paranoia

Restaurants of New York: Stop Serving Assemblyman Felix Ortiz Food Prepared With Salt In Any Form

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Mar 15 2010

My sincere apologies to any lookalikes. Perhaps you could go moustache-less for a while? No salt for you!

Just over a week ago, a New York state assemblyman from Brooklyn named Felix Ortiz proposed a bill that would prohibit “the use of salt in any form in the preparation of any food for consumption” with penalties of “not more than one thousand dollars for each violation.” Presumably that wouldn’t prevent restaurants from providing salt for customers to add at their own discretion, but the bill offers no further details about what would and wouldn’t be considered a “violation” of the law or what is and isn’t included in the definition of “salt in any form”: see the full text here (hat tip: Reason).

Surely table salt (NaCl) would count, but what about any of the other edible ionic compounds that are chemically considered to be salts, like MSG (a sodium salt with the molecular formula C5H8NNaO4) or cream of tartar (a potassium acid salt with the formula KC4H5O6)? What about salty condiments like soy sauce, fish sauce, and ketchup? Would a restaurant that serves a ketchup-topped meatloaf have to forego the salt in the loaf mixture but still be able to slather ketchup on top (if so, why wouldn’t they just start adding ketchup to the mix as well, and finding ways to incorporate condensed soups and bouillon into dozens of other things that don’t already have them)? Or would they have to find or make their own salt-free ketchup—obviously a much larger burden on some kinds of restaurants? Even if it could make you live forever, would it be worth it?What about all the other prepared foods that already include salt and get used as ingredients in the preparation of other foods? Would Momofuku Milk Bar be banned from serving its famous compost cookies, which call for the addition of two “snack foods” like potato chips and salted pretzels?

House-baked, cured, and brined things would clearly suffer most from a law like this. It's one thing to have to salt a soup or curry or burger at the table, but everything from deli pickles and salami to homemade cinnamon rolls and pie crusts would become completely unpalatable, if not impossible, without salt. When questioned by the Albany Times Union about salt-cured meats and pickles:

Ortiz didn't have answers, saying repeatedly, "This all needs to be debated."

Of course, it’s probably not worth worrying about the ramifications of a bill that I can’t imagine has any chance of passing. Even the NYTimes has backed down from their initial, crazypants coverage of the recent NEJM study that claimed a small reduction in sodium consumption would save 44,000 lives a year—which is exactly the sort of statistic that gives legs to hysterical nutritional crusades (hysterical both in the funny-ha-ha sense and in the wandering-uterus-induced-insanity sense). The best example of that phenomenon is probably the equally batshit claim that obesity causes 300,000 deaths per year, but even anti-obesity crusaders have struggled to get far less aggressive measures passed, like the mandatory inclusion of calorie counts on fast food menus (which, incidentally, do not seem to reliably reduce how many calories people purchase).

Ortiz’s bill is actually so preposterous and so much more aggressive than the other recent proposals for reducing salt consumption, like the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s campaign to persuade food manufacturers to reduce the salt content of processed food by 40 percent over the next 10 years, that I initially thought it might be a sort of “straw man” bill designed by restaurateurs and/or salt-reform-skeptics to win people over by making salt reform seem even crazier than it actually is. But according to Ortiz, it was actually inspired by his father’s death:

He said he was prompted to introduce the bill because his father used salt excessively for many years, developed high blood pressure and had a heart attack (Albany Times Union).

Pity his father’s heart attack couldn’t be attributed to excessive exposure to creepy moustaches. Read more

Things That Won't Kill You Volume 3: MSG

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Oct 14 2009

From Flickr user "The Other Dan" taken in Corktown, Toronto 

Unlike juice, which has sort of a mixed reputation even among contemporary nutritionists and doctors, MSG has been consistently demonized. Most people can't tell you why, they just know that it's bad. If pressed, they might tell you that it's "unnatural," that food manufacturers put it in processed foods to con people into eating "junk," that it's basically salt (which I'll address in a future post in this series), or that it gives some people headaches. Or they might just gesture to the fact that it's common knowledge that MSG is basically some kind of poison—after all, why would Chinese restaurants be so eager to reassure you that they don't use it if it were completely benign?

