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Online Shopping: Hazardous To Junk Food's Health
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that the trend toward online shopping is reducing the sales of impulse-purchase items, most notably candy and snacks often displayed at the checkout counter. As even grocery shopping shifts online, junk food producers are feeling the squeeze. From the article: 'Anthony Hopper, chief executive of advertising agency Lowe Open, said brands need to change how people buy chocolate, but acknowledges that it won't be easy. "If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop? It's a long-term strategy," he said.'"
besides, you could plan to buy one at a time.
if I'd buy four candybars and they would come in the mail I would eat them all! ALL! excuse me while I go raid the fridge for some kitkat.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeah, because it's something that everyone should be buying, despite the fact that:
so many are struggling financially
people want to live better and feel better
Right? It's got to be because of online shopping.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
People are getting poorer.
But don't mind my life experience.
Remember your home ec class? One of the lessons was to use a shopping list -- and stick to it -- in order to avoid impulse buys.
Well an online shopping cart is, for all intents and purposes, a shopping list. Looks like your home ec teacher was right all along.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I hit a different liquor store for booze tonight than normal. It was one of those yuppie "wine and cheese" places, because it was convenient.
They had all sorts of chocolates at the counter. I skipped lunch and was hungry, so I almost got a couple to tide me over.
If I was somehow buying magic alcohol that was getting delivered to me same day? Wouldn't have even considered it.
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After that scene where he talks about eating fava beans with a light chianti, I figured he could make anything sound tasty. No surprise he ended up in food advertising.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
they can just add an Halloween 2 in the summer time
Honestly it's starting to irk me a bit when people are against processed food. Most people have no idea what it even means and what the concerns might be (actual or merely perceived.) You can live perfectly healthy on processed foods. In fact, people who don't eat processed foods are extremely rare, even indigenous tribes devoid of modern technology process their food.
http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/food%20columnist0/Beware_Processed_Foods.shtml
It also irks me a bit when I hear people say you need to stay away from ingredients whose names you can't pronounce. I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it. Not a very good idea to completely shut out one of the most important amino acids from your diet. Words you don't recognize, or even things that aren't "natural" aren't inherently bad, in fact most of them are fine to consume.
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This comment was proudly brought to you by the Monsanto corporation.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
In fact, people who don't eat processed foods are extremely rare, even indigenous tribes devoid of modern technology process their food.
When people say to avoid processed food, they're not talking about some tribeswoman grinding it up with a mortar and pestle. They're talking about things like Cheez Whiz, which despite what you may think, is not a healthy food source.
Words you don't recognize, or even things that aren't "natural" aren't inherently bad, in fact most of them are fine to consume.
I'm sorry, but "most" isn't good enough. When you're talking about things that people stuff into their bodies, they damned well better all be fine to consume.
> ...what they think of ascorbic acid,... they'd avoid anything containing it.
> Not a very good idea to completely shut out one of the most important amino acids from your diet.
BTW, ascorbic acid is not an amino acid.
Newflash !
Online shopping does not cure binge eating.
News at 11
There is nothing wrong with processed food in theory, but in practice a lot of it has been optimized more for low cost than for health or taste. For example, a minimal amount of the taste-providing ingredients and then a lot of salt and MSG to compensate for that.
If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop?
No. No, you cannot. Because:
1) Most people prone to impulse-buying your crap would eat it all the same day it arrives,
2) Impulse buyers tend to act on impulse, and wouldn't actually seek it out deliberately, and
3) People intentionally buying chocolate buy chocolate. Not your "HFCS, carob and soy lecithin" garbage.
Now, if we consider junk foods beyond just candy, let's consider margins of impulse-buys vs planned buys. I happen to like Doritos. Yeah, complete crap, and bad for me, but I intentionally (whether impulse or actually on the list) buy them every now and then.
As an impulse buy, I pay basically a buck for a 1.5oz bag of their crap. For two bucks, I can get a full-sized bag. So, Frito Lay needs to ask itself something - Can you afford to sell Doritos without the insane margins on your "vending-machine" sized packs? Or do those basically subsidize the price of "family packs" that you may well only sell for the purpose of keeping us "hooked"?
