Tangentially related, but I take a look at the amount of sugar in a regular cola (39g of added sugar in a 12oz can of Coke!!), and I wonder how much damage that has done to my body (and taste buds) over the years (let alone society as a whole). I always wondered what a Coke with just half the sugar would taste like. I think I would enjoy it. Well, recently, my grocery store has been stocking De la Calle Tepache. It's not cola, but still, it's a carbonated soft drink with just 8g of sugar in a 12 oz can. It's got less than a quarter of the sugar of Coke and it's still plenty sweet!
How many people could have avoided diabetes or other health problems if coca-cola just set the standard that 8g of sugar is enough?
Looking at the ingredients of "De la Calle Tepache" it contains ERYTHRITOL, which is a sugar alcohol/artificial sweetener but does not count as "sugar" on the nutrition facts label. This is why it tastes "plenty sweet".
It's not correct to say that it's an artificial sweetener -- not all non-caloric sweeteners are artificial, and not all processed additives are synthetic. That is to say, erythritol occurs in the environment in all kinds of settings, where e.g. sucralose is artificial because it needs to be synthesized by humans in a laboratory.
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!
>It's not correct to say that it's an artificial sweetener
And what does that matter for the context of this conversation? Honestly?
The conversation isn't about whether or not it's synthetic sweetener. It's about the total amount of added sweeteners in the product. Therefore, any sweetener, synthetic or natural, count toward this end, correct?
Does the erythritol in food products come direct from nature? Not according to wikipedia
> Erythritol is manufactured using enzymatic hydrolysis of the starch from corn to generate glucose.[25] Glucose is then fermented with yeast or another fungus to produce erythritol. A genetically engineered mutant form of Yarrowia lipolytica, a yeast, has been optimized for erythritol production by fermentation, using glycerol as a carbon source and high osmotic pressure to increase yields up to 62%.
So I feel like your specific wording is just as misleading as calling it "artificial".
Did they control for the fact that most non-nutritive sweeteners get consumed in a diet of highly processed foods, which are more likely to be causative of CVD than just the sweetener?
I drank a couple Cokes a day for many, many years. I finally decided to quit. It took a full year before losing desire for Coke. I tried a few sips of it, and it actually tasted bad.
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 quit consuming protein powder, too. I can't find a brand that is just protein powder, without any sweetener of any sort, even at health nut stores. I switched to eating boiled eggs instead.
edit - I should add, you can get a bit of an idea of the quality of the protein powder by just looking at the percentage of protein in it. Nutricost is 85% and Bulk Nutrients is 87%. Doesn't leave much room to shove other ingredients in with protein levels that high.
NOW has unflavored protein produced in a GMP-certified facility. You can also buy protein powder directly from dairy farms, which is helpful when there's a shortage/price-spike - I've bought from Dana farms. It's also significantly more fresh and tasteless. Buying from Dana Farms you can either buy it with a small amount of emulsifier to help it dissolve in water or just single-ingredient pure without that.
If purity is particularly important to you I'd recommend "isolate" over "concentrate", it will have even lower amounts of lactose, which can benefit people who are severely lactose-intolerant.
That's surprising, my local upscale supermarket even has like multiple brands of plain whey protein. I'd probably just order it online then. I like to mix it sometimes with cocoa powder, then just more or less chug it lol
Difficulty finding it could just be where you live? Every supplement shop within 50 miles of me (of which there are only 4) has an unflavored, unsweetened protein. And, if I type "unflavored unsweetened whey protein isolate" into amazon, there's 30 bags for me to choose from. I randomly clicked on 5 of the first page results, and none of them had a sweetener on their nutrition facts/ingredient list.
I too ran into that issue as I nearly cut all sugar from my life since 6 months.
As the other pointed out, here is my alternative, which is great [0]! I once drank it raw, it was terrible. But usually I blend it with the European version of Soylent powder and then it tastes amazing.
1. https://www.natureletics.de/products/natureletics-pure-natur...
You could use Kefir to make your own whey protein. You use milk but the Kefir actually eats the sugar in the milk and the whey ends up separated from the fat.
One that's easy to find in stores is "collagen peptides", I add them to oatmeal, pretty good. And to echo a sibling comment, unflavored whey protein is harder to find, but it's out there, one of my grocers stocks it.
