
I think it just takes time. I live in Austria, and some of these measures were only introduced 5 years ago, some are still not implemented.
People don't give up smoking overnight, the 20 year lead the US has over these measures is not something we can expect to catch up... Smoking is going down, slowly, and I think it's because of all these measures.
In my anecdotal experience, it's simply no longer cool to smoke, at all, in fact very much the opposite.
I smoked for about 10 years between the mid 80s and 90s. When I started, most of the 'cool', 'sophisticated' etc people seemed to smoke. When I stopped, it was mostly a health choice, but partly because it seemed no longer 'cool', everyone I knew had given up or was trying to.
I can't even fathom why anyone would start smoking now, it seems like an affliction of the poor and/or the old rather than anything sophisticated.
All of this is mostly a change in fashion, people having a deeper awareness of the health risks, becoming aware of tobacco industry manipulation, etc. No doubt government messaging aided and supported that change, but it is not the only or even the main cause imho.
> a change in fashion, people having a deeper awareness
Where do you think this change is coming from? When I was a kid, there was a huge billboard right next to my school with a man wearing aviator glasses, an airplane in the background, smoking Memphis cigarettes. That was the coolest guy I've ever seen.
Compare that to 20 years later, there's a photo of a depressed guy on the package and a message "smoking causes infertility".
When I first started at uni, students still smoked in the auditorium. That was cool.
By the time I finished, people who smoked had to go outside and stand in smoking zones like animals. The opposite of cool.
There's a reason why the public perception changed. I don't think the public perception would have changed as drastically without government intervention.
I think those things mainly followed, getting a mandate from, the changing fashions; the health-conscious, status and performance oriented 80s, for example, rather than creating it, but I'm sure there's influence both ways.
> While it was not possible to complete a full Cost Benefit Analysis for this PIR (due to the limitations on the data available at this time and provided by industry), potential monetised benefits were also analysed including an illustrative example of health benefits. That example estimated that a 0.07 percentage point drop in smoking prevalence would be equivalent to $273 million in monetised health benefits
I wonder whether they take into account the long-term cost of people - who quit or don't smoke because of this legislation - becoming more of a burden on the social systems because of extended life? Things like this always remind me of the 'Smoke Screen' episode from Yes, Prime Minister [1]
I don't know why this comment got downvoted, I find this to be an important discussion. The solution can't be to kill old people, or to reduce the population in any way, but to bring cost down on other fronts. The follow-up questions would read something like: How can we increase active life span on a population level? How do we tackle sicknesses of elderly people? How can we make health-care cheaper? ...
> I believe smokers generally become a burden on social systems a few years earlier than nonsmokers, and so have fewer years where they are a benefit.
The vast majority of smokers remain productive until they retire but they have lower lifespans. Also take into account that nicotine suppresses appetite and smokers are less likely to be overweight.
Apparently, smokers take more sick leave days than non-smokers.
From the same report linked in this comment chain, page 53:
> As another example, the Analysis of Costs & Benefits also considers potential gains to productivity. There is sufficient evidence both in Australia and internationally to conclude that smokers take more sick leave than non-smokers. There are also academic reports that estimate the level of excess absenteeism attributable to smoking. Using these sources, and others, the Analysis of Costs & Benefits estimated productivity gains that would be realised where the tobacco plain packaging measure prevents initiation of smoking or increases the number of smokers who quit. The estimated value per working smoker avoided is $337.48 per year and the value of increased productivity per working quitter is estimated at $84.37 per year.
The report doesn't cite those studies, but here's one from Sweden:
> Smoking was found to increase the annual number of days of absence by 10.7 compared with never smoking. Controlling for risk factors at work, and thereby accounting for some of the selection of smokers into riskier jobs, reduced the effect to 9.7 days, corresponding to 38% of all annual absences due to sickness. Moreover, controlling for health status further reduced the effect of smoking to 7.7 days. The effect of smoking on sick leave was similar for men and women.
> Using a conservative estimate of excess absenteeism from work, male smokers took off an average of 4.36 sick days and male non-smokers took off an average of 3.30 sick days. Female smokers took off an average of 4.96 sick days and non-smoking females took off an average of 3.75 sick days.
As a side note, the stark difference between those two countries in excess sick leave is the average annual days of sick leave: 25.2 in Sweden, 3.9 in Taiwan.
i found a german article that looks at both sides. the argument appears to be that everyone has health problems in old age that cost money. smokers die earlier so they benefit less from pensions, and the taxes from selling cigarettes make up for the cost of the smokers treatments.
this is pretty close to what regulated tobacco packaging has looked like in australia for the last decade. a giant message with a health warning ("SMOKING HARMS UNBORN BABIES") paired with an often gross / confronting photo of the corresponding health outcome.
similar to what we have had in the UK for a good while too, there is one with a sad limp looking cigarette and SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE which I find very effective, more so than the ones of tumours even.
There actually do exist smokers who because of these pictures attempt to collect cigarette packs with all of these ugly pictures like children do for collectible stickers. :-)
Morbid thought, but I wonder if, given enough time, this might cause people to start to associate positive feelings with these gory images through some kind of Skinnerian mechanism.
I don't believe such measures have a significant impact on obesity because they don't target the main causes of obesity which are the easy availability of food and the reliance on private cars for transportation.
Furthermore, they push the misleading idea that you can still drive to the supermarket, buy processed foods, load them in your car, drive home, eat them in front of the TV and be fine, as long as you don't buy the high-in-sugar stuff.
If you want to beat obesity start by buying just the ingredients and then cooking meals at home. It's not that hard. Then start walking to places instead of taking the car. Taking public transportation is also good because it frequently forces you to walk a non-negligible amount. Also stop eating while watching TV. You can go one step further and throw out the TV altogether.
You don't need to work out (although you should for other health reasons); you also don't need to diet; the vast majority of dieters gain all of the weight they lost during the diet and then some.
We have effective weightloss drugs now like ozempic and semaglutide.
What effect do people report from them? Reduction in appetite. Which tells us the obvious truth: you need to eat less or parity calories in then you do going out. A nutrition professor ate nothing but Twinkies and lost weight[1] while doing so. Probably wasn't fun, but it worked. Someone did the same with nothing but McDonald's[2].
