New research highlights the damage caused by processed food
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It's like if a patient came to their doctor complaining of water retention, and the doctor said "well clearly you're drinking more than you're excreting" and sent the patient home with instructions to drink less and pee more.
My hunch with the CIM is that a human in good health can pretty effortlessly maintain a non-obese weight without much regard for things like macronutrient balance, but that some fairly widespread factor has disrupted that regulation mechanism in a large fraction of the population.
That in a sense a keto/low-carb diet is a workaround for a mechanism that's broken in a lot of people, rather than some platonic ideal of how everyone should be eating.
As to what broke it, there are some interesting hypotheses here [https://slimemoldtimemold.com] but no clear answers.
I do personally feel a bit better eating a lower glycemic diet (from the standpoint of consistent energy levels), but I haven't achieved any weight loss that way (BMI hovers just under 25).
The average American consumes more than 3,600 calories daily – a 24% increase from 1961, when the average was just 2,880 calories.
And that's just the average.
I think there's some truth to the CIH and palatability. It's pretty hard to argue that food engineering hasn't made super tasty snacks designed to get you hooked. Those same snacks just so happen to mostly be high-carb as well.
I think it's as simple as the availability and quantity of food in front of us at all times.
We're eating just as often as in the past, but portions (of everything) are so much larger and our bodies will eat more if it's available.
Satiety is always a lagging indicator to stop eating, so by default we'll over eat if we can. Combine this with food always being available and it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the trend is going to go.
This feels even more accurate to me as I've started doing alternative day fasting (because I'm about 50 lbs overweight), but I've been tracking my food intake on days I eat and I'm almost always eating 2500-3500 calories.
Stuff adds up quickly.
* 500 calories for a bowl of cereal with milk
* 1,000 calories for a sandwich from a sandwich shop
* 1,000 calories for dinner
* 500+ calories from drinks
And eating all of that doesn't make me feel stuffed. It's what makes me feel full. Which I know is a good bit more than "just enough" which I've done when I was working out a lot and watching every calorie I ate.
A cup of cereal is under a hundred calories, and a cup of milk less than 200, so a bowl of cereal with milk should run about 2-300 calories. 500 calories is a Big Mac. Are you spooning sugar into it? Cream?
What the heck kind of sandwich has 1000 calories? Okay, a fully loaded footlong from Subway maybe, but you seriously have that for lunch? A normal sandwich, such as you might make at home, has 300-500 calories. No 6 inch sub has more than 600 calories. Why is your lunch the same size as your dinner?
1000 calories for dinner is more reasonable, but still - that's a huge dinner. That's like a generously large platter of spaghetti bolognese. I don't know how you could be hungry for that after downing an equivalent meal at lunchtime.
500 calories from drinks is truly horrifying because unless you're chugging milkshakes that's probably all high fructose corn syrup. A quarter of your recommended daily caloric intake, in the form of pure refined sugar! That's an express ticket to diabetes-ville right there. 4+ cans of coke daily is not a healthy intake.
I'm not trying to lay into you here. I'm glad you're experimenting with fasting. But, reality check - I would physically struggle to eat that quantity of food without being sick. I wonder if all that soda is messing with your appetite?
I like honey bunches of oats cereal. It’s delicious. The variety I like is also ~200 calories _per cup_. That’s before adding milk of any kind. Add a little bit of milk and tip the box a bit more than usual (I imagine a lot of folks are not very precise when measuring breakfast cereal) and we’re easily sailing over 500 calories. I eat a modest 1700 calorie diet most days and I could easily crush 1,000 calories of this cereal without even feeling full.
Likewise for sandwiches. The best rated local sandwich shops near me offer a selection of (very likely) 1,000+ calorie sandwiches. They also do not list calories so my estimates are based on casually deconstructing them and plugging in constituent ingredients into MyFitnessPal ensembles with surprising results. It’s surprising because I’ve proven I can eat more than one without feeling full.
It doesn’t take a mad genius in an evil food lab somewhere underground to make food that’s guaranteed to derail a diet. The ingredients are cheap, easy, and abundant everywhere.
That’s the problem.
* Two servings of frosted mini-wheats (120g - 400 Cal)
* 1 or 1 1/2 cups (240/360 ml - 160/240 Cal) of whole milk
To fill out a day when I was eating super carefully my lunches (1/2 each) would be 1 cups of steamed broccoli and 1/2 a Turkey sandwich.
Lunchs Total (566 Cal) - 1/2 per lunch
* Broccoli (200g - 72 Cal)
* 2 Slices Oroweat whole wheat bread (200 Cal)
* 4 oz deli Black Pepper Turkey (164 Cal)
* 2 Tsp whole grain mustard (30 Cal)
* 1 Tbsp Miracle Whip (25 Cal) / 1 Tbsp Mayonnaise (100 Cal)
Pair that with a dinner of Marie Callender's Chicken Pot Pie (600 - 930 Cal)
* 10 Oz Chicken Pot Pie (600 Cal) / 15 Oz (930 Cal)
So without any snacks or beverages that puts me at 1,726 Cal - 2,136 Calories.
If I had a glass of milk with lunch and dinner and some Almonds for a snack (1 oz 175 Cal) that would add another (495 - 655 Calories).
Total of 2,221 Cal - 2,791 Cal.
And this is me watching what I eat, but just getting a little sloppy around snacks and beverages. I could easily blow past that by having a Red Bull or soda. Maybe some dessert at some point in the day. It could be easy to add another 1,000 Cal.
Once you start eating whole foods (mostly meat, vegetables, nuts and eggs), you’ll realize how easy it is to lose weight (particularly once you start exercising). I think the trouble is that most people have conditioned their tastebuds to respond to highly processed food, so they think they can’t eat “normally”.
Finding, shopping, choosing and cooking whole foods was the biggest pain in the ass I had when I was single. I don't mind eating healthy, but I hate the work that goes into it. And given the choice I'm going to throw butter, honey, mayo, avocado, etc onto whatever I'm eating to make it tastier.
