[Amezarak]

> The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.

In my case, I'm arguing that doing away with these things, regardless of any health effects they may have, has the effect of eliminating the entire class of foods you have a problem with.

> "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.

I'm not arguing that people should drink coke (which is full of all kinds of stuff besides HFCS I doubt people should be consuming), but the obesity epidemic is not well-correlated to soft drink consumption. The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.

[tptacek]

My point is that you're arguing for something far outside of the mainstream, but the "UPF" framing makes it hard to tell; it sounds at first like you're saying we should stop subsidizing Takis (fair enough!) but in reality you're also saying all the yogurt needs to be reformulated (not gonna happen). I'm not trying to engage with your theory of health; I'm trying to establish that the UPF thing has Prop 65 vibes.

The Prop 65 people make a lot of the same arguments you are --- most especially that we should more formally adopt the precautionary principle. Which is why you get cancer warning labels on bags of organic sweet potato sticks. And so nobody takes those labels seriously anymore.

[Amezarak]

OK, so how do you propose we reduce consumption of "packaged hyperpalatable low-satiety foods"?

I thought making them practically unviable was a good route to take.

> but in reality you're also saying all the yogurt needs to be reformulated (not gonna happen).

It's not "all yogurt" and nobody asked whether we should reformulate it the first time.

[UncleMeat]

But bans on UPF wouldn't actually do that. Potato chips aren't ultraprocessed, but they sure seem like hyperpalatable low-satiety foods. Pastrami is ultraprocessed but doesn't seem like it is any more hyperpalatable or low-satiety than roast beef.

[Amezarak]

Almost all potato chips are UPF. Even the ones that aren’t so bad would be much more expensive if they had to be fried in olive oil or lard instead of UPF ingredients like canola oil.

[tptacek]

100% of potato chips are bad for you. 0% of unsweetened yogurts are bad for you. You're defending a scheme that labels some of those yogurts as unhealthy, and some of the potato chips as healthy. Extremely simple issue.

[Amezarak]

I’m skeptical that thinly sliced potatoes crisped in olive oil are bad for you.

I don’t believe unsweetened yogurt is bad either, although some people would say so because of the saturated fat content. Certainly very few people are going to eat any real amount of unsweetened yogurt, except perhaps as a dip.

[UncleMeat]

It is weird to me that the boundary between seed oil panic and upf panic appears to be so fuzzy.

The nova classification has canola oil as Group 2, by the way.

[Amezarak]

Canola oil:

- is made from a plant historically considered inedible

- has a very high input:output ratio

- often has extensive processing steps that include industrial solvents like hexane and deodorization steps to make the end product tolerable

If that’s not a UPF then I would not regard that definition as useful.

Personally I don’t hold to any particular “seed oil” claims, but vegetable oils are a major ingredient in almost all UPFs, are very calorie dense, and canola/soybean oil have risen from near-zero to be one of if not the largest calorie source for Westerners in just the past few decades; canola oil was not even consumed before the 1970s. They would certainly be one of my main suspects in the obesity epidemic.

It’s certainly true to talk about how bad chips are we’re talking about what makes them so high calorie is the oil.

[jrs235]

>The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.

I'm curious about this. Do you have a reference for this? What is in decline specifically? Number of people drinking sugary soda? Number of sugary sodas consumed per person (on average)? Amount of sugar consumed by drinking sugary soda? I'm curious because it seems the amount of sugar per can of soda has drastically increased since the 90's. If my memory serves me well, a can of soda 20 years ago was like 26g of sugar, today they're like 53 g per soda. At least in the United States.

[nradov]

I don't think your memory is serving you very well. A 12oz can of Coca-Cola contains 39g of sugar, which hasn't changed in a long time. (Some people claim that switching the sugar from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup had harmful effects but there's little evidence for that.) Other brands have a little more or less sugar but that's probably the one most commonly consumed.

https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/faq/ingredients

Sugar consumption per capita has been trending up slightly in the last few years. But ironically it was actually higher back in the 1970s when the population was less obese.

https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/sugar-consumption-pe...

[Amezarak]

Gallons of soda per capita.

I think what you're observing is larger cans and bottles are available now. I haven't seen an increase.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-drinking-way-less-s...