Your entire list is just a list of your perception of "virtuous" activities, and has nothing at all to do with whether or not you'll gain or lose weight. It's lies, judgement and irrelevancy to push an agenda about how people should live, rather then sticking to the observable facts of the matter.
Saying "you need to eat less calories than you expend in order to lose weight" is like saying "to win in chess just mate your opponent's king". It's just saying the same thing in different words. The fact of the matter is that people that don't do those virtuous activities have a very difficult time maintaining a healthy weight and people that do do those virtuous activities have a much easier time.
A home cooked meal is not "better" for you in terms of calories then anything else. Carbohydrates are incredibly energy dense, in ways people just don't expect. Milk is incredibly energy dense - so is bread.
Now this is normally the point someone says "well obviously you have to cook things which don't..." - yeah. Exactly. Whether or not it's "home cooked" doesn't matter. What matters is you have a calorie budget per day and you need to not exceed it on average.
Virtuous activities don't accomplish much of anything directly. Walking just plain doesn't burn that many extra calories.[1] The benefit of that whole list is basically "it's hard to eat while you're walking or not at home or at the shops". The benefit of the improved cardio-fitness is going to make you feel better, but you won't burn a lot of extra calories.
That's what I mean about lies and judgement: "throw away the TV" - why? It's got nothing to do with anything. Sitting around reading a book is just as sedentary. Telling people they have to do a bunch of things which aren't associated with the core outcome is just setting them up to fail - or have unrealistic expectations because everyone has a different built-in sense of "correct" about food.
To actually help people you start from the core facts, and give them the tools to figure out what habits are going to work for them. Try counting calories for a week and get a sense for what healthy portion sizes and meal composition actually looks like (this is where nutrition labels help a lot). The conclusion of "do home cooked meals" is one which follows - maybe - from that exercise, but it's absolute fiction to think that it's impossible to gain weight if you only cook at home.
I fully agree. But I'm often flabbergasted at how unfathomable large something like "throw out the TV altogether" or "start walking/cycling to places" is for many.
I guess it's part herd behaviour and part natural resistance to change, but what has made "us", the human species so entrenched, that we think we need cars, TVs, premade meals? Humans "never¹" had them, yet now, within one or two generations somehow believe we cannot do without it? All while the rational evidence is clear that it's hurting both individuals², all of humanity and in some cases all of nature?
¹ statistically seen, if we take the entire history of the human kind
² to clarify the difference with something like "health care" that the human kind also statistically "never" had.
I have an answer to that: because it's more comfortable that way and people naturally seek comfort.
Whenever I stop at a fueling station I see the same picture: a young, somewhat overweight man wearing tracksuit pants picking up junk food. He chose comfort. Can you honestly blame him for that?
Of course as a species we thrive in discomfort, but the benefits come with a delay - there's usually no incentive to start.
Why, yes, off course. I don't judge him for that, but certainly he's the (only?) one to blame for his "somewhat overweight" and all the health issues that might come from that.
One might argue that marketeers, big-food, TV, influencers, politicians, and whatnot also may hold blame here, e.g. by "making this man believe he wants this", but that's a whole different debate.
> but certainly he's the (only?) one to blame for his "somewhat overweight" and all the health issues that might come from that.
Do you believe he values this over being comfortable?
> "making this man believe he wants this",
I don't think it takes much convincing - after all being comfortable is great.
It's deciding to be uncomfortable - so walking/cycling instead of driving, eating less overall etc. that goes against our basic instincts - I'm surprised that you're surprised that not that many people do it when out of the two lifestyles it's the one that requires more effort.
True, but that man isn't experiencing them now - at least not to the extent that would make him change anything.
Most of my friends with health issues associated with lifestyle got their first wakeup call right before their 30s. Plenty of time to develop habits which take over a decade to drop - or more if they started during childhood.
And here's the kicker: not all of them made the necessary changes. Also some others did, but are unhappy with this new lifestyle and would like to go back but external factors like the threat of divorce keep them from doing so.
What I'm getting at is that it's the people who consciously choose effort who are the weirdos. Healthy, longer living weirdos, but weirdos nonetheless.
People drive cars, eat trash and lay on the couch because they like to. You'll only get other outcomes in an environment where it's too hard to do any of those things.
> If you want to beat obesity start by buying just the ingredients and then cooking meals at home. It's not that hard. Then start walking to places instead of taking the car. Taking public transportation is also good because it frequently forces you to walk a non-negligible amount. Also stop eating while watching TV. You can go one step further and throw out the TV altogether.
This all seems pretty strange and won't make you lose weight. What will is just eating fewer calories. That's it. You don't have to change anything at all if you don't want to. You can drive to the store, you can eat in front the TV, you can eat your hamburgers and drink coke. Just eat less of it, and you'll lose weight.
The idea that people have to be "educated" to know this is ludicrous, such a typical "government" / "expert" notion. Eat too much = get fat has been known and understood for centuries. People knew this when they were illiterate peasants. School children tease each other about this. The obesity problem is not caused by lack of education, it's caused by lack of self-control (exacerbated by the refinement of food composition, improved cost and convenience, and marketing).
From an ex-obese, it's simple : do you know how much my ankle hurts? I had a cyclop eye that blocked ankle movement, the surgical operation wasn't fully reimbursed (only 70%) and I had basically no money. I couldn't do my usual job because my ankle was hurting, tried to become a youth camp director, took CS classes for a month because summer camp with computers was the future, liked it, studied for 3 years, sitting in front of a cumputer all day (away from the were the only sport I could do with my ankle, kayaking, was), became even more obese, but richer, and operated my ankle. As that time, I was so fat my thighs rubbed on each other with each movement, walking more than 15 minutes wasn't possible without scarring them (I also had a bad case of HPV at the time, which didn't help). I ate healthy food, but too much. A coworker told me about 'learning to accept the hunger' by fasting (under supervision). I did that. The second day was the worst, but after the 5 days fast I understood that being hungry is just a state, it doesn't mean that you need food. I'm constantly hungry after my meals nowadays, but my BMI is 25-26, and my waist to hip ration < 1 (not healthy yet, but still). I couldn't really do any decent walking before my BMI was under 28, but now I'm hiking regularly (still have ankle braces on my left foot though).