A recent commercial for Campbell's New Select Harvest Light (which is the sort of self-satirizing product name I'd expect to find in David Foster Wallace's fiction) suggests that even if people don't know what MSG stands for, they know that it's bad—potentially bad enough to deter people from buying a particular brand. Reading from a Progresso Light can, blonde #1 gets through "monosodium" but stumbles on "glutamate"—fortunately, the rainbow coalition includes an Asian woman who can translate that jargon into something we all understand: "That's MSG."

Although people may still associate it primarily with Chinese restaurant cooking, the Campbell's ad hints at its broader prevalence—MSG and other forms of glutamic acid are omnipresent in processed foods. They're especially likely to be found in foods designed to taste like things that have a lot of naturally-occurring glutamate (or similar molecules like inosinate or guanylate). Stock, broth, and bouillon often contain MSG, as does anything cheese-flavored or ranch-flavored, like Doritos, which actually contain five different forms of glutamate. I taste it the most in instant ramen and Chex Mix, but even though I know what it tastes like on its own, I can't always tell when something contains it or not. When used sparingly, it may not even be possible to discern because whether the glutamate in a dish comes from a mushroom or a salt, once it's dissolved in liquid or on your tongue, it's the exact same molecule:

from Wikipedia, showing up weirdly gray here

So even people who think it's "bad" and expect to feel bad after eating it probably eat MSG, at least from time to time, without even knowing it, and without suffering any negative effects.Read more

Things that won't kill you Vol. 2: Fruit juice

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Sep 17 2009

This may seem like a strange thing to argue about, because the popular consensus still seems to be that juice is healthy. Jamba Juice markets itself as "the category-defining leader in healthy blended beverages, juices, and good-for-you snacks." They even use Jamba as an adjective to mean the opposite of high fructose corn syrup and trans-fats (adding those things to juice ""just wouldn't be Jamba"), which again, constructs the brand as healthy vs. the demon poisons that make people fat. Even if it's foolish to go looking for truths in advertising, I don't think Jamba Juice's branding generally occurs to people as a massive irony or lie. Advocates of banning or restricting soda vending machines in schools often claim that the soda should be replaced with 100% fruit juice with no added sugars, and for many people, a glass of orange juice still represents "part of a nutritious breakfast" strongly with desirable nutrients like Vitamin C.

The Case Against Juice

But a number of health trends have begun cast suspicion on juice, especially the (impartial and incomplete) shift from primarily low-fat to primarily low-calorie and low-carb dieting in mainstream weight-loss culture, and the growing concern about the role sugars (especially fructose) play in personal and national obesity.

On the low-calorie front, people who believe that losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight is all about the basic algebra of calories-in vs. calories-out often end up axing all caloric beverages from their diets because they have a bad satiety-to-calorie ratio—I mean, obviously, right? Fruit juice is just fruit with some or all of the filling fiber removed. If the goal is maximum satiety on minimum calories, you're better off eating whole fruit and drinking water or artificially sweetened beverages.

On the low-carb front, people who believe that what's important is not how many calories you eat but what kind are also going to see juice (and sometimes most fruits and vegetables as well) as "unhealthy." It does seem to be true that diets high in carbohydrates drive up insulin levels, slowing metabolism and encouraging the body to store fat. And the overwhelming majority of the calories in most fruit juices are in the form of carbohydrates. Some green vegetable juices have protein content approaching 50% of the carbohydrate content, but that just makes it 75% bad rather than 100% bad, at least as true carbophobes are concerned.

And finally, there are some non-carbophobes who might avoid juice because they're wary of sugar qua sugar, rather than sugar qua carbohydrate. The carbohydrates in fruit juice primarily take the form of fructose—wikipedia has a handy chart of the kinds of sugars in common plant foods. It doesn't seem like there's a true consensus yet about whether or not fructose is especially bad—despite recent studies linking fructose to obesity, even within the medical community, some people still advocate fructose as a "low glycemic" sugar that's better for diabetics. It basically all comes down to whether you think the fact that fructose is digested in the liver and doesn't trigger insulin production is a good thing or a bad thing. To link it to other sugar purveyors: pro-agave nectar people should also think that fruit juice is healthy and people who think hfcs is bad because they think it's "high fructose" compared to other sugars are, well, a) wrong, but b) should also be advocating hfcs-sweetened sodas over fruit juices, which are even richer in sugar.

