Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!
It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire “butter-like” fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I’m not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!
- traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
- palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
- contains memories of butter
I’m sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.
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I was with you at the beginning, but—
This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health.
A single serving only contains 40%. Not great, but not as terrible as you’re making it out to be. (And unlike a lot of packaged food, the size of a serving here is pretty reasonable.) Very few foods are good for long-term health when eaten alone, and singling out this particular one because it doesn’t fit with your specific use case weakens your argument.
They are lying about the ingredients. That’s true, and it should be noted because false advertising is terrible for consumers. Not because it’s bad for a one-meal-a-day fad diet, but because it’s bad in general for anyone who buys a product based on what is on the label.
You probably shouldn’t be eating an entire pie every day. That isn’t going to be good for you, even if it was made with the very best ingredients available.
Agreed. Best to diversify pie intake. Apple, chocolate, blueberry etc.
However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health.
Saturated Fats have been much maligned by Ancel Key’s lipid heart hypothesis, but it doesn’t stand up to modern scrutiny - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077
Saturated fats are not bad for your health.
Worried about health. Planned to eat nothing but pie for 2 days.
Wat?
These pies cost 15+ at Aldi’s but they are really good
Who eats pie thinking it’s healthy?
The bad thing about palm oil isn’t how unhealthy it is (because what it is replacing isn’t healthy either); the bad thing is that palm farmers have destroyed many thousands of square miles of rain forest. When you fly from Singapore to Jakarta, virtually all rain forest you used to fly over is now palm. It’s an unmitigated environmental disaster.
You’re right, but if we used butter instead, the necessary cows would surely require yet more space.
Its replacement depends on the product you’re trying to make. Like, they could not remove the cocoa butter from chocolate, for example.
Which reminds me, someone gave me a bunch of chocolate bars with a large “rainforest alliance” logo on it that had palm oil as the second ingredient. They’re inedible.
It’s not a choice between palm oil or butter. You can create a vegan pie easily. Yummie yummie.
Isn’t palm oil vegan?
It depends on your definition of veganism. There is no animal product in it, but to use it in the quantities we do requires the destruction of a lot of habitat that certain animals require to survive.
Yeah, people constantly confuse veganism for a diet.
Nope, it contains bits and pieces of orangutans.
That doesn’t sound right. But I don’t know enough about orangutans to dispute it.
Since veganism is mainly about ethicality, i’d guess not.
ethicality
Only when it comes to animals. You can be an almond milk drinking vegan despite the amount of water necessary to make an almond. You can be a palm oil vegan despite the amount of habitation destruction necessary for palm oil to be economically viable.
Only when it comes to animals.
Like, killing them / driving them away, for a cocoa plantage?
I had an argument about palm oil with a vegan who said that I was against it because I supported Big Dairy…
i think so since it comes from a tree
If only vegetable oils existed…
You mean like palm oil?
Different use cases.
Fats that are solid ( or at least not kept liquid) are not directly comparable to oils. They fulfill a different function in baked goods. In particular, pie crust with vegetable oil would fail totally. It wouldn’t hold up.
Mind you, if you don’t object to hydrogenated oils, they can do the job. Yay margarine? But you can’t just dump 10 grams of canola into your biscuits and expect the results to look, taste, or feel like a biscuit. You’d get something, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Palm oil doesn’t tase good at all so you can just as well use margarine made from sunflower or canola oil.
It’s pretty tasteless overall.
And when it comes right down to it, hydrogenated oils are their own nightmare. There’s really no perfect choices for every person in every situation.
Like, lard and tallow work even better than butter in some applications, including some desserts. But then you run into the health side of things and vegetarians aren’t going to use them.
I personally don’t like palm oil either. I find it unpleasant for mouth feel. I’m just saying that it fills a role that other things don’t, and does it in a way that’s a different set of problems.
