California Passes Law to Ban Ultra-Processed Foods From School Lunches

What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?

I imagine it’s got more to do with ingredients than processing. Local restaurants might make fresh bread with a bleached flour product that has various dough conditioning agents added to it, while puffed rice absolutely requires an industrial process to create and has one ingredient.

So processedness is a proxy for healthiness. But raw sugar and guacamole would both count as processed.

whelp, nestle is on me, you will not believe guyz how many upvotes and downvotes i get on this one

Thanks for that Link to the Nova classification. TIL there is even a database that lets you lookup the Nova level: openfoodfacts.org

That's not true. The law does not define UPF as Nova Group 4 foods.

Much "olive oil" out there is actually ultra processed. Not real extra virgin olive oil, but the cheaper more common olive oil including fake evoo can be either cut with soybean oil or is refined processed olive oil following the same process used in making refined soybean oil.

Look into the process involved in making soybean or canola or sunflower oil. One named ingredient that sounds natural but is itself ultra processed and not real food.

The peanuts might be roasted, too. Roasting is a process.

> Biscuits and crisps are generally considered to be ultra processed foods, despite containing only basic ingredients

Depends on if they’re ultra processed or not.

If they won’t stale for weeks, they’re ultra processed with preservatives and/or solvents. If they go stale and have a simple ingredients list, they probably aren’t.

(And kids don’t need to be habituated to having either with every lunch.)

Well that is because there's two very different things, both called "cookies".

When a grandma bakes some cookies for their grandchildren she uses only some basic ingredients - eggs, flour, butter, sugar.

For the product that food industries calls as cookies however, the list of ingredients looks like a git SHA.

Soybean or canola oil is not a basic ingredient.

Avocado calories are pretty close to 10% saturated fat, as an example.

Excess sugar and simple starches tend to get absorbed more completely than excess fat, I'm not sure added fat is the biggest issue.

> (3) Not more than 35 percent of its total weight shall be composed of sugar, including naturally occurring and added sugar. This paragraph shall not apply to fruits, vegetables that have not been deep fried, or a dried fruit and nut and seed combination.

wonder who'll be the first to argue that HFCS isn't sugar.

I don’t think kids should be having boutique, hand-crafted “bean to bar” chocolate in their school lunches, but I also don’t think most Californians have products like that in mind when they think of “Ultra-Processed Foods”.

Also as quoted elsewhere: Deep frying is ultra-processing?

So no pasta carbonara or Jam

so is that

“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3)).

or

“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3)), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).

or

“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2)) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).

Ha!

Brilliant sleight of hand by the processed food industry.

Of the fats one can eat, saturated fat is generally the least processed and most natural.

Humanity has eaten saturated fat for ever. Refined/processed oils are a completely new thing that has become a staple of the modern industrial diet. Under this law kids will be made to eat more of the ultra processed literally refined oils and less natural fat.

Unlikely. Commodity food made available by the USDA is directly sold or distributed by the USDA [1].

[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-pr...

> 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?

Xantham gum is used quite often for gluten-free foods. It can really help make a usable gluten-free loaf of bread and sauces as well. It's purchaseable at plenty of grocery stores and is sometimes included in flours, it's been a boon for those living gluten free.

I think the scientific community has done just fine. When these individual substances are tested they're by and large not found to have negative health effects. Then the loonies just refuse to believe it and thing the chemicals are making their kids gay.

The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents.

There are just three lines that actually address nutrition:

(i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.

(ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1.

(iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars.

Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.

> Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy”

Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.

Some do, some don't.

Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.

For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.

If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases. We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way.

Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?

They "may" affect your insulin response, some studies have found this plausible, some have found no link.

Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.

One thing that is not in doubt is that many UPFs are hyper-palatable. It’s much harder to overeat if the food in question is potatoes, carrots, and fish than if the meal is Pringles, Ice cream, and deep fried fish sticks.

> 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.

> Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.

So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure?

> Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes".

Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.

> 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 via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins.

Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.

I think the reference was maybe about the butter vs. margarine controversy? That margarine was lauded as more healthy, but turned out to be actually less healthy than butter, due to hydrogenation producing trans fats which elevated cardiovascular risk.

Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats.

Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad.

This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.

No, just plain old cholesterol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Karelia_Project

How much of the refusal to eat anything healthy stems from lack of good options? The example given (an apple) in an American school setting brings to mind my cafeteria serving only Red Delicious (which is one of the worst apples for taste).

When the option is some fried food vs a wilted salad with no protein source, it's a wonder that any kid would choose the salad.

I would love to see better options that are both healthy and enticing. Until then I doubt that we will see much change when the choice of what to eat in the lunch room is left to the children.

When I was in highschool (2010ish), our school gave you several options for lunch: You could have a real meal that was cooked even though it probably came from the cheaper end of the Sysco catalog but at least was real food, you could get a sub sandwhich made from real ingredients, you could get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or you could get a minuscule slice of the absolute lowest quality pizza ever made, literally worse than Dominos in quality and flavor and barely over an inch long in arc measurement.

95% of the student body ate that pizza every single day.

This includes the supposedly "smart" kids in honors classes.

The real food was good! It was fresh and perfectly palatable and varied enough to be healthy!

Instead of eating it, the students literally invented a lie to hype up this disgusting facsimile of "pizza" as good. It was regularly claimed that this pizza came from a local small business that sold pizza. This was flagrantly wrong and obvious to anyone who had eaten that pizza, as they used a sweet sauce that was not used in the school pizza.

But what the actual hell do Americans expect? We spent decades disallowing the government from telling your kids anything useful, we opted out of "Only 12 minutes of advertising to children per hour on TV" because "regulation is bad", we built a society that advocates rampant consumerism to your kid from before they even can read.

Of course they're going to eat the shitty pizza. It's what consumerism tells people to do. In the US, consumerism is a literal lifestyle brand!