Google Bans High Fat Sugar Salt Food and Beverage Targeting Minors in UK and EU | Hacker News Reader

Google Bans High Fat Sugar Salt Food and Beverage Targeting Minors in UK and EU

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1 pointrexbee6 comments

Yikes Google! Fat is not the enemy. In fact without healthy fats you can not trigger the release of bile. You need bile to break down many nutrients into something usable. Instead of banning all fats, ban the bad fats and require healthy fats. By all means kill off the sugar and high fructose corn syrup. Fat adapted people can produce all the glucose they require through gluconeogenesis [1]. Salt is also not the enemy provided it is offset with the correct balance of potassium and not consumed in excess and you don't have stage four renal failure.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis

I think the term "high" is key here, no?

It says "high fat, sugar, salt" not "all foods containing fat, sugar salt"

I think that depends. All the foods I have seen that are "high fat" are not high fat at all. If anything, we were sold the idea that foods should be "low fat" to be healthy but from the studying I have done in nutrition that was actually a mistake and possibly influenced heavily by the sugar industry. Another mistake we as a society have made was to allow meat snacks to be preserved with sugar rather than salt. Glycated meats or Advanced Glycation End Products a.k.a. AGEs or meats exposed to sugars are thought to play a causative role in the vascular complications of diabetes mellitus. AGEs can induce crosslinking of collagen, which can cause vascular stiffening and entrapment of low-density lipoprotein particles (LDL) in the artery walls.

In summary, I would not be so quick to ban "high fat" until we really understand what types of fats we are talking about, what amounts and what proteins they are accompanied with and if they are bound to sugars. I believe we want the easy path out of problems and over-generalize. I don't know if this is to satisfy various food lobbyists. Either way, fat is not the enemy. Glycated proteins and sugars can safely be kicked to the curb.

From what I'm aware, nutrition science isn't even close to settled. But I agree, that the types of fats are important to consider. Not a single company is documenting the different fatty acid compounds in their products for regulators or consumers to read from what I'm aware. Perhaps that could be a good first step

But yes, it is extremely complicated and there are numerous things that aren't being considered when its simplified down to just "high X foods"

For what its worth, if you find anyone claiming to have settled some aspect of science, be weary of them. That gets into the realm of scientism [1] vs science. Science by its very nature is never really settled. The best we can do is look at the positive and negative outcomes of things and make a best effort to do the better things and constantly try to improve. This is one of the reasons that such generalizations Google are likely being paid or coerced to enforce are extremely dangerous. They set a settled precedence and law is much slower to evolve than science. The infamous food pyramid exemplifies this dark pattern and is one of the reasons that a large number of people in first world countries have either metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes or full blown type 2 diabetes and upwards of 70% of them are unaware of this until it is too late. Here is some discussion of the CDC reports [2]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LTWJOi3bCo [video]

How about classical physics? For the most part we can use those models with a great degree of success. I would consider this sort of progress to be converging on "settled" whereas we do not have any real model that can be used to predict the outcomes of varying the chemical constituents of a diet, besides the thermodynamics of CICO.

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