- is made from a plant historically considered inedible
- has a very high input:output ratio
- often has extensive processing steps that include industrial solvents like hexane and deodorization steps to make the end product tolerable
If that’s not a UPF then I would not regard that definition as useful.
Personally I don’t hold to any particular “seed oil” claims, but vegetable oils are a major ingredient in almost all UPFs, are very calorie dense, and canola/soybean oil have risen from near-zero to be one of if not the largest calorie source for Westerners in just the past few decades; canola oil was not even consumed before the 1970s. They would certainly be one of my main suspects in the obesity epidemic.
It’s certainly true to talk about how bad chips are we’re talking about what makes them so high calorie is the oil.
You can take that up with the nova classification I guess. And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.
In another comment you say that chips fried in olive oil would be healthy. But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.
> And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.
Maybe we have different definitions of "seed oils" or "panic claims". Nothing I said is controversial: canola oil as food did not exist before the 1970s, the standard method of creating canola oil involves crushing a massive amount of canola and then using a solvent like hexane to maximize extraction, vegetable oils are one of the primary sources for 21st century calories and are hugely present in UPFs.
I would consider a "panic claim" to be something like "seed oils cause cancer", "seed oils cause heart attacks", "seed oils cause inflammation", "the hexane in canola is poisoning people", or even "seed oils are definitely responsible for the obesity epidemic", etc. I am sure there is (limited) evidence for these claims, and that's fine: it's nearly impossible to get high-quality nutritional research showing long-term dietary impacts because of the nature of the problem. What do you do? Interviews are unreliable, you can't feed people controlled diets for a lifetime, population/consumption studies are beset by thousands of confounders. Thus, I don't have any reason to place a lot of belief in any study saying "seed oils bad!"; some other study explaining how they're great is just as likely to be true, in my mind.
All I can go by is the simple heuristic I explained earlier.
> But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.
Because I don't think calories are likely to be the real explanation behind the public health problems. Every food item, even 100% unprocessed, has all sorts of pharmacological side effects besides turning into cellular fuel. Most of them are very subtle, have different effects in different populations, etc. Most people have had access to plentiful high-calorie low-satiety foods for a long time and this didn't happen. Perhaps the "hyperpalatable" part is involved, but lots of sugary and high-fat treats fall into this category and we still didn't have this problem. What we didn't have was modern UPFs or vegetable oils. So if the cause is dietary, it seems reasonable to look in askance at these, and it's obvious that we don't "need" flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and the various preservatives we now have except to enhance the profitability of Kraft and General Mills. My second point was that this would have the side effect of rendering uneconomical or unpalatable whole categories of products that presumably tptacek does have a problem with, even if he doesn't align with the reason for doing so. So if he thinks chips are a public health menace, this makes them rarer and more expensive.
We did not consume canola oil prior to the 70s. I do not understand why this should carry nutritional information.
Hexane is used to extract oil from rapeseeds. This sounds spooky but is pretty deeply studied. It does not appear to make its way into our bodies at measurable levels.
"Well it must be something so why not canola oil" is not the right way to approach this problem, in my opinion. The swap to include "flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and preservatives" (none of which are are canola oil) is also odd here. Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?
Right, I didn’t make any argument that the hexane used in rapeseed processing is dangerous. Just that those factors are obviously indications it’s a highly processed food.
> Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?
We wouldn’t, and nowhere did I suggest that. Just that it’s probably a good idea to eliminate all these highly processed food items. Maybe they’re fine but the main thing they’re fine for is big food manufacturer conglomerates. If you don’t think UPFs are themselves the problem, that’s fine: getting rid of them gets rid of all these low-satiety calorie dense foods, including potato chips, unless you make them much more expensive because you’re cooking them with lard or something. Which in turn still reduces consumption.
- is made from a plant historically considered inedible
- has a very high input:output ratio
- often has extensive processing steps that include industrial solvents like hexane and deodorization steps to make the end product tolerable
If that’s not a UPF then I would not regard that definition as useful.
Personally I don’t hold to any particular “seed oil” claims, but vegetable oils are a major ingredient in almost all UPFs, are very calorie dense, and canola/soybean oil have risen from near-zero to be one of if not the largest calorie source for Westerners in just the past few decades; canola oil was not even consumed before the 1970s. They would certainly be one of my main suspects in the obesity epidemic.
It’s certainly true to talk about how bad chips are we’re talking about what makes them so high calorie is the oil.