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Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

Like the author I'm certainly glad I don't have to churn my own butter, but this attitude could easily be taken too far. A recent study "found a significant association between unprocessed or minimally processed foods and lower risks of all reported diseases."

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-evidence-links-ultr...

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My thoughts as well.

You don't need to spend an entire day in the kitchen to prepare yourself a few meals with unprocessed or minimally processed foods: frozen or fresh veggies, dairy products, eggs, raw meat, or fish with about 20 mins of cooking, frying, or boiling and you have yourself a few meals.

Its actually cheaper than eating out and if you apply meal prep on a weekly basis, like I do, it doesn't even take too much of your time.

of course it's cheaper than eating out, it's like an order of magnitude difference usually

the weekly approach is especially efficient. one tip i've seen but never tried is to use a deep freeze to interleave different weeks, so within a given week you might cook three dishes but, by eating food you'd frozen over the previous 7 weeks, eat 21 different dishes

While processed foods consumption correlates with diseases, it's likely because food that's processed outside of your house typically includes ingredients (or preparation method) that either make it last longer or taste better at the expense of your health.

But that doesn't mean that processing is always harmful. Frozen fish is considered "processed", but freezing also kills parasites.

I'm guessing the study authors would include frozen fish in their "minimally processed" category.

There's no reason why a certain preservative can't have positive health effects. Pretty sure a lot of them do, we just don't talk about it.

Essentially this leads to a useless circular definition: "processed" food is bad for your health because we define "processed" as being bad for your health. A statement "unprocessed food is good for your health" contains zero information.

"Food that is bad for your health" is not the definition used in the studies I linked. They provide their actual definitions, and measure health outcomes from varying levels of reported consumption.

So if you want to access a non-zero amount of information, the bottom of that article has links to the full-text studies.

Pretty sure freezing in general is a form of processing that destroys some protein and nutrients. Hence why fresh vegetables taste better than frozen vegetables.

There are lots of reasons different types of processing could reduce healthiness of food.

Plant cells have rigid cell walls and are damaged more by freezing than animal cells

I’m in a number of autoimmune groups. While drugs often work. Sometimes very well, sometimes not. Diet often gets the best results.

Things like autoimmune protocol diet are amazing at reducing pain and fatigue.

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