So, this article highlights important issues with convenience foods, with a minimum of fearmongering relative to the standard of this topic.
The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for BHA/BHT, a preservative. At this point I stopped reading due to an overwhelming urge to bang my head into the table. Preservation is in fact a major reason for seasoning-- in a preserved meat, no less! (And BHA/BHT are antioxidants-- which makes them Good...)
Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG. Glutamate is a fundamental building block of life. If you've ever tasted yeast extract, you will immediately notice that it's very salty. The only reason to eat it is as a flavor enhancer, because as a major constituent it's too salty-- except for various Commonwealth countries that like to put it on toast.
Etc...
Shit, I bet the egg yolks in my cake batter are Bad because they substitute for cholesterol, an emulsifier and flavor enhancer which is linked to diseases (it also tastes nasty on its own)
Crappy food optimized for convenience, scale and profit is a huge problem. I hate-- the actual, painful, comsuming hate-- convenience foods and I double hate franchise restaurants etc. because they reduce the amount of "real," freshly prepared, flavorful food immediately available to me. But that doesn't obviate the need for critical thinking.
Finally, as a practicing biochemist and excellent cooker/eater I'm Offended by the insinuation that one cannot be equally comfortable in a kitchen or in a lab.
Derek Lowe's several article[0]s should be boilerplate at the end of any chemicals vs food piece.
> The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for BHA/BHT, a preservative.
It's bad because they're being dishonest. They're running a solvent extraction on rosemary to obtain a fairly impure mixture of carnosic acid and carnosol - the chemicals they actually want - and remove all the stuff like aroma and flavour that makes it identifiable as rosemary, then they're calling it "rosemary extract" rather than "carnosol" because it sounds better, even though the end product is almost nothing like rosemary.
> Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG.
This is not so much an issue of bad or good chemicals, it's an issue of honesty. There are tons of products out there with "no added glutamate" that have yeast extract on their ingredient list. I don't even mind when food producers hide that they add glutamate by using yeast extract as long as they declare it as a flavor enhancer.
Labeling glutamate content is a silly idea. The issue is that anyone would make a "no added glutamate" claim, thus perpetuating the myth that glutamate matters.
While correct on many issues, Clearly this author missed his biochemisty lectures, ascorbic acid is vitamin C. Salad washed in tap water with chlorine is how we wash our vegetables at home. But still there is more good than bad in this piece.
>Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG. Glutamate is a fundamental building block of life. If you've ever tasted yeast extract, you will immediately notice that it's very salty.
The issue I have with yeast extract (vs. pure MSG) is that it tends to leave an unpleasant aftertaste in my mouth that won't go away for hours. This is why I generally try to avoid it.
People who are hung up on ingredients being "natural" drive me nuts. I'm 100% for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe and allows the creation of higher quality food, it shouldn't matter it is natural or not. Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural" either...
There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
The desire for things that are "natural" arises from the wariness of ingesting something that hasn't been tested by time and human history. There's a long history of commercially-common chemicals that turned out to have tremendously bad impacts on human health (e.g. trans-fats, lead in gasoline).
Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and immediately obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use. In comparison, the only benefit from chemical food additives is usually saving a few bucks.
> Vaccines raise the same concern, of course, but have dramatic and immediately obvious countervailing benefits that justify their use.
Vaccines have an enormous amount of data logged, an actual trust fund dedicated to paying out if there is even a whiff of an issue, and regulators who oversee them.
At no point has anyone shown a modern vaccine (last 20+ years) to be unsafe. Period. Quit spewing your uninformed opinions.
This is in stark contrast to the food chain where quite a bit of it is uninspected.
> At no point has anyone shown a modern vaccine (last 20+ years) to be unsafe. Period.
That is simply not true. I am pro-vaccines, but your sentence is false.
Simply google: rotavirus intussusception and you will see.
