Okay... Pop Tarts are also Kellogg's, not a tobacco company. But let me pick some other examples.
Eggo waffles predate RJ Reynolds getting into this by 10 years.
Twinkies were introduced in the 1930s.
I'm not defending ultra-processed foods nor tobacco companies. I'm just saying the authors have a major blind spot if they think the concept or popularity of ultra-processed foods started in the 1960s.
The Twinkie of 1940 is very different from the Twinkie of 2000. Lots of old and sort of OK things got corrupted when pulled into the corporate-Zerg-slime
Agreed. They have to be significantly helping at least some, but we can't say who these people are for certain yet, or how many there really are.
And yes, in some cases, no other options are possible, so even if the evidence is pretty dismal for their effectiveness, they are still broadly safe enough to definitely be worth a try. They probably just shouldn't be the first-line approach.
I tend to feel the same way. The medication is obviously useful in some cases and for some conditions, but there's also a pushback against the notion that it isn't the best solution for other cases and conditions. There are cases where other solutions might be healthier, especially in the long term, but the availability of a potential pharmaceutical fix interferes.
And look at the new batch of weight-loss drugs. It's a similar circumstance. It's a wonder drug in many ways, helps so many people that wouldn't have been helped otherwise. Yet, also being used in some cases as a shortcut to avoid a behavioral change that would be advantageous for a person to do.
It is important to remember that there are people for whom these drugs are literal lifesavers. And at the same time, there are those for whom the drugs enable avoidance of fixing a root cause.
I don’t get why people are so negative about drugs. They’re just a medical treatment, with pluses and minuses. If they help and they’re not too costly then what’s the big deal? Half the population is addicted to caffeine and nobody cares. A huge number of people need medical intervention for other things and we don’t get this quasi moralistic opposition to them.
Agreed. The problem is largely that the pluses of antidepressants have been quite significantly overstated, and the minuses have been understated, meaning the cost-benefit equation is unfortunately quite different than what the general public assumes.
We don't want to get rid of them, we just need to recalibrate prescribing, and also to properly assess cessation at intervals more frequently than we have been.
Yeah, I’m open to the idea that their effectiveness may have been overestimated and they’re overprescribed as a result. But this “I can’t believe we’ve normalized antidepressants” “there are better solutions than drugs” stuff is just moralizing.
I suppose it can be moralizing, and probably is in the parent comment.
For me I still feel the surprise because I've followed the evidence carefully for well over a decade, and the methodological problems and lack of evidence for meaningful effectiveness have always been clear. I.e. it is clear standardized effect sizes are meaningless, and you need to determine important differences, as this is just basic science, but only a tiny handful of papers ever bothered.
So it feels very much like "how can we have normalized something so incredibly scientifically shaky", i.e. for me the moralizing is not "drugs are bad, how are we normalizing drugs" it is "how can an entire medical field and society so recklessly adopt something so obviously weakly supported". I.e. my dismay is more about the weak epistemic standards of society than it is about drugs.
The downsides to these drugs are pretty well understood and not generally that bad, right? Can we really say it's "reckless" to attempt to treat people with something that's fairly safe and see if it helps them?
This is what really rubs me the wrong way and makes me call it moralizing. There's this implicit foundation of "drugs bad" that's basically straight out of D.A.R.E. You're supposed to avoid drugs, but we might make an exception if they treat a serious problem and there are no alternatives.
Once in a while I'll take Tylenol or ibuprofen for a headache. Do they actually help? Hell if I know. Is it "reckless" to do this when I don't know if it actually does anything? Absolutely not. Antidepressants aren't as safe as those are, but at least some of them seem like they're safe enough to say, let's give this a try and see how it goes.
> I’m not trying to discount mental health, I just think there are better solutions than drugs to fix your state of mind.
Find one that's as effective on the general population.
I mean, sure, perhaps lifestyle changes are better. Can you get a higher percentage to change them and improve people's lives than we currently can with drugs?
