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Comment by phonypc | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of hot pockets, but what exactly is the point here? That the list of ingredients is long?

Most of the list is regular food ingredients or vitamins/minerals added to the "enriched flour". The stabilizers and emulsifiers with scary chemical names are present in tiny amounts regulated by various health departments.

If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie; too much or too little of some nutrients. Not because of some magical consequence of being too processed or having too many ingredients.

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> If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie

Sorry to pick on you, but this confusion that a Hot Pocket is the same as a homemade meat pie is a great demonstration of the food corporations' capture of nutritional intuition and discourse.

The public has been convinced that there's nothing concerning about increasingly replacing, for example, a nutritious, real meat or cheese (milk, cultures, and rennet) with cheaper analogues that are so empty that modified food starch, emulsifiers, and textured soy have to be added to the product for no other purpose than to masquerade as the texture you expect of real ingredients.

You're eating a replica of food and you've been persuaded that the only difference is some "scary chemical names".

The food corporation has a new breakthrough, figures out how five more cheap ingredients can be used to create the texture of some chicken, and you have somehow told yourself that it's the ingredient count that people must be making a fuss over rather than what the growing list represents.

I'm not confused about hot pockets being the same as honest meat pies. Insofar as they're even in the same category, hot pockets are a pretty sad alternative.

My point was that their nutritional value rests on the same qualities as any other food. Overabundance or lack of certain nutrients. Say lack of fibre, or too much saturated fat.

Excepting certain unequivocally harmful ingredients like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (which could just as easily be added to homemade meat pies in the form of shortening), I don't think the number of ingredients or processing steps will materially affects the nutritional value of a food independent of its nutrient quantities.

I'm not going to engage with someone who didn't read the original article, nor is familiar with the domain. Sorry.

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