Is my diet unhealthy? Yup and I know exactly how unhealthy it is. But I love sweet things. That's just something I've come to accept.
Did my tastebuds adjust when I ate healthier? Also, yup, but and I was fine with it at the time. When I met my wife my eating habits slowly got worse until I didn't think about my food choices at all and just when with whatever sounded good at the moment and that was also fine.
But I've learned over the last 10 years that thinking about food constantly (in order to consistently eat healthy) multiply that by two with because my wife's food preferences are vastly different than my own and it's a burden I don't want.
All that is what lead me to alternate day fasting. This is a much easier choice than watching what I eat (I'm being a bit hyperbolic for effect, I'm adjusting my diet too, but not drastically like in the past). I eat enough every other day to sustain myself at a nice 170 lbs, so that's just what I'm going to do. I actually don't find it a burden at all to not eat for a day.
[Edit: Also, food choices were pretty random off the top of my head, but still you picked on the miracle whip, but not the mayo?]
The worst example I can think of is, one of my favorite sandwiches, Jersey Mike's Club sub. The "mini" is the size with a reasonable portion. It has Provolone cheese, mayo, bacon, and olive oil on it (if you get it "Mike's way") that takes it from 280 Cal to 640 Cal without changing size (visibly). But I don't always get the mini. Sometimes I get the regular which brings it up to a whopping 1,120 Cal.
And yes, there are plenty of times I'm not really hungry for dinner, but I'm so accustomed/habituated to eating dinner with my wife that I'll eat out of habit. I wasn't hungry, so I chose a small serving, but that still ends up being 500-600 Calories that I didn't need.
So that's 1,200 - 1,800 calories in two main dishes. It is way more food than I need? Do I feel stuffed after eating it? Not usually.
Your body is incredible at adapting, and it's happy as pie to adapt to a high calorie diet. A few months ago I started calorie counting rigorously and was shocked at how many calories I was casually consuming in what I felt was a normal diet.
The easiest switch I made (and I acknowledge it's not for everyone) is having precisely the same breakfast and lunch every weekday which is a 300 calorie breakfast and 500 calorie lunch. Only one milky coffee per day (in Australia coffee is often made with all milk, no water).
If you come home from work having eaten 800 calories then it's no great hardship to keep within 1000 calories in the evening. But if you've had 1500 calories before 5pm you're stuffed.
Then I looked at the labels in my pantry: Store brand muesli - 330 kcal per cup / Kashi GOLEAN - 176 kcal per cup
I also looked up cereals I ate as a kid (I find them too sugary now): Frosted Mini-Wheats - 210 kcal per cup-ish / Cap'n Crunch - 150 kcal per cup / Froot Loops - 113 kcal per cup
These numbers are surprising to me but they probably shouldn't be. Despite Froot Loops being subjectively the most sugary cereal I've eaten and the muesli having a proportionally low amount of sugar, the density of the muesli (82g per cup!) compared to the Froot Loops (29g per cup) means that it's crazy calorie-dense per volume (which is how most people eyeball their cereal, I think).
Having eaten 600-700 kcal worth of cereal with milk just before I typed this, and not thinking that amount particularly remarkable (but the calorie count was surprising!), I'm starting to wonder how my weight has remained stable and well below average my entire adult life. I pretty much only drink water (and the cereal milk), so at least I have that going for me.
Eating 500 calories worth of non-starchy vegetables, on the other hand, would be much harder, because you would feel stuffed.
But it wouldn't be unusual for me to have three cans of soda a day if I'm not paying attention. Two during the work day and one with dinner, so that's still 500 Calories.
In the last year I've figure out one of the causes for this. I'm, apparently, very sensitive to the flavor of water.
I picked up a home reverse osmosis filter and my water consumption has gone back through the roof and soda consumption down to 1 every few days just because I like the flavor.
Maybe a big chunk of folks can naturally avoid this but, honestly, modern life is basically about being bombarded continuously with advertising to over-consume while blaming everyone who falls victim to it - whether it be racking up credit card debt or overeating.
I mean, this pretty much answers the question. Also, I suspect, more hidden fat and sugar. It would be interesting to track the calories of processed food that you generally wouldn't associate with snacks, such as bread or salad dressings. I could imagine those got a higher sugar amount over the decades.
The other side of the equation might also be to blame - less energy output: Today, more areas are optimised for cars, not for walking. We also spend more time in front of a screen - both at work and for leisure.
It really doesn't though.
Wild animals and lab rats have been gaining weight.
Biology is all about homeostasis, cybernetics, and feedback loops. People aren't universally overweight in industrialized countries, therefore it suggests something is messing with those feedback loops.
These feedback loops are myriad and complex, ranging from the simple control loop that tries to keep blood sugar in range, to the choices you make based on concepts such as self image.
If you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2000 calories a day, you are in a steady state. Won't gain or lose any weight. But if you burn 2000 calories a day and eat 2100 calories a day, you have a 100 calorie gain. This should all be obvious. So you do that a month and a few days, and after a month or so you are up 3500 calories, which is one pound.
Now that you are one pound of fat heavier, you now burn an additional couple calories per day. If you continue to eat 2100 calories, you will gain 10 pounds before you reach your equilibrium weight from consuming 2100 calories.
Every 10 daily calories is worth 1 pound. Every daily apple is worth 10 pounds long-term. The 720 calorie average above is worth 72 pounds of fat. And that's even before we consider if now that you burn more calories, you will start eating more calories to keep the same offset?
That's not true. You can see it's not true by the fact that so many people do in fact dispute consequences of this claim, despite it both being trivially true and proven multiple times in studies with actual humans.
If you eat at a calaoric defict, no matter what you are eating, you will lose weight. That is both undeniable and widely denied, and has lots of explanatory power, because at the end of the day, a correct question to ask about the world is "why are people eating more calories?".
