Diabetes is not always a byproduct of over consuming sugar and a company producing sugary snacks and diabetes pills does not force or even encourage over consumption of sugar.
"does not force or even encourage over consumption of sugar."
Actually they do encourage you to eat a lot of sugar. Specially children. Their marketing campaigns are specially tailored to that objective. Just look at the cereal advertisements, most of their cereal brands have a lot of sugar in them.
If that is not encouraging over consumption of sugar I don't know what is...
"Look, we're not encouraging over-consumption of sugar. It's just that we know that people will over-consume sugar, and we make food packed with sugar, and we market it to those people."
I'm sure they'd say something like that, but it is false. People were not eating gobs of sugar for breakfast until someone came up with sweetened breakfast cereal and marketed it.
I used to eat a lot of sweets when I was young. Not for breakfast, because that's not the customary here, but at all other times. I liked that stuff. As I grew older, I lost my taste for all that. I have seen this pattern in so many other people too. Kids like sweet stuff. As long as they are active and are in the normal weight range, I don't see any reason to discourage it either, except at night, after brushing teeth.
Hardly. Sugar has been made the scapegoat. Many things contribute to diabetes, sugar is but one among them. Meat has been shown to contribute significantly[0]. If you dig into it further, you'll see study after study blaming "normal" amounts of meat consumption as a factor for an increased risk of diabetes. And yet, few people want to give it any thought.
> Furthermore, total red meat intake was positively associated with total energy intake, intakes of all fatty acids, cholesterol, and protein but inversely associated with dietary carbohydrate, fiber, magnesium intakes, and glycemic load. Similar associations were observed for total meat and processed meat.
and also
> In the age- and energy-adjusted models, total red meat and processed meat were significantly associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes
This study does not go into refined carbs, but it does adjust for total energy. Don't focus on just this one paper. They this is just one of many such papers. The link between meat and diabetes is well established at this point.
> Red meat intake was not associated with CHD (n=4 studies; relative risk per 100-g serving per day=1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.81 to 1.23; P for heterogeneity=0.36) or diabetes mellitus (n=5; relative risk=1.16; 95% confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.46; P=0.25). Conversely, processed meat intake was associated with 42% higher risk of CHD (n=5; relative risk per 50-g serving per day=1.42; 95% confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.89; P=0.04) and 19% higher risk of diabetes mellitus (n=7; relative risk=1.19; 95% confidence interval, 1.11 to 1.27; P<0.001). Associations were intermediate for total meat intake.
Note that "processed meat" means any method of extending shelf-life like smoking, curing, adding salt or preservatives, etc. but excludes freezing. None of the the meat-eaters I have known (including myself) really differentiate between processed and unprocessed meat when it comes to their diet.
Edit: All these studies blame just processed meat at the moment. But keep in mind that all we were discussing so far was diabetes. There are more than enough good reasons to avoid all animal-based food, including dairy. I will not go into that now. My intention was to show that sugar has been made the scapegoat for diabetes. There are plenty of other diseases that sugar does not contribute to, but meat does.
> These results remained significant after further adjustment for intakes of dietary fiber, magnesium, glycemic load, and total fat. Intakes of total cholesterol, animal protein, and heme iron were also significantly associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.
Their marketing is designed to sell cereal. People unfortunately are happiest (short term) to consume sugary cereal. They really are.
I met a breakfast food operative in the supermarket once. I told him I thought his company should offer a low sugar version. He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell.
People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.
I don't know. I just think that if we're going to talk about what companies encourage customers to do through their marketing, we should be straight about it.
The market forces companies to peddle garbage to children who generally lack the capacity to make a healthy informed decision in the face of multimillion dollar campaigns designed to get them to consume sugary cereal?
> He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell. People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.
> peddle garbage to children who generally lack the capacity to make a healthy informed decision
I don't know many kids that do the shopping :)
It's parents that choose the sugary breakfast cereals for their children. I think many have the capacity to make a healthy, informed decision, but for some reason they do not. Marketing is likely at least part of the reason.
1. It's quite possible (though it's a huge rabbit hole we shouldn't plumb here) that they were taxing the wrong macronutrient entirely, that is to say, that fat on the body is more a factor of sugar going in than fat going in. So in addition to imposing costs it may have failed to give benefits (whereas had it worked to improve health outcomes maybe it would have been worth the costs of enforcement etc.)
