If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.
And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.
All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.
And in doing so you can see that what you're saying is actually not true. Look up any random advertiser and you'll see that it's pretty uncommon for ads to be based around insecurity. Almost always it's on banal product features. The insecurity-focused ads do exist but they tend to be focused on a few broad lowest hanging fruit ad categories.
I have personally overdeen hundreds of millions of spend on ads and never ran an ad that manipulated people's emotions based on insecurity or etc.
Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.
How can it be "uniquely bad" if it's "along with other drugs"?
Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.
but then theres RFK nuttery, so its not that stupid.
but yeah, ultra processes has no functional science behind it even though we still know cheap food is typically unhealthy and addictive
That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.
If the state of physics was "stuff falls, heat sticks around, light goes fast" I think it'd be fair to describe that as "abysmal".
Health/nutrition is a spectrum but no one will tell you to eat a bag of chips a day and rinse your mouth with coke
This is why Google no longer has just some unobtrusive text ads to the side. At the time it was great because it wasn't annoying, but then the analytics came in and showed that more prominent and better camouflaged ads had higher conversion and revenue. And people grumbling aside, their revenue multiplied over and over again.
What people object to here isn't the efficiency, it's the motivation and the profit.
I don't think US tobacco firms diversifying is bad, personally. I'd rather they sold food than cigarettes. But, they want to sell high fat, high sugar, high salt PROFITABLE foods to people worldwide, not actual nutritionally balanced good food (good as in healthy, not moral).
Ultra processed foods have a long shelf life. That's part of why they are efficient. If they applied the same logic to shipping soy protein, vitamin rich fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and dairy produce, would that be wrong just because they're called "Philip Morris"?
You'd find plenty of definitions if you looked for them
> generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.
Go ahead and list the negatives too lmao... what do you think the additives meant to prevent living organism from developing on the food do in your gut for example ?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11901572/
Ultra processed food benefit companies more than they benefit you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
And regarding health risks, please ask your doctor about your consumption. You may be surprised.
And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.
Cynical arguments are facile. I'm not interested in hearing that people are dumb or evil. I am genuinely curious how these companies attract talent.
Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.
I also agree that people have choices.
I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.
Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery.
And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.
dried bananas chips as a snack? fine. potato chips cooked mostly in palm oil? not so great.
both "snacks"
Canned fruit is packaged in syrup. It has more sugar than candy.
Why do we allow this? Just behave like all others.
Now we want to push for smoke-free societies: but non of ways to achieve this even dares to talk about "just make tobacco giants list all the ingredients/additives".
Edit: Both boys and girls are dependent on these things now and they seem socially acceptable (no smoke, no spit, just swallow the chemical nicotine). Get ready for a huge wave of GI problems due to this.
That was the “let me stop you right there” moment.
(Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)
Instead the executives went in front of Congress in 1994 and swore under oath that they believe nicotine was not addictive:
And all profited personally from that law breaking denial of basic facts that directly lead to pain and suffering for their customers.
From that you can see the future we now live in clearly laid out before you.
I wonder if they killed more people with cigarettes or with the anti-science movements they kick-started so they could kill more people with cigarettes?
He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!
Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)
He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.
I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job
The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market.
With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete.
If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.
The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience, better margins for the producers, etc.
With those kind of basic ideas you can mostly survive and figure your way around. No one needs to check spin on electrons when living their day to day. Or the mass of a neutron star versus a blackhole
Similarly, nutrition science can be extremely specific about gut microbiome compositions and its effect in regulating specific hormones and so on. But most humans just need the guidelines of dont over eat, have mostly fish/legumes and veggies and be active (strength training and regular walks) to have a healthy life.
no one needs to know the exact frequency and voltage of your plug to be taught to not stick your giners on the wall, and no one needs to know the exact victamin C and iron content of spinach to know its healthier than ultraprocessed chips
The definition I have heard is "food made with ingredients or processes not commonly used in ghome Unfortunately, when I looked to leading scientific orgs, they are dithering on releasing formal definitions, but all say something like what I'd heard.
Conflicting information doesn't mean an abysmal situation. I'd argue the opposite. Everyone "knew" the sun orbited Earth.
I know there is science around it, but the very concept looks very unscientific, it's almost like talking about "unnatural food"
Well, for starters - the refined sugars, carbohydrates and oils that seem to be the main culprits behind the obesity epidemic are mostly things that wouldn't be efficient (or in some cases, even possible) to create in a home cooking environment.
Sure, you could order some grain milling or oil extraction equipment on Alibaba and DIY it, but 99.999% of households aren't going to do that.
The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.
