California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches | Hacker News Reader

California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches

gov.ca.gov

197 pointsKaibeezy270 comments

I'll be very interested to see the definition of "ultra-processed" in this legislation. I couldn't find one at a first glance - it seems to mandate that someone defines it, but doesn't contain a definition itself from what I could see.

Edit: Found it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (thanks to @crummy for the correction). Seems like a reasonable start. Amusing to see that alcoholic drinks are specifically not considered ultra-processed foods for the purposes of school meals!

> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic.

Wow.

Pretty sure it is NOT the definition of that law, but my own definition is: You make a meal only of basic ingredients. A basic ingredient is something that does not have an ingredient list on its packaging. I.e. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat and fish does not come with an ingredient list. There are some exceptions like dairy products (butter, yoghurt, cheese) which are okay to use.

This is based on Nova definition probably.

- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fresh or frozen products, yoghurts, etc)

- Processed culinary ingredients (oil, vinegar)

- Processed foods (foods created from combining elements of the first 2 groups using typical cooking processes, like bread, pasta, some meats, canned vegetables)

- Ultra-processed foods (foods requiring industrial processing).

What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?

Flour is processed from grains

> What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?

Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.

Is flour considered food at all? It sounds more like an ingredient than a food.

> sounds more like an ingredient than a food

Nova doesn’t distinguish between ingredients and food [1]. (It needs to be able to do this. UPFs are defined, in part, by almost lacking low-Nova inputs.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

You can eat it and survive.

Cooking it first is a big improvement, but the same is true of carrots, IMO.

AFAIK, whole-wheat flour is considered minimally processed. Of course bread is not equal, so it was more about home-made/sourdough types, not high-processed, shelf-stable ones.

Flour, presumably.

Bread is a bit of an exception here, as it undergoes extensive mechanical (milling), biochemical (fermentation) and thermal (baking) processing. Yet it does not count as ultra-processed.

Bread is made from dough, which is mainly made from flour (the "minimally processed" food), which is made from grains (the unprocessed food)

It definitely stood out as a bit of a confounding example. That combined with the emotive language used in the classification names makes me a bit wary of this way of classifying food.

I imagine it’s got more to do with ingredients than processing. Local restaurants might make fresh bread with a bleached flour product that has various dough conditioning agents added to it, while puffed rice absolutely requires an industrial process to create and has one ingredient.

> puffed rice absolutely requires an industrial process

“Traditional methods to puff or pop rice include frying in oil or salt. Commercial puffed rice is usually made by heating rice kernels under high pressure in the presence of steam, though the method of manufacture varies widely” [1].

If I had to guess, the commercial stuff is more thoroughly and homogeneously gelatinized. That, in turn, probably raises its glycemic index.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffed_rice

The texture is completely different. The industrial method involves heating it under very high pressure with steam and releasing the pressure extremely quickly. The closest non-industrial analog is a Chinese popcorn cannon… but it’s much more controlled. It incorporates much more air into the final product without imparting any flavor from the heat source.

So processedness is a proxy for healthiness. But raw sugar and guacamole would both count as processed.

> raw sugar and guacamole would both count as processed

No. Processed culinary ingredient (Group 2) and minimally processed (Group 1). (Obviously, both can be turned into a UPF through fuckery.)

Guacamole would count as Group 3 I believe. You use Group 1 and Group 2 ingredients to create it unless you're just grinding up avocados, in which case that's not a guacamole. If you really want to get interesting, you could even say homemade guacamole uses citric acid (from limes) to extend shelf life and enhance the flavor, which is on top of the sodium chloride (salt) that you use to do the same.

TIL the No True Scotsman fallacy can be used by guac snobs! :)

I mean... different dishes have different names. Mashed avocados would probably just be called mashed avocados. Guacamole has many many regional versions, but I do think salt would be considered an essential ingredient in most of them. Salt would be a Group 2 ingredient. Nova calls out adding salt or sugar to Group 1 makes it Group 3, and specifically calls out Group 1 does not contain added salt.

"Minimally processed foods, that together with unprocessed foods make up NOVA group 1, are unprocessed foods altered by industrial processes such as removal of inedible or unwanted parts, drying, crushing, grinding, fractioning, roasting, boiling, pasteurization, refrigeration, freezing, placing in containers, vacuum packaging or non-alcoholic fermentation. None of these processes add salt, sugar, oils or fats, or other food substances to the original food." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/

> Guacamole would count as Group 3 I believe

Too minimally processed-I’d say it’s Group 1. You’re taking Group 1 ingredients (avocado, jalapeño, lime, onion, maybe tomato and cilantro) and chopping, squeezing and pounding them. It can entirely be done with stone tools.

Can be done with just your hand.

Salt is Group 2, isn't it? (Salt is present unless you make a low sodium guacamole or it's a recipe I've never seen)

Salt is the Group 2 ingredient that I was mentioning. Nova calls out adding salt or sugar to Group 1 makes it Group 3, and specifically calls out Group 1 does not contain added salt.

nestle downvoted you

whelp, nestle is on me, you will not believe guyz how many upvotes and downvotes i get on this one

> basic ingredient is something that does not have an ingredient list on its packaging

These are unprocessed foods [1].

From them you get processed culinary ingredients, like olive oil, vinegar, honey and butter. As long as you’re minimally vigilant with these, you should be fine, though some production methods may still add preservatives or use solvents in their manufacture.

After that one has processed foods, which may still have a good amount of Group 1 and 2 ingredients, before we get to Group 4, UPFs, what California is banning in school lunches.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

Thanks for that Link to the Nova classification. TIL there is even a database that lets you lookup the Nova level: openfoodfacts.org

That's not true. The law does not define UPF as Nova Group 4 foods.

Much "olive oil" out there is actually ultra processed. Not real extra virgin olive oil, but the cheaper more common olive oil including fake evoo can be either cut with soybean oil or is refined processed olive oil following the same process used in making refined soybean oil.

Sounds like you're defining processed food, whereas this is about ultra processed food.

For me, processed food might include something like unsweetened peanut butter where while the only ingredient is peanuts, it's still been through a process of grinding so that it's no longer in its natural form.

At the other end of the spectrum an example of ultra processed food would be a factory packaged item with a long list of ingredients which includes ones you don't recognise e.g. chemical names or E numbers.

The peanuts might be roasted, too. Roasting is a process.

Look into the process involved in making soybean or canola or sunflower oil. One named ingredient that sounds natural but is itself ultra processed and not real food.

Biscuits and crisps are generally considered to be ultra processed foods, despite containing only basic ingredients.

> Biscuits and crisps are generally considered to be ultra processed foods, despite containing only basic ingredients

Depends on if they’re ultra processed or not.

If they won’t stale for weeks, they’re ultra processed with preservatives and/or solvents. If they go stale and have a simple ingredients list, they probably aren’t.

(And kids don’t need to be habituated to having either with every lunch.)

Salt is a preservative, vinegar is a solvent. Individually or combined they can prevent spoilage indefinitely.

So no, it’s a lot more arbitrary than that.

> Salt is a preservative, vinegar is a solvent.

Sure. But they’re commonly in kitchens and simply produced, making their status as Group 1 and 2 Nova foods unambiguous.

Well that is because there's two very different things, both called "cookies".

When a grandma bakes some cookies for their grandchildren she uses only some basic ingredients - eggs, flour, butter, sugar.

For the product that food industries calls as cookies however, the list of ingredients looks like a git SHA.

Man, you're missing a bunch of ingredients to actually make tasty cookies. Definitely need some salt. She's probably also using vanilla extract or purchased chocolate chips (or chunks) or cinnamon. Plus the leavening agent, so baking powder (or baking soda and another acid). That's all just for the basic cookies, there's so many options out there using stuff like malted chocolate powder, and that's ignoring making palatable gluten-free cookies.

It was just an example of the kinds of ingredients, not a complete list. Granma is not going to add Potassium bromate, for example.

Yeah, but the point is adding salt raises the "Classification" to processed. Using store bought chocolate chips raises it to ultra processed because it contains ultra processed ingredients.

Is there any evidence that those are any healthier? If I'm going to overeat the same amount of calories eating store-bought cookies or grandma-made cookies - is my health outcome any different?

Absolutely. calories dont tell you much.

So what's the evidence? I couldn't find anything. What do they not tell? I assume that macros in homemade and bought cookies are roughly the same.

Depends on where you are. There's food additives that are used in the US that are forbidden in Europe [1]

> The E.U. says that if they can’t dismiss the possibility of harm, they can’t find an additive safe,” Galligan says. In the U.S., the bar is much lower; companies can add new ingredients to their foods without even informing the FDA. “In the U.S., it feels like the FDA is waiting to act until harm is definitely proven,” says Galligan.

[1] https://time.com/7210717/food-additives-us-fda-banned-europe...

Yes.

Look into the process used to make soybean oil vs the process used to make butter.

I'm not sure how is that relevant. My guess would be that saturated fat in butter is worse for health outcome.

We're talking about what makes ultra processed foods unhealthy - the process used to make each ingredient is exactly what is relevant.

Soybean or canola oil is not a basic ingredient.

that would preclude basic ingredients like salt with anti-caking agents or spice blends. Seems kinda silly and arbitrary.

thanks for the tip. The text is not on that page, but here's a link to it if anyone else is curious:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Duh, thanks - forgot I'd found that on the page with the actual bill!

> 104661. (a) (1) For purposes of this article, except as provided in subdivision (b), “ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).

> (3) (A) High amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as defined respectively as follows:

> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat

I feel like the saturated fat limit would be the most impactful restrictions.

However right after it's entirely opened up again:

> (b) “Ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” does not include any of the following:

> (1) Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.

> (2) A raw agricultural commodity as defined in Section 110020.

> (3) An unprocessed locally grown or locally raised agricultural product as defined in paragraph

Avocado calories are pretty close to 10% saturated fat, as an example.

Excess sugar and simple starches tend to get absorbed more completely than excess fat, I'm not sure added fat is the biggest issue.

Look into the keto diet. Fat is definitely not the main issue, sugar and other simple carbs are.

Your conclusion presupposes we buy into the "keto diet is healthy" proposition.

However, there is a preponderance of real data that fats have been demonized by the sugar industry in the past, and HGI foods (high-carb, generally) are a bigger issue.

Yeah, this reads like popular health guidance left over from the 1980's. Back then we though that "fat makes you fat" and shifted to sweeteners to make food taste good. Later, we found out that was all due to the sugar industry.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

Indeed, lots of anti-fat researched was sponsored by sugary drink companies.

