Shitty Food Porn

Oh, those are good points. I did some digging to try and answer them, hope you don't mind.

They are bending over backwards to remove animal sourced fats from infant food..

Yeah, the American Academy of Pediatrics cites two reasons for this:

• Infants cannot digest cow's milk as completely or easily as they digest breast milk or baby formula.
• More importantly, cow's milk is not a source of complete nutrition for babies under 1 year old, since it does not contain enough of certain nutrients they need.

https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/formula-feeding/Pages/Why-Formula-Instead-of-Cows-Milk.aspx

So instead, they remove the milk fat and replace it with a composite fat blend. The catch is that not all oils are created equal, and plant oils vary in composition which means they need an industrial process to standardize and purify them for consistent results in baby formula.

All baby formulas contain a blend of different fats or oils that provide important fatty acids (like DHA) for brain and eye development. About 50% of the calories in breast milk and infant formulas come from fat.

Because Similac formulas have no palm olein oil, our oil blends are designed to support excellent calcium absorption for strong bones.

https://www.similac.com/baby-formula-ingredients.html

They’re especially trying to avoid olein oil (from palm oil), which is linked to reduced calcium and fat absorption in infants:

We conclude that fat is less well absorbed from a mixture of 53% palm olein and 47% soy oil than from a mixture of 60% soy oil and 40% coconut oil, and that absorption of calcium is less from a formula containing palm olein, presumably because of the formation of insoluble calcium soaps of unabsorbed palmitic acid.

https://ajcn.nutrition.org/article/s0002-9165(23)17392-8/fulltext

why industrial oils in baby food?

I get the concern. The word industrial can sound ominous like we’re talking about synthetic byproducts or factory waste. But here it just means the oils are refined under strict quality controls to guarantee safety, purity, and consistency.

Iirc, in the video Reardon refers to formula as an example, but defines highly processed foods as those with low nutritional density and high in added fats and sugars. Formula doesn’t really fit that. In fact, the processing here is done to preserve and optimize nutrition, not strip it away.

So the popular “processed foods are bad” idea really depends on what you’re processing into what. If you're left with junk, then it’s a problem. But in this case, processing helps create a safe, nutritionally complete food.