If I wasn't lucky enough to have a good pre-college education, I wouldn't have learned CS, and without money and contacts outside my family (I was ashamed of what I became), pretty sure I would have stayed obese. It was 90% luck, 10% effort.
[edit] for the 'obese should just walk crowd' : did you ever walk so much, blood soaked up your boxers and pants? My ankle was hurting so much man, but the worst was the dampness caused by the blood. Twice a week, for a month. Lost 200g. My inner thighs are reddish-brown because if the scar tissues. Only solution is eating less, but when you've learned all your life to eat till you aren't hungry, what can you do?
I recently read ultraprocessed people and while it's a bit hyperbolic it's still eye-opening about the state of the packaged food business.
My son is allergic to Soya, Nuts, Eggs, Dairy and since he started eating solids we've have to label check everything and in doing so as a family we've basically stopped eating packaged foods alltogether. Do you know just how hard it is to avoid Soy now, it and it's derivatives are in pretty much everything, and even if it's not a raw ingredient it's in the bulk of the 'supply chain'.
I think when we look back in 20 years the packaged foods business is going to look at lot like the tobacco one does today...
Companies are suing Mexico: if the justice system is as fast as my country, I'd make them go through the normal process, and have a verdict in 5 or 10 years.
I am a bit torn about these new labels. I'm from Argentina and they were implemented over there some time ago.
On the one hand, I think it's great to warn "ignorant" people about the content of their foods. And by Ignorant I don't mean poor uneducated people. You'd be surprised how many college-educated, well-off people in Argentina think that a cereal bar is a "healthy food". Or that corn flakes is a healthy food. So, suddenly, these black scary labels started appearing everywhere and people were like "Oh wow, does this have a lot of sugar in it? I thought it was healthy".
So that's a good thing.
But on the other hand, they'r extremely simplistic. A label that says "excess fat" can actually be a good thing. If it's some raw, healthy fat (say, Oil, butter, etc), that's a great type of food. But it'll share the same "excess fat" label with a crappy hydrogenated-fat based food.
Take for example whole milk, which it is now known that is the ONLY healthy type of milk. It'll have a "excess fat" label. While Skim milk will contain non such labels.
Anyway, I think the balance is favorable for those labels. At least "protect" the uneducated people. If anybody wants to learn more about food, they'll put the time and learn to ignore those labels and just focus on the raw macronutrients.
EDIT: I know the "whole milk is better than Skim milk" might STILL be a hot take (not for long I hope...). Here's my answer to another comment:
> The gist is: fat is not bad; at all. Most of Vitamins contained in Milk are fat-soluble. That means that all the good properties of milk are transported by fat. Also, whole milk is less processed.
> Here's a very "intuitive" reasoning, as an exercise: if Vitamin D is fat soluble... how is it possible that Skim milk has MORE Vitamin D (or A) than whole milk? (answer: because it's artificially added).
In this case I'd take "extremely simplistic" any time over well-balanced-through-slightly-more-complex-set-of-rules. Thing is, the rules will be gamed in the long run, period.
Simpler rules would eventually allow consumers to easily determine how are they being cheated.
Yes, I agree with you as well. But with the word of caution that they're not the silver bullet and people should still educate themselves regarding macronutrients.
You can find just a few sources below, out of the MANY studies done.
The gist is: fat is not bad; at all. Most of Vitamins contained in Milk are fat-soluble. That means that all the good properties of milk are transported by fat. Also, whole milk is less processed.
Here's a very "intuitive" reasoning, as an exercise: if Vitamin D is fat soluble... how is it possible that Skim milk has MORE Vitamin D (or A) than whole milk? (answer: because it's artificially added).
but more importantly, Vitamin D/A added WITHOUT fat, is just wasted. The body absorbs those vitamins only in the presence of fat. So, most of the artificially added Vitamins will end up being disposed adding extra stress to your kidneys.
I didn't look into what the labels actually mean, but if "excess fat" means more than 30% fat, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Your diet should avoid processed food that are mostly fat.
But in the end, I don't think these labels work by instantly educating individuals. It works by continuously reminding people that these foods are not healthy. Most will not stop eating them because of the labels, but many will probably give it at least a second though.
to be more clear, (from a quick search on the subject), vitamin D needs fat so that the body can absorb it. that doesn't mean skimmed milk with vitamin D is useless, but only as long as there is other fat coming from elsewhere at the same time (and i don't know how much time that means), so skimmed milk is simply less practical.
You actually have to consider what's the body going to do with the excess Vitamin D that can't be absorbed (because of the lack of fat). The answer is: probably going to stress more your kidneys.
For me, the bottom line is, why would I drink skim milk if it's just a more "watery" version of the perfectly healthy whole milk?
Btw, and this is just me, I'm not lactose intolerant (I eat A LOT of yogurt, milk, cream, cheese, etc), but skim milk makes me "sick" (lactose-intolerant symptoms). Maybe it's just my brain.
why would I drink skim milk if it's just a more "watery" version of the perfectly healthy whole milk
i suppose an argument can be made that it makes up for more fat elsewhere, but i agree. personally i avoid any milk product that has less fat than is natural for that product. and i am a big fan of raw milk. when we had the opportunity we used to buy milk directly from a farmer because it just tastes so much better.
If we are going to reform food labels, how about requiring that they include a last update timestamp?
When I’m considering buying a food item for the first time I read the entire label to make sure it meets my criteria. It would be nice when buying it again to be able to at a glance tell that it is still the same as when I last bought it.
- Products do not change formulas at random, if they did they'd have to re-submit samples for the label evaluation.
- These labels don't have your best interests in mind anyway: If you are a bodybuilder, you will have tor read nutrition info labels yourself and ignore the warning labels, because only you know what quantities for each nutritients you will take to meet your goals.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadthey have medical patients on their boxes down there, the trade is a big as ever
The tobacco companies lost, thankfully. :)
In terms of % of population smoking, the trade has been shrinking significantly: https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/31/2/129
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myv7yydtCKc
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-18/glp-1-dru...
lol. This isn't the kind of innovation we want market capitalism to deliver, but it's exactly the kind it is best at sometimes.