But the jury is still against too much saturated fat, since the lymphatic system doesn't handle it in the healthiest of ways. So limiting saturated fats is still the WHO recommendation.

Avocados are excluded by the points further down, they're raw/unprocessed.

I was responding to the other poster saying that the rules were entirely opened up by the exceptions. Other than meat, it's a freak ingredient like avocado or maybe some nuts that has that much fat.

so is that

“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3)).

“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3)), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).

“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2)) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).

> (3) Not more than 35 percent of its total weight shall be composed of sugar, including naturally occurring and added sugar. This paragraph shall not apply to fruits, vegetables that have not been deep fried, or a dried fruit and nut and seed combination.

wonder who'll be the first to argue that HFCS isn't sugar.

Take your pick, could be either one of: Coca Cola, PepsiCo, Red Bull, Ferrero, Kellogg, Kraft Heinz just to name a few.

That aside, I think the law is a great step in the right direction for the US.

Hopefully it can be expanded across the US.

Unless HCFS is magically not composed of sucrose/fructose, which are sugars, what arguments can they raise?

I don’t think kids should be having boutique, hand-crafted “bean to bar” chocolate in their school lunches, but I also don’t think most Californians have products like that in mind when they think of “Ultra-Processed Foods”.

Also as quoted elsewhere: Deep frying is ultra-processing?

Yeah the whole "ultra processed food" angle is meaningless. Just call it junk food.

If the thing that is bad for us is the processing and preservatives then we can pursue that... but if you want to count things like potato chips then we need to be honest about what the label actually means. The UPF label adds a veneer of scientific precision that isn't actually present in any guidelines surrounding it.

The problem with potato chips is not potatoes and may not even be the fact that the potatoes are fried. It's that they are fried in toxic ultra processed industrial oil which makes up 50-60% of the calories (more than the actual potato).

"If only we fried potatoes in olive oil or beef tallow they'd be healthy" is not something I would expect most nutritionists would say is supported by the research.

The seed oil panic is even more ridiculous than the UPF panic.

I'm open to being wrong but if it's not the oil or the frying, what is it that makes potato chips junk food?

Woah woah woah.

Potato chips are junk food. The important thing is that they aren't ultra-processed in a meaningful sense. What people want to mean when they say "ultra-processed" is actually "junk food." This is why people end up bending over backwards to find a reason to label ice cream and potato chips as "ultra-processed" so it can be a cure-all solution when reality isn't so simple.

I agree with you there, that the healthiness of different foods is complex and a binary category of "ultra processed" is not sufficient for understanding it.

In the case of potato chips though, I specifically disagree that they aren't ultra processed - look into the process for creating soybean or canola oil and try to explain how that isn't "ultra processed".

further thinking along these lines:

Consider a boiled potato. That would generally be considered healthy.

Now add butter to it. Those who think saturated fat is unhealthy would say it's unhealthy, I'd say it's healthy - though sure, fat generally has more calories per micronutrients so you also need to get your micronutrients somewhere, like by eating lots of greens too. And with caveat that butter from conventional cows can have issues like the hormones or medications but I haven't dug deep into that. And there are people who have sensitivity to dairy, etc. But for a normal healthy person, adding lard, or butter, or real unrefined coconut oil, or real unrefined olive oil to one's potato while increasing the calories doesn't itself make it junk food or unhealthy.

Frying it could be an issue, proportional probably to the amount and intensity of frying, though I'd argue much more so in cases where the frying oil is reused, as reused frying oil is going to be much more oxidized and thus cause more oxidative stress / free radicals in the body which are understood to be a big cause of metabolic / mitochondrial damage which lead to diseases like diabetes.

And there's one of the nuances - different fats are more or less easy to oxidize. Specifically, saturated fats are the hardest to oxidize, omega 3s are a little easier to oxidize, and omega 6 (polyunsaturated fats / PUFAs) are much easier to oxidize. You can verify this by looking into the chemistry a bit. That's one of the key mechanisms of action as I understand it.

Still, deep frying in tallow that has been reused for a week is still going to be really bad because tallow does still oxidize, just much less readily than PUFAs.

Refined PUFAs are heated several times during the processing, which causes oxidation. Not to mention antioxidants are removed by the process, and also the PUFAs themselves are more prone to oxidize in the first place.

So to recap: 1. boiled potato = fine 2. boiled potato with added butter = more calories per micronutrient, but still real food and no particularly bad thing in it 3. potato pan fried in [butter, lard, tallow, coconut oil] = more oxidative stress than above, but still probably not terrible considering pan frying food is very normal. 4. potato deep fried in [butter, lard, tallow, coconut oil] that has been used repeatedly = significantly more oxidative stress, would not recommend, maybe I'd call it junk food 5. potato deep fried in [soybean oil, canola oil, etc] = significantly more oxidative stress again than #4

This does not yet get into the other potential issues with refined oils: - hexane residue (people eat average of 25 to 250mg per year of hexane in the US in refined oils) - may not matter at all but still something weird about the food. - other chemical residues from the other processes

This is all seed oil panic not based in real science. Olive oil has less omega 3s than canola oil. Omega 3 vs Omega 6 ratio is not a "key mechanism of action" supported by coherent science. It is instead crank stuff extrapolated wildly from research. Frying potato chips in butter won't make them healtheir.

People do studies on hexane residue in canola oil. We don't find it in our bodies. "This sounds weird to me" is indeed how a lot of this panic works. Vibes.

So do you think the whole understanding of oxidative stress, antioxidants, etc is all crank panic vibes? I thought that that was pretty widely accepted. I realize that the idea that some oils oxidize easier than others and have less antioxidants and thus might cause more oxidative stress is often ignored or dismissed outright without being looked at.

And, what is it then that makes potato chips junk food compared to a baked potato with butter? The potato? The oil? The salt? The frying? The fact that the oil was fried in many times over and not fresh? A combination of these - but which specifically?

I think the extrapolation to "canola oil is poison" is the crank bit.

Ok. I wouldn't necessarily call it poison, but would say it's qualitatively a new kind of food that was never eaten until the last ~150 years and is a likely contributor to chronic disease.

You called potato chips junk food but seem unwilling to say what about them makes them junk food, compared to, for example, a boiled potato.

I assume junk food means unhealthy and a likely contributor to chronic disease.

So no pasta carbonara or Jam

I'm OK with kids not being fed a pile of jam.

If it's spread on bread, the jellied bread is the food. (As that still is probably mostly carbs, it's still not a good lunch item for kids.)

Ha!

Brilliant sleight of hand by the processed food industry.

Of the fats one can eat, saturated fat is generally the least processed and most natural.

Humanity has eaten saturated fat for ever. Refined/processed oils are a completely new thing that has become a staple of the modern industrial diet. Under this law kids will be made to eat more of the ultra processed literally refined oils and less natural fat.

When I try to open the link I get

"NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack

from [...] to http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov."

> Stabilizers and thickeners, as defined in Section 170.3(o)(28) of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

...

> “Stabilizers and thickeners: Substances used to produce viscous solutions or dispersions, to impart body, improve consistency, or stabilize emulsions, including suspending and bodying agents, setting agents, jellying agents, and bulking agents, etc.”

So ... flour? Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?

Sub-division b point 1 excludes:

> Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Which I'd guess includes flour.

Unlikely. Commodity food made available by the USDA is directly sold or distributed by the USDA [1].

[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-pr...

Oh, ok, that doesn't mean at all what I thought it meant, sorry! (British, I just assumed 'commodity food supplied by agriculture' would be all cereals etc., possibly nationally grown only, but you know, commodities.)

So is the same item counted as UPF when the USDA supplies it but not otherwise, or does it mean the USDA supplying it grant the category of item non-UFP status.

Does this count if they supply it from a vending machine on their premises :-)

> So ... flour?

If used as a thickener, perhaps.

> Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?

This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se, but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.

> I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.

I would gander you have little to no experience in the kitchen. Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup? Do you eat soup?

> gander you have little to no experience in the kitchen

Keep ganderin’.

> Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup?

None of these need to be thickened with xantham gum…

Depending on the consistency you're going for, many are way better with it than other thickers. It's natural, and has a much lower impact on your blood glucose than flour. It's good stuff. Everyone should have it in their kitchen.

Cooking is vast. Being hung up on a very specific ingredient is really weird if you ask me.

Heaven forbid anyone should be weird...

I cook all of these on a regular basis, and have done so for 15 years, and I’ve never had Xanthan gum in my house. I wouldn’t even know where to find it in my grocery store.

Xantham gum is used quite often for gluten-free foods. It can really help make a usable gluten-free loaf of bread and sauces as well. It's purchaseable at plenty of grocery stores and is sometimes included in flours, it's been a boon for those living gluten free.

> Xantham gum is used quite often for gluten-free foods

I think one could make xantham gum as a processed culinary ingredient (Nova group 2) ingredient, so long as it isn’t packaged with preservatives.

I was more commenting on the uses of xanthum gum to be helpful, but reading through the Nova classifications... They seem problematic in the exact way you're describing here and are at best a proxy for nutrition that can be manipulated, using words like "simple food products" and "rare culinary use" is ripe for interpretation.

The bill itself calls out using USDA databases for various ingredients and various sections of federal regulations, so I can't comment too much about how they'd feel about xanthum gum without diving deep. Not to go off on a tangent, but just from the bill's text, I can say for sure they don't like nonnutritive sweeteners, which I think really hurts diabetics choices at reducing their reliance on insulin while still enjoying nice treats. Although not too important for a school meal, it's definitely part of the ultra processed conversation and why it's not a simple thing to categorize food into groups.

> The bill itself calls out using USDA databases for various ingredients and various sections of federal regulations, so I can't comment too much about how they'd feel about xanthum gum without diving deep.

For reference: xanthan gum specifically would fall afoul of the rules, as... a (ii) stabilizer or thickener, (iv) coloring or coloring adjunct, and (v) emulsifier.

https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...

It's quite silly that it's classified as a coloring agent and an emulsifier, when it's neither of those things.

For various reasons, I believe the CFR defines flour as a food, not a food additive, but it may have additives that qualify. (I can't find any text that explicitly states that foods are not food additives, but either way, no form of wheat flour is listed in the Substances Added to Food database.)

Common culprits include chemicals added during the bleaching process and addition of "enzyme" / other ingredients that help improve baking consistency. Some examples:

https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...

