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How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

nytimes.com

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Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#181

Post by stevenwoo »

BetaDeltaAlpha wrote: post #74
vector_spaces wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail…

Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.

Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Whole-Foods-vs-Safeway-W...

Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#183

Post by unregistereddev »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #24
SirFatty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...how hard it is to find healthy food options compared to the unhealthy ones." Sure, if you limit your purchases to Dollar General and Casey's. If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.

The comment is still true regardless of the fact that Whole Foods exists. It is genuinely more difficult to find healthy food in the US than abroad. (i'm ignoring the additional fact that the US has many more food deserts than abroad. even within rich neighborhoods with many expansive grocery stores, those stores have more unhealthy options and fewer healthy options than abroad, unless it's specifically a "health foo…

I wholeheartedly disagree. Grocery stores in the US are typically much larger than grocery stores abroad. A Kroger, Publix, Piggly Wiggly, Schnuck's, or HyVee will typically have just as many healthy food options as a grocery store abroad. The difference is these US grocery stores also stock a much larger variety of unhealthy options.

As someone else in this thread used sweet yogurt as an example, it is trivially easy to find unsweetened yogurt in nearly any grocery store in the US. The difference is that there's also a very large selection of sweet flavored yogurt.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#184

Post by stevenwoo »

kritr wrote: post #169
BetaDeltaAlpha wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.

Ironically in SF it seems inversed. Whole Foods is second cheapest to Trader Joe’s, and Safeway is the most expensive.

I live in Los Altos next to Mountain View and Safeway is very expensive compared to every other option except Whole Foods. There are a few items they have that are the same as others, like bananas so I sometimes walk to the closest Safeway to stock up on those but otherwise one has to be wary of the pricing.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#185

Post by fnordpiglet »

Milpotel wrote: post #58
fnordpiglet wrote: post #10

Due to the paywall I couldn’t get beyond the first image claiming convenience. I’ve no idea what the rest says so I’ll speak disconnected from the content and just to the concept. People assume ultra processed came about due to demand side factors but it’s actually more about supply side supply chain management and the scale in size of the US. By processing the food into more constructed ingredients they always enter…

That's a bit too naive considering how bad food became during the last decade. Formerly perfectly fine products now have artificial ingredients to increase profits.

How is it naive? You were literally unable to eat the foods because they rotted in delivery and refrigeration was so expensive it made fresh foods unaffordable to the consumer. Even then they were not edible because they were not ripened due to the lack of ethylene.

I’m not discussing the last decade, in fact in the last decade the availability of fresh food is absurdly better vs say 1930-1995 or so. The article also starts in 1950.

We are at a point where we can turn the tide, but the prevalence of fresh food in the store is counter balanced by the fact affordability is decreasing as inflation, restrictions on free trade, and stagnation of lower income takes the fresh foods away as an option. Add into it cultural inertia of 70 years of processed food prevalence as a staple food, you end up in this situation.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#186

Post by nradov »

chimpanzee wrote: post #149
nradov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your comment. Trader Joe's sells plain yogurt with no added buttermilk. https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/greek-whole-mil... Or you can buy essentially the same thing for less at Walmart. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mountain-High-Low-Fat-Yogurt-Vani... While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of find…

> While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality. Some… Most… You’ve made some broad assumptions here. I’ve lived in various neighbordhoods in one of the largest cities in this country and near and far suburbs of the same. Only when I’ve lived in ritzy or trendy areas have I had no issu…

I haven't made any broad assumptions. You can buy healthy food like frozen vegetables, raw chicken, ground beef, potatoes, beans, rice, apples, olive oil, plain yogurt, etc pretty much anywhere. I travel a lot and have seen these foods widely available in neighborhoods that are not remotely ritzy or trendy. They are usually inexpensive, and if you have a little storage space then you can stock up when stores have discounts to save even more.

There are a small fraction of people who do live in food deserts and we ought to help them out. Probably the best thing we could do to make many food deserts "bloom" would be to fund the police and strictly enforce shoplifting laws, especially against organized retail theft gangs. Good grocery stores have been driven out of some neighborhoods partly by high shrinkage rates (not the only problem but a major contributing factor).

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#187

Post by Scarblac »

benrutter wrote: post #167
tptacek wrote: post #93

This all has very big "uncured bacon" energy to me (if you didn't already know: there's no such thing; vendors of uncured bacon performatively drive the same chemical nitrite reaction using vegetable extracts). For example: yogurt becomes a UPF simply by dint of adding carrageenan, which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu. It's not that there isn't a very legitimate issue underneath all this:…

> It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods I've heard this criticism a fair bit, and I sort of agree. The only thing is, what is the right metric? And if we don't have one, and know these foods are causing harm, should we just use UPF as a term anyway?

The thing is that, although the list used (the "Nova classification") is obviously somewhat arbitrary, the fact that everybody uses it makes research results comparable to each other.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#188

Post by steanne »

yesb wrote: post #91
secabeen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, Greek Yogurt is not the same as Yogurt, it's a different product. Those two items are not "essentially the same thing". Also, low/zero-fat yogurts dominate the market in the US. Plain Whole-Milk traditional yogurt is more available now than it was a decade or two ago, but it's still nowhere as common as the high-sugar flavored ones.

It's the same thing with the additional step of straining out some whey

the original is, but in the usa 'greek' yogurt is often thickened with additives instead.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#189

Post by OJFord »

supportengineer wrote: post #102
arrozconcosas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist but are a small minority of the shelf. You have to really look for them.

This begs the question - is it reasonable for the consumer to put in a little work - reading labels and doing research outside of the grocery store? I find that you do the research once, and then you know what to buy next time.

I think the point is more that the norm is sugary, and so it's necessary to do what you describe to find plain (not to say 'normal') yoghurt.

Re: How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

#190

Post by kulahan »

colingauvin wrote: post #141
kulahan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't possibly disagree with your last point harder. What's with people and blindly trusting that the pharma companies found a holy grail medicine and didn't rush it to market well before the necessary research is in? Even more than that, dosing hundreds of millions of Americans for life is one insanely expensive and ridiculous solution. Side note, is there good research on the effects of microplastics on the bo…

If you're worried about the possible, unknown side effects of GLP1s, check out the inevitable, well-known side effects of being morbidly overweight.

Thankfully, this is not a binary problem where those are the only two options :)
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