California passes law to ban ultra-processed foods from school lunches • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by agobineau » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:20 PM UTC

hellotheretoday wrote: post #21

kome wrote: post #10

Americans need to get their act together, about food, but not only. 40.3% of American adults are obese (not overweight), against the 17% in the EU. Sport won't fix that, food will.

Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especiall…

most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits

the only places that dont need to build suburbs with 10 mile buffer zones from other people are cities like SF and NY that exclude people via rent prices or other place like alaska, obvious reasons

i have had (white) frends visit LA/hollywood and get arrested for walking on sidewalk, taken to local police station and told yes this is for your own safety, you are free to go but do not walk around here

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

#162

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:20 PM UTC

schrectacular wrote: post #113

I always thought it was a travesty that the "chefs" at my schools were just heating up junk food. It's the perfect place to achieve the economies of scale to produce whole-foods-based meals. But yet no 'real' food - dishes made from raw meat and raw vegetables that are processed in-house - was ever produced. I honestly don't think this will change in my lifetime. It's too much work and it feels like working hard, esp…

I work at Google. We have cafeterias with real food. There are videos on youtube fawning over how cafeteria staff are able to tackle this logistical challenge of serving high quality food to so many people each day. "Wow you have such amazing food there" is a selling point. People take their friends to have a meal at work to show off.

This responsibility is roughly identical to the responsibility that cafeteria staff have. Feeding meals to hundreds of kids is not any different from feeding meals to hundreds of adults. Yet cafeteria staff are, like you say, treated as garbage and uncreative jobs. So of course nobody who is passionate about food production decides to work in a school cafeteria.

Money solves this (plus society giving a shit about the flourishing of children). That's the long and short of the story. Decide that school lunch is not just about meeting minimum nutritional standards and make it about the joy of serving and eating food. Vastly increase pay for cafeteria staff, increase their autonomy to produce meals, and increase their budget for ingredients.

Everything else is putting lipstick on a pig. Further constraints on acceptable ingredients or macro and micro nutritional breakdowns will just force the cost optimization to some other unwanted state.

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

#163

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:24 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #81

donatj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours argument is coming from just a place of science denialism. Industry powers do not negate simple science. Come to me with scientific evidence and not fear mongering, and then we can talk on an equal field.

Isn't the overwhelmingly obese American population scientific evidence enough?

Is it any more evidence for ultra processing being the problem than the last N food panics? Obesity was high when the story was "high fat foods are the problem" too.

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

#164

Post by UncleMeat » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:27 PM UTC

agobineau wrote: post #161

hellotheretoday wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diet is part of the problem but a big part of the issue is the inherent sedentary lifestyle associated with American infrastructure and suburban development. If you design tons of housing in a way that encourages people to utilize cars as much as possible, invest as little as possible into infrastructure like public sidewalks and bike lanes, etc then don’t be shocked when your populace becomes fat and lazy, especiall…

most of the sedentary lifestyle of the US is intentionally done, as a silently understood truth, to avoid violent crime without getting caught by title vii lawsuits the only places that dont need to build suburbs with 10 mile buffer zones from other people are cities like SF and NY that exclude people via rent prices or other place like alaska, obvious reasons i have had (white) frends visit LA/hollywood and get arre…

It is the case that we've structured things like suburbs around avoiding something that frightens much of American society, but it isn't violent crime.

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

#165

Post by chithanh » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:32 PM UTC

KempyKolibri wrote: post #157

chithanh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence actually suggests that soft drink consumption is equally associated with higher all-cause mortality and artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened. Even when controlling for smoking status, BMI, physical activity, and alcohol consumption. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478 It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic f…

You have to be very specific in the intervention you’re either looking at in an RCT or modelling in a prospective cohort study. We wouldn’t expect adding NNSs to a diet to improve much ( perhaps some benefit from carbonated ones on body mass). We need to investigate/model replacement of SSBs with NNSs. When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that…

Yes, replacement can work to adjust weight trends in a controlled setting.

But all empirical observations so far show that artificial sweeteners in people's diets do not have the desired effect when people's food and beverage intake is uncontrolled.

In fact results from animal studies are that you can even substitute part of the feed with just the artificial sweetener to achieve the same body mass gain. And this is known since 1960s with Cyclamate and rats: https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

More studies in the meantime varied a bit on the size of the effect, and some were inconclusive, but generally the results held up.

So no, artificial sweeteners do not help to manage weight. What the studies actually show is that controlling people's intake does.

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

#166

Post by KempyKolibri » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:41 PM UTC

chithanh wrote: post #165

KempyKolibri wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be very specific in the intervention you’re either looking at in an RCT or modelling in a prospective cohort study. We wouldn’t expect adding NNSs to a diet to improve much ( perhaps some benefit from carbonated ones on body mass). We need to investigate/model replacement of SSBs with NNSs. When we do that we pretty consistently see benefits. Good overview as a response to the WHO position paper here that…

Yes, replacement can work to adjust weight trends in a controlled setting. But all empirical observations so far show that artificial sweeteners in people's diets do not have the desired effect when people's food and beverage intake is uncontrolled. In fact results from animal studies are that you can even substitute part of the feed with just the artificial sweetener to achieve the same body mass gain. And this is k…

Let me get this straight: your epistemic framework is such that when presented with RCTs in humans showing positive effects, observational studies in humans showing null findings (likely because of poor adjustment models) and negative associations in rats, we should conclude “artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened”?

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

#167

Post by kelipso » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:43 PM UTC

vjk800 wrote: post #141

kome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an annoying question. When you add industrial chemicals, yes, it's ultra processed. If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food. But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dex…

Are all of these ingredients equally harmful? If not, why not just ban or restrict the ones that are harmful and keep using the rest of them? It's sort of weird to bundle a lot of very different types of chemicals under the same term.

These novel ingredients keep getting banned for negative health issues like causing cancer, new variants keep getting introduced to the public, the new variants keep getting banned doe being harmful, repeat ad infinitum.

The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.

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

#168

Post by adammarples » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:44 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #54

donatj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering. Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish. The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no r…

sure, it's all nature. and then wonder why you get 50% of the population morbidly obese... you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.

The population is obese because they eat too many calories and they will not stop. Arbitrarily banning foods because they are not "normal" doesn't prevent this. Butter is OK, cream is OK, sugar is OK. When sugar takes a slightly different form it's "not normal" so banning it will make everyone thin again.

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

#169

Post by josefresco » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:47 PM UTC

kome wrote: post #10

Americans need to get their act together, about food, but not only. 40.3% of American adults are obese (not overweight), against the 17% in the EU. Sport won't fix that, food will.

US today, EU tomorrow.

EU obesity has increased by 138% across the broader WHO European Region since 1975, with rates rising 21% between 2006 and 2016 alone.

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

#170

Post by chneu » Thu, Oct 09, 2025, 12:48 PM UTC

schrectacular wrote: post #113

I always thought it was a travesty that the "chefs" at my schools were just heating up junk food. It's the perfect place to achieve the economies of scale to produce whole-foods-based meals. But yet no 'real' food - dishes made from raw meat and raw vegetables that are processed in-house - was ever produced. I honestly don't think this will change in my lifetime. It's too much work and it feels like working hard, esp…

School lunches are designed by the state or admin.

Cooks have absolutely no say in what they cook or really how they cook it.

It's Sysco food.