Seems like a typical blanket baseless unscientific attack of everything deemed "unnatural". Lots of the typical insane stuff, sugar is okay, but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not. Spices are okay, but MSG is not. Just a laundrylist of the typical alternative medicine mumbo jumbo. Kind of pathetic, but not unexpected from the state legislature

I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol

I think it points to a failure of the scientific community to identify better criteria.

There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics.

Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".

I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay.

The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents.

There are just three lines that actually address nutrition:

(i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.

(ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1.

(iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars.

Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.

> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.

Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated

> I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.

I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.

As I wrote elsewhere:

If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases.

We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way. Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?

The evidence actually suggests that soft drink consumption is equally associated with higher all-cause mortality and artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened. Even when controlling for smoking status, BMI, physical activity, and alcohol consumption.

https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.)

And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.

You have to be very specific in the intervention you’re either looking at in an RCT or modelling in a prospective cohort study. We wouldn’t expect adding NNSs to a diet to improve much (perhaps some benefit from carbonated ones on body mass). We need to investigate/model replacement of SSBs with NNSs.

When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that goes over that evidence base: https://mailchi.mp/b30c80ddf8ba/who-as

Yes, replacement can work to adjust weight trends in a controlled setting.

But all empirical observations so far show that artificial sweeteners in people's diets do not have the desired effect when people's food and beverage intake is uncontrolled.

In fact results from animal studies are that you can even substitute part of the feed with just the artificial sweetener to achieve the same body mass gain. And this is known since 1960s with Cyclamate and rats: https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

More studies in the meantime varied a bit on the size of the effect, and some were inconclusive, but generally the results held up.

So no, artificial sweeteners do not help to manage weight. What the studies actually show is that controlling people's intake does.

Let me get this straight: your epistemic framework is such that when presented with RCTs in humans showing positive effects, observational studies in humans showing null findings (likely because of poor adjustment models) and negative associations in rats, we should conclude “artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened”?

No. What I say is if we introduce a public health policy, then we need to take human behavior and adherence rates into account.

Example: Abstinence is 100% effective against STDs and teenage pregnancy in any controlled setting. That does not make it a good public health policy to tell teenagers to abstain from having sex. In fact despite condoms having lower efficacy than abstinence, teaching people the proper use of condoms is overall more effective.

If we want to solve obesity then randomly adding/substituting artificial sweeteners to human food will not work. Instead we need to reduce access to hyperpalatable foods, which can be done through economic means (e.g. taxes).

Ok, so if I understand correctly, your argument is: in order for you to support a public health intervention we need to see evidence that such an intervention results in positive outcomes in a free living population with ad libitum consumption, regardless of the evidence in controlled settings.

So what’s the evidence that banning artificial sweeteners leads to positive outcomes in a free living population, considering you said: “I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners”?

> So what’s the evidence that banning artificial sweeteners leads to positive outcomes in a free living population, considering you said: “I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners”?

It depends on the context. In the context of school lunches (which is discussed here) they absolutely need to be banned, same as added sugars. Giving children (sugar or artificially) sweetened meals trains children's palates and shapes lifelong preferences for sweet foods.

Ok, so we already have your standard: in order for you to support a public health intervention we need to see evidence that such an intervention results in positive outcomes in a free living population with ad libitum consumption, regardless of the evidence in controlled settings.

We have your proposed intervention: “In the context of school lunches (which is discussed here) [NNS] absolutely need to be banned, same as added sugars.”

So now we need evidence supporting this intervention sufficient to meet your own goalposts. Do you have it?

> Ok, so we already have your standard

Who is "we"?

I don't know what you are going on about. Empirical evidence is one thing, mechanism is another source of knowledge by which we can shape public health policy. While empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained, mechanism is universal.

For example, we mandate wearing seatbelts in cars in the name of public health. It is however not necessary to do seatbelt on/off RCTs with actual people. How we know that this is beneficial: Because physics, verification through crash tests (with dummies), and because we know that seatbelt mandates increase the frequency of people wearing them.

Going back to the original question, it was clearly shown in observational studies that giving children sweetened food is bad: Childhood dietary habits shape lifelong food preferences, and preference for sweet food leads to worse outcomes regarding chronic diseases later in life. This has been shown in lots of research, both in humans and in animal models:

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adn5421

https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16030428

https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjr050

With randomly adding or substituting sugar with artificial sweeteners there is however no empirical evidence nor known mechanism which supports a public health benefit. In fact the mechanisms we know from animal farming suggest a detrimental effect.

> Who is "we"?

Me and anyone else reading this.

> While empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained, mechanism is universal.

Mechanisms are inferred from empirical evidence, I don't see how you can treat them as two separate categories. For example, in your crash test dummy analogy, verification through crash tests (with dummies) is empirical evidence. Yet under your framework, should we assume that it is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained - only for dummies, not people; in cars pushed towards walls in controlled situations, rather than on public roads?

If you name proxy experiments that support your views (crash tests) as mechanisms and ones that don't (SSB replacement with NNS RCTs) as "empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained" then sure, everything you want to believe is supported by sound science and everything you don't isn't. But the view itself seems to contain a logical contradiction, so you're dead before you've even got off the ground.

I would understand mechanistic evidence in the domain of health science to be in vitro and animal studies. Even if we were to grant that mechanism is universal in this field (which I wouldn't, we frequently see heterogenous results even within the same exposures on the same mouse models, for example), there are thousands of mechanisms that come together to influence the outcomes we actually care about. This is why when we look at translation rates of mechanisms to outcomes in humans we typically see rates below 5% (and is also why pharmaceuticals that work perfectly in animal models barely ever make it to market in humans).

Going back to the evidence you've cited in support of your intervention - the first two (the only ones in humans) are neither looking at NNSs nor an intervention on banning them. So it doesn't meet your own goalpost for "if we introduce a public health policy, then we need to take human behavior and adherence rates into account". In the rationing example, you have an entirely different context - one in which people literally cannot purchase large amounts of sugar. This would not be the case if we were to ban NNS today.

Your third study was in mice which, as discussed, has an incredibly low chance of actually translating into human outcomes. I don’t find “we have evidence in RCTs that NNSs are beneficial but there’s this mouse study that says otherwise so let’s ban them” a convincing argument.

So again, any actual evidence in support of your proposed intervention? How do we know, for example, that banning NNSs won't just lead to higher sugar consumption and adverse outcomes, since we know from RCTs that substituting SSBs for NNSs improves health outcomes? If all those consuming your banned substance now switch to SSBs instead of their NNSs, congratulations, you've just worsened health outcomes.

> Me and anyone else reading this.

In that case, no "we" don't, because I am reading this and I do not agree with this "standard" nor your characterization of what I wrote.

> Mechanisms are inferred from empirical evidence, I don't see how you can treat them as two separate categories. For example, in your crash test dummy analogy, verification through crash tests (with dummies) is empirical evidence.

This is not how it works. Crash tests are used for validation, but the data from crash tests is generally not used to infer mechanism. Physicists don't come up with a new theory of mechanics every time a crash test has an unexpected outcome.

> If you name proxy experiments that support your views (crash tests) as mechanisms and ones that don't (SSB replacement with NNS RCTs) as "empirical evidence is valid only for the situation in which it was obtained" then sure, everything you want to believe is supported by sound science and everything you don't isn't.

I don't think you understand. If you want to support a public health intervention you either have the empirical data with a relevant endpoint,

or you can point to mechanism which bridges the part between the data that you have and the outcome which you want to achieve.

When it comes to pharmaceutics and food additives, our mechanistic understanding is insufficient so we often have to resort to empirical studies on humans, including RCTs (Pfizer's Covid vaccine trial had tens of thousands of participants) and also observational studies at population level. And it is the last part where artificial sweeteners fail to show benefit so far.

When it comes to seat belts, our mechanistic understanding is sufficient so we don't need to resort to empirism. Yes we perform validation but only to check if there are no design oversights in the vehicle nor shortcomings with the simulation software, typically in a low triple-digit number of crash tests. But no humans involved and especially no control arm with humans.

(Well if you ignore the one study on the efficacy of parachutes which was done as RCT https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k5094 )

> So it doesn't meet your own goalpost

It does, because again, mechanism is provided. You could say that the study has weak evidence for the mechanism and it works like that perhaps only for sugar. Because that some mechanism is found in mice does not mean it is also found in humans, and it would be a fair point. This is why many species are tested and so far the results held up (testing humans takes too long for obvious reasons).

Sorry, I summarised what I thought was your goalpost earlier in the exact same words and you didn’t correct me, so I made the assumption in subsequent replies. I’m not interested in straw manning your argument, just trying to understand.

I’m going to pass on the crash test dummies bit. You’ve misunderstood the point I was making, but it could be poor communication by me and I think the point is becoming increasingly tangential.

> When it comes to pharmaceutics and food additives, our mechanistic understanding is insufficient so we often have to resort to empirical studies on humans, including RCTs

> It does, because again, mechanism is provided. You could say that the study has weak evidence for the mechanism and it works like that perhaps only for sugar. Because that some mechanism is found in mice does not mean it is also found in humans, and it would be a fair point. This is why many species are tested and so far the results held up (testing humans takes too long for obvious reasons).

So you don’t feel you’re being straw manned again, can I get a clear answer to this: is your argument that if we stack together sufficient numbers of mechanistic animal studies we can be sufficiently confident enough in the translation rate of such studies to humans that we can roll out public health interventions without any evidence of efficacy in human populations?

The fact that you want to ban everything under the umbrella term of "artificial sweeteners" is why I think you have a fundamentally unscientific approach. Your other responses seem to suggest you just have something against sweet things (even when you seem to acknowledge there are other factors at play like acidity and tooth decay)

I'm saying this as someone who rarely consumes these things..

> Just look at why they are used in animal farming

I don't know anything about the science behind that - so I'm not in a position to judge. Did they try every possible "artificial sweeteners"? How about if there is another one discovered next year? Is it going to be pre-banned even if it doesn't have these drawbacks?

These aren't like the same substance tweaked a bit where you're in a endless ratrace with the chemists.

> Your other responses seem to suggest you just have something against sweet things (even when you seem to acknowledge there are other factors at play like acidity and tooth decay)

We are talking about school lunches here. Sweet meals are bad (whether sugar or artificially sweetened) as it trains children's palate and shapes lifelong preference for sweet food. Hence I support banning artificial sweeteners as California plans to do.

When it comes to sweetened drinks, switching from sugary to artificially sweetened is not empirically shown as beneficial. This is the hurdle that proponents of public health interventions to replace sugar with aritificial sweeteners need to overcome.