There are certainly other factors which matter, depending on why you are asking the question: if it's for personal weight loss reasons, a good question to ask is "what kind of diet will allow me to eat less calories in the easiest way". If it's to explain the obesity epidemic, the answers are "why are people in general consuming more calories now than they were in the past".
But if you discard the base mechanism by which people are gaining weight, you don't even know what questions to ask.
If water is free of calorie, has weight, affects body in some way, shouldn't that be taken into account?
Weeks of 1000kCal deficit without weight loss might not necessarily mean EBM is wrong. But EBM doesn't explain the phenomenon.
But if you're running a 1000kCal deficit for weeks, you are going to lose weight. Just think of the limit case - if you normally eat 3000kCal to be at maintenance, then running a 3000kCal deficit will cause you to lose weight quickly, then eventually die for lack of food. Eating at 3000kCal will cause your weight to stay the same. Deficits in between will cause you to lose weight more slowly.
I think this is still kind of missing the point about why people think that the EBM is unhelpful.
Intentionally eating fewer calories to lose weight is a little bit like lowering the mains voltage going to your house because the thermostat is stuck at too high of a setting and your house is too hot. In the extreme case it will work (how could it not?) but it's going to cause all sorts of other problems in the meantime.
In the case of diet those other problems take the form of constant intrusive thoughts of eating, irritability, inability to think clearly, feeling cold all the time, and disinterest in any kind of movement/exercise.
And it also (in the mind of the CIM adherents and friends) focuses attention away from the real problem (maybe my thermostat is broken) and toward something that doesn't really have anything to do with the real problem (maybe the voltage that seems to work for everyone else is too high for my heating system).
I don't think it's missing the point so much as disagreeing with the point :)
> Intentionally eating fewer calories to lose weight is a little bit like lowering the mains voltage going to your house because the thermostat is stuck at too high of a setting and your house is too hot. In the extreme case it will work (how could it not?) but it's going to cause all sorts of other problems in the meantime.
So this is why I have a problem with people arguing against the EBM and arguing against carbs (assuming I'm right of course!). It's teaching people a wrong underlying mechanism, that CICO "doesn't work", and that what foods you eat is more important than how much you eat.
What we should be teaching people is that any diet will produce weight loss, assuming it causes them to consume fewer calories. They need to find a diet that works for them and fits their lifestyle, and doesn't cause the above side-effects.
For one person that might be going keto and getting rid of carbs, because that seems to be a fairly "automatic" way of doing things, that causes people not to have hunger, and also not count calories. Great! They should do that.
For other people, getting rid of carbs is simply not something they can do for a sustained time. For them, other options might be better. Finding ways to make less calorically-dense foods, finding more fulfilling or lower-calorie versions of foods they like, etc.
For me personally, when I started my (relatively small) weight-loss journey a year ago, I just did pure calorie counting, which seemed to fit my life the best. I could still eat whatever I wanted, I just had to be smarter about amounts. I also had to learn to sometimes eat more fulfilling foods, otherwise I'd be hungry. It was a great way to learn about how nutrition and hunger work, and it's what I think will help most people.
So many people I ran into were surprised that this worked for me. After all, the only way to lose weight is to stop eating carbs, or so think a huge chunk of the population (including me a year and a half ago!).
> In the case of diet those other problems take the form of constant intrusive thoughts of eating, irritability, inability to think clearly, feeling cold all the time, and disinterest in any kind of movement/exercise.
Yes, just saying "eat less, move more" is definitely not the end of the conversation, because it's hard. You need to learn about foods and nutrition. You need to learn to substitute lower calorie alternatives or have more satiating meals. But you need to understand the underlying mechanism to even get there - if you think it's just about carbs, you're severely limiting your options and understanding.
Both lab rats and wild animals have been consistently gaining weight for the last 50 years. Is your hypothesis that they have just gotten lazy?
I suspect that this is the way how our ancestors in the 1950s-1970s stayed slim (at least compared to us) without calorie counting or even knowing what calories were, even though they held white collar jobs too. Body tries to find an in/out equilibrium, and ultra processed foods disrupt this process.
Take any photo of an engineering or academic team from that period and compare it to a photo of people doing similar jobs today. A massive difference in size, though the job's physical demands aren't that different.
I would suspect multiple things at play, some combination of processed food, food scientists tweaking flavors so that we don't burn out on eating foods, increased carbohydrate and calorie density, PFAs and endocrine disruptors in the food and water, plastic gloves leaking human analogue hormones into fast food fry grease or some currently unidentified hidden factor is a play here.
Somehow these things the combination has to be shorting out the satiation signal so that people don't stop eating when they have enough. Trying to listen to your body when your body is being lied to.
It's not as simple as people eat too much. Something is creating the hole that they are trying to fill.
I agree that if that were the only thing the doctor said, they would be a pretty terrible doctor. What would happen in the real world is that the doctor would try to diagnose why the person is drinking more than they're excreting, and help stop that from happening, whether it's a psychological reason, an illness, or some other reason.
What the doctor for sure needs to have, though, is a base understanding that if someone is complaining of water retention, the underlying thing that is happening really is that they're drinking more than they're excreting. That's the basis of the diagnosis process. "You drink, then you excrete liquids, and if there's a misbalance there you have a problem" - if the doctor denies that, it's impossible to diagnose anything.
> but the EBM to me just seems hilariously inadequate to explain the obesity crisis.
I'd just like to point out that people usually talk about diet/nutrition in two contexts. One is the context of "how should I personally eat to lose weight" (or gain weight, but losing is more common). The other context is "how do we explain the society-wide obesity epidemic.
Those are very different questions. They both need to start by taking the EBM seriously, since it's completely proven science (both on a theoretical and on a practical level).
But I completely agree with you that the model by itself doesn't explain the obesity epidemic. It doesn't even try to, really - it just says that we know for sure people are eating more calories now, and therefore they are becoming obese. Why they are eating more calories is a separate mystery (though, in my mind, it's not very mysterious - far larger access to far more calorically-dense but nutritionally-poor foods).
