Tag Archives: FoodPolice

The disrespectful name I’ve given to policymakers, healthcare providers, educators, and all my well intentioned colleagues who believe in enforcement instead of kind words.

🟢Pumpkin Pie – the taste of added sugars

The aroma that fills my kitchen when I’m baking a pumpkin pie lingers even after the pie comes out of the oven. It’s a sweet, voluptuous, and earthy aroma that fills the room and lifts my spirits.

There’s nothing new about humans enjoying sweetness. Industrially refined sugar cane is relatively new addition but all civilizations have had a preferred source – honey, molasses, jaggery, dried fruit, maple syrup. That’s why sugar is classified as NOVA Group 2 Culinary Processed. Industrially refined sugar is a traditional sweetener that is part of our food environment.

Since I’m a traditional cook, it makes sense that the ingredients for my pumpkin pie are simple and traditional: the pie crust (whole wheat flour, olive oil, whole milk plain yogurt, salt); the pie filling (canned pumpkin, turbinado sugar, milk, egg, butter, vanilla, spices). The only ingredient that falls into Group 4 is vanilla extract so I’m giving my pumpkin pie a green 🟢 for NOVA compliance.

And since I’m a dietitian, I also take a peek through the nutrient lens. This view presents a darker picture. Assuming the pie makes 6 servings, the percentage Daily Value reflect too much fat and way too much sugar. That added sugar percentage jumps out and smacks you in the face – 29 grams / 58% DV!

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Added Sugar has been a line item on our Nutrition Facts Label since 2016. Percentage Daily Value (%DV) has been part of the labeling process however since 1994. A Daily Value for a nutrient is based on nutrition research and scientific evidence which does change over time. The DV on our labels can be updated to reflect new research. But this updating process is incredibly cumbersome and moves at a notoriously slow pace.

There are two way to interpret what a %DV means.  On an item by item basis. Or in the context of the whole day.

As per the FDA, a consumer should use %DV to determine if a serving of the food is high or low in an individual nutrient – 5% DV or less is low and 20% DV or more is high. Food manufacturers like the item by item basis. That’s the current marketing strategy behind sugar substitutes. Banners for SUGAR FREE and NO ADDED SUGAR are proliferating. Manufacturers are using various combinations of novel and artificial sweeteners to reduce the %DV for added sugar on CPG labels.

My preference however, especially for sweets, is the other interpretation. I favor setting the percentage in the context of a whole day. If you don’t eat much sugar at breakfast, lunch, or snack time, having a piece of my pumpkin pie for dessert looks much better. That percentage (58%)  is significantly under what is recommended for the whole day.

🟢Roasted Cauliflower – eating more plants

The final meeting of our Dietary Guidelines 2025 Advisory Committee meeting was held this past week. The committee members have again concluded that me and my fellow Americans don’t follow the guidelines and we eat poorly. Not much change since the first set of guidelines was published back in 1980.

And that brings me to cauliflower.

October is a great month for eating more cauliflower. It’s peak season for fall vegetables here in the Hudson Valley and that cauliflower pictured above came from a local farm stand. Local, seasonal cauliflower gets to my farm stand a lot faster than commodity cauliflower grown in California or Texas and I can taste the difference. Cauliflower imports from the west coast are welcome during winter and early spring but it’s October so I always opt for local.

By weight and by calories, roasted cauliflower is made with mostly minimally processed ingredients and therefore deserves a NOVA mostly minimally processed green dot 🟢.

Even better, if my roasted cauliflower were a product I could probably use the word “healthy” on the label. I’m not stingy with olive oil and I salt to taste because I want my vegetables to be irresistibly delicious, so I was pleasantly surprised how good the stats looked for sodium and saturated fat. Nutrition stats are pegged to specific FDA reference amounts (85g for vegetables). That’s the serving size gram amounts you’ll see for example on frozen cauliflower in the freezer case. My serving is about twice a big as the reference amount because I love the taste of my roasted cauliflower. But you better believe that I too would use the smaller serving amount if I were marketing a product and could make a “healthy” nutrient content claim.

