I think there are certain things good people ought to do to combat brain rot and malicious actors that they don't do because they feel too icky for a good person to do. Like using a some basic baysian filter trained for sanity. You just take the 160 people that upvote some garbage and penalize them. The internet is too hostile for passive pure hearted systems to survive.
The person in the TikTok put on their Scientist Halloween costume though so at least we’re getting good production value. Wouldn’t want to pour dangerous chemicals like corn syrup without gloves on!
I started to notice a subtle shift a couple years ago. An increase in vibes and hype and a decrease in reason and critical thinking.
Reminiscent of something like Eternal September possibly, but with bots this time? Maybe my interests have simply grown beyond what is typically found here.
I don't think there's "we" anymore. A large population of HN readers got to hate the combination of tech and capitalism that HN stands for because its effects on society are horrible. Techno-optimism is dead.
This is such a bad video. Someone else's video, cut over multiple different times, a horrible slurred AI voice, shaky filmed screen with a guy talking over… Each layer adds nothing, but somehow this is the version worthy of sharing?
It's a Twitter link to a post of an NFT guy, my expectations were near zero before the video started. I'm disappointed he didn't even bother to hide that he was reading the output of a chatbot, though. At least the video didn't end with "buy #ingredientsplitcoin".
I'd post the link to the source but of course all attribution has been scratched off the video and the first level of overlays.
Agreed, I googled "Ingredient Splitting" to find a better description and interestingly got pages of pet food related content - it seems a bigger issue with dogs than people
With animals, particularly dogs, you got a very vocal minority of owners going hard on the "feed them naturally" idea - in Germany we call them "BARF" for "biologisch artgerechtes rohes Futter" or "biologically correct raw food". And oh boy. These people are factually correct in everything they say, but have an energy and persistence level that would put hardcore Evangelical proselytizers to shame.
"These people are factually correct in everything they say"
Are they? I don't know the German movement, but the talking points I hear coming from US BARF people seem to mostly be a mix of FUD, naturalistic fallacy, anti-vax, and misunderstanding of biology.
Your opinion is wrong in my opinion. BARF is very much practised in the US as feeding whole raw unprocessed food. Like, chicken (with feathers, poop, stomach contents and everything that came with the bird), lamb (again everything that came with the lamb), fish (everything that…… you get the idea). And that really keeps the dogs healthy, no teeth problems, no cancer, nothing. I have a 11 year old Tervuren that outruns and outperforms 3-4 year old working Malinois.
Right, the "this diet cures cancer!" claims are probably why the parent comment has their opinion.
Both are likely correct. Highly processed foods are likely as bad for dogs as they are for humans, AND the people who lean hard into those claims tend to be nutters who are coincidentally correct about this alongside the antivax, anti seed oil, naturalistic bullshit that they use as virtue signaling.
I think even worse than this is the disconnect between a product name and the actual composition of the product.
Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.
This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.
It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
But lots of things are mostly water. Fresh fruit juice, wine, meat, humans. They're just not made by adding water. Beer is though. I don't think it should be labelled "water".
"From concentrate" pretty much means all the water was taken out, and then they decided how much to put back in. It also allows them to make incredibly sugary drinks while also advertising "No added sugar".
I suppose to be fair, whole pressed juices are incredibly expensive. But I think they should be forced to be more upfront about what these "juices" actually are - mostly apple juice powder with a few other fruit powders sprinkled in and then mixed with water to the desired sweetness level.
The wool thing is mysterious, because I keep hearing about sheep farmers losing money on shearing sheep because the raw wool price is too low, and then I went round a fabric shop the other day and it was all polyester, I don't get why.
It's all processing.
Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared.
More than 20 years ago, it was a pretty lump sum for someone who would shear 10K sheep a year. Still not much compared to the shearing price, but that helps sheep get more meat, reduce disease problems, and also reduce their size to the feeding stations. So a win for everybody.
Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China. Priced dropped entirely, to the point where it would mostly be considered a net negative. You have to store it before you can send a batch, and that takes a lot space. Not only that, but it has to stay dry. Then, consider you want to have a basic sort already done, because you don't want the whole batch to be paid little because it would be considered the lowest grade. So Bags should be consistent; they also have to be dense enough to avoid taking too much space (typical bags are around 1 cubic meter / 100kg). Most of these operation require quite a lot of very tiring human labor, which also require some skills, a problem pervasive with the sheep industry.
So yes, in the end it's too cheap to produce but too expensive to buy.
I can't believe how common this erroneous view is. Sheep reared for wool were bred specifically for the quality of their wool. Those that produce the best wool are not used for their meat. Wool is not a free by-product of anything, it is the product.
> Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared
One of the problem here is that while yes, you have to shear sheep raised for meat, the wool is going to be of an exceptionally low quality, because (a) you generally aren't raising a wool breed for meat, and (b) you aren't keeping your sheep in a manner that minimised damage to the wool.
We receive a fair bit of free by-product wool from meat herds, the processing cost is roughly double that of wool from a proper wool herd, and the end result is inferior.
The best use of by-product wool is often quality-insensitive bulk applications, like wool pellets for roof insulation, at which point there is very little money in the whole value chain
FWiW, in the actual sheep for wool trade there's still a high demand in China for ultrafine low micron merino wool for modern high end breathable suits. So:
> Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China.
really depends on the grade and quality of the wool - a lot is low grade rag fibre for stuffing and insulation, some (many tonnes per annum) is for quality tailoring.
> It's all processing. Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared. More than 20 years ago, it was a pretty lump sum for someone who would shear 10K sheep a year.
50 years ago, the wool sold for more than the meat.
Timber is the same way. Trees are free-sih It's what you do to them (basically converting diesel into a different commodity) after you cut them down that adds money.
Being too bulky to engage in overseas shipping shenanigans probably helps it.
Polyester can be made 24/7 365 while wool comes in batches. Also, regardless of how low wool prices are, it will be more expensive than polyester components as the sheep require being fed and what not. Maybe polyester prices are affected by Hormuz closing????
Every juice cocktail I've ever drank has been upfront about the juices inside.
Your hangup on dehydrated juice is weird. Like, yea, they removed all the water from the juice so all you need to do is add water and it ships better and keeps longer....
This is out of control in the supplements industry.
A company called Botanic Tonics makes a product called Feel Free. These are shots containing extract of kava root, and kratom leaf.
When it was launched, there was no mention of the kratom at all. It was advertised as kava (which it isn't, it's kava extract) and pushed hard on college campuses and gas stations.
After thousands of people got addicted to the kratom, they were sued and the label has slightly improved, but the kratom is still only on the hard to read ingredient list on the back of the label. Their website, and all their social media marketing only mentions kava.
Started by ex-con Jerry Cash aka JW Ross (a good friend an donor of RFK Jnr), the company is also part owned by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, so the Feds turn a blind eye while going after competitors to Feel Free, like 7oH manufacturers.
In the chemistry sense, but not in the ingredient sense. If I press an orange into a glass I've added 100% orange juice. Notice that I never explicitly added any water to the glass. Whereas if I make it from concentrate I'm adding tap water as an input.
It's not a scam. And added sugars are listed prominently in the nutrition facts.
It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.
There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.
Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
Your definition of scam is too narrow as you seem to think it must include lying.
Mine is more dictionary based, meaning "intention to deceive". And prominently putting strawberries or merino on the label while not mentioning what constitutes most of it would fit it. It's especially egregious when nutrition facts are printed in low contrast with tiny print I have difficulty reading even with my glasses.
As an aside, around here traditional jam has more fruit than sugar (per weight and volume). Otherwise you are really just eating flavoured sugar.
Because there is generally no intent to deceive. Processed foods are developed to optimize their quality, longevity, and price. Not the order of ingredients on the label.
Nutrition facts are printed in black and white at a readable size when there is room for the full panel, this is by law. It's not up to food manufacturers.
And I don't know what you mean by "around here". Traditional jam has equal amounts of fruit and sugar. Like the kind your great-grandmother made. Of course it is essentially eating flavored sugar. That's literally what jam is and why you spread it thin rather than eating whole spoonfuls of it.
I have to check the official recipe here in Argentina.
Obviously there is no official recipe, but "Doña Petrona" is very close to that. She was very famous in 1930-1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do%C3%B1a_Petrona I just looked at her book and it says "1000g Strawberry and 600g Sugar". Here is a webpage that says that they lifted the recipe from the book https://anis-estrellado.blogspot.com/2011/12/mermelada-de-fr... and says "2200g Strawberry, 1000g Sugar + 100ml lemon juice (optional)"
So at least here it's like 2 to 1 by weight. From my memory, I remember the 1 to 1 rule, but I think it was "by volume" instead of "by weight". But note that strawberry have a lot of water inside them, so it's also misleading to think that they have more strawberry than sugar.
Anyway, I agree with you that traditional jam was already "flavored sugar". In particular they used a lot of sugar to prevents the grow of bacteria, so the jam can be store without a refrigerator.
Around here means Slovenia. No idea what my great-grandmother made because I didn't know her, but down the line they didn't use this much sugar and my mother would be downright appalled at the idea.
Down the line, what was made is likely preserves and not actual jam. Jam has a specific texture associated with it, and the sugar is used for not only sweetness but to help it gel properly.
I agree with this. "Scam" is used way too liberally these days. I can read , and like you say the nutrition facts clearly list total added sugars in a standardized way.
Completely unrelated topic, but Lord I wish cookie popups were standardized the same way nutrition facts are.
You're defending the example (why idk), but what about, say, a dog food company listing "buffalo meat" as its #1 ingredient by simply splitting every filler ingredient into constituent parts?
How does one reward the "good guys" when one can't tell the difference between a gamed metric and an honest one?
Why? Because I once researched it also assuming it was a scam, and then found out it very much wasn't.
