The article mentions growth hormones. Although banned throughout the EU in 1988, they are likely still used illegally. Notably, the "hormone maffia" murdered Belgian inspector Karel Van Noppen in 1995.
Anytime we talk about "banning" something I prefer a very conservative approach (conservative as in let's not ban things unless we are really sure). We are constantly learning new things that upend what we used to accept as science regarding nutrition and how the human body works. I think we do ourselves a disservice sometimes by banning things that we don't understand (and sometimes we think we understand but really don't).
That said, there is something wrong with our food. We have had an explosion in auto-immune disorders over the last few decades that is accelerating. Allergies to common foods are increasing rapidly as well. An allergist that I see has recently starting adding citrus tests to her test panel, because citrus is suddenly (and for unknown reasons) becoming a big problem. I don't know what's wrong, but I do hope we figure it out.
>Anytime we talk about "banning" something I prefer a very conservative approach (conservative as in let's not ban things unless we are really sure). We are constantly learning new things that upend what we used to accept as science regarding nutrition and how the human body works. I think we do ourselves a disservice sometimes by banning things that we don't understand (and sometimes we think we understand but really don't).
If you aren't sure, then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!". Surely it makes more sense to be cautious about the things we ingest..
> Surely it makes more sense to be cautious about the things we ingest..
Completely agree
> If you aren't sure, then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!".
False dichotomy. I don't think the choices are either "ban it" or "okay, feed it to your kids!" There's a middle ground there that I think makes more sense.
What’s the middle ground you are referrring to? Don’t feed it to kids but feed to adults? If you don’t know something is safe for consumption then it shoulnd’t be sold, right?
Getting into specific policy prescriptions is tempting the fate of Godwin's Law, but I don't believe it's wise or even possible to regulate every single molecule that gets sold for consumption.
Constant evaluation, testing, and liability for people/companies that knowingly use dangerous or harmful ingredients can go a long way here. In fact often times it's the only way broader datasets can be gathered. The market provides a strong incentive here as well not to poison your customers.
I also think that education, including warnings on packages, and then letting adults make their own decisions, is a good way to go. One state that I know of recently banned a pest control chemical because some idiot sprayed his dog's food bowl with it. The dog later died. The state's knee jerk response of banning it is counter-productive IMHO. I've been using it for DIY pest control for many years and it is one of the most effective I know of, and when used as directed is perfectly safe (don't spray anything that will be ingested with it, such as dog food bowls, gardens, etc).
The market provides a strong incentive here as well not to poison your customers.
The history of corporate malfeasance and the desire of people to optimize for short term gain versus long term gain indicates that your view is not supported by reality.
For example see the cigarette industry and how it deliberately made its products addictive and more dangerous.
Selfishly, I’d be happy with banning a lot more food stuff. I love salt, sugar, and saturated fat, and like that they are well understood.
Most of the newer riskier things are ways to improve margins for companies that mass produce food, either by letting it sit on a shelf longer, or to make processed cornmeal taste more interesting.
Actually, no, there's plenty of people that believe wheat not be safe. Obviously this is true as well if you have Celiacs, which also wasn't widely known until relatively recently.
Your definition of safe does not correspond to most peoples’ definition when it comes to food. Safe, in this context for most people, means safe for general consumption. Unsafe means that the product causes harm in just about everyone who consumes it.
>then I don't think I get the logic on the default being "okay, feed it to your kids!"
Why would you feed something to your kids just because it’s legal?
Who are the idiots that just pick things blindly off of shelves in stores without reading what’s in it?
Sugar is completely legal, yet I read the amounts of sugars in foods to avoid high sugar items. I’m also not giving my children bottles of olive oil to drink with dinner.
The nature of bans makes it pretty difficult to specifically name items that I feel banning them was a disservice :-)
But here's an example: Cannabis. Why? There's now tremendous evidence that the ban was misguided, and that there are very real medicinal properties that benefit the human body and help control inflammation. When banning it (and making it a schedule 1 substance) research was severely hampered and in many cases halted.
Banning ingredients for food is a very specific kind of ban. I'm against the war on drugs, but I'm totally for banning strongly psychoactive ingredients from food - cannabis should be a controlled substance.
Many people consume cannabis specifically as an ingredient in food. But at a broader level I think it's unproductive to limit categories to "banned in food" v. "banned", since that's a very arbitrary distinction. Also:
> but I'm totally for banning strongly psychoactive ingredients from food - cannabis should be a controlled substance.
