Tag: safety

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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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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