Do you have an alternative to suggest that’s less ecologically damaging? I keep hearing complaints about palm oil but I’ve never heard an alternative suggestion that doesn’t involve even more land use.
You could not eat food with palm oil in it. There’s a suggestion.
Nothing I eat has palm oil in it. I don’t specifically avoid it, but I do avoid processed foods generally, and palm oil is only in processed food.
Avoiding processed foods is certainly a valid option, though not one I see gaining popularity anytime soon.
However, the average detractor isn’t suggesting sweeping diet changes, they’re suggesting buying products using other plant oils, as if that wouldn’t cause even more deforestation if everybody did it.
I think the problem is that all the global “fat” supply has gone into palm oil since it’s low cost and tastes nice, so the scale of it’s production make the problem worse…
so even if the alternatives are worse on paper, splitting the production between them could mitigate the damage maybe?
btw I found this quite comprehensive study
splitting the production between them could mitigate the damage maybe?
Moving half of current palm oil usage to other oils would require about 250M acres of land. Anybody got a spare country or two lying around?
Anyway, production is already split. As I mentioned in another comment, palm oil currently accounts for about 40% of plant oils, while using less than 10% of the land.
I’m pretty skeptical that palm oil is more unhealthy than butter. The farming practices surrounding it’s production are not wholesome sure. But it tastes good and cost less than butter.
It’s good and cheap, therefore it’s okay to deforest tropical regions.
I specifically did not say that deforesting the rainforest was good. Don’t put those words on my mouth.
Cattle farming is also a major cause of rainforest deforestation (although beef cattle since that is internationally transportable where dairy is more perishable). Palm oil produces more calories per production acre than dairy, where many acres have to be used to grow the grains used to feed the cattle. The transition is being managed irresponsibly, but once stabilized palm oil should have less environmental impact than butter.
Yes, that’s bad enough. OP should have just said that instead of lying about/spreading misinformation on it being bad for your health.
For all those decrying the ethics of palm oil - you are aware of the yields per hectare of the various plant oils, right?
- Soybean: 0.47 ton oil/ha/year
- Sunflower: 0.78 ton oil/ha/year
- Rapeseed: 0.74 ton oil/ha/year
- Palm Oil: 3.36 tons oil/ha/year
Would anybody like to suggest how to switch away from palm oils without deforesting what remains of the Amazon?
The difference is the others don’t require a tropical environment to grow. So you can grow them without any deforestation.
Globally, palm oil occupies approximately 19 million hectares (about 47 million acres) of land.
Despite supplying over one-third of the world’s vegetable oil, this footprint is remarkably small—using less than 10% of the total land allocated to all oil-producing crops worldwide.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
The obvious answer is some of the Land used to grow soybeans and corn for animal feed.
By that logic though, imagine how much land we could reclaim for other purposes (including reforestation) if we shifted more existing farmland towards palm oil.
That’s not where palms grow.
so we’ve gotten a shitton better at aero- and hydroponics. can we grow the right palm tree in a greenhouse yet?
i’m in the california bay area so palm trees are more of a wealth indicator than a “hey they grow here” thing. but they’re everywhere because people want to signal that they’re wealthy, even if they aren’t.
That will never be able to compete on price with clear cut rainforest land and trained primates doing the picking.
True. So reforest the land instead.
Ooh, what if we use Alaska?
we make them. with environmental impact because you can’t exist without it, but we do what we can to minimize it yes. We got a shitton of land out in texas that is being used as oilfields. get some environmental remediation out there first to make it suitable for farmland, use some of the grassy areas as well (not all we need the grassy areas), and there’s a good quarter of that chunk at least.
and I’d bump that up to like 650million acres, because we’re not using prime farmland to get this oil. yields will probably be less.
but like, the room to grow this is there. i drive by sunflower fields (that are either for oil or eating) fairly regularly.