Of course, most supermarkets are more interested in profit margins, and whatever helps to increase them.
(Against warning labels on junk food in Mexico: How Switzerland danced to the Nestlé tune)
https://stories.publiceye.ch/en/nestle-mexico/
So in this case the intention is to make people eat healthy and Kellogg is violating that intention by replacing sugar with an ingredient that they know isn't covered, because they specifically lobbied for it not to be. Similarly Coca-Cola by designing their labels to only have the warning on one side and asking the supermarket to place the items so that the warning isn't visible.
There's no real way that these companies come out of this looking good. Either they label correctly and people can see that their product is a lot more unhealthy than they might have realized or they go to court to protect their "right" to knowingly damage the healthy of their customers for profit. I fail to understand how you can have so little moral integrity. Why not just embrace the new labels and design better products.
Not to disagree, but this is probably the same kind of thinking that means websites have popovers saying "we respect your privacy click here so we can share your behaviour with an unfeeling AI designed to manipulate you into obsessively returning to this site at best, and at worst also with advertisers who will use their own unfeeling AI to manipulate you into buying stuff you don't need and can't afford for the highest price they can squeeze out of your overburdened wallet"…
instead of just not having analytics and advertising tracking.
This is actually one reason I love FBA - I can buy all sorts of small brand specialty health foods from Amazon, bypassing what the local stores choose to stock (or, more often, not stock).
Amazon's anticompetitive practices mean this will become harder in the future however, as they will use this sales and pricing and customer data directly against any mom and pop product that becomes sufficiently successful.
We really need better protections for small businesses that sell via giant online platforms. There is no shortage of healthy, tasty food, people who want to sell it, or people who want to buy it.
6 or 7 supermarket chains further, sometimes a dozen products in same category, end result: not one (0) without added sugars. Anywhere. And all in a similar range, iirc.
So basically the same product everywhere. Just minor tweaks (or with/without chocolate, eg.) + packaging, brands & pricing differences.
Just goes to show how powerful food conglomerates destroy consumer choice.
What other sorts of solutions are possible other than forcing people to put things on their packaging that they don't want there?
Do you feel the same way about the ingredient list?
A ton of court decisions say it is in the US. Here is an article that cites a plethora of them [1]. Note: I have no idea who gfi.org is or whose agenda they are pushing or what side they are on. They just happened to have an article with a nice list of relevant cases.
[1] https://gfi.org/resource/the-first-amendment-right-to-use-cl...
So if you want to argue that being required to label the ingredients and other required prose on the outside of your packaging is 'speech' then you are effectively siding with the corporations against humanity. You can probably find some justification for that in your own mind but it isn't going to convince me that you have it right, no matter how many silly arguments you can find to back it up. There is such a thing as common sense and courts risk their own legacy as well as ridicule if they lose that very important element. And in the United States the supposedly independent supreme courts vote o n just about any subject that is even mildly politically tinted can be guessed with an accuracy that borders on certainty, something that should never ever happen if the court were independent.
This sort of reasoning is what got you 'the United States vs $50,000' and other elegant bits of bullshit. And don't get me started on the political nature of the US supreme court, which seems to be visible to all but a handful.
As one of those evil American conservatives, I'm perfectly okay with targeted compelled speech in business activities, such as requiring marketing to be truthful.
Very few conservatives would be upset with the FDA being focused on "truth in packaging" as opposed to "FDA-approved" translating to "force employers/schools to force this on everyone" (aka experimental COVID shots).
Very few conservatives want to remove all regulation - many I know like the safety of the banking system as opposed the scam-heavy crypto market. However, we don't like over-zealous political enforcement of regulations (aka IRS doing targeted audits on conservative leaning institutions) or every transaction being reported to the government.
You are correct there isn't a meaningful economic difference between Democrats and Republicans right now. Both parties are letting inflation run rampant, have done little to fight taxes, deficits, or debts, and have no sense of financial responsibility to their taxpayers or voters, even though they both scream it when they are the minority party.
However, most Conservatives care about the federal debt/deficit, even if all the Republicans in the House don't. That's why Congress's approval rating is crap.
I'm joking (sightly), but it's easy accounting. Give yourself X sugar point, Y fat points, and Z salt point, per day/per week, and you can still eat unhealthy food while making some effort. Small steps etc.
This song from Fito Olivares is quite old and is still a hit in most parties. You'll also encounter it in many tiktoks and instagram reels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-RV8ZbMcdQ
So I would say if what you want is for people to eat less of a certain food, it works. It's not ridiculous.
Only problem with these sort of policies is a phenomenon called "complexification" [1] where in order to get rid of the seals you introduce complexity into the product itself to escape it (for example by replacing certain chemicals with derivatives that are not quite but very similar).
It's difficult to escape the race, but for a while, these policies do work.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
If they didn't at all, the food companies probably wouldn't be fighting so hard against them.
Great definition. Added to my quotes list.
True. How many people think drinking a coke is great for hydrating yourself or think pre-packaged/fast-food-chain products are "good food"
This is the main issue
How many daily calories are from snacks and other 'needless crap'?
How ridiculous is it if big corporations take them seriously? In fact, if we look at how tobacco laws worked, this kind of messaging works extremely well in shifting perception of people about it in the long run. Sure, people may still drink it, but maybe they won't give some to their kids, or introduce them to it later, or they won't make jokes about people not joining them in that habit at social gatherings, etc.
Here's a twitter thread explaining it better (in spanish): https://nitter.net/22xTJuan/status/1635239549902389248#m
The point being, the added sugars will probably come to 20-25 percent of the daily allowance if you drink a single bottle of beverage. At the same time, it will not be seen as "high in sugar" because, hey, the serving size is only 250/330 of a bottle, so the sugar level is below 20 percent. [Sophisticated level of duplicity]
Most people are not that careful anyway - they might glance at the nutritional label, and see that the sugars are only 7.5% and think: that's pretty good, I'll have one, not seeing the 100 ml gotcha. [Basic level duplicity]
The only thing that will alert you is the cloying sweetness of the drink which will cause you to pull out a calculator and see what that small bottle is going to really cause.