His point about vaccines is 100% correct: Until the vaccine has been on the market for 10-30 years we do NOT know that it is safe. We might consider the risk worth it, but do not confuse that for "safe".
This is equally true for all the non-natural food additives. The natural ones have the benefit of decades, centuries, or millennia of testing. (The only exception would be things like vanillin that are exact copies of known natural additives. I consider them just fine even if they are classed as artificial.)
Yes, let's (even though 1999 is almost 26 years ago, but okay, I consider anything after about 1990 to be "modern"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotavirus_vaccine
"In 1998, a rotavirus vaccine (RotaShield, by Wyeth) was licensed for use in the United States. Clinical trials in the United States, Finland, and Venezuela had found it to be 80 to 100% effective at preventing severe diarrhea caused by rotavirus A, and researchers had detected no statistically significant serious adverse effects. The manufacturer of the vaccine, however, withdrew it from the market in 1999, after it was discovered that the vaccine may have contributed to an increased risk for intussusception, or bowel obstruction, in one of every 12,000 vaccinated infants."
Note the may. The number is so low as to make it difficult to correlate. That's 40-50 cases in a year. Aspirin kills that many in a year and we don't consider it unsafe and we take it for things which are lots less pressing.
However, they pulled the vaccine because the perception in the United States is that we have adequate treatment for Rotavirus without the vaccine and it simply wasn't worth trying to correlate.
"Meanwhile, other countries such as Brazil and Mexico undertook their own independent epidemiological studies which demonstrated that 4 deaths were attributable to vaccine, while it had prevented approximately 80,000 hospitalization and 1300 deaths from diarrhea each year in their countries."
4. You will get that many people dying of an allergic reaction to anything if you give it to several million people.
More people die of peanuts in a year. Is that "unsafe"?
The official CDC website says that they found it definitely did cause intussusception:
"The results of the investigations showed that RotaShield® vaccine caused intussusception in some healthy infants younger than 12 months of age who normally would be at low risk for this condition. The risk of intussusception increased 20 to 30 times over the expected risk for children of this age group within 2 weeks following the first dose of RotaShield® vaccine."
See http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/rotavirus/vac-rotashield.... Now, that's not much of an increase in absolute terms because intussusception is relatively rare, but so is infants dying due to rotavirus infection in the US - the estimates I'm seeing are 20-60 deaths a year without vaccination. Even a relatively rare adverse reaction is enough to outweigh the benefits of the vaccine in the US.
Now, you're right that the clinical trials "detected no statistically significant serious adverse effects". That's because they were so small that, even though the adverse reactions were common enough to outweigh the benefits, they couldn't actually detect them as being statistically significant. Hell, even if the vaccine was somehow hypothetically killing ten times as many babies as would've died from rotavirus, I don't think the trials used to approve the vaccine could have detected that. That's kind of worrying.
And at no point in the last 2,000 years has anyone shown celery to be unsafe. Testing and historical use are both sources of confidence in the safety of something. Vaccines have the former, and I have quite a bit of confidence in their safety. Food additives don't really have either basis for confidence.
I'm not sure that argument holds water. Plenty of "natural" products "tested by time and human history" have ended up exposed as harmful. Tobacco is the obvious one, but folks have been grilling meat for likely hundreds of thousands of years, and that's probably riskier than many artificial additives[1].
I agree, I'm a pretty relaxed person when it comes to diet. Like the parent, I get somewhat annoyed by people who come off as judgmental and overzealous in their quest for the 'natural.'
But, when I read articles like this one about how companies manipulate and bend rules or information to omit ingredients from labels, it doesn't give me confidence they're as safe as they say. They very well could be, but hiding a chemical's use from me isn't going to build confidence.
I feel like articles like this are as useful to those of us who will drink a Coke and eat a drive-through burrito, as it is to those who might only eat 'raw.'
Trans-fats? Interesting case where factory-based food engineering based on waste products was sold as a healthier alternative to "natural" products (butter, lard).
