At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle and the naturalist fallacy. I'm fine with people being squicked out by food additives that are products of petroleum chemistry, like benzaldehyde. You can get carrageenan simply by rehydrating and simmering seaweed and then filtering it through cheesecloth.
Whatever else is going on with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt, the carrageenan itself isn't doing anything to drive the health problems this speaker is talking about.
This is actually I think a really good illustration of the problem. There is absolutely a (primarily message-board-driven) literature of concerns about specific variants of carrageenan. But those concerns --- which I don't think are well-founded --- have nothing to do with the wave of concern about "UPFs" generally. The UPF thing isn't about IBD (some think kappa carrageenan exacerbates intestinal inflammation with susceptible people) --- it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
> At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle
Is there something wrong with the precautionary principle? It would be one thing if the supposed benefit was something really incredible, like extending lifespan or curing cancer. Then maybe we should be less cautious. But we're talking about adding something to your ice cream to make it look nice for longer.
> it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
I'm not advocating anyone eat tons of sugar, but sugar consumption and the obesity epidemic are not very well correlated. I would agree that we should eliminate "hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food", but if you were to hypothetically ban basically all non-salt/sugar preservatives, stability agents, flavor enhancers, colors etc. then you almost eliminate this entire product category, because it's no longer practical to produce and sell, easy to consume, or as marketable. Even banning corn syrup in packaged food (as a UPF ingredient) would be a positive move because forcing its replacement by cane sugar (regardless of whatever alleged health problem HFCS s may or may not have) would mean that such products become less economically viable, because its more expensive and less stable.
> the naturalist fallacy.
The naturalistic "fallacy" is approximately true for diets. We are animals that evolved in a way that optimized for the consumption of various foods in our environments. We're some of the most wildly complex chemical systems in the world, and we have remarkably broadly adapted digestive systems with a pretty good tolerance, so you can get away with throwing a lot of stuff down the pipe without anything bad happening. But that's exactly why "eat the same foods people always have and not bizarre lab concoctions" is a useful heuristic for health. It's entirely possible that various additives are perfectly fine or even pro-health, but it's not the way to bet as a general principle, and it's impractical to conduct meaningful long-term nutritional studies to find out with any real assurance.
If you believe that about the naturalistic fallacy, you should be fine with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt; the carrageenan is arguably more "natural" than the yogurt.
But all this just shows to go you: this whole "UPF" thing is a sort of motte and bailey deal. We all broadly agree that packaged hyperpalatable low-satiety foods (along with liquid calories) are a danger to human health; that's the motte. The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
The right food classification scheme wouldn't have this problem, and wouldn't be a way for people to smuggle in proscriptions against sodium citrate or transglutaminase while coming up with "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
> The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
In my case, I'm arguing that doing away with these things, regardless of any health effects they may have, has the effect of eliminating the entire class of foods you have a problem with.
> "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
I'm not arguing that people should drink coke (which is full of all kinds of stuff besides HFCS I doubt people should be consuming), but the obesity epidemic is not well-correlated to soft drink consumption. The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
My point is that you're arguing for something far outside of the mainstream, but the "UPF" framing makes it hard to tell; it sounds at first like you're saying we should stop subsidizing Takis (fair enough!) but in reality you're also saying all the yogurt needs to be reformulated (not gonna happen). I'm not trying to engage with your theory of health; I'm trying to establish that the UPF thing has Prop 65 vibes.
The Prop 65 people make a lot of the same arguments you are --- most especially that we should more formally adopt the precautionary principle. Which is why you get cancer warning labels on bags of organic sweet potato sticks. And so nobody takes those labels seriously anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Yes, there's a large difference in water weight. That database says 100g of potato chips has 1.86g of water, while 100g of baked potatoes has ~75g of water.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Right, I didn’t make any argument that the hexane used in rapeseed processing is dangerous. Just that those factors are obviously indications it’s a highly processed food.
> Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?
We wouldn’t, and nowhere did I suggest that. Just that it’s probably a good idea to eliminate all these highly processed food items. Maybe they’re fine but the main thing they’re fine for is big food manufacturer conglomerates. If you don’t think UPFs are themselves the problem, that’s fine: getting rid of them gets rid of all these low-satiety calorie dense foods, including potato chips, unless you make them much more expensive because you’re cooking them with lard or something. Which in turn still reduces consumption.
>The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
I'm curious about this. Do you have a reference for this? What is in decline specifically? Number of people drinking sugary soda? Number of sugary sodas consumed per person (on average)? Amount of sugar consumed by drinking sugary soda? I'm curious because it seems the amount of sugar per can of soda has drastically increased since the 90's. If my memory serves me well, a can of soda 20 years ago was like 26g of sugar, today they're like 53 g per soda. At least in the United States.
I don't think your memory is serving you very well. A 12oz can of Coca-Cola contains 39g of sugar, which hasn't changed in a long time. (Some people claim that switching the sugar from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup had harmful effects but there's little evidence for that.) Other brands have a little more or less sugar but that's probably the one most commonly consumed.
Sugar consumption per capita has been trending up slightly in the last few years. But ironically it was actually higher back in the 1970s when the population was less obese.
Whatever else is going on with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt, the carrageenan itself isn't doing anything to drive the health problems this speaker is talking about.
This is actually I think a really good illustration of the problem. There is absolutely a (primarily message-board-driven) literature of concerns about specific variants of carrageenan. But those concerns --- which I don't think are well-founded --- have nothing to do with the wave of concern about "UPFs" generally. The UPF thing isn't about IBD (some think kappa carrageenan exacerbates intestinal inflammation with susceptible people) --- it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.