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

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

#251

Post by hshdhdhehd »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #217
gusgus01 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

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

#252

Post by KempyKolibri »

lithocarpus wrote: post #247
KempyKolibri wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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?

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

#253

Post by contrarian1234 »

chithanh wrote: post #91
contrarian1234 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 specif…

> (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 far…

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.

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

#254

Post by michaelsshaw »

impish9208 wrote: post #240
michaelsshaw wrote: post #7

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 o…

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.

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

#255

Post by KempyKolibri »

chithanh wrote: post #241
KempyKolibri wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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 nec…

> 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.

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

#256

Post by jjcob »

throwawaymb wrote: post #197
stinkbeetle wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bal…

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

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)

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

#257

Post by chithanh »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #253
chithanh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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 far…

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…

> 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.

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

#258

Post by StackRanker3000 »

chithanh wrote: post #232
StackRanker3000 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 revi…

Thanks! I’ll take a look

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

#259

Post by UncleMeat »

lithocarpus wrote: post #250
UncleMeat wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pot…

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.

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