Processed foods (snacks and beverages) in India seem to be very high in sugars, sodium and fat, more so than the same brands available elsewhere.
Why is it strange? The metric system? It's exactly the same in Europe. Nutritional information is per 100ml/g, so that you can easily understand compare nutritional values.
>Most people are not that careful anyway - they might glance at the nutritional label, and see that the sugars are only 7.5% and think: that's pretty good, I'll have one, not seeing the 100 ml gotcha.
No mate, people in India and in EU are used to looking at the nutritional information per 100g/l as that lets you easily compare nutritional value between foodstuffs packaged in different weights, and figure out what's healthy/unhealthy, for example I saw Coca-Cola and most soft drinks are about 10g/100ml sugar, meaning that 10% of the product is sugar, so that's my yardstick of unhealthiness, or that most chips/crisps have around 30g/100g fats, aka 30% fats, so I seek out variants that have much less.
Having only the nutritional value listed per random serving size or the entire product like in the US is confusing because I can't easily compare sugar/fat percentage content of different products of different weights.
I mean, it's annoying that they do things like '3.5 servings per container', but at least you only have to multiply by 3.5 (I would just prefer a total on each container). If it were 'there are 5g of carbs/sugar per 100g of material,' it would end up being an extra step to determine total grams, divide it by a potentially wonky number or round and divide, then multiply the 5g times the resulting number. Sure it's not that much harder, but it would really add up throughout the day if you were tracking your diet. And IME that's a much more common use case than comparing nutritional value of different products by comparing the macronutrient makeup in grams from the labels, which I've actually never done once
> The only thing that will alert you is the cloying sweetness of the drink which will cause you to pull out a calculator and see what that small bottle is going to really cause.
Not sure I understand this point. Something that is 7.5% sugar will taste the same whether you drink 100ml of it or 2l. There are definitely problems with the concept that a serving from a 330ml bottle is 250ml - that is clearly meant to deceive. But if you have some concept of how much sugar is too much for your taste, the 7.5% sugar figure is enough.
So you get 500 ml bottle with nutritional info shown for every 100 ml and 250ml because that's the 'serving size'. No-one has ever drunk 250ml (8 ounces) and then left the rest for later.
"Servings" are just a convenient way to capture the fact that there are some cases where you're not expected to ingest the entire container: that's why a packet of mayonnaise and a jar of mayonnaise have near identical serving sizes, and same for packets of sugar vs boxes of sugar.
It's crazy that Coca-Cola is paying restaurants to only offer their poison (no still or sparkling water). These companies are literally making us sick.
Holy sh... that would be in the US, right? Is that even legal?
Yes, there's 20 servings in this package if by a serving you mean 1/5th of what you average adult eats in one sitting.
The one exception here is when a portion actually equates to a portion, eg. '80 calories per cookie'. Those are wonderful, and probably what the original motivation for that type of labeling was; tangible.
And %: say, peanuts 51g fats/100g -> ah, product is roughly 1/2 fat.
Personally I ignore "Serving size" as meaningless bs.
As for whole packaging: say 22g sugar / 100gr, and there's 350g in the package. 3.5x22 is too difficult to calculate in one's head? (roughly!)
While actually it's basically 100% sugar.
Maybe nobody drinks half of a modern 500ml bottle, but people certainly used to think of less than half of that as a single serving.
That's why there need to be strict rules on that. In the EU, serving sizes make sense (1 cookie or 2 slices of bread) (probably because they have to), and there always has to be the normalised by 100ml / 100g too, so you can compare even if serving sizes are lying.
Like 1 child hand full of muesli, totally typical serving size for a breakfast. Totally legit to label the sugar with A or B then.
I just get EU labels on Import products but so far I don't get it. They all have A or B and are full of sugars, sweeteners and aroma products.
Like: The box says score A but when you check the 100g list you realize that you are eating a complete meal calorie wise as snack using a realistic serving size. With little to zero nutrition value. Why A?
And it makes us even fatter
Similar when checking prices, I compare the price per 100g, not the price per randomly sized package...
The only good thing about EU labels is that they always have precise values per 100g or 100ml, which allows accurate calorie tracking vs. US labels with ridiculous serving sizes (eg. serving size is half a cookie. Who the fuck eats half a cookie)
Not always unfortunately. 2 examples I have in mind:
- biscuits are sometimes « individually » packaged by 4 or 6 (ie you buy a box containing 2 or 3 smaller packages inside) and the serving size is 2 biscuits. Real serving should be 1 package for it to make sense
- there’s a brand of fresh ravioli which I buy, the package makes 2 servings, but if you do that you have a ridiculously small serving. 1 package makes a normal plate
There’s no way to get a « serving » unit that makes sense. I always rely on the /100g instead
Actually I had a coworker who would in fact drink 250 ml of a 500 ml bottle and leave the rest for later, although usually he would never get around to finishing it because he drank carbonated beverages and by the time he was next thirsty they had gone flat.
The odd thing was he did this for all size bottles and cups. E.g., if I went to get lunch and he was too busy for a break then and I offered to bring something back for him no matter what sized drink I got for him he drank half.
"Per serving/portion" seems like an American quick, like "tablespoons" or "cups" as units in recipes. The EU the labeling standard is per 100g or 100ml.
> So you get 500 ml bottle with nutritional info shown for every 100 ml and 250ml because that's the 'serving size'. No-one has ever drunk 250ml (8 ounces) and then left the rest for later.
What do you mean? I do that all the time.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
The serving size can be relevant (whos going to drink an entire large bottle of V8 all at one time?) but there's no reason they can't do a side-by-side comparitive thing, similar to how cereal boxes compare the stats for the cereal by itself (dry) and with milk.
The idea being, you could eg. tell your kid that they can have any cereal as long as the border is yellow, and have to mix it with one whose label is green.
The black "BAD" labels are not as effective, they desensitize to BAD, and if all sweets are BAD you just ignore the label (though they do help some, according to data from Israel which implemented such labels a few years ago).
The color codes (not as direct, but even more universally recognized) and the chance for a middle level is a better system. And they could put Allulose in that level, for a compromise that has a better chance of passing.
That plan was lobbied to death; no surprise.
Well there goes half the incentive to remove the excess sugar.
