Algorithm, food, intoxicants, anything that has manipulative potential.
Except banning heroin clearly didn't work so well! There's still a lot of people using it. And the profits from selling it go to criminal gangs. And the people using it often die due to inconsistent dosing.
How do you define "manipulative potential"? If you ban sugar in drinks, do you ban fruit juice too? Where do we draw the line for "acceptable harm"? Personally I don't want to live in a society which bans huge numbers of things.
Our bodies interact with extremely large amounts of elements in the environment and behavior that act beyond our conscious comprehension.
Sometimes in our favour and some others against us.
Banning everything that at some point worked against us is just establishing human life full of total deprivation. Worse than living in jail. Good luck maintaining a society in those conditions.
The individual and the society should instead focus on educating and teaching how to navigate an environment full of those elements.
Are churches a predatory business? If the answer is no, then why are sugar manufacturers? If the answer is tradition etc., then that basically proves my point.
the institution that invented Tithes? The institution that if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people? Which will take old women aside and talk about getting into heaven and helping missions in poor countries full of poor little children?
That institution might have a predatory business model?
The threat of hell is certainly very uncoercive yeah
> if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people
So basically you're paying for a service? Your argument would be much better if they didn't actually help people with important stuff.
That is the kind of situation the funeral thing was highlighting, not the provision of a service, but the creation of a coercive incentive for social hierarchy and emotional support around a very difficult moment.
Its the same reason predatory loans are predatory, not because loans are bad but because you find people at their lowest and provide a service where they are incentivised to make reckless financial choices
The power asymmetry behind and in the front of the six inch screen is immense.
THe big challenge is separating the good from the bad commercial interests. It's not a challenge because differentiating the good from the harmful is difficult, but because bad actor industries also make A LOT of money that buys a lot of political power and also employ a lot of people, so removing them from economy would have negative economic and political consequences.
Basically it's like a dead man's switch in a mutually assured destruction weapon.
Killing the tobacco industry for example would have incredibly positive economic consequences, despite the job loss.
Yeah but both tobacco industry employees and smokers vote. If they make up a large enough voter base, then this is political suicide in any democracy.
Hence how it took until 2019 to ban indoor smoking in my EU country, even though it was known for a long time it's a public health issue.
Which technically isn't hard because criminal enterprise is pretty damn inefficient!
A list of sugar alcohols including their classification numbers in Europe is:
Sorbitol (E 420)
Mannitol (E 421)
Isomalt (E 954)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Lactitol (E 966)
Maltitol and Maltitol Sirup (E 965)
Xylitol (E 967)
Erythritol (E 967)
Seems to me that it would require quite a lot of sweets, frequently.
Hence why they are excluded in a low-FODMAP diet (the P stands for polyols).
"That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy."
Unhappy Meals - Michael Pollan https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/
It's the bare minimum if you care about aging well, maximally healthy is a whole other thing
But I am biased. I‘ve seen this slogan everywhere to promote UPFs that claim to be healthy because they are „vegan“.
Now that the market for meat alternatives has collapsed I don’t see this reasoning anymore. What a strange coincidence.
What country are you reporting from? It seems to be absolutely booming in the UK. A brief internet search suggests it's growing and predicted to boom in the US as well.
Just like: Don't smoke, don't drink, work-out, take walks, spend time with your family and friends, don't work too much. Also, don't worry too much!
All the real problems come in practice.
Don't get me wrong, it's good to have a solid basis.
However, 80% of success comes from applying these things in your messy life.
For example what do I have for breakfast? Oh let's boil and egg amd grab a carrot and corn on the cob. Or whatever.
What do I do in the supermarket? Meats, veg, bit of fruit maybe bit of dairy. Am I obessing over avacado vs. pear. Nope. Chicken vs. beef? No. Chocolate bar vs carrot? easy choice.
Now probably once you get thay square you can do harder stuff like food reaction / allergy testing and so on.
I regularly see folks agonizing about every decision and new study, but the thing is.... the tips on OP's very basic list are responsible for like 80% of the value one gets from "living healthy".
All the rest of the organic whole grain horseshit and panicking about microplastics MIGHT net you another 10%, but at double the cost to your happiness.
The last 10% is basically impossible to achieve without completely sacrificing your quality of life.
Vegetarian India literally suffers from one of the highest rates of protein deficiency and stunted growth worldwide.
Sometimes we don't need cold baths or extreme regimens to fix all the messed up things we're doing to our bodies. Simple changes go far to heal the damage.
Most people fighting addiction and having a hard time is fighting a chemical dependency, which is a lot harder and when people start looking beyond "Just do X instead".
From the article:
> Basic science models show that liquid sugar concentrations around 10% by weight—comparable with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew—can reliably trigger addictive behaviors in animals, including bingelike consumption, withdrawal, and dopamine system alterations.
But yeah, it's obviously nothing close to a nicotine.