> Did they try every possible "artificial sweeteners"?

The study which I linked in another reply looked at various commercially available artificial sweeteners and some combinations. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14203032

This is necessary because not every species' taste receptors respond to every type of sweetener, e.g. rats do not respond to NHDC.

> These aren't like the same substance tweaked a bit where you're in a endless ratrace with the chemists.

Well it depends on who has the burden of proof that a certain food additive is safe and does not cause undesired long term effects, especially in children.

I went on a trip to South Korea recently. There are very few overweight people there. But the food that people eat doesn't seem healthy at all.

- every meal is served with white rice ("empty calories")

- every meal is served with Kimchi (high sodium)

- most dishes are flavored with soy sauce, gochutan, rice syrup... they are extremely high in sodium + msg

- people love fried chicken with syrupy sauces

- korean barbeque is popular, with very fatty cuts (pork belly etc.)

Pretty much all of those foods would be considered unhealthy, but somehow Koreans don't seem to suffer from obesity like US + Europe do, I have no idea why.

It’s actually pretty simple. Despite what you’re calling unhealthy foods (I’d argue kimchi has health benefits from the fermentation), they have a lower overall caloric intake and societal pressure to conform to a thin appearance. If you want to be skinny eat less calories. If you want to be healthy, eat highly nutritious foods and the right amount of calories for your lifestyle.

I am not sure there is a strong societal pressure to be thin. Last several years, sure. But older generations, nor so much (see deities in any buddist temple). And there was enough time after food became abundant for the older generations health to tank if that diet was very bad for them. My 2c.

I am not sure there is a strong societal pressure to be thin. Last several years, probably. But older generations, nor so much (see deities in any buddist temple). And there was enough time after food became abundant for the older generations health to tank if that diet was very bad for them. My 2c.

I don't think a large proportion of thin people are thin because of societal pressure. And conversely I don't think societal pressure makes many people thin, because I hear so much complaints about body shaming and unrealistic beauty expectations and discrimination against obesity etc, so it clearly isn't working any miracles.

I think most people who are thin just have a food intake regulation that is pretty well balanced so they don't over eat because they don't feel that hungry when they have had enough calories.

The reason why some groups of people have been increasingly prone to obesity is external factors interfering with that regulation. It's probably lots of things, food availability, ingredients, cost, culture, other mental health issues, medications, entertainment, work, availability of cars. One thing it is not is simple.

The calories in vs calories out mechanic is simple, the reasons why that's going out of kilter is not.

Asians dont consume the same amounts of sugars. its that simple. they also tend to exercise more.

It's total calories, not just calories from sugar. And I already said that part of it was simple, remember? It's in the post you're replying to!

The question is why they have better balanced calorie intake. It's certainly not lack of sugar availability.

Rice syrup + corn syrup are used in pretty much every savory dish, subway stations often have a bakery that sells sweet pastries (filled with bean paste), Starbucks style coffee drinks are also popular, people snack dried octopus (loaded with salt + sugar)...

I loved the food, but it was not at all what anyone would consider healthy.

(Instant Ramen are also extremely popular, industrially produced fried noodles with way too much saturated fats + sodium)

I have read somewhere (on HN?) a hypothesis that such traditional diets pretty quickly wipe out genetic lines predisposed to diabetes, etc. And that the effect is not diet, it is genetics+diet.

Not sure if there is any truth in that.

Koreans intensely shame each other about gaining weight, which helps people control calories in and calories out. East asians eat very little food. Tik Tok is full of videos of Chinese making fun of Japanese for their “sad, tiny lunches.”

The quantities of those ingredients are what matters most.

Every meal must contain more empty calories than everything else combined, but not in an excessive amount.

I do not know about Korea, but I have been in Japan, where also every meal is served with excellent white rice. However, there was never too much of it and in general the quantities of all ingredients were right for a balanced diet, much more so than I have seen in most other countries.

A few things come to mind. First, South Korea has low obesity on the global scale (BMI >= 30 kg/m2) but within the country [1] they use an "Asia-Pacific" scale for the definition which starts at BMI of 25. [2] So, from the Korean perspective, they have substantial obesity.

Second, I do not know whether there are some Korean diets that are more correlated with obesity. In Thailand, people eat much the same, and they are more often obese on the global scale. Less kimchi, though, and probably more coconut milk and sugar.

Simple diet composition is probably not the main factor in obesity. I do notice that "normal" portion sizes are pretty small in Korea, based on what I see in their media. Even feasts are shown to have reasonable portion sizes. In the US, portion sizes tend to maximally fill the stomach, and have grown considerably over the years.

Highly processed foods are generally designed to add addictive properties and cause overconsumption. I am not sure that's the goal of the Korean dishes you have tried. If we understand what the new weight loss drugs are telling us, we can see that increasing satiety faster with fewer calories should be the goal of our foods. (no citation, just my interpretation of what's going on).

1. https://general.kosso.or.kr/html/user/core/view/reaction/mai... 2. https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/13/2/373

> The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet.

Part of the problem is the logistics and financing of school and generally cantina meals.

Unlike restaurants which can command high meal prices for artisans preparing meals out of ingredients as close to "fresh from the field" as possible, mass kitchens face insane cost pressure, which often means going for pre-processed food with very long shelf lifes for packaged units to keep waste as close to zero as possible.

Generally, I love to point at tomatoes when talking about food access and quality... for one, most tomatoes you can buy these days are grown in greenhouses with artificial light and bred to have pretty robust skin to avoid damages in shipping and storage, at the cost of flavor. As an individual making a tomato salad, you can mask off that lack of flavor by just dumping balsamico, olive oil, salt and pepper over the tomatoes... but if you are making, say, a tomato soup in a large ass kitchen for pasta, you'll probably go for the ultra-processed variant from a can or tub: no need to have employees cut up and mash tomatoes, it will keep fresh for far longer than if you'd send someone to the wholesalers to buy tomatoes every day...

And the truly ultra large kitchens that make meals for thousands of school children (or prisoners or hospital patients) a day, they probably go for the even cheaper variant and that's where the problems really show - entirely premade tomato sauce, filled with preservatives to prevent the sauce from going bad, with tons of sugar and flavorings to make it palatable (as the source tomatoes are going to be the cheapest, lowest quality, flavorless tomatoes the original processor can find), and quite possibly with a bunch of food dyes on top to appear "healthy red like a good organic tomato".

> Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy”

Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.

>but "Nonnutritive sweeteners" are not

They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.

They "may" affect your insulin response, some studies have found this plausible, some have found no link.

Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.

Some do, some don't.

Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.

For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.

This seems like a fancy way of saying “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.

What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?

What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?

If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.

> “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.

No, not at all.

Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.

This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.

> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?

When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.

Cheers. Do you have any citations handy for the old studies? I’m open to being wrong, but after some very brief searching and reading I’m skeptical that they properly controlled for increased feed intake (possibly due to palatability) to conclusively determine that some other mechanism was at play

The original study was:

DALDERUP, L., VISSER, W. Effects of Sodium Cyclamate on the Growth of Rats compared with other Variations in the Diet. Nature 221, 91–92 (1969) https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

But of course the manufacturers of feed additives also extensively studied which artificial sweetener compositions achieve body mass gain / feed efficiency increase for which group of animals. There is an extensive review e.g. on pigs here:

https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14203032

Thanks! I’ll take a look

If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases. We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way.

Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?

People “just don’t work that way” when they have to exercise will power, because they can obtain what they want.

That’s not really the case when discussing school meals though, when kids will generally be eating what is put in front of them.

Oh, so was your point that there’s no reason to feed them to children, but there are good reasons for NNSs for gen pop?

It is unscientific nonsense given there is no proven causal link between "pRoCeSsEd FoOdS" whatever they might be and longterm adverse health.

The countries that consume the most processed foods are also the longest lived, obviously such a correlation does not imply processed foods lead to longevity, just that any accusation of cause and effect is more easily explained by abundance and affluenza (sic).

How long before the UPF cult proclaims vaccines are poison, I note than some of their number already do.

One thing that is not in doubt is that many UPFs are hyper-palatable. It’s much harder to overeat if the food in question is potatoes, carrots, and fish than if the meal is Pringles, Ice cream, and deep fried fish sticks.

Agreed, I do think that hyper-palatability is the actual problem and not some poorly defined idea of "ultra-processed"

But what if it is lays potato chips? Potatoes fried in oil and then salted. None of the potato scrap mashing and molding that pringles have.

There is a connection between ultra processing and hyper-palatability, but it is a very lossy one. Doritos are ultra processed but no honest definition of ultra processed foods can include Fritos. Are Doritos substantially worse for you than Fritos?

Is ice cream ultra processed? There are definitely ultra processed ice creams you can buy, with lots of stabilizers or whatever. But you can also make ice cream with just cream, milk, sugar, and vanilla beans. If anything, the homemade stuff that isn't ultra processed is even more hyper-palatable than the "frozen dairy dessert" kind.

Fritos are highly refined, industrially manufactured, and have plenty of processed additives. I think they are plainly ultra processed

Huh?

The ingredients in Fritos are corn, oil, and salt. What processed additives? Is extruding cornmeal mixed with water through a die ultra processing?

The oil used is itself ultra processed and is not a natural food or whole food. It's a lipid isolated from the original food by a series of industrial processes.

The NOVA classification for canola oil is Category 2.

This is spinning wildly into seed oil crank stuff.

My two sentences above are simple and verifiable with any reasonable definition of "whole food" or "natural food".

Do you know how canola oil is made?

Yes I'm familiar with the seed oil paranoia.

No, it's about processing. The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them.

Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.

Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". If that results in some hypothetical healthy food being banned, so be it, but really this is about a loss of trust.

> No, it's about processing

What’s “processing”?

> The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them

Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything.

> Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.

So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure?

> Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes".

Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.

Processing is defined in the legislation. By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens. Fancy means something that doesn't fulfill that definition.

The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens.

The idea that we can process our way to a healthy diet has not stood up to the real world experimentation. Maybe it's time to stop experimenting on school children and just accept that perhaps they should be fed food that is generally recognised as such down to its base ingredients.

> Processing is defined in the legislation

The whole discussion here is how the legislation's definition is lacking, because it excludes otherwise perfectly healthy foods.

You tried to clarify it by saying "it's about processing", and when pressed, said the definition is what the legislation says it is.

You see how this is circular?

> By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens

I have MSG in my kitchen. Does that make it ok then? An "ultra-processed" food becomes "ok" if people just... see it more often?

