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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you almost need some kind of eating disorder these days. Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural and mass produced, there is a massive amount of sugar in everything. If you aren’t actively monitoring your food intake and making deliberate decisions to not eat your gonna be unhealthy.

I like the quote: “keep whatever addictions kill you the slowest”. I think a minor eating disorder is preferable to eating 100s of grams of sugar every day.

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Mass production isn't inherently bad, and you're explicitly making an appeal to nature of questionable worth.

There's plenty to find fault with in the modern food industry: toxic or carcinogenic pesticides, antibiotic-resistant pathogens created by human abuse, contamination of water supplies and oceans with runoff, the role of government in creating various health crises by subsidizing high-carb/high-glycemic index foods simply because they're a cheap way to feed a population, ground subsidence due to unchecked dependence on slow-filling aquifers, native habitat destruction... off the top of my head.

But all of that doesn't make "natural", on its own, better for human nutrition.

> Mass production isn't inherently bad

Mass production is inherently corner-cutting, and, given that nutrition is an unsolved problem, natural is inherently wholesome in a way that artificial can, at best, only attempt to duplicate.

In Germany we mass produce bread that essentially contains exactly the same things I'd put in it if I made it myself.

This. Even if something gets „mass-produced“, it doesn't mean it has to be bad. It just won't be the cheapest product on the market any longer.

Frozen vegetables are basically raw, untouched, pretty good for you food, and they are grown by pretty terrible corporations trying to make as much scummy money as possible, and it STILL only costs me about a buck a pound or less at the grocery store.

The entire point of bread is turning wheat seeds into a digestible food. Part of that is milling, part is baking, and a big part is the fermenting and the long natural yeast rise.

Mass produced bread never does this long natural yeast rise. Cheap versions use all kinds of chemicals to get the texture right, even the high quality variants use rapid rising yeast because natural yeast is way too slow. Only in a local bakery or at home will you find bread that is made in the healthiest way possible. The natural yeast fermented slow rise results in a much healthier product, bread that even gluten-sensitive people have no issue eating (and it tastes better)

I usually buy sourdough rye bread in the supermarket because that's the cheapest form of bread and I like it. It contains no "chemicals" that the legislator deemed necessary for inclusion in the ingredient list, save some sodium acetate as pH regulator and preservative. Sure, the artisanal bread at my local bakery is tastier, but it also costs about ten times as much.

To my knowledge yeast doesn't touch gluten at all and only breaks down the starch. I really doubt that there are measurable health benefits of artisanal bread. Do you have any studies to back up that claim?

> I really doubt that there are measurable health benefits of artisanal bread. Do you have any studies to back up that claim?

There are clear health benefits of artisanal foods: they costs more, you buy less (for the same weight), you get less calories - you aren't obese.

Mass produced bread can be produced like that. There's nothing about the concept of mass production that forbids products from taking a long time to produce.

Maybe in the US, nobody mass produces bread like that.

No, profit maximization is inherently corner-cutting

It does, white rice and white flour - for instance - don't exist. We're supposed to eat the whole grain with all the micronutrients. Industrialisation removed them for no reason, and enabled never-before-eaten substances like trans fats, and tablespoons of polyunsaturated fats (seed/vegetable oils). Then refined sugars come along, too.

So yes, you are not evolved to eat these substances. You do not need them. You can survive perfectly without them.

It's like the popular line,

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

My behavior definitely looks like an eating disorder sometimes. But holy hell, they're still putting unhealthy-at-any-level trans fats in regular food, and the label can say "0g trans fat"!

The sugar only comes from eating packaged products. Buy groceries to make your own food and there's no sugar problem. Snack on vegetables and tree nuts.

Fair warning everybody: nuts are incredibly calorie dense.

It's fine.

Fair warning everybody: vegetables are packed with nutrients.

Unfortunately we have bred a good chunk of them away over the last century. Median 5 to 40% deline in mineral content as of this 2009 meta analysis, likely even worse now.

https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...

Calories are not just calories. They're a useful rule of thumb but they're not a metric to live and die by.

Always remember that calorimetry is basically burning mass(nut) and measuring energy(nut) by how much it increased the temperature of some water.

Combustion is an extremely primitive hand wave over the VERY COMPLEX digestive system not to mention how we then go on to store that energy (glycogen vs fat) and then eventually burn that energy.

Drinking x ml of olive oil vs eating y g of nuts for equal calories will have different outcomes even though they're primarily both fats. Fiber is key and will affect energy absorption intake. Even chewing efficiency will affect how well you absorb that energy. Let's not forget that digestion itself takes energy.

Obviously if you eat an extra 2kcal of nuts a day you're going to see the effects of that, but calorie for calorie, I'd rather eat nuts than a big mac or ice cream (and expect to see less weight gain)

Or being healthy - I'd rather have whole almonds supplementing my meals than cottage cheese (from a pure calories perspective)

> Our Bread, milk, meat is all unnatural

Please avoid this emotional appeal. All things are natural. What would be unnatural? Ectoplasm? Sorcery?

> there is a massive amount of sugar in everything

Not everything. This even lead to a somewhat humourous case against Subway's bread [0].

Other commenters have pointed out how flawed your mass production statement is as well, so I won't reheash.

* [0] https://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/subwa...

Moderation in eating isn't equivalent to a minor eating disorder. I agree though that some behavior you need to do today might have been seen as symptoms of a type of disordered eating in the past.

But by definition, if it's keeping you healthy, it mostly shouldn't be considered disordered.

I know in the past cutting up food into very small pieces was seen as a symptom of disordered eating because the thought was that you're intentionally slowing your eating so you eat less. Today's portion sizes in the US make it mandatory to break up a pre-prepared meal or a snack into smaller pieces so each bite isn't so calorically dense. In fact, in certain contexts, cutting up food is seen as proper and having manners. If you're eating a big piece of meat, you don't grab it in your hands and chew on it, generally. You cut it up into bite sized pieces.

Really wish there was a polite and socially acceptable way to ask for a reasonable portion.

It's both fortunate and unfortunate that I come from a culture with rich delicious food and implicit pressure from elders to never deny an extra serving or leave food on the plate. It's hard saying no to a loving aunt or grandma. And most celebrations are marked by giving deserts and sweets.

It’s true, but an eating disorder doesn’t mean eating scantly, or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make. Eating disorders are compulsions, and those that suffer from them aren’t able to choose not to do them. This is similar to how alcoholism doesn’t mean drinking a lot. Alcoholism is a complete dependence on alcohol, making it nearly impossible to stop.

> or even throwing up after every time you eat if that’s a choice you make

I think that’s a misleading statement to make.

While this could be theoretically true, I imagine, in practice, no one would choose to throw up after every meal without having a disorder.

Sure, but the point is that if you choose to do it, then your behavior is not a disorder, it's just a weird choice that you're making. Just like drinking heavily doesn't automatically make you an alcoholic.

I think the line of "choice" here gets blurred, which is exactly what disorder refers to in the usual context.

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