This doesn’t seem so obvious to me… it seems reasonable to me that any abundance of calorically-dense food would lead to obesity. I don’t think it is obvious without study that the food being nutritionally poor is a requirement for widespread obesity.
I think calorically dense is "sufficient". Maybe nutritionally poor is a poor choice of words - I was trying to say calorically-dense, but not very satiating.
a keto/low-carb diet is a workaround for a mechanism that's broken in a lot of people
This might just be anecdotal evidence but my body was definitely broken. My gut was b0rked and I was in a cycle of eating more and more carb-y food to not feel hungry/cravy/fatigued all the time.
What getting on the right probiotics and doing keto did for me was what I think is to restore the natural state human bodies should be in again. I finally am able to feel "full" again and eat when I'm actually hungry vs. just eating three meals a day (plus 'cravings').
Now I don't subscribe to any religion but I do think that any religion that includes a "fast" does right is to basically do something akin to keto. I don't believe in any of the religious aspects of fasting but I do recognize that the easiest way to get a large populace to stay healthy is to subscribe them to a religion and then let the religion dictate things that keep them healthy and happy.
E.g. I don't eat breakfast any longer. I just don't need it. I don't feel hungry in the morning any longer. I oftentimes don't even feel hungry at lunch any longer and only do so around maybe 2pm. Not being bound to traditional meals and customs around eating helped me with this. I just go scour the fridge at 2pm to find some cheese and eat some almonds. Maybe some peanut M&Ms (at the office - at home it'd be say raspberries with cream). I can totally recommend peanut M&Ms with cheese actually! Awesome combination!
As you can see in my comment history some people have asked before after comments like this one from me. What I did was try a lot of different probiotics but what I think helped in the end is Garden Of Life - Primal Defense. You don't have to use that brand but what I think did it is the Bacillus Subtilis included in it, which wasn't part of any of the other probiotics I tried. I'm sure there are others that have that one. I started off with 1 a day, then 2 a day, then 3 a day and I felt like crap for a few weeks. Then it all went away and I felt awesome. I'm still on those to make sure I maintain a healthy gut flora but I'm down to one in the morning and one in the evening and I also made Sauerkraut from it (i.e. empty a capsule into your Cabbage and let it ferment).
The experience has also shown me how ignorant we still are in terms of nutrition and medicine. My surgeon basically gaslit me, and handed me 5 different prescriptions. Hopefully we get to a place where nutrition is taking seriously, and we get proper tools to evaluate our body’s health
I would like to add that _all_ of my blood markers improved to completely normal levels when doing keto. Except for cholesterol, which improved too (HDL and LDL) but not to "normal" levels. I've been on statins before (up to max dose over ~15 years) and it did nothing except to cause muscle pain as the dose went up, which caused me to stop them, because the heart is a muscle and a serious (if seldom) side effect of statins is to cause muscles (including the heart) to do things they shouldn't. In an arm muscle it's painful. In a heart muscle it's deadly.
Same experience with gaslighting from most doctors. Not helpful at all. I figured this all out through experimentation and internet research. What triggered it for me was getting migraines worse than drinking 10 bottles of sweet wine from a 333ml bottle of alcohol free beer. A long research period that also explained a lot of previously just weird experiences. And none of the doctors helped at all.
My current GP is awesome though in that regard. She doesn't know much about this stuff either but she's curious. She googled with me, prescribed the blood tests needed etc. Just awesome!
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aj...
Compare this to the article
> A landmark paper proves that obesity is not just energy in and out; the type of food matters.
The paper does not say what the article claims. The paper is about proposing a credible alternative model of weight gain and is a call for further research. This article, like most science journalism, is fake news and we need to stop sharing “stories” like this
In the USA, Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018)
>That in a sense a keto/low-carb diet is a workaround for a mechanism that's broken in a lot of people, rather than some platonic ideal of how everyone should be eating.
This was studied several times now and they haven't discovered it. Some people assert GI microbiome is broken and there has been success there. Others are asserting that it's glysophate somehow interrupting, that keto avoids the larger concentrations of glysophates in our food.
The one that seems simplest is that 100 years ago we didnt eat carbs unless you were poor. For thousands of years we ate game meats. About 75 years ago the governments of the world were fooled by political activists and they started an experiment on us. I have 73.6 reasons that experiment failed.
* The popular fake meats, such as Impossible burgers, seem like ultra-processed foods. Is that right? Are they healthier than meat (a question without a general answer, but worth considering)? They could help with climate change, regardless.
* A basic question, but I haven't found an authoritative answer: Warnings about carbohydrates talk about processed foods but are silent on whole grains. Are whole grains a more healthy way to consume carbs?
1: https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189392...
Very interesting - what are they called? What are they made of? Where do they come from?
Here's an article from several years ago that talks about the tradition https://www.economist.com/1843/2018/07/02/china-the-birthpla...
Processed foods have a well-established impact on health. Do you have some evidence tat says otherwise?
> do not make any definitive statement about the healthiness of those products
Did someone say "definitive", or maybe it's a factor. If you don't think that's a factor, what is your evaluation of the healthfulness of the fake meats?
(Is 'bogeymen' like a spell - if we say that magic word, we make something meaningless? 'The bogeyman of Covid!' 'The bogeyman of my mortgage!' This is awesome!)
So, it's anything with any amount of salt, sugar, or oil.
How much?
An Impossible Burger trivially meets the definition of a processed food. In more meaningful terms:
• An Impossible patty has 370mg of sodium. That is actionable information and should inform your dieting, should you choose to eat one. But with the WHO suggesting a daily limit of 2000mg (the American Heart Association aims lower, 1500mg), a single 370mg patty alone isn't anything to be scared of. Yes, it's a substantial portion of your budget, but if you're committing to eating a burger, how much more are you actually planning to eat? It should be a significant fraction of all of the food you're eating today, regardless of the salt content!
• Impossible patties have less than 1g of added sugars. At that low quantity, I don't much care.