> The Nova definition of ultra-processed food does not comment on the nutritional content of food and is not intended to be used for nutrient profiling.
> Nutrient profiling: also nutritional profiling, is the science of classifying or ranking foods by their nutritional composition in order to promote health and prevent disease.
So it looks like this classification doesn't mean what you think it means.
Yes, and cigarettes cure cancer amirite ?
We all know what they mean by ultra processed food, it's 75% of your supermarkets. 45% of the US is obese, the rest is overweight, food is one of the main factor in the top 2 leading causes of death in the US, if you can't see the problem you're blind
There is a very good definition on wikipedia btw, and yes not all ultra processed things are bad, but the vast majority of them are
Don't need ultra-processed food to be unhealthy. Rich guys in the 1800s would get fat and get gout and all these issues from overconsumption. It's just they were the only ones who could back then.
We're talking 1980s, not 1880s by the way
Could it be that maybe, maybe, there is a link to this and the subject of the paper being discussed?
Very scientific!
> Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Yeast, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Soybean Oil, Dough Conditioners (Contains One or More of the Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- and Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, DATEM, Ethoxylated Mono- and Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Monocalcium Phosphate, Soy Lecithin, Calcium Propionate (to Retard Spoilage).
A good rule of thumb is that if your grandpa would have needed a PhD in chemistry to identify 80% of the ingredients it probably is ultra processed.
The same type of bread in France:
> Wheat flour 63%, water, sugar, rapeseed oil, salt, vinegar, yeast, broad bean flour, WHEAT gluten, flavouring (contains alcohol), acerola extract.
These terms have actual definitions.
Bread can be ultra-processed depending on how it’s prepared.
Better question is why you don’t think a packaged bread product with HFCS and preservatives designed for a long shelf life would be considered ultra-processed.
Things I do not include when I bake at home, which I found from the first hit I got by searching for "bread" in a local Norwegian store's web site: E 472e emulgator, E 471 emulgator, margarine, dextrose, E 300 flour treatment, amylase enzymes, xylanase enzymes.
And that's a fairly short list compared to Walmart bread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411980
"Processed" means that ingredients had to be manipulated to produce the food (e.g. most recipes). Most of what you make at home is "processed".
"Ultra-processed" means food produced using industrial processing, using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc. That's a clear distinction.
Whether or not that means anything for the nutritional value and health outcomes from consumption of the food is a different question, but it can clearly be studied.
> Regulation of the multiple addictive products that tobacco companies have disseminated to markets globally may be needed to protect public health.
That seems less about logistics and more about manipulating the content of food, perhaps to encourage some low-level of dependence. People eventually came to expect this from tobacco products, I think many would be surprised to see this kind of thing from Oreos or potato chips.
Ah yes, the capitalist trick of blaming the consumer for structural failings.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-... - food desert map.
Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.
Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.
Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.
Consider the half of the US population that doesn't vote, not only do they not vote... but most of the time it's not even a system that they think about at all. There are a number of people who barely even know who the candidates in any given election are. You can live your entire life within a very narrow line of sight.
The "banality of evil" [1] is term coined by Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann who killed over a million Jews in the HOlocaust. She described Eichmann as an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who was (in his mind) advancing himself in the Nazi Party. The term has been exapnded to describe how disconnected most jobs are from their outcomes through complexity. You might be working on an AI feature that just identifies from external phone activity when someone is home or not. Sounds harmless right? What if you knew it was used by militaries to assassinate journalists while they were home so they got their families as well?
This also feeds into the concept of "social murder" [2].
Cognitive dissonance was best described by Upton Sinclair [3]:
> It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
Even if you, as a tobacco employee, realized the connection between what you were doing and selling more cigarettes, you'd find people rationalizing it by saying things like "I'm selling to willing buyers" or you'd couch it in terms of personal freedom.
Lastly, violence, specifically state violence. We (generally) have a skewed view of what constitutes "violence". We all understand that if you get attacked by someone in the street it's violence. Where it gets more contentious is for something like eviction. Many will say "well that's protecting somebody's asset". Others will argue that putting people out on the street, particularly in a wealthy country, is state violence [4].
I bring this up because we live in a society that doesn't guarantee basic necessities. So you need a job to pay for those things. Well, that's putting a proverbial gun to people's heads. If someone is selling tobacco, are you going to tell them they should risk homeless for that moral stance? Would you? I don't mean that as a provocation. It's a thought experiment.
[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
[3]: https://rowansimpson.com/quotes/salary/
[4]: https://hnmcp.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp/news/evictions-can-kill-...
stuaxo•1h ago
The same law firms seem to back tobacco and fossil fuel companies as well - a true axis of evil.
gostsamo•1h ago