That reads to me as contradictory. banning != controlled substance
Banning in food = you can't sell food containing the substance as normal food. Nobody would prohibit you to mix it into your own food and eat it, though. So, the substance's uses are controlled, but it's not banned :)
Many of these food tech choices are the difference between more starvation and high enough yield to feed poor people. If we farmed the way we did 100 years ago, there would be mass starvation. The yield just isn’t there.
The FDA faces the same ethical dilemma every time they decide on new drugs. A slow approval process is literally letting people suffer and die in exchange for trials with more certainty.
The old FDA food guidelines that shape what schools are allowed to feed children are a perfect example of the stupidity of legislating based on poorly understood food science. “Carbs are good, fats are bad!”
Low sodium guidelines because “salt kills people!” also turned out to be pretty stupid in retrospect.
If the cause of starvation were under-production, I’d sympathize with this argument. But given the amount of food waste in Western countries, I’d say the real issue is one of distribution or access. Producers make production efficient not in order to feed the poor, but to increase margin by lowering the costs of production.
Growth hormones exist to make the agriculturist more money, they don’t help feed a war torn country.
If the priority of these systems were solving hunger, we’d disincentive meat and dairy production and incentivize high nutritious vegetarian production.
When we’re dumping corn into salmon feed, sugars, and vehicle fuel, I can’t fall for the idea that food is constrained by supply.
The cause of starvation is lack of food available at a given price point.
Producers make production efficient to capture more of the market at the lower price points on the demand curve. There aren’t enough rich people to pay for thick margins at a large scale in the food industry. The only ones with large margins are the organic farmers selling to rich people.
Growth hormones exist to make chicken much faster, which means much cheaper chicken for consumers and to make the chicken raisers more money. If it weren’t cheaper, people wouldn’t buy more of it and it likely wouldn’t be worth the investment.
Here’s a thought exercise, why do you think sellers of factory chickens outsell free range chickens by orders of magnitude? If the only difference was margin and not price, nobody would buy the factory stuff.
Nobody is starving who is able to buy food on the world market. People starve in Yemen because there are guys with AK47s between them and the nearest functional port.
How do you know that it is food related in itself? It is a common area of anxiety but I don't think much has stood up to statistical scrutiny - otherwise they'd start to see far more significant differences from differing lifestyles and diets.
There are many possible culprits from gut bacteria to hygiene hypothesis of an overactive immune system going after anything that remotely looks the part due to having evolved in filthier environments and being evolutionary "calibrated" to be overactive by default because parasites immunosuppress.
> How do you know that it is food related in itself?
I don't know that for sure. It's simply my suspicion as a mostly layperson that has spent years researching and experimenting on myself through various diets, everything from SAD (Standard American Diet) to Paleo, AIP, Carnivore, Keto, etc. I notice a huge difference in the way I feel based on how I'm eating.
>Allergies to common foods are increasing rapidly as well
Is there a list of stats for incidence of food allergies? It seems many friends I know (in EU) have food allergies to things like cucumber, hazel, peanuts, also gluten (celiax or something). One person I know has Crohn's disease. I would be curious to see the stats in both US and EU to see if it's really linked to a region's food. Or if it's just that common diets across the world are causing it.
Edit: or a third possibility is that rates haven't changed at all and it could be increase in either reporting or population making it seem like it's more commom now than before.
The stats that I've seen were at my allergist's office, so unfortunately I don't have a link. I'll definitely look for one tho.
What you say is very interesting. Cucumber (like citrus) was also not something that people really had allergies to until recently (or possibly your third possibility kicks in here). Peanuts and gluten have skyrocketed recently too.
Maybe off topic, but I read an interesting theory regarding the use of GMOs to explain this. The logic went basically like this:
Plants were genetically modified to be resistant to herbicides -> farmers began spraying fields indiscriminately, knowing that the plants they cared about wouldn't die, but the weeds would, therefore producing bumper crops much more regularly -> This led to one of two possibilities: 1. the chemicals are being consumed in unsafe quantities by humans now when they eat those plants or 2. the mutations that hardened the plants changed their protein structure such that they are less digestible, which leads to intestinal damage, which promotes intestinal permeability, which leads to food allergies to foods not previously a problem.
I wonder if the citrus is that the land were the groves are farmed has been saturated year after year with pesticides. In addition the fruit is less dense in nutrients, less nutrients in the soil, might lead to the plants trying to use the pesticides in the place of standard nutrients? Very wild hypothesis
As a European I'm interested in knowing what most Americans thinks about this (their food has additives that is forbidden in Europe).
