9 ms·

Seems like a typical blanket baseless unscientific attack of everything deemed "unnatural". Lots of the typical insane stuff, sugar is okay, but "Nonnutritive s

Seems like a typical blanket baseless unscientific attack of everything deemed "unnatural". Lots of the typical insane stuff, sugar is okay, but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not. Spices are okay, but MSG is not. Just a laundrylist of the typical alternative medicine mumbo jumbo. Kind of pathetic, but not unexpected from the state legislature I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol

londons_explore 1y ago
I think it points to a failure of the scientific community to identify better criteria. There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics. Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".
- contrarian1234 1y ago
  I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay. The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents. There are just three lines that actually address nutrition: (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat. (ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1. (iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars. Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
  - chithanh 1y ago
    > (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat. Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated > I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose. I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.
    - KempyKolibri 1y ago
      As I wrote elsewhere: If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases. We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way. Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
      - chithanh 1y ago
        The evidence actually suggests that soft drink consumption is equally associated with higher all-cause mortality and artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened. Even when controlling for smoking status, BMI, physical activity, and alcohol consumption. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.) And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.
        KempyKolibri 1y ago
        You have to be very specific in the intervention you’re either looking at in an RCT or modelling in a prospective cohort study. We wouldn’t expect adding NNSs to a diet to improve much (perhaps some benefit from carbonated ones on body mass). We need to investigate/model replacement of SSBs with NNSs. When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that goes over that evidence base: https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as
- rayiner 1y ago
  > Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy” Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.
ReptileMan 1y ago
>but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.
- jpfromlondon 1y ago
  They "may" affect your insulin response, some studies have found this plausible, some have found no link. Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.
- chithanh 1y ago
  Some do, some don't. Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed. For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.
  - StackRanker3000 1y ago
    This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”. What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency? What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar? If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
    - chithanh 1y ago
      > “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”. No, not at all. Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer. This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect. > What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar? When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.
jpfromlondon 1y ago
It is unscientific nonsense given there is no proven causal link between "pRoCeSsEd FoOdS" whatever they might be and longterm adverse health. The countries that consume the most processed foods are also the longest lived, obviously such a correlation does not imply processed foods lead to longevity, just that any accusation of cause and effect is more easily explained by abundance and affluenza (sic). How long before the UPF cult proclaims vaccines are poison, I note than some of their number already do.
- LPisGood 1y ago
  One thing that is not in doubt is that many UPFs are hyper-palatable. It’s much harder to overeat if the food in question is potatoes, carrots, and fish than if the meal is Pringles, Ice cream, and deep fried fish sticks.
  - chithanh 1y ago
    Agreed, I do think that hyper-palatability is the actual problem and not some poorly defined idea of "ultra-processed"
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    But what if it is lays potato chips? Potatoes fried in oil and then salted. None of the potato scrap mashing and molding that pringles have. There is a connection between ultra processing and hyper-palatability, but it is a very lossy one. Doritos are ultra processed but no honest definition of ultra processed foods can include Fritos. Are Doritos substantially worse for you than Fritos? Is ice cream ultra processed? There are definitely ultra processed ice creams you can buy, with lots of stabilizers or whatever. But you can also make ice cream with just cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla beans. If anything, the homemade stuff that isn't ultra processed is even more hyper-palatable than the "frozen dairy dessert" kind.
    - LPisGood 1y ago
      Fritos are highly refined, industrially manufactured, and have plenty of processed additives. I think they are plainly ultra processed
hgomersall 1y ago
No, it's about processing. The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them. Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes. Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". If that results in some hypothetical healthy food being banned, so be it, but really this is about a loss of trust.
- ninkendo 1y ago
  > No, it's about processing What’s “processing”? > The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything. > Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes. So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure? > Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.
  - hgomersall 1y ago
    Processing is defined in the legislation. By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens. Fancy means something that doesn't fulfill that definition. The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens. The idea that we can process our way to a healthy diet has not stood up to the real world experimentation. Maybe it's time to stop experimenting on school children and just accept that perhaps they should be fed food that is generally recognised as such down to its base ingredients.
    - 1y ago
KempyKolibri 1y ago
Yep, this seems like quackery. Wholemeal bread with soya lecithins? Evil UPF, ban it. Artisinally produced sourdough using refined flour with tons of salt but no lecithins? Delightful, fill your boots. We've let nutrition policy become controlled by fad diet book authors and the results aren't pretty...
- zjzjzxkx 1y ago
  > tons of salt Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries. > refined flower Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries. > soya lecithins Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins. Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.
  - KempyKolibri 1y ago
    Let’s do this one at a time, starting with salt. What’s your goalpost for evidence here, I.e. what would it take to convince you that salt consumption above the levels indicated in dietary guidelines is harmful?
    - zjzjzxkx 1y ago
      [dead]
    - lithocarpus 1y ago
      Actual studies that isolate salt consumption as a variable and show worse outcomes from more salt would be a start. Every study I've looked into that purported to show salt was a problem did not isolate salt, and the most likely reason IMHO that the "less salt" group did better was because they ate less ultra processed food and more natural food.
lonelyasacloud 1y ago
>> ... baseless ... Depends on a) How well it's believed science is able to keep up with the "creativity" and dollars of the food industry. b) The health costs to the individual and society of any subsequent problem. c) How well the society in question is likely to do in overcoming the vested interests to fix any subsequent problem.

