How many people could have avoided diabetes or other health problems if coca-cola just set the standard that 8g of sugar is enough?
So similar to Coke Zero/Diet Coke.
To be clear, that is the only sense in which I distinguish artificial/synthetic and natural substances -- those words are heavily loaded now and carry with them all kinds of connotations to the point of not even being particularly useful, but if we're going to use them we should at least be correct!
Switched to diet Coke, and drank that for a few more years. Then decided that was probably just as bad, and now drink sparkling water.
I no longer have any desire to drink sweetened beverages of any sort.
Being older, I decided to stop eating all ice cream, cookies, candy bars, pie, etc., about 2 months ago. This is difficult. I've tried that before, and failed.
I'm still ok with honey, and every once in a while I have a hankering for a single scoop of ice cream or custard.
A few times a year I get a migraine or super bad headache. A can of coke, when you don't ever drink it otherwise, is super effective against headaches.
Heh that's usually what gets everybody who visits Germany for the first time: what's with Germans and that sparkling water? I never realized it isn't really a thing in most parts of the world.
And it seems pretty divisive to folks visiting from outside Europe. Some think it's disgusting, some get used to it after a while and like it.
I drink both, plain water and sparkling water. Sometimes I feel the urge to have something more than just water, especially in the summer returning home and being really thirsty, and usually sparkling water is enough to fool my senses. So depending on where you are, maybe you wanna try it for some time if you're trying to get off coke or other soda.
Just regular ol' water is eternal
The carbonation makes it acidic which is one of the two elements that makes carbonated soft drinks the best way to rot out all of your teeth as quickly as possible (the other element is the copious amounts of refined, simple sugar).
Nothing beats plain old water, except maybe tea.
Note: do not brush your teeth immediately after drinking soda. The sugar (or rather the byproducts of the digestion of sugar by bacteria in your mouth) and the phosphoric acid in the soda will temporarily soften your enamel, which will then be partially removed by brushing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Unite...
Some other drinks (including Pepsi) have been reformulated with less sugar in the UK, but Coca Cola isn't one of them.
So when adults say, 'I discovered I didn't need as much sugar', maybe they, like the children, are just following their biological urges.
I did a very quick look for research on the question but didn't find anything.
As a sidebar, I really like British style baked beans. Trying to buy something locally made in the US with the same amount of sugar is impossible. For example, Heinz Vegetarian beans contains 31.5g! of added sugar per can. Even if you go to Whole Foods, the Amy's brand contains the same amount of sugar. The UK version only contains 12g, so I end up buying the imported beans.
I avoid processed foods whenever practical, added sugar among the reasons. Sugar (and too much of it) is added to a ridiculous % of products, for no good reason.
In your example: try dried (white) beans. Soak overnight, cook ~1 hour until the beans are soft, steep or add eg. potato starch to bind leftover liquid, and then: add tomato paste & salt to taste. Just concentrated tomato, not ketchup / pasta sauce! Personally I add some chili paste as well, various herbs / spices could also go in but are really not needed.
Tastes waaay better than the canned stuff from supermarket. Practically 0 sugar in it, and not as much water as in the canned stuff.
8g of sugar is enough for the taste but not enough for the crack effect to take place. Coca Cola et all did plenty of research into how to get their product to sell ever higher quantities (addictive properties).
As someone who very rarely drinks soda of any kind, I find typical Coke or Pepsi products overwhelmingly sweet and feel sick if I actually drink a whole can. I can stomach Olipop though. (No paid endorsement here, I discovered these through my partner. She is a health-obsessed person with a sweet tooth.)
We have two versions of Coke, both taste exactly the same except one kills you and one doesn't, and people will still voluntarily choose the one that kills you instead.
In mexico they sell horchate in plastic baggies with straws --boy, are they sweet.
It doesn't take malice to add sugar. It only takes people choosing to buy
When I finally manage to cut them out, I will be incredibly proud. But, man, they've made them so, so addicting.
Also... I don't know. I drink bottled water, which has microplastics, eh? There's no winning.
Having little money doesn’t mean your kids don’t magically need fewer calories (and not providing those calories is itself a crime), so if you have an affordable source of calories that’s what you go for, even if those calories come with a side helping of excess calories (stopping hunger requires volume of food so high calorie/volume ratio results in over eating), and often huge amounts of fat as well.
I grew up dirt poor in the early 80s in NZ, and the cheapest food then was oatmeal and dried spaghetti, but by the 90s the time people were having to work and the amount being paid for that work and rent, and the super steep drop in price of McDonald’s etc (it went from being an expensive birthday treat when I was a kid to being cheaper than fish&chips) means that the diet switch was likely unavoidable.
Luckily for me by that point my parents had been able to start working, so fridge and weekly shopping was an option (bread wouldn’t go stale, we could keep meat and vegetables in a freezer), but I can’t imagine having the same outcome if my families life was shifted ten years later (much higher student loans, even less money while they were students, most non junk food being more expensive while junk food was cheaper).
I recognize 80s NZ poverty is not US poverty, but even in NZ I can’t imagine how much harder life would be for a similarly (economically) placed family is today vs for me, everything seems tailored to create obesity and struggles.
This is usually the point where someone interjects some examples of cheap foods that poor people ought to just buy - because everyone, everywhere has trivial access to their middle class shopping experience.
But even past that: Being poor also means subject to ceaseless Denial of Resources Attacks. Resources here meaning funds, attention, energy, ability, hope, will and anything one needs to raise one's station.
