I Don't Want To Comment On Brexit

So instead, I will be discussing diet. This issue is decidedly uncontroversial— I'm right, and a bunch of numpties are wrong.

A few days ago, I found myself googling for lactose-free ice cream. Because I am lactose intolerant and yet I enjoy ice cream. Obvs. Naturally, if I search for lactose-free ice cream, it is unmistakably clear that I am seeking sources of productage which meet two criteria, namely (1) is lactose-free, and (2) is ice cream.

You can google the phrase yourself and verify that no such results are produced. Instead, I get many pages and sites promoting various dairy-free ice cream alternatives. Is that what I am looking for? No. Of course it fucking isn't. It meets criterion #1, in that dairy-free products are devoid of lactose, but it fails on criterion #2 in that an alternative to ice cream, surprising as this may seem, isn't bloody ice cream.

It's not like lactose-free ice cream is impossible to create. It just needs to be treated with lactase enzyme to break down the lactose into glucose and galactose. We are talking about a product that physically exists on the Earth at this time, not some science fiction wondermaterial. Yet not only have I yet to acquire this tasty yet non-toxic delight, but it seems the entire internet has failed to understand why this might be in any way relevant.

OK, so I'm not the only person on the interwebs who understands concepts like diet and what the words "healthy" and "restrictions" mean when used in relation to it. However, for some reason, dietary health is one field in which the internet has been absolutely inundated with thickies who don't let their complete and utter ignorance of all things food-related prevent them from offering detailed earnest advice on how to improve your health. In fact, just while googling for the name of that lactose-free ice cream I've never actually seen in the shops, I ended up finding this load of dross about ice cream.

Just the title is enough to set sensible people on edge:

9 Delicious Alternative Ice Cream Brands: From Organic to Lactose- and Gluten-Free

I'm not sure what an "alternative brand" is (my opinion on the subject of brands already being well-covered on this blog), and all ice cream is organic by definition, since "organic" means "carbon-based" which lipids and sugars are. Then we get "lactose-free" and "gluten-free" side by side, as if they were equally noteworthy when, in fact, ice cream does not naturally contain gluten under any circumstances while it does contain lactose unless treated with lactase enzyme.

The very first line of text offers this little insight:

Nothing says summer like a rich, creamy ice cream cone -- and who says this has to be a guilty indulgence?

I have a heuristic I find quite useful when evaluating food and advice relating thereto— if the person purveying it believes there is a non-zero chance I might feel guilty for eating something, they are not worth listening to.

And then we get this:

Options from these nine companies include a lactose-free flavor with naturally more protein, one made with coconut milk and gluten-free cookie dough, and an organic ice cream sandwich.

In which a health-mandated dietary restriction (lactose-free) is treated as indistinguishable from bullshit fad diets (more protein). It gets even worse on the next page, in which it describes goat milk ice cream thusly:

If you're lactose intolerant, then you'll appreciate that it won't affect you like cow's milk. If you're a health nut, then you'll like rest easy knowing it has more protein and calcium than other ice creams.

NO! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.

All ungulate milk regularly consumed by humans has the same amount of lactose— about 6% give or take. If you're lactose intolerant, you will get just as sick from eating that as you would regular ice cream. If you are allergic to milk, you can probably consume it safely, as milk allergies are usually triggered by a protein specific to cow's milk but milk allergies are incredibly rare compared to lactose intolerance.

If you're a health nut, then the protein and calcium might well appeal to you, but it will have exactly bugger all effect on your overall health.

So now that I'm done ranting about the very most recent bit of diet-related rubbish I found, how about some meaningful advice? What actually does make a healthy diet?

It's actually fairly simple. Your body needs a certain amount of energy to power its vital functions. Energy comes from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Meeting your body's energy requirements is simply a matter of consuming the right number of kcals per day. It doesn't matter where they come from, although fat is more energy-dense than either protein or carbohydrates.

In addition to energy needs, your body also needs protein and very small amounts of a large number of other chemicals like riboflavin and ascorbic acid and iron, but if you live in a developed country and you've got enough money to buy groceries at shops regularly and you're not following any weird fad diets then you really don't need to think about any of them; you'll meet your body's need for those things without even trying.

If you have any specific health conditions, you will need to accommodate them. However, just because someone has them doesn't mean you do; many fad diets (see: gluten-free) are based around taking a food or ingredient that is genuinely unhealthy for the often-small minority of people who have an often-obscure health condition and declaring, sans evidence, that it is unhealthy for everyone.