Personally, I think the evidence that fructose in large amounts causes equivalent blood sugar spikes to other sugar, increased "bad" cholesterol and triglycerides and signs of insulin resistance compared to glucose, and can cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease consumed in vast quantities suggests that it is certainly no better and possibly much worse for human health than glucose or sucrose. But "worse for human health" is relative, not absolute, and depends a lot on amount, kind, and context.  Read more

Things that won't kill you Vol. 1: High-fructose corn syrup

Posted by Margot | Filed under:
Sep 7 2009

Confession: I not only avoided high-fructose corn syrup (hfcs) until about a year ago, I was actually skittish about fresh corn for a while after my first encounter with Michael Pollan in The New York Times Magazine (or it might have been this article). I stopped eating corn tortillas and frozen corn kernels and felt vaguely panicky about the possibility that I was consuming hfcs in condiments and sandwich bread when I ate out, even if it would have only been tiny amounts.

Now that I'm over it, I sometimes have a hard time remembering what was so scary about the idea that there was corn in everything I was eating, an idea that was obviously ludicrous anyway because I was a vegetarian who mostly ate food prepared at home from whole, fresh, non-corn ingredients. But looking back at the articles linked above, they are pretty ominous. Even though Pollan notes that a corn-based diet has been the norm in Mexico for centuries without any apparent ill effects, and the story he tells about the "cornification" of the American diet is too complex to be a nefarious plot designed to kill us all, it's clear that he thinks the amount of corn Americans eat on average is a Bad Thing. Sure, it may rely on innocent accidents of nature, like the uniquely efficient way corn fixes carbon during photosynthesis and and the great distance corn pollen has to travel to reach the style, but it's also reliant on much more insidious developments: synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, an arcane federal farm subsidy systems that turned corn into "a welfare queen," agribusiness giants with seed patents on genetically-modified strains, giant livestock feeding operations that use antibiotics to keep cows alive because eating corn makes them sick, and food manufacturers who profit from getting people to buy cheap food in ever-increasing quantities. Eating corn in any form may seem like a way of giving in to all of that or even supporting it.

So although I did a fair bit of eye-rolling when I read about people avoiding sweet corn at their farmer's markets this summer or feeling "corn guilt" when they eat popcorn, it's worth remembering that I was one of them not so long ago.

HFCS paranoia is not primarily an issue of ethical consumption

It's not that many of those concerns are invalid—it's true that most corn relies on a lot of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, that much of it is grown using genetically modified seeds with patents held by huge corporations that have been known to sue farmers when corn with their patented genes end up in their fields, that cows fed diets of corn get sick and are more susceptible to diseases like e coli that can threaten humans. But it's also far from clear that refusing to eat ketchup containing high fructose corn syrup is an effective means of changing any of that or even primarily motivated by the desire to change those things.

Although people like Pollan have made a big deal about corn sweeteners being artificially cheap due to farm subsidies, the actual farm cost of hfcs in the food products we buy is so minimal that even if subsidies were eliminated entirely, it might not affect portion sizes or consumer demand at all. Even in soft drinks, which are by far the most demonized hfcs delivery system, hfcs represents just 3.5% of the total cost of manufacturing. The corn content, the only part actually affected by farm subsidies, is only 1.6 percent of the price (based on US Department of Commerce data). A comparison between the U.S., Australia, the UK, and France, all of which have different sugar policies but similar consumer prices, show no pattern in the relationships between how cheap sugar is, how much of it people eat, or how fat on average they are (which most people wrongly assume is a reliable measure of health outcomes, but I'll tackle some other time).

Pollan's formal case against hfcs relies primarily on arguments about price and prevalence, but that doesn't really explain the kind of paranoia his books and articles have helped inspire about eating corn and/or hfcs. Not buying and eating something because it's too cheap just isn't the kind of consumer behavior that spreads the way hfcs-phobia has. Nor is this some sort of mass avoidance of all added or refined sugars, or brands like Snapple and Pepsi wouldn't be running huge campaigns to advertise soft drinks containing only "natural sugar."

