Last July I wrote (here) about Ultra Processed Food (UPF), a concept introduced by Dr Carlos Monteiro at a conference in São Paolo in 2010. My post looked at the difference....
<conspiracy-theorist type="moi?">
(in sub-editorial tone, not in substance)
</conspiracy-theorist>
... between a Medscape article about UPF and the Portuguese article it was a translation of...
<sic>
(and if you wanted me to write '... of which...', see my earlier posts, passim. In brief there are silly pseudo-grammatical 'rules' that you have to break whichever way you deal with a subordinate clause that contains a prepositional verb:
- 'a shibboleth about which I have written' ("should" be 'that I have written about' – that in a defining subordinate clause" insists Miss Thistlebottom
<tangent>
(and Microsoft Word's accursed grammar checker: if you want something really fouled up, use a computer...<meta_tangent>...).
I'm reminded of Amol Rajan's description [on this week's Today Podcast] of social media as 'the industrialization of confirmation bias'.
</meta_tangent>
</tangent>
- 'a shibboleth that I have spoken about' (but that leaves a preposition at the end of the sentence, breaking another silly 'rule')
As I have written before, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. and I've chosen my path to perdition.)</sic>
In the third of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures one of the guests...
<parenthesis>
(Dr Chris vanTulleken, cited in that July post, presented the three lectures, but he had a dozen or more guests, and I didn't note all their names.)
</parenthesis>
... concocted a soft drink, saleable in today's market, which he said was dominated by products that trade on the difference between WANTING and LIKING, starting from the predictable base of water. The first additive was six teaspoonsful of sugar...
<not_THAT_easy>
I know I know I know. They use less fattening sweeteners. This was just a demonstration of a principle. Food scientists use cheaper/less wholesome ingredients and mask any undesirable side effects by engineering with food-like additives.
</not_THAT_easy>
... which the guinea-pig (Dr VanT) found unpleasantly sweet. The next additive was citric acid, to counteract the sweetness. Again the doctor found a reason for disliking the improved drink, and again the guest added something else. This went on for several more steps, with the additives getting more and more arcane, and their net result was a drink that started out with an excessive amount of sugar (an amount that the body was wise enough to reject), but that had that natural feeling of satiety cloaked; the body wanted more and took it before it had a chance to realize that the sweetness was not a healthy amount.
According to the OED, English has had a word for this since the late seventeenth century, but had scarcely any use for it until the late twentieth century, when discoveries – and exploitation of those discoveries – popularized it: moreish. In fact, it was so rarely used that unlike many other words (most? – Discuss) it has retained only one meaning for over three centuries:
(Don't bother clicking on any apparent links; this is just a dumb screenshot.) |
And this Ngram from Google Books shows that for the first 290 years of its 3⅓ centuries' life the word was flying below the radar, virtually invisible; then it rocketed up (to use a slightly less inappropriate [but pleasingly aeronautical] metaphor:
While researching this post I was struck (or do I mean stricken?) by a phrase in the Medscape article quoted in my July post that referred to UPF's 'hyperpalatability and high caloric density'. I suppose 'hyperpalatability' just means 'moreishness'; and 'high caloric density' means 'hidden ability to make you eat more than is good for you'.
<Newspeak_reflection>
The apparatchik that strung together those words (I'm not sure such a person would deserve the term 'writer') was, in Newspeak terms, a 'doubleplusgood duckspeaker'.
</Newspeak_reflection>
At the risk of confirming my nearest and dearests' feeling that I always see the dark side of the Sun, I'm inclined to conclude that there's a red flag here: if you describe something as 'moreish' it's almost certainly UPF.
That's quite enough.
b