FDA Rewrites Rules of 'Healthy' Foods For First Time in 30 Years, do you think this will be beneficial for the populace?

Because peanuts on their own have to be visibly pleasing as peanuts or people won't buy them. When you put them in a candy bar, you can use the crap looking ones.

Also, buying in bulk drastically decreases the price. If you had the purchasing power of Hershey, you could get your peanuts really cheap too. Join a food co-op as a starting point.

We at Payday Corporation hear your voices.

We have to give a few peanuts to the cocoa slaves, to prevent an uprising. In exchange we had to replace the peanuts with chocolate. They do not respect wealth in the dark heart of Asia.

We appreciate your lifelong commitment to Payday.

Sincerely,

The Payday Corporation

19 E. Chocolate Avenue

Hershey, Pennsylvania, US

Half of them are only cheap because of heavily subsidized corn being heavily processed into an inordinately cheap sugar substitute.

Taxes aren't really raising prices so much as undoing the subsidies distorting the market.

I think sin taxes are absolutely acceptable if the government is also fully paying for the healthcare of all citizens (which we should totally be doing).

The combination of the two would make America a much healthier place overall.

Denmark instituted a sugar tax and that seemed to have very positive effects (manufacturers reduced the sugar content in various products, better health outcomes). It makes sense in countries with socialised health care systems that you'd make the people that end up costing more due to behaviours pay more into it.

Sin taxes are an incredibly effective way to reflect externalities of actions... sin taxes on offensive goods with no healthy malady are dumb as fuck - but we should be making sure that consumers are seeing a more accurate cost for expensive consumption habits. In an ideal world those revenues would be earmarked for programs to counter the societal harm (i.e. buying a pack of cigarettes would come with essentially a payroll style tax that'd fund smoking cessation programs) but America is currently deeply dysfunctional.

I'd be okay with that. The key thing is we need to do more than we're currently doing because the system is broken

It's amazing to me how many people respond to everything with "tax it" or "ban it". WTF happened to liberty as a national ethos?

I read in another article that the “healthy” symbol is currently under development.

First, they came for frogs and made them gay, and I didn't speak up for I'm not a frog.

Then they came for my fats and made them trans.

I just don't put fats on any sort of pedestal.

They're just part of cooking, a means to an end. Excess is the enemy of any form of health, just have a balance.

No steak cooked in butter will be healthier than broccoli boiled in it.

Saturated fats are not good actually. That's a lie funded by dairy industry.

And trail mix (with nuts and whole grains and fruit) is in fact healthy.

The overwhelming majority of Americans eat nowhere close to the bare minimum recommended amount of fiber. Guess which one has lots of fiber? And is also full of minerals not found in many other foods

From what I could find, the whole "saturated fats are healthy actually" and the whole "seed oils are bad" and "polyunsaturated fats are not good actually" are things originating from meat and animal products lobbying, and recently popularized by the Joe Rogan podcast when he had a self-identified carnivore on? Or something?

Basically, it seems to be yet another manufactured culture war shit by the right filled with misinformation and disinformation that goes against the science. At this point I feel like anything that gets championed by the right needs to be very heavily examined for truthfulness.

Also, expect a lot lot more of this after the Trump administration takes over. Be skeptical of people skeptical of seed oils and polyunsaturated fats. Be skeptical of people glorifying meat and butter and saturated fats.

They've always been behind the times. If you're old enough you'll remember the cholesterol scare. They apparently hadn't learned the different types of cholesterol yet. This is from my youth.

So are my cheerios healthy? They not only make that claim on the box but I was raised with that knowledge all my life, as were my parents. And it is oats, and does have what used to be a decent amount of fiber. And I eat it with yogurt and fruit. Yet it’s another carb, and has much less fiber, vitamins, protein than many modern breakfast cereal.

Are my eggs healthy? Or do they raise cholesterol? Or am I likely to cook them with less healthy choices? Is my toast more carbs than cereal or less? More fiber or less? Is butter bad or good this week? What if I pair with sausage or bacon?

I used to believe all that kind of stuff. Our diets are so much more diverse and food more available than ever. We have fresh produce in the winter, and our meat is farmed instead of scarce and hunted. We understand things like needing vitamin C daily, either fortifying rice or not killing / stripping the b-vitamins on it. We can get far more nutrients than we need from food which is why people can eat so many empty calories and be fine.

