The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese | Hacker News Reader

The Chemicals in Your Mac and Cheese

nytimes.com

37 pointsbrandonhall40 comments

“The phthalate concentrations in powder from mac and cheese mixes were more than four times higher than in block cheese and other natural cheeses like shredded cheese, string cheese and cottage cheese,”

As a chemist, I have to ask, how much phthalate was actually found? Telling me it's 4x higher than block cheese tells me nothing since block cheese may have barely detectable phthalates.

The dose makes the poison.

Our ability to detect chemicals has vastly improved over the years. It's not hard to detect chemicals in the parts per trillion (ppt) at this point in time.

You can't say "the chemical is there, let's be scared". The levels need to be quantified.

That's why drinking water has acceptable levels for things like cyanide, lead and mercury. No matter what water you test, you'll find those things. But if the amount is well below toxic levels, then it's not a big deal.

From the article:

>Although the concentration of phthalates in food may be quite low, measured in parts per billion, they are still present at higher levels than the natural hormones in the body, said Heather B. Patisaul, a professor of biological sciences at the Center for Human Health and the Environment at North Carolina State University in Raleigh

>they are still present at higher levels than the natural hormones in the body

This still doesn't mean anything. How does the body process said chemicals? Is there evidence that it's actually unsafe at the levels published?

There's probably a reason this study wasn't published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Ok, but what is the potency of these phthalate? Natural hormones are very potent. Everything I've seen says phthalate aren't that potent.

Isn't that true of nearly everything in food? It would be really weird if what you were eating were the chemical equivalent of homogenized humans. Like, what exactly are you eating??

The study claims that the levels are 4x higher in the fat, but only around 2x higher overall (presumably since mac and cheese has less fat than cheese itself). I agree with you that there's a lot of information missing here.

No matter what water you test, you'll find those things.

...and even the most highly purified water has nonzero detectable contaminants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrapure_water

They link to http://kleanupkraft.org/data-summary.pdf which says

Natural cheese: 53ppb average Cheese powder: 106ppb average

The highest individual pthalate was Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DHEP). The wikipedia page for that says that average consumption of DHEP is 0.25mg/day; if you ate 1kg of cheese powder that would be 0.1mg, and 1kg is a lot of cheese powder.

So basically you're getting the same amount of pthalates as you would if you ate twice as much natural cheese?

That's not exactly correct, in your last sentence, for the case of things which bioaccumulate: a million doses in the parts per billion range would be a single dose in the parts per thousand range, no?

On a related note, I've spent an embarrassing amount of time searching for good, creamy mac and cheese, including from-scratch recipes.

So far, this has been the winner: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2017/01/3-ingredient-stov...

It's three ingredients, stupidly simple, and you pick the cheeses you want. I'd argue it's as easy as boxed; you don't even have to drain the pasta. (P.S. if you've never cooked pasta the way the recipe instructs, you'll be blown away by how much more rich the flavor will be!)

We use sharp white cheddar from the grocery store, mixed with a little bit of American. Add a dash of dijon mustard and Frank's hot sauce. Feel free to experiment (but stick to good melting cheeses)!

I also add a dash of sodium citrate before adding the cheese. It helps the cheese remain completely smooth and more tolerant of careless cooking. You can buy a huge bag off Amazon.

EDIT: Also, when we have friends over for this, we've started cooking it in a large dutch oven. Sounds crazy, but it actually turned out even better. The heat regulation and retention of the dutch oven I think helps the cheese melt more evenly and consistently. Plus you can keep it warm for longer after cooking.

I still prefer making a proper cheese sauce: roux, add milk (béchamel), add cheese. Pour over boiled and drained macaroni, then bake.

I'll sometimes also long cook broccoli and diced garlic, mush that all up with a fork, then add it along with the cheese sauce to the noodles before baking. Years ago that was the only way to get my son to eat his broccoli. :-) (Aside, you can peel and dice the stems and cook them in too.)

However, I have a family recipe that's a bit different: boil and drain macaroni, mix in a container of cottage cheese and one or two eggs along with as much shredded cheddar as you like, then bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes.

Seriouseats / Kenji Lopez has some of the best info on the web when it comes to making tasty food.

Here is the video for the mac and cheese you're talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWaYdGQqxQU

Every time I read an article like this, I'm reminded of Michael Pollan's writings on food. His advice, even though I read it years and years ago, has stood the test of time for me:

> Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....

That's about nutrition though, and this is about contamination from packaging. The article would still have been written if mac and cheese were an entirely untreated plant product.

I don't follow what you're saying?

He's saying that the advice you mention "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is not very relevant to the article, because even if you mainly eat plants, the kind of chemicals that the article talks about can still be present in them (from the process of packing, transporting them, etc -- plus of course all the crap they put on them to make their grow faster and bigger).

In other words, your advice is about "eat less processed food" while the article is about how all kinds of food (processed or not) can have those chemicals. Plants can still come wrapped in plastic, with labels attached, pass through conveyor belts, etc.

If I'm reading the article correctly, it says that the phthalates in mac and cheese are in the cheese mix, not the plastic packaging.

For that particular case, perhaps, but they also say:

  Phthalates are not deliberately added to food. They are 
  industrial chemicals used to soften plastics and are used 
  as solvents, in adhesives and in ink on packaging. The 
  chemicals migrate into food from food processing equipment 
  like plastic tubing, conveyor belts and gaskets and other 
  plastic materials used in the manufacturing process, and 
  can also seep in from printed labels or plastic materials 
  in the packaging."