I drink Orgain which I buy from Costco (the regular 20g one, not a fan of their “plant based one” or 30g one.) It uses monk fruit as a sweetener instead of sugar.
Once I realized I only liked soft drinks because of the carbonation, it was easy to switch to seltzer water. Now not only can I not stand most sugary drinks, I've almost entirely lost my sweet-tooth for everything. I basically only drink water, coffee, and whiskey in various proportions but mostly water. A little cream in the coffee.
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.
> Then decided that was probably just as bad, and now drink sparkling water.
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.
I have a similar story, used to drink a litre of coke every couple of days when I was 15. At some point I decided I didn't want that life any more and quit. It's been several years now and I still can't stand the taste of coke. It just tastes so artificial with an awful after taste; and I've never really had a sweet tooth anyway.
Sparkling water is also bad, albeit significantly less so.
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).
Whoa, in the UK they changed Coca Cola to contain "only" 11.4g carbohydrates. I think that was a response to the Soft Drinks Industry Levy of 2018. To me it tastes the same but without the stickiness that made me want to brush my teeth immediately afterwards.
> made me want to brush my teeth immediately afterwards.
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.
Are you sure that the difference isn't from sugar in the UK Coca Cola vs. high fructose corn syrup in US Coca Cola? The prevalence of HFCS in the US is partially (largely?) due to corn subsidies on top of the cheapness of producing HFCS [1].
I got rid of my car about a year ago and I got fed up of carrying bottles of the shit back from Tesco so just switched to water. I wasn't even drinking the sugar stuff. Made me think about the whole drinks industry a little.
They were a tyranny in our house too! I bought a Sodastream, HobbyBrew CO₂ cannister and an adapter to join the two together. For the cost of like 30 bottles of Diet Coke I now have cheap fizzy water and the kids can add squash to it.
Yeah the CO2 bottles and exchange is expensive as hell. It's apparently cost effective if you use a commercial one but the outlay is pretty high. Not worth it either way IMHO. I just put up with flat shit.
There's also Sparkel, which uses a baking soda + citric acid powder in a separate reaction chamber. The cost is pretty low per bottle if you buy the bulk powders and mix it yourself; has been a while but when I had a Sparkel, I think I worked out that the cost was somewhere under 10 cents per 750ml bottle.
Juice is not really healthy, it may not be a dangerous part of a particularly active lifestyle but for most lifestyles it probably is dangerous, especially considering that it is probably replacing whole fruit.
I wonder how much sugar craving depends on age. As a child I would happily eat spoonfuls of plain sugar. Children seem much happier eating candy, etc. than adults. I wonder if sugar provides some additional value to children.
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.
I think this is part of it. Iirc “studies show” appreciation of bitterness (coffee, dark chocolate, broccoli) correlated with age. Iirc it was biologically related, but don’t quote me on that.
I've seen speculation that this is evolutionarily driven.
Kids do not have the wisdom to know which bitter foods are ok and which could harm you, so they avoid them all or die. By adulthood the selection pressure is much smaller because you will have learned what is safe to eat.
Part of it too is not just age but also careful engineering to breed out bitter compounds. Case example: brusselsprouts
"About 30 years ago, a Dutch scientist identified the chemicals that made brussels sprouts bitter. He selected seed varieties with lower levels of the bitter chemicals and bred new high-yielding varieties that tasted less bitter."
Your taste buds adjust over time after you cut back. I used to drink a TON of soda and on the rare occasions I have one it's usually too sweet and I can't finish. There is sparkling water cola (no sugar, no sweetner) available in my area and it honestly tastes pretty close to what I remember cola tasting like at my peak soda days.
I would be curious to this as well if they truly made it less sweet. In the past they tried this with Coke C2 but instead swapped it with artificial sweeteners (yuck). Nowadays I only drink sparkling water and avoid added sugars like the plague. Now I find Coke way too sweet now to the point that it's enjoyable. I can't believe that when I was younger I would drink multiple cans per day.
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.
> Trying to buy something locally made in the US with the same amount of sugar is impossible.
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).
