Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition | Hacker News Reader

Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

bmj.com

Just by comparing photos and videos from the 1980s to the situation in the streets now, it is painfully obvious that we (and by "we" I mean at least half of humanity) have a serious obesity and metabolic syndrome problem.

It is breathtaking how civilized nations silently accept such an enormous slide in quality of life, when other, much smaller problems lead to civic unrest, political discussions and overhaul of old structures and laws.

Bad nutrition kills way more people than violence, drugs, air pollution etc. ... together, and makes even more people miserable for decades before they finally die.

And yet, crickets. Even nations where one would actually expect some serious pushback (such as Scandinavian countries) can't be bothered with much more than half-arsed measures.

I am 42. My "kids these days"... complaint is that "kids these days are horribly fat". Compared to the 1990s, yeah, fitness of the young generation has gone down significantly.

It is not their fault, but their parents' and schools', but the consequences are the same; a lifetime spent in frustrating struggle with weight gain and chronic diseases.

(Please forgive the scattered reply. I'm tired and I've mostly pieced this together from other discussions I've had on this topic.)

I firmly believe that the problem stems from a mass unspoken refusal to address obesity as a symptom of food addiction.

Food addiction is among the hardest to kick because humans not only need food to survive, but also need glucose (and/or ketone bodies) in order to have sufficient mental energy to have self-control. Furthermore, nearly every social event in the US is tied to the consumption of food and cheap unhealthy food can be found almost anywhere.

> I firmly believe that the problem stems from a mass unspoken refusal to address obesity as a symptom of food addiction.

Meh, it's also easy in the United States to be stuck in a lifestyle where you can't walk anywhere.

Having people be more active would help, but exercise is almost never enough to overcome bad eating habits.

I walk a lot, exercise a lot, but whether I have a (small) belly or not, is almost fully determined by my eating habits.

Not to mention that there is a vicious cycle at work. Once you are heavy enough, physical movement becomes very unpleasant, especially in hotter climate (American Deep South, Mexico).

But even though the US really leads the heavy charge, other countries are catching up. I believe we (Central Europe) are like 25 years behind you, but following. And there are sidewalks everywhere here.

The human body is incredibly efficient. Obesity is roughly 90% diet and 10% lack of exercise. Sugar puts the body into “convert and store all this excess energy into fat, right now, because we might starve later! overdrive” and most foods in the US are packed with sugar.

Of course the sugar and processed food industries fight tooth and nail to reframe the conversation and somehow obfuscate the above.

I am just watching the British "Supersize Vs Superskinny" series.

The heavy articipants have serious addiction problem, obviously. The question is whether some foods are inherently addictive, at least for some people who are more predisposed to food addiction.

There are some obvious commonalities in the diets of the superfatties: pretty much every one of them consumes a lot of pizza, fries, soft drinks and various fat-and-salty snacks. "Normal" cooked meals that were the staple of nutrition before the advent of fast food are almost absent from their diets.

I'm sure some foods are inherently addictive, but I hesitate to put the blame on specific foods because I gained most of my weight from eating sushi rice… a pot at a time.

My experience suggests to me that food addiction is primarily psychological in nature and is often the result of a history of "experience coupling" (examples to follow) and a genuine misunderstanding of what feeling "full" truly feels like.

Most obese people I know have no idea when they've eaten enough food and often don't stop eating until they're in pain. I'm not sure if this problem is physical, but as a formerly-obese person I can state with confidence that I still don't quite know when I've eaten enough. There is no feeling of "full" for me; just pain vs. no pain.

"Experience coupling" examples…

* Feeling the need to eat popcorn while watching a movie

* Feeling the need to eat peanuts, hot dogs, and beer at a baseball game

* Feeling the need to meet with friends at restaurants, coffee shops, etc.

* Feeling the need to eat cereal by the fistful when trying to work through a tough algorithm (<-- personal anecdote)

* Feeling the need to snack on road-trips

"have no idea when they've eaten enough food and often don't stop eating until they're in pain"

Our hunger / satiety feelings are driven hormonally by hormones called ghrelin and leptin. Ideally, those two take care of a perfect equilibrium.

If something messes this self-balancing mechanism up, feelings of hunger and satiety may no longer respond to actual caloric intake - a recipe for a slow-motion disaster.

Worth noting that satiety (to a large degree controlled by leptin) is triggered much more by fat than by other macro nutrients. So white rice, and all other carbs, are worse on that axis too - high in calories but not very filling, thus promoting overeating. The decades of war on fat have contributed to people indulging in these foods.

Why do you think this? I've never seen a satiety index that scores butter over white rice.

You may know this, but, white rice has one of the highest glycemic indexes (along with white bread). High GI foods tend to be addictive, in that spikes in blood sugar are sort of a double whammy, the sharp rise help cultivate future cravings (the body produces dopamine in anticipation of big “positive” effects in the body, in this case to help encourage finding similar high calorie food stores in the future), while the almost immediate drop in blood sugar is a signal that we’re hungry, despite possibly having a too full belly, and already having a high baseline blood sugar level.

As to the rest of your comment, yeah, associative memories are a bitch when it comes to compulsive behaviors. I personally have to keep things out of the house otherwise I too would always eat popcorn and candy with every movie...

I have been one of those "Experience coupling" eaters (eating while reading) and decided to try and experiment on myself last month. I decided to no longer eat while reading, watching TV, browsing my phone, etc.

I noticed I ate much less than I would usually eat, enough to stick to 1500 calories a day rather easily.

please note: sushi rice is not just plain white rice. Sushi rice often has sugar added to it, that's a big part of what makes it so addictive. And then, in the sushi itself, they often add oils, mayonaise (also made from oils), and sugary syrups on top too.

> Sushi rice often has sugar added to it

I know since it was homemade!

I'm glad I didn't become diabetic.

> The question is whether some foods are inherently addictive, at least for some people who are more predisposed to food addiction.

In some sense, yes, because to get to extremely high weights, you need to consume extremely high amounts of food. Your stomach will grow, but I would imagine a person would struggle to eat enough carrots to weigh 500 pounds. Quick napkin math says some obese people eat 6700 calories a day. 50 calories is ~12 baby carrots. That's ~1608 baby carrots per day. If my math is right, that's about 67 one pound bags of baby carrots per day.

Carrots are probably an extreme example, but I think the point stands that to get that overweight on healthy food, both the volume of the food and the time required to eat it become astonishing. I don't even know if we can metabolize carrots fast enough to eat that many in a day without rupturing some part of your stomach.

> "Normal" cooked meals that were the staple of nutrition before the advent of fast food are almost absent from their diets.

I think this is a big part of it. Calorie dense food has always been around. The problem was that it was often difficult and/or expensive to make. How long would it take you to replicate a Big Mac combo meal, and how much would it cost? It takes a while, especially given grocery shopping, and it's probably not much cheaper. Likewise, I can go to the grocery store and buy a whole cheesecake for like $10.

Honestly, I think the best way to tackle it is not to outright ban the foods, but just add an excise tax. If we added a 10% tax to soft drinks, fries and pizza, it probably wouldn't make a huge difference to the average citizen's spending. It would be a 10% increase in your food budget if that's all you eat though. If you want to go crazy, add a program that lets you earn that back by doing healthy things, like riding a bike. We should probably do that anyways. If we want to reduce the amount of driving people do, paying them walk/bike places instead of driving isn't a bad system either.

>Honestly, I think the best way to tackle it is not to outright ban the foods, but just add an excise tax. If we added a 10% tax to soft drinks, fries and pizza, it probably wouldn't make a huge difference to the average citizen's spending. It would be a 10% increase in your food budget if that's all you eat though. If you want to go crazy, add a program that lets you earn that back by doing healthy things, like riding a bike. We should probably do that anyways. If we want to reduce the amount of driving people do, paying them walk/bike places instead of driving isn't a bad system either.

The behavioral epidemic is defined by being irrational and not in the self-interest of the sufferers. How would a slight change in food prices lead to any change in behavior?

The price of products does have an impact for shoppers. Also especially with poor people, raising prices limits the amount they can afford.

"It was concluded that there is reasonable and increasing evidence that appropriately designed taxes on sugar sweetened beverages would result in proportional reductions in consumption, especially if aimed at raising the retail price by 20% or more. There is similar strong evidence that subsidies for fresh fruits and vegetables that reduce prices by 10–30% are effective in increasing fruit and vegetable consumption."

https://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/publications/fiscal...

It has worked to some degree with cigarettes.

>If we added a 10% tax to soft drinks, fries and pizza

The argument against this is that it becomes a regressive tax scheme. Many in the lower income strata disproportionately eat these foods because they are convenient and relatively cheap. A 10% increase in the food budget of someone at or near poverty isn’t trivial.

Talk to chefs at high-end restaurants and you’ll see how much fat is inherent in (or gets added to) “luxury” food as well. But I almost never hear about them in the discussion about fat/sugar taxes. I’m not necessarily against the idea, just not in favor of the classist way it’s usually discussed.

The WHO found that the consumption of sugary soda declines when it is taxed[1].

> A 10% increase in the food budget of someone at or near poverty isn’t trivial.

The goal is to decrease the consumption.

[1] https://www.who.int/dietphysicalactivity/publications/fiscal...

That’s a given. Increase the cost of anything and you’ll decrease the consumption (in general, exceptions exist).

My point is that the discussion is centered around only taxing the sugar/fat disproportionately consumed by those in the lower economic strata, meaning it becomes a de facto regressive tax.

Like I said above, I’m not against the idea. I’m against the way the implementation is typically discussed. Tax it, but tax it across the board. Tax caviar and truffles as well as hamburgers and sodas, that’s all.

Sure, but the lower income strata are also the ones who are more disproportionally fat as well, so they benefit. Something I've always found amazingly annoying is the tendency to throw pragmaticism out the window for "virtue points".

Also, chefs at high ends restaurants is a non-sequitur. People, even of wealth, do not eat those every day. And those with the capability to do so are a tiny subset of the population. Furthermore, there's a negative correlation between wealth and obesity in developed countries.

Fair enough on the frequency argument. But you could easily substitute a different, more apt comparison. Even making the case that sugar laden coffee deserves an equal tax even though it would probably apply to the middle class. It does come across as condescending that since they are likely to benefit, it necessitates the government telling a particular group what personal choices they should make, almost as if they aren’t capable without regulation.

It’s not about “virtue points.” Its about understanding the true nature of the problem. Poorer people don’t disproportionately eat that food just because they’re too dumb to know better or somehow lack willpower. They often lack the time or access to higher quality affordable food. So by taxing it, you’ve just made a hard lifestyle even harder. To a large extent, the food consumption is the symptom of much larger problems. It’s not like just taxing soda will fix the US’s obesity epidemic. (The percentage of calories coming from soda doesn’t actually amount to enough - the numbers I’ve heard are around 6%). If anything, this type of taxation is the feel-good regulation that ignores the root problem. IMO that’s anything but pragmatic and tends to be be a shortfall of technocrats who sometimes fail to see the larger picture that spans multiple domains.

Now if we’re talking about using those taxes to address the deeper problems, I can get on board with that. I’ve yet to have anybody reply to that effect though, almost as if they think banning soda would magically fix our health crises.

If poor people eat so much of it that they get fat, then at a higher price point they will only afford less of the same stuff and thus get less fat.

So why doesn’t the same logic extend to non-poor people?

Again, the issue isn’t with the intent, it’s with the execution. No need to apply it in a manner that disproportionately affects that subset of the population, especially when there are significant other systemic factors that contribute to that consumption.

“Fat and sugar is bad” is quite different than “fat and sugar eaten by poor people is bad”

But what makes carrots "healthy food"? Is it that it has some vitamins and few calories? Does that mean that a multivitamin pill combined with a piece of plastic is the ultimate healthy food? It has vitamins and basically zero calories, because you can't actually eat the plastic.

On another note, 6700 kcal is a once in a while type event. Calorie calculators put the calories needed at 6700 kcal at excess of 450 kg (1000 lbs). That's more than the record weight of a person. 6700 kcal is still 2.5 kg of Big Macs.

Also, carrots just aren't great as food. They're more like flavorings. You would definitely have a brought deficiency on a carrot diet, whereas it's less so on a Big Mac diet.

The thing is that our bodies need a wide range of materials to function well. We can function even when our diets aren't great, but there will usually be some small problems. I don't understand why food that's actually poor as a food is considered healthy.

The article "The opioid effects of gluten exorphins: asymptomatic celiac disease" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025969/

Gluten can be degraded into several morphine-like substances, named gluten exorphins. These compounds have proven opioid effects and could mask the deleterious effects of gluten protein on gastrointestinal lining and function. Here we describe a putative mechanism, explaining how gluten could “mask” its own toxicity by exorphins that are produced through gluten protein digestion.

No wonder it is addictive when you can get a morphine like effect when eating it. Most fast food contains wheat and vegetable oils (and not the ones that are good for you like Olive Oil). Nobody can stay slim with these food as they usually contain close zero in nutrition value except for energy.

Cheap food might be the biggest issue you sort of glossed over. Cheap because the US government heavily subsidizes wheat and corn. So we have chips, sugar, sugary stuff galore ... it’s cheap. One could argue it starts there.

More than 100 million Americans have diabetes or are prediabetic[1]. The current scientific literature in cardiology suggests that insulin resistance is a key driver of cardiovascular disease[2]. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S.(outside of COVID for this year). You're right, the fact that there's no outcry about any of this is a shame, and really any effort to regulate this here is going to be met with a lot of resistance.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...

2. https://cardiab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12933-01...

45 here. Here's what I've noticed since the 80s:

- More wealth and more choices now. - More eating out now. Meals are bigger, sweeter, richer, etc. - Less activity now. When I was a kid, video games were just getting started and most folks didn't own computers. TV & media was less engaging.

Food addiction seems more... refined these days. There is a lot less fat shaming too, although I'm not suggesting we bring it back. I think it did have an effect on reducing obesity though.

I grew up on fast food and TV dinners, so I don't see food being significantly more refined now, but I am aware there are newer ingredients(thickeners, texture modifiers, preservatives, etc).

I don't think its the food, I feel its several cultural shifts:

- The tamping down of phy ed classes and general removal of exercise from elementary schools with more of an emphasis on learning. If you are not ok shape in middle school, it leads to learning issues. One problem begets the other

- Shifts in parenting. When I grew up in the 1980's, our family ALWAYS ate dinner at home, together as a family. My mom got home early from work when me and my sister got home from school and started dinner before my Dad got him from his job. We RARELY ate out and it was looked as a privilege, not something that happened often.

