Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

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> I looked up "plain hummus" and it has a score of 70? But the ingredient list shows almost zero additives.

Almost zero != zero. Your cited hummus with a score of 70 includes the additive "guar gum". Other hummus vendors with a score of 1 do not include that additive, so the simple numerical score succeeds in flagging the product for manual human review.

Washington Post (2022) article lists guar gum as an ultra-processed additive, https://archive.is/LG1V1

  Many ultra-processed foods are made in industrial machines that subject grains, corn and other raw ingredients to extremely high pressures and temperatures. This can destroy micronutrients and create new compounds that can be harmful, including carcinogens, said Carlos A. Monteiro, an expert on ultra-processed foods and a professor of nutrition and public health at the School of Public Health at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

  “These foods contain many chemical compounds that are not nutrients,” he added.

  Ultra-processed foods often contain an array of additives whose effects on our health we don’t yet fully understand, said Mozaffarian. “It’s not just the salt and sugar, which are the obvious ones, but the artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, emulsifiers, stabilizers, guar gum and xanthan gum,” he said. “We don’t know that they’re innocuous.”

So why should I be so concerned about my hummus having a little bit of guar gum in it?

It's an ultra-processed chemical with little to no nutritional value that's not listed as an ingredient in hummus recipes or included in competing products.

Maybe it's fine! Your personal level of concern may vary, but if it's anything but zero, then surely it's more worthy of concern than hummus without guar gum.

Ultra processed chemical. It's a bean that's roasted, crushed, and sieved. Coffee is also an ultra processed chemical under your definition. Once again really showing this idea that "ultra processed" seems to carry no real meaning, as once again pretty much any cooked food can be called "ultra processed".

Cooking routinely adds things for no nutritional benefit but because it changes the texture or taste to something better. Adding some cinnamon to oatmeal or a red pepper flakes to a pasta sauce isn't going to change the nutritional benefits by any large margin, but I do it because it helps me enjoy the food more. You don't necessarily add egg to cake mix for the nutritional benefit the egg provides you do it so its springier and has a better texture. One might add a little guar gum to hummus to make it thicker and have a slightly different mouth feel which some might prefer.

What exactly about guar gum is bad?

It's not my definition. I doubt coffee counts though.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28322183/

Also, I never meant to imply there were conclusive negative effects of guar gum. I don't know! I do know it's an entirely unnecessary ingredient in hummus, so why would you want something that unneeded? Glass beads are probably more inert, but I still wouldn't eat them if I had a choice.

> I do know it's an entirely unnecessary ingredient in hummus, so why would you want something that unneeded?

Hummus itself is entirely unnecessary for humans to consume. Why would I even consider eating it? Maybe because it tastes good and has a texture people enjoy? Maybe guar gum improves the texture to the food? I don't know, I'm not really a big fan of hummus, so I can't speak to whether or not guar gum makes it better or worse. But I imagine the people selling it determined people tend to enjoy the hummus with the guar gum more. They didn't just include it in there because they're an evil megacorporation out to control the world by adulterating hummus with guar gum, they put it in there because in the end they thought they'd sell more hummus.

If the yardstick of what we should eat is based entirely of if its "necessary", most things people generally consider fine wouldn't make the cut. Once again, its not necessary for me to put cinnamon in my oatmeal, should I stop doing that? Its not necessary for me to put red pepper flakes in my pasta sauce, should I stop doing that?

You can make a cake without egg in it, its not "necessary". It won't be the same as a cake with egg in it, but it can still be something sweet, kind of bready, and edible. But I'll continue to put egg in most of my cakes even though its not strictly "necessary" to make something edible.

From your article trying to define ultra-processed:

> The term “ultra-processed” was coined to refer to industrial formulations manufactured from substances derived from foods or synthesized from other organic sources. They typically contain little or no whole foods, are ready-to-consume or heat up, and are fatty, salty or sugary and depleted in dietary fibre, protein, various micronutrients and other bioactive compounds.

Isn't pre-roasted, pre-ground coffee beans made in a factory "industrial formulations manufactured from substances derived from foods"? They're not whole foods anymore, they're ready to consume or heat up, you're brewing it to get the fats out of it, depleted of the original fiber, doesn't have anywhere near the protein content of the original bean, and roasting destroys a lot of the original micronutrients of the original bean. Sure seems to me roasted ground coffee beans meet the definition of ultra-processed laid out by your source.

Unlike a printed dictionary constrained by physical paper, we now have digital publishing where every product, ingredient, additive and health consequence can have their own digital database definition.

Instead of debating abstract semantic categories like "processed" and using random items to support or negate specific claims, we can now aggregate data directly against digital identifiers for physical items.

GroceryDB is a research baby step that illustrates what can be done to augment consumer decision making. The processed-food industry can create their own ICantBelieveItsNotProcessedDB to annotate products and ingredients with the benefits of industrial processing. Over time, food consumers can make local purchasing choices after human review of available data on food chains and health consequences.