Now back to eating more plants. Eating more roasted cauliflower is a delicious way to eat more plants / vegetables. And the guidelines are clear that Americans don’t eat enough vegetables. It’s October and cauliflower is in season so joyfully and with great pleasure, I’m only too happy to comply.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

As per our current dietary guidelines, a healthy eating pattern is based on nutrient-dense plant-based foods. I applaud the plant-based part of the recommendation, but I do have concerns about the nutrient-dense component. Salting to taste means using just enough salt to highlight the flavors of the food, but never so much that salt overpowers the food. Sometime when I run the stats, sodium falls below the “healthy” threshold and sometimes it doesn’t.

Most of my fellow Americans don’t cook on a regular basis anyway. They depend on the food industry. In many ways, the guidelines are as much about setting limits on the food industry as they are about providing individual Americans with the nutrition facts to make informed decisions.

Here’s the dilemma. The food industry wants to sell us what we enjoy eating which as it stand right now is food products that are high in fat, sugar, salt. The dietary guidelines recommend restricting our choices to food products that are low fat, sugar, salt to reduce the risk of chronic disease development. Something gets lost in the battle between high versus low however. And that something is moderation. And that loss concern me.

🟡Actual Veggies Burger.


Veggie burgers were born during the 1980s. The rational was simple – concentrate or extract the protein component of a plant instead of using muscle meat. Next enhance using texture modifiers, colors, flavors to form a flattened, rounded patty that resembled a ground beef paddy. These original veggie burgers were clearly ultra-processed. 

An alternative method was to use an intact food like black beans or mushrooms. Since I am partial to the intact food approach, I have always favored for black bean version. So when I found a new black bean burger “chef crafted with caramelized onion”, I decided to give Actual Veggies Black Bean Burger a try.

Like every other veggie burger in the freezer unit of an American supermarket, Actual Veggies meet the criteria for an UPF – an industrially formulated mass produced food product with considerably more than 5 ingredients.

There are good reasons to be cautious with UPF. A decade of research, most of which has been done outside the US, has established significant correlation between percentage of ultra processed food products in the dietary pattern and negative health outcomes. On the other hand, avoiding UPF means systematically avoiding convenience products and about 70% of the food currently sold in our supermarkets.

Not an easy decision especially if you’re a working mom or dad and depend on convenience to feed the family. Even tough for folks like me who prefer the taste of freshly prepared but welcome a break from the daily grind of scratch cooking. So the question then becomes, where do we draw the line between acceptable convenience and frivolous indulgence.

The best place to start thinking about making a decision is to start with an ingredient list.

The Actual Veggies burger list reads as follows: Black Bean, Carrot, Parsnip, Oat, Yellow Onion, Red Onion, Red Pepper, Chickpea Flour, Lemon, Spice Blend (Ovata Seed, Kosher Salt, Garlic Powder, Paprika, Chili Powder, Cumin, Black Pepper).

There are no added colors, no added artificial or natural flavors, and no texture modifying agents like xanthan gum or lecithin or methylcellulose. On visual inspection, I can see the black beans are intact and I can see small flecks of red pepper. The rest of those vegetables however have lost their individuality and become part of the puréed mass that holds the burger together.

I do see one “unfamiliar” ingredients I don’t keep in my kitchen cabinet – ovata seed. In fact I’d never heard of ovata seed until I read the ingredient list. Here’s what came back from a Google search. Plantago ovata is a common medicinal plant widely cultivated in tropical regions of the world. The outer seed coat of P. ovata, obtained by cleaning the seeds, contains soluble and insoluble fibre in a ratio of 7:3, making products containing P. ovata husk an ideal source of health-beneficial fibre.

Time savings are significant – I didn’t have to make my own black bean burger or bake my own brioche bun or mix up a batch of home made mayonnaise.