So if you have no diet-restricting health issues and you have regular access to shops that sell food you really only have to worry about total kcals consumed— well, and also quirks of your metabolism about when to eat them, and there's rather a lot of meta about what will make you feel full and so forth, so in fact it wasn't entirely true to say that diet is easy. Perhaps I should have said that there are certain complications you can just ignore because they are all rubbish.

So let's focus on those.

QUESTION: How do I tell whether a particular food is healthy or not?

ANSWER: There is no such thing as a "healthy" food or an "unhealthy" food. A diet can be healthy or unhealthy overall depending on whether you are consuming the right amount of the many various chemicals you need but there's no such thing as a food which is inherently healthy or unhealthy in isolation without regard to how much of it you eat how often and what else you eat. (Unless it's gone off; mouldy food is unhealthy.)

QUESTION: What about all the studies that say [$INGREDIENT] is good/bad for you and may cause/cure cancer?

ANSWER: Did you read the study itself, or just the headline of the Daily Mail article that misunderstood the study? Firstly, any scientific study can produce spurious results; the effects of various foods on health has been so over-studied that chance alone dictates that most foods can be "shown" to cause/cure a particular malady. Secondly, science can be done badly; a lot of money rides on our food choices and companies are happy to invest massive sums into "proving" that their food improves your health and the competition harms it. Thirdly, even when science is done right, the accurate and robust study will be filtered through pop science publications that want "groundbreaking discoveries" that the slow and methodical process of science rarely provides and misinterpreted by woo-woos pushing fad diets before it reaches you; thanks to this massive game of Chinese whispers, a robust scientific study showing that, say, pregnant women who consume milk chocolate are just as unlikely to damage the brain development of their feotus as pregnant women who consume dark chocolate will be released to the public as articles proclaiming chocolate to be "brain food" that improves your intelligence.

QUESTION: OK mister clever clogs, if you know so much about diet then how do I lose weight?

ANSWER: You can't. It's impossible. Sorry. If you want to lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off, then you're right fucked and should probably try for a more realistic goal like winning an Olympic medal.

I know that's not the answer you want, but that = the facts. The diet industry is feeding you lies (and usually very nasty food as well).

In theory, losing weight is a simple proposition of burning more energy than you consume; the resulting deficit must be extracted from your fat reserves, so you lose weight. Basic physiology doesn't lie; maths neither. Psychology (and more complex physiology), on the other hand, are about to heap a bunch of complications on this "just don't eat so much" plan. Basically, your body regulates your appetite and metabolism in order to maintain itself in good condition. Unfortunately for our fat friends, it interprets whatever you weigh now as your "baseline" to maintain and if you start going below that your body will assume that you're starving and will crank up your appetite and slow your metabolism in order to conserve the energy it thinks is precious. The slower metabolism limits your calories burned, all while the increased appetite drives you to eat more, creating a surplus that cancels the earlier deficit. This brings us to the part where a bunch of people start prattling about "willpower." If only you had the willpower to keep to your diet and not binge on food just because your appetite cranked up, you could be skinny now! I would like to suggest that those people conduct an experiment: Light a candle, then hold your hand right in the flame. Continue to do so for as long as you can. How long did you last? Two seconds? Ten seconds? I bet most of you didn't even have the willpower to put your hand in the flame at all. Maybe some of you are super tough and lasted a minute or two. Congratulations! You can try the second task: Hold your hand in the candle flame forever. All it takes is the "willpower" to override your survival instinct nonstop for the rest of your life, which you think every fat person can do.

The good news is that obesity isn't nearly as bad for you as most people think it is. I know that won't help with the social stigma but I can at least throw you that bone.

Now that we've handled that I shall finish off this post with a quick primer on the difference between lactose intolerance and milk allergy, which by virtue of being posted on a blog with literally no readers, will serve to educate the entire population of the Earth so that I never see the two confused and conflated again.

Lactose intolerance is the inability to metabolise the sugar lactose, a disaccharide comprised of glucose and galactose. Like most polysaccharides, lactose cannot be absorbed by the intestine directly and must be broken down into its constituent monosaccharides by an enzyme called lactase. Lactase is produced by the intestinal tract of infant mammals who have not yet been weaned and by adult humans who have a mutation called lactase persistence. As such, lactose intolerance isn't a health issue as such; lactose is only found in milk, so being unable to digest it is the default condition for all animals other than infant mammals who are nursing. Lactose is found in all milk, and it is found in the same quantity in all milk adult humans regularly consume, however it is not found in a wide variety of products derived from milk. For example, because lactose is a sugar, it is effectively absent from butter (which is all fat), from heavy cream (which is mostly fat), and from most cheese (which is mostly protein and fat). Consuming lactose when you are lactose intolerant will cause various digestive complaints because while you can't digest it, your gut flora can and they will do so via fermentation, much to your chagrin.