This is exactly the sort of blanket BS the OP was talking about.

We really are not in a good position to assert what foods are "healthy" and which are not. Many long held views on things like saturated fat simply don't hold up when you view the ingredients in isolation. Research on health factors related to food is incredibly difficult to do.

That said, we can look at proxies like "what do healthy people tend to eat more of?", and the clear evidence is that people that are healthy by and large have diets that are low in UPFs and high in home prepared food. Of course, this could be a correlation, but until we have this properly established, the precautionary principle would be that we shouldn't eat too much in the way of UPFs, because that necessarily also implies food prepared and cooked in a way we know to be correlated with health. We certainly shouldn't be pushing it on our children.

There's no circularity. You asked me what processing meant and I said what it says in the legislation, which is pretty similar to the Nova classification. That definition was used because it's broadly useful without being overly restrictive.

By all means use MSG - nobody is stopping you. But there's a good hypothesis that MSG is problematic precisely because it is one thread of hyper-palatable food. Of course soy sauce or miso contain plenty of MSG (or at least a close analogue), but they also tend to influence flavour so are hard to use to excess; they also cost more so there's an cost pressure to limit excessive use.

Yep, this seems like quackery.

Wholemeal bread with soya lecithins? Evil UPF, ban it.

Artisinally produced sourdough using refined flour with tons of salt but no lecithins? Delightful, fill your boots.

We've let nutrition policy become controlled by fad diet book authors and the results aren't pretty...

> tons of salt

Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries.

> refined flower

Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries.

> soya lecithins

Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins.

Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.

Let’s do this one at a time, starting with salt.

What’s your goalpost for evidence here, I.e. what would it take to convince you that salt consumption above the levels indicated in dietary guidelines is harmful?

Actual studies that isolate salt consumption as a variable and show worse outcomes from more salt would be a start.

Every study I've looked into that purported to show salt was a problem did not isolate salt, and the most likely reason IMHO that the "less salt" group did better was because they ate less ultra processed food and more natural food.

So DASH-sodium (https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2021.03.320) seems like it meets those goalposts? As does TOHP (https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.39147.604896.55).

When we scale out to what I believe to be a superior intervention - replacement of sodium with potassium, we have really robust data. The SASS trial (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2105675) showed reductions in stroke and CVD incidence from consuming salt substitute, along with reduction in all cause mortality.

I have a real salt taste - if I had no care for health outcomes I’d absolutely cover my food in it! However I think the evidence in favour of reducing or, ideally, replacing it with potassium-heavy substitutes is really convincing.

Thanks - I'd not seen DASH-sodium but only the DASH study whose samples it's based on.

Having read the study now: DASH-sodium barely indicates anything about sodium independently. It looks at three biomarkers which _correlate_ with cardiovascular disease, and finds that reducing sodium from high to low levels for four weeks reduced one of those biomarkers by 19%, _increased_ another biomarker by 9%, and didn't change the third. You could say that this suggests higher sodium increases cardiovascular disease risk but that seems like a stretch when if you'd picked a slightly different set of CVD-correlated biomarkers you would have got exactly the opposite result.

Even if the results had been more convincing, the methods are not - it's an extremely short term study and looks only at correlative biomarkers and not at actual health outcomes. There's no meaningful way to quantify the impact based on this.

The potassium study is indeed interesting. It shows among people who already have CVD, a reduced risk of death of 12%. I think it's pretty well known that modern diets have a significant electrolyte imbalance, i.e. not enough potassium per sodium. I do supplement potassium for this reason sometimes and recommend it, though I'd prefer to just have a ton of natural nutrient dense food available and not feel like I need to. So we're in agreement on that one. That said I don't take that study to strongly show that sodium is a primary driver of CVD - it could just as easily be interpreted that the lack of potassium due to lack of real natural food is a cause of CVD (potassium being mostly in nutrient dense greens, and grass fed meat (i.e. animals that ate more natural diets i.e. greens)).

So, thank you - this helps my understanding of the whole topic - not that I know the answers, but it does make me more curious about sodium/potassium electrolyte imbalance being a factor in CVD. Ideally this would be fixed with a healthier diet but it can be hard/expensive to get enough nutrient dense foods.

Edit: oops - I missed the TOHP study - but that's one where they don't isolate sodium: > The active intervention, described in detail elsewhere,22 involved dietary and behavioural counselling on how to identify sodium in the diet, self monitor intake, and select or prepare lower sodium foods and condiments suited to personal preferences. Individual and weekly group counselling sessions were provided during the first three months, with additional counselling and support less frequently for the remainder of follow-up.

> You could say that this suggests higher sodium increases cardiovascular disease risk but that seems like a stretch when if you'd picked a slightly different set of CVD-correlated biomarkers you would have got exactly the opposite result.

What’s the evidence for this?

> Even if the results had been more convincing, the methods are not - it's an extremely short term study and looks only at correlative biomarkers and not at actual health outcomes

You're going to have to pick your poison here - when you're after long term data on dietary interventions showing hard outcomes it's highly unlikely you'll ever see this in the form of RCTs that you're looking for (i.e. where you _only_ alter salt consumption). That's why we look for converging lines of evidence - biomarkers/soft outcomes from RCTs and hard outcomes from prospective cohort studies, for example. When we look at this for salt, we consistently see lower salt = lower adverse outcomes.

That said, when we meta-analyse RCTs we do actually have sufficient power to see improvements on hard outcomes. In this meta (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61174-4) we see a 29% reduction in cardiovascular events in the 7 months to 11.5 years in normotensives in RCTs which looked exclusively at salt reduction. I wouldn't call 11.5 years short term, nor cardiovascular disease events a soft outcome. So surely this ticks all your boxes?

> What’s the evidence for this? Exactly what I paraphrased from the study - they chose three biomarkers that correlate with CVD - A increased 19%, B decreased 9%, C stayed the same. If they had chosen some other biomarker D instead of A, that increased say 5% or less, it would give an equally strong but opposite result as the result from the study.

Meta analysis is only as strong as the studies it's based on. I looked at quite a few studies before that purport to show sodium causing CVD, and none of them strongly support their conclusion - they all had significant flaws, not that they're not useful research just that they don't show what they are used to say they show.

For example, there were studies showing that increased salt increased blood pressure by ~5 mm Hg over long term. I understand that blood pressure can be affected very slightly by salt intake, I would guess because the body is holding more water or some other normal mechanism like that, but this does not suggest it's the long term cause of blood pressures going up from a normal 120 to a chronic 160 or 200 as we're seeing in tons of people. There could be any number of adjustments that would increase blood pressure slightly WHILE the change is in effect and then go back to baseline afterward. The chronic high blood pressure is a disease that doesn't just go back to normal immediately after a change.

Anyway, I don't have time at the moment to look through the 11 studies cited in that meta analysis, but if you pick the one or two that give the strongest evidence for salt causing CVD I'd look at them.

I'm genuinely trying to figure this out myself as best I can, because I know way too many people close to me dealing with early stage CVD and diabetes. And a lot of them say they're working on it by avoiding meat and dairy and eggs and salt, and instead of that they end up eating more refined oils and refined flour and sugar. It doesn't seem to be helping them any after years of this, and I think this is backwards advice. I'm not saying we need to eat tons of salt, maybe it does have a minor effect, just that it's not the real culprit.

You said:

> if you'd picked a slightly different set of CVD-correlated biomarkers you would have got exactly the opposite result.

So the evidence I’m looking for is empirics showing CVD correlated biomarkers that suggest a beneficial effect from consuming levels of sodium above recommended levels. Without that evidence then I don’t see why we should believe they would have got the opposite result if they picked other CVD biomarkers.

> but this does not suggest it's the long term cause of blood pressures going up from a normal 120 to a chronic 160 or 200 as we're seeing in tons of people

I’m not claiming that salt is the single cause of hypertension, but that doesn’t mean that the kind of reductions you see from salt reduction aren’t meaningful or contribute to those very high figures. It’s easy to dismiss 5mmHg as insignificant, but we generally see a 5mmHg reduction in sysBP translate to a ~10% reduction in CVD events. Considering how prevalent CVD is, that’s a pretty large effect size.

Chronic diseases are often overdetermined and stack - people have a poor diet which means they consume too much salt, they’re overweight and obesity, have T2DM or prediabetes, sedentary lifestyle, etc etc. The fact that we can’t point to a single one of these and say “this is the thing causing your 160/100 BP doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fix the individual factors. So sure, salt reduction seems to offer 5-6mmHg reduction, exercise 4-8, hypertensive drugs 10. But put them all together and that’s a massive change.

> Anyway, I don't have time at the moment to look through the 11 studies cited in that meta analysis, but if you pick the one or two that give the strongest evidence for salt causing CVD I'd look at them.

It’s just three trials (or four depending on how you count TOHP I & II). I think I’ve met my burden in terms of showing there’s evidence of high salt intake having adverse effects, I have no interest in forcing you to read them. Just trying to provide evidence if that’s something you’re seeking.

> I'm genuinely trying to figure this out myself as best I can, because I know way too many people close to me dealing with early stage CVD and diabetes.

I’m sorry to hear that. We certainly seem to be struggling with chronic lifestyle-related disease these days, though with GLP-1 RAs I’m a lot more optimistic than I was a few years ago.

> And a lot of them say they're working on it by avoiding meat and dairy and eggs and salt, and instead of that they end up eating more refined oils and refined flour and sugar.

Yeah depending on the composition of what they’re eating that doesn’t sound great. IMO Replacing butter with refined oils and whole grain flours/carbs - sure, solid move. Replacing meat with plant proteins is also a worthwhile step, and eggs don’t seem to be great for health in many respects. But fermented dairy seems to be a positive as far as CVD risk goes, so ethics aside, seems like a backwards step if they replacing yoghurt and cheese with sugar and white flour!

> I'm not saying we need to eat tons of salt, maybe it does have a minor effect, just that it's not the real culprit.

I’m very wary of trying to find “the culprit” for public health problems. It’s so rarely the case that a disease has a single aetiology, and in my experience the people who’ll tell you “it was the sugar all along”, “it was the seed oils all along”, “it was the glyphosate all along” have a book to sell. The reality is probably closer to it being a combination of several things. Not as sexy though, no publisher or influencer is interested in that view!

Regarding the reduction in mm Hg due to sodium - my argument is that the kind of impact on blood pressure can be qualitatively different.

In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.

---

> IMO Replacing butter with refined oils and whole grain flours/carbs - sure, solid move.

