Cognitive decline linked to ultraprocessed food, study finds
cnn.com
cnn.com
If you don't drink protein shakes, you will get as big as nature intended for your natural diet and genetics.
Cutting out ultra processed foods because they are not part of our evolutionary diet allows us to omit six or seven figures worth of grant money for science we don't need. Saves time for readers, too.
The author has a "natural" bias.
There's emerging evidence that consuming potassium with salt tends to reduce the negative effects of higher salt intake. Basically, that many of the prior sodium studies ignored the sodium/potassium balance. Of course you could still have too much sodium while staying in balance, but just thought that's worth pointing out. If nothing else, it illustrates how complex it nutrition science can be, and how much we still have to learn (or at least dispel popular half-truths).
What this should all build down to is the nutritional content of the food. Just because I go to a local farmers market and buy the greatest "organic" or "non-gmo" (or insert some other mostly meaningless thing that has been turned into a way to scare consumers to spend more money) and buy the greatest looking apples I can find.
That isn't going to do a damn thing if I turn around and try to replicate the McDonalds (or I guess Popeyes now?) fried apple pie. It is still horrible for me and I highly doubt there is much if any difference in the little bit of vitamins I would get from the apples still in the pie.
Meanwhile I can go for about as processed as you can get, and do Soylent or Huel and have a pretty damn balanced diet if I could somehow sustain myself entirely on that (more of a willpower thing and not an issue with the food itself).
This also ignores the major clasism that has made its way into how people eat and what food they have access to. There is a reason it tends to be urban well off white people going on and on about this stuff.
I cringe anytime I hear the words "real" or "whole" food as if that has any real meaning outside of a marketing term.
If anything this tells me that we need to do better with how we process food, not that processed food itself is the issue.
What would prevent us from doing a study like this: take 1000 diverse subjects, assign each of them a lab assistant, and for 2+ years, diligently track everything they eat, their exercise, sleep, etc. You could pay each participant and staff $100k/each, and the cost would be on the order of $400MM.
May not be epistemologically perfect given that people change their behavior when observed, but still superior to plenty of the stuff getting published now, and likely the knowledge gained for humankind would be worth many billions.
Better to spend some of that budget instead on a randomised controlled trial but there are likely issues with getting people to follow their prescribed diets to the letter
On my peak fitness enthusiasm I kept a rigorous food diary for some time and it was such a pain in the ass that I don't believe for a second that food diaries coming from people who are not 100% committed and interested in keeping one are accurate at all. People would often forget to log small snacks they have, or estimate portion sizes completely wrong, or neglect logging sauces, oils, condiments, etc.
It seems too short and unfocused to learn anything meaningful.
Essentially everyone's condition and situation would be different.
Keep in mind that 1000 people is the size you might expect for a controlled trial where you change one single thing you expect to have a big impact like a cancer medication and even then you try to screen the patients to have as little variation as possible.
There's no snappy one-word term for this dietary choice, maybe someone could come up with one.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/18508-eat-food-not-too-much...
Relatedly: I'm taking bets regarding lab-grown meat.
This startup is growing a specific species of fungus that is high protein and vitamin rich. I haven’t tried it but reviews so far are saying it cooks, tastes and feels like meat.
Time will tell :)
What has you convinced?
I wouldn't be surprised, but I'm curious if you're relying on anything more than intuition. I don't think intuition is worthless, for whatever it's worth. Seems like a pretty common-sense idea that non-fresh foods could have adverse effects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a major factor in increased rates of cancer, which is surely a combination of many mild factors that accumulate over a long period of time.
> "Ultraprocessed foods are defined as "industrial formulations of food substances (oils, fats, sugars, starch, and protein isolates) that contain little or no whole foods and typically include flavorings, colorings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives," according to the study.
But if I have a package that says it is whole grain or whatever, how do I know if it is or isn't ultraprocessed or just, you know, regular processed?
Stay off the granola bar with high fructose corn syrup.
