Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by m3kw9 1005 days ago
For junk food which is what this mostly tracks, shrinkflation is good for people’s healths.
4 comments

>inflation is a good thing and here's why
Inflation Could Save Your Life! The reasons why may shock you.
Lipids HATE this one trick
It's not lipids you should be worried about, it's emulsifiers:

> celluloses, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids, modified starches, lecithins, carrageenans, phosphates, gums, and pectins. Some recent studies have indicated that emulsifiers can disturb gut bacteria and promote inflammation, potentially increasing susceptibility to cardiovascular issues.[0]

0. https://studyfinds.org/food-e-numbers-heart-disease/

clickbait is not what i meant, why are we having a reddit-tier comment chain?
Well, till you need to get 2 burgers instead of one to feel full...
That is the point, people eat fewer burgers because they cannot afford more.
This has not worked out so well for other products. I live in Canada where cigarettes are enormously expensive due to taxes. Yet I know people who continue to smoke.

They're a lot poorer now, and so they have less money to spend on healthy food. So not only are they destroying their health by smoking, they're stuck eating crappy food as well.

I would not expect a higher price to stop every single person from buying the item immediately, especially not at at a price that is still obviously affordable.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/434150/share-of-canadian...

Yes, GP is absolutely correct, all the people in the developing world who can't afford food are much healthier than those of us in the West, that live long enough and eat enough to deal with diseases of obesity that primarily affect one after 60 years of age. /s
You put /s, but that to an extent is sort of true. Diseases can't be cured as effectively where remedies or mitigations are too expensive, but the same first world locations where medicine and care is most available also have a litany of factors working against health.

I don't believe though that this is inevitable, and I hope that the first world will continue to improve its situation, and that less well-equipped areas will somehow avoid making the mistakes and leapfrog these uncomfortable middle periods. We see this for instance with the Industrial Revolution, where those that can be credited with facilitating it generally did pretty poorly for themselves, but those who industrialised later were substantially better off.

The context is not affording junk food, not not affording food. Most burgers qualify as junk food.
Sure. Starvation is more deadly than obesity however, and globally more prevalent.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...

>In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.

>39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.

https://www.who.int/news/item/06-07-2022-un-report--global-h...

>The number of people affected by hunger globally rose to as many as 828 million in 2021

I would bet the obesity numbers have greatly increased since 2016.

To OP's point, would be interesting to have an option to filter out junk food.
Good news everyone! You can't afford snacks anymore.