We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)

> I’m very wary of trying to find “the culprit” for public health problems [etc]

I agree entirely with this. It's very complex, many factors, no single culprit or silver bullet, and that this is extremely important. It's all the things. So it's important to try to tease out which things are having which kind and degree of effect. And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.

> In the same way that increased salt intake causes increased water retention, and thus increased weight, but this increased level of water weight goes away after a few days if you start consuming less salt, and there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

We've already gone over data showing that when we summate data from RCTs and salt consumption we see reduced salt consumption leads to reduced cardiovascular disease events, so it's demonstrably not the case that there's no evidence of this causing long term harm.

Additionally we have strong evidence of a dose-response curve regarding blood pressure and atherosclerosis, so that additional 5mmHg is contributing to additional plaque burden. Even after you reduce your salt intake, that plaque is still going to be there, increasing your risk of a CVD event.

Additionally when we look at the results of INTERSALT, age-related increases in blood pressure only seemed to occur in populations consuming more than 2-3g salt per day, which suggests that in addition to acute rises in BP, higher salt consumption than this may also be responsible for much larger rises in the long term that are not reversed when salt consumption is dropped.

Taking that whole body of evidence in totality, I think it's hard to argue that the effects of salt on the risk of adverse health outcomes is akin to water weight.

> I could see where if one already had severe CVD, maybe eating more salt could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and thus until they heal the CVD it could be wise to limit salt. But this would be no indication that the salt is the cause of the CVD or causes any long term chronic problem. And it is the long term chronic CVD that is by far the most important to address IMHO. If salt is not causing that, this whole discussion is largely misdirected energy.

Again, even small increases in BP over normal range (and even slightly below - we tend to see increases in risk once systolic BP rises about 110) is associated with increases in CVD, so the raised blood pressure is one of the forces driving that long term chronic CVD.

> We disagree here but that's a separate issue from salt so I'll leave it. :)

Well if you're open-minded about the topic but think refined oils are a health risk, you're the same as I was a few years ago. I ended up changing my view on the topic. If you think there's a health concern not addressed by https://uprootnutrition.com/blog/seedoils I'd be genuinely interested to know.

> And this is where I think salt has been scapegoated in a way that probably just distracts from the root problem as I describe above.

I think the evidence very strongly suggests that sodium consumption is one of the root problems driving chronic health issues in the West.

What's wrong with eggs btw?

The only thing I can easily find is that they have saturated fat - but it takes 4.5 eggs to have as much saturated fat as 1tbsp of butter.

Aside from 1 year of strict vegan diet, I've eaten an average of 4 eggs with 1tbsp butter mostly daily for my entire adult life (I'm 34), and also ate eggs regularly in childhood, and I seem to be in excellent health with no known issues. But I'm curious what I should be watching for.

The evidence base on eggs is a funny one because of: 1. Genetic traits influencing response to dietary cholesterol. 2. The effect of baseline dietary cholesterol on the impact of additional dietary cholesterol (if you're already consuming ~300mg/d cholesterol, adding more on top is unlikely to increase risk by much). 3. The effect of baseline CVD risk on the impact of egg consumption.

Generally when we take this into consideration, we see a linear increase in risk from increased egg consumption. For example this paper suggests that the higher your genetic risk for CVD, the higher the increase in risk from egg consumption, but even those with lower CVD risk see a ~6% increase in CVD events per 3 eggs/week increase: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652....

Additionally replacing the 1tbsp butter with plant oils would likely reduce ACM risk by ~17% (http://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2025.0205), but I'll be the first to admit that there's nothing that really replaces butter on a taste basis :D. Got to find the happy balance between health and hedonism IMO!

>> ... baseless ...

Depends on

a) How well it's believed science is able to keep up with the "creativity" and dollars of the food industry.

b) The health costs to the individual and society of any subsequent problem.

c) How well the society in question is likely to do in overcoming the vested interests to fix any subsequent problem.

$HERE the anti-processed proponents seem to be mostly pro-butter folks. Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats took a lot of effort and these useful idiots are undoing much of that work.

YMMV.

> Getting premature deaths down in the eighties and nineties caused by saturated "natural" fats

What? Are you talking about trans fats?

I think the reference was maybe about the butter vs. margarine controversy? That margarine was lauded as more healthy, but turned out to be actually less healthy than butter, due to hydrogenation producing trans fats which elevated cardiovascular risk.

Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats.

Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad.

This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.

No, just plain old cholesterol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Karelia_Project

>> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic.

> Wow.

Sadly, I'm not too surprised. My state also has free breakfast and lunch in public schools and it is possible for them to get served over 100g of added sugar between the two meals and classroom provided snacks. Then add to it whatever the kids are eating at home.

It also creates added difficulty for kids to concentrate on lessons when their blood sugar is spiking and crashing repeatedly throughout the day.

How much of this is that children refuse to eat normal whole foods? I've heard stories from teachers that mention that children often would rather go without food than eat anything remotely healthy (e.g. apples from cafeteria). My own personal experience from places that are considered food desert is often seeing rotting fruit not being consumed.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to offer healthy option, but just that those would have a limited impact on obesity, expect for maybe calorie deficit if they choose to forgo breakfast or lunch

How much of the refusal to eat anything healthy stems from lack of good options? The example given (an apple) in an American school setting brings to mind my cafeteria serving only Red Delicious (which is one of the worst apples for taste).

When the option is some fried food vs a wilted salad with no protein source, it's a wonder that any kid would choose the salad.

I would love to see better options that are both healthy and enticing. Until then I doubt that we will see much change when the choice of what to eat in the lunch room is left to the children.

When I was in highschool (2010ish), our school gave you several options for lunch: You could have a real meal that was cooked even though it probably came from the cheaper end of the Sysco catalog but at least was real food, you could get a sub sandwhich made from real ingredients, you could get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or you could get a minuscule slice of the absolute lowest quality pizza ever made, literally worse than Dominos in quality and flavor and barely over an inch long in arc measurement.

95% of the student body ate that pizza every single day.

This includes the supposedly "smart" kids in honors classes.

The real food was good! It was fresh and perfectly palatable and varied enough to be healthy!

Instead of eating it, the students literally invented a lie to hype up this disgusting facsimile of "pizza" as good. It was regularly claimed that this pizza came from a local small business that sold pizza. This was flagrantly wrong and obvious to anyone who had eaten that pizza, as they used a sweet sauce that was not used in the school pizza.

But what the actual hell do Americans expect? We spent decades disallowing the government from telling your kids anything useful, we opted out of "Only 12 minutes of advertising to children per hour on TV" because "regulation is bad", we built a society that advocates rampant consumerism to your kid from before they even can read.

Of course they're going to eat the shitty pizza. It's what consumerism tells people to do. In the US, consumerism is a literal lifestyle brand!

A finding that most kindergartens and youth centers finds out is that cutting apples into pieces will have a significant difference in consumption compared to providing them as whole. It could be the aroma or the lower investment to start eating (just one slice, and then a second one...). It also work on adults in places like wellness centers, and hotels (watch what happens if they place a plate with cut fruit vs a bowl with whole fruits).

School food generally has the problem that they made to be cheap, low labor, and lowest common denominator terms of taste, spices and salt. To take Sweden as an example, the cost per serving sit just between $0.6 to $1.2 per student in term of ingredients cost. Even providing an apple per student would cut into that budget.

“Refusing to eat” is such an absurd phrase. It says more about your impatience than it says about them.

They’re rejecting WHAT you offer WHEN you offer. They’re not refusing to eat. If you simply allow them to say no, they get hungry and come back (usually within an hour). Ask them what they want from the available healthy options and feed them that.

In fact you can set this up ahead of time. “Child what are your five favorite foods? Great two of those are special occasions only, pick two more. Great. That’s your list. Here’s the deal. At meal time you can pick one of those five. I promise to make it, if you promise to eat it.” This gives them a feeling of control and gives you an easy answer.

This actually makes your life easier because you can plan ahead and always have that whitelist available. And it’s less complicated because their pallets are simpler.

There is a whole branch of child psychology devoted to this question. They’re not refusing to eat. They’re simply not interested in the thing you offered.

I was at a friend’s recently. He prepared a lovely meal. Fresh caught salmon and great sides. His daughter didn’t eat a single bite. I was slightly offended. I overheard the fight later “dad, I hate fish, you know that” (actually quite reasonable) his reply was “it’s not a very fishy taste” (a tenuous argument). She was hungry before bed and did eat. The whole mess could have been avoided by not trying to feed her something she hates. I then watched for the rest of the weekend. Every time she was offered something she liked she ate it no problem.

This does of course assume that nobody else is undermining you by offering them junk when they get hungry after refusing a meal.

> [ultra] processed

This whole terminology just brings about brain damaged discourse as seen in this same thread. Just you wait for someone to say "itS jUsT LiKE caLLiNg wAtER dIHydrOgEN mONoXide".

I much prefer the following:

1. Food providers basically do all this crap to reduce costs. That's it that's the incentive. For _various_ reasons, a good, local food supply chain has become expensive. If we go debugging the causes of that we will find that the solution is outside the purview of a nutrition department. Let's not do that.

2. Instead, we try to limit menus that tend towards being cheap (like school food in this context) to contain dishes that are cheap by default. Food that's cheap by default, pre-cost-optimisation, is most often simple food. Small number of ingredients, very simple cooking process, minimal frying, etc,. Simple enough that they can just make it right there from start to finish, or somewhere nearby, for low cost, with minimal supply volatility.

Using my hollywood-inspired knowledge of the american school menu, but practical experience with handling food at schools in India, I'd suggest s/cereal/oats+fruits, s/mac-n-cheese/simpler pasta dish-say pesto or shredded chicken pasta, s/choco milk/just milk, s/chicken nuggets/pulled chicken sandwich with simple veggies. Can add some stew/soup in there as well. Beans too if needed. All with simple spice combinations.

These can be easily made fresh on-site or at a satellite kitchen serving 10-15 schools. Beyond 30-40 is when even this gets dicey.

Eggs I suppose schools won't be (probably aren't right now) allowed to break it and cook it on-site due to salmonella risk, which is why they all use pasteurised pre-made crap. So I've omitted it. It's also weird for lunch, I assume. I've left out cheese too due to the tendency for folks to shift to imitation cheese, as it's most common cheese even in usual grocery shops. Oil is also minimal - you basically are only using a drizzle of it for trapping flavour above. No frying is done. Bread is pretty much the only processed product left there, you can probably mandate whole wheat % for those, but still, overall it will be a big improvement.

