[jensen123]

The other day I went to buy some canned refried beans. When I read the label, I noticed that it contained refined sugar. WTF?!? There should be no need for sugar in refried beans! After recovering from the shock, I went to another grocery store, where I found refried beans without sugar.

Why does this happen? Obviously, sugar tastes good. That has to be why companies add it to all sorts of things. However, if most people were like me, they would read the label and refuse to buy anything that unnecessarily contained sugar. The companies doing this would lose money, and soon stop doing it. But the opposite has happened. Why?

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb. However, when you read about stuff like this in the mainstream media, it's always framed as if "big evil corporations" is the whole problem. That "average Joe" has a low intelligence is never mentioned. Of course, the media wants as many consumers as possible, too, so calling most of their potential readers/viewers stupid is probably a bad strategy, even though it's the truth.

[dahart]

> Why does this happen?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

> There can be only one explanation

Why/how have you arrived at this conclusion?

> it's always framed as if "big evil corporations" is the whole problem

So, you have evidence of food that shouldn't have sugar in it but does in fact have sugar anyway. And you conclude that it's the consumer's fault, because they're stupid, and not the company that puts the sugar in?

Humans have lots of biological and mental weaknesses that can be exploited for profit. Preferring highly caloric food is one of them. It seems fairly pessimistic to call that "dumb". Before the invention of mass produced food, preferring sweet things was an evolutionary advantage. That fact is now being used against you, and all of us, in a big conspiracy called "marketing".

[hinkley]

I'm really having a hard time with the cognitive dissonance in our society that says that optimizing to the Bliss Point is okay, but putting additives in cigarettes to make them more addictive is bad.

They are motivated by the exact same desire and goal. If we're gonna rake Phillip Morris for it we should be doing the same to Kraft, Nabisco and Nestle.

[ArkyBeagle]

So which corporations aren't subject to the RJR v. United States treatment then? Is that really what we want?

"Damn you, you gave us what we wanted. Now pay up, sucker."

I suspect the only additive put in cigarettes to make them more addictive was nicotine itself. And that was probably an engineering decision so they could use a broader spectrum of tobacco leaf.

[mulletbum]

Do you feel that a consumer is responsible for what they put in their body?

If they never tasted the food, they would miss out on this "marketing." The fact remains, if those manufacturers have always produced their beans with sugar, then they should not be at fault. If those companies changed their recipe to contain sugar after they found people grey addicted to it, there should be a label to warn the consumer that a change has suddenly been made.

[cookiecaper]

>Do you feel that a consumer is responsible for what they put in their body?

Of course. But the average consumer is not only at a disadvantage, they are regularly deceived into believing that unhealthy foods are in fact healthy. In reality, culpability is a complex calculation that passes through the farmer, the food processor, the manufacturer, the ad firm, the grocer, the consumer, and any other party involved in the transaction. All share some part of the blame.

However, the blame game is rarely productive. When something is having a serious negative impact on 50%+ of the population, it's time to stop pushing blame around and start focusing on finding a workable solution. If 50%+ of your website's users were getting lost on your page and having a hard time finding an efficient way to do things, would you spend all your time blaming them for their idiocy, or would you up the ante for your UX people and make it work? (hint for the n00bs out there: in this situation you should up the ante, not sit around and blame your customers)

It's society's problem to figure out how to fix this public health crisis, because regardless of our beliefs about whether someone should be able to carefully select healthy foods, the evident reality is that people aren't able to do so, and we have to accept that and adjust our processes and habits to accommodate.

The goal is not to admonish or uphold anyone, not to protect or liquidate profit, not to see one brand or flavor triumph over others. The goal is simply to cause the obesity rate to rapidly decline and stay declined. That's what we should focus on making happen at the macro level.

[ams6110]

The blame also rests with regulators like the FDA, who for decades promoted a food pyramid that was basically upside-down in terms of what was healthy; who for decades promoted that partially-hydroginated oils (trans-fats) were preferable to natural saturated fats; who encouraged a "low fat" diet that prompted food producers to substitute sugar for fat to make foods tasty and consumers to consume an unhealthy high-starch, high-sugar diet and a nearly manic avoidance of fat.

[gumby]

Remember the FDA is part of the Department of Agriculture and that the Ag department's responsibility is to simultaneously protect the food supply (i.e. make sure it happens, take the farmers' side etc), manage food safety and support public health. Any surprise these objectives are at odds, and which side has more profit attached?

This is like the Department of the Interior whose mission is to protect the environment and to encourage mining. In their case it means oil company employees had did drugs with and had sex with their government regulators (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/washington/11royalty.html?...)

I am beyond considering this corrupt and simply shake my head that it's fundamentally mis-architected.

