[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.

[tptacek]

I mean, at the point where you're arguing that fried potato chips are healthy, I think we've kind of established the poles of the argument and can leave it there.

[Amezarak]

I think if you don’t feel the need to explain, then you’re probably right.

Is it better if I drizzled the same amount of olive oil, on a baked potato instead? Is this about the potential problems of heating oils or something else? Are you just one of the people who believe carbohydrates are the cause of the obesity epidemic? And therefore chips are bad because of the carb content while unsweetened yogurt would be fine?

[aw1621107]

> Is it better if I drizzled the same amount of olive oil, on a baked potato instead?

"Drizzled" might be a bit difficult to do for the amount of olive oil you'd need. For example, the USDA FNDDS database says 100g of plain potato chips has ~34g of fat and ~54g of carbs [0]. 100g of a plain baked potato (with presumably nothing added), on the other hand, has approximately no fat and ~21g of carbs [1], though to be fair 100g is probably not what you're eating; the database lists a medium baked potato as 285g and a large at 400g.

[0]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2709422/nutrients

[1]: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2709383/nutrients

[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.

[UncleMeat]

You can take that up with the nova classification I guess. And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.

In another comment you say that chips fried in olive oil would be healthy. But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.

[Amezarak]

> And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.

Maybe we have different definitions of "seed oils" or "panic claims". Nothing I said is controversial: canola oil as food did not exist before the 1970s, the standard method of creating canola oil involves crushing a massive amount of canola and then using a solvent like hexane to maximize extraction, vegetable oils are one of the primary sources for 21st century calories and are hugely present in UPFs.

I would consider a "panic claim" to be something like "seed oils cause cancer", "seed oils cause heart attacks", "seed oils cause inflammation", "the hexane in canola is poisoning people", or even "seed oils are definitely responsible for the obesity epidemic", etc. I am sure there is (limited) evidence for these claims, and that's fine: it's nearly impossible to get high-quality nutritional research showing long-term dietary impacts because of the nature of the problem. What do you do? Interviews are unreliable, you can't feed people controlled diets for a lifetime, population/consumption studies are beset by thousands of confounders. Thus, I don't have any reason to place a lot of belief in any study saying "seed oils bad!"; some other study explaining how they're great is just as likely to be true, in my mind.

All I can go by is the simple heuristic I explained earlier.

> But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.

Because I don't think calories are likely to be the real explanation behind the public health problems. Every food item, even 100% unprocessed, has all sorts of pharmacological side effects besides turning into cellular fuel. Most of them are very subtle, have different effects in different populations, etc. Most people have had access to plentiful high-calorie low-satiety foods for a long time and this didn't happen. Perhaps the "hyperpalatable" part is involved, but lots of sugary and high-fat treats fall into this category and we still didn't have this problem. What we didn't have was modern UPFs or vegetable oils. So if the cause is dietary, it seems reasonable to look in askance at these, and it's obvious that we don't "need" flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and the various preservatives we now have except to enhance the profitability of Kraft and General Mills. My second point was that this would have the side effect of rendering uneconomical or unpalatable whole categories of products that presumably tptacek does have a problem with, even if he doesn't align with the reason for doing so. So if he thinks chips are a public health menace, this makes them rarer and more expensive.

[UncleMeat]

We did not consume canola oil prior to the 70s. I do not understand why this should carry nutritional information.

Hexane is used to extract oil from rapeseeds. This sounds spooky but is pretty deeply studied. It does not appear to make its way into our bodies at measurable levels.

"Well it must be something so why not canola oil" is not the right way to approach this problem, in my opinion. The swap to include "flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and preservatives" (none of which are are canola oil) is also odd here. Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?