2 replies to this topic

[TAW]

A few months ago, my partner and I attended a comedy show and the warm-up act was asking different people in the audience about their careers.  I mentioned to the comic that I was a Food Safety Manager for a small candy company.  And his immediate reaction was "CANDY ISN'T SAFE!!!".  My reaction was to basically respond with some form of "It may not be healthy, but it's safe."  Yet, that response got me thinking about the philosophy behind food safety.  Every food safety and quality professional out there deals with this push and pull between health and safety every single day.  

 

Ultimately I want to attempt to answer the paradox between healthy food and safe food, but I'm still at a loss as to how I feel about it.

 

Food safety is ultimately making sure the food that we as people and our pets consume is not going to kill us.  Yet, a paradox arises when we bring up certain food types like sweets.  Sweets (especially hard candy) are generally on the lower risk of food safety issues, but no one would consider hard candy a healthy food.  On the other hand, your more common foods that have higher food safety risks are farm fresh fruits and vegetables.  This category is considered one, if not, the healthiest food categories there is.  

 

What makes candy, a generally accepted unhealthy food, safe to eat?  Because it will most likely not kill you tomorrow or a week from now, but over time it can cause health issues.  

 

Personally, I feel that us in food safety are trying to prevent immediate health impacts.  Biological, chemical, physical, and possibly radiological hazards that could harm consumers in the short term.  As for the long term, it becomes personal choices and habits that affect health outcomes from food.

 

Just a nugget of thought.

[kconf]

Interesting. 

 

Everything in moderation is the key. The dose makes the difference between being safe and poisonous. The candy you call it "safe" but not unhealthy could be loaded with not only sugars but could be made with harmful synthetic dyes. Is it still safe? 

 

The same could be said about any thing. Even a farm or distributor that sells carrots could say they are safe and healthy food supplier. Now someone could argue that carrots contain heavy metals. If too much is consumed then one can get side effects of too much vitamin A. 

 

Same thing about food with allergens. There is no single food item that is good for everyone that can be consumed without consequences. Some foods are healthier and safer than others. 

[GMO]

There was a post I saw on linked on on the converse.  A sign saying "healthy breakfast options" and underneath were raw oysters.

 

Brave breakfast choice but not necessarily a safe one.

 

It did get me thinking of the overlap between healthy and safe and I came to similar conclusions the previous poster did in a way.  It's a dose dependent relationship which is acute (for safety) or chronic (for health).  

 

In the UK at least, due to the HFSS legislation, some of this is now being designed in.  So for example, salt levels have been gradually reducing, fat reducing etc.  But with sweets, an obvious "treat" food, unless you make it sugar free (which is not pleasant on a lot of peoples' bowels), it's always going to be an "unhealthy" food.

 

Should it exist is one question?  I'll leave that to the legislators but foods which have no benefit to the diet and can only harm in excess, it is a paradox and also alcohol could fall into that area.  The evidence small amounts are good are overstated.

 

When we live in a world where we're knowingly making foods which are difficult to stop eating (or drinking) and have no positive health impacts yet we call ourselves food safety people?  That is hard.  But I also believe that prohibiting these foods and drinks doesn't work.  So it comes back to legislators to restrict occasions and locations where they can be bought, use nudge to reduce purchasing habits etc.  Have maximum bag sizes.  The normal size bags of sweets nowadays just didn't exist when I was young.  Ditto crisps (chips) were only ever sold in individual portion sizes.  Multipacks weren't a thing and big "sharing" bags that nobody shares certainly weren't.  Etc etc.

 

What's interesting is the vast divergence on soft drinks globally nowadays.  We have a "sugar tax" in the UK which means any high sugar drinks are taxed at a very high level so even "full sugar" options now contain sweeteners or are reduced sugar.  There are also a lot of diet and sugar free options which are now often outselling the full sugar.  Pepsi Max here is way bigger than Pepsi for example.  Personally I think it's pretty likely that sweeteners are going to have more "scare" stories about them for high consumers over the coming years so that's not necessarily a panacea but how the standard recipes differ from the US now to the UK is eye opening.

 

But lastly it's all about palate.  I was recently with some US colleagues in a mainland European country and we were only offered water with our lunch.  Which is fine by me, I mostly drink water and that's not all that unusual in the UK.  There was no dessert offered after lunch.  Less common in the UK but I wasn't particularly bothered.  By the second day, one of the US colleagues was missing soda, chips and something sweet so much she went and bought her own.  I found that fascinating and it does suggest that some changes in some populations are going to need to be gradual to change behaviours or people will just see it and react firmly in the opposite direction.  

 

Making that kind of change though needs some coordinated action including legislation.  And FBOs are there to sell food, not to prevent someone eating sugary sweets even though they have type 2 diabetes, like my partner does.      Even though they have all the knowledge they need to know this will cause them harm.