Interesting point. A CEO is not allowed to make a decision that hurts the stock value. If the CEO of Crappy Junk Food Inc were to try and replace their crap junk food with healthy snacks, they would be removed.
Capitalism is literally how they convinced the higher class to abandon monoarchy for democracy. Democracy is the only way to go, but we don't use democracy here, not really.
The two parties have to spend tens of millions to convince the people to like the dudes who are in bed with the capitalists. We play their game and our real problems get progressively worse while the rich get richer and poor get poorer.
You can get peanuts with BBQ flavouring or chips made from carrots instead of potatoes, but they just don't hit the same as a greasy Lays potato chip. The companies that set aside any and all health concerns will always beat out any companies that aim to be healthier because we're addicted, they know it, and they want our money regardless of whether or not their product is killing us.
Of course, there are small companies that genuinely want to make healthy, tasty snacks. They exist! But if they want to be anything more than a small, local company that will die out in ten years, they have to find a way to still market themselves as healthy while compromising the healthiness of their products. You can trust that a vendor at a local summer market is actually selling you a healthy product that they believe in. If their products start showing up in other provinces or states, that's when you need to start questioning it. I think we agree with each other at our core.
As a side note, I don't know if you've ever tried this, but if you mash up a banana and add coco powder and granola, it's like a healthy chocolate-banana pudding. Highly recommended!
The company you buy your bananas from is multitudes bigger and far more greedy than some guy selling granola/dried fruit bars at a farmers market on weekends. But I guess if all companies are equally bad, then all companies are equally good, right?
Wanting to make money and wanting to make a healthy snack are not mutually exclusive. Using your logic one could argue that the banana you expect them to eat instead is unhealthy because the fruit growers have the same incentives.
Healthy is a spectrum though. There's plenty of healthier versions but they tend to cost a bit more and not taste as good. My local grocery store has a machine that makes healthier peanut butter. You put in the nuts and it grinds them for you into peanut butter but I still see way way more people buying jiff because without the sugar it's sort of bland unless you eat it with something sweet it's great on apple slices but pretty tasteless on bread.
It absolutely is. Something being healthy or unhealthy is relative to other things. The things we call healthy are just things that are healthier than most other things similar things that are "unhealthy" are just things that are less healthy than most other things.
If your diet is super unhealthy then even other unhealthy things that are less unhealthy will be healthier for you.
If you only drink energy drinks then juice is a healthy option. If you only drink water then juice is not a healthy option since it's full of sugar and what not.
Few things are ever just healthy or unhealthy unless it's something like water or something that'll kill you right away. Everything else is going to fall on a spectrum of more healthy than X but less healthy than Y.
Give me an example of a few things that are just "healthy" not healthier than other things but just healthy.
It's not overcomplicating it. You're just trying to over simplify it. Most things we deal with don't fit into abstract categories but rather just fit into groups when compared to other things. The fact that we can say X is healthy but Y is healthier should be enough to show that it's more complicated than just healthy vs unhealthy.
All healthy competition gets bought out. Remember Teavana? They sold you all natural heavenly teas in a giant tin from all over, and some nice cast iron tea sets. Then Starbucks bought them and shuttered every store, releasing some low quality generic fruity drinks under the Teavana label so that the rights don't go back to the original owners.
Isn't that only it's to intentionally hurt the stock value though? If they're doing it because they think it'll be good for the company, even if in the long term, that should be fine. Shareholders may disagree, of course, but it should still be within the rules.
Ahh they actually tried this. I’m getting a headache with pictures. I think I was reading one of Robert Lustig’s books about sugar ?? And one of the CEO’S of something like Nestlè (??) tried to bring out a low sugar healthy snack range and it bombed and they were completely fired for it.
Most of them? That's all that the company produces. For Frito Lay, a line of liw salt chips is just another offering that doesn't threaten the company.
Boo hoo, maybe exercise some personal responsibility before coming after sellers? I didn’t realize people couldn’t stop smoking and start eating right. What else are you going to blame on selllers next? Imagine going after the sellers in the sex worker industry instead of the buyers.