I can't speak to dog food, I haven't researched that -- just the multiple sugar types. And also that when ice cream lists skim milk as an ingredient along with heavy cream, this isn't to make it appear healthier either -- it's to control the overall milkfat levels.
But if you're looking for nutritional information, that's literally on the label next to the ingredients. If you want to judge the protein or the sugar, then just look at that. If you're trying to judge those amounts by looking at the order of ingredients, that's your mistake to begin with.
There.can be multiple reasons for things. It is true that blending sugar, corn syrup, and HFCS gives finer control over texture and flavor. It is also true that there is immense marketing value to "strawberries" being the first ingredient, and if "sugar" was listed first they would see a drop in sales.
If you think the second item there does not get consideration by these companies, you are dead wrong.
> It is also true that there is immense marketing value to "strawberries" being the first ingredient, and if "sugar" was listed first they would see a drop in sales.
To add to this, I recall an actual marketing campaign from one of the big US cereal manufacturers (I forget which) about the first listed ingredient in some of their cereals being whole grain, explicitly selling their product on the fact that the plurality ingredient of it is healthy.
Granted, that by itself doesn't mean much, but if they also split sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, their claim of "more whole grain than any other ingredient" could easily fall under technically-correct-but-misleading. Of course, a shopper can get more useful information from the nutritional facts but most people shop by the pretty picture on the front of the box (and the friendly message on their screen) rather than the technical label on the back.
The best solution is to control all the ingredients in your own kitchen. Relying on labeling to protect your health is insufficient. If you select your produce, you can prefer Jim Bob's local farm over the Monsanto option. You can sidestep entire categories of health risk. I'll sometimes buy a full hand basket worth of one thing like onions or limes depending on availability and quality.
There are still some shelf stable goods that you can buy without getting screwed. But it's exceedingly rare now. Peanut butter is a good example. 99% the inventory is JIF with palm oil and added sugar in a plastic container, but on the very top (or bottom) shelf you can often find a glass jar that contains only peanuts and salt. It took me a month to get used to peanut butter like this. The exercise of stirring it almost ruined it for me. I can't imagine going back to the other stuff now. I tried JIF again recently and it tastes like a product you'd buy from Home Depot to do a drywall job.
Many grocery stores have in house peanut butter grinders where the ingredient is nothing but peanuts, ground on demand for you into a bulk container. This contains no sugar or palm oil or other ingredients, and is often cheaper than any jar PB, and can often be used before it separates, meaning no stirring is necessary. Ever since we discovered this we buy nothing else.
I am in the USA. Out of the four grocery stores I frequent, three of them have fresh peanut butter grinders, including the giant Kroger-owned megachain one.
Come to think of it, I've never seen a grocery store with a bulk foods section where you can buy grains etc in self serve bags by weight, that didn't have a peanut butter grinder.
TBF it varies by region (and over time) in the US. Where I'm at even the big box national chains consistently provide several peanut butter options - combinations of (at least) glass vs plastic, added sugar, and alternative oils. (For my part I don't want the sugar but I'm not concerned with a plastic jar or a natural oil to help emulsify.)
I also live in EU and you can only find that kind at small organic food shops. The type you get from Lidl is solid with added sugar, salt and vegetable oil. I guess Denmark is the odd one here.
Pure peanut one is great for cooking if you want a neutral taste but I would never put it on bread it's disgusting.
> The exercise of stirring it almost ruined it for me
Stir (very well) once, store in the refridgerator. The colder storing temperature keeps it from seperating, and in small volumes (like the amount you've put on bread) it warms back to a spreadable consistency within a minute or two
> If you select your produce, you can prefer Jim Bob's local farm over the Monsanto option.
Maybe. I've seen cases where the local Farmer's market was reselling produce from grocery stores at higher prices (because Farmer's market).
Farm stores may have similar problems - they might stock things they don't make so they can sell it for convenience. Just because you buy corn from them doesn't mean they made the corn.
Yes, super annoying. As other comments mentioned, it is very common to say "No sugar added" but then it is still sweetened with stevia or something. Like, I WANTED IT NOT SWEET.
When I visited South America I saw products that would actually more precisely say "sin edulcorante" as opposed to "sin azúcar".
It's for those Karens who believe everything will poison them, but instead of just avoiding processed foods, they will buy stuff with no "sugar" or "glutamate".
I personally don't get why anyone would volunteer to pay for expensive agave syrup or cane juice when you could just add sugar. Maybe only consume it in moderation (and no sweetened beverages).
Unless you can link some actual reference, I'm going to call bullshit on this one. Dehydrated cane juice is literally just (less refined) sugar, and in my experience I have never seen a "no added sugar" label on a product with dehydrated cane juice. I actually look a lot for this because in my experience "all natural" combined with "no added sugar" almost always means Stevia, and I can't stand that stuff.
I just did a search online and all the Whole Foods soy milk I could fine listed either "organic cane sugar" as an ingredient, or was unsweetened.
Don't holiday in Spain or other countries that highly tax sugars. It's itols and aspartame all the way. I literally paniced when I realized I cant/wont eat like 90% or the packaged food in each individual store chain.
I saw “dehydrated cane juice” years ago as an ingredient in Horizon chocolate milk, though they appear to have dropped the charade and now call it “organic cane sugar”.
Deception is bad, but from a nutritional point of view this really shouldn't be an issue for informed consumers (ie. people who read the ingredient lists) given that "nutrition facts" also exists. 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS. This is especially true in highly processed foods, where the processing eliminates any advantage that "natural" sugars have.
No, making the law only protect those who are informed is a poor idea on many fronts.
Firstly, you've incentivized companies to prevent people from becoming informed. You can already see online that lies spread faster because they don't have the inconvenience of needing to be true. You have one truth, and it has to stand up to countless thousands of lies.
Secondly, nobody can be informed about everything. The whole reason we have experts is because they are the ones informed on their subject, and they devote their entire careers to it. You cannot possibly be well-read and up to speed about everything you buy while still being able to function as a human being.
Thirdly, what happens when the deceptive, shitty product completely out-competes the safer one because it's that much cheaper? Hey, guess what? You can't buy the safe or sustainable version of the product anymore because every business that did went out of business. It's no longer in the market.
I want to buy the thing that was the most expensive and exuberant to manufacture for the lowest price. So yeah, when I want jam, I want jam that is the most strawberries. This isn't complicated.
It is actually complicated in this case, because you want jam. Jam is made with 1 part fruit 1 part sugar. But it is even more complicated now because you want not just any jam, but strawberry jam in particular. This is a low pectin fruit so you have to supply your own. Things also change depending on the type of pectin you go for and I think I better stop here...
And yet some people will pay extra to buy jam with no added sugars but agave syrup. I'd rather pay more to have more fruit and just ... less overall sugars.
> 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS.
From a biological pov, that is wrong on so many levels. It is why labels now have Added Sugars listed separately. Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation, whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
>Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation
That's why I specifically mentioned the processing part. Sugar in apple might not be comparable to sugar in a coke, but all of that goes out the window when you're comparing the sugar content of jellies.
>whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
Ok, you might not know this, but sucrose (white sugar) is a di-saccharide consisting of a molecule of glucose and one of fructose, which your body splits during digestion. So the amount of fructose you get from HFCS is almost identical to the amount you get from white sugar. Your body can't tell the difference.
That's why I don't get the US hype about Coke with actual sugar. It's still 50% fructose, what do you think will happen if you drink several cans every day?
I can tell the difference, but I couldn't tell you which is which.
This usually pops up around Passover, when Coke switches to an all sugar formulation for reasons I'm unqualified to explain. It's an "oh hey, this Coke tastes different", I'll check the label, and see that it's sweetened with sucrose instead of HFCS.
I'll handwavingly claim that this is close enough to a blind study/anecdote as I'm not Jewish and haven't a clue when Passover falls. As I buy cans, not bottles, it's not the yellow caps giving it away either.
I'd be wary of what people say they prefer in tests. People also prefer Pepsi to Coke in blind taste tests but they don't prefer it to drink an entire can.
Pepsi tastes much sweeter than Coke and I wouldn't be surprised if corn syrup Coke was sweeter than sugar Coke.
That's not metabolically true. Fructose by definition doesn't have glucose which is present in sucrose. Metabolically, your body absolutely reacts differently.
A core issue is that isolated fructose and its derivatives, e.g. HFCS, don't sufficiently trigger satiety. In contrast, regular sugar and glucose trigger satiety. This has been known for over a decade:
- Dissociable Behavioral, Physiological and Neural Effects of Acute Glucose and Fructose Ingestion: A Pilot Study (2015) (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130280)
- Attenuated hypothalamic response to fructose via a dedicated gut-brain pathway (2026) (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2026.05.013)
The claim isn't that HFCS isn't bad for you, it's that it isn't worse for you than just regular sugar. Linking a bunch of articles about how HFCS is bad doesn't refute that.
Isolated fructose and its derivatives, e.g. HFCS, don't sufficiently trigger satiety, while stressing the liver and the heart. In contrast, regular sugar and glucose trigger satiety. This has been known for over a decade.
Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...
The irony is that this is the entire reason that the FDA was originally formed - to provide clarity and standardization on food ingredients, but now the FDA is often controlled by the exact same organizations that it's supposed to regulate.
Perhaps it's time for the FDA 2.0 where leadership cannot have any connection whatsoever to the organizations being regulated. If I need years of industry experience and a doctorate to understand why you're adding a chemical to my food, then I don't want it in my food. I don't think that's an unreasonable position. We were far healthier before all of these 'safe' chemicals and additives began being added to food.
Honestly I don't mind if I need to do a bit of reading to understand the purpose behind an additive. But I think that information should be readily available for every processed food product by law. If you're going to add something that can't be purchased as an ingredient at a typical grocery store then you should be required to publish an explanatory statement similar to the MSDS that I can pull up for any given cleaning product or pesticide.
