Mexico started putting ads on cigarettes on how it causes death. Graphic images as well. Then they started adding labels to food, "excess sodium / sugar", etc. Then they banned mascots on food products. No more Toucan Sam or Tony the Tiger. Though the last thing seemed a bit excessive, the cereal does look more generic and I know that as a kid, I asked for name brand cereal. I hope they target fast food ads next depicting great looking food that in reality usually look as if it was stepped on.

>No more Toucan Sam or Tony the Tiger. Though the last thing seemed a bit excessive, the cereal does look more generic and I know that as a kid, I asked for name brand cereal.

Nah advertising to kids is a bunch of bullshit. It should not be allowed in general and definitely not for things that are harmful to them.

If it's bad for kids, what makes it any better for adults?

Adults presumably are adults.

Advertising at its core is one adult telling adult about something. There's utility there and it seems like a pretty fundamental right. Though I agree that it's warped into a bit of a monster and should be dialed in a bit.

Surely you can argue it is a fundamental right to have communication between consenting adults. But often in the case of advertising, the receiving party does not really have a choice. I would sooner argue that it should be a fundamental right to not be on the receiving end of communications you don't want, than that it should be a fundamental right to advertise to people who do not want to be advertised to.

>But often in the case of advertising, the receiving party does not really have a choice

I can't think of a situation where that's true.

This is my key argument on why billboards and similar advertising that can’t be avoided if you’re in public shouldn’t be allowed. There’s been no consent obtained.

Ads for adults is hardly better...

I was in Cancun, MX recently and bought a box of Oreos at the resort shop. There were stickers on it with multiple warnings. I was quite surprised, but pleased to see the government making an effort to reduce consumption.

Oreos: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/tijuana-mexico-sept...

Lucky Charms: https://i.redd.it/8l2z1fa5q3w71.jpg

Obesity is a problem, however, it's hard for people to download an app and gain hundreds or thousands of pounds on a single night.

Completely false. You can order food deliver in thousands of apps all over the world. Everyone who's ever had a feast knows you can gain enough weight in a weekend it'll take months if not years to diet off.

If you chug down 3 lites of vegetable oil, and it somehow all ends up in your lipid stores rather than giving you an unpleasant visit to the ceramic throne, you gain at most 2.8 kg.

This may indeed take months to shift, but it's not even close to the maximum possible damage to someone's finances from gambling.

Your number is exactly correct (1.4kg/day) [1] but you can easily do it without oil as they did in the study (there are a lot of waking hours in the day and a lot of good fatty foods.) Alcohol (and some medication) of course makes both storage and consumption easier.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7598063/

3 lites of oil is approximately 10 times the recommended calorific input for adult men; it certainly isn't "easy", on the basis of what I've heard from a now-long-deceased acquaintance with cystic fibrosis who was required to consume 10,000 kcal/day just to overcome the medical condition; and 10,000 kcal/day is less than half the amount here (24,436 kcal), which I chose on the basis of it being a lot of fluid to drink in one day even if it was water.

> Everyone who's ever had a feast knows you can gain enough weight in a weekend it'll take months if not years to diet off.

Is this actually a thing? I've definitely massively overeaten for short periods before (e.g. Christmas dinner). But the effect on weight was very transient.

Yes i highly doubt the validity of his statement. My calorie intake is around 2500 a day to maintain a weight of around 70kg (with some excerise). If i wanted to gain 2kg of weight id have to consume around 10000 excess calories over a period of two weeks.

I have also many times lost 2kg over a period of a few weeks by simply being lazy to calculate my calorie intake while excersising more than usual. Gaining weight takes ridiculously more effort for me than losing weight.

> If i wanted to gain 2kg of weight id have to consume around 10000 excess calories over a period of two weeks.

Which is of course trivial to do. That's one kebab extra per day.

You just don't eat caloricilly dense food at a high frequency and grossly underestimate how many calories someone can eat in a day [1]. Also, for most people losing 1kg a week is considered very fast weight loss at the border of what's recommended for safe caloric restriction.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36339530

I've lost about 65 lbs, then gained about half of that back. If I overeat in a single day, I can put on a pound or 2. If I don't compensate the next day for that excess, some of that weight will stay on. If I don't compensate within a couple days, all of that weight will stay.

