Online Shopping: Hazardous To Junk Food's Health 151
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that the trend toward online shopping is reducing the sales of impulse-purchase items, most notably candy and snacks often displayed at the checkout counter. As even grocery shopping shifts online, junk food producers are feeling the squeeze. From the article: 'Anthony Hopper, chief executive of advertising agency Lowe Open, said brands need to change how people buy chocolate, but acknowledges that it won't be easy. "If you're somebody who on average buys one bar of Cadbury Dairy Milk on impulse once a week, can I encourage you that it's actually better value to buy a pack of four when you're doing your next online shop? It's a long-term strategy," he said.'"
A higher likely reason (Score:4, Insightful)
People are getting poorer.
But don't mind my life experience.
Validates what your home ec teacher said (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember your home ec class? One of the lessons was to use a shopping list -- and stick to it -- in order to avoid impulse buys.
Well an online shopping cart is, for all intents and purposes, a shopping list. Looks like your home ec teacher was right all along.
Re:Or, maybe (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly it's starting to irk me a bit when people are against processed food. Most people have no idea what it even means and what the concerns might be (actual or merely perceived.) You can live perfectly healthy on processed foods. In fact, people who don't eat processed foods are extremely rare, even indigenous tribes devoid of modern technology process their food.
http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/food%20columnist0/Beware_Processed_Foods.shtml [healthnewsdigest.com]
It also irks me a bit when I hear people say you need to stay away from ingredients whose names you can't pronounce. I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it. Not a very good idea to completely shut out one of the most important amino acids from your diet. Words you don't recognize, or even things that aren't "natural" aren't inherently bad, in fact most of them are fine to consume.
Re:Or, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, people who don't eat processed foods are extremely rare, even indigenous tribes devoid of modern technology process their food.
When people say to avoid processed food, they're not talking about some tribeswoman grinding it up with a mortar and pestle. They're talking about things like Cheez Whiz, which despite what you may think, is not a healthy food source.
Words you don't recognize, or even things that aren't "natural" aren't inherently bad, in fact most of them are fine to consume.
I'm sorry, but "most" isn't good enough. When you're talking about things that people stuff into their bodies, they damned well better all be fine to consume.
Re:will it help against impluse eating? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or, maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
Trace amounts of hydrogenated oil are harmless, but large quantities are probably not a good idea.
Gee, and guess what a lot of "processed foods" contain?
Large quantities of hydrogenated oils.
Foods you pick off of the vine contain these things.
In general, they contain trace amounts of bad things, and a large number of essential things.
Processed foods, OTOH, tend to include large amounts of bad things and omit many of the essential things you'd find growing on a vine.
The key is in the amounts, not whether they or not they can be detected in one food or another.
On a scale of 10... (Score:5, Insightful)
On a 0..10 scale of problems to worry about, this ranks around 0.01.
The dynamics of on line food ordering could get interesting. Has anyone noted interesting suggestions from Amazon Fresh?
Here's a theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps you're actually better off not buying the junk food after all. You don't need to buy in bulk.
Re:Or, maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more likely that a large food processing factory will do several things with the carrots and broccoli...
1, use more of the spoiled/bad vegetables that most people would discard
2, use less vegetables and add more cheap filler materials to bulk out the product
3, use more fat, salt, msg etc to improve the flavor (which may have been ruined by the filler materials) in the cheapest way possible
4, replace other ingredients with cheaper substitutions wherever possible, again using more salt/fat/msg/etc to try and disguise the difference
If carrots and broccoli are sold in their original form you can see what they are, and you can see that unknown substances have not been mixed in to bulk them out. The same can't be said of a processed product, where the end result will usually make it very difficult if not impossible to identify the source ingredients and processes used.
Companies want to reduce costs in order to increase profits, and profits are considered far more important than customer satisfaction or health. Processed foods allow them to hide all manner of things that people would disapprove of and which might alter their purchasing decision. I doubt you'd buy a 200g pack of broccoli if it came with 50g of broccoli and a 150g blob of grey paste and instructions to blend them together and then reform it in broccoli shaped moulds to get the final product.