And having one major problem is better than two.
I've been on a campaign of cutting sugar down as much as I can: even in nominally "sweet" things it's incredible how much sugar standard recipes will call for then you can 1/3rd to 1/4 as much and get a superior result.
my main concern is that many artificial sweeteners are suspected to cause cancer
I do think there is an underlying truth to this.
I get stomach problems from nearly all common sweeteners, especially at the dosages they throw them in. Assumingly because I never really ate them before this all started.
There are now whole categories of items in the supermarket where no product is digestible for me.
[1] https://www.amazon.in/Cadbury-Bournvita-Chocolate-Health-Dri...
[1] https://www.milo.com.au/powder
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cadbury-Bourn-Vita-Chocolate-Powder...
I live in Australia, this reminds me of our tobacco plain packaging legislation [1]. A post implementation review was conducted a few years afterward [2]. Some interesting bits from the PIR conclusion:
> Applying the government’s RBM framework, the regulatory burden was estimated as $73.87 million across the entire industry (including manufacturers, importers, wholesalers and retailers).
> While it was not possible to complete a full Cost Benefit Analysis for this PIR (due to the limitations on the data available at this time and provided by industry), potential monetised benefits were also analysed including an illustrative example of health benefits. That example estimated that a 0.07 percentage point drop in smoking prevalence would be equivalent to $273 million in monetised health benefits
> Dr Chipty’s modelling also estimated a 0.55 percentage point drop in smoking prevalence in Australia, over 34 months following implementation, attributable to the 2012 packaging changes. This strong result, that is “likely understated”, is expected to grow into the future as the full effects of the 2012 packaging changes are realised over the longer term
So, within 3 years after the introduction of packaging changes, smoking prevalence throughout the population had dropped by at least half a percent (approx 100k people). It cost the tobacco industry less than $100m in one-off transitional costs, and it's estimated to have more than $2b in monetised health benefits over that three year period alone.
It also cost tobacco industry lost revenues & profits, but hey, that's their problem, maybe they can find a different business to invest in.
[1] https://www.health.gov.au/topics/smoking-and-tobacco/tobacco... [2] https://oia.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/posts/2016/02/Tob...
This reminds me of the analysis I’ve seen for marketing campaigns.
In my experience, it is easy to break one of the many assumptions inherent in methods like Diff-in-diff. Because of this I have little trust in these techniques in general.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_in_differences
Anything in the real world has many many factors affecting its consumption. What would it matter if it was trending down specifically? Or are you asking what models and statistical tools they use to make analyses like this when there are a complex set of factors at play?
Depends where you live. Visiting the US I don't remember ever seeing anyone smoking, but in Europe it's huge, especially in centra/southern/eastern Europe, including the Balkans where coffee and cigarettes are the staple of any nutritious breakfast.
I see plenty of teenagers smoking, plus on outdoor terraces and outside of offices, clubs, bars, even the balconies in my building, it's full of smokers.
Europe is a few decades behind the US on giving up smoking. Also, now the hipster thing is to switch to these e-cigarettes.
I think a lot of people, non smokers mostly, don't see all the bonding, networking, flirting, and general socializing that happens when smokers get together for a fag, which probably explains why this unhealthy habit is still very popular today in many countries. I know many people who met their SOs at smoking breaks or found out about new yet unpublished job opportunities from the chit-chat that happens at smoking breaks.
Could be because it's seen as a socially acceptable addiction to have during daytime, granting you more breaks at work. If someone goes out every 45 minutes to play games on his phone he'll be seen as a lazy slacker, but if he were to go out for a smoke, it would be more likely to be allright, especially if his boss was also a smoker.
There's something about the smoking break gatherings, from a social aspect, like asking for a cigarette, asking for a light, cupping the flame against the wind for someone, which act like natural ice breakers, conversation starters and could help create instant bonds or chit-chat opportunities, that can't be replicated at other kind of gathering during the day such as water-cooler or standings in line.
You don't need to be wealthy to smoke a lot, just bad with finances.
That’s probably because the places where people do smoke are less likely to be visited by tourists.
It's going down because of many measures that have been implemented:
- restriction of billboard advertising
- restriction of tobacco ads in film and tv
- warnings on packaging
- photos on packaging
- banning smoking in public buildings
- banning smoking in restaurants
- banning smoking in public transportation
- banning smoking near entrances
- age restrictions on buying cigarettes
- banning of automatic vending machines
etc.
Each of those have a small effect, but in total the effect is large. It's hard to measure the effectiveness of individual measures, but in aggregate it's clear that these measures significantly reduce smoking. Especially if you compare countries where these measures have not been implemented yet with countries where they were implemented sooner.
People don't give up smoking overnight, the 20 year lead the US has over these measures is not something we can expect to catch up... Smoking is going down, slowly, and I think it's because of all these measures.
I smoked for about 10 years between the mid 80s and 90s. When I started, most of the 'cool', 'sophisticated' etc people seemed to smoke. When I stopped, it was mostly a health choice, but partly because it seemed no longer 'cool', everyone I knew had given up or was trying to.
I can't even fathom why anyone would start smoking now, it seems like an affliction of the poor and/or the old rather than anything sophisticated.
All of this is mostly a change in fashion, people having a deeper awareness of the health risks, becoming aware of tobacco industry manipulation, etc. No doubt government messaging aided and supported that change, but it is not the only or even the main cause imho.
Where do you think this change is coming from? When I was a kid, there was a huge billboard right next to my school with a man wearing aviator glasses, an airplane in the background, smoking Memphis cigarettes. That was the coolest guy I've ever seen.
Compare that to 20 years later, there's a photo of a depressed guy on the package and a message "smoking causes infertility".
When I first started at uni, students still smoked in the auditorium. That was cool.
By the time I finished, people who smoked had to go outside and stand in smoking zones like animals. The opposite of cool.
There's a reason why the public perception changed. I don't think the public perception would have changed as drastically without government intervention.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/237908/smoking-rate-hits-new-lo...
Hell, when I was in high school, you could still smoke at 16.
I'd argue the health risks have become way more know, which drove most of the reduction.