[larubbio]

Although the food pyramid as originally designed was modified at the request of food industry lobbyists out of fear it would hurt sales.

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/09/invented-foo...

[escherize]

... while being funded under the threat of force (taxation).

[Dylan16807]

There are many ways the government could raise money for a small program like designing the food pyramid. It's really not relevant which one they picked.

[hinkley]

And parents. We learn many of our bad food habits when we're under the care of an adult.

That's the great thing about marketing a habit forming product. The parents end up doing your advertising for you!

[unclebucknasty]

>someone should be able to carefully select healthy foods, the evident reality is that people aren't able to do so

You are conflating people's ability to select healthy foods with their desire to do so. There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy, at least here in the U.S.

It's just that people frequently eat what they like and, then, too much of it.

[dragonwriter]

> There is no lack of information regarding eating healthy

There's a very high noise-to-signal ratio in information purporting to be about eating healthy, with considerable investment in misinformation by commercially interested parties. So, while it is in one sense true that there is not a lack of information, that should not be taken to mean that it is simple for laypeople to get and identify accurate information on which to make healthy eating decisions.

[unclebucknasty]

That's a bit of a red herring. Sure, misinformation and even disinformation exists, but many people knowingly make choices that are widely and irrefutably known to be poor: fast food, high sugar content, fried and overtly fatty items, processed foods, gross overeating, and on and on.

This is overwhelmingly the problem versus health-conscious people being consistently duped into making poor choices.

Given this, there's little reason to believe that resolving controversy over "finer points" of misinformation to which you refer would be significantly impactful.

[cookiecaper]

No, I disagree. Foods are regularly marketed as healthy when they are in fact unhealthy. Labeling is frequently deceptive. Foods that are well-known to be healthy, like fruits and vegetables, are modified to accommodate preferred taste profiles.

Go to Walmart and look at the maple syrup section. You'll see about 8 SKUs that claim to be "Syrup", meaning they're just a viscuous fluid, but cleverly omit the actual term "maple" (while showing pictures of things usually associated with maple syrup). These products are called "syrup" but they're not related to real syrup in any way. They are literally dyed sugar water. If you look in the rightmost corner of the topmost aisle, you'll find a glass bottle that costs like $8 and contains real maple syrup. The rest is crap that costs $3-4. The people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets. But they're not.

Now, repeat this for every type of food at Walmart.

We need to admit there is a real systemic problem here that is not as simple as individual gluttony. It is not at all true that obese people eat 40 Snickers a day, which is what many fat-person-hate types seem to believe.

[slavik81]

If Aunt Jamima's is unhealthy due to its sugar content, actual maple syrup is going to be unhealthy too. The authentic stuff might taste better, but it's still basically just sugar.

I happen to have a glass bottle of pure Canadian maple syrup in my fridge. It contains 53g of sugar per 60mL. That's apparently 18% of your recommended daily intake of sugar. It contains 4% of your daily intake of Calcium and is 'not a significant source of other nutrients'.

Though, to your point, I do have a second bottle of pure maple syrup that is labelled emphasising it's nutritional value. It has a bit of calcium, iron and manganese, but there's way too much sugar that goes with it for it to be a significant part of a healthy diet.

[dragonwriter]

> people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets.

The fetishization of "natural" (and related terms like "naturally occurring") is, I would argue, one of the major areas of health misinformation when it comes to foods. (In any case, maple syrup isn't naturally occurring, its a processed foodstuff -- the process may not require particularly modern technology, but its still processed; there's a considerable difference between unprocessed maple sap and maple syrup.)

[VLM]

"a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed"

I think there's some problems there with the definition of ancestors as in just the last one or two for an extremely small subset of ethnic groups. And that microscopic subset is being compared to a diet consisting primarily of corn syrup for 2/5th of a billion people.

The idea of eating grains is recent in evolution. Unsurprisingly farmers use grains as a tool to fatten up livestock. Works pretty well on humans too. Pancakes and syrup are in no way natural or healthy.

The condiment industry is interesting. Maple syrup in particular is advertised as the breakfast itself, with the pancake merely as sponge to soak as much as possible. Consumed as a meal, 60 mL isn't much. As an occasional condiment 60 mL is a multiple of a reasonable amount. Consider an analogy with hot pepper flakes. A tiny subculture that uses a fraction of a teaspoon to flavor chili once in awhile while its in season will have different medical issues than a culture where basically everyone eats two cups per day, every day.

[unclebucknasty]

But, it's all right there on the label. The problem is that many people just don't care.