Hacking a meal plan struggles to rise to the top of a priority stack when one has dozens of problems in a critical state. And because of poverty, it requires 10x the steps to solve those issues than non-poor people face.
source: decade of hunger-level poverty with kids
Nestle has a long history of doing lots of fucked up things. I try to use as few Nestle products as possible. I don't get why government can't regulate these companies which has a monopoly on everything you eat or drink[1]
It's a reminder that no matter what a company's founder's principles are as soon as it goes public it's a target to have all that reversed by people with no principles at all.
At least Roundtree's foundation survives.
By the way, the name is spelled “Rowntree” (I also used to think the first syllable was “round”).
Only my cat regularly consumes anything on that list.
My problem: I really really really hate Nestlé and don't want to invest even a single penny in them. What can I do? I assume they're in the included in the index. There are ESG-weighted alternatives, but Nestlé managed to get quite good ESG ratings, so I presume they're included there as well.
The pro of this approach: you don't have to think about or manage that task.
The cons: you'll need enough money for that to be worthwhile, you might not see as good a return as you would simply parking your money in an ETF, you will likely face higher fees than normal for active management.
You could save money by actively managing your investments yourself, but that would be quite time consuming and generally requires you to have more upfront capital to invest.
BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, etc. They are all the same.
If you open the article, you might discover that this is about literal baby food for infants as young as six months, not snacks and such for [older] children.
I haven’t seen anyone proposing reasons why these added sugars might be beneficial. Is there a counterargument? Are these countries where calories are very hard to come by, and thus they make the case that they are helping deliver those calories cheaply?
[0]: https://youtu.be/MRWWK-iW_zU
[1]: https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/culture/culture-soci...
Nestle spent enormous effort purposely convincing impoverished mothers in third world countries to spend their little money on Nestle infant formula despite knowing 1) The mothers would not be able to get clean water to make the formula with 2) would not be able to properly refrigerate unused but already mixed formula, which is a foodborne illness time bomb 3) that the mothers could not afford enough formula to adequately feed their infants, and the infants would be malnourished as a result
And they did this while trying to convince people formula was "healthier", while they knew that to be untrue.
When an infant formula company poisoned some kids in China meanwhile, some company execs literally got the death penalty.
I would argue they are much more evil than any oil company.
The amount of terrible ingredients and misleading information they are putting on the market is just stunning. And the cost in terms of people’s health and the cost is enormous.
It’s kind of hard to understand that we let them get away with this.
Absolutely, to a certain extent at least. The food industry and mass-marketing complex has to be stopped, it is harming the health of humanity. We need a higher quality food supply, and we need a ban on most food marketing because it is a uniquely psychologically damaging form of propaganda.
This is not some problem with the character or individual discipline of people living in certain countries, it is the problem with production decisions and a powerful industry that has gone too far.
But it's a kind of "fast attack, slow decay" thing: you get hooked in no time, but it takes ages too lose that craving for sweetness.
No doubt food companies are very aware of this. Get 'em young, and... who cares if it ruins people's health, as long as it's legal & makes nice profit.
They're pretending that it's good for the kids and prey on the uninformed or those who can't afford better alternatives. That's unethical to me.
I do not mean to give you a "woke" lesson or whatever, but the reality where I come from is that people do not have the instruction level to know that this product is harmful to the health. The child will just ask for it, and if they are lucky/hard working enough to afford it, parents will buy it.
> Von der Wiege bis ins Kästle – alles Nestlé!
which roughly translates to
> From the cradle to the casket - everything Nestle!
But something I could not find in the article, are there any other differences between the formulas? So it's focused on added sugar, but do the base ingredients have less sugar? So what is the difference after looking at the numbers? Are they using cheaper ingredients in the low to mid income places?
No doubt they are doing bad things here, but it feels like I am missing some details.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-america-waged-global-...
Perhaps steered in more ways than one. Baby digestive comfort with breast milk varies with maternal diet. Some foods cause substantial infant distress. So there's an exploratory debugging process around material diet expansion, with backing off to a known-good bland diet, and experimental (re)introduction of foods. A friend was very systematic, and ended up with a list of problematic foods. Nothing singular, there are lots of similar lists out there.
Now you get a lot of mail around pregnancy and birth - it's a prime advertising window with new habits being formed. One bit of mail was a substantial booklet of recipes for new moms. Oddly substantial, with no ads. Also oddly, the recipe overlap with her breast-feeding distress list was massive. "WTF?" - a puzzle. How could someone manage to write a recipe booklet for new moms where every recipe harms breast feeding?? Until on the back page, in small print, "(c) Nestlé". Then not a puzzle at all.
The children in higher-income countries were already spoken for by much more well-established multinationals.
It started centuries ago after moving tonnes of raw cargo from plantations in tropical agricultural colonies.
The crop was not commercialized internationally like the crystals were. The syrup was extracted, crystallized, and accumulated for most efficient transportation as a fungible commodity in bulk. The highly concentrated active ingredient of an agricultural product, at a landed cost very low among the digestible alternatives in so many markets. Tropical oils come to mind as another concentrated active ingredient from other crops.
Low cost alone can make some things fly off the shelf by themselves, but when you've got bulk, and trading, you get more surplus than lots of other times. And when the cost of some parcel of excess drops to effectively zero or even negative, it can fly off the shelf with much greater momentum, even if it is temporary while it lasts. But occasional stimulus effects like that over the centuries could outlast a market upset like few other things, sugar (and fat) are widely regarded as habit-forming. No stronger supply-chain to support the habit than to deal with the pure material.
Looks like Nestle is a multinational re-exporting a highly value-added commodity in bulk (at its own scale), and to some tropical countries which have great agricultural potential themselves. No wonder it seems to have been accomplished in a deceptive way.