Yes but your "i dont mind" shouldnt constitute consent from everyone else, not everyone has the time or discerning to do that, it should already be taken care of at a higher level as a cost of doing business and hopefully enough to disincentivize bad deaing
You do not seem to appreciate how regulation works in general in the United States. Product labeling is a perpetual game of cat-and-mouse. I can give you a litany of ways that vendors skirt the regulations, hide ingredients, lie to consumers, and falsify their labels while still remaining 100% legal. And obviously, I am not privy to all of their tricks, but just some of the obvious ones.
I do not know if the Utopian Japanese Food Industry* is so trustworthy and impeccable so as not to mislead customers or engage in malicious compliance. Perhaps they simply abide by the rules and manufacture honest food and inedible leaden paint chips. I don't know; Japan is the place where you can insert your whole rice into a streetside vending machine to have it robbed of nutrients... err, hulled and sifted.
Since I live next-door to a pan-asian market now, I will eventually figure out how they are labeling their sodas and snack foods. Thank you.
Works pretty well in Europe as well. You could try adjusting the rules, start testing products and dining the shit out of the ones not following the rules.
Given how often HN trends to the frontpage “rage for views” posts that link to GitHub issues where the submitter dislikes the current outcome, this three-word argument against the post is uniquely unpersuasive here. This US foods practice is a worthwhile topic to rage about given the severity of public health impact of the mislabeling alone, and it’s an easily-solved problem when regulators aren’t captured.
This is a dumb thing that HN does, certain words get stripped from titles. You can edit them back in but submitters either don't know that or just don't bother.
If you make jam at home you’re going to be adding a very similar amount of sugar. Ingredient splitting may be an issue, but a sweet fruit preserve is a silly choice for showing it.
Yup, stopped using SLS toothpaste because I heard that it could be causing my canker sores. I've had ONE in the three years since, when they were a weekly occurrence before.
also, when I was young I worried I might have herpes or something, but doctor told me canker sores are different from cold sores. Later in life, turns out there might be a chance I have crohns?
there's a big constellation of autoinflammatory health issues that affect people, especially the autistic/adhd types who might find their way to Hacker News in large numbers
if you are not already familiar, you should have your doctor go through https://allbrainsbelong.org/clinician-resources/ (this is a nonprofit's project funded through an HHS grant) and see what actually applies to you
Crohn's, irritable bowel syndrome, regular old heartburn, brain fog, chronic fatigue, depression, sleep apnea, hives, rashes, waking up in the middle of the night, heat sensitivities, Ehler-Danlos, joint issues, vascular issues, dizziness on standing, arthritis, long COVID... it's quite the list!!
(and it's really frustrating when (e.g.) a cheap allergy medication can solve half your problems and you go without it for years because no one's thought to connect those dots)
I do have autoimmune issues, but I had a totally different gut issue that they basically hand waved as IBS due to those until a different set of docs realized it was a dysfunctional gallbladder. I had been dealing with weekly gall bladder attacks for a decade and then they pulled it.
Just to say, be careful with the diagnosis. They can be rather imprecise.
I have thought about this hack before while looking at ingredient lists. I don't know what the best wording would be to establish the spirit of the law, but obviously this should be banned.
> You must mention the quantity (by percentage) of any ingredients that: appear in the name of the product (example: ‘apple pie')
[; or] are emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics (example: ‘with walnuts')[; or] are essential to characterise the food and to distinguish it from other foods[.]
This would be rather interesting, I've noticed whenever a product is "with ___" [insert hot substance or ingredient], its almost always near the very end of the ingredients list, meaning its among the lowest in amounts of ingredients used in the product
Yes, it’s generally bad to have a high percentage of capsaicin, but it’s still a figure worth noting :) I would encourage in that scenario specifying the % and then also the estimated scovilles total.
How is this a 'hack'? It's listing ingredients in order of quantity. The nutrition facts already tell you total amount of sugar per serving separately, that's not what the ingredient list is for to begin with. Also, I don't have much sympathy for someone surprised that jelly contains a lot of sugar:
A) Have you tasted it
B) Do you have any idea what jelly is or why it exists
C) Have you ever made it?
Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
> Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
If a typical jelly recipe calls for pounds of fruit and a few cups of sugar wouldn't be normal to expect fruit to be the first ingredient? If a company is using more added sugars than fruit that should be obvious without having to look at the nutrition facts
Typical jelly & jamrecipes call for close to 1:1 fruit to sugar. E.g. ¹Ball mason jars strawberry jam recipe calls for 7 cups sugar to 5 cups strawberries. Martha Stewart calls for 3/4 cup sugar for every cup of juice² in making jelly. The Joy of Cooking (44th printing 1988)notes that "Store-bought jellies, according to law, must have at least 45% fruit and 55% sugar". Etc.
The Joy of Cooking's recipes do this, but the total sugar content ends up the same because they boil down the juice into a thick syrup first. The sugar just comes from the same fruit as what's being preserved, instead of cane or beets.
There's no way that would be legal to sell. The whole point of the sugar in jam is preservation - you may get away with it for a while in a home canning scenario, but really a jam with 5% sugar is not shelf stable, and needs to be stored under refrigeration (commercial low sugar jams have to add an additional preservative like potassium sorbate instead).
In some jurisdiction, you cannot call that a jam, because you added foreign pectin. A jam must only use the fruit's natural pectin, plus sugar to activate the pectin.
You can make quick mocktails with a fruit juice as base (or a mini can of Coke, 200ml): 1 part fruit juice, 1 part fizzy water, a little tonic water, a few dashes of your favorite bitter (Angostura, orange, cardamon, etc...) and a slice of lemon or lime.
It depends on the type of fruit though, since there are some fruits that won't set properly with the low-sugar pectin. (This only applies to home canning though, since the industrial manufacturers should have access to other thickeners.)
It does come out a bit less viscous than industrial jams, although enough that it can stay on top of a slice of bread, but it's much healthier and, more importantly, it tastes so much better. Works with berries pretty well.
> It does come out a bit less viscous than industrial jams, although enough that it can stay on top of a slice of bread
It really depends on the fruit though—most of the time it works great, but there have been a few fruits that wouldn't set at all (closer to a syrup than a jam) with a low-sugar recipe, but set perfectly when I added more sugar.
> and, more importantly, it tastes so much better.
I think my comment was a touch deeper than you caught. Jam doesn’t have a strictly required amount of sugar, it’s not defined as having X amount, so saying “you can make it with less” is two people talking about how much milk makes a bowl of cereal. Both are correct, it’s jam either way and it’s a bowl of cereal either way. Think about it.
For the product in question, they aren't using more added sugars than fruit.
As you can read on the label:
Ingredients: Strawberries, High Fructose Corn syrup, Corn syrup, Sugar, Fruit Pectin, Citric Acid.
Serving Size 20g
Total Sugars 12g
Total Added Sugars 9g
Each tablespoon of jam contains 10-11 grams of fruit and 9-10 grams of added sugar. The jam is 60% sugar overall because there is sugar in the fruit too.
And that's weighted by share of the output. If you're measuring the input, this recipe is going to take a lot more "fruit" than "sugar", because part of making jam is boiling away a bunch of the water that occurs in fruit, whereas all of the added sugar is retained. (Corn syrup, however, seems to be about 2/3 water, which will make that comparison look worse.)
The hack is to use several different ingredients of the same type where they would have used just one, and doing it just so they can have the ingredient they want listed first as first.
The solution is to require % by mass number next to each ingredient. This way even if strawberry is first ingredient, the low percentage will make the scam obvious.
Sorry if it sucks for their competitive advantage or profit margin or whatever but people are literally going to put this stuff in their bodies to sustain their existence so you have to say what’s in it. If you want to keep your product composition a mystery go make SaaS and put it behind an API.
The same argument could be used against disclosing ingredients altogether.
I'd rather know what I'm eating and not have greedy CEOs pinching their pennies of profit like they're guarding the Krabby Patty formula, because they're scared someone else will learn the generational secret of how to make (checks notes) strawberry jelly. Trust me, the economy will survive if Smuckers tells you how much sugar you're eating.
As another commenter mentioned, EU rules already require this for "prominent" ingredients (e.g. ingredients that appear in the name of the product, like "Strawberry" jam), but not all ingredients in the list, which seems like the appropriate compromise.
That solution is already in place for sugar. The jam that is the focus of the tweet is 60% sugar, and this is prominently printed on the label. What problem do you think you're trying to solve?
The product could still be 60% sugar and contain 0% strawberries. It could be still be 60% sugar and contain 1% strawberries.
Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.
The only problem here is that no part of your comment is true.
The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹
Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.
The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.
> The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
The point of this "article" is that they can break up the sugar ingredients so that it's possible for no single source of sugar to be more than the amount of strawberries, but to still have more sugars than strawberries and yet put strawberries first. I'm not saying that this particular jelly example does that, only that the rules would allow for it.
Is it really a scam though? They still have to list all of the sweeteners. Not all sweeteners work the same too. And... not limited to American companies...
Honestly I half expect these "food industry is bad!" videos/people are sponsored by the food industry itself. They're unhinged enough that I feel a lot of people dismiss them as just scare tactics. Unfortunately the stuff that goes into some products genuinely ARE in desperate need of being reviewed/banned.
These types of pieces I feel however do more harm than good to that cause.
@WallStreetApes is not a reliable source on literally any topic in the world (maybe besides how to make money by being a right-wing Twitter content farm). This being on the front page is a discredit to HN.
There's a city-level law in Santa Cruz (California) that levies a punitive tax on beverages that contain added sugar. It's weird in a couple of ways.