And while it's easy to blame P&G in retrospect, trans-fats had the support of the US government food administration, reputable scientists and academics.
As for lead in gasoline, that was a case where the US government was warned of the health hazards (and workers died of lead poisoning) but still allowed it.
In both cases the government support was a result of active industry lobbying, so it's hard to see how it absolves the industry participants of responsibility.
I'm not excusing the industry lobbying: a lot of it was reprehensible. Still, a lot of America's bad nutrition advice came from bad (or at least, not very good) science.
> I'm 100% for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe a
And how many long term tests have you personally performed or at least how many scientific studies have you persnally analized to know if an ingredient is 100% safe?
"Natural" doesn't mean much these days. I presume here it means "it won't result in short or long term harm".
> Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural" either...
Yap not natural. And "new car smell" that so many people love and appreciety is pretty bad for you.
> There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.
You mean real world is not 100% black and white? I think it is reasonable to assume vaccines are safe and result in a net benefit if taken yet to being skeptical of new and untested long term compounds. This has happened many times with known "safe" chemicals that let us down. BPA and plastics, DDT, medication that caused birth defects. The track record of vaccines letting us down doesn't come close to that.
(In all honesty, this proprietary and hidden labelling is what needs to go. Of course, that means people wouldn't buy these "foods", unless they had to or didn't care. I'd rather not be a guinea pig. In other words, I don't trust them to make sure what is safe or not.)
Cars for example do have a negative impact on hour health. They are unnatural prosthesis. We do not use our natural foot anymore. Therefore we are getting fat and immobile.
I can see a lot of positive comments here, but say that even IF these additives don't impose any risks to the consumers, apparently this is still something the consumers don't want. For the industry to then whitelabel these ingredients is just like Lenovo secretly puts adware on their laptops with the arguments that they are helping their customers find new products.
I don't want you to help me in secret. I want you to be transparent so I can make my own decisions!
Starting a food startup revealed a lot of this stuff to me. There's something called "clean labeling" which refers to the ability to put various synthetic shelf life or flavor enhancing compounds in your foods and label it as something innocuous sounding due to skirting the labeling laws. The companies that generate these compounds advertise them as such. This intersects with the fact that the FDA operates essentially on a complaint basis. That is, if they don't receive any complaints about something it is very unlikely to ever be looked in to. And how would you know to complain if the package just says "modified starch"? So it's hard to credibly differentiate yourself along this dimension since in some cases there is literally no way that the customer could tell that one company is using less crap in their food.
I live out in the country. My favorite part of the summer is that most of the food I consume is coming from farms/homes that are within 2 miles of where I live. Vegetables from one guy, chicken, eggs, meat from another. It's hard to keep up with it in the winter, but it really opened my eyes as to what I am eating. I started out just thinking, "I wonder if I could eat without going to the grocery store." It was surprisingly easier than I thought and then I realized all the health stuff after. Its nice knowing where my food comes from.
I would be surprised if how easy ingredients are to pronounce is correlated with their health. Since half of all food is wasted, preservatives could even be good for the environment.
> NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, not an ingredient, so there’s no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their “fresh” fruit salad is weeks old.
Here's how the FDA defines processing aids [1]:
(ii) Processing aids, which are as follows:
(a) Substances that are added to a food during the
processing of such food but are removed in some
manner from the food before it is packaged in its
finished form.
(b) Substances that are added to a food during
processing, are converted into constituents normally
present in the food, and do not significantly
increase the amount of the constitutents naturally
found in the food.
(c) Substances that are added to a food for their
technical or functional effect in the processing but
are present in the finished food at insignificant
levels and do not have any technical or functional
effect in that food.
I have not seen anything that says that it means to have a "technical or functional effect".
Speaking of food labeling, I just last night noticed something odd at Domino's. Here is what they list on their site as the ingredients in their garlic dipping sauce:
The author Joanna Blythman is a British journalist, with the article published in a British newspaper. I think you'll find that a US agency has little to do with what was discussed, and that European regulations are what applies. They are also the source of 'E' numbers mentioned.
