What Is a 'Healthy' Food? The FDA. Wants To Change the Definition.
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What Is a 'Healthy' Food? The FDA. Wants To Change the Definition.
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Crucially, there is currently no limit on added sugars under the current definition -- an omission that the F.D.A. believes is inconsistent with today's nutrition science. "The old rule was really outdated -- you could create any kind of Frankenstein food that met the nutrient criteria and label it as healthy," said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and professor of nutrition at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston. "This is a major advance." The proposed rule, which the agency announced to coincide with Wednesday's White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, introduces a new limit on added sugars -- in general, no more than 2.5 grams per serving, although this can vary depending on the food. It also restricts the amount of sodium to no more than 230 milligrams per serving and provides limits for saturated fat, which can similarly vary depending on the food, the F.D.A. said.
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Good. Their definition has been out of date for literally decades.
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The sugar industry knew this half a century ago when they started gaslighting America into pointing the finger at fat.
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The food pyramid is a ponzi scheme. Also, it's healthful, not healthy.
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A few food items are actually healthy. For example, if you tap on an open mussel shell and it closes up, then it's still healthy.
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Yup.
A really simplified and accurate rule would be: No, over processed packaged food would be "healthy".
Basically if it is sold on the outside perimeters of the store, it is likely to be healthy/healthful.
If it is in the center aisles, is shelf stable at room temperature, it is not.
Beer and frozen veggies, of course...are excluded from the 2nd part there...they are always healthful!!
Especially beer.
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"Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much." -- Michael Pollan
Short, pithy, to the point, and gives guidance without being overly prescriptive.
Thing is, food and nutrition is complicated. Sounds like I can't label table salt as "healthful" because it has too much sodium, even though it's pretty important as an iodine delivery vehicle.
Anyway, you'd hope by now people would understand they need to take any words printed on a food label with, well, a grain of salt. Just because a packet says it's healthful doesn't
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Thing is, food and nutrition is complicated. Sounds like I can't label table salt as "healthful" because it has too much sodium, even though it's pretty important as an iodine delivery vehicle.
Oooh..for the most part, we get enough iodine in normal diet.
I do not use "table salt" to cook with just because it has iodine and I cannot stand the taste it imparts to my food.
I tend to stick with either Kosher Salt or Pink Sea Salt to avoid the iodine.
But other than that, I'm with you on your post.
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by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Friday September 30, 2022 @02:26PM (#62927371)
I wonder how much consensus there will be on any new definition though. It seems like there is a caveat to every rule, so it's hard to keep sight of the main points since they don't cover every case.-
There will be no consensus, because the premise that "healthy" is a meaningful label to have on a food package is flawed to start with.
A healthy diet is about balance. Sanity. It's about habits and context. Any food with this "healthy" label is not going to be healthy if you stuff your face with it, for example. But if it's labelled as healthy, maybe you feel better about it. This kind of label is only useful in facilitating overconsumption. Nothing else.
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The FDA's "definition" has been intentionally wrong, geared towards industry lobbyist profits, since the FDA's inception.
The FDA has consistently steered people away from healthy food, towards grains, starches/sugars, and plant-based solvent oils, and away from healthy fats and proteins.
This is the first time we've seen an exception to the rule, from what I have seen.
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are you new here?
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I don't know if using the word "healthy" affects buying habits as I believe most people are numb to marketing buzzwords. When I read "healthy" on a label my mind usually echoes "bullshit".
The nutrition content labels do affect our food purchases since we have problems with gluten/soy/dairy and salt. We also like to keep sugar to a minimum.
Better product labeling is a definite plus for us. Buzzwords not so much.
I do prefer blue labels over yellow and orange.
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The problem with a single catch-all term like "healthy" is that the very concept depends on the context of who is eating the food. Are you a low-income individual with food insecurity? Well then getting a Chipotle burrito might be considered healthy since it would contain a day's worth of proteins, dairy, carbs and grains. But to an obese individual, that same burrito could be extremely unhealthy.
If you going to run a marathon tomorrow, then a salad that is mostly iceberg lettuce can't be healthy: It would have almost no nutritional value. But to an obese individual, eating that same salad could be healthy if it replaces a fat-heavy meal.