Sure, not every obese person eats 40 Snickers a day. But, short of glandular or other medical reasons, they are surely aware that their diet and lifestyle are unhealthy. You don't get to 400 lbs without realizing that it may be something you're doing. So, It's a little misdirection to suggest that people are consciously attempting to make healthy choices, but are tricked into the exact opposite without once questioning it during their journey to obesity.

Add to this the fact that messages about calories, sugar, exercise, etc. are copious and inescapable.

Yes, marketing and even labeling can be deceptive, but it's not the root of the problem by a longshot.

[Larrikin]

I don't think anyone or very few people believe that Aunt Jemima's is real maple syrup. Its popular number one because its cheap.

I'm probably in the minority but I can afford real maple syrup and buy Aunt Jemima's because I actually prefer the taste of it over maple syrup, not because I'm misinformed.

A better example of deceptive marketing would be Breyer's "ice cream" in the US having half of their flavors not legally allowed to be called ice cream anymore sold next to the real ice cream and their few remaining flavors that are actually ice cream with the same packaging.

[gumby]

> Do you feel that a consumer is responsible for what they put in their body?

Of course, but nobody has the time to become a domain expert on every subject (consider this a low pass filtering problem). It's reasonable for there to be food safety standards (who has time to investigate the meat packing plant, the mill, etc etc), building codes etc as baseline rules.

[wnevets]

> That fact is now being used against you, and all of us, in a big conspiracy called "marketing".

addiction would be a better term IMO.

[TeMPOraL]

Marketing is spot on. It's funny how people seem to know this, and yet don't realize it in practice - most of marketing is actively malicious. It's not like a law of physics which you can understand and then learn to work around; marketing is done by humans who have decades of psychological research, hundreds of years of honed best practices and many billions of dollars of budget annually within the industry; you can't expect an average person to stand a chance against focused effort of so many people who don't care (or don't even think about) they may harm other people as long as they get their paychecks.

[cookiecaper]

I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.

I think it's inappropriate to say that most marketing is actively malicious. I will agree that much of it is uncomfortable. I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.

[TeMPOraL]

The system is actively malicious - maybe not in the sense that it goes out of its way to be evil, but definitely in a sense that it's not a static system. It's not like gravity that always points you down and that you can learn to work around; it's constantly adapting, evolving and adjusting to be more effective at exploiting your weak sides. When we invented aeroplanes, the force of gravity did not suddenly triple. But marketing does react to people learning to work around its influence.

> I think most marketers believe that the products they're marketing have at least some valuable properties, and that their job is to ensure everyone understands what those properties are. That the product may, in some cases, be improperly used or applied is an implicit technicality that the consumer should understand and accommodate even if those improper uses are not highlighted in the marketing.

Sure, in many cases it is true, and in some cases the product in fact has a lot of valuable properties and marketing may do a fair work of informing about them. But more often than not it is not the case.

My experience of working alongside marketing people (as a programmer who got transferred to a sales&marketing company) is that quite often they tune out the "irrelevant" issues like "is this product actually useful at all?" and focus on technicalities - on how to get people to buy it. So they may expound various features of the product and construct elaborate use cases, while conveniently ignoring that compared to the competition, the product is crap, or that the whole product idea is something the customer is better off staying away from.

(Oh and BTW, the amount of bullshiting I saw in social media marketing is beyond belief; I think I'll have to write a post about it one day. My experiences led me to believe that a lot of business happening in Internet marketing is people who understand absolutely nothing about maths & statistics using complex tools to bullshit themselves as well as their customers, who don't understand squat about statistics either, so the money flows, everyone is happy, but nothing of actual substance is happening for anyone.)

> I've lost a lot of business due to reticence to get into the mud on this, but I think I'm at the point where I believe it's a necessary evil that has to be engaged in, but handled with as much finesse and decency as possible.

Yeah, I understand. It's something you have to engage in - because everyone else does too, and those who refrain from it get outcompeted by those who don't. Personally, I value what you call "finesse and decency", as well as honesty, and try to gravitate towards people and companies not afraid to tell me their product may not be a best fit for my current use case.

[ArkyBeagle]

Reousrces for this include anything you can get on Bernays ( the Adam Curtis "Century of the Self' is a decent survey ) and "The Hidden Persuaders." Also maybe Marshall MacLuhan.

Really, media/advertising literacy is pretty important. If you don't know who the sucker at the table is...

This being said, it may or may not be actively malicious per se but it certainly tries to hack your unconscious thinking to affect your behavior. I'm just not quite ready to broadly label that "malicious" just yet - although some of the anti smoking propaganda now makes me wonder that I should.

[orangecat]

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

Or other people have different tradeoffs between short-term pleasure and statistical long-term health. You can define that as "stupid" if you want, but I'm guessing there are plenty of things that you do because you enjoy them that you would not do if maximizing health were your sole priority.