There is another alternative that is getting more popular in the US, which are Olipop sodas. They are sweetened with stevia and have only 2-5g of sugar, plus a lot of added fiber.
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.)
The funny thing about Coke is that they have literally invented a version that tastes exactly the same, except it has zero calories and zero sugar. It's called Coke Zero.
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.
I agree. In my experience all the Coke Diet/Zero/etc varieties has this really distinctive taste and the aftertaste is also quite different from Classic. My husband is a fan of Zero and also claims it tastes the same. He has occassionally poured Zero into a glass for me thinking I couldn't tell the difference. Every single time I take one sip and that's all I need to identify it. YMMV.
That bad artificial sweetener aftertaste is way less pronounced if you are making a Rum and Coke though, so I always use Coke Zero for my adult beverages. Can't let the sugar kill me when I'm having several cups of vodka!
I think it does. But even so, 80% of the taste with 0% of the calories seems like a bargain. Getting some marginal pleasure for 140 extra calories seems like a bad trade-off unless you're not trying to lose weight.
For me Zero tastes quite different and quite unpleasant. I had the same senstation of unpleasant flavour with Diet as well. If the only option was Zero/Diet/etc I probaly would just give up Coke altogethrer.
Diet Coke absolutely tastes different, but Coke and Coke Zero taste exactly the same - I doubt you would get a reliable result if you did a blind test.
I find this varies from person to person. I have nothing to back this up, but I have a hunch it is a genetic thing, like how cilantro tastes like soap to some but not to others.
I can identify the taste of Coke Zero (or anything with artificial sweeteners) vs coke 100% of the time. They barely even taste similar to me. My wife can’t taste a difference at all.
No, it doesn't taste the same. It's different from Diet Coke because Diet Coke has it's own unique formulation but Coke Zero 100% has that artificial sweetener taste.
I can assure you that one sip is enough for me to reliably identify it. Both Diet and Zero leave a very distinct and unpleasant aftertaste that's just absent on the regular one.
(doesn't apply to Pepsi though - here the regular one also tastes bad now as it contains sweeteners as well, so I doubt I'd tell it apart from Pepsi Max unless trained beforehand - they're both gross, so I unfortunately had to switch to Coca-Cola for my occasional coke cravings)
You're thinking of Diet Coke. Aspartame absolutely does have a taste, but it has also been studied an absolutely insane amount over literal decades and nobody can ever actually pin down a negative health effect from it.
Better the devil you know. Everyone knows that sugar is bad for you. But aspartame is sold as being good for you because it’s zero calories. Must be good, right? It’s Diet Coke! A diabetic friend said his doctor told him regular coke was better for him. It causes migraines (source: me). I have heard many doctors say it is worse than real sugar. Yes, we don’t understand it yet. But we are pretty sure it’s bad, that’s why it’s the devil.
If you manage to take a break from Coke for a while then when you come back to it it's really undrinkable. I personally stopped drinking this or any similar hi sugar soft drinks a while ago and really makes me nauseous if I try.
Coca Cola actually made a reduced calorie with half the sugar content. It was called Coca Cola Life. It tasted less sweet obviously but not something I would notice if I didn't pour the drink myself.
I despise these companies for pumping sugar into everything... however, understand that street drinks in those countries are plenty sweet themselves and can be less hygienic as well --street food is also very fatty or oily. So, both local and foreign chains or brands exploit sugar and fats but so do the mom and pop or in many cases, kid street vendors. The stuff sells and costs less.
In mexico they sell horchate in plastic baggies with straws --boy, are they sweet.
Why despise them? If you mom put more sugar in one of her recipes because she thought it made it more tasty, and she got compliments on it when she served it, would you despise her?
It doesn't take malice to add sugar. It only takes people choosing to buy
Yeah, that's why my drink list contains mostly water, coffee, and tea. Trying to cut the energy drink habit, which is incredibly hard (they have 0g sugar, although for sure have artificial sugars). I'm down to about 1 per day, sometimes none at all.
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.
I'm not a Nestle fan, but I'm not sure they're evil and they're nowhere close to the most evil company. One well-documented prime example would be Krupp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arms_of_Krupp
Making weapons of war is a kind of banal evil that most people can wrap their heads around.
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.
