Kellogg’s is waging a war here over Tigre Toño and Sam el Tucán.
A 2019 policy requires companies that make unhealthy foods to include warning labels on the front of any boxes they sell in Mexico to educate consumers about things like excess sugar and fat. Any food with a warning label — like Kellogg’s Fruit Loops or its Frosted Flakes, which typically contain more than 37 grams of added sugar in a 100-gram serving — is also banned from including a mascot on its packaging.
And that’s not the worst I have seen. Things like raisins are basically flavoured sugar.
But they’re dried grapes and mostly without added sugar. We shouldn’t need to live in a world where raisins are sold “now with less sugar”. Humans spent hundreds of years cultivating eating grapes to be as sweet as they are…
Most raisin Bran cereal (including Kellogg’s) coat the raisins in more sugar! https://www.seriouseats.com/cereal-eats-the-great-raisin-bran-off
The sugar we know isn’t that different. It’s essentially a dried plant too but with stuff removed.
Sure adding sugar is another big issue. But fruits aren’t that great for us either. Certainly better to eat an apple than drink apple juice though.
Actually fruits are pretty great for us, if they aren’t highly processed.
Better to eat an apple than drink apple juice, also better to eat an apple than just about anything from the supermarket that isn’t fresh.
Of course, you still need a balanced diet, and you can’t get nearly all the necessary nutrients from just apples. Still, assuming an otherwise nutrient-complete diet, it’s a lot less healthy to eat a slice of frozen pizza than an apple or a banana. (the apple might even contain less available sugar than the pizza slice - people often overestimate how much sugar fruits really contain)
The “stuff removed” bit is more important than you seem to give it credit for. Take out all the fiber and water and sure it’s still the same sugars that are left over, but we didn’t evolve to consume large quantities of pure sugar, so it spikes our insulin and gets stored as excess fat.
Fruit juice is pretty unhealthy, because all the sugar is more available due to all the fiber being stripped out and you can consume a dozen apples’ worth in a few minutes, which you wouldn’t do with actual apples.
Sure, there’s not that much fiber left in raisins either. But in the context of musli they can be combined with whole grains and nuts, so you get enough fiber back to make the sugar less quickly digested and thus more healthy.
A third of the entire cereal mix being sugar is definitely worse than musli with raisins (which comes to about 10g of sugar per 100g), especially considering that a good portion of the rest of the mass in the case of musli is made up of fiber, proteins and healthy fats.
Adding sugar isn’t just “another big issue”, it’s the big issue. Eating fresh fruits is a non-issue, and usually so is eating dried fruits in moderation.
There is a whole lot of things that aren’t fresh but are good for us and better than fruits. Interesting statement.
I’ve been trying to think of things commonly sold in supermarkets that are not fresh and that are more healthy than fruits, and after a few minutes I have to say I came up blank.
Maybe vegetable soup? Not sure if you can get a good soup at the supermarket.
Care to share a few examples?
Whole grains, lentils, frozen vegetables, plenty of meats, fish, eggs. These come to mind. In the perfect world I would give fruits a blanket stamp of approval (I know right, the self-importance). But almost nobody I know don’t already have plenty of sugar in their diet, which means fruits just compound that. That’s not to mention that selective breeding has made our fruits unnecessarily sweet (try the most popular apple types after not having any sweets for a few weeks).
Of course though, there are lots of fruits and many of them are great as long as they’re not processed (e.g. smoothies).
I generally just go for vegetables. Getting into them can be tough but once you do they’re a game changer for your palate.
Pedanticism aside, fruits are miles better than almost any sweets. So if you do manage to replace cake time with fruit time, congrats. That’s a huge step.
I think you’re both on the same side of things but had a comm glitch on the word “fresh”. You think of fresh as being totally unprocessed, Wols think of fresh as being minimally processed (I believe they count whole grains, legumes, and dried vegetables as fresh)
That does indeed seem like the hangup in this case, and it’s on me; I should have used a less vague word or else clarify.
To me fresh is anything that hasn’t been processed for preservation (except drying). So cheese isn’t fresh, heat treated milk/cream isn’t fresh, smoked and cooked meats aren’t fresh, pickled foods aren’t fresh, frozen foods aren’t fresh and anything with actual preservatives added is definitely not fresh.
“raw” would probably have been the better word to use.
Also, having thought about my own understanding of the word a bit more in depth, I’ll concede that some pickled veggies are pretty healthy, as well as yoghurt.
You were right with all three examples.
Good points.
I would argue that grains, lentils and eggs are fresh, as well as most meats that I would consider “healthy” enough to be compared with fruits, but that’s maybe due to my perhaps non-standard understanding of the word so I apologize for the confusion (let me conveniently hide behind the “non-native speaker” excuse).
I concede frozen vegetables.
I agree that veggies (especially legumes and root vegetables) are even healthier than fruits.
But I think we should encourage fruit consumption as a more healthy way to enjoy sweet things.
I think it’s more effective than to continue consuming large amounts of processed foods with added sugars and more pragmatic than trying to cut out everything sweet altogether.
Most unhealthy diets are caloric surplus anyway, so I think it makes more sense to replace things than to simply add them, and fruits are a good substitute because they taste really good by default.
I enjoy many vegetables, but most are not that tasty without good preparation (cooking, seasoning, etc. - notable exceptions: carrots & tomatoes).
You can just bite into a banana and it tastes great, scratches that sweet craving and will also satiate you a bit; a good substitute for a chocolate or ice cream. Or a bag of chips.
Opining about fruit being too sweet is always an interesting conversation to have with folks. It always take a second for their brain to catch up when you start talking about selective breeding for certain traits eventually having negative effects. That’s when you pull the bait-and-switch and mention the evils of dog breeding. Poor pugs/bulldogs.