- The shift from the nuclear family. Most of my friends are married and both parents work full time, their kids are heavily involved in sports, and after school activities. Less time for family, less time for organized meals, less time to prepare good food for your kids. The basic idea now is "just get something in them and get them to soccer, hockey, gymnastics practice, etc."

Likewise, the parents have little or time to properly feed themselves either. Same thing, grab something fast, shovel the food into your kid, then get something fast on the way home before you have to jump back on your laptop and finish the last bit of work you didn't get done because you had to get little Bobby to practice.

This is a situation that never gets any better. Your kids have more activities, you constantly have more work to do. The go go go go attitude of our culture has left the nuclear family and our nutrition in the dust.

Humans are lazy by nature. Make it easier to eat unhealthy foods and we'll do it. Its all we've done for the past 40 years.

You missed the most significant issue outside of portion size changes, etc.

Car dependency. The shift over the last 60-70 years to push everyone to drive more and more and walk, bike, etc less has had an absolutely massive impact on obesity and being unfit.

Compare the obesity rates in any area in the US versus types of transport and you'll see a huge correlation when other factors are fixed. e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28322880/

When I was a child it was quite unusual for other children at my school (private school, well-off families) to be dropped off at school by car in the morning. It would have been at least 95% who either caught a bus, rode a bike or walked.

I was walking to school with my older sister at age four. At age 6 I was doing a fairly long bus ride with her (and we walked down to the bus stop of course). The rest of my school life was mostly riding and walking to school. And this was completely unremarkable. What was remarkable were the kids who were dropped off at school; I viewed it as a somewhat eccentric practice.

When I was a kid growing up in the Pacific Northwest I would say adults biked less but kids walked/biked more than today. I think adult biking is massively more popular and accepted today than in the 80s.

Agreed on the biking.

I remember begging my parents to let me bike to school because all the "cook kids" rode their BMX bikes to school and the bike racks were overflowing with kids who were biking to school. I remember being made fun of in the summer for taking the bus instead of riding my bike.

I don't remember seeing bike racks at any of the schools my sisters kids attended.

What is a nuclear family to you? The normal definition is parents and children. Even if their schedules are too full.

One other thing: I think more jobs are desk jobs these days. Jobs that are desk jobs are more tied to the desk than they ever were.

Oh, and one big thing I don't thing anyone mentioned yet: Smoking. When I was a kid, a lot more people smoked. That has a well known side-effect of reducing calorie intake.

I've been working desk jobs my whole career, and I consider it absolutely mandatory to just get up and walk around often. Always take the stairs, walk to the water cooler, take a walk outside after lunch, stand up at your desk.

Unfortunately management and company culture tends to frown on doing these things.

Is there a lack of phys ed or too much soccer and hockey etc classes? Looks like a contradiction.

Re: fat shaming, this is horribly misunderstood by people who have never struggled with obesity.

When you are obese, you are fat shamed by yourself, every day of your life, every time you look in the mirror and what you see doesn’t reflect who you think you are. There is an incredible amount of societal baggage in being fat - the stereotype is that fat people are lazy, stupid, and incompetent. I know better, but even I have to catch myself to avoid unfair bias against fat people (e.g. in hiring decisions) - and I know the stereotype is bullshit because I myself used to be morbidly obese.

Fat acceptance is bullshit, being fat is unhealthy. And because so many people are fat, many folks don’t even know what a healthy weight looks like. I’m not advocating for fat is good or fat is beautiful thinking, because that is counterproductive.

But fat shaming is far worse than saying nothing. Binge eating/food addiction is driven by cycles of shame and hating yourself for being fat is a big part of that. I couldn’t have lost 120+ lbs without first getting over shame and embarrassment.

In my first-hand experience with obesity fat-shaming is a great way to push people harder into a shame->self hate->binge eating-> shame-> self hate cycle, which just makes things worth.

This is clearly a societal problem, we shouldn’t shame people for succumbing to it, but instead work to help people recover.

P.S. it is sometimes hard for naturally skinny people to empathize with obesity. Obesity makes all of the steps to lose weight harder - exercise, nonstop hunger (due to broken hormone regulation). Struggling with dieting long term causes metabolism slowdown which makes the problem harder. I gain weight on 1300 calories, and that’s with an active lifestyle with 16.000 steps of walking daily. American culture at least makes it really difficult to participate in society and stay under 1300 cal/day. I imagine it’s even worse if you’re not a 6ft male.

> Fat acceptance is bullshit, being fat is unhealthy.

Fat acceptance is about ending the disrespect leveled at fat people by society as a whole. Like many other groups, the obese are "acceptable targets" for all sorts of mockery and hate. Changing that is a good thing.

Unfortunately, a lot of fat people seem to have somehow deluded themselves into thinking being obese is healthy. This is of course absolutely false but these people keep posting baseless statements in an effort to remove the negativity associated with obesity. They turned fat acceptance into active promotion of obesity...

Sweeter indeed, amount of sugar im food is absolutely insane these days. I am from Russia, and food in Uk is like 3 times sweeter, there is added sugar on freaking Roasted Vegetables! Its bonkers!

what's scary is that you said UK and not US. Coming from other Anglo cultures and going to the US feels similar to what you describe moving from Russia. instant increase in added sugar and serving sizes.

I live in the US and recently tried to find bread--standard, sliced bread--without sugar in it at my local store. They don't have any. The lowest I could find was a gram of sugar per slice!

I bake various types of bread on a weekly basis, and have never seen a recipe that doesn't require sugar or honey. I'm pretty confident it's needed to fuel the yeast for the rising process vs the flour alone.

That's empirically not true. Yeast do just fine with the starches in the flour. Here's a simple recipe without sugar (and the oil is optional too): http://www.thebreadkitchen.com/recipes/simple-whole-wheat-br...

I'm afraid that's just not true. I've made sourdough bread for years, and never added any sweeteners.

There are plenty of bread recipes that require no sweetener, and it's definitely not needed for yeast to develop.

Yeast will do just fine on the carbohydrates in the flour. I find that whole-grain flour tends to lead to more yeast activity, which is sort of the opposite direction.

A lot of the packaged supermarket bread has additives to keep it fresher longer, one of which is sugar. Go either a little upmarket or to the baked-in-store section and you'll find some without it.

French bread is water, flour, yeast, and salt.

When I was a kid, my grandma baked home bread (1930s rural style, she was born in 1926 in eastern Slovakia) and never used any sugar for that.

Bread has been staple food for millennia. For most of that time, sugar was rare, expensive or totally unavailable.

I started baking bread when I moved to the US cos it was so hard to find any without sugar.

It’s quite frightening that you’ve never heard of sourdough bread given your baking experience. And as the other replies allude to, it’s quite common historically and in other places. Are baking books edited to exclude that knowledge in America? It really brings to mind the possibility.

There is reason for optimism. Less than a decade ago you could barely find something in the middle aisles of a grocery store that didn’t have trans fats and now it is relatively rare. These things can be overcome in relatively short order if the will exists.

I kinda feel if kids had a 20 inch black and white tube tv with no streaming/dvr/games they'd be a lot more active too. Fast food is way too cheap, when I was growing up it was a special treat when you were on vacation, now its just a regular meal or even a snack.

>video games were just getting started

It's also worth noting that the nature of video games have changed. Back then you'd pay $ for a cartridge and CD and that was it. There was little in the way of analytics.

Now it's all about DLC and ancillary monetization - with high power analytics. The model has shifted towards addiction.

Yeah. Video games are literally designed to be addictive these days. Many mobile games are essentially gambling...

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game...

Anyone who's ever played some gacha money sink will understand the danger they pose. It seems harmless until you're waking up at 4 AM to do daily tasks that boil down to nothing but resetting a couple timers.

The worst part is the traditional games industry is watching. They really like the way these mobile games generate revenue. This sort of design is starting to show up on the more traditional platforms too...

> I am 42. My "kids these days"... complaint is that "kids these days are horribly fat". Compared to the 1990s, yeah, fitness of the young generation has gone down significantly.

Dude, I was the fat kid back in the early 2000's. These days, 1/3 of the kids I see are way fatter than I was, but it seems way more normal now.

This is akin to legalizing all drugs and selling them in every grocery store with huge ads of George Clooney puffing the magic dragon... And then complaining that everyone is an addict.

American food is a drug. And by any comparison much more harmful than alcohol, smoking and weed combined. However try to tell a normal person to eat a healthy diet (aka, don't be an addict) and they will hate you for it. Or actually, let's start with "healthy diet". What does that even mean? The only proven healthy diet I know of is AIP and related diets. However, it takes substantial mental strengths and abstinence from social gatherings to get going. I know, because I am on it. It completely changed my life, why is the only reason I can sell my brain to hate all the "normal" (addictive) food.

The only way to eat healthy is to realize other food is making you sick and let your brain stop yourself from eating it. The other way around it doesn't work. You can't force yourself to eat healthy; you need to fully buy into it and live it and want to eat healthy from the inside out.

To me, this problem is much worse than drug addiction. Drug addiction is frowned upon. Drugs are largely inaccessible, they are expensive and mostly prohibited. You know it's bad to be an addict. You know stronger drugs literally destroy your body.

Bad food on the other hand... All ads want to make you eat it. Your family eats it, your friends eat it, everyone eats it and wants you to eat it. And it destroys your body over decades, making it hard to connect the "old age" at 40 with your eating habits... I guess I am getting old, huh? Let's order some pizza. It is frowned upon to eat healthy. Healthy food is hard to get (you need to cook it yourself). Healthy food is expensive... See some similarities here? There is an inversion. When it comes to food, the drug is the easily accessible, socially accepted product, while the healthy ones are moved to the margins, just like real drugs are. Crazy stuff.

Furthermore, it's gotten much worse in the last year. Now the government forces gym closures and discourages people from going outside or to the grocery store, practically forcing people to live a sedentary lifestyle and encouraging fast-food eating _even more_.

This statistic from the article is mind-boggling:

> Ultra-processed products now account for nearly half of the average dietary intake of some high income countries, with consumption rising rapidly in most other countries.

Note that they aren't just referring to processed foods. They classify ultra-processed foods as a step beyond what we typically think of as processed foods:

> Ultra-processed foods and beverages can be defined as products with additives and industrially processed ingredients that have been technologically broken down and modified. They are not merely processed foods with high levels of sugar, salt, and fat but also contain ingredients and additives not commonly used in home kitchens and artisanal restaurants

I wish we put more emphasis on educating young people about basic cooking and nutrition. There's a common misconception that people reach for ultra-processed foods because they're cheaper, but in my experience most people prefer these foods because they think it's more convenient.

For many people, the idea of cooking a meal has been elevated to a special occasion event, as a treat or a date night. This is partially due to the fact that boring, everyday meal recipes just aren't as flashy as a 15-ingredient, hour long recipe that results in a stunning picture for someone's blog or instagram. Everyone should learn how to cook some boring, staple meals using basic ingredients from the store. It's amazing how many people don't know how easy and cheap it can be to prepare simple crock pot or stir-fry meals that are healthy and delicious.

Ultraprocessed is a counter marketing term from the meat and dairy lobby. It is authored in opposition to things like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat. Nobody uses this term organically, look in Google Trends yourself. It is an obvious and conspicuous marker of a campaign, exactly equivalent to something like “drinkability,” an Anheuser Busch marketing term.

This is a market that traditionally derives most of its profits from a close relationship with the government, for subsidies (the #1 source of profit for farms, maybe for the whole agricultural sector) and health guidelines (the cheapest, and therefore highest RoI advertising). Beyond Meat enjoys none of these advantages and its equities wildly outperformed e.g. Tyson.

I am not saying that marketing does not play a role in health outcomes. Just that the nutrition discourse is overwhelmingly marketing budget driven, that actual nutritionists struggle against consumers immensely, and that once you’ve heard one ad campaign you easily become jaded of all of them. Well meaning people get coopted by all of this.

You know, it's completely possible that there are multiple bad guys.

There are a lot reasons to hate the meat lobby and factory farming, but sticking up for industrial labs cranking out the most addictive chemicals that they can legally push on us is completely unnecessary.

>> Ultraprocessed is a counter marketing term from the meat and dairy lobby.

This sentence risks framing industrially manufactured food products as equally nutritious to meat and dairy (and fruit and vegetables, beans and pulses, eggs and fish, etc. etc.).

It's a true framing! Off the top of my head, cheese, yogurt, tofu, and flour are nutritious and industrially manufactured through chemical processes. And I don't mean this in some tricky "everything is chemicals" way - you can look up pictures of the Chobani factory online, and it's pretty indistinguishable at a glance from any other snack food production line.

The point though is that this article decrying the influence on science by industry is itself influenced by industry and shows this by not using neutral terminology.

What evidence do you have that this is from opposition to Beyond and Impossible?

Yes, it's a new term in the literature, but the fact that it Beyond and Impossible are also newish products is a correlation at best.

Most content online I see that refer to 'ultra-processed' are usually referring to items like potato chips, soft drinks or coloured breakfast cereals.

>, but in my experience most people prefer these foods because they think it's more convenient. [...] Everyone should learn how to cook some boring, staple meals using basic ingredients from the store. It's amazing how many people don't know how easy and cheap it can be to prepare simple crock pot or stir-fry meals that are healthy and delicious.

I'm a strict health food eater but I have to be realistic and concede that preparing healthy meals is more work.

For example, I have a green smoothie drink made from raw vegetables every day for breakfast for more than 10 years. I'm pretty efficient at it but it still takes more work (and time) than just putting an unhealthy Pop Tart in the toaster.

And my dinners of lentil soup or tofu are more prep work than tossing a frozen pizza into the oven. I have a diabetic friend who often "cheats" with junk food (McDonald's burger) because cooking supposedly "simple" healthy meals is still too much of a hassle even for him.

Yes, cooking healthy may be "easy" but it's still more work than junk food. Convenience junk foods are just... more convenient.

Cooking in general is time consuming. You and I appear to eat vastly differently, yet we both make our own food from scratch. For breakfast I eat 10oz whole milk, 2 - 3 strips of bacon, 2 - 3 eggs, and grits with butter (at time I'll have potatoes or toast depending). Our other other meals will include roasted vegetables, potatoes and meat.

Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day cold when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly naturally so this factors into it.

Now I do live in Louisiana and Mardi Gras is right around the corner which means King Cake. Is this healthy for me? No, not at all. But it's once a year and we buy them from the local bakeries, where each bakery has their own recipe. Does this it make anymore healthy? Probably not, but they are good.