If you read the Wiki, you'll see that weapon's manufacturing is nowhere near the worst thing Krupp did. Krupp used Jewish slave labor during WWII, and treated the slaves so badly that the SS criticized them for it.
They're up there for most evil currently-extant Western company. Certainly near the top for most evil company that a median HN user might directly interact with the products of (unlike, say, arms manufacturers).
I would argue they are much more evil than any oil company.
Ah yes. The well known categories of junk food being bottled water and coffee. Maybe you're one of the weirdos who categorize pizza as "junk food", but no reasonable person would expect that California Pizza Kitchen, DiGiorno, Delissio , Jacks and Tombstone (which are all sold next to each other on the same shelves) are all owned by the same company. That accounts for 80%+ of the chains in major grocery stores. The "competition" is entirely fabricated.
I think many people interact with Krupp's modern incarnation on a very regular basis; ThyssenKrupp is one of the largest manufacturers of elevators in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThyssenKrupp
Not trying to give Nestle a pass here since they have done some really bad things.
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.
I've got no idea about finances and would like to invest a meaningful part of my money in ETFs. Because I'm so clueless I assume I cannot really go wrong with a ETF that is tracking the MSCI Developed World Index.
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.
If you have enough money for it to be worthwhile, you can essentially approach a financial advisor with exactly your needs and they will manage your money to ignore Nestlé (though check their actual qualifications and whether they're a fiduciary).
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.
If it's worth it to you, tell your investment manager that you want to track MSCI Developed World minus Nestlé. You'll get charged a fee for a manually-managed brokerage compared to just dumping everything into an ETF, but this type of detailed preference is literally what active investment management is for.
A recent piece from ProPublica taps into the related "toddler milk" phenomenon and how, in essence, it's a way for formula manufacturers to capture the market in areas where they legally can't advertise baby formula.
Nestlé is a truly awful company, and their CEO has historically been a terrible human being, but… this isn’t a nestlé specific activity? As far as I can tell this is standard behaviour from every company involved in snack foods, candy, soda, etc? And they go to great lengths to to hide that’s what they’re doing - most of the “juice” you can buy at US stores are essentially just soda minus the bubbles, growing up in NZ a huge part of childhood was flavored milk (many more and better flavors than in the US - lime was my favorite :) ) than in the US, but those all had absurd amounts of sugar as well, despite being advertised/pushed as healthy milk products for children (I still love them all and try to pretend they’re not functionally soda when they’re available).
> this isn’t a nestlé specific activity? As far as I can tell this is standard behaviour from every company involved in snack foods, candy, soda, etc?
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.
Sorry I didn’t include that as well, but it’s the same category of “cheap high calorie”, and nestle is still not alone in that. That’s most cheap baby formula producers
I think the point is that the offer products that cover a significant portion of the market throughout your entire life, so they are highly incentivized to act in such a way to get you to consume sugary products (theirs) as much as possible.
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?
There's some specific things they're doing, like adding sugar to infant formula and milk, that they don't do in Europe but do in lower income countries apparently. That seems like a very conscious thing targeted at very young children?
> Parents looking for information on infant nutrition may be directed to this platform and be exposed to content that steers them towards Nestlé products. [...] recipes
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.
>children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries
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.
It’s ok to hate on Nestle but let’s not forget that most of the food industry is basically leading a war on the world’s health in search of profits.
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.
Who is "we"? I don't eat the junk. I'd rather other people didn't either, and you probably agree, but should we force our preferences on everyone else?
> but should we force our preferences on everyone else?
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.
Yeah, there’s a real failure to understand that sugar and junk food while unhealthy in the long term remains the most cost effective source of calories.
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.
> Yeah, there’s a real failure to understand that sugar and junk ... remains the most cost effective source of calories.
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.
Depends on how you eat. Stuff like rice and beans is cheap and good for you, available everywhere too. Easy to make, probably 15-20 mins all in with most of that passively simmering rice.
The original article was about lower-income "countries". I pointing out it's also in the US. So yeah, pretty much everywhere. Unless you have data to prove otherwise, you're wrong.
