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Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists

Scam American companies are using to manipulate ingredient lists

bilsbie

Comments (166)

  • squeegeeninja
    This is such a bad video. Someone else's video, cut over multiple different times, a horrible slurred AI voice, shaky filmed screen with a guy talking over… Each layer adds nothing, but somehow this is the version worthy of sharing?
  • WarmWash
    I think even worse than this is the disconnect between a product name and the actual composition of the product.Its most rampant with juices, where every juice is actually just apple juice (from concentrate, so mostly water anyway) with a splash of [fruit] juice thrown in (also from concentrate, so also mostly water). Maybe if you are lucky you'll catch an apple shown on the front label behind the huge passion fruit or whatever.This even extends to clothing, where stuff like "Wool Sweater" is 5% wool 15% cotton and 80% polyester.It should be a law that the primary ingredient of a product being the leading noun in the name of the product.
  • crazygringo
    It's not a scam. And added sugars are listed prominently in the nutrition facts.It's the fact that different sugars have different properties. In terms of texture, moisture, etc. And they can be used at different stages of the manufacturing process.There's nothing wrong with this. Nutrition facts clearly label the total added sugars.Plus, strawberries are often going to be listed first anyways because traditional jam is approximately a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar. So even if it were just one type of sugar, strawberries could still be listed first.
  • bob1029
    The best solution is to control all the ingredients in your own kitchen. Relying on labeling to protect your health is insufficient. If you select your produce, you can prefer Jim Bob's local farm over the Monsanto option. You can sidestep entire categories of health risk. I'll sometimes buy a full hand basket worth of one thing like onions or limes depending on availability and quality.There are still some shelf stable goods that you can buy without getting screwed. But it's exceedingly rare now. Peanut butter is a good example. 99% the inventory is JIF with palm oil and added sugar in a plastic container, but on the very top (or bottom) shelf you can often find a glass jar that contains only peanuts and salt. It took me a month to get used to peanut butter like this. The exercise of stirring it almost ruined it for me. I can't imagine going back to the other stuff now. I tried JIF again recently and it tastes like a product you'd buy from Home Depot to do a drywall job.
  • gumby
    I remember looking at a carton of Whole Foods soy milk that prominently said “no added sugar”.I looked on the back and after water the second ingredient was “dehydrated cane juice”.The food system has been gamed forever.
  • gruez
    Deception is bad, but from a nutritional point of view this really shouldn't be an issue for informed consumers (ie. people who read the ingredient lists) given that "nutrition facts" also exists. 10g of sugar is 10g of sugar, regardless if it came from a strawberry, fruit juices, or HFCS. This is especially true in highly processed foods, where the processing eliminates any advantage that "natural" sugars have.
  • yummypaint
    Simply adopting reasonable labeling rules proven in other countries would fix a lot of problems in general. Japan has a great system for beverages. It wouldn't hurt if we adopted their safety standards around eggs either. https://xn--btro1dr1yrpow7m.com/en/what-are-the-rules-for-ju...
  • DavCreator
  • timcobb
    This is why the "total added sugars" line is critical and why it was fought tooth and nail by "food" companies for decades.
  • pjmlp
    All companies do this across the globe.For example in Europe, it is common to list mayonnaise by the elements required to make it, instead of putting mayonnaise on the ingredients list.Naturally when we mix eggs, oil and mustard, what comes out?So when wondering what kind of white sauce is on that salad or sandwich, check the ingredients with care.Unfortunately most folks don't pay that much attention.
  • eli
    Hard to imagine a less trustworthy source
  • anon
    undefined
  • cwillu
    > I included 10 more popular American foods where this same “ingredients slitting” scam tactic is being used at the end of the videoRage for views.
  • kuratkull
    His ChatGPT wasn't even asked to give references to the info it spat out. Who uses ChatGPT like that?
  • joeblubaugh
    If you make jam at home you’re going to be adding a very similar amount of sugar. Ingredient splitting may be an issue, but a sweet fruit preserve is a silly choice for showing it.
  • arpinum
    luckily in UK (and probably EU) jam, jelly, and marmalade are all defined in law with specific sugar to fruit ratios.
  • montag
    Prefixing the title with “The” would make it a lot easier to parse.
  • Incipient
