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by LeifCarrotson
1722 days ago
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No, I'm not. You're correct that fruit is not sufficiently addictive for adults to gorge themselves on it to fatal levels. At the very least, it has not historically been sufficiently available to cause people to succumb to heart disease or diabetes before, on average, they had >2 children per couple: Humanity has not yet gone extinct. Whether Nestle's next concoction will be able to do that, composed of eye-catching, almost fluorescent colored dyes, unimaginably sweet high-fructose corn syrup, surreptitiously enhanced by most of your daily recommended dose of salt, tempered by delightfully tangy citric acid, all carried in a smooth, bouncy xanthan/guar gum matrix, no one knows yet. I'm pessimistic regardless of the engineering behind the treat: it seems likely that a sufficient number of people will always be able to make it through childbearing age before succumbing to diet-based problems, if that ever ceases to be the case, then the dwindling population will soon be unable to keep the global industries its manufacturing requires in operation. |
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The problems isn't just which foods are addictive, it's the economics of food costs too:
Fruits are expensive relative to much worse options. Fruits mostly are not very calorie dense, so you could gorge yourself completely on strawberries, eating an entire container in a sitting and paying (near me) $4 for it @ ~150 calories.
Or you could pay $2.59 for a 3-pack of microwave "movie theatre butter" popcorn for an effective price of $0.86 and consume around ~400 calories.
Calorie-dense junk foods are simply much cheaper to begin with. If you're on a budget and love, equally, strawberries & popcorn and want a few snacks for the week, you can spend $12 for 3lb of strawberries or $2.59 for the popcorn.
Or compare the cost of a 3-liter bottle of soda (about $1.10, or 1 penny/ounce) to the cost of 100% pure apple juice, which is about 3x the price per ounce. Yes both are sugar heavy, but the carbohydrates in pure juice aren't as bad and juice at least has other nutrients, and is sometimes fortified with more. enact a course-correction, it is always more expensive to
(There is at least one partial exception to the fruit issue: bananas. Compared to other fruits, they are massively cheaper on a price-per-calorie basis. But you can't live on bananas alone.)