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

gov.ca.gov

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

#171

Post by chithanh »

KempyKolibri wrote: post #166
chithanh wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”?

No. What I say is if we introduce a public health policy, then we need to take human behavior and adherence rates into account.

Example: Abstinence is 100% effective against STDs and teenage pregnancy in any controlled setting. That does not make it a good public health policy to tell teenagers to abstain from having sex. In fact despite condoms having lower efficacy than abstinence, teaching people the proper use of condoms is overall more effective.

If we want to solve obesity then randomly adding/substituting artificial sweeteners to human food will not work. Instead we need to reduce access to hyperpalatable foods, which can be done through economic means (e.g. taxes).

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

#172

Post by chneu »

KempyKolibri wrote: post #119

There’s an excellent discussion of the most recent RCT on UPF foods with its author here ( https://sigmanutrition.com/episode577/ ). Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time. Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view tha…

Be aware that the science on this is evolving pretty quickly.

A study came out recently that showed when folks ate a designed diet, one with and one without UPFs, they found the UPF diets resulted in a few additional lbs of weight gain.

The study accounted for a ton of variables. It showed that UPF calories lead to weight gain when consuming the same number of unprocessed calories.

https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...

I think, at the current moment, there is enough evidence to support guidelines to avoid UPFs for the most part. Idk about banning but I do think it'll eventually get there, at least in schools. But who knows? American lunches are garbage in the first place

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

#173

Post by chneu »

reorder9695 wrote: post #101
forinti wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One rule that's easy to verify is: would you have all the ingredients at home? UPFs usually have ingredients you've never seen for sale.

How do we define what food is ultra processed though? Do we need "cake (commercial)" and "cake (home baked)" as I can bake a cake with all the standard stuff I have at home, but commercial cakes are usually chock full of E numbers. Another example would be like a jar of pasta sauce and a pasta sauce I've made, I don't think it's arguable that a pasta sauce I've made is ultra processed. Like that definition doesn't se…

You're fixating on a singular definition.

A homemade cake is minimally processed. The flour and sugar are processed but nothing that heavily alters it.

A commercial cake on the other hand has stabilizers, ph balancers, etc.

You're over thinking it. Almost nothing made at home is ultra processed unless you're doing some weird sausage making. If you can name the ingredients easily, it probably isn't ultra processed.

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

#174

Post by chneu »

adammarples wrote: post #168
kome wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except a lot of evidence suggests that the foods we eat nowadays cause more weight gain than before industrialization.

Two people can eat the same number of calories, but if one of them is slamming UPFs they will gain more weight.

Additionally, UPFs do not satiate hunger like more natural foods. Meaning people can eat more UPFs than more natural foods before feeling full.

There are absolutely industrial ingredients we should be banning in the US that other countries have rightfully banned.

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

#175

Post by chneu »

actionfromafar wrote: post #25
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…

Japan eats a lot healthier too. Carbs as a number is not everything.

Something like 7% of Americans eat enough fiber on a daily basis. Also something like 45% of calories consumed in the US are ultra-processed now.

That tells a huge story.

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

#176

Post by zjzjzxkx »

KempyKolibri wrote: post #160
zjzjzxkx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tons of salt Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries. > refined flower Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries. > soya lecithins Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits v…

Let’s do this one at a time, starting with salt. What’s your goalpost for evidence here, I.e. what would it take to convince you that salt consumption above the levels indicated in dietary guidelines is harmful?

[dead]

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

#177

Post by ninkendo »

hgomersall wrote: post #155
ninkendo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it's about processing What’s “processing”? > The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything. > N…

Processing is defined in the legislation. By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens. Fancy means something that doesn't fulfill that definition. The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens. The idea that we can pro…

> Processing is defined in the legislation

The whole discussion here is how the legislation's definition is lacking, because it excludes otherwise perfectly healthy foods.

You tried to clarify it by saying "it's about processing", and when pressed, said the definition is what the legislation says it is.

You see how this is circular?

> By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens

I have MSG in my kitchen. Does that make it ok then? An "ultra-processed" food becomes "ok" if people just... see it more often?

This is exactly the sort of blanket BS the OP was talking about.

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

#178

Post by johaugum »

donatj wrote: post #57
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So ... flour? If used as a thickener, perhaps. > Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum? This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se , but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.

> I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it. I would gander you have little to no experience in the kitchen. Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup? Do you eat soup?

I cook all of these on a regular basis, and have done so for 15 years, and I’ve never had Xanthan gum in my house. I wouldn’t even know where to find it in my grocery store.

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

#179

Post by chneu »

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…

You say crime, history says racism.

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

#180

Post by hgomersall »

ninkendo wrote: post #177
hgomersall wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processing is defined in the legislation. By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens. Fancy means something that doesn't fulfill that definition. The point of anti UPF sentiment isn't to be healthy per se, but to remove the disconnect between food as most people understand it and we evolved to handle and what is typically produced in industrial kitchens. The idea that we can pro…

> Processing is defined in the legislation The whole discussion here is how the legislation's definition is lacking, because it excludes otherwise perfectly healthy foods. You tried to clarify it by saying "it's about processing", and when pressed, said the definition is what the legislation says it is. You see how this is circular? > By and large it's ingredients most people use and recognise in their own kitchens I…

We really are not in a good position to assert what foods are "healthy" and which are not. Many long held views on things like saturated fat simply don't hold up when you view the ingredients in isolation. Research on health factors related to food is incredibly difficult to do.

That said, we can look at proxies like "what do healthy people tend to eat more of?", and the clear evidence is that people that are healthy by and large have diets that are low in UPFs and high in home prepared food. Of course, this could be a correlation, but until we have this properly established, the precautionary principle would be that we shouldn't eat too much in the way of UPFs, because that necessarily also implies food prepared and cooked in a way we know to be correlated with health. We certainly shouldn't be pushing it on our children.

There's no circularity. You asked me what processing meant and I said what it says in the legislation, which is pretty similar to the Nova classification. That definition was used because it's broadly useful without being overly restrictive.

By all means use MSG - nobody is stopping you. But there's a good hypothesis that MSG is problematic precisely because it is one thread of hyper-palatable food. Of course soy sauce or miso contain plenty of MSG (or at least a close analogue), but they also tend to influence flavour so are hard to use to excess; they also cost more so there's an cost pressure to limit excessive use.

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