Ok. Texas is 170M acres. We’ve allocated Texas, that’s 30% of what we need. Which other US states can we sacrifice? :)
I’m liking this plan.
i don’t think missouri or mississippi would mind if we sacrificed them. but we’re going to need 10 million acres from a few states each in europe to make this work i think.
Aren’t some of those plants grown in plains? I don’t think the yield per hectare is the whole story. Palm oil is tropical, leading to deforestation, but at least some of the others you listed are not.
Globally, palm oil occupies approximately 19 million hectares (about 47 million acres) of land.
Despite supplying over one-third of the world’s vegetable oil, this footprint is remarkably small—using less than 10% of the total land allocated to all oil-producing crops worldwide.
Where are you suggesting to find another 500 million acres of land, a tad more than the size of Alaska, without environmental impact?
Why are you moving the goalposts? In your first post the goal was without further deforestation of rainforests, but in your reply, you changed the goal to without environmental impact. As long as global population growth is a thing, the former is possible, the latter not so much.
I’ll admit I’m not terribly interested in this topic. I only replied to your comment (at the same time as another commenter making a similar argument) because you come off as a shill for palm oil, which is odd.
I’m not trying to write a thesis and pick exact words here. Let me move the goalposts back.
Where do you suggest to find 500M acres without deforesting something and driving a few more species extinct?
Just because a random Internet stranger doesn’t know a better solution off the top of their head, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem to be clearly seen.
I’m not arguing there isn’t a problem, I’m pointing out the stupidity in advocating for an even worse solution. No, I don’t have the answer either.
Do butter.
Can’t tell if you’re making a pun or being serious :)
In case you’re being serious, I’m pretty sure we’d need magnitudes more land and methane emissions for butter.
The cow is not killed when butter is harvested. But they do need to be fed, so I’m not sure about that.
Animals take up a ton more space than do plants. I’m sure you’ve heard all the arguments at some point for moving away from meat. I’m not going to rehash them (especially since I’m a meat eater), but it’s just a question of how many magnitudes more land cows would use, not if they would use more land.
The grass and/or grain the cow eats does though.
I was being serious; figure up the tons per hectare per year of butter production.
Google says 250kg per hectare, So about 6% of palm oil productivity. About 15x the land usage.
What are you talking about? This is just like grandma used to make it! With a heaping glob of palm oil scooped out by her palm, measured by eye yet always coming out the same constant taste.
Too bad after the 18th heart attack, poor Mee Maw is in heaven now but she sure did love her palm oil.
This should be illegal.
It could be argued that is, but that company is small enough they can get away with it. The larger the food company is the more conservative they tend to be with callouts like that on pack. Lawyers would typically only pursue claims against mega food companies, and even then it would be a class action where everyone gets $5 or some shit
It is illegal in certain parts of the world.
In the netherlands we have an award for the most misleading commercial/advertisement/packaging.
Palm oil is also bad for farmers, the environment, and the economy
Also this company is owned by the dickhead maga mayor in my state that we struggle against constantly. So, fascist pies.
Sorry, genuinely. This is a shitty thing to learn post purchase
Thankfully I always check ingredients before purchase. Haven’t had my fill of apple pie in months. 😭
this company is owned by the dickhead maga mayor in my state
The plot thickens!
They only way to get good actual butter pies of any kind these days is to make it yourself, for better or worse.
Depends on where you are. Where I am, we have little farm shops and bakeries that sell frozen pies that are the real deal. Unfortunately that’s very dependent on location but might be worth a look.
Palm oil can be bad for deforestation, but so is cattle farming (most forest clearing is for cattle grazing or cattle feed). There is certification around to source palm oil from outside recently cleared forests. In general, plant based diets will almost always beat animal products by a very significant margin.
Good find, it’s shady as fuck they healthy-wash the processed food. But your post is also interesting for a second reason- you care about eating healthy and do some specific diet, and yet you plan to live on frozen apple pie, whose nutritional value, traditional or not, is practically just sugar with fat? Unexpected choice for a conscious diet.