2. The Danes taxing butter?!? That seems extremely odd given the dairy industry and culture. But I suppose major kudos for being able to overcome such prior biases to even run the experiment.
Marketing potentially harmful products to children should simply not be allowed. It is well-accepted that children lack the experience and power of judgement to properly evaluate marketing claims.
A product sold as breakfast, that consists of 25% sugar, absolutely qualifies as harmful.
I dislike the idea of solving this via more regulation. Children don't decide what they eat, their parents do. So either the parents don't care about the health of their children (hard to believe), or they're not properly educated about healthy nutrition.
The amount of discipline a parent (limited by the time and willpower a parent can input into the process) can impose is finite. Once we accept this hypothesis, we can see how usual norms are imposed by parental discipline plus non-parental discipline. A parent going against a norm will have to use an extraordinary amount of time and willpower to impose his unconventional norm, as he will lack the enforcement of the non-parent actors. Eating sugary cereal is a societal norm in today's developed countries. Therefore, a parent wishing to diverge from this norm would have to expend an extraordinary effort.
He's also going against the professionals who already succeeded in imposing the norm and simply have to maintain it today.
As a parent I would agree that there is little education. Health professionals (in the UK) don't seem to care. Products you think are safe are then found out to be harmful in other ways.
I don't think education is the silver bullet, but habit forming is. For example, what is the habit you resort to when deprived of sleep, late for work and kids are throwing a tantrum? Sometimes that habit lies in preparation, something most of are are not very good at.
Or they are exhausted from working all hours because the banks create credit from thin air to maximize rent extraction and lack the willpower to argue with their children every shopping trip.
I have kids, it's a constant battle even though we have no TV and I'm fortunate enough to have enough time to educate them. I'm constantly fighting with a whole room of people who are disgusting scumbags with access to millions of advertising spend.
Do you also think all marketing for alcohol should be banned? It is "well-accepted" that many adults lack the judgement necessary to prevent over-consumption of alcohol.
A product designed to impair judgement absolutely qualifies as harmful.
How about McDonalds? Or Coca-Cola? Should we just ban all marketing because we're no longer adept at making responsible decisions for ourselves and our children?
When do you draw the line of "encouraging" and "this is what people actually want." I know that sugary cereals are bad for me, no one is encouraging me to eat them, but sometimes I really want Fruity Pebbles. The fact is that kids like sugary cereals, adults like sugary cereals, and a company is there to provide that product. I see nothing wrong with that.
But let's also point out that fact that diabetes is -not- caused by sugar consumption itself. There is a genetic strain, and there is a strain caused by obesity. Does sugar lead to obesity? Yes, it can, but it does not directly cause diabetes. This is an important distinction.
As a CEO in the US you're legally obligated to maximize profits. In that sense I don't see this as a problem with Nestle, more so the greater system in which Nestle sits.
Over here (EU), the purpose of a corporation does not have to be maximising profit (although that is the default) and CEO does not have to use every legal method to maximize profit, at all costs.
Even in the US, it is not really true. The CEO is not allowed to unreasonably undermine the company's profitability, but they are allowed nearly unlimited business judgement. As long as they can come up with any remotely plausible business justification for their actions, no court in the US will stop them.
The CEO of Nestle could say something as simple as "acting in this manner will be perceived negatively and will harm our future sales" and they would be safe from legal action.
The leading cause of diabetes is poor diet. Nestle is selling you foods that if consumed in large quantities will absolutely result in you becoming a diabetic.
It's called vertical integration and it's not accidental.
You're right that responsibility ultimately lies in the individual, but people aren't silos. If advertising didn't work, people wouldn't do it. Some responsibility must be given to those who try to convince others to do unhealthy things.
That's their job - to sell legal products to those who want them. What happens to the purchased products is a matter for people's own assessment and capacity for self-control. What was it a McDonalds' guy told folk? Something along the lines "It's not my job to teach your kids to eat vegetables".
He's saying that people didn't overeat sugar until they were given sufficiently easy access to significant quantities of sugar to make it easy to overeat it.