"All-natural juice" is exempt, and it's defined by whether the sugar is "added". So if you combine 20 gallons of orange juice and evaporate the water away until it's reached the concentration of sugar you want, that's fine; if you get one gallon of juice and add sugar until you've reached the same concentration, you're subject to the tax. Oranges contain enough sugar that this is viable for orange juice. Limes don't, so limeade is taxed very heavily while orange juice that contains the same amount of sugar is exempt.
Milk products (dairy or imitation) are exempt, and they are legally defined by the first ingredient (for milk) or first two ingredients (for imitation milk). Chocolate milk isn't a sugar-added beverage, because it's a milk product. Eggnog is a milk product too.
This second point seems to explain why it's important for companies to manipulate which ingredients are listed first.
There's really no chance of misleading the consumer, because right above the legally-mandated and legally sensitive ingredients list you'll see the legally mandated and not legally sensitive nutrition facts, which will tell you that eggnog is about 17% sugar by weight or that, to use the example here, Smucker's strawberry jam is 60% sugar. ( https://www.smuckers.com/fruit-spreads/jam/strawberry-jam )
I guess if you just look at the first ingredient but its both obvious there are multiple sources of sugar/simple carbs and that jam is typically very heavily sweetened; this is how it has a long shelf life.
Jam is a pretty sweet product, but that doesn't mean I'd expect I'd expect more sweeteners than fruit. A basic recipe for strawberry jam might require a couple pounds of strawberries and a couple cups of sugar. That'd still have a shelf life of a year or more (unopened).
But sugar is literally added to jelly as the preservative, that's why jelly exists to begin with.
For example, the very first recipe for strawberry jelly from some horrible spam recipe site:
2 cups (16 ounces) pure strawberry juice (I used 3 1/2 pounds ripe, fresh strawberries to get this amount of juice)
3 1/3 cups (666 grams) granulated sugar
Sure, that’s why sugar is added, but it doesn’t have to be. The point is to remove free water (water that bacteria can use, I don’t know the English expression for that), and you can do that by:
1. adding more sugar
2. cooking it for a longer time
3. adding pectin (either store-bought or from natural sources)
Of course it depends on the kind of fruit, but it’s quite rare to have more sugar than fruit, even without pectin or longer cooking time.
I ain't watching that video or clicking on Twitter, but from the comments, this is about "ingredient splitting", where they "split an undesirable ingredient into several varieties so that each appears further down the list", because in the US ingredients are ordered by weight. So you can "hide" the amount of sugar by claiming it's from several sources, and listing those sources distinctly.
In this case it was the submitted title but I think we can fix it by shortening further.
(Submitted title was "scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed 1st". Software rewrote it to "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first". I've since changed it.)
There's an entire industry of this--often operating under the term 'nutraceuticals' (i.e. food additives/preservatives) and other weird stuff. My friend works for one of these companies and was telling me to NEVER eat the Chinese sausages from Costco because they use a bunch of weird anti-fungal ingredients that they just label 'natural flavoring'. This is going on with literally everything sold at the grocery store. You can't even buy just Italian pasta and assume it's safe--Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate. If you want glyphosate free products, you have to actually buy specialty Italian pastas that use Italian wheat. It's insane how hard it is to just eat non-processed foods.
> Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate
False. The wheat sold into the EU is not treated with glyphosate, and is strictly verified to comply with EU regulations. Canadian farmers are happy to do that because they charge more for the EU-compliant wheat than the NA-compliant one, and Italians are happy to buy it.
Most people make money ultimately by lying and deceiving/manipulating. Either works for a company whose income is based on the practice, or directly participates in them.
Of course at the expense of others.
In this case, our health.
Is your resume any more truthful than these ingredient labels?
160 points on a submissions pointing to a tweet from an NFT account posting a low information tiktok video.
Times are changing. I'm having nostalgia for the decades we were only worried about turning into reddit.
I think there are certain things good people ought to do to combat brain rot and malicious actors that they don't do because they feel too icky for a good person to do. Like using a some basic baysian filter trained for sanity. You just take the 160 people that upvote some garbage and penalize them. The internet is too hostile for passive pure hearted systems to survive.
The person in the TikTok put on their Scientist Halloween costume though so at least we’re getting good production value. Wouldn’t want to pour dangerous chemicals like corn syrup without gloves on!
Flag the post if you don’t want to see more like this.
Leave this site if you don’t want to see things called out this like.
It's X.com. We deserve better sources.
The account almost exclusively posts X/Twitter accounts on HN. Unsurprisingly it's a post-2021 HN account.
Yeah, I know we’re not supposed to say it, but HN is dying. The amount of slop that is getting praise on the site lately is insane.
I'm not sure if dying, but there's definitely been a change, and I wonder about the cause.
So far I thought it was mostly AI companies and users pushing their products here, but maybe there's a shift in userbase as well?
I started to notice a subtle shift a couple years ago. An increase in vibes and hype and a decrease in reason and critical thinking.
Reminiscent of something like Eternal September possibly, but with bots this time? Maybe my interests have simply grown beyond what is typically found here.
> we were only worried about turning into reddit
I don't think there's "we" anymore. A large population of HN readers got to hate the combination of tech and capitalism that HN stands for because its effects on society are horrible. Techno-optimism is dead.
The real story (sorry) is that this post is readable on X without js! Wtf is happening?
This is such a bad video. Someone else's video, cut over multiple different times, a horrible slurred AI voice, shaky filmed screen with a guy talking over… Each layer adds nothing, but somehow this is the version worthy of sharing?
It's a Twitter link to a post of an NFT guy, my expectations were near zero before the video started. I'm disappointed he didn't even bother to hide that he was reading the output of a chatbot, though. At least the video didn't end with "buy #ingredientsplitcoin".
I'd post the link to the source but of course all attribution has been scratched off the video and the first level of overlays.
Agreed, I googled "Ingredient Splitting" to find a better description and interestingly got pages of pet food related content - it seems a bigger issue with dogs than people
https://www.dogfoodadvisor.com/dog-food-industry-exposed/ing...
With animals, particularly dogs, you got a very vocal minority of owners going hard on the "feed them naturally" idea - in Germany we call them "BARF" for "biologisch artgerechtes rohes Futter" or "biologically correct raw food". And oh boy. These people are factually correct in everything they say, but have an energy and persistence level that would put hardcore Evangelical proselytizers to shame.
"These people are factually correct in everything they say"
Are they? I don't know the German movement, but the talking points I hear coming from US BARF people seem to mostly be a mix of FUD, naturalistic fallacy, anti-vax, and misunderstanding of biology.
Your opinion is wrong in my opinion. BARF is very much practised in the US as feeding whole raw unprocessed food. Like, chicken (with feathers, poop, stomach contents and everything that came with the bird), lamb (again everything that came with the lamb), fish (everything that…… you get the idea). And that really keeps the dogs healthy, no teeth problems, no cancer, nothing. I have a 11 year old Tervuren that outruns and outperforms 3-4 year old working Malinois.
Right, the "this diet cures cancer!" claims are probably why the parent comment has their opinion.
Both are likely correct. Highly processed foods are likely as bad for dogs as they are for humans, AND the people who lean hard into those claims tend to be nutters who are coincidentally correct about this alongside the antivax, anti seed oil, naturalistic bullshit that they use as virtue signaling.
> And that really keeps the dogs healthy, no teeth problems, no cancer, nothing.
Cures all diseases.
> I have a 11 year old Tervuren that outruns and outperforms 3-4 year old working Malinois.
Backed by anecdote.
The TikTok generation is on Hacker News now. This is their bread and butter.
I wonder how long until we have a tiktok.com post on the front page.
That's when you put on your shoes and head out the door.
Or you just flag it and move on?
But as you can see from replies crowd here is from TikTok as well. Sadly HN is in downward spiral.
I know plenty of my fellow millenials addicted to this slop too.
The text version is not any better.
I think even worse than this is the disconnect between a product name and the actual composition of the product.
Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.
This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.
It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
But lots of things are mostly water. Fresh fruit juice, wine, meat, humans. They're just not made by adding water. Beer is though. I don't think it should be labelled "water".
"From concentrate" pretty much means all the water was taken out, and then they decided how much to put back in. It also allows them to make incredibly sugary drinks while also advertising "No added sugar".
I suppose to be fair, whole pressed juices are incredibly expensive. But I think they should be forced to be more upfront about what these "juices" actually are - mostly apple juice powder with a few other fruit powders sprinkled in and then mixed with water to the desired sweetness level.
The wool thing is mysterious, because I keep hearing about sheep farmers losing money on shearing sheep because the raw wool price is too low, and then I went round a fabric shop the other day and it was all polyester, I don't get why.
It's all processing. Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared. More than 20 years ago, it was a pretty lump sum for someone who would shear 10K sheep a year. Still not much compared to the shearing price, but that helps sheep get more meat, reduce disease problems, and also reduce their size to the feeding stations. So a win for everybody.
Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China. Priced dropped entirely, to the point where it would mostly be considered a net negative. You have to store it before you can send a batch, and that takes a lot space. Not only that, but it has to stay dry. Then, consider you want to have a basic sort already done, because you don't want the whole batch to be paid little because it would be considered the lowest grade. So Bags should be consistent; they also have to be dense enough to avoid taking too much space (typical bags are around 1 cubic meter / 100kg). Most of these operation require quite a lot of very tiring human labor, which also require some skills, a problem pervasive with the sheep industry.
So yes, in the end it's too cheap to produce but too expensive to buy.
> Wool is a free by-product
I can't believe how common this erroneous view is. Sheep reared for wool were bred specifically for the quality of their wool. Those that produce the best wool are not used for their meat. Wool is not a free by-product of anything, it is the product.
> Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared
One of the problem here is that while yes, you have to shear sheep raised for meat, the wool is going to be of an exceptionally low quality, because (a) you generally aren't raising a wool breed for meat, and (b) you aren't keeping your sheep in a manner that minimised damage to the wool.
We receive a fair bit of free by-product wool from meat herds, the processing cost is roughly double that of wool from a proper wool herd, and the end result is inferior.
The best use of by-product wool is often quality-insensitive bulk applications, like wool pellets for roof insulation, at which point there is very little money in the whole value chain
> sheep have to be sheared
Not sheep raised for meat, bred to be low wool volume producers, and regularly (two or three times a year) run through a defoliating spray.
See, for example: https://farmtable.com.au/ag-library/ag-business-resources/se...
FWiW, in the actual sheep for wool trade there's still a high demand in China for ultrafine low micron merino wool for modern high end breathable suits. So:
> Then, everything closed and the only thing left was to send it to China.
really depends on the grade and quality of the wool - a lot is low grade rag fibre for stuffing and insulation, some (many tonnes per annum) is for quality tailoring.
> It's all processing. Wool is a free by-product, sheep have to be sheared. More than 20 years ago, it was a pretty lump sum for someone who would shear 10K sheep a year.
50 years ago, the wool sold for more than the meat.
Timber is the same way. Trees are free-sih It's what you do to them (basically converting diesel into a different commodity) after you cut them down that adds money.
Being too bulky to engage in overseas shipping shenanigans probably helps it.
There's many grades of wool and the coarse ones really are very cheap. So cheap as to be used for carpet in government schools (in NZ/Australia).
Polyester ~$1000/MT, wool ~$15,000/MT. Polyester is cheap, barely more than it's feedstocks.
Polyester can be made 24/7 365 while wool comes in batches. Also, regardless of how low wool prices are, it will be more expensive than polyester components as the sheep require being fed and what not. Maybe polyester prices are affected by Hormuz closing????
Every juice cocktail I've ever drank has been upfront about the juices inside.
Your hangup on dehydrated juice is weird. Like, yea, they removed all the water from the juice so all you need to do is add water and it ships better and keeps longer....
> It also allows them to make incredibly sugary drinks while also advertising "No added sugar"
you can do this also without any concentrate using regular apple juice
I know I've seen American beer alongside the water in at least one German market.
I don't know, if beer were labelled ‘water’ i’d be less productive, but also less anxious..
they're made out of water?
[They're made out of meat.](https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/)
This is out of control in the supplements industry.
A company called Botanic Tonics makes a product called Feel Free. These are shots containing extract of kava root, and kratom leaf.
When it was launched, there was no mention of the kratom at all. It was advertised as kava (which it isn't, it's kava extract) and pushed hard on college campuses and gas stations.
After thousands of people got addicted to the kratom, they were sued and the label has slightly improved, but the kratom is still only on the hard to read ingredient list on the back of the label. Their website, and all their social media marketing only mentions kava.
Started by ex-con Jerry Cash aka JW Ross (a good friend an donor of RFK Jnr), the company is also part owned by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, so the Feds turn a blind eye while going after competitors to Feel Free, like 7oH manufacturers.
Read the horror stories on r/quittingfeelfree.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/a-herbal-product-sold-...
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1FJFJQsc42/
https://azcapitoltimes.com/news/2026/09/23/arizona-ag-sues-o...
> kratom products are taken by millions of Americans, despite FDA warnings linking them to liver toxicity, dependence, and in some cases, death.
Never heard of liver connection, wonder if thats actually true of standard powder kratom. With extracts obviously anything goes.
Same difference as coca > cocaine
Is cratom legal?
"mostly water" is hardly a problem here
not-from-concentrate or freshly pressed juice is also mostly water
In the chemistry sense, but not in the ingredient sense. If I press an orange into a glass I've added 100% orange juice. Notice that I never explicitly added any water to the glass. Whereas if I make it from concentrate I'm adding tap water as an input.
What's the difference of the resulting mixture, chemically?
Yeah, a small container of powdered fruit to drink wouldn't have the same benefits.
Many things we eat and drink are mostly water. You’re mostly water.
It's not a scam. And added sugars are listed prominently in the nutrition facts.
It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.
There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.
Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
I agree, no scam here.
When I look at an ingredients labels I assume it’s listed by order of quantity, but it tells you nothing about the total amount.
You could have two ingredients listed but you don’t know if it’s 99% first ingredient, 1% second or 50.1% first and 49.9% second.
That’s why you look at the nutritional label
EU regulation for ingredients requires that some ingredients do have their percentage displayed in the ingredient lists.
E.g. "strawberry yogurt" must list the amount of strawberries because that is displayed in the name/label.
Still important to look at the nutritional label too.
EU has destroyed innovation though.
Agh I can't innovate when I have to [checks notes] put the ingredient amounts on the label!!!
Its too hard! We just dont have the technology [flips desk]
Your definition of scam is too narrow as you seem to think it must include lying.
Mine is more dictionary based, meaning "intention to deceive". And prominently putting strawberries or merino on the label while not mentioning what constitutes most of it would fit it. It's especially egregious when nutrition facts are printed in low contrast with tiny print I have difficulty reading even with my glasses.
As an aside, around here traditional jam has more fruit than sugar (per weight and volume). Otherwise you are really just eating flavoured sugar.
Because there is generally no intent to deceive. Processed foods are developed to optimize their quality, longevity, and price. Not the order of ingredients on the label.
Nutrition facts are printed in black and white at a readable size when there is room for the full panel, this is by law. It's not up to food manufacturers.
And I don't know what you mean by "around here". Traditional jam has equal amounts of fruit and sugar. Like the kind your great-grandmother made. Of course it is essentially eating flavored sugar. That's literally what jam is and why you spread it thin rather than eating whole spoonfuls of it.
I have to check the official recipe here in Argentina.
Obviously there is no official recipe, but "Doña Petrona" is very close to that. She was very famous in 1930-1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do%C3%B1a_Petrona I just looked at her book and it says "1000g Strawberry and 600g Sugar". Here is a webpage that says that they lifted the recipe from the book https://anis-estrellado.blogspot.com/2011/12/mermelada-de-fr... and says "2200g Strawberry, 1000g Sugar + 100ml lemon juice (optional)"
The closest modern version is "Paulina Cocina" https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulina_Cocina that always have good, easy and tasty recipes. She says https://www.paulinacocina.net/mermelada-de-frutilla/40082#:~... "1000g Strawberry, 500g Sugar + 1 lemon juice"
So at least here it's like 2 to 1 by weight. From my memory, I remember the 1 to 1 rule, but I think it was "by volume" instead of "by weight". But note that strawberry have a lot of water inside them, so it's also misleading to think that they have more strawberry than sugar.
Anyway, I agree with you that traditional jam was already "flavored sugar". In particular they used a lot of sugar to prevents the grow of bacteria, so the jam can be store without a refrigerator.
Around here means Slovenia. No idea what my great-grandmother made because I didn't know her, but down the line they didn't use this much sugar and my mother would be downright appalled at the idea.
Aboute intent I guess we'll have to disagree.
Down the line, what was made is likely preserves and not actual jam. Jam has a specific texture associated with it, and the sugar is used for not only sweetness but to help it gel properly.
> eating full spoonfuls of it
I dont buy or keep jam stocked but I'll admit i go a little nuts whenever im in reaching distance of those little Smuckers packets. Yumbo!
I agree with this. "Scam" is used way too liberally these days. I can read , and like you say the nutrition facts clearly list total added sugars in a standardized way.
Completely unrelated topic, but Lord I wish cookie popups were standardized the same way nutrition facts are.
The label lists truthful facts, but the intent is still to deceive.
You're defending the example (why idk), but what about, say, a dog food company listing "buffalo meat" as its #1 ingredient by simply splitting every filler ingredient into constituent parts?
How does one reward the "good guys" when one can't tell the difference between a gamed metric and an honest one?
Why? Because I once researched it also assuming it was a scam, and then found out it very much wasn't.
I can't speak to dog food, I haven't researched that -- just the multiple sugar types. And also that when ice cream lists skim milk as an ingredient along with heavy cream, this isn't to make it appear healthier either -- it's to control the overall milkfat levels.
But if you're looking for nutritional information, that's literally on the label next to the ingredients. If you want to judge the protein or the sugar, then just look at that. If you're trying to judge those amounts by looking at the order of ingredients, that's your mistake to begin with.
There.can be multiple reasons for things. It is true that blending sugar, corn syrup, and HFCS gives finer control over texture and flavor. It is also true that there is immense marketing value to "strawberries" being the first ingredient, and if "sugar" was listed first they would see a drop in sales.
If you think the second item there does not get consideration by these companies, you are dead wrong.
> It is also true that there is immense marketing value to "strawberries" being the first ingredient, and if "sugar" was listed first they would see a drop in sales.
To add to this, I recall an actual marketing campaign from one of the big US cereal manufacturers (I forget which) about the first listed ingredient in some of their cereals being whole grain, explicitly selling their product on the fact that the plurality ingredient of it is healthy.
Granted, that by itself doesn't mean much, but if they also split sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, their claim of "more whole grain than any other ingredient" could easily fall under technically-correct-but-misleading. Of course, a shopper can get more useful information from the nutritional facts but most people shop by the pretty picture on the front of the box (and the friendly message on their screen) rather than the technical label on the back.
The best solution is to control all the ingredients in your own kitchen. Relying on labeling to protect your health is insufficient. If you select your produce, you can prefer Jim Bob's local farm over the Monsanto option. You can sidestep entire categories of health risk. I'll sometimes buy a full hand basket worth of one thing like onions or limes depending on availability and quality.