I wonder whether they take into account the long-term cost of people - who quit or don't smoke because of this legislation - becoming more of a burden on the social systems because of extended life? Things like this always remind me of the 'Smoke Screen' episode from Yes, Prime Minister [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsqTz4zg8Xk
I can't see how that could potentially be a net positive for society.
The vast majority of smokers remain productive until they retire but they have lower lifespans. Also take into account that nicotine suppresses appetite and smokers are less likely to be overweight.
From the same report linked in this comment chain, page 53:
> As another example, the Analysis of Costs & Benefits also considers potential gains to productivity. There is sufficient evidence both in Australia and internationally to conclude that smokers take more sick leave than non-smokers. There are also academic reports that estimate the level of excess absenteeism attributable to smoking. Using these sources, and others, the Analysis of Costs & Benefits estimated productivity gains that would be realised where the tobacco plain packaging measure prevents initiation of smoking or increases the number of smokers who quit. The estimated value per working smoker avoided is $337.48 per year and the value of increased productivity per working quitter is estimated at $84.37 per year.
The report doesn't cite those studies, but here's one from Sweden:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598486/
> Smoking was found to increase the annual number of days of absence by 10.7 compared with never smoking. Controlling for risk factors at work, and thereby accounting for some of the selection of smokers into riskier jobs, reduced the effect to 9.7 days, corresponding to 38% of all annual absences due to sickness. Moreover, controlling for health status further reduced the effect of smoking to 7.7 days. The effect of smoking on sick leave was similar for men and women.
and another from Taiwan:
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/14/suppl_1/i33
> Using a conservative estimate of excess absenteeism from work, male smokers took off an average of 4.36 sick days and male non-smokers took off an average of 3.30 sick days. Female smokers took off an average of 4.96 sick days and non-smoking females took off an average of 3.75 sick days.
As a side note, the stark difference between those two countries in excess sick leave is the average annual days of sick leave: 25.2 in Sweden, 3.9 in Taiwan.
Sure. Smokers also probably take more breaks at work when they do show up. But that isn't the same as becoming a burden on society as the OP claimed.
look at this indian governmental press release mandating photos to be posted on tobacco packs
edit: CW. NSFL imagery on the page
Furthermore, they push the misleading idea that you can still drive to the supermarket, buy processed foods, load them in your car, drive home, eat them in front of the TV and be fine, as long as you don't buy the high-in-sugar stuff.
If you want to beat obesity start by buying just the ingredients and then cooking meals at home. It's not that hard. Then start walking to places instead of taking the car. Taking public transportation is also good because it frequently forces you to walk a non-negligible amount. Also stop eating while watching TV. You can go one step further and throw out the TV altogether.
You don't need to work out (although you should for other health reasons); you also don't need to diet; the vast majority of dieters gain all of the weight they lost during the diet and then some.
What effect do people report from them? Reduction in appetite. Which tells us the obvious truth: you need to eat less or parity calories in then you do going out. A nutrition professor ate nothing but Twinkies and lost weight[1] while doing so. Probably wasn't fun, but it worked. Someone did the same with nothing but McDonald's[2].
Your entire list is just a list of your perception of "virtuous" activities, and has nothing at all to do with whether or not you'll gain or lose weight. It's lies, judgement and irrelevancy to push an agenda about how people should live, rather then sticking to the observable facts of the matter.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profe...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/woman-says-mcdona...
From my country, where "everyone" cycles to work, two random papers:
https://www.uu.nl/en/news/dutch-bikers-live-six-months-longe...
https://www.kimnet.nl/binaries/kimnet/documenten/rapporten/2...
Now this is normally the point someone says "well obviously you have to cook things which don't..." - yeah. Exactly. Whether or not it's "home cooked" doesn't matter. What matters is you have a calorie budget per day and you need to not exceed it on average.
Virtuous activities don't accomplish much of anything directly. Walking just plain doesn't burn that many extra calories.[1] The benefit of that whole list is basically "it's hard to eat while you're walking or not at home or at the shops". The benefit of the improved cardio-fitness is going to make you feel better, but you won't burn a lot of extra calories.
That's what I mean about lies and judgement: "throw away the TV" - why? It's got nothing to do with anything. Sitting around reading a book is just as sedentary. Telling people they have to do a bunch of things which aren't associated with the core outcome is just setting them up to fail - or have unrealistic expectations because everyone has a different built-in sense of "correct" about food.
To actually help people you start from the core facts, and give them the tools to figure out what habits are going to work for them. Try counting calories for a week and get a sense for what healthy portion sizes and meal composition actually looks like (this is where nutrition labels help a lot). The conclusion of "do home cooked meals" is one which follows - maybe - from that exercise, but it's absolute fiction to think that it's impossible to gain weight if you only cook at home.
[1] https://greatist.com/fitness/calories-burned-walking#calorie...
I guess it's part herd behaviour and part natural resistance to change, but what has made "us", the human species so entrenched, that we think we need cars, TVs, premade meals? Humans "never¹" had them, yet now, within one or two generations somehow believe we cannot do without it? All while the rational evidence is clear that it's hurting both individuals², all of humanity and in some cases all of nature?
¹ statistically seen, if we take the entire history of the human kind ² to clarify the difference with something like "health care" that the human kind also statistically "never" had.
Whenever I stop at a fueling station I see the same picture: a young, somewhat overweight man wearing tracksuit pants picking up junk food. He chose comfort. Can you honestly blame him for that?
Of course as a species we thrive in discomfort, but the benefits come with a delay - there's usually no incentive to start.
Why, yes, off course. I don't judge him for that, but certainly he's the (only?) one to blame for his "somewhat overweight" and all the health issues that might come from that.
One might argue that marketeers, big-food, TV, influencers, politicians, and whatnot also may hold blame here, e.g. by "making this man believe he wants this", but that's a whole different debate.
Do you believe he values this over being comfortable?
> "making this man believe he wants this",
I don't think it takes much convincing - after all being comfortable is great.
It's deciding to be uncomfortable - so walking/cycling instead of driving, eating less overall etc. that goes against our basic instincts - I'm surprised that you're surprised that not that many people do it when out of the two lifestyles it's the one that requires more effort.
Diabetes isn't comfortable. I know all about it, I'm type I.