It's extremely time consuming. It takes hours to properly cook meals for an entire family. That's time I'd rather spend doing something else since I don't really enjoy the process of cooking itself. There's also the time required to prepare the dining room, clean the dishes, shop for ingredients and supplies and more incredibly boring tasks that I'm probably forgetting. Doing this every single day is just so tiresome!

Of course people would rather open an app and order some delicious fast food which arrives in about 20 minutes. It's not healthy but it wastes less time.

Apps like "Eat This Much" can simplify meal planning by helping you make dishes that last multiple days. It lets you optimize each meal for time to prepare, variety, cost, etc. It also prepares a weekly shopping list. (Seriously, great app, few rough edges though and onboarding is not friendly)

Also, sauces. 1 day making bolognese is 3 days of main courses.

Ideally you are only making 2 or 3 main courses during the week.

If you have any thoughts on what would make ETM’s onboarding more friendly, would love to hear them :)

Hi!

I was one of your early sign ups when you first announced on reddit. I came back this year and resumed my usage.

So, originally, I was a single guy looking to put on muscle. ETM works great for that! Like, super duper well. Baring a few issues.

But now, it isn't just me! And I can't get away with arguing "well the meal is nutritionally balanced."

So, from a wife acceptance factor, whole meals, more than 1 course.

Next, ETM gives wacko shopping amounts sometimes. I know that the math may work out, but 25 cups of spinach is too much. The amounts listed to buy are so far off reality that I am not going to trust the delivery option, which, well, totally sucks because that'd be nice. I think it had me buy 6 heads of lettuce one week.... I did. I ended the week with 4 heads of lettuce in my fridge.

For that matter, the entire UI around "original serving size, servings to make" is confusing as hell.

I should sign up for a new account to give a real FRE feedback, but the UI for existing users to configure meals and such is both absurdly powerful and also hard to manage in regards to "types of meals" and "meal plan". I totally get why the UI is how it is (except for why menus are where they are, separate topic) but I wouldn't ever suggest someone who isn't technically inclined, and also very dedicated, to even try to get started.

Which sort of sums up ETM: It is a power user's tool.

Oh and adding a recipe sucks. After doing one I gave up. I currently have a one note of "recipes from ETM except fixed so they taste like food." No offense (since I fit in this category) but a lot of the recipes are obviously written by gym bros to be as efficient as possible. Like, some of the recipes are easily transformed from meh to good by the addition of basic seasonings.

On the topic of recipes write some sort of import tool so I can point you at a website and you just scrap that shit. Or even let me paste it in and you parse it.

Even if I had to take the parsed results and verify each ingredient, it's be 10x better.

I need to be clear, I like ETM, it saves me a ton of money and makes meal planning easier, but if I didn't know how to cook, estimate amounts of food I need to buy, and if I wasn't able to on the fly figure out other courses for the meals, it would be far less useful to me.

But, as a tool for gym bros to meet their macros, bloody amazing. And gym bros will learn any UI if it promises gains, none of the other tools I use are exactly user friendly.

At the end of the day, if you had a slick onboarding process of "select 5 meals from NYT cooking that we legally slurped up because recipes have no copyright protection, and we'll ship you all the ingredients you need to cook them", well that's be an awesome product.

Oh and pay attention to when certain proteins are cooked. Buying $40 of fish on Sunday for Friday dinner is stupid. Either I freeze $40 of fish and hate you, or the fish goes to waste and I hate you. Both are shitty options.

I chose C, ignore the schedule and I cooked the Halibut on Monday.

Are you a Randazzo’s devotee? Also curious about data science prospects in the area or remote, tbh

Randazzo's is currently my favorite! Though I pre-ordered a Dong Phong's this morning as I was unable to get one last year.

Local Data Science prospects are low to non-existent. I work remotely and remote prior to Covid. Companies reach out and don't seemed concerned about my location so I don't foresee being remote an issue.

You seem to have missed some words in your second paragraph. What were they? One, I guess, is doctor.

Ah, sorry about that.

Edit -

Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view it as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day (a cold) when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the doctor for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly active naturally so this factors into it.

Got it, thanks.

I wonder what is the effect of the widespread loneliness on the willingness and ability to cook.

If you are two or a family, cooking for the others to enjoy is a pleasure. If someone lives alone, I can see why they rather eat something quick-and-dirty.

Anecdotal, but I am much more motivated to cook a nice meal when my partner is staying over. When I’m alone I find it easy to slip into grabbing fast food on the drive home from work.

I love to cook, and cook for both me and my partner probably 5 nights of 7, but the moment she leaves for a night or a weekend it's takeout or ramen. Anecdotally, most of my couple friends have a similar dynamic.

The effect is sure to be high.

Disappointingly, some people quite literally cannot cook - I don't have a stove.

This is a lot more common[0] than one might think, and arguably hits the worst demographic for it - university students and fresh out of university students, where the only affordable place is $2-3k for barely a hundred square feet with a microwave and minifridge.

There is a fair amount of places near tech companies where it's quite common that someone renting there pre-COVID would just have been getting meals catered at work or similar.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/rent-...

Dorms usually ban them, but for everyone else you can buy single induction burners relatively cheaply for cooking. Instant pots and similar products are another compact alternative.

When I was a student, I did a fair amount of cooking in shared kitchens in dorms, mainly because I enjoyed it and it helped me relieve stress. My goto strategy was to pick an unpopular time (middle of the week during the day, ideally) and meal prep for 2-3 hours, then mix those meals in with restaurant/cafeteria meals for the next week. I was able to make that work reasonably well.

Good strategy. Most people don’t know this but in San Francisco ferry market plaza whose first floor is full of restaurants, there is no gas connection. The code doesn’t allow for fire extinguishing infrastructure and the overhead foam sprayers etc. pretty much all of them have electric and semi prepped food made off site made in a commissary kitchen or at another restaurant branch.

Restaurant code and permits are notoriously difficult and in San Francisco expensive ..a nightmare actually. If restaurants can do without a stove..cooking in a dorm is easy peasy.

Get an airfryer and an instant pot. Neither one takes up much space on a countertop, and they are easy to clean and store. I hardly use my stove anymore unless I'm baking something.

Instant pots are a game changer. It does limit most menus to one pot meals but still a pathway to good nutrition.

In fact I have my stove unplugged and 3 instant pots sitting on top of it (and an air fryer near by)

Ditto! I barely use my stove these days! For Indian food..the transition was super easy from pressure cooker to instant pot.

Our neighbor who moved to the East coast sent me a bag of wild rice from her state. I made a wild rice and mushroom soup in less than half an hour. The same would have been a production earlier as wild rice takes longer to cook than regular rice. I was also able to make it a larger batch and freeze it for later.

I am used to flash freezing having worked in restaurants and I am not a fan of freezing left overs in a home freezer and probably won’t be doing this again if this fails the texture test.

The smaller instant pot was perfect to make a nice roux for thickening and it doesn’t burn. And clean up is a breeze.

You can cook more things in a microwave than you'd imagine.

If you have an instant pot, air fryer, and a microwave you can cook a healthy meal in 15 minutes. That's what I do when I got home from work most days: cook some rice in the instant pot, chop up some meat and cook it in the air fryer, and steam some vegetables in the microwave. Sure, it's not as fast as heating up a burrito or something, but it's not that much longer either and once you've done it a few times you can just do it on auto-pilot.

I bet the same people who "don't have" 15 minutes to cook spend way more time scrolling Facebook or watching TV.

> Yes, cooking healthy may be "easy" but it's still more work than junk food.

One advantage of intermittent fasting is that it's much less burdensome to make a single, large healthy than it is to make three healthy meals plus snacks.

(Though this can be a double-edge sword. If you wind up eating junk food, like pizza, for your large meal, then it becomes the equivalent of eating junk food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

Who the hell makes 3 meals a day anyway? Unless you include reheating something prepared in bulk several days ago in that count?

I typically do, although some dinners or lunches will have a component that is reheated (e.g., reheat some frozen braise from last weekend, but with fresh cooked veg and potatoes, say.)

If I'm in a hurry, there are lots of things I can make in 30 min or less. More often if I'm busy I'll make something that doesn't require much interaction; e.g. 10-15 min prep and 60 nearly untouched in a 500 degree oven for a roast chicken with root veg in one pan. I do other things in that hour.

Honestly, I've been doing this long enough I'm pretty efficient. I could save a little time buying more prepared food, but my meal quality would go way down so I don't mind. Shopping is pretty efficient too, as I mostly don't shop by recipe.

To be fair though, I find cooking relaxing as a way to wind down after work, so sometimes I'll do something more involved just for the hell of it on a random Wednesday.

also, what consists of three meals? the way I learned to cook (and most people I know) is you get a couple of ingredients for a dinner, and use the leftovers for lunch/dinner the next day. breakfast usually consists of something simple like bread + cheese or a kind of meat. (some people don't even eat breakfast and just start the day with a coffee or a glass of water).

I always made three meals a day even alone in a apartment. It's not difficult to make eggs or cook salmon

Hm I definitely do, for my whole family. I work at home, though

That's why I love Trader Joe's. It has the convenience of junk food but the ingredient lists actually look like something I'd prepare myself.

My go to meal when I don't have much time is lentils and frozen broccoli. I put 180g red lentils in my pressure cooker with 500ml water and 400g frozen broccoli. Done in about 10 minutes. Very filling, tasty and healthy. I usually eat it with rice. Add whatever spice you like but I recommend turmeric, cumin, cayenne, mustard seed, and black pepper. But it also tastes good with just salt!

If being healthy is too much work then I guess obesity wins. I cannot imagine eating fast foods. Cooking is cheaper, besides the healthy thing. It's also FUN.

I mostly cook German stuff, some French, a little Chinese and a fair few BBQs in the summer. I have quick and easy things I make, and more elaborate stuff that tastes unlike anything you can buy ready-made.

I shop at local markets where you get to know the farmers, smallholders who sell what they grow. Food is way too important to me to not put the effort into it that I do.

Lastly, I'm not a health nut. I don't go to the gym. I see my GP once a year and age usually tells me to try get more sunlight in the winter but otherwise gives me a clean bill of health. I'm approaching 50 and sleep 8 hours most nights.

I totally agree.

As I was until recently working in a food startup, producing "ready to cook" products (organic fair trade delicious mixes of grain, dried vegetables and spices), I can testify of a strong society injonction towards healthier food AND at the same time a rejection of this pressure.

Can you share your green smoothie drink recipe?

My greenie is not the sweet kind and very simple.

The 2 bulk ingredients are kale and tomato. To save time, you can use canned tomatoes (half can of diced tomatoes). Then add for flavor... basil, olive oil, lemon/lime juice. I sometimes add spoonfuls of ground flax seed and hemp. The purpose of olive oil is to add some fat to satiate the appetite and also give it a buttery flavor. The purpose of lemon/lime juice is to mask the bitterness of raw greens.

If you prefer sweet smoothies, there are lots of youtube videos showing recipes with bananas/apples/blueberries/cherries/yogurt, etc.

EDIT ADD: you can try spinach instead of kale or mix kale+spinach. To add even more flavor, you can try sun-dried tomatoes (in jar of oil) but that ingredient makes it more expensive to drink every day.

I'm actually trying to avoid sweet smoothies. So you just add kale, tomato and other ingredients you mentioned? I'm just worried if that much kale will bother my stomach. I'll give it a shot though. Seems like a great breakfast.

The “How Not to Die” cookbook also has some good smoothie recipies.

If half of our food is ultraprocessed, then that's a problem with the definition of ultraprocessed.

Breakfast cereal is "ultraprocessed" by the definition of the article. But Grain Berry cereal is going to be grossly different from a nutritional perspective than Frosted Flakes. For both to be lumped into the same category of "ultraprocessed" is a bit ridiculous.

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Its not like "processing" makes something more or less poisonous. 100% all natural fully organic death cap mushrooms will kill you.

Now high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, high-preservative stuff is probably bad. Those things have clear science and nutrition issues associated with them. But the nutrition in "processed" canned corn (picked and canned at peak ripeness) is often found to be superior to "fresh" ears of corn (which loses nutrition the longer it sits in the food aisle).

If you cook all-natural brown rice with fresh pork-belly all day every day, and you'll have a heart attack from all that fat you're eating. It doesn't matter if that pork-belly is ultraprocessed bacon or freshly cut from a squealing pig in your backyard: pork-belly contains a ton of fat and is just innately unhealthy.

> Its not like "processing" makes something more or less poisonous

I completely agree with this. There's nothing inherent to processing food that makes it less healthy. In fact it could potentially make it even more healthy, e.g. adding fiber or protein to a starch. Heck, even just like at the original processing technique. Cooked vegetables are more nutritious than raw vegetables.

But the reality is that 99% of processing is directed at making foods hyper-palatable, calorically dense, and easy to digest. Because that's what consumers crave. If someone's investing the capital necessary to process foods, it would not be smart to do it such a way to make their product less appealing.

So the reality is that avoiding processed foods in favor of whole foods winds up being a pretty good heuristic. The only real exception I can think of are products marketed explicitly as health food, and even a lot of times they're not actually that healthy.

My issue with this "processing" designation is that its meaningless once we enter practice.

> But the reality is that 99% of processing is directed at making foods hyper-palatable, calorically dense, and easy to digest. Because that's what consumers crave.

Yes, people want unhealthy foods.

You can buy a perfectly organic, fully unprocessed meal from Panda Express. Its called rice stir-fry, and as long as you hold back the soy sauce its "unprocessed".

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A friend of mine went vegetarian for better health. He ended up eating potato chips and gaining weight. Yes, there's a general "vegetables are usually better for you than meat", but, there's no guarantee that following such vague advice helps anyone.

You need to think harder, and eat smarter than that if you want a better diet. This "unprocessed vs ultraprocessed" designation is too vague, too unhelpful. It will just cause people to eat Panda Express all day every day.

> You can buy a perfectly organic, fully unprocessed meal from Panda Express. Its called rice stir-fry,

Butter, sesame/vegetable oil and white rice are all processed foods. An unprocessed version would consist of brown rice, eggs, and the chopped veggies. Which would be an improvement on 95% of the typical meals Americans consume.

I do get your point though. There's an aspect of Goodhart's law here. When we come up with some sort of diet management heuristic, over time our personal habits and eventually the market will find exploits. We'll look for the most unhealthy/tasty food that complies with the ostensible rules of the diet.

> Butter, sesame/vegetable oil and white rice are all processed foods.

The article is clearly using NOVA's definition of unprocessed vs ultraprocessed. Under NOVA's definition of unprocessed: butter, vegetable oil are "Group 2" (ingredients) while white rice is "Group 1" (unprocessed / minimally processed).