The FDA has no problem with rBST for cows, while it is banned in Europe and several other countries. The way the EU and the US treat eggs is also different, although it is harder to tell who is right: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nadiaarumugam/2012/10/25/why-ame...
The trade show being covered is an international trade show, not just a European trade show. Exhibitors from all over the world exhibit there, for buyers from all over the world. It happened to be in Europe when the reporter visited. The 2015 instance will be in Russia.
The particular exhibitor (NatureSeal) that told the reporter their product was a processing aid is a US company, so it seems a reasonably safe bet that then they describe their product as a "processing aid" they are using a definition similar to the meaning of the term in the US.
The UK definition is indeed similar to the US definition: "any substance not consumed as a food by itself, intentionally used in the processing of raw materials, foods or their ingredients, to fulfil a certain technological purpose during treatment or processing, and which may result in the unintentional but technically unavoidable presence of residues of the substance or its derivatives in the final product, provided that these residues do not present any health risk and do not have any technological effect on the finished product" [1].
Could "Natural Flavor" not include garlic? I can't see why not, but IANAL. I'm actually a little hazy on what the limits on declaring ingredients as "Natural Flavour" are - they seem very broad.
The definition of natural flavor under the Code of Federal Regulations is: “the essential oil, oleoresin, essence or extractive, protein hydrolysate, distillate, or any product of roasting, heating or enzymolysis, which contains the flavoring constituents derived from a spice, fruit or fruit juice, vegetable or vegetable juice, edible yeast, herb, bark, bud, root, leaf or similar plant material, meat, seafood, poultry, eggs, dairy products, or fermentation products thereof, whose significant function in food is flavoring rather than nutritional” (21CFR101.22).
Funnily enough, I believe the distinction between natural and artificial flavoring refers solely to the process by which the flavor compound was derived, even if it's the exact same molecule in the end.
The problem lies deeper. The main problem is the alienation between the producer and consumer. Industrialization does not fit well with food production. Because price optimization through division of fixed costs leads to standardized high volume products. But it is diversity that is healthy, tastes good and is natural.
The Community-supported agriculture (CSA) model or Food cooperatives (foodcoop) directly addresses those fundamental problems.
The author of this article and the food industry seem to know what the people want:
> Ingredients that give the impression that they originated in a grandmother’s kitchen and have not been processed too harshly are of great appeal to consumers.
The common convenience food route minimize price and maximize flavour but ignores nutrition. They are so optimized flavor-wise that they are literally addicting. On the other hand, "natural" foods maximize "healthy sounding" ingredients. What if advancements in the food industry were used in healthy food too? For example, what if we could create a spinach salad that is as addictive as dorritos?
As an example from the article, the scientists were able to transform potato protein into something that tastes like "butter, cream, and eggs." There's no mention of the nutritional value of this stuff but imagine if it was a powder with no nutritional value (like Splenda) which you could sprinkle over your previously bland and healthy food to make it taste buttery?
Industrial processes are slowly making their way into the mainstream with books like Modernist Cuisine. As an example from the book, the common "grandmother" way to thicken gravies and other sauces is to use flour or corn starch. However, these thickeners require (1) a large amount of starch, and (2) have a large particle size. The result is that the flavour in the food decreases (perhaps now you need to add more salt), and the mouthfeel becomes gritty. Scary commercial chemicals such as N-Zorbit (Tapioca Maltodextrin) don't have this problem.
There's no big secret about this. See "http://www.foodprocessing.com". Typical article: "Understanding Polydextrose and How It Works".
Food stopped being "natural" when cooking was invented.
Then there's the darling of the startup community, "Soylent". Not only is it incredibly overpriced ($85/week) for a soy product, they require pre-ordering months in advance.