If we are being honest, whatever changes the FDA proposes to processed food packaging will almost certainly have zero impact on the dietary habits of people. Just like how putting calories on menus or fast-food displays also has had no impact.
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But it does stroke the egos of people who gravitate to government and hold the conceit that whenever something good happens, it's their doing, and whenever something bad happens, they alone can fix it.
The truth is less satisfying: the only person looking out for what's best for you is you. And possibly your mommy. Any regime created by government to remove your opportunities to hurt yourself by poor decisionmaking will either be circumvented by predators who have a vested interest in making you feed more hu
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Your straw man is so great that he won an award - he was out standing in his field.
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I can remember a time when I was less educated on the topic and would accept labels of 'healthy' food at face value enough though it was packed full of sugars and other negative impacting additives.
In short, I needed study ingredients a bit and learn what I was consuming. Does that mean I eat better? Not in the slightest, but if I had some level of reference again that rejected some outright terrible food options, I would probably be a bit more determined to make better food choices when in a pinch and tr
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> The problem with a single catch-all term like "healthy" is that the very concept depends on the context of who is eating the food. Are you a low-income individual with food insecurity? Well then getting a Chipotle burrito might be considered healthy since it would contain a day's worth of proteins, dairy, carbs and grains. But to an obese individual, that same burrito could be extremely unhealthy.
They could be bypassing a lot of those issues by only rating as "healthy" a standardized serving, while als
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The book, "The Poison Squad" by Deborah Blum is a fascinating story of the lack of food safety at the end of the nineteenth century. Dr. Harvey Wiley was named chief chemist at the agriculture department and for more than two decades campaigned for safety in food ingredients & honesty in food labeling. Jars of honey on the store shelf which contained no honey at all; bottles labeled "Whiskey" which contained no whiskey; milk laced with formaldehyde; arsenic, lead, and other metal compounds used as food coloring; all of these were common and violated no law or regulation here in the U.S....anyway, a very good book for anyone interested.
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Perhaps some of it is true, although much of it was related to the limited scientific knowledge at the time and clearly not all of the products had this issue. They still have products with arsenic and other metal compounds in make-up, there are still issues with production of many products. The question is whether it is because or despite the FDA.
Besides that, in a purely anarchic society, there is still product liability. The biggest problem with the FDA is that is sets a standard for "allowable" contamin
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For example, FDA allows a significant percentage of mouse droppings and insects in most of your food. This is a big handout to big corporations who use this to skirt by the regulations at sub-par health inspection ratings, while most smaller companies like mom-and-pop bakeries today would immediately fold if the health inspector didn't give them an A+ rating.
Here is your problem with the idea that no mouse droppings be allowed in food for consumption by humans. Let alone that it's some sort of conspiracy to let corporations poison us.
We all gonna starve to death. Because it is simply impossible to have agricultural food with 0 mouse droppings, or insects and their various materials in it. Maybe with hydroponics, but nothing grown in a field will ever be free of that stuff you are afraid of.
A mouse turd in an entire silo? Burn it, Starve to death later.
It's like how a reservoir was drained because someone urinated in it https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
Meanwhile, fish shit in it, birds fly over, and shit in it, but a person goes peepee in it and you flush 38 million gallons of water.
We simply cannot remove all the gross stuff in our food and water supplies.
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I once read that by eradicating TB by a large margin, our bodies gave way to allergens that never before bothered us. We somehow weakened ourselves by eradication of too many things.
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Kinda where Peanut allergies came from.
My kid got a huge rash when we first took him to our horse barn. Our pediatrician told us to be certain to keep taking him there. Sure enough, after two more times, he never got a rash again. Let the kids play in the dirt.
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In the physical world we inhabit, there's a little of everything in everything. If the limits on mouse droppings and insects parts were too high, it would be making people ill.
Actually I'm more concerned about the long-term pernicious effects of plasticizers than eating a few bugs. People are looking into it but the types of harm that play out over a lifetime and are pervasive are very difficult to pin down.
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This is a rather disingenuous thing to say. It is historically well-established that food adulteration was common before it was outlawed -- bread contained plaster; milk contained lead etc. This was not due to some kind of lack of scientific understanding that mistook plaster for flour or gypsum for sugar.