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As such, fresh Stir Fry from a restaurant with white rice, oil, and butter is Group2.

Group3 and Group4 are the "problematic" (allegedly) groups of high-processing.

I'm vegetarian and have never understood the "going vegetarian because it's healthier" concept. It's actually not healthier at all, especially if, as you said, you get the bulk of your calories from starches (e.g. chips or pasta); which is easy to do because they're easy and obvious options until you have a larger stock of recipies in your head. It's also easy to not get enough protein that way. (In general getting enough protein as a vegetarian, especially an ovo-lacto one isn't difficult, but it can require being aware.)

Anyway, it's perfectly healthy to eat meat; vegetarianism isn't healthier. What's healthier is being deliberate and thinking about the food you consume.

(For reference, I became vegetarian because I ha concerns about factory farming's environmental impact and slowly just started to dislike the idea of having to sacrifice another animal for my benefit when it became clear to me that not doing so isn't actually that difficult.)

Interestingly, Ayurveda recommends cooked vegetables more than raw vegetables, and less (but not zero) of raw food generally, on the principle (IIRC) that cooked foods are usually easier for humans to digest - and digestion is "the key to health" in Ayurveda. Source: Prakruti - your Ayurvedic Constitution, by Vaidya* Robert Svoboda.

*Vaidya is the title for an Ayurvedic doctor.

If this stuff has the same veracity as what was in Aghora, I have to wonder if Svoboda met any Ayurvedic experts at all

He has not just met experts, he has gone through the full 4 or 5 year Indian Ayurvedic degree, which includes some parts of MBBS degree, IIRC.

I have not read his Aghora series. That could be esoterica or even a spoof, who knows. I have only read his Ayurveda book. Doubt that that book is wrong, since my family has some background in Ayurveda as users for two generations or more. Also read his bio on his site - says he was gold medals winner in his Ayurveda degree exams from the Pune university he studied at. I know of that school. Unlikely to be fake info, could easily be verified.

His Aghora book (the first one) includes the following assertions

that Sri Ramakrishna got throat cancer by wish of some female guru as punishment for wanting to learn Tantra out of turn

Abbottabad is hottest place in Asia (it’s Jacobabad near where my mom grew up)

Wajid Ali Shah died soon after he was sent to Calcutta by British

Confuses Shamse Tabrez and Shamsuddin Sabzawari (RA)

Mostly agree, after all, our food is heavily "processed" in our digestive system, so it's possible many of the things we think 'unprocessed' foods provide do not survive the stomach. That said, I don't think we know this 100%. Sure, we have mapped essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients enough to know what keeps an organism alive, but there may be other things gained by consuming, say, minimally processed cellular material.

Again, on the other hand, some foods require processing to extract necessary nutrients(i.e. nixtamalization of corn).

> If half of our food is ultraprocessed, then that's a problem with the definition of ultraprocessed.

Why? Just because we consume a lot of it does not mean it is not "ultraprocessed". We should be afraid of a name just because a lot of modern food falls into the definition.

* Are there bad foods that are ultraprocessed? (Ex: Frosted Flakes)

* Are there good foods that are ultraprocessed? (Ex: Grain Berry)

* Are there good foods that are unprocessed? (Ex: Brown Rice)

* Are the bad foods that are unprocessed? (Ex: Pork Belly)

If "ultraprocessed" fails to distinguish good from bad, then the word itself is worthless.

You can actually eat pork belly without it having bad effect on your health. You just have to avoid to do it too much. Is grain berry in the amount that satiate you actually good for you to be eaten every day for breakfast?

It is puzzling to me why low-fat cereal would be some kind of win or automatically should be considered great thing. You get energy from fat, sugar and proteins. Healthy human can and should eat all three, but I really dont understand why specifically amount of low-fatness of some cereal box would be advantage.

The issue with nutrition is that it is complicated. Food is rarely straight in the "good" and "bad" category. If distinguising between processed and ultraprocessed allows us to simplify it enough to reason about stuff in contemporary stores, then it is useful.

> It is puzzling to me why low-fat cereal would be some kind of win or automatically should be considered great thing. You get energy from fat, sugar and proteins. Healthy human can and should eat all three, but I really dont understand why specifically amount of low-fatness of some cereal box would be advantage.

Dietary fiber is a huge part of nutrition and you're ignoring it in your above analysis. In particular, dietary fiber allows you to feel full without consuming ludicrous amounts of calories.

A high-fiber, low-sugar, low-fat cereal provides "stomach filler", so to speak. It makes you feel full, it provides vitamins, minerals, and fiber (important nutrients to live).

The psychology of a full stomach has a huge effect on whether or not someone is going to overeat later in the day. If you eat high-calorie foods like lard (_unprocessed_ fat from pork belly), you're simply not going to have as full of a stomach as someone who was filling up on fibers (even if those fibers are "ultraprocessed").

You shouldn't need "stomach filler" to feel satiated. If the food you are eating has enough nutrients, you should not feel hungry. Nutrition-derived satiety is not the same thing as fullness, which should probably be considered a negative consequence of overeating.

Unfortunately many people are so used to eating nutritionally bankrupt food that the connection between satiety and nutrition is broken, and many people exist in such a constant state of hunger that only fullness can temporarily stop them from eating more. The people I've met who overeat fiber to keep themselves from overeating caloric food have typically not been very healthy.

This "psychology of a full stomach" is not a requirement to live. In moderation, fiber is fine, but so is lard. You don't have to eat until you are full, you can simply stop eating when you have consumed enough nutrients. The body can give good feedback if one chooses to listen. Unfortunately this innate animalian skill is easy to forget in a world of soda and cheetos.

If you want a more thorough exposition of this idea, consider the book "Why Diets Make us Fat" by Sandra Aamodt, especially if you are interested in the psychology of eating. Please stop hating on pork belly. It is fine in moderation.

It's only useful it it allows you to reason correctly about stuff in contemporary stores. The argument is that the label does not supply information that is actually relevant to crafting a healthy diet.

It is sufficient information. Replace processed food (candy bar) with less-processed (granola bar without added sugar) or non-processed (apple).

People don't like ultra-processed in an partake-abstain framing (like many do with illegal drgus), but they could just apply a how-often, or frequency framing, (like they do with alcohol).

People are just uncomfortable with the responsibility being theirs and are exercising their denial.

The demand for a narrative about evil-FDA or evil-food-corp is HIGH. Everyone could just eat like the healthiest among their friends and family, but you can't sell a story without a villian.

But that argument is kind of weak when it comes packed with example that claims fat is bad and sugar+fiber is good.

That is just not how nutrition works either. And honestly, the processed/unprocessed distinction will end up with better result then "fat is bad".

One of the bad parts of processed (and by extension, ultraprocessed) foods is that (depending on the food, of course) a lot of the nutritional value is stripped out during the industrial preparation processes. This leads to the body feeling less satiated by the same amount of unprocessed food, and leads to overeating. For instance, boiling veggies instead of steaming them, because it's more efficient, and then discarding the water that the nutrients leached into.

What if the processed-food percent of a persons diet predicts their health outcomes as well as questions like "do you exercise regularly?".

Aren't we more interested in health outcomes associated with food rather than moralistic rules or labels?

The leap from "this general rule has some exceptions" to "this is worthless" is unwarranted.

You still personally expect people that eat less processed foods to be slimmer on average than those that eat more, right?

> You still personally expect people that eat less processed foods to be slimmer on average than those that eat more, right?

Not if you consider low-fat low-sugar cereals like "Grain Berry" as "ultraprocessed". All you're doing is making it harder for people to craft a useful diet.

The second ingredient of Grain Berry cereal is sugar.

The first ingredient of Lard is... Lard. Which is "non-processed" by this strange designation.

Would you say that Lard is more, or less healthy than a high-fiber cereal?

It seems like you think that Lard is axiomatically unhealthy, which may have been a common view 20 years ago, but no longer is.

Lard doesn't contain trans fats, which is what fast food is full of.

Lard is a time-tested animal product that has been used by many long-lived civilizations. "trans fats" wasn't a thing until ~20 years ago, so basically science is catching up with the implicit knowledge people have had for thousands of years.

https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/nutrition/2013/...

Lard is definitely healthier than processed oils, e.g. vegetable oil in the supermarket.

I eat food cooked with lard before I eat fast food or industrial cooking, every time. (and I lost significant weight in the last 3 years, so I'm medically "normal", which is 20-30% percentile -- i.e. most people are heavier than me)

Ditto for butter -- natural, whole fats were "out of fashion" 20 years ago because of incorrect nutritional knowledge foisted upon you by interested parties. Again, there are many mainstream books that cover these topics, like Pollan's.

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And as much as these comparisons make sense, I would say that lard is also healthier than a cereal with the following ingredients:

Whole Oat Flour, Wheat Starch, Sorghum Berry Bran, Modified Corn Starch, Brown Sugar, Salt, Tricalcium Phosphate, Tripotassium Phosphate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E) added to maintain freshness.

The sugar, salt, and preservatives gives me pause. I believe that unprocessed sugars like honey, maple syrup, and dried fruit are easier for the body to metabolize, and I don't think that's very controversial these days.

So I eat granola without preservatives or much added sugar instead (although you can be tricked by concentrated apple or pear juice, etc. which is basically sugar). You have to pay about double, and it rules out about 50% of what's on the shelves at Whole Foods, and maybe 80% at Safeway. But I think it's cheaper in the long term.

> Its not like "processing" makes something more or less poisonous.

At scale, processing food often introduces challenges only solvable by introducing chemicals and practices that are considered harmful to humans.

Phthalates become more common in foods the more times it changes hands. Sterilized environments necessary for processing must be sanitized by using chlorine, some of which is exposed to the food itself. Most processed foods have ingredients that are also processed, so the effects of this are compounded. Many preservatives, past and present, have positive correlations with various types of cancer and neurological diseases.

I agree with base premise — you don't automatically start eating healthily by choosing whole foods. But I think it's harmful to consider processing as benign.

pork-belly contains a ton of fat and is just innately unhealthy

Citation needed. Not all fats are created equal.

For example Inuits consume 50% of their calories from fat [1]. They do not have the "western diet disease" (obesity, heart disease, etc.)

It really IS the processed fats that are bad for you. You can see this all over the world when Aboriginal peoples are introduced to industrial cooking / ultra-processed foods / "western corporate diet".

They literally get addicted, and their body size increases by double digit percentages within a generation. This also happened in the US, but happens faster around the world. The average body weight for a man in the US increased from ~166 in the 1960’s to ~196 today [2].

This is an amazing fact that needs an explanation if you don't believe it's a result of the rise in industrial cooking.

And if you believe in capitalism, you would have to explain how this would NOT happen. Why wouldn't companies gradually develop cheap, consistently manufactured, addictive foods? The profit motive would lead them there, even if it weren't intentional.

I suggest reading some of Michael Pollan's books like Omnivore's Dilemma or Cooked; they talk about this (and probably talk about Inuits specifically as far as I remember)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/12/look-...

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Another anecdote: I know someone from the Midwest with "industrial cooking disease" who dropped from 350 lbs to 200 lbs in a year by going on the "carnivore diet", where he ate exclusively beef and chicken (yes, literally).

I remember someone else remarking the same thing on HN, and observing that going vegan can have the same effect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177116 (not sure if this is the thread but there are many of them on HN)

Hypothesis: Both the carnivore diet and a vegan diet are BOTH suboptimal. The reason that they help many people with "western diet disease" is that you eliminate industrial cooking / ultra-processed foods from your diet.

The human body is extremely flexible and can metabolize a wide variety of things in the environment. What it apparently can't metabolize is addictive foods that corporations have created...

> Citation needed. Not all fats are created equal.

Filipino diet, consisting of fresh chicken, fresh pork, fresh fish, and fresh rice will lead to heart attacks at relatively young ages.

Nothing against my family or heritage. But these things are known. Balancing it out with some "processed" canned veggies for +Fiber intake can grossly help and improve overall health. And cutting out the fatty Lechon (aka: "Island Pork" with the apple in the mouth) helps too.

Also bad air quality, bad water quality, etc. etc. lead to other issues. But diet is clearly a problem IMO. Even if it is a fresh chicken and/or fresh Lechon/Pig (which really is quite tasty, and barely processed at all)

Hahaha, the Filipino diet involves FAR more than those fresh foods you list. The poverty experienced in that nation is extreme and very few eat properly. I'd wager that they may have worse health metrics than americans in nearly every category (including obesity)

Worse, everyone (even americans) tend to agree that "ordinary" Filipino food is less healthy (and less tasty) than basically anyone elses. Compare your experience at jolibees to at McDonald's. I claim that almost everyone (even people who hate both) will prefer the food at McDonalds, and that the average item from McDonalds is healthier than from Joliebees

Filipinos trying to bring up their good food and "somehow were still having bad health outcomes" is pinoy pride going wrong. And who can forget about THIS delicacy? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagpag

Yes, but... How much lumpia and stir-fry is going along with the fresh chicken, pork, fish, and rice? My personal anecdote of around a dozen Filipino friends shows me that they're eating their mothers fried food far too often. Preparation matters.

Stir-Fry is unprocessed foods. Its just rice, veggies, and meats.

That's what's so ridiculous about this "unprocessed" vs "processed" label. Lumpia is just flour + water for the wrappers, and then fillers (beef+rasins is pretty common, but maybe you're a veggie-lumpia person). Ultimately, its just flat + fresh dough wrapping fresh foods. Nothing processed about it at all.

I bet you that frying your food and filling it up with oils and salts probably has more to do with your health than how "processed" those foods are.

----------

If you've been to the Philippines, you can watch people literally rip the plantain (a bananna-like fruit) from a tree, wrap it, and deep fry it for you. Its about as fresh and "unprocessed" as it gets. Literally, these people just sit on the side of the road selling this stuff. Its kind of awesome. (Or they'll climb a tree and cut a fresh Buko / Coconut for you. Etc. etc.)

That doesn't make it any healthier. Now it makes it really, really tasty and a really good experience. But no way in hell am I going to call that healthy eating.

Frying (and cooking in general) is absolutely a type of processing. It generally degrades a food's micro-nutrient content to at least some extent (chemical breakdown of vitamins due to the high temperature, and leaching of nutrients in the case of boiling).

That's not to say we shouldn't cook our food (and in some cases cooking can make food more nutritious by destroying anti-nutrients like phytic acid), but we should be aware of how the cooking time, temperature, and method affect nutrient content. Boiled vegetables are generally going to be less nutritious than steamed vegetables, for example.

And of course, frying tends to use industrially produced oils which are highly processed. Oily foods like avocados that you find in nature are going to have some fiber and other nutrients; the process of removing all that to produce pure oil is a form of processing.