I've had this struggle for a few years, gaining about 30 lbs over the course of a few years.

What the GP said might not apply to everyone, but it does apply to those who have eaten to excess in the past and are now struggling to keep that excess weight off again.

except people need food to survive? you don't need gambling. thats why its fine to ban. you're jsut engaging in a very bad faith argument since they aren't even close to equivalent.

There is no way that a normal person can gain 1.4kg of body mass in a day unless they are on some sort of eating challenge. Even then I doubt that they would metabolise even half of the food unless they built up to it.

That's a 10,000+ calorie surplus, you'd have to eat 1.5kg of straight mayonnaise and digest it all.

Sure, you can get the scale to shift by that much, I can do that in a few minutes by drinking 1.4L of water.

If you want to learn about actual realistic bodyweight tuning, look into the bodybuilding community, or any sport that has weight classes. Much more accurate information than using indirect measures of what people sort of felt like they sort of wanted to eat.

That's not really the problem with gambling either, though. The problem is addiction.

That's true but it would be extremely expensive if not impossible to implement therapy for all the addictive people in the world (most people, including me). So we just have to accept addiction and then try not to deliberately encourage the more damaging addictions. So addiction to coffee is not great but it doesn't do that much damage. Addiction to cigarettes does much more damage so while we don't probit it we don't allow people to deliberately encourage it via advertising.

Addiction to coffee? Are there a lot of people for whom coffee is harmful yet they keep on drinking it? The only people I know who say coffee is bad for them don't drink it.

Obese people, on the other hand, continue to eat despite knowing it makes them fat and unhealthy. It's an addiction just like cigarettes and should be treated the same.

Indeed; gambling as a business model, be it betting apps or gacha games, relies on hooking in "whales" (gambling addicts) for most of their profits.

>download an app and gain hundreds or thousands of pounds on a single night.

Home delivery apps do that. Although I am not sure if "pound "is a unit for weight or currency in this case.

If it's currency - in the UK, there are mandatory loss limits (esp. for new accounts). If weight thousand[s] of pounds is unrealistic gain to anyone.

Do you have examples of food advertisements in the Guardian?

In Australia at least they partner with another magazine (broadsheet) which is basically all about food and entertainment.

They have two in-house restaurant reviewers.

One of these is Jay Rayner [0]. His reviews are not always positive for the restaurant concerned [e.g. 1], so I don't count them as pure advertising.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/apr/23/jay-rayner-rest...

Jay Rayner writes for The Observer, which is a sister publication of The Guardian.

Well, and the Guardian.

Here's today's piece (a Thursday, not the Observer's Sunday):

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jun/15/shopping-bags-t...

Ah, indeed. Thanks. I ought to have been more precise about what he writes about on a Sunday.

From their own website, a case study in their partnership with Ocado [0]. In summary "For a whole year, Ocado own all ad inventory in Feast [the Grauniads online food magazine] – both print and online"

[0] https://advertising.theguardian.com/advertising/case-studies...

This is like when people say that consuming meat is a problem for climate change, completely ignoring the utility of meat. Obesity is a problem, but at least food, even fast food, even junk food, has some utility, whereas gambling has none at all.

I don’t think people who say meat is a problem for climate change are ignoring the utility of meat. They’re just pointing out that meat is a problem for climate change. Which it is, regardless of utility.

> gambling has none at all

It pays for newspapers.

> has some utility, whereas gambling has none at all.

Different people have different preferences. It's like saying anything that provides only recreational/etc. value has not utility.

It gives people a reason to watch soccer. Watching 90 minutes of a zero zero game is pretty boring unless you bet on that outcome.

I didn't say fast food should be banned. I said fast food advertising.

It’s entertainment. Isn’t that utility?

People also build community around it and make friends.

Certainly sports betting makes watching professional sports (which have no utility) far more interesting. Like spiking a drink.

2025, now: https://www.just-food.com/news/uk-government-delays-junk-foo...