2d ago

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

www.sciencealert.com FDA Rewrites Rules of 'Healthy' Foods For First Time in 30 Years

The United States has redefined what qualifies as "healthy" food for the first time in 30 years, striking items like white bread from the list while welcoming nutrient-rich options such as eggs and salmon, officials said Thursday.

The article seems to be shittily written in my opinion but I figure if you watch the video (about a minute) it will get the point across.

My question lies in, do you think this will benefit the health of the people moving forward, or do you fear it being weaponized to endorse or threaten companies to comply with the mention of Kennedy being tied to its future as mentioned in the end of the article

77 comments

You know what would be way better than a symbol for "healthy" food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as "unhealthy." Bonus points if you tax it to death so it's no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it "food"
Like, shit, the public perception is that I can't afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it'd be easier to avoid
- Why is a Payday candy bar 1/3rd the price of a bag of peanuts with fewer peanuts than the Payday has?
  
  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
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- I don't want more sin taxes. Sin taxes are anti choice. Subsidizing products that's meet the healthy label I could agree with though
  Edit: aka subsidizing the crops that are used to produce and possibly writing laws to ban the taxation on foods labeled healthy. Thus making such food in states like I live cost 10% less just by banning the state taxes on them before even getting to the subsidization on the crops. Shit, forcing us to move off corn to things like sugar cane would be great. Dense, the crop cycles are better, water usage is less and overall would be easier to manage. As in if we are going to kill ourselves with gas powered cars using 10% ethanol from corn... Why not use 10% from sugarcane which is easier to acquire and better for the population long term
  
  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?

Weird to write an article that links to the page it’s mostly plagiarized from: https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critical-foods/use-term-healthy-food-labeling
- Thanks for posting that. Honestly I would almost guess the article was compiled by AI, as it seems to assume you know information it has not previously mentioned.
  If you notice it mentions the symbol multiple times but never shows it. (Not a symbol it can type) Where as a human would have written/drawn/ known it has to be shown or none of the references make sense.
  Or I'm an idiot and they just are saying the term "healthy" is the symbol they are going to use?
  
  I read in another article that the “healthy” symbol is currently under development.
- Wondrously helpful to provide a link to the information's source page!!!

And it will get reversed in a month...already heard Trumpicans calling it "woke".
- Damn librulz always tryna take my trans fats!
  
  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.
- Sorry, trail mix isn't healthy.
  And saturated fats can be. The whole thing against sat fats is wrong, and was proven so by 1994.
  The FDA is full of shit on this.
  
  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.

Not really.
If you cook from ingredients, you'll usually be reasonably healthy. It's not impossible to make healthy prepared foods, but it's (comparatively) expensive enough that that, not awareness, is the main limitation.
- It is harder to cook healthy foods nowadays than it was even 40 years ago because commercial farming has expedited the growth cycles of plants and animals to the point where they simply cannot process the nutrition available from the environment the way that they used to.
  If you want to eat truly healthy, you basically have to grow the food yourself.
  Since that is completely unreasonable for the grand majority of the modern world, your goal should be to try to eat as healthily as you can. Cooking from scratch and not over cooking your food are very good places to start.
  
  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.

This is a good try, but no I don’t see it helping. Those of us who can afford healthier choices already do so.
My simplification is that most people fall into one of these scenarios
just need the cheapest, possibly emphasize comfort food - doesn’t matter what’s healthy if it’s not in your budget
proportions and quantity. This won’t help
prepared food, whether frozen or restaurant, is a disaster.
I fall in to the second camp. I generally know what’s healthy and try to get it, but I don’t succeed with portion control or proportions. If the wrong things still dominate your plate, and your plate is too full, it doesn’t matter if some things have a healthy symbol.
I have no idea how to fix people like me, but for the first scenario I really believe we need a financial incentive. Back in the old days you ate a lot of vegetables because what came out of your garden was the cheapest food. Now thanks partly to government subsidies, corn syrup is both the cheapest food, and appeals to our evolutionary desire for sweetness. Let’s start by redirecting those subsidies to support a healthier food supply, but yeah I think we’re going to need a vice tax
- I agree with most of your post except the the first 2 sentences.
  We don't know what we don't know. You assume we already know what the healthy options are. But with 50 years of education propping up a food pyramid that was developed as a marketing tool by kellogs we don't actually know what's best for us.
  We think grains & cereals are the best. These along with sugars have the highest caloric value. It makes absolute sense to eat these if food is scarce and difficult to get as they provide the best bang for buck.
  But in modern society where food is easy to get grains and carbs aren't good.
  So reeducating everyone using the understanding science has developed oner the last 50 yrs is hugely important. We've been feeding ourselves based on misinformation.

Lower fat means more sugar. Have less of full fat products.
- Fat is a necessary macro, and the public's ignorant obsession with fat-free is crazy, especially since it almost always corresponds with more sugar, like you said. Guess what the body turns sugar into.
  
  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.
- Doesn't that disagree with most of the mother'l sauces?
  
  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.

Not subsidizing corn would be a good start. Why is HFCS shit cheaper than vegetables? Rhetorical question.

Probably most people like myself will ignore the guidelines. The advice looks better than before but I don't like half of it.

OP, please reword title of your post to be an open-ended question.
- Ah, I just clicked the copy button as I thought it was one of the communities that required the title to match the articles title. (Jerboa doesn't show community rules on the side). Sorry about that
  Edit: done
  
  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 :-)

Bad nutrition both in the comments and the FDA. :-\
- Care to elaborate on what you are referencing?

77 comments