There’s a taste test to follow of course, but in terms of degree of processing, Actual Veggies burger gets a yellow dot. 🟡

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Always important to remember that people eat food not ingredients. That means the burger needs to be all dressed up before I take my first bite or run the numbers. Besides the Actual Veggies, I used an artisan brioche bun from a local Northeast regional baker, some olive oil for frying. I also added a couple slices of tomato, some mayo, and lettuce.

I’m happy to report that my Actual Veggies burger passed my taste test.

The calories clocked in around 400 / 450. Nutrient analysis reflects 11 grams protein (plant based protein for the sustainable crowd), 8 grams dietary fiber, and a serving of vegetables (Actual Veggies, lettuce, tomato).

The sodium does look high and there’s not enough potassium to balance the potassium:sodium ratio. The sodium comes from ultra-processed foods (my brioche bun, the mayo, the Actual Veggie). But honestly, if I had done it all from scratch, the sodium would have roughly comparable.

The CDRR for sodium is 2300mg per day independent of age, gender, or lifestyle. The Advisory Committee DGA2025 meeting #6 this year made a sobering assessment regarding sodium reduction in US dietary patterns. Sodium exceeds 2300mg even when criteria are applied to identify lower nutrient density foods. My reading of that assessment is Americans are going to have to adjust to a No Added Salt dietary pattern to comply with the CDRR. And I’m not sure setting such an austere goal is helpful. Or even attainable without enlisting the food police.

🟢Seasonal tomatoes – salt to taste.


Last August, I wrote about how good a single vine ripened tomato tastes when sliced and served with olive oil and some salt. And I used the same picture of some local Hudson Valley tomatoes

The post prompted a caustic comment. A prominent member from the academic activist community who favors legal action again industrial food manufacturers questioned the amount of salt I used. So I backed off and committed to re-checking my calculation. As a result of that comment, I’ve spent the last year honing my salt metrics skills.

I had to wait until August to republish because I needed the complex flavors of a local vine ripened seasonal tomatoes to test what I’ve learned and tomatoes here in the Hudson Valley are only in season during August and September.

Good cooks salt to taste. It’s a tactile sensory skill that develops over time. A vine ripened seasonal tomato needs just enough salt to enhance the complex flavors of the tomato but never so much that those delicate flavors are overwhelmed. Nothing could be easier or simpler or more delicious.

I ran the numbers for a second time and my salt calculation was exactly the same as last year.

That activist academic didn’t believe a plate of tomatoes would need as much salt as my calculations suggested. That’s probably because academics don’t usually cook and if they do cook they don’t usually run numbers on their own recipes. But that’s a discussion for another day.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

The next question now is how much salt did I actually use? And is that amount “healthy”?

As noted above, I spent many hours over the last year improving my salt metric skills. To standardized my technique, I decided to use MALDON salt. Why Maldon? Because it’s a flake salt that is easy to distribute with my fingers. Several times over the last hear, I weighed out 10 grams of Maldon salt. Then I counted out how many 2-finger pinches I got from each 10 gram weight. Over the course of the year, a pattern emerged. The result? Each of my 2-finger pinches weighs about 250 mg and puts about 100 mg sodium on the plate.

Now let’s take a look at the label posted above. The value listed for sodium is 280 mg. In other words, for each serving of sliced tomato, I used 280 mg sodium / 700 mg salt. That’s a smidgen under three of my 2-finger pinches.

So now we move on to the more challenging question. How “healthy” Is that amount of salt? The current Daily Value for sodium is 2,300 mg and reflects Chronic Disease Risk Reduction (CDRR).

The sodium CDRR represents the lowest level of intake for which there was sufficient strength of evidence to characterize a chronic disease risk reduction. The sodium CDRR, therefore, is the intake above which intake reduction is expected to reduce chronic disease risk within an apparently healthy population.

In other words, if everyone stopped adding salt to food, fewer folks would develop high blood pressure and the population would experience fewer cardiovascular events.