Because the same logic applies to almost every less-than-bulk sized junk-food out there. Sodas make a great example - a 20oz soda at the register costs MORE than a 2-liter bottle. A 3-pack of gum in the candy aisle costs less than a single pack of the same gum at the register. Can "impulse-buy"-centric companies actually afford to sell only their more economical sizes?
I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it. Not a very good idea to completely shut out one of the most important amino acids from your diet.
Would you please show me the amino (NH2) group specific to aminoacids in the C6H8O6 molecula formula of the ascorbic acid?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I'm sorry, but "most" isn't good enough. When you're talking about things that people stuff into their bodies, they damned well better all be fine to consume.
All of them are fine to consume, it just depends on the quantity. Trace amounts of hydrogenated oil are harmless, but large quantities are probably not a good idea. Along that same line of thought, few people know that too much potassium can have very deadly short term consequences that can kill without warning, even deadlier than too much hydrogenated oils.
Foods you pick off of the vine contain these things. The fact that something on the shelf might also contain them doesn't make it inherently bad.
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I'm vegan, lactose-intolerant and allergic to casein. It seems that almost all snacks companies (chips, cookies, granola bars, chocolate bars, etc) not only do not care about losing all the vegan customers but some even have the habit of adding lactose to the ingredients. Lactose in chips, for example. Yes, there's lactose in some brands of salt and vinegar chips to give you a strange example. I know to avoid anything cheese-flavored but the salt and vinegar ones took me by surprise.
Vegans in small towns do not have access to vegan brands and only get the "commercial" stuff. So the first company to actually comply with vegan requirements will be able to cash early on by grabbing customers who are currently left behind.
At the moment, the only chocolate bar I've found to be vegan is made in France, sold at our local dollar store.
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Trace amounts of hydrogenated oil are harmless, but large quantities are probably not a good idea.
Gee, and guess what a lot of "processed foods" contain?
Large quantities of hydrogenated oils.
Foods you pick off of the vine contain these things.
In general, they contain trace amounts of bad things, and a large number of essential things.
Processed foods, OTOH, tend to include large amounts of bad things and omit many of the essential things you'd find growing on a vine.
The key is in the amounts, not whether they or not they can be detected in one food or another.
All I know is that after reading all the facts about hydrogen oxide I've stopped using it!
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The point is that the term "processed food' is inaccurate speech at best, and complete bullshit at worst. There are planting of "processed" things (e.g. E-350/Asorbic Acid) that are things you absolutely want to be consuming plenty of, there are plenty of unprocessed things (e.g. Cyonide found in apple pips) that you absolutely don't want to consume any of.
What they *should* be saying is not to consume poisons, or not to consume sufficient volumes of the good stuff that it becomes poisonous. Neither of these has anything at all to do with the level of processing involved.
Oh okay, so then corrupts and broccoli become unhealthy the moment that a large factory start cranking them out? Sounds reasonable. Better steer clear of pretty much any carrots of broccoli sold in a supermarket, because guess where they came from!
Well, feel free to live without street lighting, rubbish collection, or sewers and drainage if you don't like paying your $3000 ;) Off you go to the woods to live like a hermit.
When people say to avoid processed food, they're not talking about some tribeswoman grinding it up with a mortar and pestle.
When most people say to avoid processed food, they're repeating some propaganda they heard somewhere. Sad but true.
One way to distinguish those who are clueless is to ask them if they'll eat any ingredient they can't pronounce. If they say yes, then just smile at them politely and move on.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It also irks me a bit when I hear people say you need to stay away from ingredients whose names you can't pronounce. I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it.
Heh.....as a result of this comment, I just posted on Facebook a 'warning' to avoid ascorbic acid, which is in many packaged foods. We'll see how many bites I get.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop? It's a long-term strategy,"
If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you to try some decent chocolate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Processed foods not only tend to contain high levels of bad stuff, they have the double whammy of also containing less good stuff. All those vitamins and minerals that appear in natural foods? Processed out of processed foods.