There are still some shelf stable goods that you can buy without getting screwed. But it's exceedingly rare now. Peanut butter is a good example. 99% the inventory is JIF with palm oil and added sugar in a plastic container, but on the very top (or bottom) shelf you can often find a glass jar that contains only peanuts and salt. It took me a month to get used to peanut butter like this. The exercise of stirring it almost ruined it for me. I can't imagine going back to the other stuff now. I tried JIF again recently and it tastes like a product you'd buy from Home Depot to do a drywall job.
Many grocery stores have in house peanut butter grinders where the ingredient is nothing but peanuts, ground on demand for you into a bulk container. This contains no sugar or palm oil or other ingredients, and is often cheaper than any jar PB, and can often be used before it separates, meaning no stirring is necessary. Ever since we discovered this we buy nothing else.
> Many grocery stores have in house peanut butter grinders where the ingredient is nothing but peanuts
Are you in the USA? Never seen one of these to the best of my recollection.
I am in the USA. Out of the four grocery stores I frequent, three of them have fresh peanut butter grinders, including the giant Kroger-owned megachain one.
Come to think of it, I've never seen a grocery store with a bulk foods section where you can buy grains etc in self serve bags by weight, that didn't have a peanut butter grinder.
In Denmark, and I suppose in the rest of the EU, it is extremely difficult to find peanut butter that doesn't need all the stirring.
TBF it varies by region (and over time) in the US. Where I'm at even the big box national chains consistently provide several peanut butter options - combinations of (at least) glass vs plastic, added sugar, and alternative oils. (For my part I don't want the sugar but I'm not concerned with a plastic jar or a natural oil to help emulsify.)
Might find peanuts and a grinder to grind your own, which is nice.
> In Denmark, and I suppose in the rest of the EU ...
Why would you draw conclusions about the EU based on Denmark, a top outlier by any good metric?
The default peanut butter here in Spain is not only full of sugar, but also swirled with caramel :/
You mostly only find the pure peanut stuff in the health food sections of bigger supermarkets.
Well the swirled peanut butter at least tells me that peanut butter is unhealthy.
I also live in EU and you can only find that kind at small organic food shops. The type you get from Lidl is solid with added sugar, salt and vegetable oil. I guess Denmark is the odd one here.
Pure peanut one is great for cooking if you want a neutral taste but I would never put it on bread it's disgusting.
> The exercise of stirring it almost ruined it for me
Stir (very well) once, store in the refridgerator. The colder storing temperature keeps it from seperating, and in small volumes (like the amount you've put on bread) it warms back to a spreadable consistency within a minute or two
If you're really lucky, you can even find peanut butter that contains only peanuts.
> If you select your produce, you can prefer Jim Bob's local farm over the Monsanto option.
Maybe. I've seen cases where the local Farmer's market was reselling produce from grocery stores at higher prices (because Farmer's market).
Farm stores may have similar problems - they might stock things they don't make so they can sell it for convenience. Just because you buy corn from them doesn't mean they made the corn.
whats jif
Choosy developers choose https://jif.com
Homepage advertising Simply Jif (simply palm oil), for your & orangoutang’s health
I remember looking at a carton of Whole Foods soy milk that prominently said “no added sugar”.
I looked on the back and after water the second ingredient was “dehydrated cane juice”.
The food system has been gamed forever.
Yes, super annoying. As other comments mentioned, it is very common to say "No sugar added" but then it is still sweetened with stevia or something. Like, I WANTED IT NOT SWEET.
When I visited South America I saw products that would actually more precisely say "sin edulcorante" as opposed to "sin azúcar".
It's for those Karens who believe everything will poison them, but instead of just avoiding processed foods, they will buy stuff with no "sugar" or "glutamate".
I personally don't get why anyone would volunteer to pay for expensive agave syrup or cane juice when you could just add sugar. Maybe only consume it in moderation (and no sweetened beverages).
Unless you can link some actual reference, I'm going to call bullshit on this one. Dehydrated cane juice is literally just (less refined) sugar, and in my experience I have never seen a "no added sugar" label on a product with dehydrated cane juice. I actually look a lot for this because in my experience "all natural" combined with "no added sugar" almost always means Stevia, and I can't stand that stuff.
I just did a search online and all the Whole Foods soy milk I could fine listed either "organic cane sugar" as an ingredient, or was unsweetened.
I get frustrated too. I avoid aspartame/sucralose/etc... then it turns out they have stevia/monk fruit extract/etc
oh, and there are some other ones that you might want to avoid.
A low FODMAP diet would cut out not only fructose, but lactose and the -itols like sorbitol, xylitol, and mannitol
Don't holiday in Spain or other countries that highly tax sugars. It's itols and aspartame all the way. I literally paniced when I realized I cant/wont eat like 90% or the packaged food in each individual store chain.
The -itols just shouldn't be allowed in food. Consume too much and you best not be out in public.
I saw “dehydrated cane juice” years ago as an ingredient in Horizon chocolate milk, though they appear to have dropped the charade and now call it “organic cane sugar”.
It was several years ago. I brought it home to my wife (the soy milk drinker in the household) and though I had a laugh, she was not amused.
Deception is bad, but from a nutritional point of view this really shouldn't be an issue for informed consumers (ie. people who read the ingredient lists) given that "nutrition facts" also exists. 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS. This is especially true in highly processed foods, where the processing eliminates any advantage that "natural" sugars have.
No, making the law only protect those who are informed is a poor idea on many fronts.
Firstly, you've incentivized companies to prevent people from becoming informed. You can already see online that lies spread faster because they don't have the inconvenience of needing to be true. You have one truth, and it has to stand up to countless thousands of lies.
Secondly, nobody can be informed about everything. The whole reason we have experts is because they are the ones informed on their subject, and they devote their entire careers to it. You cannot possibly be well-read and up to speed about everything you buy while still being able to function as a human being.
Thirdly, what happens when the deceptive, shitty product completely out-competes the safer one because it's that much cheaper? Hey, guess what? You can't buy the safe or sustainable version of the product anymore because every business that did went out of business. It's no longer in the market.
I want to buy the thing that was the most expensive and exuberant to manufacture for the lowest price. So yeah, when I want jam, I want jam that is the most strawberries. This isn't complicated.
It is actually complicated in this case, because you want jam. Jam is made with 1 part fruit 1 part sugar. But it is even more complicated now because you want not just any jam, but strawberry jam in particular. This is a low pectin fruit so you have to supply your own. Things also change depending on the type of pectin you go for and I think I better stop here...
And yet some people will pay extra to buy jam with no added sugars but agave syrup. I'd rather pay more to have more fruit and just ... less overall sugars.
> 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS.
From a biological pov, that is wrong on so many levels. It is why labels now have Added Sugars listed separately. Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation, whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
>Sugars as whole fruit aren't unhealthy in moderation
That's why I specifically mentioned the processing part. Sugar in apple might not be comparable to sugar in a coke, but all of that goes out the window when you're comparing the sugar content of jellies.
>whereas HFCS is one if the unhealthiest added sugars. There is no way to equate them except in pure chemistry with no relation to biology.
Source?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Healt...
>As of 2026, there is no scientific consensus or regulatory concern that fructose or HFCS impacts cardiometabolic health when substituted for sucrose
https://medicalxpress.com/search/?search=fructose&h=1&s=0
Ok, you might not know this, but sucrose (white sugar) is a di-saccharide consisting of a molecule of glucose and one of fructose, which your body splits during digestion. So the amount of fructose you get from HFCS is almost identical to the amount you get from white sugar. Your body can't tell the difference.
That's why I don't get the US hype about Coke with actual sugar. It's still 50% fructose, what do you think will happen if you drink several cans every day?
People say they prefer the taste. I don't know that I could tell the difference though.
I can tell the difference, but I couldn't tell you which is which.
This usually pops up around Passover, when Coke switches to an all sugar formulation for reasons I'm unqualified to explain. It's an "oh hey, this Coke tastes different", I'll check the label, and see that it's sweetened with sucrose instead of HFCS.
I'll handwavingly claim that this is close enough to a blind study/anecdote as I'm not Jewish and haven't a clue when Passover falls. As I buy cans, not bottles, it's not the yellow caps giving it away either.
Some people definitely can, but at least in the informal sample for this article, they preferred regular coke.
https://www.seriouseats.com/coke-vs-mexican-coke
I'd be wary of what people say they prefer in tests. People also prefer Pepsi to Coke in blind taste tests but they don't prefer it to drink an entire can.
Pepsi tastes much sweeter than Coke and I wouldn't be surprised if corn syrup Coke was sweeter than sugar Coke.
> Your body can't tell the difference.
That's not metabolically true. Fructose by definition doesn't have glucose which is present in sucrose. Metabolically, your body absolutely reacts differently.
A core issue is that isolated fructose and its derivatives, e.g. HFCS, don't sufficiently trigger satiety. In contrast, regular sugar and glucose trigger satiety. This has been known for over a decade:
- Dissociable Behavioral, Physiological and Neural Effects of Acute Glucose and Fructose Ingestion: A Pilot Study (2015) (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0130280)
- Attenuated hypothalamic response to fructose via a dedicated gut-brain pathway (2026) (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2026.05.013)
The claim isn't that HFCS isn't bad for you, it's that it isn't worse for you than just regular sugar. Linking a bunch of articles about how HFCS is bad doesn't refute that.
Isolated fructose and its derivatives, e.g. HFCS, don't sufficiently trigger satiety, while stressing the liver and the heart. In contrast, regular sugar and glucose trigger satiety. This has been known for over a decade.
For anyone who actually bothers to read:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-06-fructose-weaker-satie...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-12-brain-reward-circuits...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-06-fructose-brain-reward...
Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...
The irony is that this is the entire reason that the FDA was originally formed - to provide clarity and standardization on food ingredients, but now the FDA is often controlled by the exact same organizations that it's supposed to regulate.