Now it *is* true that as our detection technology gets better we can detect *miniscule* levels of contamination, but that was not what was going on back then. What was going on back then wasn't acciden
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Yeah, you have to remember context. In1890, the germ theory of disease had only just beat out the miasma theory (and many doctors still didn't buy it). We didn't understand how toxic heavy metals like arsenic and lead were. I'm surprised people didn't sprinkle cyanide on their food for some tomfool reason.
Compared to that, someone believing a Goop vaginal candle is a good idea is pretty tame stuff.
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Your examples sound like common-law fraud - law which certainly already existed at the time.
Offering for sale "honey" with no honey, "whiskey" with no whiskey definitely would have been fraudulent and illegal even at the time, without any special laws or regulations. Common law did not (and does not) permit lying to people to part them from their money.
"Milk" that's not suitable for human consumption, I don't know. I think there was probably even then an implied warrantee of fitness for purpose, but I'm not
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> "Milk" that's not suitable for human consumption, I don't know. I think there was probably
> even then an implied warrantee of fitness for purpose, but I'm not sure.
Speaking of milk, here's the event that "...led to the passage of the first food safety laws in the form of milk regulations in 1862"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal
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Sounds like an interesting book. Does it dig into why some companies thought they could and should do this? I mean, some cases (replacing honey with sugar syrup) make sense: it probably was cheaper and Ma Kettle ain't gonna know the difference. Others, like formaldehyde in milk, I shake my head at. What was the thinking behind this? Was is it intended to be a preservative? And if it was, was it actually worse than drinking spoiled milk? For all I know it actually was healthier than the alternative. Or maybe
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Sugar is the wrong word. The enemy is carbohydrates for many people. Isolating a single carbohydrate of many is non-productive. CARBS are bad and kill many people. Sugar is only one carb.
Nobody seems to understand that when you open your mouth for a slice of bread or a spoon of breakfast cereal, your tongue immediately begins to convert that starch into sugar. Right there, before you can even chew or swallow it. Potatoes, rice, corn, oats are all mostly carbohydrate. Bananas and many fruits and all fruit juices are loaded with carbohydrates. These foods have been manipulated for thousands of years to produce more carb and relatively less fiber and nutrients. Some people believe that honey or maple syrup are somehow different from sugar so they can eat all they want. Some people want to scream and cover their ears when they hear that their favorite foods are destroying their bodies and their brains.
Isolating sugar as the 'bad guy' is like saying Colt 45 pistols are responsible for all gun deaths.
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No offense but your understanding is incorrect or out-of-date. Or you are a shill for the food industry. I'm very happy the FDA is finally recognizing just how bad sugar is.
Part of the problem is that the words and terms have been deliberately manipulated to confuse the issue. Just like the oil industry used the term "ethyl gasoline" to avoid saying the word "lead". Nowadays people say "sugar", but we have no idea what sugar they are talking about. And they say "carbohydrates" but we have no idea what carbohydrate they are talking about. Ethanol (and even methanol!) are carbohydrates...these alcohols are nothing like rice or potatoes.
You are 100% correct that all starch is broken down into GLUCOSE. Glucose is one particular sugar, it's literally what your body and brain run on; there's no possible way to say that it's bad for you (unless you eat too much of it and get fat or diabetes). Your liver will literally synthesize glucose if you don't eat it. People in Japan live on mostly starch, and lots of people have lived on mostly potatoes. But starch is not sugar...starch is GLUCOSE. By the way, actual glucose isn't very sweet. That's why the stuff they have you drink for your diabetes tests tastes like shit. You can buy pure glucose (literally pure blood sugar!) in the baking aisle in the form of "corn sugar" (completely different than corn syrup, wow that's not confusing or anything right?), also known as dextrose. Nobody buys it for baking though, because glucose isn't very sweet.
SUGAR (table sugar) is a mixture of glucose and FRUCTOSE. FRUCTOSE is another particular sugar, different than glucose, that cannot be metabolized by your body directly. Your body cannot run on it. If you eat it, it will not raise your blood sugar or cause an insulin response. It has to be processed by your liver through complicated metabolic pathways, kicking off all kinds of byproducts, one of which is lipogenesis (creation of fat). These metabolic pathways are very similar to those for ethanol, which is another carbohydrate which your body can technically metabolize, but with all kinds of unhealthy side effects. Eating sugar and drinking alcohol are strikingly similar in their effects. You get a beer belly, hangovers, and fatty liver from both. The only difference is that sugar is worse because you can drink 5 40oz big gulps in a row without getting drunk under the table. Fructose and ethanol are both borderline poison that your body has a way to break down but clearly your body is not equipped to ingest large amounts of them for energy as a part of your diet. Here's the hook though...fructose is sweet. That's why table sugar is sweet, and why we use it as a sweetener. I don't know if you can buy pure fructose...