• Impossible meat contains coconut and sunflower oil. Coconut is one of the healthiest options for a food oil, whereas sunflower is sometimes high in omega-6 (the ingredients list is not specific enough to tell). I would love to know the relative proportions, but I'll content myself with knowing that coconut is higher on the list.
So at the end of the day, an Impossible burger seems like a fine meal to me. By my standards, it doesn't clearly raise alarm on any of the three axes that define a "processed" food. Take that scare word away and let's deal in material facts.
Hmmm ... it's a widely used term of art in nutrition around which there is a lot of consensus.
> An Impossible Burger trivially meets the definition of a processed food.
It clearly meets (ha) the definition of ultra-processed foods, afaict. You can find the definitions elsewhere too.
> an Impossible burger seems like a fine meal to me. By my standards ...
You should eat what you like, of course. But we are entitled to your own opinions, not to our own facts. Your personal standards and mine have no bearing on the health of Impossible foods.
It's no mean feat for a vegetarian who's traveling to find a source of protein at any of these restaurants.
Before the "fake meat" products, Taco Bell bean burritos were basically the only ubiquitous option. Starbucks, and some other fast food joints, do have some egg-based protein options in the morning.
So I have no love for Impossible/Beyond/whatever ultraprocessed stuff, and I'd much rather get a big bowl of black beans with some tempeh or something, but the convenience of being able to find any protein when you're pressed for time is welcome.
Yes, more healthy. The less processed it is, the more fiber it has, and the more micronutrients remain. To the degree that you consider carbs to be the problem, though, it's still carbs.
I scaled the nutrition facts to match serving size grams, all number are grams except cal: calories. I hope formats ok...
Serving
size cal fat protein carbs fiber
Impossible 113 240 14 19 9 3
Beans(pinto) 113 161.90 0.66 9.91 29.74 9.91
Refried beans 113 85.45 1.92 4.79 12.78 3.51
Ground Beef 113 308 20 31 0 0
Hummus is technically a processed food. But if it's not too high salt or filled with preservatives, it's not less healthy than eating garbanzo beans with sesame seeds, etc. From my perspective, impossible is a little healthier than a burger (a lot healthier if you count the environment) but it's not a salad.
https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189392... https://www.nutritionix.com/food/pinto-beans/1-cup https://www.nutritionix.com/food/refried-beans https://www.nutritionix.com/food/ground-beef
> Hummus is technically a processed food. But if it's not too high salt or filled with preservatives, it's not less healthy than eating garbanzo beans with sesame seeds, etc.
I'm not sure what the properties of hummus (or artichokes or beer) implies about the properties of Impossible burgers.
But I guess it's kinda obvious that there are levels of processing and IDK what impossible is doing. But I'm curious.
Nixtmalized corn is a good example here, too.
I see. Here's what I understand, but can't substantiate or explain the mechanics myself:
* Eating foods with less processing is one of the strongest consensuses in nutrition - almost universal, in a field where there is a lot of uncertainty.
* Processing is a matter of degree. From the OP (and based on it, I'd guess that Impossible food is ultra-processed, hummus somewhere between minimally processed and processed, depending on the hummus):
Ultra-processed: Foods with additives or few whole food ingredients; includes most packaged snacks, frozen meals, granola bars, soda, and cereal.
Processed foods: “Foods such as canned fish, vegetables and artisanal cheeses, which are manufactured by adding salt, sugar, oil, or other processed culinary ingredients to minimally processed foods.”
Processed culinary ingredients: Table sugar, oils, fats, and salt.
Minimally processed foods: Frozen fruit or vegetables, breads with just a few ingredients, milk, canned beans.
* Why does processing matter? Essential question and I don't know much of the answer, but part of it is that context matters: The effects of foods relies on much more than individual nutrients in the food, but what they are contained in (obvious when you think about it: you couldn't ingest a pile of carbon, etc.). But what are the factors that matter and why? No idea. I'd love to learn about it.
The best source I've found, which examines it on a basic level, recommended several years ago by a leading nutritional expert, is the Brazillian government's dietary recommendations (note these are from 2015):
https://bvsms.saude.gov.br/bvs/publicacoes/dietary_guideline...
I'd be more interested in scaling that by calories. I.e. what happens if you make all of those the same amount of calories instead of grams. I think that does wonders for how we eat.
One of the benefits of keto for example (once you're actually in at least mild ketosis) is that you don't actually feel hungry any longer and the calories are just taken from your fat stores. The body no longer 'cares' for easily usable carbs. It has come to terms with the fact that there are no carbs to use and thus it no longer 'sends the signal to go eat more carbs'. It 'knows' that there's a lot of fat stored in the body that it can use up and so it just does that.
I dunno if you're done keto but one thing that happened, at least for me, is that foods that normally don't taste sweet started tasting sweet. E.g the first pancake I had after starting keto (and being in blood test verified ketosis) did definitely taste sweet (recipe: spelt flour, egg, milk) without anything on it.
This is where I think the 'fasting' of many religions has health benefits (nevermind that none of that is explained and it's just religious tradition/rules - but they were onto something basically).
I think keto is (in most instances) a dangerous fad diet, but feel free to experiment. Tho I have at various times cut sugar and processed carbohydrates (only eating whole grains) out of my diet and everything was sweeter.
Fasting and keto are not the same thing.
I never said that fiber needs are different. I said that fiber works for some people but not for others. I should have specified better. What I meant is that apparently while many if not most people feel satiated from eating fiber, others don't. I.e. it does not help them feel full. You still want to eat a good amount of fiber for other reasons, such as having enough "bulk".
I never said keto and fasting were the same. I drew a link between some of the benefits that I saw from going keto and some of the benefits of fasting.
I am interested though to hear more about why you say it is a dangerous fad diet. I think you're definitely are onto something, if I interpret correctly but I don't want to mis-interpret. I say that because I see a lot of "keto bomb", "keto bar", keto this and keto that pre-packaged food popping up in the grocery stores. I wouldn't trust any of that either. There's also a lot of fluffy and shiny info out there on the internet about it. As with any topic really, one has to be careful while doing research, especially if someone wants to sell you something.