I tell that story because it is true.
And I wonder... is there a town named Twinkieville in the USA where everyone dies of obesity and/or diabetes and kids can buy pounds of candy at the store without an ID? Or, is every town in America Twinkieville?
Its financialization of everything including food, government tipping the scales against peoples well being and a declining purchasing power of the average american that has resulted in this awful reality where food isn't food.
I'm not sure NSS are necessarily "healthwashing" - they are genuinely a healthier alternative, at least in SSBs. Pointing to some very speculative research about "gut microbiome disruption" as if that somehow means NSS are something we should be concerned about in our diet doesn't seem to reflect the body of evidence on the subject. On balance they seem to be either a neutral or beneficial product, depending on what they replace in the diet.
I think one important distinction between UPF and cigarettes is that we have lots of examples of healthy UPFs. Are there any such examples for cigarettes? Even those researchers who voice concerns about the health impacts of UPFs (Kevin Hall, Samuel Dicken) seem to be largely interested in identifying _which_ UPFs might drive poor health outcomes and why, so we can regulate industry to make their products more health promoting.
My concern with this analogy between cigarettes and UPFs is that we end up with a movement to completely ban UPFs when they have lots of useful properties (can be stored at ambient temperature, long shelf life, reliable quality) that make them very important for people with limited means. The dream scenario, IMO, is that we regulate out the worst of the harmful properties, rather than trying to get rid of them entirely (which I think is the dream scenario with cigarettes).
Isn't that basically vapes? A nicotine delivery mechanism without the most harmful properties, created by regulation on tobacco.
The thing with tobacco is it doesn't really have any benefit. It isn't a social lubricant like alcohol and doesn't have medical use like opiates. Old World societies managed fine before tobacco.
It is, and I'm not a smoker. Ironically mainly because of the indoor smoking bans.
You can stop this addiction right now by merely doing nothing and not eating "UPFs". You have the power. When you get stressed and want to burn time and energy eating because it's at least eating, how about doing a different thing? Each one of us is powered by a soul that can defy these behavior loops with some self-reflection.
I hope you enjoy spending all of your mental energy self-reflecting to kick the addiction.
And in many places UPFs are cheaper and more widely available than unprocessed food. If you're worried about paying rent, you're not questioning cheap calories for your family.
Even if we can agree that people should exercise more willpower, isn't there something wrong with companies weaponizing science to make food as addictive as possible?
(For the record my only vice is coffee.)
Forget McDonalds, almost any Italian or Thai restaurant to me is like a drug dealer.
There is no amount of chicken alfredo that is satisfying to me. It doesn't matter how it is made, the poison is in the dosage and I am going to eat way too much.
------------
There was a "Nature of Things" episode on this titled, "Foodspiracy". The reason why UPF's have been designed and marketed with many of the same strategies as tobacco is because several big tobacco companies diversified into food. They literally transferred their expertise from marketing cigarettes to marketing junk food.
Companies like Joe Camel started out using cute/cool animal mascots to condition kids so they'd buy Joe Camel cigarettes when they were old enough to smoke (if not sooner). There was a lot of competition for adult smokers, so hooking kids on their brand before any other company got to them was a winning strategy. When they pivoted into UPF's, they immediately put animal mascots and cartoon characters on cereal boxes. They no longer had to wait for their target audience to grow up a bit.
It's sobering to find out that companies specializing in unhealthy addiction have literally gone from cigarettes to potato chips and TV dinners without missing a step.
h33t-l4x0r•1h ago
4gotunameagain•1h ago
gostsamo•1h ago
h33t-l4x0r•1h ago
teekert•1h ago
unglaublich•1h ago
smt88•1h ago
Even American Spirit's website denies that "organic" or natural tobacco is any safer.
1. https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-ingredients-co...
h33t-l4x0r•1h ago
cobblestone32•16m ago
> In pure form, nicotine is a colorless to yellowish, oily liquid that readily penetrates biological membranes and acts as a potent neurotoxin in insects, where it serves as a antiherbivore toxin.
deaux•1m ago
shawabawa3•1h ago
These are not the same thing
It's likely safer but not meaningfully enough to make much difference, as it's still obviously very bad for you
embedding-shape•1h ago
As far as I can tell, that page never actually tries to answer "Are "all-natural" cigarettes less harmful than ones with additives?".
Neither are healthy for you, yes, we get that, but the question is if one is slightly less unhealthy?
iberator•1h ago
cobblestone32•49m ago
> The overwhelming majority of independent research shows that filters do not reduce the harms associated with smoking - a fact understood by tobacco industry scientists in the 1960s. In fact, filters may increase the harms caused by smoking by enabling smokers to inhale smoke more deeply into their lungs.
Also, plain common sense will tell you that inhaling toxic smoke through a small piece of paper is not much healthier than inhaling toxic smoke directly.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9340047/
smt88•1h ago
nkrisc•1h ago