Entirety of article about the many forces at play in the UPF industry at the following link -

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...et-newtab-en-us

They ARE the new tobacco. Using the same tactics. RJ Reynolds bought Nabisco, moving to another addictive substance.

It is becoming clearer that it's the industrial ingredients which have really accelerated the effects of a poor diet. Processed carbs are a recognized problem. It leaves them nowhere to go. Good fats and animal protein sources are not dirt cheap.

Yes, WB, the new tobacco companies.



Packaged food is NOT nutritious!!! Learn to read contents label. Shop the outer perimeter, and still read labels, esp dairy . Lots of crap added to dairy: cream cheese, yogurt, sour cream. Look at shredded cheeses for nya______, an antibiotic added to our food. [ pisses me off, cause Antibiotics are only available via a vet now, yet our cheese is covered in an antibiotic!!!] Sheesh

We,my family, are making a real effort to cook dinner. No prepackaged food, unless boxed lettuce. 😂

Quick meals like fry a steak, steamed veg with butter, and a baked potato for some.

EASY!

The more I read of that article, the more appalled I was.

So it would seem!

Ultra-processed food is 'as addictive as smoking'

While UPFs are definitely as addictive as smoking, what they all seem to fail to acknowledge is that even homemade UPFs are just as addictive.

They only thing they have that keeps you from eating them all day long is the number of hours it would take to make the homemade cookies/cakes/pies... or for that matter homemade bread.

But what happens when you have hours every day that you can spend making homemade goodies?

2020 is a perfect example - people who had never even eaten homemade bread before started baking bread from scratch because they were stuck at home most of the time and had teh hours to devote to bread baking. If you're going through 5 lbs of flour every week just making bread - that's easily 5 loaves of bread. And it's much tastier than the stuff you buy ready made, so you're not just toasting a slice for breakfast and using a couple slices for a sandwich for lunch - you're eating the bread at every meal, and every time you feel like a snack.

Flour is a highly processed ingredient - doesn't matter if it's whole grain flour or bleached white flour - it's still takes a lot of processing. It will have some kind of fat in it - and if the recipe doesn't specifically call for real butter, it's probably some kind of highly refined seed oil. Sugar, which is also highly refined - gotta have a least a little in the bread recipe to feed the yeast - and whole grain breads call for a lot of sugars to hide the off-taste of whole grains that are going rancid. Those who think homemade bread (or homemade cookies, cakes, pies) are not UPFs are just deceiving themselves because they're being made from highly processed ingredients, which makes them UPFs, whether they're factory made or not. (They may lack the preservatives and packaging of grocery store UPFs, but it's still the same basic principle of irresistible, addictive food.

The UPF manufacturers have taken the processing to the extreme - they want products that can be stored for a very long time without showing signs of rancidity or spoilage, so they use ingredients that don't go bad easily (sugar, flour) and throw in preservatives to make sure they keep longer.

Most people are herding animals.

If the salespeople in your living room (TV and other media) tells you enough to eat horse manure, you will get millions of people eating and paying big bucks for horse manure.

They will write articles and books by "Doctors" telling you how much you need to eat horse manure, they will show influencers (celebrities) eating horse manure, they will sell horse manure ovens, and tell you that you are just not an 'in' person if you aren't eating horse S___!

We, as a herd, still haven't learned to think for ourselves. Those who do, are outliers.

The last few years, I've spent a lot of time being sick in bed and watching Youtube I do curate my watching, and rigorously tell unfavorable stations suggested to me to go away. Constant vigilance, price of freedom stuff.

I got hooked on the people debunking Fat Acceptance/HAES, and all the bizarre behaviors in the food/diet/health worlds, and learned a lot. To me, it's undeniable that these people are "hooked" because of these behaviors. It's willful feeding their feelings, instead of finding adult ways of handling things. Having struggled with disordered eating myself, I know how much we long for a simple solution, and having gotten to the other side of it, I can say, yes, it's a drug or it's gambling or shopping or abusing your prescription.

It's a disordered coping skill and should be treated as such, but no other problem, except perhaps shopping, floods the environment so much with tasty ease-of-use.

That's why we have stats like 80% of the population is metabolically deranged. And now we know this leads to being mentally deranged, too.

It's like some kind of slow-motion zombie thriller.