Perhaps it's time for the FDA 2.0 where leadership cannot have any connection whatsoever to the organizations being regulated. If I need years of industry experience and a doctorate to understand why you're adding a chemical to my food, then I don't want it in my food. I don't think that's an unreasonable position. We were far healthier before all of these 'safe' chemicals and additives began being added to food.
Honestly I don't mind if I need to do a bit of reading to understand the purpose behind an additive. But I think that information should be readily available for every processed food product by law. If you're going to add something that can't be purchased as an ingredient at a typical grocery store then you should be required to publish an explanatory statement similar to the MSDS that I can pull up for any given cleaning product or pesticide.
Yes but your "i dont mind" shouldnt constitute consent from everyone else, not everyone has the time or discerning to do that, it should already be taken care of at a higher level as a cost of doing business and hopefully enough to disincentivize bad deaing
But like has anyone spared a thought for the shareholders?
You do not seem to appreciate how regulation works in general in the United States. Product labeling is a perpetual game of cat-and-mouse. I can give you a litany of ways that vendors skirt the regulations, hide ingredients, lie to consumers, and falsify their labels while still remaining 100% legal. And obviously, I am not privy to all of their tricks, but just some of the obvious ones.
I do not know if the Utopian Japanese Food Industry* is so trustworthy and impeccable so as not to mislead customers or engage in malicious compliance. Perhaps they simply abide by the rules and manufacture honest food and inedible leaden paint chips. I don't know; Japan is the place where you can insert your whole rice into a streetside vending machine to have it robbed of nutrients... err, hulled and sifted.
Since I live next-door to a pan-asian market now, I will eventually figure out how they are labeling their sodas and snack foods. Thank you.
* Heartily endorsed/promoted by the sugary, indefatigable punk princess Avril Lavigne: https://youtu.be/LiaYDPRedWQ?si=_ZB7CmKX9RA9C040
God, I miss Tower Records
Works pretty well in Europe as well. You could try adjusting the rules, start testing products and dining the shit out of the ones not following the rules.
https://xxcancel.com/WallStreetApes/status/21085949986568070...
oh nice, xcancel is back (for a while anyway)
Well, XXcancel at least, the twin service dodging the DNS takedown notices.
> I included 10 more popular American foods where this same “ingredients slitting” scam tactic is being used at the end of the video
Rage for views.
> Rage for views.
Given how often HN trends to the frontpage “rage for views” posts that link to GitHub issues where the submitter dislikes the current outcome, this three-word argument against the post is uniquely unpersuasive here. This US foods practice is a worthwhile topic to rage about given the severity of public health impact of the mislabeling alone, and it’s an easily-solved problem when regulators aren’t captured.
The problem isn't the topic; to hear what the real problem is, subscribe to my youtube channel.
This is why the "total added sugars" line is critical and why it was fought tooth and nail by "food" companies for decades.
Prefixing the title with “The” would make it a lot easier to parse.
This is a dumb thing that HN does, certain words get stripped from titles. You can edit them back in but submitters either don't know that or just don't bother.
Had the same thought.
> Scam American companies
... why would I do that?
> Scam American companies are using
... so fake companies?
> Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists
... What?
(reads post)
Oh. "Food companies are splitting up ingredients to manipulate you"
(as a tangent: There's zero percent chance this is only "American" companies. Useless addon word.)
So it’s not about scam American companies, who are using drugs(?) to manipulate…?
If you make jam at home you’re going to be adding a very similar amount of sugar. Ingredient splitting may be an issue, but a sweet fruit preserve is a silly choice for showing it.
Thanks for reminding me not to buy American anymore
https://xd1.dev/2025/09/not-buying-american-anymore
His ChatGPT wasn't even asked to give references to the info it spat out. Who uses ChatGPT like that?
A lot of high powered decision makers around the world. Or people that feed information to them. Sleep calmly.
The problem I had was figuring if a product had Sodium Lauryl Sulfate.
I found that if I wash my sheets with detergents with it, the first night my sheets make me feel like I'm sleeping with a sunburn.
Apparently toothpaste with SLS might cause canker sores.
It is deliberately hard to determine!
lol, here's a website:
https://namephantom.com/other-names-for-sodium-lauryl-sulfat...
they use different names on purpose.
Yup, stopped using SLS toothpaste because I heard that it could be causing my canker sores. I've had ONE in the three years since, when they were a weekly occurrence before.
> canker sores
TIL Canker sores are a specific type of mouth ulcer. Where I am (New Zealand), this would just be called a mouth ulcer.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/canker-sore/s...
same here.
also, when I was young I worried I might have herpes or something, but doctor told me canker sores are different from cold sores. Later in life, turns out there might be a chance I have crohns?
there's a big constellation of autoinflammatory health issues that affect people, especially the autistic/adhd types who might find their way to Hacker News in large numbers
if you are not already familiar, you should have your doctor go through https://allbrainsbelong.org/clinician-resources/ (this is a nonprofit's project funded through an HHS grant) and see what actually applies to you
Crohn's, irritable bowel syndrome, regular old heartburn, brain fog, chronic fatigue, depression, sleep apnea, hives, rashes, waking up in the middle of the night, heat sensitivities, Ehler-Danlos, joint issues, vascular issues, dizziness on standing, arthritis, long COVID... it's quite the list!!
(and it's really frustrating when (e.g.) a cheap allergy medication can solve half your problems and you go without it for years because no one's thought to connect those dots)
I do have autoimmune issues, but I had a totally different gut issue that they basically hand waved as IBS due to those until a different set of docs realized it was a dysfunctional gallbladder. I had been dealing with weekly gall bladder attacks for a decade and then they pulled it.
Just to say, be careful with the diagnosis. They can be rather imprecise.
I have thought about this hack before while looking at ingredient lists. I don't know what the best wording would be to establish the spirit of the law, but obviously this should be banned.
Strawberries (11%) would be sufficient:
> You must mention the quantity (by percentage) of any ingredients that: appear in the name of the product (example: ‘apple pie') [; or] are emphasised on the labelling in words, pictures or graphics (example: ‘with walnuts')[; or] are essential to characterise the food and to distinguish it from other foods[.]
— EU food labeling rules, https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-rules-complian...
This would be rather interesting, I've noticed whenever a product is "with ___" [insert hot substance or ingredient], its almost always near the very end of the ingredients list, meaning its among the lowest in amounts of ingredients used in the product
Yes, it’s generally bad to have a high percentage of capsaicin, but it’s still a figure worth noting :) I would encourage in that scenario specifying the % and then also the estimated scovilles total.
How is this a 'hack'? It's listing ingredients in order of quantity. The nutrition facts already tell you total amount of sugar per serving separately, that's not what the ingredient list is for to begin with. Also, I don't have much sympathy for someone surprised that jelly contains a lot of sugar: A) Have you tasted it B) Do you have any idea what jelly is or why it exists C) Have you ever made it?
Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
> Jelly inherently, as a direct consequence of its very reason for existing, contains a lot of sugar, duh.
If a typical jelly recipe calls for pounds of fruit and a few cups of sugar wouldn't be normal to expect fruit to be the first ingredient? If a company is using more added sugars than fruit that should be obvious without having to look at the nutrition facts
Typical jelly & jamrecipes call for close to 1:1 fruit to sugar. E.g. ¹Ball mason jars strawberry jam recipe calls for 7 cups sugar to 5 cups strawberries. Martha Stewart calls for 3/4 cup sugar for every cup of juice² in making jelly. The Joy of Cooking (44th printing 1988)notes that "Store-bought jellies, according to law, must have at least 45% fruit and 55% sugar". Etc.
¹https://www.ballmasonjars.com/blog?cid=classic-strawberry-ja...
²https://www.marthastewart.com/1127955/basic-jelly-recipe
³ ISBN 0-02-604570-2, Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer & Becker, page 832
You can make jam with a lot less sugar. I make my own strawberry confiture at home and use about 5% sugar, plus pectine and sweet lemon juice.
The Joy of Cooking's recipes do this, but the total sugar content ends up the same because they boil down the juice into a thick syrup first. The sugar just comes from the same fruit as what's being preserved, instead of cane or beets.
There's no way that would be legal to sell. The whole point of the sugar in jam is preservation - you may get away with it for a while in a home canning scenario, but really a jam with 5% sugar is not shelf stable, and needs to be stored under refrigeration (commercial low sugar jams have to add an additional preservative like potassium sorbate instead).
It doesn't matter it's not legal to sell. I keep it in my basement which is cold (around 15 C) all year round, without problems.
In some jurisdiction, you cannot call that a jam, because you added foreign pectin. A jam must only use the fruit's natural pectin, plus sugar to activate the pectin.
Irrelevant.
This was my impression. I also find most juices can be diluted at least 25 % and its still incredibly drinkable, you just get more bang for the buck
You can make quick mocktails with a fruit juice as base (or a mini can of Coke, 200ml): 1 part fruit juice, 1 part fizzy water, a little tonic water, a few dashes of your favorite bitter (Angostura, orange, cardamon, etc...) and a slice of lemon or lime.
It depends on the type of fruit though, since there are some fruits that won't set properly with the low-sugar pectin. (This only applies to home canning though, since the industrial manufacturers should have access to other thickeners.)
It does come out a bit less viscous than industrial jams, although enough that it can stay on top of a slice of bread, but it's much healthier and, more importantly, it tastes so much better. Works with berries pretty well.
> It does come out a bit less viscous than industrial jams, although enough that it can stay on top of a slice of bread
It really depends on the fruit though—most of the time it works great, but there have been a few fruits that wouldn't set at all (closer to a syrup than a jam) with a low-sugar recipe, but set perfectly when I added more sugar.
> and, more importantly, it tastes so much better.
Agreed 100%.
