How Big Business got Brazil hooked on junk food

[lagatta]

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/16/health/brazil-obesity-nestle.html

Nestlé, Coca Cola and other multinationals also interfered with government efforts to promote healthy eating.

I put this here as a food issue, which touches people on many continents, not only Brazil or South America. Fine to move it to Port and Starboard if you think that is a better fit.

[bixaorellana]

The conclusions are hardly surprising, but so depressing. I was not aware of the aggressiveness of the giant companies' campaigns to enshrine their non-foods as the core of the diets in developing countries.

I've watched the fattening of the US throughout my lifetime and, when I lived on the Texas/Mexico border, I saw the effect of fast foods on the Mexican-American population. In the twenty years I've lived in Oaxaca, the change from an overwhelmingly normal-sized population to a city of overweight people has been striking. I would wager money that I am the only person on my block who doesn't have a 2-liter bottle of pop in the house.

The introduction of sweetness into all foods has been going on for decades. Sugar and corn syrup are cheap preservatives -- why else introduce them into something like hot dogs? And babies go directly from drinking high fructose corn syrup in their formula to being offered foods that are appealing based on excess added sweetness. Add to this all the ready-to-serve puddings, meat sticks and other crap, and you have a population craving a goopy, greasy, sugary diet -- preferably all beige and deep-fried.

People grow to adulthood not knowing what food tastes like in its natural state. I like to buy my yogurt from the dairy vendor at my local market, but her supplier is erratic. That means going to a supermarket and reading the backs of all the yogurt containers claiming to be natural, i.e., not flavored. Those "natural" yogurts more often than not contain sugar. Sometimes they proudly proclaim themselves to be sugar-free, but then turn out to be sweetened with something else instead.

The article's comment about kids being re-educated to eat healthfully is chilling: For some children, the center’s test kitchen provides their first introduction to cabbage, plums and mangos. How sad in a country which grows a very wide variety of produce.