[ewzimm]

Nothing beats being healthy, which is why I'm not one of these idiots who doesn't read labels. I've put in the work to optimize my purchasing habits, so I know that the average grocery store contains about 38,718 items. It only takes me around 15 seconds to skim a label for nutritional content and add a mental note of it's contribution to my dietary needs, so I can finish shopping in a new store in just over 161 hours. I have a special exercise routine I do during that time to maximize the experience.

[em3rgent0rdr]

You only have to read every label in the store if you want to make the optimal decision. But a healty diet can still be achieved by only reading labels of products you are most interested in, but not purchasing the unhealthy ones.

[ewzimm]

You're right, of course, but I have to do something to break up all the time I spend reading EULAs and terms of service for all the websites I visit.

[ghock]

I think this "stupid" and choice discussion that comes up quite often for this subject is somewhat of a distraction. There's plenty of people who eat relativly healthy not because they are "smart" about it, but because that's how they grew up. They are just "dumb" in the right direction. I doubt people were more knowledgeable about food when everyone smoked and there was lead in everything.

[noxToken]

I don't know if dumb is the right word. Ignorant is probably most apt.

I want you to think about all of the food that's in your house. Eliminate anything that you would consider intentionally sugary like candy, confection, soda, etc. Now how much of a time consuming task would it be to scrutinize every label for needlessly added sugar? Consider how many people would be willing to do that to check for some extra sugar?

And that's why, I believe, companies can throw extra sugar in their products without most of the public being none the wiser. Not only would you have to check your current inventory, you'd have to stay abreast of the issue every time you went shopping. If you went shopping for the entire month like me, you'd spend an extra hour in the store reading labels to check for newly added sugar.

[MisterBastahrd]

Time consuming? I read the label of every product I buy when I go to the supermarket. If I do it often enough, I keep track of what's got added sugar and I just don't buy those anymore. It isn't that hard.

[helloguille]

Most of the time is about ignorance, but even if you know Sugar is not good (Parent wrongly assumes just refined sugar is the problem) it will be very difficult to see where is contained. There are many names for "Sugar" and hidden in different ingredients, like HFCS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup

[andrewjl]

The solution is to have the FDA mandate big bold warning labels stating that long-term consumption of high quantities of sugar has been linked to diabetes and other health problems. Give consumers some information to help make an informative decision.

[rusabd]

It's easier than someone might think. If you avoid food that contains ingredient list as a general rule scrutinizing the rest would be not such a hard work

[Sharlin]

Really? You're surprised that people in general don't make the most healthy dietary choices? Given the almost epidemic rise of obesity and related issues in the West and particularly in the US?

Your conclusion is arrogant, unfair, unhelpful, and unactionable. To be fair, the "corporations are evil" conclusion is similarly unhelpful.

This is actually a prime example of a coordination problem [1]. We're going to have to do better than just pushing the blame around if we're going to do something about it. For instance, obesity is a bigger problem among the poor than the well-to-do. Why? One of the most trivial reasons is the fact that unhealthy food is also inexpensive!

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[mikestew]

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

You know how that makes you sound? Like a 9/11-was-an-inside-job, "we never went to the moon" conspiracy theorist. "There can be only explanation: the majority people aren't as enlightened as I; wake up sheeple!"

But let's go with that: people are dumb. Assuming that to be true, are you arguing for or against regulating what goes into a can of refried beans? As you've already proven, people are not capable of making sense of nutritional labels, therefore it is not fair to put the onus on those who are incapable, I see no other option than to regulate the industry with heavy oversight for the good of those who are not as enlightened as you.

Just thinking out loud here, but what options open up to us if we don't assume we're smarter than everyone else?

[logfromblammo]

The Reinheitsgebot Bavarian beer purity law [0] restricted the allowable ingredients for "beer" to water, barley, hops, and yeast.

US Federal Standards of Identity for bourbon restricts ingredients to at least 51% corn (Zea mays) in the mash, new charred oak barrels, and mandates alcohol content in the final product.

The specific type of bourbon traded as Tennessee Whiskey has additional requirements for charcoal filtering and geographical origin.

There is ample precedent for regulating the ingredients, processes, and geographic origins of food or beverage products using a particular product name.

It doesn't even need to have the force of regulatory law behind it. You could invent a trademark for frijoles refritos, and license it as a marketing aid to any manufacturer willing to meet your requirements.

Specify that the ingredients must be specific types of beans without their skins, chicken stock, onion, garlic, pork fat, salt, and a consistent spice mix which may include any herb from a pre-approved list. You could require different qualifiers for pinto beans (no qualifier, or "norteño"), black beans ("negro"), kidney beans ("rojo"), or subbing vegetable oil and vegetable stock for chicken broth and pork fat ("vegetariano").