Milk allergy, on the other hand, is an allergy, meaning like all allergies, it is effectively an autoimmune disease. Rather than being caused by your gut flora calling bagsies on a food source you clearly can't use, it is caused by your immune system launching all-out war on a harmless substance. Accordingly, while a milk allergy can cause digestive complaints similar to lactose intolerance, it can also cause hives, anaphylaxis, and death. While lactose intolerance, as the name implies, is a reaction to the sugar lactose, a milk allergy is usually a reaction to a specific protein found in cow's milk. As such, while lactose intolerant people must avoid all milk but not sugar-free dairy products like butter, cream, and hard cheeses, people who are allergic to milk must avoid cow's milk and any products derived from it.

Some people (including those linked earlier in this post) believe that goat's milk is better for lactose intolerant people than cow's milk. I've seen this spewed anecdotally in many places but it's almost certainly bullshit (or goatshit as the case may be). Taking lactase enzyme supplements is effective, but only to a limited extent.

So hopefully you will now make good choices related to food rather than wasting money on fad diets and wasting effort on trying to keep track of which foods are "good for you" and "bad for you" according to pop science articles misinterpreting studies. Remember, when you know how nutrition really works, ALL food is guilt-free!

Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 4— Tablets

Tablet PCs. Those things that are like laptops but don't have a keyboard or a proper operating system or any proper applications— just limited cut-down stuff they have to call "apps" for legal reasons. Or maybe they're mobiles you can't actually make calls on. They have some use, but you could invariably buy a laptop that does all of the same things as a tablet and more, but is also cheaper. Unless, of course, you get a knockoff tablet like the Shenzhen Haina Haipad, which barely works. I've mentioned tablets before (scroll down), and NO, I didn't sacrifice my principles at the same alter as when I bought the smartphone.

Apparently tablet PCs are all the rage among the easily swayed, to the point that they've effectively cannibalised the netbook market, although admittedly that's only because Apple doesn't make a netbook and people will rush out to buy anything Apple makes because they're mad.

Well apparently, as of the market research survey I took the other day, tablets are now something marketers simply assume that you own. In exchange for enough money to buy a tank of petrol for my three-inch-long model car, I provided my opinions on various brands (and it's always brands, innit) of electronic and whether I owned them and whether I'd consider buying them and similar drivel.

In this survey, it was simply assumed that I owned a tablet, and that I would buy another tablet when it broke or got stolen or couldn't run the latest update to "Where's the Rope's Angry Fruit" or a marketer told me it was obsolete or out of fashion or whatever.

They made a point of asking me whether I'd heard of Samsung and Motorola, in case I lived on the moon and wasn't at least familiar with the existence of major multinational corporations with advertising budgets bigger than the GDP of Namibia, but that I owned a tablet was simply assumed since even people who live on the moon own tablets because it's required by law.

Maybe it's because the names "Samsung" and "Motorola" are brands and marketers' obsession with brands makes them perpetually anxious that you won't have heard of theirs or won't emotionally connect with theirs, while the idea that you may not want their product because it's useless and expensive and the label has nothing to do with it never crosses their minds.

So yes. In marketer world, that you own an entirely redundant wad of electronics is simply assumed, but that you're at least dimly aware of the existence of Samsung and Motorola must be carefully ascertained because many people have never heard of massive multinational Japanese and Indian tech companies respectively. (That's what those are, right?)

At this point, clever people will have noticed that in the first paragraph I referred to a sacrificial location as an "alter" and, being clever, they got the joke in that I was sacrificing my principles and thus "altering" them. If you are observant but not clever, and thus noticed the "incorrect" term but didn't understand why it was used, then please refrain from commenting. It will only embarrass us both.

Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 3— Assortment

I don't have a proper edition of DFMW this time, so here's a small collection of minor tidbits gleaned from various surveys I took.

Although the obsession with brands is something I've already written about at length, I was struck nonetheless by a particular example in a recent survey I took. In the midst of a long survey about dish washing products, the survey asked me:

"What drives your loyalty to the particular brand of automatic dishwasher detergent that you use?"

If ever called to provide a succinct explanation for my belief that marketers aren't actually human (thus ruling out my usual verbose rants), I would offer up that quote. A marketer writing a survey to try and learn the opinions of consumers assumed (a) that all consumers buy soap (a parity product) based on brand over all other factors, (b) that all consumers will only ever buy one brand of soap unless extraordinary external factors persuade them to change, and (c) the reason for this is because all consumers have loyalty to specific corporate trademarks. Keep in mind that at no point did I suggest anything that might support this conclusion even out of context; the question came completely out of the blue and not as a response to something I said.