Look up the history of "fortified" foods. Manufacturers spend time and energy removing nutrients from foods, then more time and energy adding them back in.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
There's a word that can be ascribed to the condition in such people: chemophobia
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
On a 0..10 scale of problems to worry about, this ranks around 0.01.
The dynamics of on line food ordering could get interesting. Has anyone noted interesting suggestions from Amazon Fresh?
Perhaps it's different in the UK (assumed b/c of spelling/word choice), but where I live, trash collection and water/sewage treatment are done by the municipality but not paid out of taxes - they're fee-for-service. Street lighting is a public service. Public education is another, but the local schools are so bad as to be unusable. My parents paid property taxes for ages, and I've been paying them for quite some time. I never spent a day in the city's schools, nor did my sister, nor did my wife or her brother, nor any of our children, and none of us were rich. My mother made our clothes herself in order to save enough to keep us in private schooling.
We pay for a lot of nominally public services that we don't actually use.
I try to keep my consumption of highly processed foods to reasonable amounts because they tend have very high amounts of things I already consume plenty of i.e. saturated fats, sodium salt, and processed sugar. I do not, however, obsess over eating healthy. Could I have a more healthy diet? Absolutely! Could I have a much less healthy diet? I did for many years. Do I feel guilty about the occasional soft drink or bacon cheeseburger? Never.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
What they *should* be saying is not to consume poisons, or not to consume sufficient volumes of the good stuff that it becomes poisonous. Neither of these has anything at all to do with the level of processing involved.
They don't in theory.
In reality, the two are very highly correlated. So in the real world, for real people, the advice about processed foods is valid.
A truck driving friend of mine once sent me a photo of his delivery - pallets full of pharmaceuticals being delivered to a breakfast cereal plant in time for the sticky kids cereal batch run. The cereal box says "fortified with iron and vitamins". Why not just have the HEALTHY and NATURAL option of bran and sliced fruit? That's good for your colon, heart and tastebuds. Why? Because the advertising industry is employed by these food companies to brainwash kids (and apparently people like you) into believing this processed sticky shit is somehow healthy.
Sorry, It's not "online purchases" or "healthier eating" that's causing the drop in prices, it's the doubling or tripling prices for chips and soda.
Most folks who are middle class can't justify spending 4.50 on a 12-14 ounce bag of chips on their salary. Living where I do, the only ones spending that are using the link card (welfare cards for food) to get chips, pop, ice cream, and other junk foods.
The folks whining about declining sales just need to wait until more folks are on government subsistence, then the profits will creep back.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Perhaps you're actually better off not buying the junk food after all. You don't need to buy in bulk.
Even if it was, does the source of information make it any less true?
No, but the fact that ascorbic acid isn't an amino acid makes
sound, at best, like an odd combination of two sentences talking about different unrelated things.
Some of these you kind of have to, though for differing reasons. Just as an example, part of my diet requires me to avoid bran (high in phosphorus,) which e.g. requires removal from brown rice to make it white rice. At that point, fortifying nutrients back into it only serves to benefit.
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Let me tell you a joke I once heard.
A guy goes to a doctor's office once after watching Dr. Oz and asks if reducing the sodium, trans fats, msg, and sugars in his diet would I live longer. The doctor thinks for a second and replies "Hmm...well, it'll certainly seem longer."
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if the taste-providing ingredients taste savory then they quite probably contain a lot of glutamate as well.
I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it.
What can you say? The average person off the street is an idiot. If you told them to avoid dihydrogen monoxide too, they would probably agree with that as well. In fact, they would even probably sign a petition on the spot to ban dihydrogen monoxide if you asked them to..
sell it to the bank and rent from them then.
technically you own it - unless you break the mortgage contract(if the contract is so screwed up that they can one handedly without you breaking the contract cancel that contract and take the possession then it's a pretty fucked up contract).
maybe stop waging expensive wars? and fuck your taxes are pretty low on international scale anyways..
and I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be paying taxes on royalties..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
While that piece of junk is technically right that "processing food" is an expression too wide to base any descision on (it DOES range from cooking or canning to adding 99% artificial ingredients and still call it food) it completly leaves out the problematic processes. The basic claim is that just because cooking food is also a kind of process, all processing done to food is harmless. Well yeah. sometimes my life would be easier if I was dumb enough to believe such BS.