Honestly, that part about eating nothing but pie for two days makes me feel like this is a
moodmild but elaborate troll.I hate the amount of time it takes to cook and eat things every day. 😆 The microwavable frozen foods section would have been my first choice, there is usually enough selection to find something suitable, but the dollars-per-calorie cost is way too high, on order of $20-$30 per day. This pie is $15 and has enough calories for 2 days and takes zero work. Sugar and fat are already two of the three main ingredients I need. Also protein, but the wheat in the crust has some. Apples are a fruit, they have vitamins and shit. Looks good to me!
Sugar and fat are already two of the three main ingredients I need
I just want to point out that apple pie is a dessert, not a dietary staple. Not shaming you for enjoying an occasional treat, I do more than my share and we definitely need to find things that give us joy in this world… But sugar is not necessary, like at all. It has zero recommended percentage on labels because humans don’t require it for complete nutrition.
apple crumble or apple oatmeal? an apple oatmeal bowl would take less than ten mins to make, an apple crumble longer but then you …could eat half the pan like you want to. .
you can usually only have have 2/3: convenience, budget, quality. Pick two. A homemade apple oatmeal bowl might hit all three markers though.
what I would do, buy: A container of quick oats, a bag of apples, cinnamon, cane sugar… uh… Yeah. In a microwave bowl pour a tablespoon of sugar (or less or more whatever, its early), a shake of cinnamon, cut an apple (skin on for fiber) in to cubes right in your hand or on a small plate/cutting board, add it to the bowl, place about a cup of the quick oats on top, fill with water (maybe half a cup? maybe 3/4 cup? or read the oat box find out how much ur to use, its actually been a while since ive made oatmeal and I like mine watery so read the package tbh), Stir, then microwave it for like, two mins and eat the shit.
No it wont be fucking rock your socks off, but its quick easy food that didt cost much. could also just buy regular oats and make this the same, and stick it in the fridge for meal prepped over night oats.
Sounds like products like huel and soylent are just for you! Would be healthier probably.
I’d love these! I’m the target audience but they cost even more per calorie than microwaveable frozen meals do.
You seen very focused on the “cost per calorie” measure. Have you never heard the phrase “empty calories”?
You misunderstand the idea of cost per calorie. The expectation is that you start with something nutritionally-complete, like these soylents, the frozen rice+vegs+chicken dinners, or even the frozen apple pies (how ever nonconventional these may be), or if that is not possible then a combination of several foods in a ratio that makes them nutritionally complete, and then scale up to hit that 1500cals/day target. A single item or known ratio of items so I don’t have to think about this ever again. If I didn’t care about nutrition I’d just be chugging high fructose corn syrup (<$1/day) which you never saw me say. My daily meal ends up being rice and beans drenched in olive oil with some raw vegetables-of-the-day on the side, since I can’t afford the soylents.
I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD)
???
That “handmade touch” claim sounds like BS too. wtf does “hand-crisped crust” mean? and something tells me “filled by hand” just means that a human hand pushed a button. “This pie is meticulously crafted” LOLZ thanks, Michaelangelo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t2IkfuWTJ8
Hand filled…
The misleading advertising aside (seems bad, but it’s not what I want to focus on), you claim that palm oil is bad for a person’s health.
This article claims with evidence that it is likely no worse than other saturated fats and may in fact be better for overall health than other sources of saturated fat: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4365303/
I am truly interested to know if palm oil is much worse than other saturated fats, so if you have additional source worth reviewing it would be appreciated.
The authors do not note any conflicts of interest either, hopefully they were honest.
Other facts about palm oil which are commonly raised are the sustainability. I did not look into this aspect and further research may be needed.
I am truly interested to know if palm oil is much worse than other saturated fats, so if you have additional source worth reviewing it would be appreciated.
Palm oil has plant sterols, which interfere with human hormonal signaling and lipoprotein function.