And there you are. Just look for the trademarked logo on cans, and you can be assured that you are eating "real" refrito beans. In theory, this is no different from putting the UL logo on a tested appliance, or a Kosher-certifying logo on compliant foods. An independent food certification company can operate entirely on quality control inspectors, marketers, public relations flacks, and trademark lawyers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot

[borplk]

This is the equivalent of RTFM or the 15 page terms of service documents that no one can possibly read. Sure it makes sense in some cases but you can't use it as an excuse to shift the burden to the consumer however you like.

[cisstrd]

15 page terms of service document versus an easy to read table that lists sugar, salt and fat content of a product?

It is my view that companies have the obligation to make information available about their products and do so in an easy-to-read manner, everything else is consumer's choice. Your comparison lacks relevance in my opinion.

(and in cases where someone asks stupid questions, which can be easily answered by looking in the manual page, yes... please read it...)

[Dylan16807]

If you're willing to completely upend your diet, then you might only look at the nutrition table and buy the things with the lowest sugar.

If you're trying to make a normal diet healthier, then the amount of unnecessarily added sugar becomes much more relevant. It tells you when you need to find a better brand, improving the health of your food without disrupting your diet.

And to do that, you need to read and decode the ingredient list. Doing this for every single food you buy is slow.

When it comes to RTFM: Sure, read before asking, but if something was confusing in the first place it's often the fault of the design. Don't let yourself forget that.

[dragonwriter]

> If you're willing to completely upend your diet, then you might only look at the nutrition table and buy the things with the lowest sugar.

Which would reduce sugar, and quite likely be unhealthy for all kinds of other reasons. Overreliance on sugar may be the most common problem in modern US diet, but that doesn't mean that a naïve and monomaniacal effort to reduce sugar won't result in some worse problem.

[nefitty]

A person doesn't necessarily have to be dumb to fall for these traps. Consider if you had been at the grocery store, particularly exhausted from the day, and just wanted to grab some ingredients. Maybe today you don't notice the added sugar. Today your brain was just spent. Does that make you a dumb consumer all of a sudden?

Most of us average Joe's and Jane's have a lot to juggle in our heads at any given moment. Can I please be excused for not scrounging several stores for sugar free beans, palm oil free chocolate, free range chicken, ethically sourced coffee, etc.? I'm not dumb, it just happens to be that the beans with the sugar are right here in front of me, I have other things to do, and I value my time considerably more than I value this one ethical preference, at the moment.

Default and convenient choices are what consumers respond to. Producers responded to basic biological facts like needing sugar and salt and fat, and so now we're in a place where I can get a Big Mac more cheaply and easily than I can get a cold veggie sandwich. I'm not dumb, I'm busy.

[tremon]

if most people were like me, they would read the label and refuse to buy

Well, obvious conclusion is obvious: people are not like you. Especially since you said earlier:

WTF?!? There should be no need for sugar in refried beans!

So why would you expect people to read the label for a product that clearly names what it should contain?

There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

In light of the above, I can offer another explanation: most consumers are too trusting. Distrust takes mental effort, so people pick their battles. I would not have read the label for a can of refried beans either.

(as an aside: I believe this is where many Europeans would say that this is what food standards are for, to which many Americans would respond: wtf regulation)

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

I read the label for unfamiliar brands of re-fried beans to make sure they're vegetarian.

[Nagyman]

A bit harsh to make a blanket statement about intelligence; people just need information which isn't being readily provided or is being drowned out with too much information. The collective actions seem counterintuitive to people paying attention, but paying attention requires time - which doesn't come easily if a swath of the population is busy with two part-time jobs and recovering with reality TV in the meantime.

[trbvm2]

"people just need information which isn't being readily provided" The breakdown of the nutritional value of every food stuff is literally right in front of the consumer's face. I'm not sure information availability is a core issue there. It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook.

If I had to guess I would say prioritization and budgeting are core issues here. It really is a very similar problem to financial budgeting. In this view we are balancing a calorie budget against time, money, emotional state, and health so the categories are different but the question is still the same as in finance. This could also be a likely culprit since we do not tend to teach this topic well and Average Joe seems to be about as bad at personal finance as he is with personal wellness.

Perhaps more training on prioritization, goal setting, and delayed gratification is part of the solution?

[kedean]

"It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook"

That's a pretty ridiculous counter. Multiply that by the dozens to hundreds of items a person buys in a single grocery trip, and you might have a valid comparison. It's true that this would be mostly a one time cost, as you would start to learn what is good and what is not, but the fact still stands that it is not as quick as checking a text message.

