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> It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.

There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.

I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...

The documentary "Sugar Coated" goes into the history regarding the pro-sugar/anti-fat industry lobbying aspect. The bad science was not a mistake—it was deliberate strategy. The same kind of FUD that "Big Tobacco" participated in. Most people are aware of the later but not the former.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Coated

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esjTpaohQq4

The tobacco companies bought all the food companies in the 80s and 90s and figured out how to make food "hyper-palatable (addictive)," by combining sugar (HFCS), salt (sodium) and fat.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...

Did not know this. Looks like they were diversifying income. Looked it all up on wikipedia, and appears they've divested it again.

> The documentary "Sugar Coated" goes into the history regarding the pro-sugar/anti-fat industry lobbying aspect.

I strongly suggest you don't take the information from a documentary, which is focused on engaging story telling in order to make money, with a balanced and complete view of the situation.

Documentaries are a style of presentation that contain a directed, (usually) information-dense slice of a specific topic. It's an easy way to immediately engage in a topic in a manner that can present layman consumable information and establish context on potentially complicated subjects. It's one of many sources of information that should be supplemented with research based fact checking and information gathering.

There was no effort to dissuade further research yourself or to not engage with other mediums. I also don't believe they were supposing your only source of information should come from their casual suggestion. "I strongly suggest" you go ahead and link the research papers you've personally vetted like the poster above you trying to contribute to the discussion did that covers these topics indepth if you feel passionate about the lacking information.

You’ve invalidated all of journalism with a sweeping statement. Healthy skepticism (which everyone should have), is not this.

Documentaries are not journalism, they are entertainment.

Dumb overstatement. They are both and everything in between.

Not in the least.

Documentaries tell stories. They often leave out facts that run counter, rarely try and provide a balanced view and their intent is to make money.

The entire food pyramid is essentially propaganda from what I understand. Corn subsidies and mandatory corn-derived ethanol in gasoline created a surplus of corn, which led to fructose and high fructose corn syrup being added to everything.

I have no idea what the motive behind the food pyramid was, but high-fat foods being 2.25x calorie dense per gram compared to carbs, can lead to a surplus more easily compared to carbs. Just eating less sugar will not help if you are consuming too much fat .

I thought it was past tense, at this point? I'll try and look in my kid's school next chance I get, but I don't think anyone pushes the pyramid anymore.

There’s a new one. It has vertical stripes and used to be found at mypyramid.gov.

But they junked that in 2011 and replaced it with a trivial pursuit-looking thing called MyPlate. More details at choosemyplate.gov.

food marketing used to much more aggressively bash competitors' products. many of the companies funding the yo-yo "X is good/bad for you studies" are basically just stealthier versions of this, if you look at who is funding the studies.

the most prominent example of this is Heinz ketchup, where Heinz lobbied for the FDA and essentially got most of its competitors out of the market as a result; Heinz was the only major ketchup producer not using preservatives. https://archive.ph/1y8f5

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IIRC the major problem in food science is that most of the people willing to pay for food studies are food makers.

The issue was beef tallow for fries, which they hadn’t disclosed to the public, and so vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad. They could’ve solved the problem either by introducing an alternate or simple disclosure. But they were hardly “tricked.”

Beef tallow was standard practice for fryers, until it was mostly replaced with “vegetable oil”.

> vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad.

I think you’re referring to the vegetarian who sued Buffalo Wild Wings for still using beef tallow in their fryers, even after the restaurant industry had mostly switched to industrial seed oils.

https://www.drovers.com/news/vegetarians-lawsuit-over-beef-t...

No, this was much earlier. There was outcry over beef tallow in the 90s and then beef flavorings in the 00s. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/09/us/mcdonald-s-to-settle-s...

Part of the reputational risk at McDonald’s was that at the time they were heavily communicating that the standard items were standardized everywhere, so the revelation that US McDonalds used beef in fries did not go down particularly well in South Asia.

McDonald's was bullied into changing its fryer oil by Phil Sokolof [0], who himself was tricked into believing his 1966 heart attack was caused by saturated fat. This article says Sokolof paid for ads to bully McDonalds in 1988: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-22-op-1193-s...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Sokolof

I said McDonald's was 'tricked' in ~1990 into switching to vegetable oil. This was trickery both because the fries became less healthy (Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, etc), and less tasty. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast McDonald's Broke My Heart is about how the fryer oil switch made McDonald's fries soggy: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonald...

The 2002 article you linked to is about how vegetarians believed the switch to using seed oils as the fryer oil made McDonald's french fries compatible with their dietary philosophy. Those lawsuits were in the late 1990's or early 2000's, which was well after the 1990/1992 fryer oil switch.

Thanks for bringing up the early 2000's lawsuit against McDonald's by vegetarians - I was not aware of that. My point was that Ancel Keys' holy war against saturated Fat was an important part of the cascade of science-mistakes that resulted in the obesity epidemic which took off around 1980 (weight started inching up in the "post WWII" period, but didn't take off until ~1980).

The definition of "ultra-processed foods" is governed by NOVA and its results are very suspect. Take a look at this boneless, skinless chicken breast [1]. It's considered an Unprocessed or Minimally Processed Food. We know that there's no way chicken breasts just "fall off" chickens like this: animals are killed, skinned, cleaned, butchered, and then packaged to get this product. This firm tofu [2] on the other hand? It's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries. Among many other problems, there's a huge bias in the NOVA system for food that Western diets consider "primitive".