Incidentally, the question was multiple choice; possible options included such delights as "I trust the brand" and "it's the brand I grew up with," plus the odd-sounding "it's the premium option."

To offer some semblance of actually answering the question, the idea of "brand loyalty" is ridiculous, especially when applied to a parity product like detergent; while I know I have dishwasher detergent in the cupboard under the sink I couldn't tell you what brand it is without getting up to check and I'm far too lazy to bother.

Moving on to another topic, many surveys on a wide range of subjects have blithely assumed I have a television, that said television is connected to some form of broadcast receiving equipment, and that I regularly watch said broadcasts when in fact, only the first is true and only barely. Many a survey has asked me how much television I watch in a multiple choice question that offered no selection for "none," forcing me to provide the awkward, if technically true, answer of "less than five hours weekly." At least three surveys have asked a series of half a dozen questions in a row where they would present a set of still images from different adverts and ask if I've seen that advert on the telly— without asking whether I actually watch television.

I suppose this is to my advantage in a way, since surveys are written for specific target demographics and they don't pay if you don't fit them; I'd have missed out on quite a few survey payments if they'd specified "television watchers" as a target demographic rather than simply assuming everyone watched. Still, it's symptomatic of a general culture among corporate interests that assumes television is the norm and "cord cutters" (to say nothing of "cord nevers" like me) are weird outliers— and that culture permeates through the media and content industries who habitually cut us cordless folk off from the best content because they assume we're a tiny and irrelevant minority.

Moving on to one more topic, it's hardly news to most people that many online retailers keep track of what products you look at to help them market at you. It's a form of ad targeting that's obnoxious as any other in principle and very hard to escape given that many online retailers won't let you buy anything without an "account" that ties your viewing habits to your name and identity, but it's one that in practice we generally let slide because the targeted ads are mostly limited to the online retailer itself; ads are more tolerable when we're in a buying mindset since they're not qualitatively different from the list of products being presented for sale anyway; basically just an aisle-end display.

That said, I have to question their value in actually driving sales. I've mentioned before that ad targeting is hit or miss under the best of circumstances; the list of "products you recently viewed" are not inherently likely to be the products you want to buy for precisely the same reasons that any targeted ad is likely to fail— a complete inability of computers to automatically determine why you looked at something from the fact that you did look at it.

The list of "products you recently viewed" is liable to be full of the products you want-ish but not that much, the products you considered inferior alternatives to the one you actually bought, or the products you did buy and don't need another of.

And then, of course, there's my list of recently viewed products from a well known electronics retailer.

Click to embiggen.

Well done, popular retailer. Well done. That ad will surely be responsible for driving many sales.

The Trouble With Brands

This is kind of a follow on or postscript for my previous long post about brands so I'm not giving it a "Dispatches from Marketer World" title because it's kind of an expansion and clarification.

One of the points I made was that brand is a very limited and flawed proxy for quality because brands can be bought sold and licensed, but the example I gave was downright obscure.

Here's a slightly less obscure one. Ben & Jerry's is a brand of ice cream that was actually invented by two guys named Ben and Jerry, specifically Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two ordinary blokes who decided hey, they liked ice cream so let's start an ice cream company. So Ben & Jerry's began, and was a different kind of company, an independent company just started up by two blokes who overcame adversity (Ben doesn't have a full sense of taste) and built themselves a little slice of success by selling a better product than the corporate mass-produced crap.

You'll notice I used a lot of past tense there. That's because Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield haven't had anything to do with Ben & Jerry's since April of 2000.

Ben & Jerry's is owned by Unilever, the same company that makes Lynx.

The independent company started by two blokes that makes a better product went out of business 13 years ago, but its name and logos live on, attached to the same mass-produced crap that everybody else makes. And it's perfectly legal because the name "Ben & Jerry's" is a brand which can be sold, even though using the name and association of one product to sell a completely different product is fraud in a moral sense even if not a legal sense.

That's why shops touting that they have "my favourite brands" is so nonsensical; the brand is irrelevant, since it can mean something completely different one day or year to the next.

Little Things That BUG Me #8

Any form of communication that says I can find/buy/save money on "my favourite brands."

Look, copy writers, just because you're obsessed with the idea of "brands" doesn't mean John C. Consumer cares what name or logo is printed on the side of the jam jar.

Sensible people don't care about what is effectively the civilised version of which dog pissed on a particular tree, and yet high street shops that want a hand in my wallet will promise "we offer discounts on your favourite brands" with such consistency that I think it may be required by law.

But even if it were, it would still bug me.