As a top performer in school, I definitely think (and still point out), that you can get fantastically high results in SAT/GRE without paying any test prep service. I and many of my peers did it. There are better solutions than paying those services. But how many who don't pay do as well as those who do? I can tell them how to study as much as I can, but the reality is that statistically, people who attend will do better than if they don't.
From a medical standpoint, telling people to change how they live and think has a fairly low success rate. The best options usually don't work on the masses.
There's hundreds of years of "depression isn't real and even if it was real the only treatment is to take a walk in the woods!!" and like a decade of "man, ssris are great, they really helped me".
Public responses have probably not finished overcorrecting.
But imo the issue with that might be that “just man up and go take a walk” may still be better advice than “hey kid with your underdeveloped brain… take this maybe psychoactive drug that absolutely changes your brain chemistry in ways we absolutely do not understand causing almost certain addiction with effectively zero supervision unless you self-report murderous and psychotic tendencies! Don’t mind that I’m making kickbacks on every subscription!!”
In terms of possible damage to self and others. And to long term society.
“Damage, difficult to measure” was not what was predicted 30 years ago. Satanic apocalyptic 40k dark elves society, blood orgies and lawlessness was much closer to the messaging. Literal actual Judaic apocalypse was a major risk.
I had a high school friend that was born here in the US but his family were Vietnamese immigrants many many years ago. We'd often hang out at his family's house and they were very welcoming and had a "family" style cooking approach with large pots of cooked rice, vegetables and other things set out and you were welcome to always grab a bowl. They often imported native food stuffs so I was fond of the spices and peppers they often cooked with.
One day, I ended up over at his house before he actually had returned home from school. I was hungry and no one was actually at the house at that moment in time and I just helped myself to a bowl of rice and vegetables and there was this extremely stringy looking dried meat that was also set out. So I helped myself to some of that as well.
As I was eating, my friend showed up and I commented on the unique flavor of the meat because it didn't taste like chicken, pork, etc and asked him what it was. He deadpan looked me in the face and told me it was dog.
After that, I always made sure to verify what exactly it was I was consuming rather than helping myself. I don't know what the point of this post really is - but I'm glad that dog meat consumption is on the decline and I could have lived the rest of my life without knowing what dog meat tastes like.
Man I wish I could downvote a comment. This is what you’d see on Reddit.
“Thankless job” is a crazy way to describe United Healthcare.
No one cares about insurance companies and their profits?? This doesn’t even make sense, so many people rely on insurance and many stakeholders profit off the American insurance system.
Im definitely in the minority but there’s just zero value to me in drinking an energy drink. If you need energy that bad, there’s several options that are less artificial with similar effects.
I’ve tasted a Celsius here and there, don’t get me wrong. I get the appeal, but it’s just silly to not consider the health effects. I’m also anti-syrup and sodas so I’m a bit odd I guess.
What health effects compared to other caffeine sources (pills, coffee)
I haven't really noticed any, or heard much studies that wouldn't apply to similar amounts of coffee at least. Do the other supplemented ingredients add a lot of harm?
No it is just a moral panic because college students like to drink vodka Red Bulls, as opposed to drinking Irish coffees or any similar combination of caffeine and alcohol.
Nah, no moral panic here. I don't see the reason to combine stimulants with depressants, you then just mask the underlying issues with both. Hence often the regulation of the combination.
Sure. Realistically you simply regulate them. Espresso martinis are already long a popular 'after dinner' cocktail with the assumption that you'll be buzzed from the caffeine and able to drive better.
No it’s not. The best case it gives you energy (it’s in the name!) to do whatever you want and it does no harm.
Assuming it actually does no harm, why wouldn’t you want more energy any time you want it, any time you drink some delicious fizzy neon green liquid?
I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t drink energy drink (because I assume and feel that it actually causes harm, not because I couldn’t use some extra boost in energy sometimes).
Very different from some basic corn flakes or bread being mass produced.