While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.

Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.

If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.

[1]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3266980891411/filet-...

[2]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/8410789140118/tofu-f...

I do not understand your quarrel with a chicken breast being unprocessed.

It is extracted, yes, but the actual thing that you eat has its original consistency, therefore is unprocessed.

Is it a perfect categorisation method? No, such does not exist. Is it immensely more useful than the other categorisation methods that we have, and does it correlate with negative health effects ? For sure.

The idea about ultra processed food cause overconsumption just because of their hyperpalatability is questionable and questioned, as ultra processed food contains a myriad of novel molecules that our digestive system has never encountered. A leading theory is that these molecules circumvent our satiation detection mechanisms, along with their hyperpalatability.

A better argument against chicken breast is that the commercial chickens have been selectively bred, fed, and treated with not-found-in-nature medicines to the point that they don't resemble a "natural" ingredient anymore. This would be in contrast to wild poultry like wild duck, goose, turkey, pheasant, squab, etc.

The same goes for vegetables and fruits. What we eat has nothing to do with what would you find in the nature.

Let's not go crazy here. There are wild apples, wild plums, wild grapes, and metric tonnes of wild raspberries growing on my property. They all taste more or less like the supermarket variety. The main difference is that they are noticeably smaller. The black raspberries in particular do taste much better though and are roughly the same size as store-bought. But saying that they have nothing to do with what's commercially available is a cheap shot.

Why would this be the case? What quantifiable difference is there in health outcomes between people who eat one or the other?

There are two kinds of food processing. One kind of food processing separates the edible or more desirable parts of the food from the inedible or less desirable parts of the food.

This kind of processing has been done industrially for thousands of years, e.g. with the production of meal or flour from seeds or the extraction of oil from oily fruits or oily seeds.

As long as care is taken to prevent changes in the parts of the food that are separated (e.g. by using cold pressing or sCO2 extraction instead of hot pressing for oil extraction), such processing methods cannot have any detrimental effects on food, but they can greatly reduce the costs needed for the storage and for the transport of food.

The second class of food processing methods mix various food ingredients and/or transform the food in various ways, by using heating, whipping etc.

When food processing methods of the second class are used industrially, as opposed to being performed at home by the end consumer, they almost always result in unhealthy food, because the interest of the food vendor of obtaining a maximum profit conflicts with the requirements that have to be observed in order to make a healthy food.

Terms like "highly-processed food" or "ultra-processed food" make sense only when applied to food processed with methods of the second class.

Chicken breast separated from bones and skin is not more processed than an apple separated from its tree.

> t's considered an Ultra-Processed Food of course, despite being a staple in East Asian countries that have much lower incidence of obesity than many Western countries.

"Ultra-Processed" and "causes obesity" are two massively different claims. If the claim is that said tofu is ultra-processed, obesity rates in countries where it is eaten are completely unrelated and do not work as argument.

Also, it is perfectly fine to define "non processed" group in a way that wont put every single meat into it. If you say that everything that requires killing or cleaning is ultra processed, then the whole term is meaningless.

Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity

why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.

Why do you think eating fats and oils causes obesity?

Maybe because they make your dinner so damn tasty you end up eating more than you should.

When I cook with lard, we all feel satisfied much sooner than usual. And it does taste better.

You can melt a tablespoon of butter and toss a bunch of vegetables in it, and it will taste delicious. But it only "cost" 100 extra calories, which is nothing. So go ahead and eat an extra serving of carrots, broccoli, green beans, lettuce, radishes, etc. You are extremely unlikely to get fat that way.

I find it quite strange that people think home-cooked meals have to be calorie-dense. It's food. Where you cook it doesn't matter. And if you have to keep your food from being delicious to control your portions... the problem isn't the food.

Guidance for most sedentary American adults (ages 31-50 [1]) is to consume 1800 kcal a day. 100 kcal is 5.5% of your daily caloric budget. You just consumed 5.5% of your daily caloric budget with that one extra tablespoon of butter.

[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-many-calories-a-day-s...

Right, like I said, it's nothing...

Assuming you have 3 meals a day, and assuming you have 600 kcals per meal, and assuming your nutritionist has prescribed a diet with a 50/20/30 carb/fat/protein ratio, and assuming one of those meals (dinner?) has 100 kcals from fat, that means 16% of the meal was fat. If you eat a lean protein (with a tiny amount of incidental fat) and carbs with that meal, that's actually the perfect amount of fat.

You can also mix up your meals so that, say, breakfast has very little fat, and dinner has more fat, or vice versa. It's all about balance.

>You can melt a tablespoon of butter and toss a bunch of vegetables in it, and it will taste delicious. But it only "cost" 100 extra calories, which is nothing. So go ahead and eat an extra serving of carrots, broccoli, green beans, lettuce, radishes, etc. You are extremely unlikely to get fat that way.

Yeah, but only anorectic are able to keep eating this long term. Until they get to hospital with all kinds of body damage.

I know a lot of vegetarians who don't end up in the hospital from eating too many veggies, but I guess they're the lucky ones...

They eat more then just vegetables with little bit of butter. It is possible to survive as vegetarian, just not from the meal you described.

Nuts, sugar, cheese, eggs, actually also fruits ...

Because Harvard sold out to big sugar back in the 60s.

You know what really helps suppress appetite?

Cigarettes.

You know what really started getting phased out in the 80’s?