Dispatches from Marketer World: Part 2— Brands

What better way to emphasise the regularness of this feature than to include two in a row?

If I'm to make a habit of highlighting how marketers think (as gleaned from the types of questions they ask or fail to ask in market research surveys), I suppose it's best to start by addressing the biggest concern: Brands.

What is a brand? I'm sure you already know that. A brand is a name, a logo, a design, a slogan; a bit of intellectual property too small or simple to be eligible for copyright protection (usually), but protected by trademark instead, and used by its owner to mark a product as having come from them.

Marketers, however, use the term "brand" to refer not only to the trademark, but to the product emblazoned with it, the company that owns it, and (in most cases), anything that can be identified as a cohesive entity. To us regular people, this is a brand. To a marketer, however, the physical can of sodypop with that logo upon it is also a brand, as is the Moxie Beverage Company that made it, and Cornucopia Beverages, the company that owns them. To a marketer, even a non-profit entity such as Oxfam or a semi-organised social movement such as Occupy Wall Street is also a brand.

This oddly expansive definition of the word "brand" means that most market research surveys are written in a comprehensible-but-awkward creole where I'm asked to evaluate a brand, provide opinions on a potential new brand, all so that an existing brand can better make decisions about which brands it should create in the future.

The over-reliance on the slightly misused word "brand" makes it a little bit difficult to comment on this next topic, but I'm fairly certain that marketers are overly concerned with brands above and beyond their obsession with the word itself.

Nearly every market research survey either assumes that which brand is emblazoned in a product must necessarily factor into my purchase decisions to a much greater extent than it actually does. It makes sense that they would think this way; they've almost certainly invested a lot of time and money in the idea that the key to success is to advertise a brand and assume people will buy products based on their resulting familiarity with the sight of the logo. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case.

Not all products are created equal, and because a brand connects a product to its manufacturer, a brand can serve as a proxy for distinguishing quality manufacturers from those best avoided. However, brands are a limited and flawed proxy at best, for several reasons.

First, the vast majority of our purchases are for small everyday things like toothpaste and napkins. These items are called parity products, meaning that all the choices on offer are the same in every respect (except, potentially, price). Many of the market research surveys I've taken asked me to evaluate a new sales pitch or piece of ad copy for one of these products, and then asked me to what extent it made me more likely to purchase the product made by the advertising manufacturer; those marketers were fooling themselves because price is the only consideration on these products.

Second, even when there are distinct differences between manufacturers, brands don't correlate to manufacturers directly. In many cases, a heavily advertised brand and a less advertised brand will both be placed on the same product; the former will be more expensive than the latter despite being exactly the same thing. It's generally a safe bet that any product endorsed by a celebrity can be found much cheaper by looking for one without the celebrity-endorsed brand slapped on it; unless you want to pay money to a celebrity who doesn't need it or deserve it, you can probably find a non-endorsed version of the same product cheaper.

Third, even when a brand directly correlates to a specific manufacturer, brands can be bought, sold, traded, and licensed like any other form of intellectual property. Many years back, my family would make a point of obtaining Stella D'oro cookies whenever we could find them. The Stella D'oro brand was owned by the Stella D'oro Biscuit Company, so any product with that brand was made by that company. The Stella D'oro Biscuit Company produced all of its delicious biscuits at a plant on West 237th Street in the Bronx, employed union workers and paid fair wages, and used high quality ingredients. If you saw the Stella D'oro brand on the package, you knew it was quality stuff.

Problem is, then the company got sold, first to Nabisco, then to Kraft Foods, then to Brynwood Partners, then to Snyder's-Lance, Inc. Snyder's-Lance and the various intermediate owners closed the Bronx facility and demolished it, fired the union workers and moved production to a state that banned unions so that they could pay insufficient wages to their employees, and cut back on manufacturing costs by switching to lower-quality ingredients. Any product with the Stella D'oro brand on it today is low-quality garbage churned out by a conglomerate, made by underpaid workers in a state you'd normally fly over.

But the brand hasn't changed. Snyder's-Lance, Inc, may be the antithesis of the family business which made the stuff I used to love and their products may be poor imitations of my beloved biscuits, but the brand is exactly the same, because they bought the rights to use it. This isn't the only case where a company bought the rights to a brand associated with quality goods in order to use that association to peddle crap but it's the one case I always think of because of how thorough the reversal was.

Maybe I'm unique in this respect - an extreme outlier on a chart of the advertising-molded opinions of sheep - but I refuse to believe that the advertising industry's obsession with brands actually has any meaningful effect on consumers' purchase decisions.

As far as I've always been able to figure, advertising is what corporations do because they're not physically capable of masturbating.