[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.

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to single out maple syrup as an ideal "healthy food". It's just a particularly egregious example of deceptive labeling, inasmuch as most people who think they're buying it are, in reality, buying a 100% synthetic imitation. There are people who will tell you they love maple syrup, unaware that they've never actually even had maple syrup.

A more widely known example is "juice" that is 0% juice.

The same thing occurs with varying degrees of severity for all the food offered at major grocers, including healthier options like loaves of bread (most off-the-shelf breads at Walmart contain large quantities of either sugar or brown sugar) and canned fruits (the "standard" version is usually canned in "heavy syrup", i.e., sugar water).

[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.)

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, like I said in another comment, I didn't use the example of maple syrup because it was a particularly healthy food, but because it's a particularly egregious instance of deceptive labeling. The consumer is being tricked into buying a completely different product than he or she intended to buy -- no part of Aunt Jemima's or other major syrup brands has any relation or origination point inside a maple tree -- and most never realize it.

[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.

[cookiecaper]

I'll admit that I don't have any real source for the claim that most people think "maple syrup" is maple syrup. I only have anecdotes and assumptions. It is certainly possible that most people already understand that "maple syrup" is not really maple syrup in the same way that it's understood things labeled "juice" are not really juice unless there's some additional indicator of authenticity.

My personal intuition is that people probably assume some sweeteners and preservatives are added but that somewhere in there, there is an actual base of maple syrup, meaning some product that is derived from the sap of a maple tree. In fact, however, there is not.

To be totally honest, I don't think any hard study on this subject would be any more useful than my anecdotes, assumptions, and intuitions because I think the chance that it would be manipulated by people with an interest in one outcome or another is too high.

[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.