But what you mentioned is still a good rule of thumb. The more of the "food processing" (from cutting to cooking) is done in your own kitchen, the better control YOU have of the whole process. And the more control you have, the less likely it becomes that you're doing something that would only benefit the manufacturer by reducing quality for the sake of profits. If you do, well, then it's quite stupid, but your own descision.
The less complex processes a food item has gone through, the easier it is for the layman to see if it is a quality enhancing or a profit enhancing process.
Likewise, the "if you can't spell it, don't eat it" is also a good rule of thumb to avoid unneccessary additives. And that even holds through for your Vitamin C example. If it is listed as an additive, it has usually NOT beed added because of its benefits as a vitamin, but as a preservative. And even as it is essential (no doubt about that) you can get more than enough by eating easy to spell food as "fruit" or "bell pepper"
If you really have to take additional vitamin suplements, that's a sign of malnutrition (or medical condition) and you should change your basic diet.
bickerdyke
...but not as much sodium.
Still waiting for that ... granted, I choose not to live in a hive of extreme population density that is probably required to make it work.
But dang, there are days I would love to just place an online order and have some milk and bread show up.
Just display candy-ads on a page on the way to checkout. You'll still get impulse buys.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
And over the many years that humans have lived on this planet we have learned which naturally occurring items should not be consumed. That's why only some naturally occurring items are considered to be "food" and other things are not.
Also its not necessarily "processing" that people have a problem with, its the underhanded and greedy methods of the food processing companies who will mix in all manner of nasty crap that we wouldn't normally want to eat. Some of us like to know exactly what we're eating.
What i also absolutely detest is "new improved recipe", where "new" and "improved" mean that its now cheaper to produce but probably doesn't taste as good. There are all manner of products i used to buy but which now either taste revolting or contain substances i wouldn't want to consume. If you change the recipe you should be forced to change the brand too, if the recipe is different then you've create a new different product.
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The real joke there of course is that "a guy" would watch Dr. Oz, as his show is clearly aimed at women. The early afternoon time slot just confirms it.
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I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it.
Do you also ask people if they are worried about Dihydrogen Monoxide and if we should end the suffrage of women? Also, protip: it's not an amino acid, it's vitamin C.
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It's more likely that a large food processing factory will do several things with the carrots and broccoli...
1, use more of the spoiled/bad vegetables that most people would discard
2, use less vegetables and add more cheap filler materials to bulk out the product
3, use more fat, salt, msg etc to improve the flavor (which may have been ruined by the filler materials) in the cheapest way possible
4, replace other ingredients with cheaper substitutions wherever possible, again using more salt/fat/msg/etc to try and disguise the difference
If carrots and broccoli are sold in their original form you can see what they are, and you can see that unknown substances have not been mixed in to bulk them out. The same can't be said of a processed product, where the end result will usually make it very difficult if not impossible to identify the source ingredients and processes used.
Companies want to reduce costs in order to increase profits, and profits are considered far more important than customer satisfaction or health. Processed foods allow them to hide all manner of things that people would disapprove of and which might alter their purchasing decision. I doubt you'd buy a 200g pack of broccoli if it came with 50g of broccoli and a 150g blob of grey paste and instructions to blend them together and then reform it in broccoli shaped moulds to get the final product.
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How about you make what people want instead of trying to get them to buy what you want to make. Just saying.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Actually, as cereals/grains make up a large part of the modern diet, the fact that they are poor sources of certain vitamins becomes relevant. For example, breakfast cereal commonly has folic acid added, not because it was lost during process (although some is), but because it is an important public health measure. Same for flour for bread making.
Additionally, some nutrients will be lost from processing - usually cooking, as most breakfast cereals are baked. Many vitamins are heat unstable and are therefore added back by the manufacturers.
So sitting on one's couch Internet shopping is actually healthier than the alternative?
Wow, there's an idiot with mod points doesn't believe me.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=youtube%20cereal%20iron%20filings
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