High-fructose corn syrup is even more confusing. Because even though fructose is what is bad for you, high-fructose corn syrup may in fact be better for you. The reason is that regular corn syrup has low fructose content. It's high in glucose, which means it's not very sweet. So if you try to use regular corn syrup to sweeten foods, which did happen (because Big Ag reasons), you have to add a fuck-ton of it to make the food sweet, which cranks up the calories and the insulin response. So the industry invented high-fructose corn syrup, which is higher in fructose, which is very similar to table sugar, we can say it's basically identical. So between two equally-sweet food items, one made with regular corn syrup and one made with high-fructose corn syrup, probably the HFCS one will be healthier for you. You are going to get about the same amount of (sweet, poisonous) fructose in both, but the one will come with a bunch of (not that sweet, real food) glucose too, which will probably be worse for you unless you are starving.
About "carbohydrates", I really think carbohydrates should not be a nutritional category, if it includes both starches and sugars together. Ethanol is literally a carbohydrate, but nobody calls it that, because they recognize that it's pseudo-poison, not a "real" nutrient. Howev-
By the way, in case you never understood before, the sugar variable is why people on the SAD (Standard American Diet) get healthier when they go on both "low carb" animal-product diets (like Atkins, keto or whatever) AND high-starch vegan or whole-food diets. Because both diet options cut out the sugar they were eating before.
Eskimos are healthier than Americans even though they eat 90% fat (no sugar). Japanese people are healthier than Americans even though they eat 90% starch (but still not much sugar). E-
I wonder about this every time I see veggies or seeds advertising just how sweet the crop is.
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There are regional preference differences too. If you go to fruit stands in Japan, around the stations where I've been at least, they have giant, softball-size flawless apples in delicate foam packaging. They are also expensive. These things are so sweet they taste like candy. That's the Japanese preference for apples. On the other hand if you go to fruit stands in France (again, at least around Paris where I go), often the apples are much smaller, almost the size of a racketball, and they are only moderate
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Nobody buys it for baking though, because glucose isn't very sweet.
If it's on the shelves, somebody is buying it. And, bakeries use glucose in more ways than you'd expect because it doesn't dry out in the oven, making for moister baked goods that don't dry out. As an example, commercial coconut macaroons are made with glucose, which is why they stay soft, sometimes for months.-
I actually buy it myself for brewing beer and cider. It ferments almost perfectly.
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Sorry but lumping all carbs together in the same way is just plain stupid. There's a reason to go after sugar specifically:
a) it's addictive
b) because it's desirable it is *added* to food which doesn't need to have it
c) by itself it offers very little nutritional value.If you're trying to tell us that the health impacts of eating potatoes are the same as eating a spoon of sugar then I highly suggest you read a book (literally any book) on the topic to correct your understanding.
There's nothing wrong with ea
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For those who are confused and think that 'sugar' is somehow unique among carbohydrates, I invite you to read the best selling book 'Grain Brain' and others similar. Note the specific reference to brain damage which is becoming a growing area of research.
For those who believe that sugar is the only addictive carbohydrate--rest in peace. Your death from deliberate ignorance isn't far off. Look at the size of the bread aisle in your supermarket, and the bakery and breakfast cereal aisle. That's a lot of expen
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What's wrong with a fast food meal? People like to associate that with unhealthy eating. Lemme tell you, I used to love that shit. And it isn't too bad; let's have a look.
Hamburger, fries, cola; oh and the trimmings- ketchup, pickle, mustard. Don't forget the bun, and maybe today you want a strawberry malted milk instead of coke. What's bad & what's good about this meal?
Hamburger bad- loaded with fat, hormones, and unknown stuff, right? Actually the meat & fat might not be the best, but they are ess
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Interesting they are still limiting salt to 230 milligrams per serving. I thought the experts were beginning to agree that salt isn't quite as bad for you as it has been made out to be in the 90's and 00's.