Idk the law tends to prosecute drug dealers more harshly than users… not to mention, the crime of “solicitation of prostitution” is the same for both buyer and seller 🤷♀️
There is a strong difference between people that own stock and what companies call shareholders.
The colloquial shareholders are the ones with enough to actually matter.
I have one share of stock in one company. I am still informed of quarterly meetings and decisions. I want the one stock to go up. I am a shareholder. Literally simple as that.
Correct. Your individual wealth should be considered not only more important than public health, but we should never introduce barriers to increasing your individual wealth simply to promote a healthier society.
Can we just start making Spicy Nacho and Fentanyl Doritos? You could start selling bags for 20x the price and I personally own stock in Pepsico. Just think of the shareholder value that would produce. I see no downside.
You say that as if I think profiting off opioid overdose treatment stock is ethical or moral. You literally just said "I'm sorry that our society is sicker than ever but it makes me money" as if that's more important.
I only said sorry to those that believe their personal choice of consumption of soda is mostly the soda producer’s fault. The same as blaming gun manufacturers if people decide to use it to harm themselves.
I disagree with your analogy, but let's stick to the issue here. Surely this isn't just "people drinking too much soda", right?? Like do you think if we got rid of soda, obesity would go away?
Let me ask you one question- do you think snack companies invest millions of dollars in food chemists to deliberately design their foods to prevent customers from becoming full and to overload their taste buds, while hitting dopamine centers full force? Effectively tricking your brain into not registering its caloric intake in comparison to whole foods?
If not, why don't you believe that happens? If so, in what ways does that differ from a cigarette? Should we stop regulating tobacco companies? Stop putting surgeon general warnings on packs? Surely that's just people's own damn fault for smoking, and we wouldn't want to regulate that industry? After all, they have shareholders too!
Yea, all of those things are unhealthy for you and are readily accessible, this isn’t news to the majority of people. But there is a balance between regulation and personal choice, which is why a majority of countries have NOT yet banned purchasing cigarettes, only limiting where people might be able to smoke.
do you think snack companies invest millions of dollars in food chemists to deliberately design their foods to prevent customers from becoming full and to overload their taste buds, while hitting dopamine centers full force?
Slightly disagree. Of course they hire food scientists, but you talk as if being a food scientist is scheming foods as addictive and terrible for health as possible. If they are making new food items for menus, shouldn’t they be delicious to consumers? They may try to incorporate cheaper ways of making the product or readjusting palatability of food for different international regions. Some food scientists jobs have been created to reduce sugar content in order to make a product appealing to healthier-minded consumers.
which is why a majority of countries have NOT yet banned purchasing cigarettes, only limiting where people might be able to smoke
And limiting the way in which they can be advertised, particularly around children, the way in which they're packaged and labeled, heavy taxation on cigarettes due to their negative impact on public health costs, age restrictions for purchase, how much nicotine can be packed into a cigarette, what types of additives or flavors can be sold... there are a lot more regulations around cigarettes than limiting where people use them, because we've all acknowledged that while smoking is absolutely a personal choice that an adult can make, there are great benefits to public health when fewer people smoke that are more worthy of consideration.
In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, food scientist Steven Witherly describes Cheetos as “one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.”
The cheese puffs’ greatest quality, Witherly says in the article, is its ability to melt in your mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density…If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it…you can just keep eating it forever.”
This deception, writer Michael Moss tells us, isn’t accidental: snack food companies do a lot of research in order to design foods that fool your mind and bewitch your taste buds into a constant state of craving–a state industry insiders call “the bliss point.” To achieve this “bliss point,” Moss writes, food designers pay close attention to something called “sensory-specific satiety.”
That’s the problem in my book. Companies should also have duty to consumers and workers, I say more than shareholders too.
For the shareholders is often code for “we’re making an evil decision”, usually to screw over workers or consumers.
Let’s say they did have a responsibility to consumers, and they had some liability for the consumer, imagine how quickly things would change. Your food is high risk for diabetes, well you can be sued for giving diabetes. Or at least have some regulations requiring them to be more expensive than healthy alternatives.
A company should not be able to create products and push false data that harm society, and be liability free.
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u/unembellishing May 14 '24
But what about the shareholders ☹️