I think sugar consumption is not unique to Lower-income countries. A study showed that a US kids consumes more than 49 pounds of sugar a year. All these are the processed food from the big box grocery stores. I suspect the sugar consumption is way less over in those countries where as a large segment of the population is unable to purchase processed food from the expensive grocery stores. Also sugary drinks are consumed by the kids at school to get some energy, many are unable to afford a breakfast and opt for that sugary syrup sold at the school canteen.
The damning thing here is that they are trying to introduce sugar overconsumption in markets not already exposed to it. They will sell two baby food products that are labelled exactly the same, with the only difference being higher sugar content in the version sold in the 3rd world. What the science tells us is that sugar addiction at young age means sugar addiction in adulthood, which is something Nestle has plenty of products to cater towards. They are aware of rich educated markets having some degree of education to avoid giving their children sugary products (and that these markets already have plenty of adult sugar addiction), and are relying on every other market to have no option but Nestle.
Nestle is an evil company, it has caused deaths of thousands of babies and continues to add to that body count shamelessly. Countries should unite in fighting this evil and prosecute it’s executives with death penalty. Hopefully indian government bans this company
I just think it's hilarious that the Swiss founder, Heinrich Nestle, legally changed his very German name to Henri Nestlé because he thought it sounded more posh and bourgeois, thus masking his family's modest origins.
It's also aquired taste: after enough time on a 0-added-sugar diet, you don't miss the sugar anymore.
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.
Sugar is normal and delicious. There's a whole world of pastries, cakes, desserts eaten in every culture in the world. Fruits are sugary and delicious. Not all sugary treats are an addiction conspiracy. I don't understand 0-sugar people, as if there is a "default state" of being where 0 sugar must be consumed? According to whom?
Alcohol is also consumed in all cultures. It's still bad for you.
I'm not a zero sugar person, but close - I'll eat fruit, or some foods with minimal sugar added (peanut butter).
It's been way better for my health than my former daily ice cream diet. I've no doubt many can walk the tightrope, but it's much better for me to leave behind the sweets entirely. Stick with it long enough and it's not so hard to maintain, and it keeps maintaining weight much easier.
To me it's more of a response to how sugar has been added and is available too easily in people's diets in the current year, it's simpler for the cognitive load to cut it out entirely than to moderate it.
I can see it the same way on how drug abusers will quit it entirely and rather than trying to have a moderate take on using since it's too much work to be moderate.
Although, sugar is not the same as a drug, the response of cutting the substance out entirely has some parallels to drug recovery. So the movement makes conceptual sense to me at least, and it's not like cutting it out is actively unhealthy. So I don't think it's a big deal to be a "zero sugar" person
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 depressing as hell that a company like Nestle was allowed to buy a company like Roundtree.
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.
Upvoted your comment because it’s so true. The Quakers have a great tradition of setting up ethical enterprises. I mostly know Rowntree because of the chocolate but I also remember the family came to Ireland during the Great Famine to provide relief to the victims of racist British “laissez faire” economics.
By the way, the name is spelled “Rowntree” (I also used to think the first syllable was “round”).
You can just Google "ice cream brands market share" and learn that Nestle has nothing resembling a monopoly on ice cream. The 5 top brand owners combined represent less than 1/3 of the market.
Because we operate on a banlist instead of an allowlist of ingredients. Banned sugar in baby porridge? Oh, we just broke down the wheat (to simpler carbs/high insulin response)
I know I will burn karma for this but what the heck: If you don't like it, don't buy it. That their sugar-added products are not sold in Switzerland or Germany is simply because people there would not buy them enough to make profit. There is nothing unethical about adding sugar to a food.
clearly someone here is probably coming from a wealthy country and never had food insecurity in their vicinity.
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.
Nestlé is a corporate serial killer who should have been given the death penalty years ago. The fact that we know what they've done before, but still have to watch them continue to intentionally hurt children over and over again across decades while nothing is done about it just shows how our society has been shaped to make us powerless. If we had any ability at all to impose meaningful consequences against Nestlé we'd clearly have done it by now. If the literal millions of infants they murdered weren't enough to make that happen, and the millions of child slaves harvesting their cocoa hasn't, I very much doubt that added sugar is going to be the thing that finally does.
How many people could have avoided diabetes or other health problems if coca-cola just set the standard that 8g of sugar is enough?
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