It is more important to avoid the bad anti-nutrients than to eat a particular food for a certain "miracle" nutrient.
This can't be true in an absolute sense. There is no way that adding a single drop of high fructose corn syrup to a meal would completely ruin any health benefits of the rest of the meal. There is also no way that adding a bit of corn syrup to a plate of broccoli would be equally as unhealthy for you as a bowl of lucky charms. Obviously the mix of ingredients matters.
Where do you get the idea that a single bad ingredient ruins the entire food?
Would a granola bar sweetened with the exact same number of sucrose/fructose molecules from organic coconut sugar (or palm sugar, or date juice, etc) be any more healthy?
I currently do not believe it would be. Sugar is sugar. But I'm not 100% sure.
1. Don't buy meals; buy ingredients.
2. The longer the list of ingredients, the more likely it is to be "highly" processed
3. The way you avoid 'highly' processed stuff is to avoid processing altogether. Buy corn you have to husk, meat you have to cut, fish you have to filet, wine you have to uncork, bread you have to slice, etc.
Ok, this is just silly. Cutting your own meat doesn't make it healthier than having a butcher cut it for you. Box wine is no more or less healthy than bottled wine with a cork. Slicing bread yourself doesn't change its health contents.
Its statements like these that make the whole argument seem like nonsense.
Obvious exceptions apply, such as going to the butcher, as you have astutely observed. These do not invalidate the rule-of-thumb.
Frozen corn vs whole corn? Were you planning to eat the cob? Does it help my diet to cut corn kernels off manually? How?
Meat you have to cut? Maybe you're thinking hot dogs here, my first thought was ground beef. Does breaking out the meat grinder, and cleaning it, help me eat right? How?
Fish you have to filet? Can I just buy the filets? Or is it 100% necessary that fish skin rot in my garbage can.
Boxed wine? Generally I consider corked wine undrinkable, and I struggle to think what other contribution a cork per se can offer to wine.
Sliced bread? I mean. Look it's a really bad set of rules so I'll have mercy here, the kind of bread which is available only sliced is not great for you, so at least here I can infer your meaning.
Not that it matters because the #1 source of extra pounds on my waist is whole loaves of sourdough bread. I slice them myself.
It's a heuristic.
I wish they just showed a graph of "decline in cognition" vs "percentage of calories from processed foods" instead of making me try to parse the relevant information out of sentences like that. What 10% of my calories come from processed foods? I'm I completely safe or is the effect linear in percentage of calories or what?
That describes nearly all modern cultivars of fruits/vegetables.
If I chop my potatoes before boiling them, is that processing? If not, which steps in cooking count as "processing"? And how many of those steps need to be included for the food to be "ultraprocessed"? How can I avoid accidentally "ultraprocessing" my food when I cook it at home?
This whole thread reads like pedantry for the sake of it.
I think the name is lousy, but I think the reason is that things like xantham gum and soy lecithin are there to provide texture. For example, low-fat yogurt has some of these in it because if you take the fat out, it doesn't have the same texture (probably isn't even solid), so you need to do some processing to get it to the same place. See [1] for a summary.
There's a podcast on the BBC where a doctor tries to get his twin doctor brother of ultra-processed food. Unfortunately, most of the episodes involve emotional issues, but they do have a few minutes of interviews with major researchers. [3] is sort of a summary.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tcz/episodes/player
"Ultra-processed foods usually contain ingredients that you wouldn’t add when cooking homemade food. You may not recognise the names of these ingredients as many will be chemicals, colourings, sweeteners and preservatives."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_...
processed foods only comes in a box, bag, or can; that is, most of the center aisles in a grocery store. buy mostly fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, and dairy--things found on the outer ring of the store. if you want grains or beans, prefer buying the grains/beans directly, not the boxed form of them.
They also help force me out of my comfort zones. There are a lot of recipes that would never try cold out of a cook book, but because they are bundling everything needed the risk/reward tilts more firmly into the "why not try it" column.