That's a good point, and I agree with everything you've said, especially anecdotally that oils in particular have more to do with nutritional health than processed foods... But, my original point was that oil _is_ highly processed.

> For many people, the idea of cooking a meal has been elevated to a special occasion event, as a treat or a date night. This is partially due to the fact that boring, everyday meal recipes just aren't as flashy as a 15-ingredient, hour long recipe that results in a stunning picture for someone's blog or instagram.

I think the root is that everyone's rents and other costs are way higher. Many folks are barely getting by. I don't think it's Instagram or vanity - I think that might reveal your personal privilege and position in society. That isn't meant in a demeaning or derogatory way, it's just that it surprises me how today people from different classes do not often 'meet' each other anymore, in their day to day lives. Propably due to rising inequity. I think a lot of working class people buy quick meals because they have so little time.

> Everyone should learn how to cook some boring, staple meals using basic ingredients from the store.

100% agree. Shame we're still letting corporations brainwash the general population, not to mention kids.

Barely getting by in America means being rich for much of the world including many European countries.

How is it that the economics works out so differently in, say, Eastern Europe where poor people's best choice is to buy staples in bulk and cook and can't afford packaged convenience food and eating out?

It's because American people's time is priced much higher and they earn much more overall.

When I was a kid, eating at McDonald's was considered to be like going to a restaurant. A moderately fancy one at that. The limiting factor was cost.

It's not the case anymore. While McDonald's is still certainly more expensive than food people regularly eat, but the gap seems to be closing. People just aren't satisfied with eating basically potatoes and sometimes some meat. They make fancier meals, but this increases cost. At some point the cost isn't all that different from what fast food charges.

Seems like people are having more disposable income and higher standards for quality of experiences.

That hardly matches the narrative that this is caused by people barely getting by and being poor.

>Seems like people are having more disposable income and higher standards for quality of experiences.

I think so too, but that's just my perspective. I'm from a former Soviet Union country and grew up after its collapse. Perhaps the (relative to the US) poverty we had ended up being treated differently from the poverty that's in the US? Eg we were poor enough that fast food wasn't abundantly available. Maybe once we're as rich as the US is right now we will have the same problem as the US does with poverty and fast food.

That being said, shen people are really poor they still get by. They will find a way. 200 years ago almost everyone (excluding nobility) lived on about $2-3 a day in 1990s money. That's like two coffees at a coffee shop. People just lived differently and usually worse lives. Also, coffee shops weren't really a thing here until about the last decade or so. You could buy coffee at gas stations, but there weren't these fancy coffee shops.

> Barely getting by in America means being rich for much of the world including many European countries.

Barely getting by in America means incredible poverty, homelessness, an inability to get medical care, and visits to food banks. I'm curious to understand what you are basing your claims/arguments on - would you be willing to share any sources that have shaped your perspective on these issues? My own arguments are based on socialist organizers who are on the ground and organizing in the US, as well as the paper this thread is discussing.

> How is it that the economics works out so differently in, say, Eastern Europe where poor people's best choice is to buy staples in bulk and cook and can't afford packaged convenience food and eating out?

> It's because American people's time is priced much higher and they earn much more overall.

I'm curious, have you been able to read the BMJ paper/article? This is absolutely not meant in a derogatory way. I am genuinely curious to understand where you are coming from or what your statement is based on.

From my understanding the paper argues that people's perceptions of which foods are nutritional has been distorted and negatively manipulated by corporations. In other words, people have come to believe low-nutritional food (or even non-nutritional food) is somehow nutritional, when in fact it actively contributes to ill-health and chronic disease/conditions.

From the first paragraph of this paper:

"In 2015 the New York Times revealed that Coca Cola was covertly funding the Global Energy Balance Network based at the University of Colorado, a research network set up to promote the message that all calories are equal.1 The network’s aim was to show that sugar sweetened beverages are no more responsible for the rise in obesity levels than any other foods or a lack of physical activity.2 In doing so, Coca Cola was copying and adapting the corporate political activities and scientific strategies that have been pioneered and perfected by tobacco, alcohol, and drug companies to defend and promote their products.34

Corporate food and beverage companies such as Coca Cola have engaged in what I will refer to as “corporate scientific activities.” These activities are designed to produce and influence the scientific knowledge used to evaluate, promote, legitimise, and regulate their products. Such activities include funding and conducting in-house nutrition research related to their products; sponsoring scientific seminars and expert meetings; involvement in scientific standards and policy committees; publishing in scholarly journals; funding scientific front groups; and delivering nutrition education programmes.2" [1]

[1] same as the link at the top of the page: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4601

Homeless people eat burgers and drink Coca Cola at the food banks and become fat?

I think the population under concern here is the lower middle class, who have disposable income but are strongly marketed to and manipulated so they use their disposable income in ignorant ways that come back to hurt them and help corporations. Including taking credits to buy stuff they don't need, getting another credit card to pay off the previous one, eating marketed and advertised junk food, consuming junk media, having no financial literacy etc.

They still aren't poor, they have cars and all kinds of household appliances (perhaps more than they need, from TV shop etc) and so on.

Food companies have led very good marketing campaigns for many years telling people that “cooking is SO difficult and SUCH A PAIN. Just buy our prepackaged food which is so much easier.”

Unfortunately when so many people buy into it, it impacts those who don’t. Lately I’ve noticed that basic bags of frozen vegetables are being replaced with “ready to steam” bags that contain half as much quantity for the same price.

May God save us from everyday staple cooking becoming trendy on Instagram with influencers because they will make bags of broccoli become some fancy overpriced fad product with some celebrity photos on the packaging.

It's a steady productization, which gets a higher price

> but also contain ingredients and additives not commonly used in home kitchens and artisanal restaurants

That is incredibly broad though? Not sure what "processed foods" would be then.

That eliminates anything with preservatives or anything that's vitamin enriched.

I've been baking cornbread from scratch a lot recently. Is that bad because the cornmeal has thiamin, riboflavin, and folic acid added and the milk has vitamin D added?

No.

The popularity of Chipotle really says a lot to me.

The steak bowls are a little more cost effective, but for the price of one chicken bowl, you seriously could make at least 4 chicken bowls if you simply went to the grocery store instead of Chipotle. The time to cook and prepare is quite similar to Chipotle as well, especially if you go to Chipotle instead of delivery.

Rice, beans, salsa, lettuce, cheese, chicken. Everything that goes into a burrito/bowl is quite cheap. You could prepare everything in half an hour and then make bowls at the same speed Chipotle does just pulling containers out of the fridge.

I can walk into Chipotle, order a burrito, and be out in less than 5 minutes with a delicious meal and no clean-up (maybe 10 if there's a lineup).

It takes me much longer to cook the chicken and rice, even if the 'prep' is done, and I still have to clean up!

I have what I'd consider a healthy diet, and I've been avoiding restaurant and prepared meals throughout the pandemic, but cooking everything has been a huge time-sink.

Cook food for a couple of days and time per meal will decrease. It takes a bit of getting used to it but once you find the gist of it it really works out

As mentioned above, I cook every meal I eat these days (averaging take-out once every 6-8 weeks). Chipotle is still much faster. Cooking chicken takes a minimum of ten minutes, rice is longer, even assuming no prep time and no clean-up.

The thing is, you don't have to stare at the rice as it's cooking.

Unless you live on top of Chipotle it's very likely the time actually invested cooking will be less than traveling to Chipotle and coming home again.

And beyond that, your simply overpaying for a meal that can be made at home. It's a waste of money, you can save it and waste it on something else you couldn't just make at home.

That’s not remotely true at all.

a) Walk into Chipotle, walk out. $10, 10 minutes.

b) Prepare a list of ingredients. Go to the grocery store. Find and select those ingredients. Go home. Cook and prepare ingredients. Clean dishes and cookware. $7, 2 hours.

Is your time worth so little that you’d spend hours to save $3?

I gotta say, I laughed out loud at your "hours to save $3."

Its honestly the exact response I expect from people who eat at Chipotle.

Even if we assume you never go to the grocery store, making a specific trip to the grocery store instead of Chipotle can likely be assumed to take the same amount of traveling time. And next time you go to Chipotle, think for a moment the complexity of the ingredients your getting. Rice? It's rice. Black beans? You could buy them canned, you won't taste the difference in a bowl. Salsa? You can just buy salsa, it's a dollar or so and lasts ages in the fridge. Cheese is cheese. Lettuce is lettuce. Now all that's left is cooking some chicken breast, your choice how to do it.

If it takes you hours to cook chicken... I don't know how to help you. Perhaps Google how to bake chicken, how to pan fry chicken, how to cook chicken in an instant pot. Literally anything.

Way to miss the point. Cleaning dishes takes time. Going to the grocery takes time. That’s why people go to Chipotle.

If you are preparing in bulk then it's really 10 minutes * # meals, whereas if you cook, you could make 10 at once and the pre-prepped meals are ready in however long it takes to warm things up.

Also, many people don't live 10 minutes walking from a Chipotle. If it was a 15-20 minute drive instead of a 10 minute walk, cooking becomes obvious.

Decide what I want today : pasta, rice or a steak with mashed potatos.

Defrost some fish or meat. Do other stuff while it thawes.

Chop some vegetables, cook some water, cook & fry. 30 minutes while I do other stuff.

Pasta, rice, beans, potatos, fresh vegetables and meat & fish, I have plenty of stock. And I live really small.

A very common pandemic meal in our household has been "taco night" - fry some ground beef with onions, throw some tortillas and cheese in the microwave, simmer a can of pinto beans, then add salsa, cream, avocado, tomatoes, etc. It tastes good, it's simple and can scale up and down to the effort, energy and tools available.

>I wish we put more emphasis on educating young people about basic cooking and nutrition.

More difficult than it sounds. Most people want to eat healthier but when they research it they'll get fad diets and pseudoscience. Just look at Keto, paleo, whole 30, etc.

Nobody wants to talk about the easy, basic stuff. And that fact makes finding the easy, basic stuff really really hard.

> More difficult than it sounds. Most people want to eat healthier but when they research it they'll get fad diets and pseudoscience. Just look at Keto, paleo, whole 30, etc.

Any of those are a big improvement over Five Guys and In N Out and other takeaway or fast food...

Ask your parents or grandparents. Or just combine some of: meat, fish, rice, potatoes, veggies and legumes. How hard can it be? Maybe it will taste bland. Get over it.

I basically cook myself fish or chicken every day but that's not my point. My point is that it's very hard for the average american to receive good dietary information.

How is it specific to diet? It seems very hard for them to get good history, climate, science etc info. There's a ton of lobbying and targeted marketing and political propaganda to keep the average person non-thinking. To all the above, including diet, it looks simple (just read a book, just Google this and this), but if you don't know what to trust because you're confused so much at the very foundation and you've been told so much distorted and selective truths and straight up lies, what can you do? People believe homeopathy, pyramid schemes, that it's patriotic to go invade the middle east again, that universal health care is communism and free tuition equals gulag, that workers rights are anti business and so anti American, that the Bible is literally true, that a televangelist deserves your money, that drugs are bad mkay, that sex ed is evil etc etc.

The food you are fed is just one small way you are exploited.

Very good points, never thought of it like that. I mostly agree.

So would a beyond meat be ultra processed while ground meat is not?

Yes because one is meat and the other is not meat.

People throwing out "processed food" as some catch-all term for packaged stuff that is bad for you is a major pet peeve of mine.

Yes, foods that are pre-packaged tend not to be good for you. You _should_ eat fresh foods and vegetables.

But saying that all "processed" foods are bad for you is a gross oversimplifcation that promotes ignorance about nutrition.

In the many conversations I've had about processed foods, people never seem to be talking about things like milk, yogurt, or cheese, all of which undergo _heavy_ processing.

And to provide a direct comparison, generally speaking, a glass of Soylent is going to be way more beneficial to you nutritionally than a plate of crappy iceberg lettuce with a little salad dressing on it. Although you could make the case that if you're extremely overweight, maybe the iceberg lettuce is better just for the lower calorie content.

Not all things that come in packages are created equal. Some "processed" foods are better for you than some vegetables. But like anything else, moderation is key. Your diet needs to be diverse.

Instead of telling people "processed foods bad hurr durr", teach them about the major nutrients the body needs and where you can get those. Then, consider that person's individual circumstances to offer them specific advice. Not all bodies are the same. Some people are going to need more of one food or another. Some people will tolerate certain foods less well than others.

Nutrition is complex. Indicting "processed foods", whatever that means (their definition does little to reduce ambiguity), is as egregious as the corporate capture of nutrition that they claim to be shining a light on.

Which is why the headline emphasis this is in reference to "ultra-processed" foods and they further go on to define ultra-processed as:

Ultra-processed foods and beverages can be defined as products with additives and industrially processed ingredients that have been technologically broken down and modified.7 They are not merely processed foods with high levels of sugar, salt, and fat but also contain ingredients and additives not commonly used in home kitchens and artisanal restaurants, such as synthetic flavours, emulsifiers, hydrogenated oils, and soy protein isolates. The role of these ingredients is often to simulate the taste, texture, or nutritional profile of minimally processed foods.

Yes, I read the definition. It does little to clear up confusion.

What constitutes a synthetic flavor? Is vanilla extract an example or do you have to go further than that?

Emulsifiers are things that actually get used in regular cooking. According to https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-does-emulsify-mean-480592.... egg yolks and honey are both emulsifiers. Based on how that sentence is phrased, you'd think that an emulsifier is something synthesized chemical that the average chef has never heard of.

Hydrogenated oils and soy protein isolates have long been recognized as things to avoid, so their inclusion in the list is not a surprise.

Like I said, the definition is overbroad and does little to help someone like me actually identify things that are very bad for me. I already know eating a bag of Doritos for dinner is not a great idea. What sort of food items do you typically see these nutritional monsters hiding out in? Are they so awful that they shouldn't be enjoyed even as a once-in-a-while indulgence?

The article specifically mentions Coca Cola and Mars, among others. I mean golly gee, thanks for the big brain insight. Are there people out there who didn't know that soda and candy bars are not paragons of nutrition?

It’s a bit like porn or automatic guns, hard to define perfectly but easy to see and discuss.

Not one person thinks of egg yolks or honey when talking about “ultra processed additives”.

I don’t think you’re making any point here about confusion you’re just ranting. If I were to try and extract some coherent positive thought out of this, I’d say a website that tracks and allows discussion of ingredients and products that are good/bad would be interesting so we could stop bikeshedding on naming when obviously there exist many levels of better/worse foods and ingredients.

