Live data from Hacker News

Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

bloomberg.com

241–250 of 347 posts

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

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.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#242
> In a 2013 review of published research, scientists affiliated with France’s national scientific institute wrote that sugar and sweets “can not only substitute [for] addictive drugs, like cocaine, but can even be more rewarding and attractive.” Although sugar is “clearly not as behaviorally and psychologically toxic,” cravings for it can be just as intense, they said.

So... how do we measure behavioral and psychological toxicity? What does that actually mean?

Feels like they're trying to escape cognitive dissonance with weasel words here.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, diabetes pills are not really 'health products.' They are more like 'you fucked up your health, now try not to die' products. Even Nestle's low-fat and low-sugar "foods" are a far cry from "health products." You are being disingenuous by conflating the two, or even for suggesting that Nestle is in the business of selling "health products." Beyond that, however, I see a pretty big flaw in your reasoning…

What is a "health" product or not is of no value to the discussion here I think, we can debate all day long about what way of eating is correct or not, then let me put it in broader terms: Targeting different groups with different products that actually might have nothing in common or even be antagonists in a way, is nothing immoral or unusual. I used the term "health product" as an antagonist to their sugary product…

Out of interest - if a cigarette company started selling lung cancer treatment, would you still hold this stance?

I would hazard to say that the analogy I've chosen aligns more closely with the stance of the article and the posters taking a condemnatory tone than your Yamaha analogy does.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#245
The offerings of humongous multinational conglomerations are not coherent. You could generate stories of this type all day, because the offerings of the likes of Nestle, GE, J&J, P&G, Coca-Cola, et. al. are the results of the efforts of hundreds of thousands of employees (for each conglomerate) subdivided into thousands of business units [read sub-companies], each with its own goals, challenges, and many existing within markets that are essentially disjoint from those of other business units under the same parent company.

This sort of story is pure narrative fallacy, because there is no person at Nestle that decided to exacerbate diabetes and then sell diabetes drugs to profit on the other end. Outside of that person existing, there's no story here. If you take away the conflation of a conglomeration with an entity of coherent offerings the premise crumbles.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#246
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 hour…

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.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#247

There's a lot of discussion on here about stupid consumers vs evil corporations, etc. As is often the case, the blame lies with just about everyone involved to some extent. The US government choose to promote a low fat diet with it's original nutrition guidelines in the 70s [4] which led the public to demand the food companies to produce low fat everything in the 80s and into the 90s. It's now emerged that there was…

But sugar is not bad for you, not even fructose.

I recommend on reevaluating that position by reading the article below. Robert Lustig is a liar and a scaremonger.

http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...

In 2009, the same year Lustig gave his lecture, there was indeed significant consumption of fructose in the Japanese diet. Anyone with an Internet connection can easily verify as much for themselves by visiting the Food and Agriculture (FAO) website, and checking the per capita intake of sweeteners in Japan for that year. Do that, and you’ll see the Japanese were averaging 52 calories per day from fruits, and a far more significant 174 calories daily from sugar. “Sweeteners, Other” and “Honey” supplied another 86 cals/day.

So just from sugar alone, the Japanese were obtaining 22 grams, or 4.4 teaspoons, of fructose per day. The Japanese do indeed eat fructose-containing sugar, and have been doing so for hundreds of years.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#249
post #234

I wonder if it will ever hit the mainstream that Nestle put plastic filler in jar baby food in order to drive sales as babies would need to eat more baby food because they would simply pass the plastics. If anyone's interested in pursuing the story, they funded research into how much plastic could be added without causing health problems.

Sounds like conspiracy bait to me.

Re: Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, diabetes pills are not really 'health products.' They are more like 'you fucked up your health, now try not to die' products. Even Nestle's low-fat and low-sugar "foods" are a far cry from "health products." You are being disingenuous by conflating the two, or even for suggesting that Nestle is in the business of selling "health products." Beyond that, however, I see a pretty big flaw in your reasoning…

What is a "health" product or not is of no value to the discussion here I think, we can debate all day long about what way of eating is correct or not, then let me put it in broader terms: Targeting different groups with different products that actually might have nothing in common or even be antagonists in a way, is nothing immoral or unusual. I used the term "health product" as an antagonist to their sugary product…

We are not talking about what is health or not, the sugar they sell is bad, that's it, there's no questioning, there are doctors that agree on that, non biased studies, half the USA is ill with diabetes, etc.

Every company has to have a social responsability, I don't see it here. They are causing harm with their products and they also sell the 'cure'. (actually the best is not to eat any of their products, then you don't need anything they sell, just eat 'real', non processed, food).

About Yamaha, motorcycles shouldn't make that many noise, that is the main problem, not the headphones.

Post reply on HN