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Comment by unyttigfjelltol | Hacker News Reader

The greater problem is normalization of unhealthy food across an entire supermarket. Then it becomes unavoidable and invisible to consumers.

My personal bugaboos are added sugar and generous use of weird preservatives. If your supermarket has 20 aisles, 16 of them are loaded with sugary sulfite-preserved stuff, removing choice and visibility to consumers. And breads fortified with folic acid.

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Re: preservatives, I remember watching a video a few years ago, where a woman decided that she didn't like all the preservatives in store-bought tortillas, so she was going to make them herself at home. It's a really simple thing to make, so why not?

They all went stale before the day was out. She compared the ingredients between what she had made and what came out of the box at the grocery store, and the ones that she didn't use? They were all preservatives.

Choose your battles wisely.

I will concede that the use of sweeteners in everything in the US is unhinged. It's hard to really understand until you've spent enough time out of the country to where you're buying groceries and looking at the ingredients. You come back to the states and everything tastes weirdly sweet. It was a real "fish don't know they're wet" moment for me, which mostly came about from marrying an Australian.

Is sodium content comparable?

This is fair, but I think overstated. It's possible to preserve a tortilla for a few days without exotic additives. I'm not even criticizing sodium, although that's not a lot better. And yes, preservatives are better than eating spoiled food.

The problem is when the whole supermarket is full of highly preserved food, then this is normalized and health consequences are obscured. The deeper issue is that for perhaps 80% of people this is fine and profitable, but for let's say 20% it introduces weird, hard to trace health problems, which don't appear to come from the supermarket because all the normal foods are like this.

I'm still upset that I picked up a set of those little fruit cup things advertising "no added sugar", only to be met by intensely bitter and gross flavor. Turns out they added monk fruit extract instead, as an artificial sweetener. To FRUIT. Fruit is naturally sweet!

Del Monte's No Sugar Added line of canned fruits often has Acesulfame Potassium and Sucralose in it. Similar no sugar added generic/house brands are similar.

https://www.delmonte.com/products/fruits/pears/sliced-pears-...

Flour fortification is one of the great public health successes of the 20th century, and I’m not aware of any data showing that folic acid is any more harmful than any of the other synthetic B vitamins added to our food. I’ve actively looked for such data, as someone with the fairly common genetic mutation affecting MTHFR, and frankly all I find is nonsense.

To expand on "great public health successes": folic acid supplementation is particularly important if you're pregnant, because it significantly reduces the odds of having a baby with neural tube defects like spina bifida (which is one of the milder NTDs, frankly). But it's also important even if you're not pregnant because B vitamin deficiencies will wreck your health.

This also reminded me of a great post from a few years ago about why salt is fortified with iodine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782954

Yes, the FDA has been emphatic that the folic acid supplementation program is a success and we would be fools to think anything else. The reality, as best I can tell, is more nuanced and for a minority of people it's possible to have too much of a good thing, particularly where 5-MTHF would be more beneficial.[1]

I don't hope to resolve the debate, only to point out it should be possible to eat bread that is not fortified with folic acid, if for no reason than I'm not in the high risk group targeted by the FDA and there are potential benefits from reducing folic acid intake in the context of robust intake of folate from other sources.

Or, even simpler: why can't I buy bread without folic acid?

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11930790/

I can buy unfortified bread at each of the grocery stores in my small town. I can also buy it at the local bakery and at the bread stand at our small farmers market.

It would not surprise me that there are some places in the US that only have easy access to packaged industrial sandwich bread. It would surprise me very much if that was the norm for Americans.

This is interesting to me, because I'm not aware of anywhere I can get unfortified flour. Even the artisan bread at the farmer's market is usually made of flour subject to FDA regulations.

Right, so I looked at that paper and its citations, and I am still not seeing any studies showing that folic acid supplementation causes problems beyond "can mask signs of B12 deficiency," which is not very compelling. I did see one paper saying "we thought excess maternal folic acid consumption might lead to asthma in children, but nope, it doesn't." To be clear, my bias is actually against folic acid supplementation: we should be using bioavailable folate, at the very least in prenatal vitamins. But I just don't see any data showing actual harm from folic acid.

Bread is fortified with folic acid because it turns out it is really important for brain development during pregnancy and it can be too late to take supplements if you wait until you find out that you are pregnant. This is a positive public health intervention.

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