-Was sick for years and in a lot of pain because of silicon dioxide (an additive commonly found in vitamins).

I won't debate this point either way. There are definitely ranges to quality, and I haven't see bona fide research on the impact of factory farming and limited strains vs whatever else.

Also, processed doesn't automatically mean unhealthy. It more just enables incredibly unhealthy things to be done either as preservatives or to cut costs.

But the biggest impact on health is from the ready, cheap availability of low quality, high calorie food that is actively optimized for overconsumption, and the fact that frozen prepared foods (and fast food) that are affordable are generally not very healthy because of cost cutting. So that's the best point of emphasis to be healthier.

I know I'm an awful pedant who doesn't wurd gud either half the time, but you meant to say populace not populous in the title. Hope you don't mind me pointing it out :-)

And research is pretty clear now that it isn't fat that causes the problems, it's unstable glucose

Yes it is, including saturated fat, in limited quantities.

Less sauce. But I've cut out roux based sauces, except occasionally. And occasionally I will use half and half for coffee and tea. Moderation in all things, including moderation. Also I do much less bread, mainly because proper flour in a food dessert desert is not easy to get, and store bought bread in the USA is gross.

Just focusing on the article and FDA statements - it reminds me of a chapter in Colin Campbell's book, The China Study. He was part of some of the committees that were involved in drafting dietary guidelines, which ended up including the now-infamous idea that fats should be reduced. In his own book he lamented how it turned out, but from his perspective it had more to do with the over-emphasis on specific nutrients (like fat, but it's also worth noting that these early guidelines did contribute to the rise of the supplements industry as well).

When these guidelines are made, what they become is essentially a hodgepodge of ideas that try to placate both nutritional professionals, as well as industry lobbyists (who are always involved in these committes and aggressively try to push their own recommendations).

So in the case of these new guidelines what I think we're seeing here is more of the same. In nutritional science there is a scientific consensus on which overall dietary pattern is considered most appropriate for the wellbeing of the general population (which is to say it currently has the largest body of evidence to support it's benefits and efficacy). That would be the Mediterranean diet, as described by Ancel Keys. Contrary to popular belief this is not a diet that's all about eating chicken all the time and guzzling olive oil by the gallon. "This approach emphasizes a plant-based diet, focusing on unprocessed cereals, legumes, vegetables, and fruits. It also includes moderate consumption of fish, dairy products (mostly cheese and yogurt), and a low amount of red meat."

(As a sidenote recent research on a new "green Mediterranean diet" variant has been demonstrating that these dietary patterns produce even greater health benefits when the plant-based side of the diet is emphasized even more).

If you squint hard enough you can still see the bones of the Mediterranean guidelines in these new FDA guidelines. But now where things get self-contradicting is their statements on saturated fat. To be clear, no matter what any half-baked health influencer spouts, the evidence on saturated fat is so voluminous and thorough it could not be more concrete. Saturated fat absolutely increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, and should strictly be limited. The recommendations from Harvard:

"The American Heart Association advises a limit of 5% to 6% of your daily calories, while the Dietary Guidelines for Americans says 10% is fine. Registered dietitian Kathy McManus, who directs the Department of Nutrition at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital, suggests a happy medium of 7%. That happens to be the typical amount of saturated fat in the heart-friendly Mediterranean-style diet."

And yet in these new guidelines you get misleading recommendations to, on the one hand, limit saturated fat, while on the other hand, they're now going to promote potentially high sources of saturated fats as "healthy"; those being dairy, eggs, and nuts and seeds.

Some things are a step in the right direction. The emphasis on whole foods is good. But I think ultimately it's going to lead to more confusion, and it's dubious as to how helpful it's going to be. It also still makes the mistake of overemphasizing single nutrients rather than overall dietary patterns.

And I dunno, it probably doesn't matter. Unless we can truly eliminate the toxic food environment (that is, the absolute cornucopia of harmful "foods" that completely dominate every grocery store shelf and other food menus, oftentimes being the most deceptively inexpensive choices), then that's what the vast majority of people are going to keep choosing.