Is there a feeling of Europeans being too cautious or would you like to have the same rules?
Having lived in both places for extended periods and observing that it's mostly America that has an alarming obesity problem, I think there is something to be said for simple foods that come out of the ground and aren't highly processed with chemicals. It's only a suspicion and I don't have proof. But even most of the packaged foods in Europe have a much simpler list of ingredients, all stuff you would recognize as basic ingredients you use at home.
I think you will find both reactions here in the United States. I am strongly of the opinion that we have too many food additives and things like antibiotics in meat. I'm not alone in this. I know a lot of people on the other hand who hear phrases like "EU regulation" and as a knee-jerk reaction start rolling their eyes and mocking Europe and/or the concept of government. I guess short of that, you have people on this thread arguing that the specific additives are not a problem.
The perception I'm aware of is that it is mixed in sensibility from early bans of carcinogenic while also including frustratingly absurd junk science bans and luddite paranoia over GMOs pushed by absurdly protectionist farmers who literally would riot over their neighbors one kilometer from the province border being given the right to use a name for identical food stuffs despite the climate and soil being identical - the whole division was literally political since ancient times.
The bit with dyes on kid focus issues for instance. That doesn't sound like a health effect - it sounds like kids being excited over bright colors as they are prone to be! It seems to fit so well with the suggestion bias of thinking kids were more hyperactive when they were given candy.
At least some of the bans seem overly cautious. For example looking at the first item on the list, KBrO3 aka potassium bromate used as a flour additive. KBrO3 is a demonstrated carcinogen but it converts almost completely to KBr during the baking process. Straight from the paper[1] that seems to have been the basis of the ban, "adverse effects are not evident in animals fed bread-based diets made from flour treated with KBrO3".
Lots of people eat raw dough. Licking the beaters is a tradition. If it's carcinogenic when uncooked, that really should have a warning so that people can ensure they prepare it properly. Though, apparently I don't need to worry about that, because it's banned in Canada.
The lowest dose found to have any effect in rats would be equivalent to eating ~5kg of uncooked flour per day, every day. I do not think many people eat anything remotely close to that amount of raw dough.
In isolation, sure. How many of these little doses of toxins from hundreds of food additives does it take before the diet as a whole is toxic enough to have an adverse effect? Is anyone even watching the combinations found in typical diets?
I kind of don't care. I don't think a lot about what's in what I eat beyond avoiding carbs and starch.
I prefer the way you order steaks in, at least, Holland and Switzerland. The steak comes with nothing - which is almost always what I want. In the US I have to explicitly ask for no potatoes, for instance.
If the bans are supported by reproducible, peer-reviewed science, then I obviously support them. But if the ban is a result of “possibility” as opposed to “proven,” then I feel that food bans have a way of becoming less about public health and more about politics. Grilled meat has carcinogens, but to actually get cancer from grilled meat, one would have to eat a hundred pounds a day (or some absurd equivalent.) I realize that grilled meat isn’t banned, but my point is, any substance can be harmful in large enough quantities and concentrations, but Europe bans some things that would have to be consumed in unlikely quantities before they’d be “harmful.”
There is a lot of “people have more allergies/obsessing/whatever than the old days,” and the assumption is that it’s because of the food, without actual science proving that’s the case; it’s just a hypothesis that doesn’t necessarily account for thousands of other variables.
People have more allergies now than they used to. Could that not be caused by more electromagnetic radiation? More TV watching? Typing more?
I would love to if the US had the same food quality laws that European countries have. By HN standards, I'm a right wing nutcase and am in favor of as small a government as we can stand, but our food is killing us.
Bread has sugar in it. If you want bread without sugar in it, you must either pay more for the organic stuff or make it yourself. If you want bread without any additives or preservatives at all, you must buy your wheat from outside the country. Wheat in the US is fortified with iron and vitamin B by law.
There's probably some room for slower digestion and absorption to matter, but calorie availability and density is likely the bigger problem then the exact nature of the calories.
Sugar is in pretty much all bread. It's a matter of quantity.
I bake all my own bread. I use one level teaspoon of caster sugar in warm water to get the yeast going. You can add a bit more to get a harder crust on the bread. But this is so little, and it mostly gets used by the yeast, so that it has negligible effect upon the taste. Salt makes a vastly bigger difference.