If you are used to soothing yourself with food, 2020 turned it up to eleven. The newest science explains how this is also about the added multiplier of the new additives and processed products being a bigger percentage of the damage done, compared to medieval times, when we couldn't process shortcuts to the New World.

Look what happened with the sugar trade. With the twin prods of profit and addiction, just like when coffee hit Europe and kings tried to ban it because "they stay up late talking and getting ideas!"

Under such an exponential influence, the "Pandemic 20" would turn into "UPF-4 50" because of the food's effect on appetite, mood, and the increase in the brain's appetite center.



We have many areas of the US which emphasize conformity over creativity. And it shows. I do think a lot of things would improve if that tendency was corrected.

Ultra-processed foods are everywhere and can fit into the MyPlate healthy eating platform. The seed oils are considered healthy and meat fats are considered unhealthy. All the added colorings, preservatives, and emulsifiers are FDA-approved.
People are being conned into thinking that real food is unhealthy and industrial foods are healthy.

I've observed that corporations don't "do business" anymore.

• Merge instead of competing on value
• Create a shell company, dump crap on the market, dissolve it
• Fire a bunch of employees to make the "growth" appear when it's not
• Wall Street demands constant growth or they will kill you, so they fake it

It is con artists all the way down. That's how "business" is done, these days.

For instance, a couple of years ago I bought an evaporative humidifier because there's so much less to go wrong. But when I tried to buy a replacement filter, it wasn't listed. It was hard to get to the business and ask, and they were all, "Send us a picture and we'll try to find one" and that's not what I call Customer Service.

Yesterday I bought "sensitive" earrings and they made my ears itch. What they have done is made me not want to buy things. Which, as we all know, is not that AMERICAN

This is so true - and it's been going on for a while, just getting worse over time.

The grocery store I worked for started adding "guiding stars" to shelf tags to promote healthy foods. Products only get stars if they meet certain nutritional criteria based on the nutrition facts label, and then they get 1-3 stars, denoting good, better, best.

When I worked there, they were slowly working their way through rating center of store foods. I see that at this point, they're rating fresh produce, meats, seafood, and dairy.

Of course the rating depends on things like high fiber, low fat, low sodium, and lower amounts of added sugars.

Several flavored greek yogurts are getting 3 stars - because they're non-fat or low-fat and have fruit additions plus extras like kale and barley. I understand the full fat ones automatically failing their obvious fat-phobic criteria, but several plain greek yogurts with no junky additions get zero stars, and the only reason I can see for that is that they don't have fruit, vegetables or grains added to them.

For some foods, the ratings make sense - but the ratings are definitely biased against sodium, fats (particularly saturated fats), and cholesterol. It looks to me like added sugars are more likely to get a pass than fats. And apparently protein content doesn't count at all.

If you want to check out the crazy ratings some foods get - google for guiding stars shelf tags. That page will explain how their criteria for ratings work. Then you can bring up the food finder page and enter the name of a food in the search bar.

As an example of ridiculous ratings:

Ghirardelli 100% cocoa unsweetened cocoa powder gets 3 stars because it has no saturated fat.

But -

Ghirardelli unsweetened 100% cocoa powder only gets 2 stars because that version has 0.39g sat fat (even though it's still 0% RDA).

The two products are virtually identical, except for a slight difference in the name - and that tiny smidgen of sat fat that remains in the cocoa powder because it's not quite as processed as the one with no sat fat.


In many cases their ratings system actually pushes more highly processed foods - de-fatted, or more additions to "increase nutrition" (additions that you could easily add yourself).

These helpful things are just to confuse people about what such choices really mean. Like that ridiculous Tufts Compass.

It's their criteria for what constitutes good nutrition that's the real problem.

I believe they really are trying to be helpful. Their heart is in the right place, it's just upside down, because of the upside down nutrition criteria.

All a corporation is interested in is perpetually increasing profits. It is the only reason to have a corporation. Anything and everything that makes the stock worth more next quarter than last quarter is fair game. If illegal, bribe the lawmakers (through campaign funding) to make it legal. If that doesn't work, figure out other ways to get around it.

If the stocks don't keep increasing, why would anyone want to keep their stock? So if the stocks don't keep increasing, the stockholders will sell.

Karl Marx and others saw the evils of corporations, but sadly, his solution proved to be even worse.

So we have to think for ourselves, and do our own research, or we will just buy what makes the corporation more money, even if it is bad for us.