[Qwertious]

That's great, people can observe the contents. And now they just need to interpret it, which requires research. What's this "HFCS", and is it good or bad for you?

It's like asking a nonprogrammer to read the source code. Sure, it's right there in front of them, but that doesn't make it useful. The obvious solution - let's require everyone to become a programmer! /s

[jensen123]

If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

As for working two part-time jobs etc., many of the people doing this buy status symbols like SUVs, iPhones, big houses etc. If they didn't buy so much unnecessary stuff, they wouldn't need to work so much.

[Dylan16807]

> iPhones

Yep, buying a nice phone for half the price of phone service is why poor people are poor. How stupid of them. If they had just saved an extra $10 a month, they wouldn't need that second job.

[puddintane]

> If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

Totally true, I myself went thru an over use of refined sugar and non-healthy fast food choices. It was a truly terrible experience that thankfully I caught at a young age before it progressed to thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands in medical care.

Essentially I ended up having tears in my throat and ulcers at the same time causing and obscene amount of blood to, well for sake of the conversation, come back out of the body reverse style. It was due to the amount of sugar intake and "fast food" that caused me to experience this horrible scenario. I feel as though a lot of people who experience this just go, "oh I'll take some pills and I can get right back into it" which in it self will cause the problem to worsen but the general populous has for some reason come to believe that the magic pill solves all and we can rely on future technology to keep us "safe from tipping the edge"..."until it all collapses into a mess".

I honestly believe it's the fact that our culture is now bred to have things handed to them so easily. As an application/web designer I often have to create "dumbed" down interfaces that to me seem illogical and a waste of precious coding time.

While yes it sucks they don't put it in bright high contrast words on the labels, but at the same time they are putting it on the label and if we just took the time we could curb this silly notion of the big corporation is evil - even creating a core class required for students to take at various stages of school would make a phenomenal difference (in theory).

Essentially while a company may be evil, they are only evil because it's making a profit. We the people of the world need to make the change for big industry to make change because at the root of it they only do it because we keep paying!

[goldbrick]

I need that stuff to get laid though.

[jensen123]

Good point. I admit that I'm not very good at getting laid myself. However, if you eat healthily, you will look much better than if you eat unhealthily. We know that men are attracted to good looking women. However, women seem to be attracted to high-status men, and put less value good looks.

I wish there were some studies that compared how much success healthy and good looking but relatively poor men would have with women, compared to unhealthy and bad looking but relatively rich ones.

I hope I did not get too off topic here, but I think maybe it's possible that this is part of the explanation. That people want status symbols in order to get laid, and thus have less time for health. So maybe I was wrong about the Average Joe having a low intelligence...

[5ilv3r]

Find a lady that likes debt free men and try to make her happy.

[tremon]

Nutrition is no longer taught in school, so you cannot demand that people know this.

Also, the acknowledgement that sugar is unhealthy beyond children's teeth is relatively new. I don't think you'll find it in nutrition books from over 15 years ago.

[thecrow1213]

I feel like shifting the blame towards consumers only shirks the responsibility that companies have to act responsibly. How much longer are we gonna excuse companies that only act in their self interest just so we don't have to do anything about it?

EDIT: Whether people like it or not, free market forces don't always offer the best outcome. We stopped depending solely on free market forces when we put in place anti-monopoly laws. We've identified that regulation is needed in some cases. Lets use it damnit.

[msluyter]

Adding to the varieties of other explanations countering your "one explanation:"

1.) Time. Although I'm (perhaps overly) sensitive to which foods are healthy and which aren't, I often find myself eating sub-optimally simply because I can't muster the time/energy to make something healthy, do the resulting dishes, etc... And veggies can be some of the most labor intensive. Or, you want a quick snack that's also really healthy? Here's $5 for a small bag of kale chips (see "Cost," below.)

2.) Skill. It's taken me a while to learn to cook well enough that much of what I make is at least on par with (non-gourmet) restaurant food.

3.) Cost. Compare the beans with sugar to higher end -- organic, in particular -- varieties.

[cookiecaper]

Wherever the baseline intelligence quotient of John Q. Public sits on an absolute scale, when we're discussing something as critical and universal as food distribution, it should be pretty easy to accept that, at a minimum, the median IQ should be accommodated. It should be easy for the consumer to understand what's in the food he's going to eat. Manually picking up every food item and reviewing the list of ingredients by hand in the middle of grocery store does not comport with this; this is a matter of efficiency more than a lack of the intellectual faculty to process a list of ingredients (though when half of those ingredients are impenetrable chemical names that only commercial food chemists understand, it makes even more sense to skip it).