Even if every meal was at a premium it's still worth it to me for the connivence.
I've shared free meal codes with friends/family - had a co-worker who's teenage daughter wanted to cook more but was overwhelmed. They tried the service, used it for a year and after she got her skills and confidence up they ended up dropping it, but remade their favorites from the last year and used those for ideas of other recipes to try that they probably otherwise wouldn't have.
You don't have to take them every week too - I currently skip around and do it maybe one or two times a month just to supplement my other cooking. The variety is nice. It is a bit of a pain requiring some micromanaging since they are obviously motivated to keep you on the weekly treadmill.
How are they correcting for correlation between the ability to afford the more money-expensive or more time-expensive ends of rich people with experts that cook for them, and health nuts (or suffers of seriously annoying allergies) that cook for themselves even though it's more time expensive?
"higher intakes of saturated fat (p for trend = 0.04) and trans-unsaturated fat (p for trend = 0.07) were linearly associated with greater decline in cognitive score over 6 years. These associations became stronger in analyses that eliminated persons whose fat intake changed in recent years or whose baseline cognitive scores were in the lowest 15%."
I, for one, am hoping it's largely to do with cheap, high-calorie ingredients and not to do with actually processing as I'm a big fan of Soylent (largely monounsaturated fats FYI) for its convenience and it doesn't get much more "processed" than that.
I'm thinking it's probably relates to all the additives in foods today. I would love to see some sort of study comparing these commercially processed foods containing additives to more traditional processing (like my grandparents eating tons of homecanned and home processed foods).
I take that to mean milk may be a whole food, yogurt might be a processed food, and spray cheese in a can would be ultra-processed.
Are food companies incentivized to create addictive products that exploit human biology? 100%
I would posit that anyone who studies "ultraprocessed" foods is unlikely to ever release a study showing they are good for you. The very category of ultraprocessed foods was invented to be a "bad-for-you" food category, and so the research program is "find more evidence that they are bad."
Categorizing food based on whether it's industrial or home-made may be a useful heuristic for lifestyle choices, but it seems unlikely to me to be useful for getting a deep understanding of nutrition and health.
This is bullshit in a very important way: you have to know how to cook. Bring back home economics classes.
I really feel for people who are trying to learn; every beginner's cookbook is full of things that require specific ingredients, complicated prep work, or a shit-ton of chopping.
I've toyed around with the idea of writing a cookbook of my own, but _that_ is something I truly do not have time for. Ah well :/
The rules of thumb, which I am paraphrasing from secondhand discussions about the book, are as follows:
1. Buy good ingredients.
2. Taste and smell as you go.
3. Herbs and spices are your friends.
4. Don't overcook.
I agree with all of them.
Here's the thing: cooking is a skill, like juggling or programming. Just knowing all the rules (techne) doesn't suffice to actually perform the act. You need to spend some time applying the principles to concrete situations (metis). The good news is that if you follow the above rules, you'll basically never make something inedible.
Another tip I can give you is to get familiar with substitution ingredients. Don't have any sour cream? Yogurt is probably fine.
Now, in direct contradiction with what I've been saying so far, let me share with you one of my favorite recipes that got me through my PhD. Cooking time: 10 mins.
INGREDIENTS:
1. 1 or two whole leeks, depending on how hungry you are
2. Sour cream (or whatever)
3. Bacon (or lardons, if you can find them, but seriously... whatever)
4. White wine (optional, but _really_ makes a difference. Prefer dry wine, but whatever.)
PREP:
1. Cut your leek in 1cm rings. Throw away the dark green part.
COOKING:
1. Cook your bacon until crispy, then crumble it and set it aside.
2. While the bacon is cooking, put some butter in a pan and cook your leeks until they're soft and slightly translucid (kinda like you would cook an onion). Don't sweat it; it's hard to fuck up.