Lots of people think this is a benefit of using plant based fats, but some of us don’t
Ahh yes, the pseudo-science group. I’m familiar, it’s fun to watch until someone takes them seriously and puts them in power. Then it’s scary and hurtful. Please don’t hurt people.
the pseudo-science group
phytosterols are a real thing - https://doi.org/10.4331/wjbc.v17.i2.121685
Please don’t hurt people.
you too!
That article indicates that phytosterols may have a range of benefits. What exactly is your concern?
Thanks for the down vote! Best way to have a civil discussion is to throw negativity around.
The entire point of including the article is to demonstrate that plant sterols are different than animal sterols. In your original comment up thread you were wondering about further differences between palm oil and animal saturated fats like butter… There you go, they are materially different
The review also lists many potential hazards. If you want to lower your LDL it’s a great tool, no question. However, ldl is not a disease and lowering it in isolation isn’t going to be good for your health.
Humans ate saturated fat as the primary fat source until about 100 years ago - to blame saturated fat for the modern epidemic of cvd doesn’t really make sense.
The real honest answer is it depends. Almost nothing in terms of food is universally better or worse. Calorically, Palm tends to be higher, with some exceptions (due to higher water content in butter). Palm can be made with a ton of different levels of saturation, which is why it’s popular in manufacturing (also cost), but how saturated makes a huge difference to how bad it is for you and doesn’t need to be labeled. Then there is consideration for natural occurrence of positive vitamins and minerals in some fat sources, or the perceived negative impacts of relatively more processed or less processed fats. Then peoples individual biology’s make some choices better than others for them personally.
The most general advice I can give is pay less attention to the source of the fat and more to the nutrition facts call-out for saturated fat (more=bad), from a purely health perspective. From a purely taste perspective, for pies butter and lard are more premium fats and all other sat fats are worse
The authors do not note any conflicts of interest
The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It’s like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the environment than electric cars written by an American.
They themselves admit in the opening abstract that “Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil.” I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.
Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It’s the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.
When they refer the mainstream information, they are referring to non peer reviewed literature. Based on your last paragraph, it seems that you would also prefer to use peer reviewed studies to make conclusions.
I’m not going to entertain the idea that a person’s country of origin precludes them from doing meaningful research on a topic. Instead, we should critique the methods and the sources that they used.
You also brought up soybean oil as a concern. I looked that one up too: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899900721002057
This article shows that replacing saturated fats in a person’s diet with soybean oil leads to the same results as if they had used another unsaturated fat. This is the expected result from such a dietary change. Do you have more information about the health concerns of soybean oil that you could share?
The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports.
That’s a valid point, but it could be that they’re looking at the global reaction to something they’ve consumed locally for thousands of years with consternation and wanted to investigate it.
I’ll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.
That feels like it might have sounded different in your head or I’m not understanding what you mean. There have been many examples of an incredibly unhealthy thing being very mainstream (lead, more than once, but also arsenic, radium, and mercury, for some of the most egregious examples, but pharmaceutical history is also full of this), so I don’t know why you would want to default to the mainstream on this if that’s what you did mean.
whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category
This is also a fair criticism, and I wish there were more research.
one of the largest producers of palm oil,
They produce less than 2% of global production, and are actually importers of palm oil, not exporters. Your ‘largest producers’ statement is as disingenuous as the packaging you’re complaining about.
Honestly, I don’t even trust food science anymore to tell me what is healthy or not. I’ve completely lost faith that they have any idea of what they’re talking about. The industry keeps changing their mind and fucking us around. I’m sure in 10 years they’ll be like, oh noo by the way we were completely wrong about saturated fat too.