> I don’t think you’re making any point here about confusion you’re just ranting.

How uncharitable.

> If I were to try and extract some coherent positive thought out of this, I’d say a website that tracks and allows discussion of ingredients and products that are good/bad would be interesting so we could stop bikeshedding on naming when obviously there exist many levels of better/worse foods and ingredients.

That's basically it. I'd hazard a guess that at least some "ultra-processed" ingredients don't have any effect on you at all. Some might even be positive.

People take medication for health conditions after all, and they help them live longer, higher quality lives. What could be more ultra-processed than that?

Scientists and engineers don't generally tolerate painting with such a broad brush, and it's at least obvious to me that there are several confounding variables here other than the artificial ingredients themselves (super high calorie density, for example).

> teach them about the major nutrients the body needs and where you can get those

The school system teaches students about the major nutrients the body needs, and what common foods include those.

The corporations use major nutrients in advertising products that also contain lots of unnecessary ingredients, and that marketing works. That's actually a large portion of what this article describes.

I don't know what public schools are teaching these days, but when I was a kid it was all about the food pyramid, which I discovered some years later in high school was absolute crap.

You could go a long way with "eat a diverse diet, prefer vegetables".

> In the many conversations I've had about processed foods, people never seem to be talking about things like milk, yogurt, or cheese, all of which undergo _heavy_ processing.

The faddish 'paleo/caveman diet' definitely says you shouldn't eat these, and I think that's the poster boy for the unprocessed diet. But it also depends on your genetics, if you're from a lineage that has no issue with lactose then it's probably fine. They are very calorie dense though if weight loss/maintenance is a goal.

One of the dangers of large economies of scale with processed foods, is that the companies that produce these foods accumulate market power and then force the entire agricultural industry towards producing particular crops as cheaply as possible. This has not only led to a drastic reduction in variety and diversity of foods that people eat, but large-scale crop monocultures also have significant environmental implications. And the continual search for lower prices means we're growing ridiculously high-yield crops that are disrupting local water balance and draining water tables like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

I've read that the amount of protein in wheat has been declining for a century.

I remember 40 years ago rye bread was really dense and rich. Now it takes like rye flavored white bread. Also bread now tastes suspiciously sweet to me.

Other common staples like corn and rice had hundreds of varieties in the past, many of which are extinct or only exist in a seed vault. The same is true for fruits. If you travel to particular developing countries or even just to Hawaii (where native varieties are protected), you'll see how different their fruits and vegetables are - both in variety but also smell and taste. I'm sure that has nutritional implications that simplistic reductionist nutrition approaches can't capture.

"Corporate food and beverage companies such as Coca Cola have engaged in what I will refer to as “corporate scientific activities.” These activities are designed to produce and influence the scientific knowledge used to evaluate, promote, legitimise, and regulate their products"

Years ago, I remember listening to a podcast and while I can't find it the host was excerpting a study he was critical of on and noting it was sponsored by coca-cola (this might be it: http://www.latestinpaleo.com/paleo-podcast/2013/11/15/latest... )

See also:

The fall of Brian Wansink and the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, where this was a major article before the issues broke out: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/brian-wansin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wansink

A typical marketing activity of companies selling sugary drinks and sugary fatty salty snacks is to overemphasize the role of exercise in weight loss.

The article states that :

Ultra-processed products now account for nearly half of the average dietary intake of some high income countries, with consumption rising rapidly in most other countries.

I've never lived for more than 1-2 months in any of these "high income countries". What does it mean to consume "ultra-processed" food? Can someone give an example how the daily dietary intake can be 50% processed foods? What do you eat for that?

Can't believe no one has quoted Michael Pollan yet, but his 7 rules still ring true (see #4 for your question):

1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says.

2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

3. Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with fresh foods when it goes bad.

4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"

6. Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals felt wrong?" Pollan asks.

7. Don't buy food where you buy your gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

There are some good rules of thumb here, but this:

> 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

This just smacks of so much ignorance as to be disgraceful. Something isn't good for you just because there's a short word for it, or bad for you because it has a scientific name. And it's definitely not bad for you just because it has more than 5 ingredients.

I remember hearing how people were duped in the past by the dangeous chemical dihydrogen monoxide: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dangers-dihydrogen-monoxid...

People should do research and be informed, not make ridiculous decisions about food based on whatever words happen to be associated to their ingredients.

This is true but the purpose of such lists of rules is that they are easy to follow for people who otherwise would have no idea what to do. Every rule has exceptions and once someone tries such a system for a time they'll probably learn them. Having them avoid such food until then and start eating healthier right now would be more beneficial than waiting.

Most of rule #2 would be encapsulated by rule #1 anyway, it just reinforces it.

If your argument is that people need simple rules to follow, that list is way too complicated. You only need one: "eat a variety of vegetables".

> This just smacks of so much ignorance as to be disgraceful.

This is a wildly uninformed, reactionary statement, Michael Pollan is literally an expert in this field in multiple domains (professor, journalist, consultant). If you stop and think for a second, perhaps an expert is choosing his words carefully, and consider that he is trying to make rules for people who think Arby's 7 nights a week is healthy, not folk who are health conscious and informed.

But hey, if you want to point me to all of the books you've written and research you've done on nutrition, I'll take a seat.

He is referring to the Hadith saying your stomach should be 1/3 food, 1/3 water and 1/3 air (ie empty)

> 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.

That's dumb. I struggled with "Quinoa."

> 4. Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.

That's dumb. Twinkies go bad and popping corn doesn't.

> 5. It is not just what you eat but how you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says.

That's dumb. Leaving a meal hungry just means you'll snack later. Eat fewer, large meals, and nothing in between.

Almost anything from a fast food restaurant, or in a box that you microwave, or in a use-once bag / single-serve container is considered ultra-processed. These tend to be a lot less expensive (because making them is much more efficient for the manufacturer) than regular foods, and are more readily available and time-convenient when compared to other foods.

That's how you can easily get to 50% or more of your daily intake with them. If you're already short on time, or if you have several family members at home who need to be fed quickly, or if you have a lower income and cannot easily afford fresh food items and the utensils with which to prepare them, you will buy and eat lots of ultra-processed foods.

Breakfast: Cereal and milk. My favorite cereal is Trix.

Lunch: Sandwich made of bread, bologna, cheese, mustard. Coca-cola or chocolate milk to drink.

Dinner: TV dinner, perhaps a Lean Cuisine or Pizza rolls. Mountain Dew or Kool Aid to drink.

This was a typical day of food for me as a child and through being a teenager.

I feel this 100%. This type of thing is totally pushed by the food industry, marketed directly to kids and tired / busy parents. Lets not pretend that people who aren't obese are somehow more enlightened or virtuous, this is clearly a matter of food production, marketing, and environment (otherwise there wouldn't have been a sharp rise in obesity right around the time all this came online).

I feel your story because I had a similar upbringing and even though I eat relatively healthy now, losing weight is INCREDIBLY difficult due to what I assume is a host of metabolic issues from all those years of poor eating as a kid.

Threads like this kill me because its a lot of lecturing about "simple calories in calories out", and "just don't eat so much junk food" like some kid who is 8 and getting served corn dogs and fruit rollups has any idea. Everyone at school is eating that stuff, the cafeteria is serving hamburgers, chips, choc milk and chicken nuggets. There are soda and candy machines in the hallways for snacks, and everything you watch on TV is blanketed with advertising for junk food.

I almost wrote about how I think eating like that during my childhood broke something with my metabolism. Like, I can't process sugars like most people do and I'm more prone to gaining weight.

That said, my view of food is 100% different now. I do feel enlightened. I don't blame my parents. I think the state needs to get more involved with regulation. I have a ton of respect for Michelle Obama's push to make school lunches healthy.

Is this really what you ate like on a day to day basis? Not snarky or anything, just genuinely shocked and curious

Yes. It was actually even worse than that on most days. The portions were bigger and I didn't include snacks and desserts. My whole family was overweight and most of us were obese (myself included). This is the majority of Americans. I'm sure that this style of eating is extremely common.

Sorry to hear. Sadly, like a typical American I also had my days of weight gain, junk food, mcdonald's, etc in my childhood, but I also grew up having mostly home-cooked food, so that's where my curiosity comes from.

While that food doesn't look healthy I don't think it would be enough to become obese alone from a calorie perspective, unless portion sizes are massive (you said one sandwich but maybe it was multiple?). Especially with a teenage metabolism.

Snacks, desserts, and sugar drinks in between meals are a huge contributor for a lot of people.

Have you ever microwaved a half gallon of ice cream and drank it?

Portion creep is a thing.

"I might as well finish the whole sleeve of Oreos"

- A child after school watching Batman: The Animated Series somewhere in the Mid-West.

They also probably had several processed snacks throughout the day like chips and oreos.

Yup.

On a lighter note: can we talk about how 6 Pizza Rolls is not a serving!? Nobody eats ONLY 6 Pizza rolls.

I did wonder that same thing, this breaks it down nicely:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed...

One example:

Corn vs Canned corn vs Corn chips

Where corn is not, canned is processed, and chips are Ultra.

My favorite example is Doritos. "Favorite" because they're soooo damn good, but sooo damn bad for me. Ultra Processed for sure.

> Where corn is not, canned is processed

And that's where this distinction immediately becomes ridiculous. Fresh corn vs canned corn is well studied: the nutrition in canned corn can be higher due to preserving the food at peak-ripeness.

Fresh corn loses nutrition the longer it sits around. If you're able to grab corn from a farmer's market, its really good and nutritious. But if that corn was shipped for miles, sat at the back of a warehouse for a week, then got to the grocery store, and then sat at your house for a few days before eating... well... a lot of that nutrition evaporated away

---------

Canned corn loses some nutrition into the water as its canned. But you can preserve that nutrition by integrating that water into your meals. Ex: canned corn in chili, just pour the corn AND the water into your meal, and you keep all the vitamins.

In either case, the dietary fiber of the vegetable remains in tact even though the canning process. And that's the stuff that a lot of people are missing in their diets.

Which is part of why, in a below, I mentioned how egregious it was to oversimplify foods to "processed" or not. There needs to be more information disseminated about what kind of convenient foods people _can_ choose and what the impacts are to your health are.

Most people would consider frozen or canned fruits and vegetables as more processed, and therefore less good, than fresh fruit or vegetables.

Although I do have a bone to pick with your assessment of why "fresh" produce tends to be less nutritious. While you correctly note that frozen or canned items are picked at peak ripeness, the fresh items don't have less nutrition simply because the nutrients "evaporated away". Instead, they have to be picked _far before_ peak ripeness in order to avoid spoilage. That means the plants just take in fewer nutrients.

> What does it mean to consume "ultra-processed" food?

Something like a snickers bar or packaged saltines maybe?

> Can someone give an example how the daily dietary intake can be 50% processed foods? What do you eat for that?

I mean, clif bars would count, for one. If you ate plain chocolate bars for 50% of your calories you'd probably overeat but... many people do!

For breakfast you could have a Pop Tart, a jam-filled pastry:

Ingredients: ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, VITAMIN B1 [THIAMIN MONONITRATE], VITAMIN B2 [RIBOFLAVIN], FOLIC ACID), CORN SYRUP, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, DEXTROSE, SOYBEAN AND PALM OIL (WITH TBHQ FOR FRESHNESS), CRACKER MEAL, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF WHEAT STARCH, SALT, DRIED STRAWBERRIES, DRIED PEARS, DRIED APPLES, LEAVENING (BAKING SODA, SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), CITRIC ACID, CARAMEL COLOR, SOY LECITHIN, XANTHAN GUM, MODIFIED WHEAT STARCH, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, RED 40, NIACINAMIDE, REDUCED IRON, VITAMIN B6 (PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE), YELLOW 6, VITAMIN B2 (RIBOFLAVIN), VITAMIN B1 (THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE).

Or a blueberry muffin:

INGREDIENTS: Blueberry Muffin (Bleached Enriched Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Sugar, Water, Soybean Oil, Whole Eggs, Blueberries, Modified Food Starch [Corn], Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Salt, Emulsifier [Propylene Glycol Esters, Mono- and Diglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate], Nonfat Dry Milk, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate, Cellulose Gum, Natural and Artificial Flavor [Milk], Sodium Caseinate [Milk], Xanthan Gum, Egg Whites, Soy Flour), Confectioners Sugar (Sugar, Carnauba Wax). CONTAINS WHEAT, EGG, MILK AND SOY INGREDIENTS. Produced in a facility that uses tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, milk, and eggs.

For lunch, consider a frozen beef and bean burrito:

Ingredients: WATER, ENRICHED FLOUR (BLEACHED WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), BEEF, PINTO BEANS, VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN, CANOLA AND/OR CORN OIL), CONTAINS 2% OR LESS, TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN, TOMATO PASTE, SPICES, JALAPENO PUREE (JALAPENO PEPPERS, WATER, CITRIC ACID), GARLIC POWDER, CHILI PEPPER, BAKING POWDER (SODIUM BICARBONATE, CORN STARCH, SODIUM ALUMINUM SULFATE, CALCIUM SULFATE, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SOY SAUCE (WATER, SOYBEANS, WHEAT, SALT), MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, ONION, DOUGH CONDITIONER (SODIUM METABISULFITE, CORN STARCH, MICROCRYSTALLINE CELLULOSE, DICALCIUM PHOSPHATE), SALT, GUAR GUM, PAPRIKA.

Or a bologna sandwich:

Bologna: Ingredients: Mechanically Separated Chicken, Pork, Water, Corn Syrup, Contains Less Than 2% Of Salt, Ground Mustard Seed, Sodium Phosphates, Potassium Chloride, Sodium Propionate, Sodium Diacetate, Beef, Sodium Benzoate, Flavor, Sodium Ascorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Hydrolyzed Beef Stock, Autolyzed Yeast, Dextrose, Extractives Of Paprika, Sodium Lactate, Potassium Lactate, Celery Seed Extract.

White bread: Ingredients: Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Calcium Carbonate, Soybean Oil, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Dough Conditioners (Contains One or More of the Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- and Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, DATEM, Ethoxylated Mono- and Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Vinegar, Monocalcium Phosphate, Yeast Extract, Modified Corn Starch, Sucrose, Sugar, Soy Lecithin, Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3), Soy Flour, Ammonium Sulfate, Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Propionate (to Retard Spoilage).