ETA: this isn't about "feeling full" or "bulk" this is about how the body processes food, and extracts energy using bacteria, who feed on fiber in our diet. google "fiber gut bacteria" for what I'm talking about
Very highly processed, but 'what is processed' really anyway. That's not a proper metric to judge things.
>Is that right? Are they healthier than meat (a question without a general answer, but worth considering)?
If you believe the status quo, the impossible meats are tremendously unhealthy. Almost always being higher in saturated fats and such than any real meats.
If you believe that political activists have wrongly accused fat of being a problem. Then these impossible meats are fantastic.
>They could help with climate change, regardless.
Most likely not. This is just another political activist move. Yes a cow farts, but if you properly assess carbon capture of animal agriculture... meat production is good for climate change. Those cow patties is practically all carbon that was taken out of the air and is being returned to the earth. The problem is that animal rights activists want to propose any idea to have animals no longer slaughtered.
>A basic question, but I haven't found an authoritative answer: Warnings about carbohydrates talk about processed foods but are silent on whole grains. Are whole grains a more healthy way to consume carbs?
Glycemic index is what you're looking for. The magic number is 30. Anything above 30, avoid.
Regular white bread is ~69
Wholegrain is ~79
Rice ~72
So it's marginally worse, and that's because the process to make it white removes various parts of the grain and ends up adjusting for more protein and less carbs in ratio.
In reality, if you don't know much about nutrition, you should really read this as you would any other contrarian group that thinks it knows better than everyone else. 99% of the time, if there is a scientific consensus which is different, it is correct, as I believe it is in this case as well.
This study has been fairly widely criticized by most people in the field that I trust.
Think of the damage doable by unprocessed food: all the pathogens and parasites that can enter your body.
The fact you can eat something that is six months old is possible thanks to processing, such as leaving it in the same air-tight container in which it was cooked, a.k.a canning.
I would say a chicken nugget is just finely ground chicken meat with some binder like egg or flour covered in breading.
I know there are not always authoritative answers about nutrition; there is much uncertainty. That's all the more reason to have the knowledge distilled by an expert (who would of course discuss uncertainties).
It's almost troubling to me how far you can go just following Michael Pollan's old chestnut: eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants. Barring any intolerances that right there will get you to near-optimal nutrition for general health in 8 words.
EDIT: Being guilty of not reading the article before posting, I just noticed my message ties nicely with the content. If you want to look good inside and out, eat food your grand-grandparents would recognise in amounts that wouldn't shock them.
1. Calories: too few and you die, too many and you gain weight, get sick and die early.
2. Macronutrients: too few and you will get sick and possibly die, too much doesn't matter so much as long as calories are under control.
3. Micronutrients: too few and you will live, you just might be a bit sickly (brittle bones, scurvy, anemia, etc). Too much of some micronutrients can be toxic, but most you'll just excrete in various ways.
That's it for the basics. There are some recommendations around fiber and other things to lower your risk of various age-related diseases, but if you just keep your calories in the right range and ensure you get the necessary macronutrients and micronutrients, then you know everything you'll likely ever need to know, barring any medical conditions that require specific diets.
Episode on metabolism and nutrition: https://youtu.be/fR3NxCR9z2U
So I trust them as much as I would trust, say, a high-school textbook
If you think about what goes into a high school textbook, including the expert reviews before one is recommended (IIRC, Richard Feynman served on a review panel for school textbooks), AFAIK there's no comparison.
I feel like I live in a bizarro-world sometimes. I seem to be the only one who cares.
You asked about quickly getting up to speed in the basics. To me that means a level of understand where you just recognise the extent of your ignorance but have a decent enough mental model and vernacular to know how to ask the right questions.
The model is going to be simplistic anyway, but as long as its recognised as such theres just so much damage particular misinformation can do.
Compared to a group of enthusiasts who actually believe their simplistic model to be more or less complete enough. There is no shortage of such models when it comes to nutrition.
> have a decent enough mental model and vernacular to know how to ask the right questions
I think people greatly overestimate themselves. A lack of expertise can result in very confused mental models and the wrong questions. IME in domains in which I have expertise, places like Reddit are filled with people with the wrong models, asking the wrong questions, and others answering based on the same wrong models. In their echo chamber, it looks right. Not different, I suspect, from any non-scientific theories, such as those before modern science.
My understanding of nutrition isn't much different than many in this thread (though others clearly know more than I do); I just evaluate our understanding as much less accurate than many others do.
I have consumed my fair share if theory from an array of sources hung up on their particular take. My take away so far is that we understand pretty little. Any particular prescription is more or less just extrapolated from rather naive statistical correlations. The current understanding is good enough to reproduce those correlation when treating particular deficiencies or diagnosing certain metabolic dysfunctions but besides that they mostly say “healthy people tend to eat such and such”
I mean desperate measures like bariatric surgery a thing. One of the most effective treatments against obesity to be sure, but not really indicative of field with shit together.
The best single source I’ve found is nutritionfacts.org - this is their YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/c/NutritionfactsOrgMD
Dr Greger isn’t perfect, and of course has his own plant-based agenda to push… but aside from maybe missing the pleasure of some foods, I can’t see that there’s anything to lose from a health perspective in following his advice… while there may be a large amount to gain.
As others have said, a home-cooked plant-based diet is a very solid base to start from.
That's one reason I'm looking for a textbook or academic course. I am not interested in the political battles; I don't want this month's new book (and I certainly don't agree with the proposition (which the parent didn't say) that everything is politicized).
Looking at a university level course list on nutrition and reading into each of the subject areas might be a start (Pick the ones that apply to you - nutrition in infants is perhaps not relevant). The Oxford Handbook of Nutrition is a good summary reference text.
https://www.booktopia.com.au/oxford-handbook-of-nutrition-an...
