Tag: nutrition

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Processed food

We eat a lot of pre-processed food. Our busy work schedules allow us to take only short breaks for meals in order to get more work done while in office or at work in general. The intensification of work has reached the next level and we move from pre-processed food to ultra-processed foods (UPFs). In medical journals and nutrition recommendations the warnings to not eat too much ultra-processed foods are abundant. The signs of obesity in societies reach higher levels from year to year. Especially younger people seem to be at higher risks to consume a lot of ultra-processed foods. Freisling et al. highlight the “risk of multimorbidity of cancer and cardiometabolic diseases” due to UPFs. The discussion between scientists is a lot on which UPFs are most harmful (beyond animal origin or and artificially sweetened beverages) and/or whether it is the combination of UPFs that additionally increases the danger of UPFs. Preventing the “too much of each” is probably the safest recommendation. Being able to read the nutrition information on the labels is already a difficult task. Just making the information abundant and very small print discourages most efforts to compare across products. Learning about basic human needs like food has never been more difficult. Combined with “shrinkflation” we have a hard time to make informed choices of what to buy and eat. There are many hurdles to overcome for a healthy meal.

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Shrinkflation

Shrinkflation is a hybrid term that combines “to shrink” with “inflation”. The trick is to keep prices at the same level for a product, but to reduce the weight or amount sold at a constant price. The intention of producers is to indirectly increase prices without touching at price tickets on products. As consumer you are likely to remember the price tag of a product, but much less the unit costs. However, the unit price is the basis for fair comparisons. In supermarkets there is an obligation to print also unit prices (€/kg or €/L) next to price labels. Comparisons allow information irrespective of package size. In shrinkflation the higher unit costs of a product will drive the official measure of inflation (Destatis, 2024). In Germany inflation for food had the top inflation rate in 2023, surpassing even price rises for energy.
On the one hand, shrinkflation is cheating on consumers to sell them less for the same price. On the other hand, oversized products that solicit higher consumption are part of the health and environmental problems we face. The obesity pandemic is part of the XXL consumption hype the food industry and supermarkets have created. In this respect, more expensive food (Eurostat info) potentially may trigger the rethinking of consumption and nutrition. “Eating better instead of less” has always been more expensive.
Besides the profit-maximising logic of shrinkflation, there is at least a small hope that behavioural changes might be triggered to consume less, to use less detergent in washing, less sugar drinks, smaller size pizza and so on. Shrinking our food intake is part of the solution for many problems. In the end cutting out most convenience food will save you a lot of money. As a side effect of such behavioural changes, eventually prices are likely to come down some time later again.

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Tobacco

The documentation on tobacco slaves has already been told many times. It is astonishing that the medical journal The Lancet just published another short article on the tobacco industry and slave trade. In fact it is the enslaving practice of only buying tobacco leaves from farmers who previously had taken out a loan from the tobacco company. The control of the tobacco supply chain creates a slavish type of relationship between buyers and sellers. The dependency created leaves most tobacco farmers with no choice but to accept the conditions of the big multinational companies.

Taking the issue of slavery even further we might go as far as condemning the advertisement of tobacco and smoking in the neighborhood of schools as an attempt to enrol tobacco slaves. Only few young people manage to give up tobacco smoking later on with already acquired serious health conditions. Helping to break the vicious circle of dependency as a form of slavery to a drug is hard to accomplish. Specialized medical centers are rare and expensive. Pathologising smoking would be worthwhile rather than other diagnoses where easy to perform physical exercise could do a lot for prevention. Helping people to quit smoking or never start with it would be such a big step ahead.

Peter Laszlo Péri 1960 Help your neighbour
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Energy Food

For more than a decade now researchers have shown the link between energy prices and food prices. At first sight this might seem surprising. In traditional or romantic associations with growing food, there is no link between the cost of energy and food production. Growing crops in your garden does not need more than sunlight, soil and water. Yes, that was long ago. Industrial production of food is heavily relying on energy to heat, feed and water plants or animals. Additionally, the supply chains have become far more distant, which increases the CO2 footprint even further. Therefore, it is no longer surprising that a great number of econometric studies confirm the close link of energy prices and subsequent pressure on food prices. This is not restricted to Europe, but has reached global contamination.
Enjoying seasonal local food is a double catch solution. You grow according to local weather conditions and use traditional conservation methods, if the crop is exceeding your demand at that time. Providing heating for animals to increase productivity or quality of products appears to be one of the most wasteful ways to further increase the spiralling up of energy and food prices.
In agricultural science there is a lot of research into the “energy intake” of animals to better grow or produce more milk etc. This is the expensive intermediary step using energy to produce energy intake for animals rather than humans. It is surprising that we take so many years to address these well-known linkages that have turned to serious problems after Russia’s war on Ukraine. Agriculture and farmers can be part of the solution rather than a problem themselves, if the link of energy consumption and food prices is taken seriously.

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Food Change

Changing habits of eating is among the most difficult behavioral changes. We get so used to our habits to prefer certain alimentary mixtures that we tend to believe we can no longer change them. Depending on our will power we are able to command for more or less longer periods our food intake. Bodily functions of blood pressure or insulin levels play tricks on us of a powerful kind. Therefore it is interesting to see towards the end of a food market what kind of food is sold and what has been left over.

In the historic market of the food, wine and spice loving region of Burgundy in Dijon the ad hoc inspection of an étalage was surprisingly different from my expectation. ‘Paté’ containing meat was left over towards the end of the opening hours and the fish based ’Paté’ was almost sold out. A change towards a more healthy and somewhat more sustainable diet is slowly creeping into societies. This gives hope that food changes are possible and markets will adapt eventually as well. It is a change for the better for each person and our societies as well as the planet.