And follow it up with a Fried Chicken Dinner:

Boneless Fried White Meat Chicken Patties (Cooked White Meat Chicken, Water, Enriched Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Mechanically Separated Chicken, Chicken Skins, Soy Protein Concentrate, Salt, Sodium Phosphates, Monosodium Glutamate, Dextrose, Spice Extract, Isolated Oat Product). Mashed Potatoes (Water, Dehydrated Potato Flakes (Potatoes, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Citric Acid), Seasoning Sauce (Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Water, Mono and Diglycerides with BHT and Citric Acid to Protect Flavor, Beta Carotene for Color (Corn Oil, Dl-Alpha-Tocopherol)), Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Dried Dairy Blend (Whey, Calcium Caseinate)), Corn. Brownie (Sugar, Water, Enriched Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Cocoa, Eggs. Seasoning Sauce (Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Water, Mono and Diglycerides with BHT and Citric Acid to Protect Flavor, Beta Carotene for Color (Corn Oil, Dl-Alpha-Tocopherol)), Acacia and Xanthan Gums, Sodium Bicarbonate (Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil), Salt, Natural and Artificial Flavor [Water, Propylene Glycol, Ethanol, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Caramel Color, Vanilla Extractives]), Seasoning Sauce (Water, Sugar, Seasoning Sauce (Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Water, Mono and Diglycerides with BHT and Citric Acid to Protect Flavor, Beta Carotene for Color (Corn Oil, Dl-Alpha-Tocopherol)), Salt, Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness])).

These weren't even picked for their egregiousness. This is the norm for the food culture of the working class in America. All of American processed food is like this. Add that it's packaged in frequently toxic plastics and contaminated with pesticides, and it's clear that this is the lead pipes of the American empire.

These aren't good examples though. You don't necessarily put all of those things into said muffins. Just the basic ingredients translate into a long list of things, because natural food contains a lot of different nutrients in them.

An apple by itself contains many different things.[0] I really encourage you to look at it. And an apple is just one simple ingredient.

[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/171688/n...

Well to start with ultra processed as defined by the article would include...

All cured meats

Meat that has been shredded ground and or blended such as hamburger or meatballs

Breads and pastries

Yogurts, cheese, and ice cream

Anything with a roux or other thickening agent

Candy

Most fried foods

Anything with preservatives added

Anything including alcohol

Anything that has been artificially colored

It's not hard to see how those add ups.

Roux is an odd one as that is butter (oil) and flour at a 1:1 to ratio cooked over heat until the desired color is reached. It's the key ingredient in gumbo which has been made since at least the early 1800s.

I like what this guy has to say about nutrition (take it with a grain of salt, he is an epistemologist)

https://meaningness.com/nutrition-resigns

"Your job is to wear white lab coats while saying that food ingredients are healthy and unhealthy, and to wave charts around. That makes the ingredients authoritatively healthy and unhealthy, which covers our asses.

...

"Signed,

[The governments of every country in the world, the agriculture industry, the food processing industry, the supermarket industry, and so forth.]"

I think if you model food as energy / volume / time you'll do better. To lose weight either increase time (fast) or volume (eat more fiber, maybe the easiest to do?) and decrease energy (lower calorie options).

Yes, according to the article that kind of science (i.e. the basic logic of energy usage) was invented by Coca-Cola. This is what happens when you combine weak knowledge of science with a credulous mind (you think everything is a conspiracy theory invented by group of people you dislike).

Maybe "processed food" (whatever that means, according to the article it is everything not produced in an "artisinal restaurant") is good, maybe it is bad but it is slightly hard to tell given that lots of people in the US are obese: which is a function of greed and laziness, not whether food is "processed" or not.

You can lose weight drinking nothing but soda. You can can lose weight eating nothing but chocolate. I have done it (and no, Coca-Cola didn't pay me). As you say, the issue of obesity is a fairly simple one of: how much energy do you use and how much energy do you put in.

What is actually remarkable to me is how many people are obese given the high basal metabolic rate of humans (at my normal weight, it was remarkably hard and time-consuming to cram enough calories in to gain weight consistently). I have gained and lost 20-40% of my bodyweight multiple times, it isn't hard, it isn't about "good" or "bad" foods (the "you never see a skinny person drinking a diet soda" phenomenom, every obese person I have ever met thought this way), and doesn't look at what their actual calories-in/calories-out is (in my experience, most people regard tracking calories this as a form of mental illness...I live somewhere that has life expectancy under 70 because of obesity...so, go figure). This isn't to say micronutrients aren't important, they clearly are...you don't have enough iron, you are going to feel very bad...but the issue for most countries in the West is excessive calorie consumption, and a failure to speak about this bluntly with people (pretty much all my older relatives have health issues caused by weight, it is frustrating when a doctor tries to be kind first rather than help them stay alive).

> which is a function of greed and laziness

This is incorrect, or at least not a useful lens with which to examine the problem. Societal changes on the level of the obesity epidemic (universal to the point of affecting lab animals) don't happen because of individual increases in greed and laziness. There is at least one broad nutritional/socioeconomic factor behind this, probably several, but because of the state of nutritional science we don't know what they are.

Yes, the social factor is...obese people eat more and exercise less. If you are assuming that every other developed country has this problem, they do not. In those countries, people eat less and/or exercise more.

1. Yes, if you got fat, you consumed more calories than you used up. The solution will require getting closer to balance.

2. The actionable way to achieve that is non-trivial. Different foods with same amount of calories have different physiological effects, including which hormones are produced with what timings and what neural circuitry is activated. This leads to different degrees of psychological fullness, cravings and potential for addiction. They may also promote more laziness or more fidgety behavior which itself can make more difference than often imagined. Moving your hands around, rocking your legs, standing up more often etc.,being more "restless" feeling the need to "get it out of your system" by going for a walk vs feeling like a slob.

CICO and thermodynamics are true as an observation but aren't actionable long term advice. You can lose weight on just eating small amount of crappy pizza, but you'll feel like crap and will have more cravings than eating food with more volume, and various other properties. Even the crunchiness of a food has effects in the brain. CICO is too reductionist as advice.

It isn't. And how often have you lost weight eating junk food yourself? I have done it...no effect. Satiety doesn't matter...thinking that it does is why people don't lose weight. You will be hungry, it will be unpleasant, but continue. Again, this is the fat person with the diet soda effect...most diets that exist don't work, that is why there are so many fat people. Reduce it to something simple, measurable, and it works. The idea of Good/Bad food is destructive for weight loss because it introduces guilt and complexity.

Also, your basal metabolic rate means you can lose weight eating two medium pizzas a day...again, it is very hard to gain weight the way many people do, it is competitive eating amounts of greed done daily, and very few people have a strong idea of the calories in food...just vague moralising about Good and Bad.

I find it much harder to stop eating seasoned chips than unsalted peanuts. The latter still tastes nice but doesn't have me mindlessly consume 800 calories in one sitting because at one point my brain gets bored with it. My brain doesn't ever get bored with chips or chocolate sweets or sweet yogurts etc. So I don't buy them.

If you overload your brain with engineered hyperpalatable packaged products, you will need superhuman willpower and discipline to keep your calories in check.

There's no magic weight loss food, but it makes a difference whether you eat fibery, normal cooked meals or packaged salty fatty sugary tasty snacks all day.

Yes it will manifest itself as calories in the end, but the only long term solution is to unhook yourself from the marketing machine and say NO in the supermarket.

Anyone interested in science informed nutrition information and advice should check out http://nutritionfacts.org. Great content from Dr. Michael Greger, also author of the bestseller “How Not To Die”. He scours the literature and compiles what he finds into short videos. Totally opened my eyes.

They had me. I have a strong idea in my brain that a meal of chocolate bars and a healthy meal will result in same weight loss if calories are equal. Some professor lost weight eating chocolate bars!

I also assumed the public knows sodas contain a nauseating amount of sugar. How will this "research" benefit Coca Cola as a soda company?

If calories in the bars are equal, and if your body can absorb the same number of calories from the food, and if your metabolism stays the same on the different kinds of foods, and if you have the self-discipline to eat only the same number of calories when the sugar rush from the chocolate bar wears off and you want another.

I believe your metabolism responds differently. The sugar signals your body that you've eaten a rich calorie source but fat is lacking, please save this as fat for later. If you had eaten a meal with more fiber and fat, it signals to your body that fatty meals are available now, you can use some for energy, no need to create more storage.

Some food will more likely get stored anyway and rather instruct the brain to move less to compensate, while others will be more likely to "energize" you to do things physically and expend the energy.

See Robert Lustig on sugar.

Even with all that, your body composition would still change over time from lack of protein.

>I have a strong idea in my brain that a meal of chocolate bars and a healthy meal will result in same weight loss if calories are equal. Some professor lost weight eating chocolate bars!

Because it's true. People don't want it to be true though. While there are some extra steps involved it does come down to the simple energy balance model. What's different about eating different foods is that they can change how we behave and feel. Eating some foods can leave you craving for more, while others won't. Fundamentally though, you're not going to gain weight on a calorie deficit.

Food journalists do an amazing job of understanding their industry, embracing the technical nature of their topic, and showing where conflicts of interest arise. It’s great to see science / medical journals also covering this topic.

Does anyone have information on the impact and credibility of the publication (BMJ)? I'm a complete layperson in nutritional science so even though this speaks to me as a genuinely important perspective when it comes the bias of nutritional science I'd like to know if this is going to have any influence in the future.

Additionally, how does this affect common meal replacements like soylent, huel, etc? Can we trust the nutritional science behind them if we presume the bias to be true as stated here?

One of the most prestigious general medical journals in the world.

Yes- I just checked its impact factor, looks like it’s in the top 40, across all journals, not just medicine.

Great, thank you! I'm not a medical person so I didn't know.

I mentioned this before on HN but it still blows my mind how much weight I lost by simply not eating processed food. Thanks to COVID, I cook most of my meals now and I lost a considerable amount of weight even though I didn't cut my portions. I think the biggest problem is that processed food makes me crave food even though I'm not hungry and the stuff used is just so packed in calories (fructose syrup).

And the best way to stop consuming highly processed foods is to write down your calories consumption.

No limits, no shame, no pressure - just write it down.

To me it was a revelation.

A friend of mine had a personal trainer that would make him send a photo of everything he ate. I thought that was a good idea.

Accountability goes a long way for some people.

My way is to eat less items with extra sugar in it. Oh boy do they hide that stuff in about a dozen different ways. Especially HFCS and 'apple/pear juice'. Then I track what I eat and try to hit my numbers. Someone I know is hitting nearly 40 pounds in a year with that method. Plus the accountability helped them stick to it.

Don't foods have nutrition facts printed on them? In Europe every package has a standardized label indicating the grams of macros per 100 g and grams of all sugars per 100 g. (also salt etc)

Most products do. You have to scour them. They usually break the carbs down by sugar and other. It is also by g. Also under a particular amount per serving they are allowed to say '0'. For example a box of tic-tacs is almost nothing but sugar. But it says 0. So serving size maters. It is also another way they will play games is by fiddling the 'serving' size. When everyone really knows the serving size is 1 container. It may say 2 or 3 per container. Or they may measure it by '1 cup' which for something like chips is a small amount of chips. But they are high in carbs. So you have to know the games played there too. That varies by manufacture. You could say better if those games are played there.

The thing is until you look you do not realize how much sugar is in everything and how many different 'types' there are.

A good rule of thumb when shopping in an american store is stick to the edges. The middle is full of processed stuff that usually has sugar. Not all processed is bad. For example a nice salsa is processed but not terrible for you and a decent time saver and usually tastes nicer than anything I have come up with. Like you point out you have to watch the labels.

That doesn't work. Doing that basically encourages people to lie to you, and poisons the relationship. Everyone trying to lose weight will cheat, and it is often the response to that cheating that determines your ability to continue. By making cheating shameful, you are basically guaranteeing failure (this is a corollary of the idea that places that don't have obesity shame fat people...naturally appealing to places with a history of Puritarinism, but largely ineffective).

You can only lose weight once you have the motivation and knowledge that you can apply to do it yourself (the stuff about processed food, for example, is utter psuedo-science nonsense that significantly confuses the issue into "good" and "bad" foods...again, Puritarinism).

I imagine the "you" in this case to be the person losing weight. If I want to lose weight then I'm going make such a commitment and it doesn't really matter who I send the photos to. It's rather just an exercise in documenting what I eat. I'd send the photos to you if you agreed to be my accountabili-buddy.

If you want to lose weight decrease your exposure to marketing. Watch less TV, avoid aisles of supermarkets with branded packaged products, don't read celebrity gossip etc. Cook simple non-fancy foods that is not hyped by influencers.

Again, that works if you assume that you won't fail at any point and/or react poorly to failure. But you will fail at some point, and very few people are determined enough to continue. Investing yourself creates risk.

It is far more effective to take a less judgemental approach, track the things that matter, and do it for yourself...not because you don't want to be shamed (most fat people get a rough ride, shame isn't a long term strategy).

> ... processed food makes me crave food even though I'm not hungry...

That is, processed food doesn't satisfy. We keep thinking it's going to, but it doesn't. (Or rather, it does, but only for a very short time. Then we want more. I've started to sometimes question whether I should take the first hit, because I know what's going to happen.)

A cynic might suspect that the primary point of the processing is to make the food sell more of itself.

Same. I stopped going to supermarket and ordered only uncooked healthy ingredients. Lost 12 kg!

That's awesome! Losing weight makes you feel better too IMO. It's weird but grocery delivery has made it easier to cook healthier. I can see my options better and maybe I'm less tempted because of the way groceries store stock their shelves?

Great, this is exactly what has been found in studies. There is a way to eat as much as you want, no calorie-counting, no portion control, just eat. It is well explained by Dr. Greger [1]. It boils down to foods having different energy density since our stomach signals satiety by how full it is. Highly recommend his videos for actionable nutrition info.

[1]https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-best-diet-for-weight-lo...

I have a fructose intolerance - it is wild how hard it is to avoid fructose, and similarly how easy it is to be "healthy" and maintain my weight with literally zero energy other than avoiding fructose.

I'm curious, what's your cut off point for processed food? Just things that are ready to eat besides fruits and veggies? What about white flour and rice as opposed to whole grains?

Not the OP, but: to me the cut point was when I started writing the calories down.

After some time (a week?) you get a pretty good idea of what takes what. An apple is 100. "Boring foods" like boiled potatoes are circa 100 calories per 100 grams. "Fun foods" like chicken breast or ikea meatballs are 200 calories per 100 grams. Oil - 10 calories per ml.

And then you look at <younameit> cheesy crackers and realize that something is wrong: no way 30 grams of human food should be 200 calories.

It’s a good way to look at things.

Someone on HN said you’ll easily lose weight if you stick to foods less than one calorie per gram.

I believe it but I can’t find many foods ...