Thank you!
Try vegan for a few weeks, try keto for a month, see how you feel. I think shaking up your diet is as important as how you shake it up. I would lean towards some research and then diving in and tracking how you feel/perform versus trying to gain a deep academic textbook understanding.
https://michaelpollan.com/books/food-rules/
And "Nutrition: the Emperor has no clothes":
Unless you're Mikhaila Peterson, who has found (after many types of diets) that eating beef and beef alone alleviates her myriad health problems.
In chemistry, sufficiently talented researchers will come to the same conclusion, with sufficiently talented researchers appearing in college, or more likely graduate school / professional labs for organic chemistry.
As humans, we don't have researchers who are so talented that if you ask them to answer nutritional questions, they will consistently and independently come to the same conclusions. This isn't because nutritionists are dumb, this is because nutrition is hard. However, it makes it much harder to suss out dumb nutritionists when the smart ones disagree.
Notably, none of this stops anyone from writing books.
AFAICT, that's not true, and only appears true because of the vast amount of attention one side is able to get, despite being an incredibly small minority.
From what I understand (I'm not in the field and not an expert), except for the few researchers in this article, basically every scientist working in nutrition will say that the energy balance model is correct, and that there's nothing special about carbs.
The media loves to amplify the contrarian and minority voices (see also things like climate change). But they really are outliers, and there really is a consensus, at least on this one big question.
Let's have a tiny sense of shame: On Hacker News (or on any social media), we're criticizing others for amplifying contrarian and minority voice?
I disagree with their ideas, but they do offer very specific differences from the EBM model, both as a tool for understanding obesity and as a tool for transforming public health.
E.g. even in their abstract:
> According to a commonly held view, the obesity pandemic is caused by overconsumption of modern, highly palatable, energy-dense processed foods, exacerbated by a sedentary lifestyle. However, obesity rates remain at historic highs, despite a persistent focus on eating less and moving more, as guided by the energy balance model (EBM).
They're directly challenging the "orthodox" view that we need to get people to eat less and move more.
But that view works! It's not the end of the discussion, because people overeat for many reasons, and in my view high palatability of food and having more wealth are the main culprits. But they clearly disagree, since they devote sections of their article to addressing exactly these ideas and why they're wrong.
Btw, for the record, all these researchers are way more knowledgeable than I am about all of this - I have no education in nutrition at all. But I have pretty solid evidence that they're wrong - lots of other smart people say they're wrong, there's lots of direct evidence that they're wrong (studies in humans), I personally lost a bunch of weight by counting calories and restricting the amounts that I ate, etc.
> You really don't need anything that sophisticated to understand what you need to know.
I've heard that all my life, but usually not from people on HN! Knowledge is a powerful thing; it enables me to think for myself and not be prisoner of what others say (or don't say).
He's a well known, non-nonsense researcher in exercise science. Take the 15 minutes to listen and judge for yourself.
> Knowledge is a powerful thing; it enables me to think for myself and not be prisoner of what others say (or don't say).
Signal to noise ratio matters. The SNR in nutrition is terrible, and will more than likely lead you to analysis paralysis. Save yourself some time and pain. Even if you decide to go deeper, Israetel points you in the right direction.
> Take the 15 minutes to listen and judge for yourself.
I don't think that's possible without knowledge in the domain. Human beings are bad at judging trustworthiness, especially the trustworthiness of their own judgment on the issue. IMHO, that's exactly how mis/disinformation spreads; sophists can easily sound trustworthy.
> Signal to noise ratio matters. The SNR in nutrition is terrible, and will more than likely lead you to analysis paralysis. Save yourself some time and pain.
Agreed. And that was the context of my original question.
Variability between individuals and also for the same meals at different times of the day or under different conditions is high.
But overall, most of the recent nutritional research shows that grandma/mom was probably right in banning "junk food" and serving "natural" foods. We've invented highly processed foods before having fully adjusted to doing agriculture.
At least my better meals (w.r.t the post-meal glucose response) were fairly self-composed whereas frozen pizza & co gave me the worst spikes.
[1] source tomorrow, maybe
People don't have long-term willpower. If someone sticks to a diet and exercise routine which makes losing weight easy-ish and natural, there's a good chance they'll lose weight; if their routine makes them constantly hungry, tired, and stressed, there's a good chance they'll gain weight. Ignoring the effects on metabolism, unprocessed food generally causes the former, insulin spikes cause the latter.
Even if "CICO" is absolute and 500 calories of broccoli = 500 calories of chocolate, that's not really important. Because 500 calories of broccoli is an insane amount that you probably can't eat even if you tried, while 500 calories of chocolate you can eat and still be hungry afterwards.
But there's one caveat: a lot of people find that occasional "cheat meals" make sticking to a diet the other 90% of the time easier. Even some pro athletes and bodybuilders have cheat meals. I really doubt smaller amounts of processed food cause the metabolic changes the article describes or any significant changes, so while the quality of food matters, that doesn't mean people need to avoid junk food entirely.
You sound like the people who say no one can eat an entire jar of peanut butter in one sitting. I assure you that you are mistaken.
While refined carbs are bad, the problem is probably more related to the entire gastrointestinal pipeline and immune system.
Processed foods are not just high in refined carbs, but also low in fiber, involve emulsifiers, stabilizers, preservatives, pasturization, and more.
Fiber is needed for healthy intestines, and may be essential for limiting overall systemic inflammation.
High temperatures denature molecules, create a large number of carcinogens: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, advanced glycation end products, etc.
Preservatives like sodium benzoate combine with molecules like citric acid to form benzene and is a problem for many soft drinks.
Emulsifiers, i.e. many stuff labelled as "gums", may literally be gumming up your works, making it difficult for your intestines to do their job, causing heartburn, inflammation, etc.
I'm not opposed to highly processed things because they are processed with advanced technology. But profit-seeking companies selling things to ignorant shortsighted consumers will maximize for shelf life, taste, and appearance over health almost every time.
