Having a greater number of competing definitions does not generally make a term more meaningful. (Take "art" for example.)

Exactly. Terms that are meaningful have one generally accepted definition. When everyone and their brother are coming up with their own pet definitions, that is when a term is considered meaningless.

The next time you're watching a commercial from some company renowned for marketing success (Apple, Coke, etc) pay attention to how much time in the ad the product is in any way mentioned, and how much is... 'other stuff.' That other stuff is the point of the ad, the actual product is largely irrelevant. The world would be vastly better without large scale marketing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model

The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.

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.

(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)

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.

The key is, eat things from the outside ring of the store, not the middle cookie sections.

I haven't gotten that "not too much" part down yet.

E-330 is citric acid which is lemon juice

E-621 is MSG which is just more meaty tasting salt from seaweed sources instead of rock.

The E classification is for regulation testing, not a label of how processed something is.

Another rule of thumb other than ingredient list is who made it. Your local baker will probably have a less processed method than a mega factory like Bimbo Hovis or any other macro manufacturer that can put 1000 loaves in every supermarket in the country every day

Cake and cookies are bread and made with the same ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, salt, herbs.

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.

All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.

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?

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

There were a ton of programs after WWII to improve the nutrition of the country. This largely meant raising calories to prevent malnutrition. And the 80s are as good a point as any other to where that succeeded.

We developed, in Snus, an apparently cancer-free chewing tobacco. We developed, in Zyn, a cancer-free, hygienic chewing tobacco with fewer GI issues. We developed, in e-cigarettes / vapes, a cancer-free, COPD-free, carbon monoxide free cigarette.

These should be regarded as public health miracles even if there remain some symptoms of partaking. If 80% of the population is addicted to Zyn or vapes but there are no smokers, you get far better health outcomes than a situation where 20% of the population are smoking and 5% are chewing.

Again, maybe not where you are, but there are definitively countries where both adults and children have tabacco under their lip for most of their waking hours, with no spitting or exhalation involved, as they're inside school/offices, can't really just spit there, even the non-synthetic stuff, as that's relatively new.

Zyn is specifically synthetic isn't it? You still seem to be mostly focused on synthetic nicotine, but the same behavior been observed for many, many decades with non-synthetics too.

Swedish Snus has been around a long time, isn't linked to cancer at all, and has no bad effect on your teeth and gums. Snus is actually associated with vast drops in cancer rates, because it usually replaces smoking. Snus is also no-spit - I think the difference between it and chewing tobaccos is that they are roasted and that snus is steamed. Makes a huge difference healthwise.

I don't have anything to say about the synthetic stuff, I'm not familiar. It's a bizarre industry that cropped up during a period where snus was trying to get into the market and the tobacco companies were trying to keep them out.

Somehow, cigarette companies lobbied to get snus caught up in cigarette taxes, even without the actual health risk. They were only even required to put the weakest possible warning on the package, because the health effects of snus have been well-studied and they're not associated with anything serious, except for nicotine addiction itself (which makes it a good substitute for smoking.)

The big US cigarette companies marketed a few horrible "snus" lines, with the marketing and goal that they would be a replacement product for when a smoker couldn't take a smoke break, and they were weak. I assume these synthetic lines developed to avoid taxes in some way by pretending to be a sort of medical product rather than a tobacco product, like a nicotine gum.

Snus is actually a better Nicorette, I suspected that the nicotene replacement industry had something to do with the sabotage of snus. Snus is cheap, free of health consequences, and doesn't lead you to associate something as addictive as chewing with nicotine consumption. Snus just quietly sits behind your lip, the minis are undetectable by the people you're interacting with, and they smell nice so they don't ruin your breath. Why would you choose a more expensive synthetic alternative?

The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well-stocked stores as food deserts.

Supposing those methodological problems were resolved, proximity to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption between groups. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in the cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].

For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in areas where elevated crime otherwise renders them economically unviable — are noticeably under-discussed in favor of the heavy handed solutions of the type you raised here.

All of which exemplifies the typical failure mode inherent to many "socialist" policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24094

But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.

Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.