OK, so for me, the only takeaway from this article is that we need radically more transparency and we will not get it from food manufacturers voluntarily.
I'm not sure it will make us any healthier, but at least it may help journalists do something a little more helpful than dumping long lists of suspicious sounding names of chemicals on us.
Ideally, more transparency would enable scientists to identify the few really bad stuffs among artificial AND natural ingredients more quickly.
I doubt it will have any big effect on public health though, as it takes very long term studies to answer even the most basic questions about the main components of our food.
I'm all for eating fresh fruit, vegetables, roots, etc, but I don't see how this article supports only a plants based diet? Really I think what it's saying is avoid mass produced food, no?
For example, the locally sourced fresh beef I buy from my local farmer?
I don't get the concerns around processed food. If I buy a bunch of apples and make apply jam (adding "chemicals") it's apparently bad now? Or if I process cucumbers into pickles?
Correct. So instead of saying veganism, we should instead be saying real/fresh food... at least, based on this article. Not saying you can't be vegan, just that this article isn't saying that.
People should focus instead on something that has worsened, not improved, with scientific intervention and technological development - the enslavement, brutalisation, and mass slaughter of billions of land animals (not to mention the treatment of sea animals and ecosystems) due to the continued maladjusted cultural preference for animal products. How can people winge and moan about their wounded sense of aesthetic purity (the same people driving this trend by picking the brand 10 cents cheaper on the supermarket shelves) when countless numbers of living, sentient creatures are brought into being by us, for the sole purpose of living miserable, dreary lives, punctuated by sickness and episodes of violence, capped off by a final often-horrific experience of slaughter, simply so that we can treat them like small factories, extracting products from them, then eating their body parts or furnishing our cars and bodies with their skin?
Why not be simply thankful that you have freedom from pain, sickness, confinement and slaughter. To complain of the food we eat, as if we are the victims of our own preferences for convenience and low cost, while billions of animals are subjected to treatment tantamount of instituionalised torture, is the height of entitlement.
So, plants are less than animals, which are less than humans? Do I understand that correctly?
All life is sacred. The human over there, or the dog there, or the orchid over that shouldn't matter: they all have an innate right to life.
We humans have this sense that we are the master of who lives and dies. Somehow, dogs and cats are pets, yet pigs and cows and chickens are food. And plants and trees can be strip mined for their resources. But this human master is based solely on might-makes-right principle.
In the end, for us to live, others must die. That is the cycle we live in. One can renounce eating meat. Yet, what we need is a conscience and ethic of food. Or better said: make your life worthy of the beings who died for you.
The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for BHA/BHT, a preservative. At this point I stopped reading due to an overwhelming urge to bang my head into the table. Preservation is in fact a major reason for seasoning-- in a preserved meat, no less! (And BHA/BHT are antioxidants-- which makes them Good...)
Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG. Glutamate is a fundamental building block of life. If you've ever tasted yeast extract, you will immediately notice that it's very salty. The only reason to eat it is as a flavor enhancer, because as a major constituent it's too salty-- except for various Commonwealth countries that like to put it on toast.
Etc...
Shit, I bet the egg yolks in my cake batter are Bad because they substitute for cholesterol, an emulsifier and flavor enhancer which is linked to diseases (it also tastes nasty on its own)
Crappy food optimized for convenience, scale and profit is a huge problem. I hate-- the actual, painful, comsuming hate-- convenience foods and I double hate franchise restaurants etc. because they reduce the amount of "real," freshly prepared, flavorful food immediately available to me. But that doesn't obviate the need for critical thinking.
Finally, as a practicing biochemist and excellent cooker/eater I'm Offended by the insinuation that one cannot be equally comfortable in a kitchen or in a lab.
Derek Lowe's several article[0]s should be boilerplate at the end of any chemicals vs food piece.
[0] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food...
Edit: after skimming the remainder of the article, it becomes clear that its author has never cooked anything