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The salt thing has always been weird. I remember years ago at the place my father worked, they removed the salt tablets from the foundry part of the building because salt is bad for people. Told the workers to avoid salt
And as you might expect, the workers got pretty messed up until someone who wasn't stupid had the dispensers reinstalled.
Same with athletes. We'd sweat off at least 10 pounds of water during game, and if I didn't grab a bag of ships before drinking water, I'd get pretty queasy. Still
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That's not even the half of it. They don't include things like sucralose as sugar, so it's entirely possible for neurotoxins to be in these foods, for the foods to be obscenely sweet and still be "healthy".
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Even if salt isn't unhealthy for you directly, it is a highly addictive substance added in high quantities in order to trick your body into increased desire for the food you are eating. Even without considering it's nutrition directly, it's addition to food is unhealthy as you tend to scoff more of it down.
It's one of the cornerstones of the obesity epidemic: low nutritional value food, loaded with carbs, with added salt and sugar to get you to buy more.
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It's worked for me. I've stayed on it for 3 years now, lost 25# putting me in normal BMI for my height, blood sugar and blood pressure down all bloodwork normal.
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It's clear the FDA is still just the marketing department for the junk food industry. There needs to be aggressive annual financial audits of all FDA management,and their families, to uncover and prosecute all of the bribery in the industry. Massive amounts of carbohydrates and toxic processed oils are the main problem. Foods containing trans fats are still allowed to game the serving size and show "Trans fat 0g." Dietary cholesterol does not effect blood serum cholesterol - the cholesterol in your blood is produced by your body and is not the cause of disease (it's a symptom of other problems). Toxic seed oils that cause inflammation shouldn't even be allowed. People are eating crap that shouldn't even be classified as "food" and then wondering why their health is destroyed.
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We all need to become breatharians! 8^/
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It's basically the same stuff peasants ate in medieval Europe in a box.
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No, midevil peasants ate remarkably better than we do today: more animal fats and proteins, vegetables as a regular part of their diets.
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Refined sugar, hydrogenated cotton seed oil, canola oil, palm oil, refined and bleached wheat flour - none of these things were a normal part of the human diet until mid last century. Medieval peasants had natural non-toxic food, just not enough of it.
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don't trust the FDA. See this article for more info: https://today.uconn.edu/2021/0... [uconn.edu]
Nearly half of the FDA budget comes from 'user fees' paid to them by companies they are supposed to be regulating. The food industry in America is boarder line criminal with what they are allowed to put in and still call it 'food'. Just like everything else, it's all about the money.
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My new line of food products includes Soylent Green, an FDA healthy food with all the nutrients the human body needs, and for that matter contains.
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As far as I can tell, it's any food that allows one to feel superior to the riff-raff.
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Most food is actually not healthy at all, most of it is dead long before you eat it.
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There's also What the Health on Netflix.
Science/evidence based, result is whole-food veganism. Mediterranean without the fish.
I'm not 100% strict, but don't cheat much (my cheats are quality food, no junk). It's not bad, and I like oatmeal, bean burritos, and smoothies. I don't like vegetables, but they "smoothie" well (with added protein powder).
If it's not a whole grain and it's shelf stable, it's not healthy (processed). FOOD goes bad.
My take: We're vegetarians by evolution (gut length, canine teeth never elongated), but capable omnivores. Flesh and animal products are inherently bad for us.
They must be cooked - no other meat eating species requires that, and fire is necessary for us to be capable meat eaters. But, problems from animal sourced foods don't present until later in life (as cancer and such per the book). This is fine evolutionarily (lifespan around 40 keeps humans flowing), but if you want to live a long healthy life, whole plants is what I would recommend (per the book). -
Just google "superfood" and eat whatever floats into the zeitgeist. You'll live forever.
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Just stay away from that "ultraprocessed" stuff, whatever that means!
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You have to be a complete moron to think ANYTHING in a grocery store is healthy to begin with. Read the stupid nutrition labels.
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You would think that 40 years of skyrocketing illness rates, fatty liver syndrome, obesity, pancreatic dysfunction and Type 2 diabetes would be enough evidence, but the FDA is still clinging to the idea that carbohydrates are healthy and fats are bad.
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