Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 193 posts

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#141

Post by mathrawka »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #103
roel_v wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about sausage? Because herbs aren't for preservation in sausages. The 'natural' preservative in sausages is celery, which has nitrate, which is then converted to nitrite during curing. 'Biological' sausage makers still do that, because this way they don't have to disclose nitrite additives, althougj their final product has more nitrite than properly dosed regular sausages. I still think there's no rea…

The way sausage is made now is most certainly a modern invention, but nitrates and nitrites are not bad for you, nor toxic, in of itself as a family of chemicals. The problem in the modern industrial world is the use of artificial nitrates and nitrites present outside of plain sodium or potassium nitrite, which thankfully is starting to become more rare again. Also, there is no scientific link between nitrate consump…

What makes you say that all the papers linked here are awfully designed?

https://progressreport.cancer.gov/prevention/nitrate

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#142

Post by sjwright »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #122
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salt is definitely bad for your if you have high blood pressure (can dig up refs if required) and high blood pressure is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Btween 35% and 40% of people have high blood pressure. For them, the consumption of "liberally salted" products is something to be avoided. Statistics from WHO: https://www.who.int/gho/ncd/risk_factors/blood_pressure_prev...

Salt is one of those weird things. The salt studies were years ago, mostly, and haven't fully been redone with modern standards. It isn't that they were fully wrong, but it doesn't always have the ills one is warned about and the amounts of "healthy" salt might vary. Some of those folks with high blood pressure will be helped by a lower salt diet: Some will not and I'm not sure if there are consistent links saying it…

And reducing salt has a devious unintended consequence: encouraging a diet higher in carbohydrates and fructose specifically—almost certainly worse than the salt for most people.

Salt is one of the most effective ways to make healthy low carbohydrate foods (particularly fats and protein) palatable and compete with the sugar, corn and wheat that are so prevalent in unhealthy foods.

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#143

Post by BubRoss »

viburnum wrote: post #75
asdf21 wrote: post #3

Pretty amazing this entire article never mentions trans fats.. which cause approx 500,000 premature deaths worldwide each year. For decades, Original Crisco had four grams of trans fat per tablespoon.

It's insane. Crisco was basically an industrial product disguised as food. It took almost ninety years for science to figure out that trans fats caused heart disease. Whenever somebody tells me how safe a new food product is, I think about how many people were killed by trans fats before anyone knew how bad they were.

Sucralose a potent sweetener in sugar free drinks but was apparently discovered while developing insecticide. The legend goes that the head guy says 'test it' and the assistant thinks he said 'taste it'. Too much sucralose can start to kill gut bacteria for some people. (Take all this with a grain of salt, I don't remember where I got this from)

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#144

Post by BubRoss »

viburnum wrote: post #127
zajio1am wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you have modern approach to health science, you would not notify such long-term effect for any food, so there is no reason to assume any traditional food is more safe w.r.t. such kind of effects.

Nope, pretty sure millions of years of evolution have better equipped humans to eat the wild plants in their environment better than whatever they came up with in a lab yesterday.

Based on what? The Chinese used to chew on cinnabar which they believed to be healthy and give longevity but was toxic, since it is actually mercury sulfide.

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#146

Post by triceratops »

cortesoft wrote: post #130
triceratops wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also true. But arguably it was only possible for those dangers to become known recently. Smoked meats cause cancer. Death by cancer was not so frequent in the past, because fewer people lived long enough to develop cancers that could kill them. Or in other words, they were safe enough at the timescales that people previously operated in. Also, even though the link between smoked meats and cancer is now as incontrover…

Wouldn't that sort of counter your argument that traditional foods would have discovered the dangers over the ages? Traditional foods could have caused cancer and not been detected, according to your own argument.

"they were safe enough at the timescales that people previously operated in."

If you were a peasant in the 1800s expecting to live till 50, sausages and smoked meat would probably _increase_ your life expectancy due to the additional protein. You would also not live long enough, or eat so much of it as to have a significantly higher likelihood of getting cancer.

The context in which those foods are consumed is different today than it used to be. People live longer and consume way more meat (of every kind) than they used to. If you eat smoked meats and fish (and really any other meats) at the same rates as peasants of 200 years ago, I doubt they'll increase your cancer risk by all that much.

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#147

Post by EdwardDiego »

sdiq wrote: post #89

Not being American and unfamiliar with both Crisco (1) and Ram Dass (2), I thought two unrelated but top stories on HN were connected. I somehow thought Chrisco Church (3) that was founded in Kenya by a certain Harry Das was international and what the unconnected stories were about. Poor me. (1) this thread (2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21861986 (3) https://www.nation.co.ke/counties/nairobi/Apostle-Harry-D…

I dislike how you're being downvoted for not being American.

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#148

Post by Retric »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #112
DiabloD3 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they kind of aren't. Northern Europeans used the same techniques that many other cultures used across the globe: remove as much water content as possible, use herbs that have certain bacteria-inhibiting properties that also taste good, apply liberal salt. Everything is some evolution of this. You may wish to provide an example as to what you mean, because I suspect whatever you are referring to is more modern…

Salt is definitely bad for your if you have high blood pressure (can dig up refs if required) and high blood pressure is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. Btween 35% and 40% of people have high blood pressure. For them, the consumption of "liberally salted" products is something to be avoided. Statistics from WHO: https://www.who.int/gho/ncd/risk_factors/blood_pressure_prev...

Based on recent studies salt does not seem to be that bad for you. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...

Anti salt advice from heath organizations has persisted despite a lot of evidence. Even the basic osmotic argument around blood pressure ignores lymph outside of blood vessels containing salt resulting in zero net forces. At most there is a minuscule change in viscosity.

Re: How Crisco Made Americans Believers in Industrial Food

#150

Post by cortesoft »

triceratops wrote: post #146
cortesoft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that sort of counter your argument that traditional foods would have discovered the dangers over the ages? Traditional foods could have caused cancer and not been detected, according to your own argument.

"they were safe enough at the timescales that people previously operated in." If you were a peasant in the 1800s expecting to live till 50, sausages and smoked meat would probably _increase_ your life expectancy due to the additional protein. You would also not live long enough, or eat so much of it as to have a significantly higher likelihood of getting cancer. The context in which those foods are consumed is differ…

Doesn't the point still stand, though, that you can't use historical usage to prove safety currently (given the change in how we eat food and how long we live)?
Post reply on HN