Lament the average consumer's lack of gross intelligence all you want, but the fact is that it's irrelevant in this circumstance. Food distribution should be accessible and understandable by nearly all adults, and if it's not, it's a systemic failure, not an individual one.

This is especially true now that all of the food for sale in a typical grocery store is altered by chemists. This artificial manipulation should cause us to be more careful about food, not less.

It is absolutely true that nearly every food item in the mainstream grocery store contains superfluous sugar, including foods that you wouldn't expect or think about. While many stores will carry one or two SKUs of a particular product without sugar, you have to be really careful to pick out the right one. For instance, canned pears come "in heavy syrup" (i.e., drenched in sugar) by default. They also offer pears in "light syrup" (i.e., sugar added). There are various combinations of heavy/light syrup canned pear offerings, and then, at the very back, you may luck out and find one can of pears "in water".

These aren't Oreos -- people are buying canned fruits and vegetables because they are trying to be healthy, and the corporate grocers are pulling a fast one on them by dumping large helpings of sugar into everything to try to make the food more addictive (and thereby, increase sales).

Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic. Discounting that is playing into their hands at the peril of public health.

[scalio]

> Manually picking up every food item and reviewing the list of ingredients by hand in the middle of grocery store does not comport with [accomodating the median IQ]

I don't know how the situation looks in the US, but in Europe, there's compulsory, standardized labels listing ingredients on every non-whole item. Whole foods are marked with the country/ies where it was produced, treated and packaged.

If it's considered too much effort to read a clearly laid-out sticker, the problem is definitely with people reaching an extreme kind of intellectual lazyness, which is why I don't understand the need to teach nutrition mentioned in other comments. Just read what's in the thing, dammit! If somebody doesn't understand that sugar has absolutely nothing to do in canned beans, well... I'm lost for words.

This means the actual problem is the complete disfunctionality of our educational systems. As you rightly point out,

> Corporate profiteering absolutely plays a massive role in the obesity epidemic.

and is easily countered by buying a tad more consciously than "I probably don't need this, but I'll buy it anyway just in case" or "I like the look of that" or "I've seen this in an ad, must be awesome", and then proceeding to throwing a quarter of your purchases away. As you might have guessed, I was not raised like that, and it utterly boggles my mind how some people can function that way. Apart from the food, it's a massive waste of money!

So yeah, the problem is, as always, education, because I don't see how foods could be marked any clearer than black-on-white stickers that take ten seconds to scan thouroughly for any unwanted ingredients.

[hinkley]

Median means it's okay to trick nearly half of the population. I think we can do a little better than that.

Aren't there laws on the books that define what the minimum mental faculty is to be an independent adult? And below that point a relative can assert power of attorney/legal guardianship over you?

[giardini]

"Why does this happen? Obviously, sugar tastes good. That has to be why companies add it to all sorts of things."

There are more reasons. Googling "uses of sugar":

"Although the main reason for the use of sugar is its sweet taste, sugar has many other functions in food technology. The most important among these are that added sugar in foods acts as a sweetener, preservative, texture modifier, fermentation substrate, flavouring and colouring agent, bulking agent."

[madengr]

Ditto for pasta sauce. Difficult to find ones that don't have sugar. Only one at my grocery store despite a shelf full of various brands.

[linker3000]

I make my own - start with a tin of decent quality tomatoes and go from there. No sugar needed.

[scalio]

Bingo.

I've come to realise myself, cooking something very edible is not hard. Buy a physical cook book so as to not get distracted on the internet, and just try some things. The first couple tries at a new recipe might turn out slightly weird, so what? You'll still get the satisfaction of having produced something yourself, it won't kill you, and it'll be a whole lot healthier than ordering or microwaving fast food. Plus you'll know exactly what's in it because you put it there.

Should you ever not have time to stand around in the kitchen, a loaf of bread, some jam and ham should do it. Add in some bacon, spread, whatever, and you've got dinner ready to go in the time it takes to take all of that out of the fridge. Heck, slice a couple pickles! There's so many ways to eat well and tasty if you just try for a moment.

Though of course, not getting fucked over by your ingredients requires you to look at them before buying. Hoo-hah.

[logfromblammo]

Preferably tomatoes grown in volcanic soil, like San Marzanos.

It is well worth buying one can of several different brands of tomato sold in your locale, and making experimental taste-test batches with all other variables held constant. With good quality inputs, you can beat the pre-made jarred marinaras every single time, using nothing more than a very basic recipe and a minimum of cooking skill.

Exercise caution. Once you know how to make a good sauce, you will never be able to stand eating at Olive Garden again.