I understand that much mass-produced bread in the US has greatly larger quantities of sugar in it. In the UK, this is only seen in "long-life" bread (which tastes terrible, and I don't know of anyone who buys it).
pretty sure sugar it's basic ingredient to make bread even in Europe to help yeast in warm water by my small experience with baking bread and going through tons of recipes
In Europe, the food industry can legally apply lots of food-altering measures from a large bag of tricks. To name a few: Foaming up stuff, adding water to add weight; using cheap low quality substitutes; removing bitter ingredients from decaying fruit by "steam-cleaning"; enzymes in the bread dough ...
In 2018 or 2017 they removed the import ban for high fructose corn syrup from the USA into the EU. Now HFCS making its way into many supermarket products.
Super interesting, did not know this and looked it up (I'm a Swede). Washing eggs is NOT illegal in the EU (at least in Sweden) if your washing them at a certified plant. Washing them the wrong way can spread bacteria through the shell of the egg. So a farmer without the certified plant is not allowed to wash the eggs.
Washed eggs are marked as washed to the consumer and all eggs I've ever bought in stores here have been washed.
Horse meat, anything deemed unsanitary like haggis (edit: think like scottish-made haggis, meaning containing "unsanitary parts" like lung), unpasteurized milk (though some states override this). I think banana tree oil and sassafras oil are allowed in EU as well but are banned in US due to links to cancer.
Interesting, never knew there was a difference. Just looked it up: in EU chickens are vaccinated against salmonella and the US not. But cleaning them does make the eggs vulnerable due to removing the outer protective layer. Hence they need to be refrigerated. Still strange though every fridge I know comes with a egg basket though nobody I know in the Netherlands puts their eggs in the fridge.
The text before your quote is "since we cannot import haggis to the US our haggis for the US market is made in Bangor Maine" and the text immediately after is "all haggis made in the US except our haggis links is in an artificial casing".
In other words, you pointed to a source which confirms that it is possible to make and sell haggis domestically in the US.
> That's not completely true. While it is banned for consumption, Indian cooking and more recently, American cooking, has begun using mustard oil
How is it untrue? The chefs in that article are (technically illegally) using massage oil with a required "for external use only" warning label, because that is "the only use for which it is legally approved in the United States."
Raw milk cheese is not banned in the US, in fact it has a specific exemption in the federal law regarding unpasteurized milk. Further, those laws only apply to transportation across states, so you can legally buy raw milk within most (all?) states.
> For now, these are the states that allow the sale of raw milk at retail stores: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah, and Vermont
There are two types of Kinder Eggs: Kinder Surprise[1] and Kinder Joy[2]. Kinder Surprise is banned in the US because it contains "non-nutritive objects" inside the egg. Kinder Joy packs the toy separately and has been sold in the US since 2017.
I bought one the other day. It turns out the US kinder egg is nothing like the EU one. The EU one is a chocolate shell containing a plastic package with a toy in it. the US one is two halves, one with a toy, and the other containing a (white-chocoate?) fondant with 2 hazelnut-chocolate balls in it. It was pretty bad and I threw it out after trying it.
My apologies, where I come from, the UK, Kinder Egg is colloquially used in place of Kinder Surprise. It wasn't until a week ago, after decades of only knowing one type of Kinder Egg, that I came across Kinder Joy.
I've just seen on the Kinder Surprise Wikipedia page.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinder_Surprise the very first line "Kinder Surprise, also known as Kinder Egg"
So, none of the things banned or severely restricted by the EU are actually proven to be harmful.
I'm not sure if I prefer the more liberal approach by the US or the more conservative one by the EU. In general I'm in favor of only banning things when they're proven to cause harm, so innovation is not stifled because of some nonsense hysteria.
Since this is concerning my health though, I'm really unsure.
That’s a hoax. China does not have a problem with fake eggs made from plastic. Chicken and eggs are a staple of Chinese diet, and both incredibly cheap and plentiful throughout the country.
Your comment is a health hazard. Monsodium glutamate is simply the salt form of the glutamate amino acid (Glu), an amino acid found in virtually every protein or meat that you eat.
MSG is not a health hazard. That’s a myth unfounded by science, often associated with the placebo “Chinese restaurant syndrome”. MSG occurs naturally in all sorts of things, seaweed, celery, meats, etc.
Is it really? Most of the things I’ve read say that there isn’t any evidence showing it causes long-lasting problems. Are there studies that show consumption (not injections) of MSG cause health issues beyond what sodium causes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Karel_Van_Noppen