But at least in the case of guar gum in hummus it seems like it's picking and choosing what is a "processed food" rather arbitrarily. Would hummus with cocoa power be rated as high as hummus with guar gum? What makes pure coca powder different from guar gum? What makes pre-packaged hummus different from just always being considered a processed food?? Practically all commercially packaged hummus is created through an "industrial process". Isn't it then all highly processed?

It's applying an index to things without even really explaining why or what that index really means. What are the actual health impacts of hummus with guar gum versus hummus without it? It's ultimately telling us next to nothing other than highlighting some ingredients the maintainers don't like while ignoring ingredients they do like, seemingly very arbitrarily.

Does the index define roasted and ground coffee as a highly processed food? Why or why not?

> some ingredients the maintainers don't like

From the Washington Post article above, you can add these names:

  Kevin Hall, Scientist
  National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases

  Dariush Mozaffarian, Cardiologist
  Dean, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
  Tufts University

  Carlos A. Monteiro, Professor of Nutrition and Public health 
  School of Public Health 
  University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

This still tells me practically nothing and answers zero of my questions, which really are genuine. I never really get a good rubric for me to determine if a food is highly processed other than "these people decided it, so it is so". Which is what you're doing here. Guar gum is bad because these people said it's bad. Ok, but, like, why? How did they decide that specifically?

On the index, why is garlic powder a 37 while chili powder which contains rice concentrate (what is that?!) is a 1? Is garlic powder, which only lists garlic as an ingredient, 37x worse for me than chili powder? What I information am I actually gaining from this index? How is looking at this index informing me of making a healthy choice at all?

https://www.truefood.tech/product/wf_365-by-whole-foods-mark...

https://www.truefood.tech/product/wf_simply-organic-organic-...

Perhaps this is not the right index for you?

Please do share indexes and professional sources that you find genuinely useful.

If an index is being touted and it's garbage it is harmful. (I have not formed an opinion on the index being assessed).

The point being if it's extremely variable it /will/ be gamed and will work against you. The circular arrow symbol on plastics is a recent example where poor definition of what it meant has even led to consumers believing a symbol indicating non-recyclable means recyclable. A superior indicator for consumers that would get vastly less wrong is "plastic is not recyclable."

This or any index to provide information to consumers should be aggressively scrutinized. What it is today will not be what it becomes unless it can be defended, which requires thorough and widespread understanding.

> I have not formed an opinion on the index being assessed

If you do later form an opinion on this particular index, it may be more consequential to file a github issue against the index, rather than appending to a dormant HN thread.

I think the intent is relevant as well:

Hummus is a dish made from chickpeas, tahini, oil, and garlic. Guar beans aren't a typical ingredient, but they're processed into power and added to give the dish some additional characteristic.

Coffee is a dish made from coffee. Coffee beans are ground up and processed because they're an essential ingredient.

Nobody has a cherished family high-fructose corn syrup cookie recipe, ha!

Neither me nor the article are suggesting that all processed foods are inherently bad and should be avoided at all cost. Guar gum is probably safer than coffee. What we are saying is that diets higher in processed foods tend to correlate with worse health, and the WSJ article goes further to suggest causes. Hummus is a terrible example... better might be McDonalds burgers vs those from a farm stand, or lattes vs black coffee. But hummus made from raw ingredients is also probably better for you than one bought from the store filled with preservatives.

Your list leaves out chili powder from the original intent of hummus. It's something I'm adding from the base ingredient list to give it an additional charistic. If I add chili powder to the top of my hummus, is that not turning it into an ultra processed dish in the same way as guar gum?

Isn't chili powder highly processed in the same way guar gum powder is?

I'm not arguing guar gum is good in any way. For all I know it is massively worse for me than chili powder. Maybe it causes indigestion or irritates my gut. But why can't we use a label like that instead of just an ultra nebulous term of "ultra processed" where some people get to seemingly arbitrarily define what is and is not highly processed?

Where in any of those definitions listed does it suggest any idea of intent for if something is "highly processed"? If intent is what matters, is adding pineapple to pizza, something that should never be done, be considered the thing that makes it highly processed, or should pizza just always be considered highly processed from the start? After all, it's not whole foods, it's being subjected to high temperatures, contains highly processed foods like cheese, etc. Or is cheese somehow not highly processed either?

Hopefully a future LLM can illuminate semantic questions.

Totally not the point here, but after reading this, I'm going to start adding cinnamon to my oatmeal. Thanks

I can't speak for hummus, but I've noticed ice creams with guar gum, xantham gum, locust bean gum, and so on, have an almost foamy texture that is quite unnatural when compared to ice creams with minimally processed ingredients (i.e. cream, milk, eggs, sugar, etc.).

My guess is hummus would suffer similarly, but I'll wait for a connoisseur to confirm.

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