6 ms·

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it’s great that processed food manufacturers are trying to replace synthetic ingredients with actual food. I don

• perlgeek 8y ago
  It would make sense if the deciding factor would be consumer's health. Instead, it's the appearance of being "natural", which is not in itself better than something synthetic or modified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy
  • evincarofautumn 8y ago
    A good example of this is meats like bacon and pepperoni cured with “celery juice powder” or “celery extract” instead of “nitrates”, when the former contains just as much of the same carcinogenic nitrate salts they would’ve used, but it’s “natural”.
    • cwyers 8y ago
      It can in fact be MORE nitrate salts, because there's a minimum level needed to cure meats, and since celery salt or whatever celery-based product you're using is less consistent in the amount of nitrate included, you have to use enough to guarantee that everything gets enough nitrate, which means that some of what you make will have substantially more nitrate than foods that aren't labelled 'nitrate free.'
  • fenwick67 8y ago
    I think consumers are honestly trying to be healthier, but the amount of effort required to understand food science is way too high. What consumers are told is healthy vs unhealthy changes from year to year. First, saturated fat was considered bad for you so they were removed in favor of trans fats. Then trans fats were considered unhealthy so manufacturers replaced them with palm oil. Then we found out palm oil isn't great, so they use coconut oil instead. Who knows if that will hold up. Ultimately consumers want a pattern they can follow to get healthier foods. "Natural" or "organic" are these patterns for some people. I don't know what a good alternative would be.
    • TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Journalists and content marketers not writing articles full od lies about food in popular media would be a good start.
    • sulforaphane 8y ago
      The food industry benefits from, and therefore desires, this situation. As a result of the confusion, many people throw up their hands, and just eat whatever they want, or avoid one bad thing but gorge themselves on another. People just want an excuse to indulge, and conflicting, ever-changing studies are perfect for that. The food industry, of course, helps out by muddying the waters with poorly-designed, misleading studies. In reality, sugar, dairy, meat, salt, saturated fat (even coconut oil), and other processed oils, are all bad for you in different ways. A good heuristic for your diet is to maximize the amount of whole plant-based foods you eat. "whole" just means not having good things taken out -- so whole grains instead of processed, whole fruit instead of juices and jams which have had peel and fiber removed and maybe sugar added, avocados instead of avocado oil, etc. Even preferring whole beans to tofu which has had fiber removed -- though tofu isn't bad for you, it's just that whole beans, or whole-bean products like tempeh, are better. The longest-living people on the planet all eat some variant of this diet -- mostly or entirely whole plant foods, with minimal meat, dairy, added sugar, oil, etc. Unfortunately, as many places become wealthier and more westernized, people tend to start to copy the American diet, which brings with it all the typical the American health problems -- diabetes, heart disease, increased cancer risk, and all sorts of other inflammatory diseases. I don't generally trust scientific reporting on nutrition. Instead, I like this site, nutritionfacts.org, where they have a team of researchers that read pretty much every nutrition study and analyze them very critically, gradually building up a picture of what we should eat for good health.
• fortenforge 8y ago
  What exactly is the benefit of replacing Red #40 with red cabbage extract?
  • mrj 8y ago
    Well, potentially quite a lot of benefit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-dyes-linked-to-allergies-adhd-and-cancer-group-calls-on-us-to-outlaw-their-use/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/food-dyes-linked-to-allergies-a...
    • icebraining 8y ago
      The actual report seems rather weak. Some people have an allergic reaction to it, and some mouses may have tumors growing a bit faster - when over 5%(!) of their diet is red dye - and only in one of the three studies.
  • toast0 8y ago
    Some of the numbered red dyes are a migraine trigger for my wife. Naturally sourced dyes don't seem to trigger that reaction, although I'm sure that some people are sensitive to cabbage extract as well. I'm a bigger fan of not adding colors to things that don't need it, but I still appreciate naturally sourced colors.
  • maxerickson 8y ago
    There are also people allergic to yellow food dyes (for example, tartrazine). Of course, there could be a downside if there are more people that are allergic to the replacement. But the replacement is still a benefit to people allergic to the original ingredient.
  • tomp 8y ago
    Red cabbage has been experimentally tested for far longer, and by far more people, than Red #40. I'm inclined to trust it more.
• sowbug 8y ago
  The point of the article is that that is a popular opinion. Whether it's an informed opinion is another matter.
• w323898 8y ago
  Sometimes it's just dumb. Nitrides are no more hazardous than maillard reaction products like acrylamide, yet we're sabotaging our pastrami because of it. Totally irrational. Having a culture where people consider organic Pop tarts to be somehow healthy is a problem. It's superstition and leads nowhere good.