> a company producing sugary snacks and diabetes pills does not force or even encourage over consumption of sugar
First of all, it is going a bit far to say they don't encourage over consumption of sugar. Nestle dropped a couple of billion on advertising last year [1], and that is primarily sugary food, or at least food that's broadly unhealthy.
Secondly, what about the tobacco companies? They did not force anyone to consume their products either; but with strict limiting of their marketing, especially to young children, the rate of smoking has gone down a lot in the States.
Studies show that willpower is a limited resource [2]. If you are being assaulted on all sides by a barrage of advertising, cheap snacks on display, and have been marketed to from your childhood, you are going to have a much harder time abstaining from these products.
I understand, or at least guess that you are putting forth a point of personal responsibility here – "Hey, don't eat those Hot Pockets, and you will be all good". But there are a ton of obstacles to that. These large food companies have pretty much ensured that most "convenience" stores carry only their products, and have little to no fresh produce or what you would consider "healthy" food. If you live in a poor neighborhood, a lot of times the only place that sells produce is located really far away, like 5 or 10 miles.
Thus, for some people it is clearly easier to eat healthy, and maybe some of that is on account of their socioeconomic class, current health, etc. But extrapolating that to all people should be a bit more nuanced, and maybe these companies' marketing should be a bit more regulated.
No, diabetes is often a byproduct of choosing to over consume sugar. Nestle didn't make them diabetic, they did that to themselves.
There is no direct cause and effect, producing sugary snacks does not cause diabetes. People choose to over consume to the point they develop diabetes.
People's lack of self control created a market, Nestle wants to be one of the companies in that market.
There is a deep difference of power and control between the average consumer and a multinational food processing corporation. The argument of the burden being on individual responsibility you are trying to make can only be made if the consumer is not being aggressively misinformed about the limited choices of products available to them for the prices they can afford. The company in question has the resources to make their relationship with the target consumer a very asymmetrical one, and they are always positioned with more information and more leverage.
Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.
Devil's advocate: why shoud they not do it? Unless every other food producer does the same, sugary foods will still be available but Nestle would lose out on the profits.
We don't accept that sort of rationale for anything else. I'll go shoplift some stuff (maybe steal some Nestlé products); other people are still going to steal whether I do or not, so I might as well not lose out on the profits.
That's a good point, from a purely economics point of view it doesn't make sense to stop. Having said that, Nestle pulling out of selling sugary products entirely would dent the market hugely, but someone else would eventually fill the gap. The moral aspect is a whole other question...
If every food producer were to follow that dictum, no one would have to take responsibility. So everyone would be incentivized to break the rules.
And if anyone wanted to begin new a behavior harmful to others, they would only have to ensure others also do it.
Decisions have to made on values, not whether someone else is already doing it. If someone's getting away with a crime, it doesn't mean you get to do it, too. It still means neither of you should be doing it.
This almost implies that some people are born with a lack of self control? You can't just simplify it like that.
From birth, everything we process with our senses adds to our understanding of the world and our ability to navigate it. If Nestle has enough money to flood the market with information supporting themselves, how can you expect people to make the right choices? And remember, not everyone has the fortune of growing up in a balanced environment that allows them to evolve a rational way of thinking, so they aren't just gonna jump on HN and start doing some research.
You can't just take the first order approximation. You gotta do the full expansion, man.
Diabetes is a product of genetics. If you have the bad genes, and you overeat sugar, you will get diabetes. If you don't have the genes, overeating the sugar will still have bad longterm effects (fatty liver, etc) but you will most likely not get diabetes.
The foods that Nestle sells are unprecedented in history, they are engineered to be much more palatable than normal whole foods. It's not surprising that people have a hard time eating them moderately.
> Diabetes is not always a byproduct of over consuming sugar
Refined carbs in general are the big issue, but sugar in particular is a very large part of the problem. It's difficult to buy any processed food that doesn't contain sugar these days.
> or even encourage over consumption of sugar
They market sugar-laden foods to children, such as sickly-sweet breakfast cereals - IMO they do encourage over consumption of sugar.
> I don't see what the actual problem is
I think the problem with Nestle doing both of these things is that it creates a pretty clear conflict of interest - to maximise revenue, they need to sell as many sugar laden products as they can, so they can sell more much diabetes medication.
I don't see what the actual problem is.