"Look, we're not encouraging over-consumption of sugar. It's just that we know that people will over-consume sugar, and we make food packed with sugar, and we market it to those people."

I'm sure they'd say something like that, but it is false. People were not eating gobs of sugar for breakfast until someone came up with sweetened breakfast cereal and marketed it.

I used to eat a lot of sweets when I was young. Not for breakfast, because that's not the customary here, but at all other times. I liked that stuff. As I grew older, I lost my taste for all that. I have seen this pattern in so many other people too. Kids like sweet stuff. As long as they are active and are in the normal weight range, I don't see any reason to discourage it either, except at night, after brushing teeth.

Children like sweets more than adults, sure, but the amount of sugar in the average diet is extremely high compared to like a century ago.

> As long as they are active and are in the normal weight range, I don't see any reason to discourage it either

Diabetes is a pretty good reason.

Where is the research linking T2DM to sugar consumption in active, normal-weight people?

Hardly. Sugar has been made the scapegoat. Many things contribute to diabetes, sugar is but one among them. Meat has been shown to contribute significantly[0]. If you dig into it further, you'll see study after study blaming "normal" amounts of meat consumption as a factor for an increased risk of diabetes. And yet, few people want to give it any thought.

[0] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/9/2108.full

Did that study control for refined carb intake?

People who eat a lot of processed meat also tend to eat a lot of refined carbs...

Quoting from their results

> Furthermore, total red meat intake was positively associated with total energy intake, intakes of all fatty acids, cholesterol, and protein but inversely associated with dietary carbohydrate, fiber, magnesium intakes, and glycemic load. Similar associations were observed for total meat and processed meat.

and also

> In the age- and energy-adjusted models, total red meat and processed meat were significantly associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes

This study does not go into refined carbs, but it does adjust for total energy. Don't focus on just this one paper. They this is just one of many such papers. The link between meat and diabetes is well established at this point.

Here's a meta analysis for example: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/121/21/2271.full

> Red meat intake was not associated with CHD (n=4 studies; relative risk per 100-g serving per day=1.00; 95% confidence interval, 0.81 to 1.23; P for heterogeneity=0.36) or diabetes mellitus (n=5; relative risk=1.16; 95% confidence interval, 0.92 to 1.46; P=0.25). Conversely, processed meat intake was associated with 42% higher risk of CHD (n=5; relative risk per 50-g serving per day=1.42; 95% confidence interval, 1.07 to 1.89; P=0.04) and 19% higher risk of diabetes mellitus (n=7; relative risk=1.19; 95% confidence interval, 1.11 to 1.27; P<0.001). Associations were intermediate for total meat intake.

Note that "processed meat" means any method of extending shelf-life like smoking, curing, adding salt or preservatives, etc. but excludes freezing. None of the the meat-eaters I have known (including myself) really differentiate between processed and unprocessed meat when it comes to their diet.

Edit: All these studies blame just processed meat at the moment. But keep in mind that all we were discussing so far was diabetes. There are more than enough good reasons to avoid all animal-based food, including dairy. I will not go into that now. My intention was to show that sugar has been made the scapegoat for diabetes. There are plenty of other diseases that sugar does not contribute to, but meat does.

Didn't see anything mentioned in the results:

> These results remained significant after further adjustment for intakes of dietary fiber, magnesium, glycemic load, and total fat. Intakes of total cholesterol, animal protein, and heme iron were also significantly associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes.

Their marketing is designed to sell cereal. People unfortunately are happiest (short term) to consume sugary cereal. They really are.

I met a breakfast food operative in the supermarket once. I told him I thought his company should offer a low sugar version. He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell.

People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.

So they're not encouraging people to consume sugary stuff, they're encouraging people to consume a category of food where people prefer sugary stuff?

This is about as sensible as saying that Krispy Kreme isn't pushing sugary foods, people just happen to prefer donuts with lots of sugar in them.

What would you have Krispy Kreme do? Pivot to Kimchi Kombucha?

I don't know. I just think that if we're going to talk about what companies encourage customers to do through their marketing, we should be straight about it.

The market forces companies to peddle garbage to children who generally lack the capacity to make a healthy informed decision in the face of multimillion dollar campaigns designed to get them to consume sugary cereal?

> He said everyone tells them to do so, but once it's on the shelves it does not sell. People want less sugar in the abstract. But they love sugar in their shopping carts, in the mornings, and in their mouths.

This sounds a little too just-so.