I found frozen veggies is the best and so convenient. This + an air fryer makes cooking so much quicker. Also good for fatty foods like wings since it bakes out the grease better than my oven.

What kind of frozen veggies do you put in an air fryer?

Usually broccoli (tossed in a small amount of oil, garlic powder, and pepper). Another amazing choice is fries. Without the additional soaked oil, the calories is surprisingly close to just eating a baked potato.

I'm not sure what approach syntaxing used, and "processed" is a fuzzy term, but bread and pasta have a lot more in common with twinkies and oreos than fruits and vegetables.

> bread and pasta have a lot more in common with twinkies and oreos than fruits and vegetables.

Not if you make your bread yourself from unbleached flour. It's cheaper (except for the really industrial sliced junk) and better than most that you can buy and if you let it ferment overnight there is not work involved in kneading it.

My usual recipe is 500 g plain flour (flour here is about 11.5% protein), 400 g water, 8 g salt, 1 g dried yeast. Mix, leave overnight, fold over a couple of times, wait one hour, heat a conventional oven and a cast iron casserole with a lid until it reaches 230 C, drop the dough in the pot, put on the lid, cook for 35 minutes at 230 C, take off the lid cook further for 20 minutes. Total time I spend actually working is probably less than ten minutes. You can use any container suitable for cooking dry at that temperature. Keeping the lid on keeps the moisture in and helps develop the crust.

Adjust the times depending on how brown you like the crust.

Sounds good - though you can also use a Breadmaker to automate the same(ish) quality natural ingredient loaf.

I have a bread maker and it is more ish than same; perhaps it's not a good one. The long fermentation of 'my' recipe means that the gluten develops better giving a better crumb and the cooking method gives a better crust both in structure and colour.

Bread, pasta, fruits, and vegetables: all things we've been eating for at least a couple thousand years; no fat or mostly saturated fats.

Twinkies and Oreos: signicant quantities of novel ingredients that have only existed in the last 150 or so years; high quantities of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats.

True, but there's also a distinction to be made among kinds of carbohydrates. I think of it in two categories, coal and jet fuel. Coal is stuff like potatoes - it's fuel, but it lasts a long time. Twinkies, white bread, and even white rice are jet fuel - they burn really fast, and then they're gone.

Eat carbs that are coal, not jet fuel.

Definitely differences, but I'm not convinced it matters so much, at least in healthy people.

E.g., lots of people eat a whole lot of white rice and seem to do quite well on it. The Hadza, a tribe in africa, at certain times of the year, get about half their calories from honey, and they are very healthy. And fruit would certainly also have to be in the rocket-fuel category, no?

(If you're already unhealthy (e.g. type II diabetic), there seems to be a lot of benefit in going very-low or no-carb.)

"The honey isn’t your store-bought, pristine golden syrup smelling faintly of HFCS. It’s straight up honeycomb, teeming with bees and larvae and pollen and the queenly secretions called royal jelly. In fact, studies tend to emphasize that the Hadza get 15-50% of their calories not from honey, but from “honey and bee larvae.”" -https://www.marksdailyapple.com/hadza-honey/

They aren't eating the honey that your or I eat. Not to mention, they're probably far more physically active.

Except, of all your examples potatoes are the fastest burning fuel. Twinkies the slowest.

What you’re referring to is (and I’m over simplifying here) glucose versus sucrose.

Potatoes have glucose, and aren’t sweet.

Twinkies and the like are full of sugar aka sucrose (which is half fructose) which is the real issue.

Avoiding all food with fructose is a good idea. Not only is it bad because only your liver can process it (none of your other cells can use it, unlike glucose) but fructose is in some emerging studies to prohibit lepton signaling. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re full and no longer need to eat. Many obese people have impaired signaling.

Food addition is not a good term. Food addictive addiction is better. No one would eat the cookies if it wasn’t for the sugar. Or get addicted to coffee without the caffeine.

Sugar is the same as alcohol - it has calories, sure, so could be considered an energy source. But it has no other nutritional value. Yet it is regarded as a food.

One cigarette is not harmful, yet we know smoking everyday will cause you some ill effects. It’s the same with sugar. An acute dose in itself is not dangerous. But over time it does.

And apples are full of sugar. Drawing the line is hard.

Apples are not processed at all. Coincidently, they have tons of fiber and you wont actually get fat from eating apples.

Unless you eat them dried, in the form of juice or in other "processed" form.

You eat the apple the way it comes from the tree, but trees today make very different apples from those 5000 years ago. We have changed most fruit substantially.

For me personally:

if (foodItem.ingredientList.size()>9) {return false;} else if (foodItem.inventedYearsAgo()<100) {return false;} else{ return true;}

So I can eat a baguette prepared traditionally, and a few brands of prepared bread from the grocery store.

I think Polan said something like "If your great grandparents didn't have it, it's probably not good for you" and I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb.

Oranges, zucchini, meat more then once a week ... none of that was available. But, they have drunk a lot more alcohol. Lets face it, our great grandparents food was not terribly healthy in a lot of ways.

Hot Pockets are a rebranding of meat pies, which have been around since medieval times.

Hot Pockets are not a rebranding. Hot Pockets are economically adulterated putrescence masquerading as a meat pie.

Ingredients: ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, NIACIN, IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, COOKED BEEF PATTIE CRUMBLES (BEEF HAMBURGER, WATER, TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN [SOY FLOUR, CARAMEL COLOR], SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING: SALT, SPICE, NATURAL FLAVORS, DEXTROSE, YEAST EXTRACT, ONION POWDER, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE), REDUCED FAT CHEDDAR CHEESE (PASTEURIZED PART SKIM MILK, SKIM MILK, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, CULTURES, SALT, FLAVORS, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, ANNATTO, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, ENZYMES, INGREDIENTS NOT IN REGULAR CHEDDAR CHEESE), KETCHUP (TOMATO PUREE [TOMATO PASTE, WATER], CORN SWEETENER [HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORN SYRUP], VINEGAR, SALT, SEASONING [SPICES, SALT, NATURAL FLAVORS, ONION POWDER, GARLIC POWDER], DEHYDRATED ONION), VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR CORN OIL), ONIONS, 2% OR LESS OF DILL PICKLE RELISH (PICKLES, WATER, DISTILLED VINEGAR, SALT AND NATURAL FLAVORS), NON-FAT DRY MILK, BUTTERMILK POWDER, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, SUGAR, VINEGAR, TOASTED SESAME SEEDS, FRACTIONATED PALM OIL, YEAST, DOUGH CONDITIONER BLEND (CALCIUM SULFATE, SALT, L-CYSTEINE HYDROCHLORIDE, GARLIC POWDER, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, ENZYMES [WHEAT]), SALT, SOY LECITHIN, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, METHYLCELLULOSE, WHEY, SOY FLOUR, DRIED EGG WHITES.

I'm no fan of hot pockets, but what exactly is the point here? That the list of ingredients is long?

Most of the list is regular food ingredients or vitamins/minerals added to the "enriched flour". The stabilizers and emulsifiers with scary chemical names are present in tiny amounts regulated by various health departments.

If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie; too much or too little of some nutrients. Not because of some magical consequence of being too processed or having too many ingredients.

ok, slightly reformatting the above and excluding "2% or less" ingredients for the first approximation we get:

- flour, water, beef, soy, cheese, ketchup, corn syrup, vinegar, salt, onion.

- the rest is "2% or less" which we can ignore for the first order approximation

To my taste it's too much salt and I also don't like sugar in my food, but other than that the ingredients are pretty benign.

It's 250 calories per 100 grams, close to my personal upper limit of "reasonable foods".

If eating one or two of these for breakfast make you feel full and happy until lunch - why not?

(edit: reformatting)

Was all-caps necessary? Or maybe a link instead?

Protein bars?

Pollan specifically calls out protein bars for being extremely processed and full of hidden unhealthy ingredients.

Mostly limited to food though; doesn't work for items like polio vaccines and three-prong electrical outlets. :)

But not ciabatta?

"Ciabatta is an Italian white bread made from wheat flour, water, salt, yeast and olive oil, created in 1982"

NINETEEN EIGHTY TWO!?! I had no idea that was so new. That's interesting. I wonder what else is out there I just assume has been around forever like that.

I used to eat a lot of quick meals (mainly instant food like instant noodles or mac and cheese and the occasion microwave food). It sounds crazy and purely anecdata, but I found that processed organic stuff tend to have less calories than non organic food. I have started eating the less processed variant of food (brown calrose rice, wheat bread, and steel cut oats) and maybe that has helped(?). But one thing I cannot tolerate is whole grain pasta. That stuff taste like cardboard+sand paper to me.

Makes sense, is has to do with how quickly the blood sugar rises after a meal. This is known as glycemic index, which can for instance be defined by the way food was process. An example are instant oatmeal vs. steel cut oats. Great explainer video on this topic [1] (and many many others!).

[1]https://nutritionfacts.org/video/which-is-a-better-breakfast...

The claims that it is better to eat whole grains than white rice or white flour are very wrong (when the claims have no context).

Obviously, if you had been some poor peasant and 80% of your food consisted of cereals, then eating whole grains would have been immensely better than eating just white rice or white flour.

On the other hand, if you eat a wide variety of foods, you can get any minerals, vitamins and proteins that you need from much better sources than whole grains.

Above satisfying your basic necessities with other nutrients, you can add enough fatty foods and starchy foods to satisfy your energy needs, depending on how much physical activity you do.

As starch sources, sweet potatoes, potatoes, bananas, maize, white rice, white flour and others are preferable to whole grains.

If you cook yourself with white rice or white flour, the food should be OK.

Unfortunately, if you buy modern bread or similar industrial products made with flour, looking at the composition you will see a huge number of substances beyond the traditional recipes.

Those substances may or may not have some deleterious effect, but, at least in my experience, one certain effect is that with processed food that I buy I am never satiated for long and I have the tendency to eat too large quantities.

Since I have switched to eating only food that I am cooking myself from raw ingredients, I have never felt again the need to overeat.

>As starch sources, sweet potatoes, potatoes, bananas, maize, white rice, white flour and others are preferable to whole grains.

Can you elaborate as to why the more processed variants are preferable? What is inherently we worse about whole grains and why do the general recommendations get it wrong?

Raw in-gre-dients.

It is a problem of optimising for taste and perceived nutrition instead of nutrition. Humans will buy tasty things that are marketed as nutritious. Companies will try to widen the profit margin by optimising the process in that direction (investing into marketing and taste). A solution that comes to mind is providing tax relief for nutritiously rich non-luxury foods.

Ok sorry to rant but the HN community lectures about processed food are misguided. As always, people trot out the "just eat less, its simple calories" and "stop eating junk food stupid Americans". This rests on the critical fallacy that those who do not have a weight problem are smarter, more active, or somehow make better choices. Do you really believe its that simple? This is a bit like the software devs who always believe "we'll write it better from scratch, its an _easy_ problem to solve", not realizing the people who wrote it the way it is probably had legitimate reasons to do so.

The truth is complex and no single factor can explain it. I've seen plenty of people with terrible diets eating the same or worse than others and not gaining weight -- even with little physical activity (just due to genetics), and I've seen metabolic issues make it nearly impossible for someone to lose weight even doing things "right". If you want to prove how "simple" weight loss and eating healthy is, then by all means take a thyroid blocker for a few months and get back to me.

As for blaming stupid people for just consuming too much bad food: I can tell you that this is 100% an environment / market force just like every other behavior you and I have (such as language we speak, recipes we know, and clothes we wear). Like all other animals, we have a finely tuned feeding system that is highly tuned and can be influenced by stimuli. Put junk food in the cage of some mice for a few years and see how it ends up. Without clear evidence that anyone is actively deciding to make choices they know are bad, we can only conclude these are the forces driving the decisions. In fact most "cheating" behavior is because people's judgment faculties are being outweighed by more primal hunger drives that overwhelm higher cognition.

As a kid in the USA you primarily feed on sodas, candy, cookies, corn dogs, puffs, hamburgers, french fries and other junk food. This is what your parents give you, what school serves you in the cafeteria, and what your friends eat. This is encouraged by all media (such as TV which markets directly to you), and by the powers-that-be who put soda machines and candy machines in the hallways at school and even hand out candy as treats and snacks daily.

So please try to understand that this is no more mysterious than the reason Einstein smoked: not because he was a moron with poor willpower and low self-control, but because he was a product of his time, environment, developmental influences, and available information. Its no more mysterious than the reason he spoke German, or that Romans went insane drinking from lead containers.

As for cleaning up your diet. Once I learned about these issues and started trying to eat better, it became clear just how hard it would be. If you live in a rural area, finding _any_ food that isn't processed with a multitude of sweeteners, flavor enhancers, etc is near impossible. Your only option is raw food prepared yourself at home; even spices and seasoning can be laden with additives. Without a lot of patience and examination, you _will_ be consuming these products even if you intend to avoid them. For example, virtually everything at restaurants includes a multitude of these additives.

Sorry for the rant, but I think people need to see the perspective of people who are trying to do the right thing, but up against a really oppressive system of influences, marketing, economics, and daily realities in the US.

You can't by raw meat and a sack of potatoes in rural America? Or loose tomatoes and apples? Or dried beans?

Ok I get the argument, and like I said "yes its possible with great discipline", but I'll again reiterate: the reason we have a problem isn't "stupid lazy people", its a matter of influences. I get that you are probably more evolved and its so easy -- but then again if you had been raised on a steady diet of targeted misinformation to shape your brain and fed a constant diet of food engineered to maximize tastes and addictive behavior, it might not be so easy to just "eat an apple" or at least that's what the scientific evidence, and piles of cash the industry is stacking up suggests.

Its a bit like taking someone with a gambling addiction and saying "its so easy, just understand gambling is a fallacy and you can walk away anytime", or "why not just have fun with something else?" -- the casino is designed to exploit human biases and mental weaknesses for an especially vulnerable population. If those biases and weaknesses were simple misunderstandings, they wouldn't be powerful enough to form those addictions, and casinos would probably be much smaller and less successful.

Ban junk food sale in schools. No vending machines, no advertisement, etc. No snacks, candies. Ban colorful attractive marketing to kids, teach basic nutrition in school.

Make school lunch easy to afford, perhaps free and put limits on sugar, salt etc. No pizza and fries, but proper cooked meals. If you don't eat it, you can't get anything else.

Buuut freedom, companies, free markets, economic growth!! Parents would be outraged, kids wouldn't eat it etc. Good luck.

"Not only is the average American fat, he is also stupid for believing corporate propaganda"

- Noel Fielding

They own your belly and food wish, as if they would grow you for money.

Just read The Dorito Effect.

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