Food engineering has grown to the point where food is treated as “products”. Taste, feel and looks are highly engineered to optimize our sensations.
Looks: Marketing of food products use wildly unrelated items (glue to mimic cheese, shoe polish to mimic seared meat) to make the food look appetizing. This sets up for completely unrealistic standards.
Taste: Sugar has been pushed in our diet under different names (dextrose, fructose, corn syrup). Salt has been optimized to excite our senses. But the proportion is carefully controlled to ensure we never feel overwhelmed or saturated with a particular taste.
Feel: Food companies hire the best engineers to optimize surface characteristics to ensure their ‘products’ has great sound, great texture and so on. Pringles famously worked on double curvature for specific mechanics.
These food companies have created ‘products’ that are extremely far from nature. They are engineered heavily to maximize profits at the cost of consumers health.
What can you do:
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Read labels: Most countries have food regulatory bodies that require companies to publish their nutrition info. Check the “daily value” information. Check the “serving size”. DO NOT TRUST WHAT IS PRINTED ON THE FRONT. The real info is always in the back in a boring black and white table.
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Spread awareness: Companies are betting on the fact that you are too tired, too occupied or too ignorant to care about all this. I understand you may have bigger problems. But always remember that you may have 1000 worries but when you have a health issue you only have 1 worry.
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Reach out: If you struggle with food addiction and over consumption don’t struggle alone. This battle cannot be won alone. You are fighting against an army. Join local support groups. Help yourselves to gather allies. If you know know someone who is struggling, reach out and help. Any food that you make at home ( no matter what you make) cannot possibly be as unhealthy as ultra processed crap.
There is some good information in here, but it’s also mixed in with some bad.
I don’t have the energy to go through it all. But for just one tiny example: Parmesan cheese and cellulose. First of all, bad information says “cellulose is what you find in wood. You’re eating wood!” Yes, cellulose is in wood. It’s also in VEGETABLES. If you eat vegetables, you’re eating cellulose. Furthermore, it’s a small percentage of the grated parmesan cheese, and it’s there to prevent the cheese from caking and clumping. This video claims [approximate quote] “There’s hardly any cheese in parmesan cheese” which is a bullshit claim. It’s usually like 95% cheese, if not more.
Just one example.
And yes, there is some good information in here.
But also, regarding being able to pronounce ingredients: Look up what makes up an apple. It’s chemicals you can’t pronounce. And yet apples are most certainly healthy.
This video is really not a great source of information. Marginal at best. I think they were trying, and there is some good info in there. But it’s mixed in with some pretty marginal info.
Reading the labels helps avoid the truly shitty makers. There was a brand of fake parmesan cheese that got outed for having higher than 45% filler in their grated Parmesan cheese. 50% of the filler was the cellulose powder.
The worst offenders are NOT a small percentage. It’s usually easy to notice because it’s so much cheaper than the rest on the shelf but not always
Iirc they called them bulking agents in the article I rememebered
You can download an app called Yuka which will tell you if a food or cosmetic product has anything suspected of being bad for you in it.
The app suggests alternatives but you have to be careful (it suggested a lot of zero-fluoride tooth pastes which would make my teeth rot)
For US consumers, Yuka will tell you if an ingredient is banned in the EU or Australia or regulated there in a different way.
Being a fan of the Pareto principle, could a lot of this be summarized with
"“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” - Michael Pollen
?
That’s my philosophy. The more unprocessed, whole, plant based, the better.
Agree we should be aware of what we’re consuming. Think the rise in certain diseases is correlated to diet and gut health. Lack of fiber, too many preservatives/sugar/etc. is getting more common in modern diets.
IMO it’s the convenience factor you have to try to overcome in most cases.
Some practical things we’ve been doing is buying more produce locally. We go to a weekly farmers market nearby or shop the perimeter of the grocery store only and avoid the center aisles. The trick is to use what you get before it goes bad (which natural food should, it’s a red flag to me if food is shelf stable for months). So we got a slow cooker and now it’s pretty easy to throw a bunch of vegetables in and have dinner ready without much effort or clean up.
The other trick is to just not have snacks in the house, otherwise we’ll end up eating those pretty quickly. I love potato chips, but if we don’t buy them, I don’t miss them and end up eating fruits or something else.
It’s a win-win, because it’s relatively cheap (beans and rice is cheaper than packs of ramen) and healthier.
But yeah it’s an uphill battle and getting increasingly difficult and more expensive to find food that’s good for you unfortunately.
It’s just very tiring not being able to trust anything. It feels like every company is out there to get you
Sadly you can’t trust this video either.
Agreed and when you find a small, indie company making good stuff, they may get bought by a megacorp who ends up worsening the product.
From what I can tell, a Certified B corp label seems to be a decent indicator of meeting at least a minimum standard of ethics. Hopefully more businesses start to put people of profits.
Damn, I miss making bread. Just seeing the title makes me want to restart my sourdough culture