    Honestly I half expect these "food industry is bad!" videos/people are sponsored by the food industry itself. They're unhinged enough that I feel a lot of people dismiss them as just scare tactics. Unfortunately the stuff that goes into some products genuinely ARE in desperate need of being reviewed/banned.These types of pieces I feel however do more harm than good to that cause.
  • m463
    The problem I had was figuring if a product had Sodium Lauryl Sulfate.I found that if I wash my sheets with detergents with it, the first night my sheets make me feel like I'm sleeping with a sunburn.Apparently toothpaste with SLS might cause canker sores.It is deliberately hard to determine!lol, here's a website:https://namephantom.com/other-names-for-sodium-lauryl-sulfat...they use different names on purpose.
  • happytoexplain
    I have thought about this hack before while looking at ingredient lists. I don't know what the best wording would be to establish the spirit of the law, but obviously this should be banned.
  • gchamonlive
    Thanks for reminding me not to buy American anymorehttps://xd1.dev/2025/09/not-buying-american-anymore
  • spullara
    for the no added sugar or whatever, just look at the calories. they generally tell you the story.
  • dawnerd
    Is it really a scam though? They still have to list all of the sweeteners. Not all sweeteners work the same too. And... not limited to American companies...
  • whall6
    How about: just eat whole foods
  • petesergeant
    I ain't watching that video or clicking on Twitter, but from the comments, this is about "ingredient splitting", where they "split an undesirable ingredient into several varieties so that each appears further down the list", because in the US ingredients are ordered by weight. So you can "hide" the amount of sugar by claiming it's from several sources, and listing those sources distinctly.
  • thaumasiotes
    There's a city-level law in Santa Cruz (California) that levies a punitive tax on beverages that contain added sugar. It's weird in a couple of ways."All-natural juice" is exempt, and it's defined by whether the sugar is "added". So if you combine 20 gallons of orange juice and evaporate the water away until it's reached the concentration of sugar you want, that's fine; if you get one gallon of juice and add sugar until you've reached the same concentration, you're subject to the tax. Oranges contain enough sugar that this is viable for orange juice. Limes don't, so limeade is taxed very heavily while orange juice that contains the same amount of sugar is exempt.Milk products (dairy or imitation) are exempt, and they are legally defined by the first ingredient (for milk) or first two ingredients (for imitation milk). Chocolate milk isn't a sugar-added beverage, because it's a milk product. Eggnog is a milk product too.This second point seems to explain why it's important for companies to manipulate which ingredients are listed first.There's really no chance of misleading the consumer, because right above the legally-mandated and legally sensitive ingredients list you'll see the legally mandated and not legally sensitive nutrition facts, which will tell you that eggnog is about 17% sugar by weight or that, to use the example here, Smucker's strawberry jam is 60% sugar. ( https://www.smuckers.com/fruit-spreads/jam/strawberry-jam )
  • xnx
    Focus on the macros first. Ingredients don't tell you much.
  • s0rce
    I guess if you just look at the first ingredient but its both obvious there are multiple sources of sugar/simple carbs and that jam is typically very heavily sweetened; this is how it has a long shelf life.
  • rafram
    @WallStreetApes is not a reliable source on literally any topic in the world (maybe besides how to make money by being a right-wing Twitter content farm). This being on the front page is a discredit to HN.
  • j3th9n
    Well no shit, Sherlock. Many more corporate/government scams waiting for this bro. But nice to see another one waking up from the matrix.
  • jjtheblunt
    @dang : the title shortener seems to have semantically goofed via syntactically having goofed
  • diogenescynic
    There's an entire industry of this--often operating under the term 'nutraceuticals' (i.e. food additives/preservatives) and other weird stuff. My friend works for one of these companies and was telling me to NEVER eat the Chinese sausages from Costco because they use a bunch of weird anti-fungal ingredients that they just label 'natural flavoring'. This is going on with literally everything sold at the grocery store. You can't even buy just Italian pasta and assume it's safe--Italians use Canadian wheat for most pasta which uses glyphosate. If you want glyphosate free products, you have to actually buy specialty Italian pastas that use Italian wheat. It's insane how hard it is to just eat non-processed foods.
  • hereme888
    Most people make money ultimately by lying and deceiving/manipulating. Either works for a company whose income is based on the practice, or directly participates in them.Of course at the expense of others. In this case, our health.Is your resume any more truthful than these ingredient labels?