> peddle garbage to children who generally lack the capacity to make a healthy informed decision

I don't know many kids that do the shopping :)

It's parents that choose the sugary breakfast cereals for their children. I think many have the capacity to make a healthy, informed decision, but for some reason they do not. Marketing is likely at least part of the reason.

How many cereal advertisements do you see marketing towards parents vs their children?

Companies know they influence purchasing decisions through the manipulation of children.

...extra tax for high-sugar products?

We tried a tax on fatty foods in Denmark and it was a huge mess. People would just drive to Germany to get the stuff, and managing it was an administrative nightmare: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/business/global/fat-tax-in...

Interesting anecdote, but

1. It's quite possible (though it's a huge rabbit hole we shouldn't plumb here) that they were taxing the wrong macronutrient entirely, that is to say, that fat on the body is more a factor of sugar going in than fat going in. So in addition to imposing costs it may have failed to give benefits (whereas had it worked to improve health outcomes maybe it would have been worth the costs of enforcement etc.)

2. The Danes taxing butter?!? That seems extremely odd given the dairy industry and culture. But I suppose major kudos for being able to overcome such prior biases to even run the experiment.

That's like taxing it only in Idaho. Of course it must be done in an economic block, like the US or the EU or China.

Marketing potentially harmful products to children should simply not be allowed. It is well-accepted that children lack the experience and power of judgement to properly evaluate marketing claims.

A product sold as breakfast, that consists of 25% sugar, absolutely qualifies as harmful.

I dislike the idea of solving this via more regulation. Children don't decide what they eat, their parents do. So either the parents don't care about the health of their children (hard to believe), or they're not properly educated about healthy nutrition.

The amount of discipline a parent (limited by the time and willpower a parent can input into the process) can impose is finite. Once we accept this hypothesis, we can see how usual norms are imposed by parental discipline plus non-parental discipline. A parent going against a norm will have to use an extraordinary amount of time and willpower to impose his unconventional norm, as he will lack the enforcement of the non-parent actors. Eating sugary cereal is a societal norm in today's developed countries. Therefore, a parent wishing to diverge from this norm would have to expend an extraordinary effort.

He's also going against the professionals who already succeeded in imposing the norm and simply have to maintain it today.

As a parent I would agree that there is little education. Health professionals (in the UK) don't seem to care. Products you think are safe are then found out to be harmful in other ways.

I don't think education is the silver bullet, but habit forming is. For example, what is the habit you resort to when deprived of sleep, late for work and kids are throwing a tantrum? Sometimes that habit lies in preparation, something most of are are not very good at.

Raising children is hard enough without segments of society actively fighting against you.

Or they are exhausted from working all hours because the banks create credit from thin air to maximize rent extraction and lack the willpower to argue with their children every shopping trip.

I have kids, it's a constant battle even though we have no TV and I'm fortunate enough to have enough time to educate them. I'm constantly fighting with a whole room of people who are disgusting scumbags with access to millions of advertising spend.

Most likely the latter, as well as advertising to children to use them as emotional leverage against the parents.

Do you also think all marketing for alcohol should be banned? It is "well-accepted" that many adults lack the judgement necessary to prevent over-consumption of alcohol.

A product designed to impair judgement absolutely qualifies as harmful.

How about McDonalds? Or Coca-Cola? Should we just ban all marketing because we're no longer adept at making responsible decisions for ourselves and our children?

When do you draw the line of "encouraging" and "this is what people actually want." I know that sugary cereals are bad for me, no one is encouraging me to eat them, but sometimes I really want Fruity Pebbles. The fact is that kids like sugary cereals, adults like sugary cereals, and a company is there to provide that product. I see nothing wrong with that.

But let's also point out that fact that diabetes is -not- caused by sugar consumption itself. There is a genetic strain, and there is a strain caused by obesity. Does sugar lead to obesity? Yes, it can, but it does not directly cause diabetes. This is an important distinction.

As a CEO in the US you're legally obligated to maximize profits. In that sense I don't see this as a problem with Nestle, more so the greater system in which Nestle sits.

That's not true, you're legally obligated not to defraud the company but beyond that you can do whatever the board lets you do.

Is this really true?

Over here (EU), the purpose of a corporation does not have to be maximising profit (although that is the default) and CEO does not have to use every legal method to maximize profit, at all costs.

Even in the US, it is not really true. The CEO is not allowed to unreasonably undermine the company's profitability, but they are allowed nearly unlimited business judgement. As long as they can come up with any remotely plausible business justification for their actions, no court in the US will stop them.

The CEO of Nestle could say something as simple as "acting in this manner will be perceived negatively and will harm our future sales" and they would be safe from legal action.

Nestlé is Swiss.