The fall of Lesser Evil 🍿

Brands like Lesser Evil have built empires out of making packaged foods that consumers can generally assume are safe from ultra-processed ingredients.

They’ve even gone as far as bootstrapping brand coalitions like the Clean Oil Crew to brag about their lack of seed oils, yet lately a number of suspicious ingredients have snuck back onto the label, some of which are essentially seed oils.

Sunflower lecithin explained:

Sunflower lecithin is an ingredient used in many packaged foods to help mix and stabilize the other ingredients. It's molecular glue that holds together emulsions, or mixtures of fats and water. Egg yolks are the key emulsifier in keeping mayo from separating, for example.

While studies don’t find any explicit dangers in seed-oil lecithin consumption it is undeniably an ultra-processed food and a byproduct of seed oil production. There is undeniable data that indicate ultra-processed food leads to chronic disease, and the hodge-podge of ungodly ingredients like this are part of the problem.

The fall of Feastables

The world’s most famous youtuber, Mr Beast, has Crohns disease, and originally designed his best-selling chocolate bar with only 4 clean ingredients in an effort to get kids off of ultra-processed crap.

We wrote a brief twitter thread on this last year and found it quite inspiring.

HOWEVER, much like Lesser Evil, Mr Beast found the texture gains from lecithin irresistible, and has fallen in line w/ big food.

Conclusions

Only buy packaged food from brands with real integrity, check the label every time you shop and stick to ingredients that appear in the bible if you want to stay out of the gastroenterologists office.