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This is assuming that the food landscape and choices available has been static It's actually dynamic and adversarial -- Michael Pollan has great examples of th
by chubot 4y ago
This is assuming that the food landscape and choices available has been static
It's actually dynamic and adversarial -- Michael Pollan has great examples of that, e.g. the "Snackwells" example
Over the decades, the industry has various types of processed food based on what the "accepted scientific advice" is at the time -- which often turns out to be wrong or in this case "interested" advice, like
- butter vs. margarine
- eggs and cholesterol
- does high fat cause heart disease? It was accepted, but we don't even know that
- vitamin D
When fat was vilified (by the sugar industry), you got pushed with "low fat" labeling
Then you got "Diet coke", 0% sugar labeling, 0 calorie labeling
There was also the "all natural" label to respond to a trend, which is ironically a bad sign, because the packaging to write the label on indicates processing. Does a banana need to have an "all natural" label?
The word "organic" was also co-opted by the industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29150342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29150342
It used to mean something, and now it doesn't.
Simlar to the way the first Whole Foods (I think in Austin TX) used to actually sell only whole foods!
Now they sell lots of processed foods at Whole Foods.
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If you avoid processed foods, you do avoid sugar, but you also avoid salt, trans fat, etc. Concentrating on a single nutrient is the reductionist fallacy, and the cause of the "scientific advice whiplash" and "national eating disorder" that Pollan talks about