And it is our fault because deep down we know this.
I don't know if that's true necessarily, probably over exaggerated.
Virtually every diabetes org now recommends keto or keto by a different name and has for years. That isn't going to change.
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/keto/
https://www.diabetes.ca/nutrition---fitness/meal-planning/7-...
You also have all the major corps realizing carbs are a problem and are now offering carb-free options on their menus. Lettuce wrapped things, etc. Keto hit the 10% market measurement awhile ago and now everyone is reacting. It is hilarious to see 'keto corn chips' and you look at ingredients and it's 99% carbs. It's just a thing now.
>Instead, in the Carbohydrate Insulin Model (CIM), they offer as an alternative, the types of food we eat—particularly excessive carbohydrates (including added sugars and refined grains)—change our hormonal balance in a way that makes our body store more fat, and that makes us obese.
this seems trivial to prove that theory. get a number of test subjects, calculate their BMR via direct calorimetry, restrict their physical activity and feed half of them a diet of supermarket garbage, and the other half a nice and balanced diet, then publish the results.
have any of the researches who seek to debunk the laws of thermodynamics attempted to do that?
Anecdotally I’ve done the same. I lost 20 lbs or so eating fast food regularly. I’m able to get to around 12-14% BF like this pretty easy. It might be harder to go leaner.
1. https://spudman.com/article/all-potato-diet-eight-years-late...
I searched after reading this article and there is Nutrisense for $185/month / subscription with 12-months commitment. This is beyond outrageous.
https://www.abbott.com/corpnewsroom/strategy-and-strength/ab...
https://diatribe.org/new-libre-sense-cgm-available-over-coun...
I’ve actually never heard of the Nutrisense CGM. I have type 1 diabetes and use a Dexcom, which is way more expensive than that. As far as I know, all others (Libre 2, Medtronic, Dexcom) require a prescription in the EU and US.
I don't buy that it is as simple as the writeup implies. (I didn't read actual research it is based on however.)
Is energy balance true? Yes. But as the paper implies, we don't have direct control of that. I suspect it is _what_ you eat.
Does insulin response matter? Yes, I assume so. But that is not the only factor.
If you are not getting proper nutrition, your body will ask for more food. Naturally we know what we need. We get a taste for broccoli if we need nutrients in broccoli. But if people have somehow short circuited their food sense and don't realize they need broccoli and instead they eat more hamburgers or fruit loops or whole grain bread, they won't get the nutrition they need, and they will probably still want more food.
So insulin response, nutrition, and I am sure there are other things too.
Other than fruits and an occasional salad, everything I eat is "processed" (cooked). When I see a headline like this, it literally tells me nothing. (Seriously it groups yogurt the same as root beer)
Even what people tend to think of when they think of processed foods, such as ready-to-eat foods, tend to be high in preservatives such as salt, sugar, vitamins, and other food-grade additives--but all of these have different nutritional effects.
What word do you like and your definition of it?
If something has negative health consequences it’ll be one specific thing, not everything done by a machine.
The idea is that the processing can alter the structure of the food lightly (grilling a steak), moderately (frying a burger), or deeply (making a sausage, with all the extractions, admixing, etc). Deep processing is often used to make less edible things more edible, less palatable things more crave-inducing, and less nutritionally good things more palatable.
If prefer people to use words that mean things. The article wasn't even about processed foods so much as how there is a nutritional model that shows high carbohydrate/low glycemic index foods are particularly fattening relative to their calorie content. The article could easily (and more accurately) be titled "New research highlights the damage from high carb/high sugar foods".
*I mean seriously, vitamin water is "natural"? That stuff is water and sugar alcohol, with a tiny bit of stevia added so it can appear on the ingredients list for people who look for that particular keyword. Those sugar alcohols do occur naturally, I guess, but not usually in foods, and never in such quantities (and never from high fructose corn syrup).
Anyway, the article was not about any of that. It was about a nutritional model describing how excess carbohydrates and low glycemic index foods would be more likely to result in obesity.
None of that has anything to do with whether the food was processed, made in a factory, or packaged for convenience. Yet all are reasonable conclusions from the title. The only information in the title is effectively that "there may be a good that is bad for you".
A banana is fast food.
What do you think it is about fast that makes food bad? If I put my banana in a pot for an hour does it become better food? Nonsense.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2019-06-19/ultraprocessed...
Usually, articles about "processed food" really mean "ultra-processed". And the general idea is that ultra-processed food is that you extract food chemicals from what is usually the cheapest sources, and transform and recombine them into a final product. By contrast regular processed food normally starts with whole ingredients rather than extracts, often of better quality because you can't make up for lower quality using extra processing and additives.
But the extracts come from whole ingredients, so if you think about where the extracts came from then the whole process is again using whole ingredients.
> Food processing in itself is not the issue. One obvious reason is that nowadays, practically all food is processed in some sense and in some way. The term ‘processing’ (like the term ‘industry’) is very general and therefore not helpful, and so judgements of foods simply because they are ‘processed’ are not meaningful.
But also "natural" ingredients are often bad as well as certain ratios (e.g. high sugar and fat together, all seed oils, etc.).
For example ALL seed oils are problematic; the only "fats" that is fairly safe are: butter, ghee, and coconut oil. The rest become dangerous with heat (especially unsaturated oils). So ANY food made with cotton seed, flax or similar oils are part of the problem.
Processed foods means "industrial made using ingredients optimized for profit". Using seed oils is cheap. Using preservatives to extend shelf-life so that 1-3 month warehousing and shipping is possible. Therefore these are used.
Personally, I only use seed oil (canola) to cook with. I'd definitely be interested to know if that's something I should stop doing.
Basically, as long as proteine is controlled for, there is no long term fat-loss difference between dietary compositions.
See here for a longer and more recent explanation: https://www.performancelab.com/blogs/nutrition/carbohydrate-...
Not sure I'd trust Performance Lab either as they're just trying to sell you their health products.