They did that! They called it iQos!

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.

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

All fresh food does not have to disclose ingredients

> 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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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

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.

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.

[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-...

"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.

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.

> Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention.

Yes, and cigarettes cure cancer amirite ?

We all know what they mean by ultra processed food, it's 75% of your supermarkets. 45% of the US is obese, the rest is overweight, food is one of the main factor in the top 2 leading causes of death in the US, if you can't see the problem you're blind

There is a very good definition on wikipedia btw, and yes not all ultra processed things are bad, but the vast majority of them are

It isn't a meaningless word, and like my sibling poster I do wonder if that sentence is astroturfed by the junk food corpos.

The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.

No it isn’t. The advice on nutrition is abundantly clear and has been for a long time: eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.

I've heard people say that even bread is ultra processed... I guess we're supposed to go back to eating twigs and berries.

I've heard this objection a lot, even from folks I respect. Its ubiquity makes me wonder it is astroturfed.

The definition I have heard is "food made with ingredients or processes not commonly used in ghome Unfortunately, when I looked to leading scientific orgs, they are dithering on releasing formal definitions, but all say something like what I'd heard.

Conflicting information doesn't mean an abysmal situation. I'd argue the opposite. Everyone "knew" the sun orbited Earth.

the one is a result of the other; but thats because nutrition seems like it should have objective measures but ultimately has a lot of sources and sinks that only on the fringes is it obvious when things are bad.

but then theres RFK nuttery, so its not that stupid.

but yeah, ultra processes has no functional science behind it even though we still know cheap food is typically unhealthy and addictive

In the space age, its x-processed.

I wonder if they go at it from that angle ("let's make these kids addicts for money!"), or if they gaslit themselves into something else. It's probably the latter, just like the tech companies did - they looked at just the numbers and analytics, did some tests, saw that if they do X then numbers Y and Z go up, rinse and repeat across decades.

This is why Google no longer has just some unobtrusive text ads to the side. At the time it was great because it wasn't annoying, but then the analytics came in and showed that more prominent and better camouflaged ads had higher conversion and revenue. And people grumbling aside, their revenue multiplied over and over again.

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