I have a simple test. Is it highly processed? Unhealthy. My definition of “highly processed” being kind of arbitrary. Looking online, palm oil can be healthy but the stuff used commercially is unrecognisable from the initial product. I’m sure if you got a palm fruit and freshly squeezed it, you’d be eating something healthy. But whatever is in that apple pie I wouldn’t trust it. What I was reading
I trust butter because you can make it yourself at home. I don’t trust margarine. Just eat normal food.
Do you drink water? What about coffee or tea? All of those are highly processed (or at least they should be to be safe).
Science by its nature is designed to discover new ideas, new knowledge, and new information. When those discoveries happen, the understanding of humanity on a topic changes and improves. It’s why we don’t dump feces into our drinking water and why our drinking water is highly processed, all thanks to John Snow’s (not the character) scientific discovery.
So yes, the recommendations of food science changes because it should. But the basics have been known for a while (protein, carbs, fiber, fats, moderation, etc). The details are still being worked out, but fundamentals are known.
Quite the dishonest argument, especially fuck off with the water is processed too line. The problem with processed foods is not that they go through a manufacturing process, but that the end product contains added sugar, salt, saturated fat, or nitrates in amounts not typically found in fresh homemade foods. The rest is semantics.
So then say that those ingredients are your concerns.
It would also be reasonable to acknowledge that salt and sugar are excellent preservatives often found in freshly homemade items. As is the case with all these ingredients, the amount makes that difference between a healthy or unhealthy diet.
Water is not what I’m talking about and you know it lol. Comparing my argument to eating literal shit is just crass. C’mon man, you can do better.
Even the fundamentals keep thrashing all over the place. Red meat good. No wait it’s bad. No it’s good again but only these kinds. No wait it’s the cooking that’s bad. Ok now it’s the saturated fat. Actually only these kinds of saturated fat. Carbs are good. No they’re bad again. Ok some of them are good. No not those ones. Vegetables are good. But not starch. Actually nevermind starch is ok.
Honestly just fuck it. I have no problem with science evolving over time, but specifically food science is very confidently wrong all the time, often completely contradicting itself every few years. They genuinely have no idea what they’re doing, it’s practically pseudoscience. Honestly you may as well ask A.I. and get a hallucinated list of healthy food, or flip a coin for every food you eat.
Ignore what everyone tells you, listen to your body, and eat what makes you feel good. Not in a dopamine sugar way, but in the genuine way. Like how a homemade hearty stew makes you feel. You already know what’s good for you, just tune out the noise and stop overthinking it.
Maybe you didn’t mean water specifically, but the water from your faucet is likely more “processed” than a jar of pickles that you make yourself from cucumbers grown by you. Neither of those things are unhealthy and both can be part of a healthy diet. But the pickles are less processed (and loaded with preservatives).
The point is the “amount of processing” is meaningless and impossible to quantify. What processes are involved, the ingredients, and how much of them are present all matter more.
Most of what you’re describing are the nuances, which can be confusing. Unfortunately, for food in particular there is a lot of bad information available as well due to traditions, culture, and capitalism. However, there are good sources of information that can simplify nutrition if you want them.
That’s why I said it’s kind of arbitrary. There’s no easy way to quantify it or write down a set of rules that you can follow. Water processing is good, but white bread is bad. Butter is good but margarine and hydrogenated oil is bad. Freezing your own meals is good but store bought frozen meals is bad. Olive oil is good but commercial emulsifiers and refined seed oil are bad. Preserving in salt is good but commercial preservatives are bad. Adding salt to food is good but fast food has too much salt and is bad. Iodising salt is good and adding folate to bread is good.
The line is complicated and blurry and changes for each person even. The only semi-consistent rule I can find, is that as soon as a company is involved and it becomes a “product”, it seems to get bad. Their motivation is to make the food addictively delicious, last forever on the shelf, for maximum profit, regardless of how much it fucks you up. Those other kinds of processes (like water treatment) are government funded for the betterment of public health. A company gives zero fucks if you get leaky gut or die of heart failure or get diabetes or obesity or whatever, as long as they’re not legally liable.