3. Add bacon and sour cream. Stir.
4. Add white wine. Stir until you're happy with the consistency
Boom. Done. Keeps well in the fridge, to boot.
You don't even need a cookbook, just take your time to learn how to use a frying pan and basic boiling in a pot skill.
Eg:
Plain pasta - cheap, extreamly energy dense, soggy if you overcook or don't use enough water (1L/100g dry w.)
Now chop the onion, saute until it's ready, drop the [the timed to cook, it's hard first three times] pasta in it for a 15-30 secs. BAM, a whole different meal.
Now the same, but add a grated carrots. BAM, a whole different meal.
The same but add tomatos OR tomate paste: BAM, whole two new meals.
Now replace pasta with a boiled or fried potatoes: BAM, 8 more meals.
Replace/add frozen vegetables - BAM... well, you know, more meals.
Just learn how to time, not using American anounts of oil and when it is time to get the pan or pot of the heat.
And no, no plastic anything IN the oven.
This doesn't include time to meal plan, grocery shop, and clean dishes. Also, 15 minutes isn't a ton of time, but it isn't nothing.
For the rest, having your groceries delivered is one solution. Life is about trade-offs.
Instant oatmeal I guess? Anything requiring dairy or eggs won’t work.
If you can't find 30 mins to make a meal, lowering that to 15 mins isn't going to make a difference. Just get up 30 mins earlier if it comes to that.
If you can't do that, then yeah ... you might be part of the .005% of people who are really in a bind, and physically cannot cook for themselves. My advice does not apply to such cases, and I can only give you my sincerest best-wishes.
This isnt an issue of whether people can physically move.
These are the basic staples I use personally. Three meals a day, hand-cooked from scratch. Add to that something pre and post workout consisting of whey protein, fresh fruit, and possibly some maltodextrin or blended frozen berries, that don't need to be cooked, and that's my entire diet.
I never had to take a home ec class and my mom did not teach me to cook. The basics are pretty simple. Apply heat until what you're heating is sufficiently palatable or above a safe temperature for meats that is indicated directly on the thermometer. Working from home is pretty key, though, since I don't have to eat super early in the morning, super late at night, or reheat a soggy lunch in the break room microwave. I guess a more powerful stove helps, as it doesn't take me anywhere near 7 minutes to bring a pot to boiling.
- Buy the best ingredients you can
- Taste and smell as you go
- Don't overcook
Following these three rules will allow for culinary experimentation, while avoiding disaster.
Final bit of advice: enjoy it. It's fun to make something delicious, especially after a hard day full of "emotional labor" and whatnot.
Don't be afraid to fail. The worst what can be is what you would wait for a pizza delivery while you are scrubbing pots.
No snapshots and backups there!
Is that because you're vegan, or because you think it takes a long time?
I'll be having an omelette for dinner this evening and if it takes me more than 10 or so minutes to prepare, I'll be quite surprised.
My diet is basically vegan + meat. (Easiest way to explain it.)
Stir-fry meat and vegetables can be quite tasty and quick to prepare.
Something like mustard greens or gai lan[0] can be shredded by hand in a few moments and/or cut up almost as quickly.
Mushrooms (whole if you're in a rush, or sliced -- that only takes a minute or so), tofu (i prefer firm tofu), are also quite nice for such a dish.
And you can grill your meat/fish/poultry and saute your vegetables too.
Fresh fruit is also quite tasty.
I guess my point is that one can make tasty, healthful food quickly and easily, even if you have dietary restrictions.
In fact, those with dietary restrictions are likely better off cooking than eating prepared/pre-processed foods, as you don't have any insight/control over the kitchen/factory in which those foods are prepared.
Not telling you what to do, just sharing my experiences. I hope you find them useful.
Almost always the actual time for "15-minute meal" is 30-40 minutes—sometimes even longer. Not counting stuff like clean-up (any that you can't accomplish via clean-as-you-go, anyway) or shopping or any of that, just the actual time between "I have all the stuff I need for this recipe and am going to make it now" and "OK it is ready to eat".