We humans do need a small amount of sodium every day. It’s estimated that need would be met with about 500 mg. But maintaining metabolic function is not why we humans use salt. Like me, most of my fellow Americans use salt because we want to eat food that tastes good. There’s no getting around the cold, hard fact that there’s often a tradeoff between tasty and healthy.

My choice is tasty so I use salt when I cook. But not a lot more. That academic’s caustic comment made me angry at the time but now I’m thankful. Without the motivation, I would not have had the patience for the tedious and time consuming task of counting out 2-finger pinches and weighing out salt batches. Because of his comment, I now feel more confident in my ability to track my own use of salt when I cook.

I’ve also improved my ability to put how I use salt in context. That way the next time the food police comes after me for non-compliance, I can at least put my use of salt in context with other recipes or other packaged food products.

🔴Twinkies – poster child for UPF

Unlike many so many Americans, I did not grow up eatingTwinkies. My first bite was when I bought the package pictured above for the post. I plan to share my reaction to that first bite with you as well as why I’m not necessarily in favor of UPF being included in our dietary guidelines, but first let’s take a look at what makes Twinkies an ultra-processed food.

✅ Industrial Formulation. Twinkies are manufactured on an automated assembly line. Many videos of the processing available online. The production line can produce more than 1000 per minute.

✅ Industrial Processes. Twinkies are mass produced with ingredients that have been deconstructed like refined wheat flour, cornstarch, soy lecithin or chemically modified like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

✅ Cosmetic Additives. Twinkies are manufactured with colors (Red 40 and Yellow 5) and flavors (natural and artificial).

❌ Displace traditions and long-established culinary patterns. Twinkies probably haven’t displaced traditions or long-established culinary patterns here in the United States. The product appeared in the 1930s, almost 100 years ago, and over the generations Americans have come to accept convenience and off the shelf sweetened snacks as normal.

✅ Profitable. Just this year, the brand was sold to Smuckers for 5.6 billion dollars so it’s reasonable to conclude the product is profitable.

✅ Tasty. Twinkies are tasty. Whether that means palatable or hyper-palatable depends on who you talk to and who is doing the tasting.

My sense is Twinkies are an excellent poster child for ultra-processing. As good a poster child as any other food product I can think of. Now for that first bite. The Twinkie tasted decidedly sweet almost too sweet for my taste, but not unpleasant. My gut was not pleased however with the Twinkie. After about half an hour I felt some discomfort. Nothing at all serious and the discomfort didn’t last long. I tried another Twinkie the next day with the same result so I never finished the package.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW.

Initially I was in favor of including NOVA and UPF in the next release of our dietary guidelines. But now I’m not so sure.

Americans who cook already appreciate NOVA because it’s hard to cook without using mostly minimally processed ingredients and most home cooks and chefs already bring a holistic perspective to food.

Americans who rely heavily on take out and convenience food have their own set of reasons for avoiding the kitchen and many of these reasons are valid and understandable. More money, more time, better cooking & storage options could help, but these are financial incentivizes and not related to degree of processing. Recommending a single mom with a couple of kids who works 2 jobs to buy more perishable food and to do more cooking at home is not going to solve financial problems.

I also think back to what happened when the USDA stopped being hostile to organic farming and enabled manufacturers to use the word on product labels. For those of who supported the original holistic view of organic, what we might call regenerative farming today, labeling food organic just meant that food manufacturers had one more label to market. Many, myself included, believe the official USDA process actually subverted the original vision and provided little value.

I’m sure once Big Food gets over being hostile to NOVA, the marketing departments will adapt quickly and discover creative ways to market more highly processed food using NOVA terminology.

So maybe, just maybe, it’s better to leave NOVA out of our guidelines. The holistic construct is fundamentally incompatible with the tool – the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) – used by my fellow dietitians to assess dietary guideline compliance. And I don’t see that reductionist approach changing anytime soon.