Instead, people have latched on to the implication, which isn't supported by any data I can find, that hfcs is nutritionally worse than other sugars. The hfcs paranoia isn't caused by the idea that hfcs might be unwisely or unfairly subsidized or that pesticides used to produce corn are poisoning waterways or anything related to feeding corn to cows. The fear is that hfcs might be some kind of demon poison that makes people fat.

The confusing part: "high fructose" isn't actually high fructose

The idea that hfcs is worse than other sugars seems to be primarily reinforced by research about how fructose is metabolized. Just last April, an article about a study comparing drinks sweetened with fructose and  glucose in the New York Times began:

Some research has suggested that consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, used as a sweetener in a wide variety of foods, may increase the risk of obesity and heart disease. Now, a controlled and randomized study has found that drinks sweetened with fructose led to higher blood levels of L.D.L, or "bad" cholesterol, and triglycerides in overweight test subjects, while drinks sweetened with another sugar, glucose, did not.

Things like this get reported all the time. However, the very last sentence of the article quotes another biochemist:

The study did not test high-fructose corn syrup, he said, and judgments should not be made about it from the findings.

Not that that stopped the author from leading with the useless, ambiguous claim about a supposed link between hfcs and obesity, but surely this deserves a little more attention: yes, fructose alone seems to cause more insulin resistance and weight gain in both rats and people than glucose alone. But high fructose corn syrup is only "high fructose" relative to normal corn syrup, which is 100% glucose.

The kind of hfcs used in most food processing, including soft drinks, is hfcs-55, which is approximately 55% fructose and 45% glucose, or almost identical to sucrose, which is about 50/50. Another kind, hfcs-42, is used in the manufacture of some baked goods, and if fructose is really worse, that would make that kind of hfcs healthier than cane sugar. Indeed, studies comparing the consumption of hfcs to sucrose have shown no differences in metabolic responses (or energy or macronutrient intake) at all.

The argument that hfcs is somehow responsible for the obesity epidemic relies entirely on correlations between the rise of hfcs in food manufacturing in the 1980s and the rise in national rates of overweight/obesity (and the exponential rise in concern about fatness). Pollan's case against hfcs amounts to a gut suspicion that:

It's probably no coincidence that the wholesale switch to corn sweeteners in the 1980's marks the beginning of the epidemic of obesity and Type 2 diabetes in this country.

Of course, this fails to account for the simultaneous increases in obesity in many other countries, perhaps most notably Australia, where obesity rates rival or even exceed those in the U.S., but sugar is the primary sweetener. It's not that he's totally wrong; it does seem probable that U.S. farm subsidies and the cheap price of highly-palatable, nutrient-poor, calorie-rich, primarily carbohydrate-based foods is one factor driving the relatively small increases in the average American's weight since the 1970s. And the history of corn cultivation and agricultural policy has something to do with that. But there's no reason to think that hfcs is uniquely responsible for the "obesity epidemic." After all, if it weren't for subsidies and tariffs that keep the price of sugar artificially inflated, which are the result of a different set of biological, historical, and political contingencies, it would be just as cheap. 

Ultimately, hfcs is just another source of sugar, nutritionally no different from cane sugar, and way better than agave nectar if you're concerned about fructose. It might be slightly worse than things like honey (esp. raw) and maple syrup (esp. grade B or lower) if you're interested in vitamins and minerals. (This is all assuming the hfcs in question contains mercury, but that's sort of another story altogether).

That doesn't mean hfcs is  "natural," a word which has virtually no meaning when it comes to food labeling anyhow, but then, if "natural" is the alternative to "processed," no sweeteners are. Agave nectar must be filtered, hydrolyzed, re-filtered, and concentrated before it can be used as a sweetener. Refined cane sugar is purified with phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide, and sometimes whitened using bone char which is why some vegetarians and vegans refuse to eat it.

The upshot is there's no reason to believe that hfcs is any worse for you than sugar or much worse for you than any other sweeteners, and there's certainly no reason to believe that a little bit here and there in a favorite condiment or even the occasional soda is going to hurt you.

Later in this series: I've gotten a request to weigh in on fruit juice, and will try to do that soon. And someday I'll get around to msg, as promised before.