Ultra-processed food consumption, cancer risk and cancer mortality | Hacker News Reader

Ultra-processed food consumption, cancer risk and cancer mortality

thelancet.com

38 pointsbookofjoe29 comments

I really want to see more fine grained research on UPF that splits it into categories. If you control for the carbohydrates and calories, eliminate anything that's been fried at high temperature, and nitrate preserved meat, is it still unhealthy? What if you further control for BMI to eliminate the effect where people eat more processed food because the taste makes you keep eating?

Some preservatives and artificial additives seem to have safety studies showing they're at least not 1987 margarine levels of bad. I don't see why a long list of ingredients would be a problem by itself,and some processed tech should in theory be able to reduce the calories with fillers and might even be beneficial.

I could see grinding as being inherently problematic the same way juicing can be, but other than that, I'm pretty confused.

Eery study seems to show ultraprocessed food is bad. But I still have no idea if uotraprocessing is inherently unhealthy, or it just so happens that 99% of ultraprocessed food is made of horrible things?

There doesn't seem to be a precise definition of processed food.

Not to say industrial food is healthy, but it really depends what "processed" means.

Bread is processed, but I'm not sure this what it means?

There are unhealthy additives and sugar dosages and fat qualities, but it's a bit misleading to just say "processed". Home cooking is processed, yet it didn't imply eating raw food is better.

My personal definition comes from how understandable the ingredients are. In the bread example, it’s just flour, salt, water, yeast, and sugar (in some breads). The bread I have at home contains soy lecithin. I know that’s an emulsifier but I don’t understand how it’s made. A quick Google search says it’s made with solvents like hexane, so I would consider that highly processed. Overall, I would consider my bread moderately processed compared to a loaf of sourdough. Now compare Velveeta to real cheese. There are many things in Velveeta I don’t understand that likely have complicated derivations.

This sort of reasoning would fall apart if ingredient labels at a molecular level were put on "whole" foods, most of which (including bread) will have hundreds to thousands of chemicals that you won't recognize. Almost invariably, some of those will be associated with cancer.

Being able to design food using mostly pure ingredients should be a way of assuring safety but it triggers a labeling requirement that might lead consumers to believe that the chemical is novel and was not previously found in food.

Another way of describing soy lethicin (if the source is soybeans) would be "a fraction of soybean oil".

> This sort of reasoning would fall apart if ingredient labels at a molecular level were put on "whole" foods

We don’t make or label food on the molecular level, so the reasoning doesn’t fall apart.

What we don't label can't hurt you, I guess.

What is harming you that currently isn’t labeled?

How would you know if it is not labeled?

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/molecules/special_issues/analys...

It's a euphemism for the hyperpalatable packaged foods that are bad for us that most of us struggle with.

It's kind of like how nobody who says "I need to cut back on carbs" is talking about steel cut oats and black beans.

i recently read "processed" meant not possible in a normal kitchen (which is still vague)

I couldn’t find in this paper the ingredients behind the processed foods. I’m still confused as to what the element variables are that make it bad. Surely it can be described. What is the spectrum of ultra to moderately processed foods? I wish the more knowledgeable scientists out there can define the common denominators. Or are we left to just avoid all grocery store shelf foods?

FTA: "Food items consumed were categorized according to their degree of food processing using the NOVA food classification system"

If you search "NOVA food classification system" there is a PDF guide as the first link.

From the paper

> Recent evidence from the NutriNet-Santé cohort showed higher intake of artificial sweeteners associated with increased risk of overall, breast, and obesity-related cancers

The cited journal article

> In this large cohort of 102,865 French adults, artificial sweeteners (especially aspartame and acesulfame-K) were associated with increased overall cancer risk (hazard ratio [HR] for higher consumers compared to non-consumers = 1.13 [95% CI 1.03 to 1.25], P-trend = 0.002).

I wonder what the general consensus is on artificial sweeteners.

Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8946744/#:~:tex...).

This is a complicated subject to me because I loathe the type of regressive attitude that comes with "I won't eat anything that has an ingredient I can't pronounce!" but at the same time we cannot and should not trust large corporations to produce food that is safe for us. They've shown time and time again that as long as the effects are not immediately and can't be easily traced back to them, they do not care.

It doesn't really matter if you can pronounce the names. If something has many ingredients it is a cost optimization problem and a shelf life optimization problem where a company is trying to collect more money for management than for the raw ingredients.

The odds that anything in the middle of the supermarket is of the same quality as or cheaper than the individual ingredients around the sides is basically zero. If its ingredients are not sold individually there's good odds that they are purely for one of the optimization problems and are a health risk.

Even if you don't share it, I'm curious why you loathe that attitude.

There is a way out. I'm not buying supermarket flour anymore and making your own bread with a bread machine is super easy (and very tasty). I have learned so much from this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Home-Ground-Flour-Book-Tech...

If you want even tastier bread I'd recommend Ken Forkish - Flour Water Salt Yeast.

I started baking bread after moving to Canada because American/Canadian bread is horrific.

It was never as good as the bread in Germany or France though.

After Reading this book I was able to make better bread than I can find at almost any bakery in Germany.

I'd also recommend The Fresh Loaf (thefreshloaf.com) and the Chain Baker on YouTube. The latter is a gold mine for understanding how certain ingredients and techniques will effect your end result.

I oscillate between making bread by hand and by machine. Both are incredibly time, money, and energy efficient and the end results are better than anything you can buy in a supermarket, and in many cases, bakeries. I cannot recommend them enough for anyone looking to eat, uh, holistically while being frugal.

I recently started baking large miches (e.g. 4kg 90% whole wheat/10% whole rye sourdough boules) because I'd rather bake once a week instead of heating a somewhat large oven daily and I prefer heartier bread during the winter. The actual time investment for preparing the dough is minimal, especially with a few tricks up your sleeve (namely, cold bulk fermentation and letting time build your gluten with periodic folds).

What's wrong with grocery store flour? I don't think that's what they mean by "processed foods", do they?

Flour is generally in the minimally-processed category [1, 2]. But grocery store flour has the problem that its too white. In principle, we should consume whole wheat flour, to ensure we obtain all micro-nutrients from it.

[1] https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/CA5644EN.pdf

[2] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?search_terms=f...

Gotcha, that makes sense. I thought the "grocery store" part was the problem. Thanks.

Yeah… Flour has got to be some of the lesser processed of all the possible processed foods out there.

Crop dessication is the biggest issue with conventionally sourced flour--namely pesticide residues.

Does anyone have a preferred resource for someone who wants to learn more about what a “processed” or “ultra processed” food is? The nova scale seems pretty vague but I get the point.

I could probably tell the difference on the shelf with good accuracy but I’d like to add a little more rigor. Like, what brands, compounds, etc to stay away from?

This is the standard https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova You can search for products using the search box at the top.

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