Something that Michael Pollan advocates is avoiding processed foods. In the quote above, though counterintuitive, "food" as defined by Pollan does not include processed foods like boxed mac and cheese.

From the article the GP post linked:

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

Ok, but why? I'm sure leafy greens are objectively "better", but is eating Mac & Cheese once a week (for example) going to cause physical harm? Do I need to adopt a zero tolerance policy?

No, of course not. But let's not overlook the fact that there are people who eat that every other day and lots of people who eat nothing but processed food to the point that they find real food sort of gross and hard to cook, eat or digest. This is a Bad Thing.

>"Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)"

The saddest part is we know exactly why this flip-flopping is happening. The methods used to "study" nutrition (NHST) automatically generate a series of conflicting results. There is no cumulative progress being made.

To pre-empt the inane pedantic reactions that always seem to accompany discussions on such articles: yes, water is a chemical too, as are vitamins, etc.

When people talk about "chemicals in food" they mean additional, lab created stuff added to the food, like artificial sweeteners, additives, preservatives, coloring, remains from the production and transportation process, etc.

Those against "chemicals" in food obviously don't advocate for food made without any kind of molecules and chemical substances.

Amazingly not only functions can be overloaded, but words too.

those against "chemicals" in food often demonstrably have no idea what they're talking about. the overloading is a rhetorical attempt to associate fear and lack of knowledge with everyday experience. your defense of this practice is vastly more inane than any objections to it.

>those against "chemicals" in food often demonstrably have no idea what they're talking about

No, but they clearly have an idea that they don't mean water or salt.

I ignore anyone who makes pedantic word-choice arguments when everyone is clearly capable of understanding what's going on. At best, it is more obsessed with their own cleverness than actual discourse, but more usually is just dishonest.

What, the pedantic reactions of people who only read the article's title? The article is clearly talking about phthalates, first mentioned in the second sentence.

>What, the pedantic reactions of people who only read the article's title?

You'd be surprised.

When people refer to "chemicals" in food, without distinguishing what type or category of chemicals, I tend to assume that they have an agenda of frightening an uninformed populace or that they are a member of that uninformed populace themselves.

Well, first there was the agenda of food companies to put as much crap can increase their profits (e.g. by making food more addictive, sweeter, longer lasting, etc) in there as legally (and often beyond legally) possible.

Here is something I think we are close to agreement on. Companies have made food more addictive, cheaper, more shelf stable in a variety of ways, to the detriment of nutritious food and consumer health in general. But unless we put the focus on the real issues with modern food, I don't think we will see much if any progress. In fact, I suspect that food companies and food scientists are up to the challenge of making food that is just about as cheap and addictive and shelf stable as the current stuff is without using any "artificial" chemicals. I mean, when "nitrate free" bacon can be sold that is, in fact, chock full of nitrates, the possibilities are endless.

When I was a child, for various reasons, I was quite a chow hound. I've long wondered if whether or not things like phthalates and BPA had significant effects on my growing body; I had a lot of less-than-masculine features to my body, some of which is correctable and some not. It could very well be that being an overweight adolescent meant that excess body fat caused me to have too much estrogen, but perhaps there was more going on. Maybe I'd have more androgen receptors by now and I'd be able to work less for the same muscle mass. IDK

At the same time, I don't think I can really say that the amount of any of these chemicals in mac-n-cheese would make me avoid it outright. Really, you should only be occasionally eating junk food link mac-n-cheese, and the amount of anything you would have in a box every week or two is not going to make a lick of difference to your endocrine system. Perhaps it's particularly bad for the poor who eat lots of cheap junk like Kraft products, but there are also far cheaper and healthier ways to get your nutrition – rice, beans, real butter, and actual cheese alone are much more cost effective than buying boxes of mac-n-cheese; just visit a Mexican market and you'll see what I mean.

Am I incorrect in assuming that any study not submitted for peer review is questionable at best and bad science at worst?

There's a fair number of case studies that aren't suitable for peer-review. But in those cases, just publish the data openly for analysis. This "study" didn't do that, and had a lot of other issues mentioned in the comments here.

So your intuition wasn't wrong here, but overall, you may be discarding a lot of relevant case study work due to over-reliance on the peer-review process.

I agree and I appreciate the nuanced tone of your answer.

I unfortunately submit stuff for peer-review and do case study work, so I know a lot about both sides of the garbage aisles. Lot of crap makes it through peer-review, and a lot of good work never does because of cronyism and single-blind review.

Misleading title. Should be "Chemicals in boxed mac and cheese". It's entirely possible (and way more delicious!) to make mac and cheese from scratch in a very little amount of time

Misleading summary. Should be "Chemicals in fatty foods that come in contact with plastics, particularly cheese, and especially cheese powder." As the article (eventually) notes:

Since they bind with fats, they tend to build up in fatty foods, including not just cheese but baked goods, infant formula, meats, oils and fats, and fast food, studies show.

So these chemicals are present in concentrations four times higher than in block cheeses (probably due to all the extra processing), but they aren't absent in real cheese (or other products).

It's not realistic to expect exhaustive detail in a headline.

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