The line is complicated and blurry and changes for each person even. The only semi-consistent rule I can find, is that as soon as a company is involved and it becomes a “product”, it seems to get bad.
That was my conclusion as well. I am not against science, I love science and industrial manufacturing, I was even willing to drink soylents! But even if you wave away the constantly changing food science health recommendations as normal churn of ever-improving scientific understanding, the interests of industrial food manufacturers are never aligned with my own. “We replaced butter with palm oil in our recipe because it is cheaper!” - well ok, good for you - “…AND it is also healthier for you! ;)” - I don’t believe it! I’ll check in back in another 50 years to see all the metastudies of the metastudies of palm oil consumption studies, but in the meantime the only rule of thumb that has survived every dietary recommendation change is to stick to whole foods.
Not quite, a few quick notes:
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white bread is fine, it is no better or worse than other sources of carbs. Whole grain bread is preferred because of the additional fiber and other nutrients, but so long as those are obtained by other parts of the diet it’s not a problem.
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margerine used to have lots of trans-fats, but thanks to improved regulations it may actually be better than butter for some health conditions. Most margerine is oil and water. It is still fat so should be consumed in moderation. Flavor wise, butter tastes better to most people.
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frozen food quality depends on the ingredients, not the freezing or place where it was made. Frozen fruits and vegetables are great. Frozen chicken has lots of protein, just like chicken.
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emulsifiers may be good or bad. Eggs and mustard are both emulsifiers. Those may or may not belong in an individuals diets. Emulsifiers by themselves are not universally bad for people.
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seed oils are typically lower in saturated fats, cholesterol, and are generally recommended as healthier options compared to saturated or animal derived fats. Seed oils are good.
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many common commercial preservatives are salt, acid, and sugar. The amount in the fodds and the amount consumed are the what needs to be considered.
Again you’re only picking out the rare good things. I can’t help but feel like you’re being disingenuous and deliberately trying to misunderstand me or something. When I say frozen food I clearly don’t mean spinach pucks. By emulsifiers I don’t mean egg whites or EVOO.
That’s why I said it’s arbitrary, because as soon as you try and write down any actual rules or definitions, it doesn’t work anymore, and pizza becomes a vegetable.
The fact of the matter is, obesity and diabetes and colon cancer were practically nonexistent 200 years ago, and now they’re epidemics. Our diets are garbage. I’m not claiming I know the exact thing that causes all this trouble, but I think it’s fair to say that maybe things like carrageenan and partially hydrogenated fat should be avoided. Anything that is a cheaper substitute that a company uses instead of an organic product should be met with suspicion.
In fact let’s do a case study. The ingredients list on a frozen pizza is like an essay. There’s this pizza that I used to buy that would consistently make me have horrific diarrhoea and digestive issues. Most of the ingredients are ok. But oh look,
- the tomato sauce contains a huge amount of “vegetable oil” in it. Which vegetable? How was the oil made?
- The base contains “E460 microcrystalline cellulose”. Why is there wood pulp in my pizza?
- The sauce and cheese also contains “E200 sorbic acid”. This just sounds terrible in general.
- The base also contains “E471 mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids”. The fuck lol.
- And tapioca starch. I don’t like tapioca. Tapioca doesn’t belong in pizza.
Why is all this crap in a pizza? One of these things makes me severely unwell, but none of them belong in a pizza. You can go on about how good ultra processed foods are, but you’ll never convince me that all these additives are good for you, no matter if they are technically approved or not. I believe that you need to be able to understand every ingredient in your food and why it’s there. Maybe I just have an unusually sensitive stomach, but even one preservative or E code emulsifier or additive gives me troubles.
Go look at what’s actually in white bread. modified tapioca starch (1413), soy flour, acacia gum, vegetable emulsifiers (481, 471, 472e). You can’t tell me that’s healthy.
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nothing says handmade and premium more than an ai generated description
