Comment by elchief
4 hours ago
"eat less ultra-processed food"
well, how do you think Canola Oil is made exactly?
it's cracked, cooked, pressed, washed in hexane and acid, neutralized with caustic soda, bleached, deodorized
on what planet is that not ultra processed?
so, i should avoid ultra-processed food, except oils that are ultra-processed?
whereas tallow, is...cut from meat
i'm not suggesting you should only eat tallow, I'm just saying it's not ultra-processed.
Sure, if you eat the tallow. People aren't doing that. They're using the tallow to make french fries etc. The problem is the french fries, not the oil choice.
Eating beef tallow is self-limiting. It's hard to eat a lot of it directly.
OTOH, it's really easy to eat a lot of French Fries.
> They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.
No, that's just as wrong. French fries deep fried in Sunflower oil are also unhealthy. Adding a spoon of tallow to your tomato soup is also unhealthy.
> There’s something else worth knowing about beef tallow that isn’t making it into the wellness content: It contains ruminant trans fats. They’re naturally occurring, present in all beef fat, and according to cardiologists, present in tallow at levels far above what’s considered safe.
The animals that produce that tallow are part of the global industrial food system too.
And tallow, by itself, is not something you eat, it's just moving the point of thermal and chemical alteration and production into your home.
Finally, most of this "eat as much animal offal as possible" movement is directly funded by the producers of these products battling it out with the producers of competing products.
You should listen to your doctors over influencers that talk about chemistry in a way that makes simple things sound dangerous and evil.
"Ultra-processed" does not mean "many steps in the process of creating it". Although I assume many people are somewhat misusing the term by now, it originally comes from the "Nova" system, where part of the current definition of ultra-processed is:
Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates).
Hexane, acid, caustic soda, bleach, and deodorisers have no or rare culinary use.
Yeah, but those dont end up in the final product afaik, which i think is the distiction being made.
The "bleach" in the bleaching process for foods is not the bleach you buy to clean your bathtub.
Any isolation of certain compounds from whole food from other compounds would be part of what I refer to as processed. In the case of refined oils, I'd call it ultra processed just because of how much is removed - even before considering the chemical contaminants.
Is criticism is directly, and convincingly, addressed in the article.
> Some of what’s driving the seed oil panic isn’t wrong — it’s just misattributed. Ultra-processed food really is a problem. . . . But seed oils are not why ultra-processed food behaves that way. They are but one ingredient in a complex and highly engineered product designed to keep you eating past fullness. The oil isn’t the villain; the food product surrounding the oil is. Blaming seed oils for the harms of ultra-processed food is as helpful as blaming the wrapper.
Absolutely a PR campaign. People started getting upset about the array of bizarre chemicals in their foods and the minimal standards and regulations about introducing new ones (or disclosing completely the ones that you are using.)
The response has been to try to convert it into a moral campaign - actually the foods packed with bizarre barely regulated chemicals are also sometimes fatty and sweet, and you should stop indulging yourself and show some self-control.
Meanwhile, 20-somethings are starting to get a ton of colon cancer.
Cows eating grain in concentrated feedlots and then made available in separate pieces all year round at the local grocery store... is also a modern industrial invention.