[malz]

Another explanation: EVERY can of beans at a mass supermarket like Safeway has the same ingredients. You have to go to Trader Joe's or Whole Foods to avoid the national brands. Many people don't have that option or choose to use it.

[fucking_tragedy]

The truth is you can add enough corn syrup, fat and salt to pretty much any cheap low quality ingredient to make palatable. Often, the available or cheaper option is not the healthiest. I don't blame consumers for having to make that trade off.

Personally, to find products that I enjoy that aren't loaded with sugar beyond reason (29g vs an equally enjoyable 6g per serving?), I had to visit four shops. That's not something you should have to do for each food product you purchase.

Someone that doesn't go to those lengths certainly isn't stupid either.

[hinkley]

See also: food desert

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

[lucozade]

On a vaguely related note, Mars Foods is planning on changing its labeling to indicate approx how often you should eat their products [1].

This was most likely a preemptive move on their part, presumably to counter the anti-sugar law being mooted in the UK.

My guess is that their argument will be that people should have the choice to eat unhealthily as long as they do it in moderation. If so, I would tend to agree but I think I'm inclined to moan about a lack of personal responsibility so I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36051333

[zwarag]

> However, if most people were like me, ...

My teacher always said: Imagine the most average american citizen. Then realize that half of the american population is dumber that.

Really brings things in perspective.

[mikestew]

Really brings things in perspective.

It does, doesnt it? I mean, you'd think a math teacher of all people would know not to use "average" when they really mean "median". I always wondered whether Carlin was being ironic when he told the joke.

[dragonwriter]

> you'd think a math teacher of all people would know not to use "average" when they really mean "median".

I think a math teacher would be well aware that "average" can be used for "median", "mode", "arithmetic mean", or any of the other means (geometric, harmonic, etc.), as well as other computed values that are somewhere in the space bounded by the extremes of a data set, and would likewise be aware that, while in a formal context "average" should -- for that reason -- be avoided in favor of identifying the specific measure more precisely, it was acceptable and unambiguous to use "average" for any of those, including the median, where context made it clear which was intended.

[lotharbot]

I like this comment so much that I reposted it to facebook. "Average" is, in fact, a generic term which we shouldn't freak out about too much.

[tdkl]

He must've been a Carlin fan (American stand up comedian).

[cloudjacker]

> Of course, the media wants as many consumers as possible, too, so calling most of their potential readers/viewers stupid is probably a bad strategy, even though it's the truth.

And this is where state sponsored media excels.

So many people concerned about imaginary covered up human rights abuses to see how all the other news gets reported in a much more informative way.

[Aelinsaar]

Why not both? If you're big and don't care about your consumer beyond their role as a source of money, maybe a stupid consumer is desirable? I think it just happens to be that almost anyone in a position of entrenched power, in government or industry, thinks they benefit from a stupid populace.

[ksk]

Well, there is one question you have forgotten to ask. How many people have YOU educated about this? If everyone spread the word and spent time educating others, the companies would lose money, and soon stop doing it.

It's easy to blame others.

[scalio]

Right on. The masses that can't be bothered to willingly switch on a couple neurons every now and again are the real problem.

We "the People" have unbelievable power once we unite behind an issue. Only problem is, the vast majority can't be bothered to unhinge their eyeballs from their newsfeeds for a moment and try and understand the world.

Capitalist corps are only happy to feed that behaviour with more happy-hormone-releasing crap.

[amelius]

> There can only be one explanation: most consumers are dumb.

Incidentally, this also shows why democracy is flawed.

[wrsh07]

Your explanation seems flawed.

Why do people play games with microtransactions?

Why are casino games mind-numbingly bland?

Companies do things that generate profit. Profit is generated by manipulating consumer behavior. Consumers aren't necessarily stupid for being exploited.

In fact, that's the whole point: their instinctive behavior is being exploited.

[marknutter]

> most consumers are dumb

If only all consumers could be as smart as jensen123. Sigh.

[NetStrikeForce]

Sugar removes acidity. I would add some sugar to home made tomato sauce sometimes.

Sugar is bad, but it's got some qualities as well. The same could be said about many things we still eat/drink/breath, but the problem with sugar is that we just use too much of it.

[jrjr]

sugar does not reduce acidity, it masks it.

Bicarbonate of Soda reduces it, and brings the sugar already present to the fore.

a micro pinch in the tomato sauce makes it bite less and reduces digestive acidity reflux from eating a tomato based meal(spag.sauce)

jrjr

[NetStrikeForce]

The more you know!

I totally used the wrong word (as I really wanted to say that masks it - I've got zero chemistry knowledge), but I'll try your tip next time.

Thank you!

[chrisbennet]

Thanks for the tip!

[hawleyal]

There are many other explanations.