Instead of playing a cat and mouse game where you make regulations, and you get back the same effect just through a route skirting those regulations, a practical solution similar to the one above, which removes the incentives to skirt, might be in order.

That said, I don't think school food has much to do with child obesity crises. What they eat outside school far outweighs school food in quantity. It's an easy political win though since it's the only part of kids diet that govt controls, which is why they harp on about it.

Related news from 8 months ago:

"Brazil limits ultra-processed foods in school meals to 15%"

https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02...

If you've never worked in food before, you may be unaware that borderline half of the foods you eat, in restaurants, hospitals, prisons, even schools, are just the same frozen foods from Sysco. Their products are sold nationally and are lower quality than the frozen foods you get at the grocery stores, sold at ridiculous markups at restaurants. Sysco UPFs are at best "mid" and usually worse. They also involve a lot of worker exploitation in Mexico and the far-east.

A popular meme variation in the chef community is as follows:

"Wait, it's all just Sysco?" "Always has been"

Video about Sysco https://youtu.be/rXXQTzQXRFc

'restaurants'

Related discussion from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45522868

You forgot "in America".

Add Sodexo and Aramark and you’ve got close to the entirety of food caterers and suppliers to schools, universities, prisons, etc.

I've never heard of sodexo, but note that when aramark isn't operating restaurants themselves, they're mainly the towel guys.

Americans need to get their act together, about food, but not only. 40.3% of American adults are obese (not overweight), against the 17% in the EU.

Sport won't fix that, food will.

Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especially when you combine this with a carbohydrate/sugar rich diet. The EU has a worsening diet. Japan eats more carbs than America. What’s the difference? They naturally walk much more as part of their daily routine because their governments invest in communities rather than stealing tax money to launder to military contractors.

Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort

Japan eats a lot healthier too. Carbs as a number is not everything.

Something like 7% of Americans eat enough fiber on a daily basis. Also something like 45% of calories consumed in the US are ultra-processed now.

That tells a huge story.

Big difference in carbs like sugar and say bread, though. Certainly not an expert on Japanese diet, but I don't think they consume a lot of sugar. Their deserts are famously rather savoury.

(And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)

most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits

the only places that dont need to build suburbs with 10 mile buffer zones from other people are cities like SF and NY that exclude people via rent prices or other place like alaska, obvious reasons

i have had (white) frends visit LA/hollywood and get arrested for walking on sidewalk, taken to local police station and told yes this is for your own safety, you are free to go but do not walk around here

It is the case that we've structured things like suburbs around avoiding something that frightens much of American society, but it isn't violent crime.

You say crime, history says racism.

> most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits

this is nonsense

That’s a lot of words to say you’re scared of black people

It’s not an America only problem, we are similarly affected. So is every other country on earth.

In Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Malta, Ireland obesity ranges from 38%–31% and it’s rising. On an individual level the solution is food and exercise. On a societal level there is no know solution and it’s rapidly getting worse.

But the reasons can be very different. East Europe had severe food shortages until the fall of communism. The result? People eating too much after the fall of communism, which become a cultural thing ("you don't have huge meals => you are poor / is like during communism"). Add to that car ownership ("public transport => only poor use it") and you get what happened probably in USA due more to lobbying and industry.

One good thing in my opinion is that is much easier in EU to at least choose. I was amazed in USA how badly marked are the components (in EU you have at least on each thing sugar/100g, fat, salt, etc.) and how unavailable are fresher things (even if they would be expensive). So while in EU I would say "repeat more to people to eat varied and not abuse salt/fat/sugar", that would not work as well in the USA (or, you need to teach them math and unit conversion as well :-p)

ozempic baby

US today, EU tomorrow.

EU obesity has increased by 138% across the broader WHO European Region since 1975, with rates rising 21% between 2006 and 2016 alone.

There’s an excellent discussion of the most recent RCT on UPF foods with its author here (https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/).

Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time.

Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view that has been echoed by pretty much all academic institutions when they’ve helped inform recent dietary guidelines.

Making big sweeping moves based on flimsy evidence is a good way to make people wary of following dietary guidance at all. After all, what’s the point of listening to “the science” if they turn around in 5 years and say “whoops, turns out we were wrong”?

This is a misstep IMO.

and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'.

if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .

> and yet when Americans set foot on European soil the first thought they have is 'everyone is so thin'.

I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making.

> if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .

Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).

Being thin is cultural. If your society shames you for being fat you are less likely to be fat. Has nothing to do with ultra processed food

Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly.

A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain.

The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...

I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place

I’m not an absolutist on this myself, if convincing evidence comes out then I’m happy to change my mind. I have no horse in this race besides wanting people to stay healthy. I’m just not currently convinced the UPF category adds much to our existing dietary guidelines.

Avoiding UPFs can serve as a reasonable heuristic as it can help you avoid HFSS foods, but you could also easily make some adverse switches following such advice.

I’m not sure that study really supports the inference you’re making re: calories and weight gain. The UPF diet had ~15g fibre/1000kcal less than the MP diet, so for an individual consuming 2500kcal/day there’s a 150kcal difference of energy per day that doesn’t seem to be accounted for by the studies methods (could be missing this in their calcs though?).

So yeah, if we don’t equate things like this, things look bad for UPFs. But what is the “UPF” category adding here. We don’t need it to know that if more calories are consumed as fibre in an otherwise calorie-equated diet, you’ll lose weight relative to the low fibre diet.

It is worth viewing the actual meals here in "Data S2" in their supplemental materials.

Do these look like 1:1 substitutions where the only controlled variable is processing?

Exactly. This isn’t a study that shows us UPF adds anything over what we already understand about dietary composition.

Nice to see a good step in the right direction.

Our school offers free lunch to all, but we pack our kids' lunches, with almost entirely minimally processed foods (fresh veggies, fruits, fresh bread [not Bimbo garbage], cheese [not sliced Kraft, also garbage], natural peanut butter and fruit preserves (not jam/jelly, also garbage), eggs, bean burritos (which we make ourselves), etc.

But it's discouraging how expensive and time consuming it is in today's world just to try to keep our kids healthy. We're not wealthy by any means, but this is what we prioritize in our spending. We could probably cut our monthly food bill in half by buying garbage food from Walmart (but then we'd end up paying more in health care costs).

This brings back fond memories of growing up in the 80s eating school cafeteria concoctions like “flying saucers” which were a slice of bologna topped with a perfectly round scoop of instant mashed potatoes, into which was stuck a bright yellow-orange stick of ‘cheese’.

Yum!

What's ultra-processed vs processed? If I make my own sausage by grinding the meat by hand, mixing it with salt and spices, then filling natural casings, I would consider that processed food. What makes it ultra-processed? When Hormel does it instead?

Check out Nova classification. In general - UPF is food that requires industrial processing and high amount of additives.

If you add nitrite to make a salami instead.

> If you add nitrite to make a salami instead

This would be a Nova Group 3 food.

Processed. But not ultra-processed.

That's an annoying question. When you add industrial chemicals, yes, it's ultra processed.

If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food.

But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dextrose, caramel color, red 40, yellow 5, etc... it's ultra-processed food.

So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering.

Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish.

The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious.

Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact.

High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation.

1. https://skeptoid.com/episodes/157

Their idea is to point out curing agents, flavor enhancers and similar stuff you would not need if using fresh food made from high quality ingredients - basically if you see food with these ingredients, chances are high that corners were cut along the path for whatever reason.

And colorants/"food dyes" are even worse. A bunch of them are under strong suspicion of being carcinogenic, and often are used to mask the ingredients being cured for longer shelf lives or being of sub-par quality.

sure, it's all nature. and then wonder why you get 50% of the population morbidly obese...

you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.

Yours argument is coming from just a place of science denialism. Industry powers do not negate simple science.

Come to me with scientific evidence and not fear mongering, and then we can talk on an equal field.

Isn't the overwhelmingly obese American population scientific evidence enough?

Not really, the same ingredients are widely used in other countries which do not suffer from the same problems as Americans.

Is it any more evidence for ultra processing being the problem than the last N food panics? Obesity was high when the story was "high fat foods are the problem" too.

The population is obese because they eat too many calories and they will not stop. Arbitrarily banning foods because they are not "normal" doesn't prevent this. Butter is OK, cream is OK, sugar is OK. When sugar takes a slightly different form it's "not normal" so banning it will make everyone thin again.

Except a lot of evidence suggests that the foods we eat nowadays cause more weight gain than before industrialization.

Two people can eat the same number of calories, but if one of them is slamming UPFs they will gain more weight.

Additionally, UPFs do not satiate hunger like more natural foods. Meaning people can eat more UPFs than more natural foods before feeling full.

There are absolutely industrial ingredients we should be banning in the US that other countries have rightfully banned.

> war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt

Depending on production method, I believe MSG can be a Nova Group 2 (processed culinary ingredient) product.

The high fructose corn syrup used for most packaged foods is 42% fructose, with the remainder being glucose.

The name comes from the additional step of converting some portion of the glucose to fructose after converting starch to glucose.

Just two quick corrections:

1. sodium nitrite/nitrate salts have been used in Europe at the very least from the 19th century to cure meat, the earliest regulations in (of course) Germany date back to 1916 [1].

2. MSG has been a part of traditional Japanese dishes, it naturally occurs in soy and fermented fish sauce.

So for these two substances, I'd say their presence in food doesn't make it "ultra processed" all on its own - they and their usage in cuisine date back to times when there was no food industry to speak of.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%B6keln

Are all of these ingredients equally harmful? If not, why not just ban or restrict the ones that are harmful and keep using the rest of them? It's sort of weird to bundle a lot of very different types of chemicals under the same term.

These novel ingredients keep getting banned for negative health issues like causing cancer, new variants keep getting introduced to the public, the new variants keep getting banned doe being harmful, repeat ad infinitum.

The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.

You can see the definition here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

The specific exclusion is: Minimally processed prepared food as defined in paragraph (4) of subdivision (a) of Section 49015 of the Food and Agricultural Code, which may include foods in a variety of forms, including, but not limited to, whole, cut, sliced, diced, canned, pureed, dried, and pasteurized.

and that bit of Section 49015 says:

(4) “Minimally processed prepared food” may include any food prepared using either of the following processes:

(A) Traditional processes used to make food edible or to preserve it or to make it safe for human consumption, for example, smoking, roasting, freezing, drying, and fermenting.

(B) Physical processes that do not fundamentally alter the raw product or that only separate a whole, intact food into component parts, for example, grinding meat, separating eggs into albumen and yolk, and pressing fruits to produce juices.