And I can make a bowl of cereal with a teaspoon of milk.
Pity you think that.
I think my comment was a touch deeper than you caught. Jam doesn’t have a strictly required amount of sugar, it’s not defined as having X amount, so saying “you can make it with less” is two people talking about how much milk makes a bowl of cereal. Both are correct, it’s jam either way and it’s a bowl of cereal either way. Think about it.
You're right, good point.
For the product in question, they aren't using more added sugars than fruit.
As you can read on the label:
Each tablespoon of jam contains 10-11 grams of fruit and 9-10 grams of added sugar. The jam is 60% sugar overall because there is sugar in the fruit too.And that's weighted by share of the output. If you're measuring the input, this recipe is going to take a lot more "fruit" than "sugar", because part of making jam is boiling away a bunch of the water that occurs in fruit, whereas all of the added sugar is retained. (Corn syrup, however, seems to be about 2/3 water, which will make that comparison look worse.)
The hack is to use several different ingredients of the same type where they would have used just one, and doing it just so they can have the ingredient they want listed first as first.
Because the intent is to mislead while staying within the letter of the rules. I don't think it's complicated.
If it is done with intent to mislead consumers, then it is a hack.
The solution is to require % by mass number next to each ingredient. This way even if strawberry is first ingredient, the low percentage will make the scam obvious.
That's likely untenable for food companies because it means disclosing their recipe.
Sorry if it sucks for their competitive advantage or profit margin or whatever but people are literally going to put this stuff in their bodies to sustain their existence so you have to say what’s in it. If you want to keep your product composition a mystery go make SaaS and put it behind an API.
The same argument could be used against disclosing ingredients altogether.
I'd rather know what I'm eating and not have greedy CEOs pinching their pennies of profit like they're guarding the Krabby Patty formula, because they're scared someone else will learn the generational secret of how to make (checks notes) strawberry jelly. Trust me, the economy will survive if Smuckers tells you how much sugar you're eating.
A company's desire to hide their recipe shouldn't matter over the consumer's desire to know what's in the food they buy and eat.
> it means disclosing their recipe
“Natural flavors.”
I doubt you can’t reverse engineer those fractions from a product and ingredient list anyway.
Well if becomes law, not doing it is even more untenable
You can be sure the competitors are putting their product on the mass spec already
It works in the EU.
As another commenter mentioned, EU rules already require this for "prominent" ingredients (e.g. ingredients that appear in the name of the product, like "Strawberry" jam), but not all ingredients in the list, which seems like the appropriate compromise.
That solution is already in place for sugar. The jam that is the focus of the tweet is 60% sugar, and this is prominently printed on the label. What problem do you think you're trying to solve?
The product could still be 60% sugar and contain 0% strawberries. It could be still be 60% sugar and contain 1% strawberries.
Sugar content doesn't tell you anything about berry content. It's not unreasonable for someone to want look at the list of ingredients and know if what they are buying is mostly fruit or mostly HFCS. Or even just mostly sugars that didn't come from the berries.
The only problem here is that no part of your comment is true.
The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
In fact, the only other ingredients are fruit pectin (the gelling agent) and citric acid (flavor), both of which must be present at very low levels.¹
Strawberries are the entire rest of the ingredients list. And they're also 25% of the sugar content, which is 12g of sugar per serving of which 9g is "added sugar". There's nothing even slightly misleading about this.
¹ Here's a make-your-own-jam page with rules of thumb for pectin in jam: https://missvickie.com/jam-pectin-calculator/ .
The recommendation for strawberry jam is 4 tsp of dry pectin per 4 cups of added sugar. There are 3 tsp in one tablespoon and 16 tablespoons in one cup, for a pectin-to-added-sugar ratio of 1:48. This suggests the jam is under 1% pectin, and the citric acid is even less.
> The strawberries are listed first, before any sugar component. That means they have to be more than 15% of the product.
The point of this "article" is that they can break up the sugar ingredients so that it's possible for no single source of sugar to be more than the amount of strawberries, but to still have more sugars than strawberries and yet put strawberries first. I'm not saying that this particular jelly example does that, only that the rules would allow for it.
No jellymandering
Presumably you could just require % amounts to be specified (and make sure to pick volume vs weight in some fashion that avoids gaming).
luckily in UK (and probably EU) jam, jelly, and marmalade are all defined in law with specific sugar to fruit ratios.
All companies do this across the globe.
For example in Europe, it is common to list mayonnaise by the elements required to make it, instead of putting mayonnaise on the ingredients list.
Naturally when we mix eggs, oil and mustard, what comes out?
So when wondering what kind of white sauce is on that salad or sandwich, check the ingredients with care.
Unfortunately most folks don't pay that much attention.
Is it really a scam though? They still have to list all of the sweeteners. Not all sweeteners work the same too. And... not limited to American companies...
for the no added sugar or whatever, just look at the calories. they generally tell you the story.
Differing serving sizes, volumes, densities etc make this hard.
That it's full of stevia and monk fruit extract?
Honestly I half expect these "food industry is bad!" videos/people are sponsored by the food industry itself. They're unhinged enough that I feel a lot of people dismiss them as just scare tactics. Unfortunately the stuff that goes into some products genuinely ARE in desperate need of being reviewed/banned.
These types of pieces I feel however do more harm than good to that cause.
Hard to imagine a less trustworthy source
@WallStreetApes is not a reliable source on literally any topic in the world (maybe besides how to make money by being a right-wing Twitter content farm). This being on the front page is a discredit to HN.
How about: just eat whole foods
There's a city-level law in Santa Cruz (California) that levies a punitive tax on beverages that contain added sugar. It's weird in a couple of ways.
"All-natural juice" is exempt, and it's defined by whether the sugar is "added". So if you combine 20 gallons of orange juice and evaporate the water away until it's reached the concentration of sugar you want, that's fine; if you get one gallon of juice and add sugar until you've reached the same concentration, you're subject to the tax. Oranges contain enough sugar that this is viable for orange juice. Limes don't, so limeade is taxed very heavily while orange juice that contains the same amount of sugar is exempt.
Milk products (dairy or imitation) are exempt, and they are legally defined by the first ingredient (for milk) or first two ingredients (for imitation milk). Chocolate milk isn't a sugar-added beverage, because it's a milk product. Eggnog is a milk product too.
This second point seems to explain why it's important for companies to manipulate which ingredients are listed first.
There's really no chance of misleading the consumer, because right above the legally-mandated and legally sensitive ingredients list you'll see the legally mandated and not legally sensitive nutrition facts, which will tell you that eggnog is about 17% sugar by weight or that, to use the example here, Smucker's strawberry jam is 60% sugar. ( https://www.smuckers.com/fruit-spreads/jam/strawberry-jam )
Focus on the macros first. Ingredients don't tell you much.
I guess if you just look at the first ingredient but its both obvious there are multiple sources of sugar/simple carbs and that jam is typically very heavily sweetened; this is how it has a long shelf life.
Jam is a pretty sweet product, but that doesn't mean I'd expect I'd expect more sweeteners than fruit. A basic recipe for strawberry jam might require a couple pounds of strawberries and a couple cups of sugar. That'd still have a shelf life of a year or more (unopened).
But sugar is literally added to jelly as the preservative, that's why jelly exists to begin with.
For example, the very first recipe for strawberry jelly from some horrible spam recipe site:
2 cups (16 ounces) pure strawberry juice (I used 3 1/2 pounds ripe, fresh strawberries to get this amount of juice) 3 1/3 cups (666 grams) granulated sugar
It's literally more sugar than strawberry juice.
Sure, that’s why sugar is added, but it doesn’t have to be. The point is to remove free water (water that bacteria can use, I don’t know the English expression for that), and you can do that by:
1. adding more sugar
2. cooking it for a longer time
3. adding pectin (either store-bought or from natural sources)
Of course it depends on the kind of fruit, but it’s quite rare to have more sugar than fruit, even without pectin or longer cooking time.
Or maybe you would expect more sweetener. What's wrong with honesty in labeling?
I ain't watching that video or clicking on Twitter, but from the comments, this is about "ingredient splitting", where they "split an undesirable ingredient into several varieties so that each appears further down the list", because in the US ingredients are ordered by weight. So you can "hide" the amount of sugar by claiming it's from several sources, and listing those sources distinctly.
Well no shit, Sherlock. Many more corporate/government scams waiting for this bro. But nice to see another one waking up from the matrix.
@dang : the title shortener seems to have semantically goofed via syntactically having goofed
In this case it was the submitted title but I think we can fix it by shortening further.
(Submitted title was "scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed 1st". Software rewrote it to "Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient gets listed first". I've since changed it.)
thanks
There's an entire industry of this--often operating under the term 'nutraceuticals' (i.e. food additives/preservatives) and other weird stuff. My friend works for one of these companies and was telling me to NEVER eat the Chinese sausages from Costco because they use a bunch of weird anti-fungal ingredients that they just label 'natural flavoring'. This is going on with literally everything sold at the grocery store. You can't even buy just Italian pasta and assume it's safe--Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate. If you want glyphosate free products, you have to actually buy specialty Italian pastas that use Italian wheat. It's insane how hard it is to just eat non-processed foods.
> It's insane how hard it is to just eat non-processed foods.
Convenience is killing us and the planet. But the alternative makes life much harder.
> Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate
False. The wheat sold into the EU is not treated with glyphosate, and is strictly verified to comply with EU regulations. Canadian farmers are happy to do that because they charge more for the EU-compliant wheat than the NA-compliant one, and Italians are happy to buy it.
Most people make money ultimately by lying and deceiving/manipulating. Either works for a company whose income is based on the practice, or directly participates in them.
Of course at the expense of others. In this case, our health.
Is your resume any more truthful than these ingredient labels?