Hardly any health issues related to "moving too little" or "eating unhealty" are comfortable.
Most of my friends with health issues associated with lifestyle got their first wakeup call right before their 30s. Plenty of time to develop habits which take over a decade to drop - or more if they started during childhood.
And here's the kicker: not all of them made the necessary changes. Also some others did, but are unhappy with this new lifestyle and would like to go back but external factors like the threat of divorce keep them from doing so.
What I'm getting at is that it's the people who consciously choose effort who are the weirdos. Healthy, longer living weirdos, but weirdos nonetheless.
People drive cars, eat trash and lay on the couch because they like to. You'll only get other outcomes in an environment where it's too hard to do any of those things.
This all seems pretty strange and won't make you lose weight. What will is just eating fewer calories. That's it. You don't have to change anything at all if you don't want to. You can drive to the store, you can eat in front the TV, you can eat your hamburgers and drink coke. Just eat less of it, and you'll lose weight.
The idea that people have to be "educated" to know this is ludicrous, such a typical "government" / "expert" notion. Eat too much = get fat has been known and understood for centuries. People knew this when they were illiterate peasants. School children tease each other about this. The obesity problem is not caused by lack of education, it's caused by lack of self-control (exacerbated by the refinement of food composition, improved cost and convenience, and marketing).
If I wasn't lucky enough to have a good pre-college education, I wouldn't have learned CS, and without money and contacts outside my family (I was ashamed of what I became), pretty sure I would have stayed obese. It was 90% luck, 10% effort.
[edit] for the 'obese should just walk crowd' : did you ever walk so much, blood soaked up your boxers and pants? My ankle was hurting so much man, but the worst was the dampness caused by the blood. Twice a week, for a month. Lost 200g. My inner thighs are reddish-brown because if the scar tissues. Only solution is eating less, but when you've learned all your life to eat till you aren't hungry, what can you do?
My son is allergic to Soya, Nuts, Eggs, Dairy and since he started eating solids we've have to label check everything and in doing so as a family we've basically stopped eating packaged foods alltogether. Do you know just how hard it is to avoid Soy now, it and it's derivatives are in pretty much everything, and even if it's not a raw ingredient it's in the bulk of the 'supply chain'.
I think when we look back in 20 years the packaged foods business is going to look at lot like the tobacco one does today...
On the one hand, I think it's great to warn "ignorant" people about the content of their foods. And by Ignorant I don't mean poor uneducated people. You'd be surprised how many college-educated, well-off people in Argentina think that a cereal bar is a "healthy food". Or that corn flakes is a healthy food. So, suddenly, these black scary labels started appearing everywhere and people were like "Oh wow, does this have a lot of sugar in it? I thought it was healthy".
So that's a good thing.
But on the other hand, they'r extremely simplistic. A label that says "excess fat" can actually be a good thing. If it's some raw, healthy fat (say, Oil, butter, etc), that's a great type of food. But it'll share the same "excess fat" label with a crappy hydrogenated-fat based food.
Take for example whole milk, which it is now known that is the ONLY healthy type of milk. It'll have a "excess fat" label. While Skim milk will contain non such labels.
Anyway, I think the balance is favorable for those labels. At least "protect" the uneducated people. If anybody wants to learn more about food, they'll put the time and learn to ignore those labels and just focus on the raw macronutrients.
EDIT: I know the "whole milk is better than Skim milk" might STILL be a hot take (not for long I hope...). Here's my answer to another comment:
> The gist is: fat is not bad; at all. Most of Vitamins contained in Milk are fat-soluble. That means that all the good properties of milk are transported by fat. Also, whole milk is less processed.
> Here's a very "intuitive" reasoning, as an exercise: if Vitamin D is fat soluble... how is it possible that Skim milk has MORE Vitamin D (or A) than whole milk? (answer: because it's artificially added).
Sources:
- https://qz.com/405498/the-case-for-drinking-whole-milk
- https://archive.is/0yBjZ
In this case I'd take "extremely simplistic" any time over well-balanced-through-slightly-more-complex-set-of-rules. Thing is, the rules will be gamed in the long run, period.
Simpler rules would eventually allow consumers to easily determine how are they being cheated.
That seems like a strong claim, according to whom?
The gist is: fat is not bad; at all. Most of Vitamins contained in Milk are fat-soluble. That means that all the good properties of milk are transported by fat. Also, whole milk is less processed.
Here's a very "intuitive" reasoning, as an exercise: if Vitamin D is fat soluble... how is it possible that Skim milk has MORE Vitamin D (or A) than whole milk? (answer: because it's artificially added).
Sources:
- https://qz.com/405498/the-case-for-drinking-whole-milk
- https://archive.is/0yBjZ
but more importantly, Vitamin D/A added WITHOUT fat, is just wasted. The body absorbs those vitamins only in the presence of fat. So, most of the artificially added Vitamins will end up being disposed adding extra stress to your kidneys.
But in the end, I don't think these labels work by instantly educating individuals. It works by continuously reminding people that these foods are not healthy. Most will not stop eating them because of the labels, but many will probably give it at least a second though.
For me, the bottom line is, why would I drink skim milk if it's just a more "watery" version of the perfectly healthy whole milk?
Btw, and this is just me, I'm not lactose intolerant (I eat A LOT of yogurt, milk, cream, cheese, etc), but skim milk makes me "sick" (lactose-intolerant symptoms). Maybe it's just my brain.
i suppose an argument can be made that it makes up for more fat elsewhere, but i agree. personally i avoid any milk product that has less fat than is natural for that product. and i am a big fan of raw milk. when we had the opportunity we used to buy milk directly from a farmer because it just tastes so much better.
When I’m considering buying a food item for the first time I read the entire label to make sure it meets my criteria. It would be nice when buying it again to be able to at a glance tell that it is still the same as when I last bought it.
- Products do not change formulas at random, if they did they'd have to re-submit samples for the label evaluation.
- These labels don't have your best interests in mind anyway: If you are a bodybuilder, you will have tor read nutrition info labels yourself and ignore the warning labels, because only you know what quantities for each nutritients you will take to meet your goals.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6950451/
https://www.twopct.com/p/is-breakfast-cereal-healthy