londons_explore 1y ago

I think it points to a failure of the scientific community to identify better criteria. There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics. Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".

contrarian1234 1y ago
I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay. The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents. There are just three lines that actually address nutrition: (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat. (ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1. (iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars. Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
- chithanh 1y ago
  > (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat. Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated > I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose. I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.
  - KempyKolibri 1y ago
    As I wrote elsewhere: If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases. We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way. Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
    - chithanh 1y ago
      The evidence actually suggests that soft drink consumption is equally associated with higher all-cause mortality and artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened. Even when controlling for smoking status, BMI, physical activity, and alcohol consumption. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.) And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.
      - KempyKolibri 1y ago
        You have to be very specific in the intervention you’re either looking at in an RCT or modelling in a prospective cohort study. We wouldn’t expect adding NNSs to a diet to improve much (perhaps some benefit from carbonated ones on body mass). We need to investigate/model replacement of SSBs with NNSs. When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that goes over that evidence base: https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as
rayiner 1y ago
> Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy” Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.

ReptileMan 1y ago

>but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.

jpfromlondon 1y ago
They "may" affect your insulin response, some studies have found this plausible, some have found no link. Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.
chithanh 1y ago
Some do, some don't. Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed. For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.
- StackRanker3000 1y ago
  This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”. What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency? What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar? If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
  - chithanh 1y ago
    > “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”. No, not at all. Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer. This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect. > What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar? When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.

jpfromlondon 1y ago

It is unscientific nonsense given there is no proven causal link between "pRoCeSsEd FoOdS" whatever they might be and longterm adverse health. The countries that consume the most processed foods are also the longest lived, obviously such a correlation does not imply processed foods lead to longevity, just that any accusation of cause and effect is more easily explained by abundance and affluenza (sic). How long before the UPF cult proclaims vaccines are poison, I note than some of their number already do.

LPisGood 1y ago
One thing that is not in doubt is that many UPFs are hyper-palatable. It’s much harder to overeat if the food in question is potatoes, carrots, and fish than if the meal is Pringles, Ice cream, and deep fried fish sticks.
- chithanh 1y ago
  Agreed, I do think that hyper-palatability is the actual problem and not some poorly defined idea of "ultra-processed"
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  But what if it is lays potato chips? Potatoes fried in oil and then salted. None of the potato scrap mashing and molding that pringles have. There is a connection between ultra processing and hyper-palatability, but it is a very lossy one. Doritos are ultra processed but no honest definition of ultra processed foods can include Fritos. Are Doritos substantially worse for you than Fritos? Is ice cream ultra processed? There are definitely ultra processed ice creams you can buy, with lots of stabilizers or whatever. But you can also make ice cream with just cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla beans. If anything, the homemade stuff that isn't ultra processed is even more hyper-palatable than the "frozen dairy dessert" kind.
  - LPisGood 1y ago
    Fritos are highly refined, industrially manufactured, and have plenty of processed additives. I think they are plainly ultra processed

hgomersall 1y ago

No, it's about processing. The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them. Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes. Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". If that results in some hypothetical healthy food being banned, so be it, but really this is about a loss of trust.

ninkendo 1y ago
> No, it's about processing What’s “processing”? > The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything. > Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes. So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure? > Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.
- hgomersall 1y ago
  Processing is defined in the legislation. By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens. Fancy means something that doesn't fulfill that definition. The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens. The idea that we can process our way to a healthy diet has not stood up to the real world experimentation. Maybe it's time to stop experimenting on school children and just accept that perhaps they should be fed food that is generally recognised as such down to its base ingredients.
  - 1y ago

KempyKolibri 1y ago

Yep, this seems like quackery. Wholemeal bread with soya lecithins? Evil UPF, ban it. Artisinally produced sourdough using refined flour with tons of salt but no lecithins? Delightful, fill your boots. We've let nutrition policy become controlled by fad diet book authors and the results aren't pretty...

zjzjzxkx 1y ago
> tons of salt Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries. > refined flower Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries. > soya lecithins Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins. Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.
- KempyKolibri 1y ago
  Let’s do this one at a time, starting with salt. What’s your goalpost for evidence here, I.e. what would it take to convince you that salt consumption above the levels indicated in dietary guidelines is harmful?
  - zjzjzxkx 1y ago
    [dead]
  - lithocarpus 1y ago
    Actual studies that isolate salt consumption as a variable and show worse outcomes from more salt would be a start. Every study I've looked into that purported to show salt was a problem did not isolate salt, and the most likely reason IMHO that the "less salt" group did better was because they ate less ultra processed food and more natural food.

lonelyasacloud 1y ago

>> ... baseless ... Depends on a) How well it's believed science is able to keep up with the "creativity" and dollars of the food industry. b) The health costs to the individual and society of any subsequent problem. c) How well the society in question is likely to do in overcoming the vested interests to fix any subsequent problem.