I don't think this is necessarily true everywhere/for everyone, it's really not common in Sweden to walk around spitting just because you have tobacco under your lip, as people sit in offices and stuff with this in their mouth, can't really go around a spit indoors.

The Snus saliva (actual snus) just gets swallowed. Same with Zyn and others.

If you remove approved commercial options for promoting yourself, like advertisements, then most of the other options left for promotion are essentially spam.

If your answer is word of mouth, that's naïve. I've worked with over 100 startups at very various stages of marketing in the last 15 years. Word of mouth is fire in a pan. It is very industry dependent, context dependent, and company dependent.

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

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

this is the chemical composition of a strawberry

my phd-less grandfather will have to now avoid his favourite dessert :(

The underlying issue is some mix of what industrial processes make possible combined with food scientist working with taste test panels to hyper optimize food. When you spend all this time and effort trying to create a snack where people are always left craving just a bit more you end up with the kinds of junk food that we have.

We want there to be some simple answer of "it's these ingredients, or this specific combination" but the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.

Food health science has always had difficulties with just how complicated the actual processing of food in our bodies is and the more we look the more complex it gets. But the "ultra-processed foods" test seems to be working out as a successful heuristic to identify especially unhealthy foods. Given the issues health science has had with coming up with exact answers a heuristic that's pretty reliable (even if imperfect) is a pretty big win!

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.

And usually the fats have to be processed because fat is generally not shelf-stable.

That was the “let me stop you right there” moment.

(Not even going into how much these horrendous procedures cost!)

The recovery period sucked, I needed antibiotics and couldn’t eat anything solid for two weeks.

If you can behaviourally prevent needing gum grafts you should.

If you really think Oreos, Pringles, and Lunchables aren't ultra-processed and extremely unhealthy, there's no point in having a discussion.

Parsing words seems super intellectual when you're 12 years old arguing with your mom about bed time, but it gets pretty boring pretty quickly after that. Something to consider.

If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.

Availability is the most important value of nutrition, above all else. I expect your comment was made having more nuance, but that just highlights the importance of a clear definition. Without it we are left to guess at what it is you mean.

> 1. Ultra processed food is a media hype -> totally dismiss it

Don't let the media decide what you think, whether you want to go against them or you want to support them. Your faith or distrust in some media organization or segment has no effect on the truth value of some statement being made. They are adding commentary.

> 2. Ultra processed food is often used without proper classification and would be more useful to have well defined sub categories

Don't come up with words and then struggle to define them, or worse, argue with people about their definitions. Language is a tool. Discuss actual things, and use words to label those actual things. If they do not offer a definition for "ulta-processed food," do not help them. It is not up to you to come up with categories of food to fit the case they are making about "ultra-processed food." It is up to them to associate their health theories with the food they are trying to classify within them, both statistically and with guesses about the mechanisms.

Don't feel like because one can have a discussion that it makes sense to have one. If I make up a word, you shouldn't waste time debating its meaning, you should just ask me to give you a clear definition of how I'm using it.

> I think this is misleading and dishonest, which is why I am being direct.

Good save, everyone reading this totally thinks that's what you were doing and not just showing your whole ass while making my point for me.

If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.

Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.

The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.

it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.

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.

How is the food unhealthy? By having lots of fats? Or high salt? Or high sugar? Is it perhaps the ingredients that make it unhealthy?

What other people are saying is that this communicates almost nothing. What it does is allow people who are doing very bizarre things to food to hide among people who are doing pretty well known, well-tested, and ancient things to food. It's literally an argument to ignore the specifics, it's an argument for ignorance.

Sure, but my worry isn't just sodium benzoate. It's also deep frying, or lots of sugar, or just being vacuously caloric while not providing saiety.

There are a lot of different things done to foods that tend to make them variously unhealthy to consume in quantity, a problem not shared by, say, cucumber or carrots. "Ultra-processed" is a useful linguistic catch all for these.

Some people lack the language skills to deal with terms that are not rigorously defined from a scientific sense, which honestly speaks to a failure of the education system rather than the term being a problem.

The only point I'm making is that it's nonsensical for you to claim to be receiving "Soros bucks" for shilling ultra-processed food as healthy. That's not a stance the Soros foundation takes.