Fortunately, 15 min start-to-finish recipes exist. And once you have four or five under your belt, it becomes something of a pleasure to extend the 15 mins to 20 (or even 30) and make something better. At least, when you have the time, which for me is on Sunday.
If you already have diced onion, bell peppers, and mushrooms in the fridge, then it doesn't even take fifteen minutes to make an omelette, a salad, or some sauteed vegetables with sausage.
The only thing that you need is that after bringing groceries home you need to prep the vegetables and put them in the fridge. The good thing is that all that labor is amortized for the rest of the week, and it makes home cooking easier and faster than ordering delivery.
It takes even more time for people preparing food for a family. Throw in kids who are picky eaters, and it is even harder.
Yep. I never understood the whole "my kids won't eat $x" thing.
When I was a kid, i ate what was given to me (which was the same as everyone else got) or I didn't eat.
And not because we were poor and couldn't afford to indulge me either. We were a family and ate the same food together. There was never any discussion or expectation of anything different.
Maybe they would have broken after a few more days of starvation, but I didn't have it in me to do it.
We have gotten to a better place now. She still will rarely eat what we eat (unless it is on one of her 3-4 meals that she will eat), but there are some healthy (enough) staples that she will eat when we eat our meal... strangely, she likes plain, uncooked, beans from a can with plain rice. She eats berries, and likes to eat plain, uncooked, spinach. She is also more open to trying new foods now, although she almost always dislikes them; our only ask of her is that she at least tries something before refusing it. If it was up to her, she would eat nothing but pizza or chicken nuggets for dinner.
She is 6, and it is an ongoing process to get her to eat more things. She complains that most food is too 'spicy', even if it isn't spicy at all. I don't think there is some magic cure that would make her eat a wider variety of foods. Her grandfather is similar, he only eats the most bland food possible.
But yeah, it's absolutely not as simple or easy as, "Well, if ya don't eat you'll be hungry" - because congratulations, now they will carry that hatred towards that food with them and it'll come out the next time you serve it to them. And even then, if they're not picky, cooking still takes time because there's a kid running around who often doesn't give a shit about the fact that you have to tend to whatever's cooking at the moment, or they're too little so you need to modify your food prep in order to eliminate/reduce choking hazards.
The crux of my point was to highlight that parenting is never as simplistic as the previous comment ("All ya have to do is tell them to eat or go hungry!") may have made it sound, not to suggest that you can mold your children exactly as you would like.
Edit: And your point about some kids being pickier than others is actually exactly my point. That's why I said it's not easy - it has taken a lot of time and patience for us to get our children to this point. I've heard stories of parents struggling for over a year or more to get a kid to break certain eating habits. It's not just picky eating, though - correcting various aspects of a child's personality requires a LOT of time and attention, often over the course of years. That's why I took an issue with OP brushing it off so casually.
Works. 100% guaranteed. They will eat everything with a smile
In my case, I use the Tio de Nadal, which makes for a fun time when he visits (Kids have to hit the Tio with a stick and sing songs, then he shits sweets and toys)
Not to sound harsh, this is just how I frame these sorts of things for my own benefit: If you have free time and are getting takeout or eating hot pockets, you're just borrowing that time from the end of your lifespan to use between work and sleep. It's like borrowing from a 401k on a fixed income.
Speaking of, the same goes for finances. We feel like certain essentials are disproportionately expensive because we can otherwise afford previously unheard of luxuries on average incomes, but we are actually just much less wealthy than consumerism makes us feel.
So if we live wisely and with discipline, it is quickly obvious that time and money are in much shorter supply than most realize. That isn't necessarily grim, but this framing is much more useful in good habit forming in my experience.
The value culture in the West has so quickly changed in only a generation or two depending on the specific region, that I'm more suspicious over time of the perceived unobtainability of certain ways of living that we frequently romanticize.
