Marketing is quite powerful and can impact us so much that we take many decisions based on the biased knowledge we have been imparted with. A recent experience with diet made me find a lot of loopholes exploited by the food industry and how it is the same product that had been there for many years with just some labels and some phrase changes. The biggest one is ‘No added sugar’. I have been believing this label until I found out the truth the hard way by cutting down on refined sugar in the diet. The number of sick days in a year went down considerably when the refined sugar in the diet came down to near zero.

No added sugar test

Take this following test – Try drinking fresh fruit juice without sugar, if you had been accustomed juice with sugar, this is unpalatable. But if you continue doing this for about a week your taste buds gets adjusted (caveat: Cut down sweets as well for that week to make it easily observable). The craving is hard to resist but promise yourselves a cheat treat if you pass one week.

By the end of a week or so the taste buds would have adjusted such that you begin to appreciate the subtle flavours and natural sweetness in the fruit juices. At this point of time, have two fruit juices of the same fruit side by side, one freshly prepared without sugar and another with a popular ‘No added sugar’ brand. Try the difference in the taste between them, see that the ‘No added sugar’ is significantly sweeter.

Why is that even with ‘No added sugar’ the branded drinks appear to be sweet? They have the following marketing tricks up their sleeve to substitute the word sugar. 

Dehydrated cane juice – Excuse me, isn’t that sugar. This was the most outrageous disguise I have found. Dehydrated cane juice is apparently not sugar for many people. This helps in adding the same amount of sugar as a sugared juice.

Some juice concentrate – This is pure genius, If you take apple juice, the label will often read ‘apple juice concentrate’ which helps to boost the per ml sugar content in the juice from the natural sugars in the fruit. We end up taking the same amount of sugar dose for a sugared juice which can be as high as two teaspoons for every 100 ml.

While a lot of people are trying to fight lifestyle and overconsumption related diseases there is a group of people who are working hard to trick people into making poor lifestyle choices. By doing so they are getting rewarded big at the expense of a unhealthy greater good. There is no big difference between an adulterer and these marketing gurus in the way they trick people to become wealthy.

There are a lot more, try to find what ‘No added preservatives‘ mean.

We generally go by ‘The Spotlight Effect‘, we always think about what others think about and assume there is a greater chance of people noticing each and every thing we do and form an opinion about it. On the contrary, every one else has very less time to think about others and often think about themselves.

As observers we do notice a lot about things and give our opinions on it, but generally we lack the expertise and we are not the person in the arena facing the situation. Nevertheless our opinion as an observer gets voiced out, but most likely our opinions will change given our experience changes.

Change the tables around, the public has a lot of opinion on us. Some of us go way too much that we go about changing a lot about ourselves to make sure the public opinion about us is good, but the public opinion is fickle. People have a lot of other work to do and many at times they don’t even remember the opinion they had on us when we meet them.

Remember the story of the deaf frog who emerged victorious, learn to listen to yourself than spending energy on what others should think about you.

 

 

We are increasingly surrounded by things what we want to hear and see, which traps us into a small circle of our own echo chamber. Before internet targeting something for someone is quite hard, a person has to do a great deal of research to find something useful about a person. Now it is just a click away and we are giving it away in a few clicks.

We are in an era that our attention has been targeted like never before and with great precision. We are giving away a lot when we message someone, when we talk to someone, when we read news articles, when we like our friend’s photos, when we order food, when we buy something, when we watch a movie, when we use maps, when we use search engines; there is not a place where we can control what we can give unless we put in deliberate effort.

All this creates a profile of us and then feeds us what we have liked and used so far. I chose to listen to jazz music one day in an app, from that day onwards I keep getting jazz music prompts and I have to wrestle my way out to find something else. Music was obvious, news is not. If I had clicked on a type of news in Facebook then I would keep getting the same kind of it and subconsciously I will be primed to think that is the only thing happening around me. The same applies for anything I can think about, as a first step I unsubscribed to all the emails and thanks to GDPR it made my life even more easy to unsubscribe. I also uninstalled Facebook from my phone and use it as a way to find some old friends and get their contact through the browser.

The next steps I began to do was to go under the radar. It may be hard to go under the radar especially when we use social networks and messaging apps but we can control a lot of things what we do on the browser. I stumbled on a link that helps us to stay private in the era of mass surveillance, I started cutting down on ads & trackers; it is easy to do even if you are not a full time developer. Privacy is getting increasingly hard, if we don’t seek it we will get stuck in an echo chamber, listen and see only what we want to not what is happening around.