Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies

Source for the claim that nicotine use "ruins" gut health?

My understanding is that the relationship between nicotine and gut health (indeed, overall health) is much more complex and nuanced than that. I know that nicotine has a positive effect on ulcerative colitis symptoms for many sufferers.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8895249/#s4

A quote:

Of all the diseases summarized here concerning systemic inflammation, especially in sepsis and endotoxemia, nicotine exerted the most pharmaceutical effect and significantly improved the survival. Next, nicotine is also a potential candidate for treating ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, multiple sclerosis, and myocarditis; the in vivo data provided a much better foundation. For local inflammation, the nicotine administration route may be more important to avoid its accumulation in other healthy organs—for example, the effect of nicotine on arthritis will be more pronounced when nicotine is directly injected into the focus of infection. Perhaps that is why, in the early years, tobacco was used to treat enteritis as enemas (4). It is evident that nicotine has a significant pro-inflammatory effect on periodontitis. However, the latest research also found that nicotine positively affects periodontitis at a lower dosage. In this regard, we consider that the effect of nicotine on periodontitis is mainly due to the influence of inevitable and original oral microbes. At present, most studies focus on the cellular level, and in vivo studies may be limited due to the difficulty of model construction. Therefore, we recommend that individuals with poor oral hygiene avoid excessive direct exposure to nicotine for oral diseases.

And teeth. This stuff will do nasty things to your gums. And receded gums never recover.

Is your problem with them that they're synthetic, or that it's nicotine? Pouched tobacco like that been used for decades in some places in the world, or even without pouches, just making your own ball and sticking the tobacco under your lip. I'm not sure these countries have a higher rate of GI/gut problems than other places, which kind of would invalidate your entire argument here.

> 95% of marketing needs to be banned.

I could get behind this.

Bill Hicks had a good advice to the marketing guys: "kill yourself" so I you're onto something here!

Tobacco is an addictive product that on average hurts the people who use it as a negative utility. Almost every other product people buy has a positive utility. Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.

It's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.

The story is an embroidered myth based on a sprinkling of facts. This is my understanding and I eat no processed food!

It’s more than marketing, they’re applying cigarette processing principles to food processing: choosing specific flavor chemicals and additives to produce maximum addiction within the varied neurophysiological profiles of different consumer cohorts

They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.

Tangential but similar nonsensical secrecy for consumables: alcohol not requiring a nutrition label always irks me.

The rule for fresh bread varies from state to state because it's not considered interstate commerce, so it doesn't have to follow the federal labeling law. (There's a ton of hypocrisy about the use of the interstate commerce clause, but this part isn't completely stupid.)

It goes for all good produced and consumed in the same state, not just bread. Tobacco and alcohol actually are regulated federally even when produced in the same state (that interstate commerce hypocrisy I mentioned). They don't require ingredients lists but they do require licensing.

Where I live (Maryland), cottage industries have to include ingredients lists. Others require just allergens. Some have no regulations one way or the other.

All fresh food does not have to disclose ingredients

I don't think anyone is under the delusion that cigarettes are healthy for you. Everyone knows they cause multiple cancers. That's part of the appeal. It shows how 'tough' and 'cool' the user is. No matter what you do, there will always be a reactionary group of people doing the opposite of what they are told.

These two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people.

Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.

idk about tobacco but the vast majority of normal people see no great problem with industrially produced food. By my reckoning if you say at a party you work for Unilever or something the most you'll get is an "oh that's cool I guess".

A significant number of people just do not care, not only do they not care, they don't even consider whether or not they should care. It's easy to live your entire life disconnected from anyone that would care, for many people they don't even have to intentionally do it. From their perspective they're just doing their job, collecting a paycheck, and living their lives the same as anyone else.

Consider the half of the US population that doesn't vote, not only do they not vote... but most of the time it's not even a system that they think about at all. There are a number of people who barely even know who the candidates in any given election are. You can live your entire life within a very narrow line of sight.

Same as the people on this every forum who work for meta, palantir, &co

We exist in a world where the exchange of goods and services is inherently oppressive. Some people draw the line at working for Northrup Grumman, some at RJR, some at Meta, some at Starbucks, and some at the local farm. I'm not one to judge where the line should be - I'm not even sure if there is a moral or ethical line that exists in the system.

People who work at McDonalds generally aren't there because they turned down a high paying job at the UN.

How? The banality of evil, cognitive dissonance and violence.

The "banality of evil" [1] is term coined by Hannah Arendt when covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann who killed over a million Jews in the HOlocaust. She described Eichmann as an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who was (in his mind) advancing himself in the Nazi Party. The term has been exapnded to describe how disconnected most jobs are from their outcomes through complexity. You might be working on an AI feature that just identifies from external phone activity when someone is home or not. Sounds harmless right? What if you knew it was used by militaries to assassinate journalists while they were home so they got their families as well?

This also feeds into the concept of "social murder" [2].

Cognitive dissonance was best described by Upton Sinclair [3]:

> It is difficult to get anybody to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.

Even if you, as a tobacco employee, realized the connection between what you were doing and selling more cigarettes, you'd find people rationalizing it by saying things like "I'm selling to willing buyers" or you'd couch it in terms of personal freedom.

Lastly, violence, specifically state violence. We (generally) have a skewed view of what constitutes "violence". We all understand that if you get attacked by someone in the street it's violence. Where it gets more contentious is for something like eviction. Many will say "well that's protecting somebody's asset". Others will argue that putting people out on the street, particularly in a wealthy country, is state violence [4].

I bring this up because we live in a society that doesn't guarantee basic necessities. So you need a job to pay for those things. Well, that's putting a proverbial gun to people's heads. If someone is selling tobacco, are you going to tell them they should risk homeless for that moral stance? Would you? I don't mean that as a provocation. It's a thought experiment. How much would you give up for a moral stance personally? What if it impacted your spouse? Your children? There was a time when certain jobs exempted you from the draft. What if you had one of those jobs and it was immoral? Would you go to Vietnam instead?

[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

[3]: https://rowansimpson.com/quotes/salary/

[4]: https://hnmcp.law.harvard.edu/hnmcp/news/evictions-can-kill-...

I'm only going by the abstract but this bit stuck out to me:

> Regulation of the multiple addictive products that tobacco companies have disseminated to markets globally may be needed to protect public health.

That seems less about logistics and more about manipulating the content of food, perhaps to encourage some low-level of dependence. People eventually came to expect this from tobacco products, I think many would be surprised to see this kind of thing from Oreos or potato chips.

Yes it seems like the authors of this article are implying this is bad? I mean ultra-processed is a meaningless term but generally processed food lasts longer, is less perishable, often cheaper, etc.

"snacks" is so broad of a term as to be useless for discussion

dried bananas chips as a snack? fine. potato chips cooked mostly in palm oil? not so great.

both "snacks"

The health effects on consumers.

Canned fruit is packaged in syrup. It has more sugar than candy.

There is a nice old comedy called "Thank You for Smoking". Worth watching if you haven't.

It's not meaningless.

"Processed" means that ingredients had to be manipulated to produce the food (e.g. most recipes). Most of what you make at home is "processed".

"Ultra-processed" means food produced using industrial processing, using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc. That's a clear distinction.

Whether or not that means anything for the nutritional value and health outcomes from consumption of the food is a different question, but it can clearly be studied.