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Joined 10 days ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2026

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  • Real quick, define heart healthy. Tell me what the Cheerios people actually mean when they say that.

    That phrase actually is bullshit. It’s marketing wank designed to illicit an emotional response from worrisome mothers and evidently specific dudes on the Internet.

    And while there’s no firm definition of a UPF, there is an actual general understanding of what that term means. No one is going to look at a bag of lettuce and call it ultra processed. In the same stroke, you can’t look at a bag of Chex mix and tell at a glance what they’re made out of. About half the ingredients on the bag are synthetic. The rest have been reduced to their component atoms and reassembled in a way that’s still technically edible.

    And brother, if you think we’re not giving UPFs to babies you’ve got a very rude awaking coming to you. Almost all of the foods marketed towards infants and toddlers are UPF. That’s actually a big problem and a likely contributor to the ongoing obesity problem we have.

    As it happens the product you’re seeing babies eat isn’t generally Cheerios, it’s something made of rice that dissolves faster to prevent choking. What’s the marketing for it anyway. And the fact that you and most people without kids can’t tell the difference at a glance says something about the food we’re feeding to kids.

    For your edification, choking hazards for children are a real thing, because we’ve failed as a society to teach our children how to chew. Because we’ve been feeding them processed crap from a spoon. If you give a baby a bit of food too big for them to swallow, they’ll pick it up and gnaw or gum at it for a while. Unless you put it in their mouth for them, in which case they’ll instinctively try to swallow it and you’ll have a problem on your hands.