Are you straw-manning or genuinely want to know the difference between your home made 4 ingredient sausage vs. 15-20 ingredient sausage by Hormel, including additives, emulsifiers, flavor enhancers, colorings, and other ingredients not typically used or readily available for home cooking?

This was my gut response too, I reluctantly read "Ultra-Processed People" after it was mentioned by so many people, expecting to find it annoying for this exact reason.

I was actually massively surprised by how helpful a label ultra-processed can be, even if there are edge cases.

Hormel are probably adding a huge number of lab-based emulsifiers, flavour enhancers and colouring, that you definitely won't have at home. It's a pretty open and shut case about whether or not its ultra-processed.

There's of course edge cases were something we think of as healthy might be ultra-processed, and something obviously unhealthy might not be considered ultra-processed. But it's a really helpful category for identifying a whole bunch of foods that are linked with a range of negative health conditions.

Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken [0]

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1039004911

There's an issue here with classification and harm. You can only say that UFPs are harmful if the definition used when measuring harm matches the definition used elsewhere. It seems all to easy to attach the harm to the label then switch out the contents while keeping the label.

Even then a group classification is useless if it includes a single element with a undue influence.

Consider an arbitrary SuperGiant classification that says that SuperGiant foods are harmful. SuperGiant foods are defined as any food you can buy in a supermarket plus also Polonium. You can easily produce a wide range of statistics to show harms caused by things classed as SuperGiant foods.

> Consider an arbitrary SuperGiant classification that says that SuperGiant foods are harmful. SuperGiant foods are defined as any food you can buy in a supermarket plus also Polonium. You can easily produce a wide range of statistics to show harms caused by things classed as SuperGiant foods.

That's very true, but you've intentionally made SuperGiant foods to have two distinct categories. Scientists only considering SuperGiant foods might show harm, but quite quickly a study could be done to show that specifically, Polonium is the relevant item.

If that couldn't be shown, then avoiding SuperGiant foods would be a sensible precaution, even if you suspect there's something specific causing harm that isn't in all SuperGiant foods - with the obvious caveat that you've defined SuperGiant foods to more or less impossible to actually avoid.

Currently UPF is not similar to this, in that nobody has yet shown that UPFs are a category containing something else which is bad for you. That probably is the case, but until the parallel of Polonium is found, being cautious around UPFs seems like a sensible idea.

Well I cannot address the accuracy of your statement on UPFs unless I assume the term UPF is synonymous with the Nova Classification, which is much of the problem. If it is synonymous then the term is bound to a classification system and that system can dictate what is meant by UPFs leading to the inability for others to refine the term for more accuracy. This is where we are headed with UPF being an evocative term that does not represent the scientific opinion of what is good for you.

The Siga Index seems to be better suited to aiming for positive outcomes but associating it with the term UPF then enables people to conflate findings regarding Nova results with Siga results.

>Currently UPF is not similar to this, in that nobody has yet shown that UPFs are a category containing something else which is bad for you.

There are two aspect to this, firstly it is not that there is containing something 'else'. By definition if it meets the criteria of the definition it is not an 'else' but a part of the criteria.

To phrase that a different way is to say it all fits within in the criteria but the criteria itself is not homogenous.

And that's the second problem with your statement. The Nova classification _is_ similar to this.

From Wikipedia

A number of studies show that although UPFs in general are associated with higher health risks, there exists a large heterogeneity among UPF subgroups. For example, although bread and cereals are classified as UPFs, a large 2023 study published in The Lancet finds them inversely associated with cancer and cardiometabolic diseases in the European population (hazard ratio 0.97). The study found that animal-based products (HR = 1.09) and artificially and sugar-sweetened beverages (HR = 1.09) are most strongly associated with diseases among UPFs.

They did find a parallel of Polonium, sweeteners (and another one with animal products)

One rule that's easy to verify is: would you have all the ingredients at home?

UPFs usually have ingredients you've never seen for sale.

How do we define what food is ultra processed though? Do we need "cake (commercial)" and "cake (home baked)" as I can bake a cake with all the standard stuff I have at home, but commercial cakes are usually chock full of E numbers. Another example would be like a jar of pasta sauce and a pasta sauce I've made, I don't think it's arguable that a pasta sauce I've made is ultra processed.

Like that definition doesn't seem to work when there's foods where the commercial variant is made differently to the normal version.

You're fixating on a singular definition.

A homemade cake is minimally processed. The flour and sugar are processed but nothing that heavily alters it.

A commercial cake on the other hand has stabilizers, ph balancers, etc.

You're over thinking it. Almost nothing made at home is ultra processed unless you're doing some weird sausage making. If you can name the ingredients easily, it probably isn't ultra processed.

I think the GP's point is there is no meaningful nutritional difference between a from-scratch cake and a box cake. Both are pretty unhealthy and should be eaten only as special treats. "Ultra-processed" is not a useful way of separating healthy from unhealthy foods.

That is precisely the point that should be discussed because, from what I've read, UPFs are much worse than plain fatty or sugary food cooked by human hands.

The extra stuff in UPFs interacts with your body in ways that you are not prepared for and some of them are designed to make you consume more. The first example that comes to mind is the sodium added to make you tolerate more sugar.

They may not differ much in terms of calories or nutrients, but there absolutely is a difference - the ultra processed cake has preservatives and additives that are way harder on your gut microbiome, which affects your body's ability to process other food.

Except you can buy soybean oil, bleached refined wheat flour, and refined sugar at the store. That's all you need to have ultra processed food. The really weird ingredients are probably also bad but are not necessary for something to be ultra processed.

What you described would be processed. Ultra processed foods are very difficult to make outside of an industrial setting. Pringles and dinosaur chicken nuggets are a perfect example. They make an almost recognizable paste and shape it.

Industrial processes involving chemicals that humans weren't capable of until very recently is one way to start looking at it.

It's not to say one couldn't use large scale machinery to make real healthy food in my general though.

I always thought it was a travesty that the "chefs" at my schools were just heating up junk food. It's the perfect place to achieve the economies of scale to produce whole-foods-based meals. But yet no 'real' food - dishes made from raw meat and raw vegetables that are processed in-house - was ever produced. I honestly don't think this will change in my lifetime. It's too much work and it feels like working hard, especially in a government position, is seen as making you a chump in our culture today.

Instead of blaming the low nutritional value of school lunches on line workers being unwilling to "work hard" because of "modern culture," consider the possibility that they aren't the ones responsible for setting the menus or budgeting the ingredients.

Your actual gripe is with local governments, the USDA and voters who consider funding any social program to be communism.

I think you are letting your biases influence your reading comprehension. I don't blame the line workers. It's not their fault. My gripe IS with the local government. Those are the the ones who have the responsibility to change the system and who seem happy to just buy Sysco. They are government workers too...

I work at Google. We have cafeterias with real food. There are videos on youtube fawning over how cafeteria staff are able to tackle this logistical challenge of serving high quality food to so many people each day. "Wow you have such amazing food there" is a selling point. People take their friends to have a meal at work to show off.

This responsibility is roughly identical to the responsibility that cafeteria staff have. Feeding meals to hundreds of kids is not any different from feeding meals to hundreds of adults. Yet cafeteria staff are, like you say, treated as garbage and uncreative jobs. So of course nobody who is passionate about food production decides to work in a school cafeteria.

Money solves this (plus society giving a shit about the flourishing of children). That's the long and short of the story. Decide that school lunch is not just about meeting minimum nutritional standards and make it about the joy of serving and eating food. Vastly increase pay for cafeteria staff, increase their autonomy to produce meals, and increase their budget for ingredients.

Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Further constraints on acceptable ingredients or macro and micro nutritional breakdowns will just force the cost optimization to some other unwanted state.

School lunches are designed by the state or admin.

Cooks have absolutely no say in what they cook or really how they cook it.

It's Sysco food.

I can imagine that some „food“ corps going berserk now. And setting up campaigns worth millions against these moves.

I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.

A lot of these limits seem to be set so high that they won't have much impact. But at the same time, the calories limit per item and saturated fat limit are low enough that you potentially cant serve a baked chicken thigh.

Probably they will just find a new name for ultra-processed foods and continue their business as usual. We've been here before countless times.

I am glad to see they have banned the sale of sugary sodas in schools. This should extend to any food or drink with sugar added.

I'd recommend this podcast to anyone interested on what ultra-processed foods actually are (and in general): https://sciencefictionspod.substack.com/p/episode-6-ultra-pr...

Spoiler: The science and definitions are... depressingly bad.

The key innovation that the UPF category is bringing to the fight is that it is hard to innovate and lawyer around it with complexity.

Seems to be because the definition is arbitrarily shaped to fit the agendas of whoever is writing the definition. UPFs seem like the screen time of the 2020s -- an overly vague and mostly useless definition borne out of hysteria around a real issue in how people eat.

Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.

Bread qualifies as an ultra processed food.

Low income people prefer processed foods over no foods.

> Low income people prefer processed foods over no foods

Kids don’t pay for school lunch in California.

No kids pay for school lunch in California.

> kids pay for school lunch in California

Not for a few years now [1].

[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/sn/cauniversalmeals.asp

Yes, because (ultra) processed food tends to be much more cheaper than un- or minimally altered food.

Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort.

Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes.

From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?

> Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives.

What preservatives are we talking about, citric acid? I checked the ingredient lists of Mutti and Heinz canned tomatoes (EU resident). Mutti contains exactly 2 ingredients: whole tomatoes and tomato juice, Heinz 3: whole tomatoes, tomato juice and citric acid.

Jarred/canned tomatoes might be the worst example. You barely need to try to make the preservation mechanism work. The pH of tomatoes tends to be very low and it's very easy to pull it down with lime juice, etc.

The highest quality marinara almost universally starts with something like an ordinary can of San Marzano tomatoes. This isn't some exotic find at Whole Foods. This will be collecting dust on the shelves at Kroger and Brookshires.

Buying fresh produce 100% of the time is theatrics. There are a lot of things it's a good idea for, but you are genuinely wasting your time in other areas.

Because that's mostly what they have access to, since sadly, garbage food is the cheapest food there is. Not only is healthy unprocessed food expensive, but it also hard to find in low income neighborhoods.

But when it comes to school lunches specifically, they're getting those for free in many (most? all?) states if they're low income. So these changes should benefit them (even if the kids would prefer coke and fries).

Weird how most of the world which lives on a few dollars a day isn't eating the processed garbage that Americans do

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