I just throw in Chicken Thighs, Rice, Frozen Vegetables. Add water. Set for 7 minutes. Come back to several servings of perfectly cooked food. Add things like peanut sauce and seasoning to taste before or after pressurization.
Total human involvement time to prep, monitor, and serve: about 5 minutes, ingredients are available at any Walmart. Electric pressure cookers are regularly on sale for $40 at Best Buy.
Cooking the same meal using pots and pans would take 60 minutes of human time and require many more pieces of equipment to buy, use and wash.
Give every poor household in the USA an electric pressure cooker, and the instructions on how to use them. Poor households wouldn't even need cooktops or ovens anymore.
There are plenty of less complicated, one pot meal recipes littering the internet. Have you tried an Instapot or a nice air fryer?
find a recipe
get the ingredients
make the meal
So most of the time I just substitute on pasta with a tomato/cucumber/whatelseIgrabbedintheshop salad.
~20 mins to shop for a two-three days worth of food, ~20 mins to make, even less if I'm lazy and bouggt frozen dumplings.
If you're making a single serving (e.g. single dinner for yourself), then the overhead of cleaning dishes and pans makes it uneconomical to do so.
Also, certain things in cooking don't need supervision and you can perform other chores during that time (e.g. making beef/chicken stock in a pot, baking a roast, etc.)
I spend 1 hour every two weeks getting groceries for ~$120. I spend 1.5 hours every two weeks (5 minutes a day + 20 minutes to prep 14 “containers”) preparing breakfast and rinsing dishes from the previous day for the dishwasher). My breakfast is cooked oat bran with walnuts, flax seed, wheat germ, Ceylon cinnamon, cacao, blueberries, raisins, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, 4oz orange juice, fish oil, vitamins d3, k2.
I spend 2.5 hours a week (5 to 15 minutes a day) preparing lunch, typically steamed vegetables + 150 grams chicken + 1 cup dry instant brown rice cooked OR salmon + simple salad + sweet potatoes OR 8oz unsalted black beans with fresh guacamole OR lentils OR potato and egg tacos with homemade salsa OR “fried” rice, etc.
I spend the same preparing dinner with same / similar dishes as lunch.
I also snack on fresh fruit / vegetables between meals sometimes.
Roughly $240 and 15 hours a month (30 minutes a day) for all food prep + cleanup, and yes, the numbers are accurate as I have timed myself over a two week period in the past, if anything I’m probably faster now. I’m sure there are other factors that can add extra time, but for me, a single guy in the US, I spend less time and money cooking healthy delicious meals at home than I did going out to eat, and only slightly more time than heating up frozen dinners, which I think is more than compensated for by the resulting health benefits.
So I don't disagree with you, but I think there's a faster, easier way now than home ec.
And to Suemoto, every nontrivial thing you cook takes waaaaay longer than getting a $9 burrito.
You can do it, but the result won't be good until you practise some. Mistakes will be made. Results may have to be eaten due to financial constraints, good or not.
Students should grow, harvest and cook their own food. While doing so, every subject should be involved.
Chemistry and Biology are the more obvious ones for sake of soil testing, plant biology, cross pollination, and composting. Chemistry also should be involved in cooking.
Math and science classes for sake of grids, spacing, growth charting, control groups, etc as well as conservation.
Economics for understanding all of the costs involved from planting, to harvesting, to buying equipment and hiring labor, shipping to grocery stores, disposal of food that isn't purchased. Additionally, budgeting for ingredients to prepare meals.
History can bring a lot of this to life by studying agricultural history and the accompanying economics, including the world events surrounding them. I'm sure there's plenty of literature go to along with it as well.
And you can even get into computer science, engineering and robotics by setting up FarmBot's in schools, which are open source. Students can learn to use them as designed as well as program new functionality.
Help students learn by making it both beneficial, relatable and connected.
Pro tip: If they teach Vo-Ag in your area, look for the FFA (Future Farmers of America) kids. They fund-raise by selling wonderful produce.