Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline
cam.mbi.ufl.edu
cam.mbi.ufl.edu
However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.
Better food items will get caught in the crossfire of someone naively avoiding the worse "processed foods", but maybe that's still a net win.
Even your fancy nuts example, if one of the main problems with ultra-processed foods is that they are hyperpalatable, then I see good reason to avoid fancy nuts (nuts with an oil + salt coating) and eating raw nuts instead. It's easy enough to overeat raw nuts!
The stuff made to sit on the supermarket's shelf for long times has such an odd consistency and flavor, very spongy and very tangy and sweet, you can't spread anything on it without toasting it first. I wouldn't take it as the standard for bread.
Additionally, you can buy sourdough, which tend to have longer shelf life then yeast breads.
It's remarkable easy to bake your own bread (as many tried in during the pandemic). Yeah, it takes time, but it's a good way to reduce your carbs intake. i.e. if you don't bake it, you can't eat it.
Each bread I bake is cut in half (even before I taste it) and put in the freezer for next soup time.
Is that a climate thing? In my (temperate) experience, bread lasts for several days, even in summer.
Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
We've got ~20 million people who don't live near a grocery store with fresh food at all.
heh... we have over fresh bakery shops IN EVERY STREET so you are no more than 10 house lengths away from one. It has no yeast, around 3% is salt but is made fresh and goes bad in hours so it is consumed HOT. I wonder if stuff like our centuries old tech can be replicated in more "modern" nations?
Hyper-Local stores would only keep most essential in demand products while you'd have to go out and buy from big stores something niche.
Add the ingredients in the evening and enjoy fresh bread in the morning.
Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it.
The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.
You need to be there for a large part of the process. The first mixing and kneading takes the longest, maybe 5 minutes. After that every 20 minutes you need to come and fold for a minute 3 times. After that, let it rest for 8-16h (depending on dough temperature, amount of yeast, environment temperature). Then you do another 2 minutes of work. Half an hour later preheat the oven. Half an hour later put it in.
Doing this over night you save a lot of time. I.e. you can start at 8pm and finish by 8am-9am if you wake up at 6am. But a lot of people can't stay home that long in the morning.
So it's very little work in essence, but it's spread over a whole day. Perfect if you work remotely. Takes less time than most coffee breaks. But you need to be home.
If you have time on the weekends only you can do amazing bread and freeze it. I prepped it on Friday or Saturday evenings, baked it the next morning. Cut and froze it and had enough for the week. That's how I survived in Canada.
But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.
Or is this just that you don't think I should use the word "hard" to mean "pain in the ass"? It comes out of your money/time budget either way.
> Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day.
and
> But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.
Which I have two thoughts on, first, I'm pretty sure most people are buying bread at the grocery store. So, the availability of fresh bread (which is also frequently available in the grocery store bakery) has more to do with lack of demand than it does with lack of availability. It seems like the convenience of pre-sliced bread that doesn't go bad in a couple days is just vastly preferred over fresh bread.
As for the local bakeries, I'd argue that those bakeries exist because they bake a variety of bread (and cakes) that are more involved than simple bread. I'd be shocked if the majority of the money they make wasn't from specialty items with wide margins.
The top level point I'm trying to get across has to do with the article and top level comment though, fresh bread is available to anybody with an extra few minutes every couple days. And, frankly, if you're doing any amount of cooking during the day, you can do it at the same time. There's usually some down time in a recipe that you could sneak in throwing a few ingredients into a mixer. Or put it together while watching whatever netflix show you're watching or podcast you're listening to.
Bread was certainly much more work but a stand mixer is not that expensive, especially compared to the amount of time it will save you if you cook semi-frequently (and even better if you make the bread you eat frequently). There are a plethora of modern conveniences that make bread so much easier to make than it used to be (and it was already pretty easy...).
No my point is that going to the grocery store daily or near daily for fresh bread adds like an hour of time to my day, because there's no very close grocery store. Not even talking about a dedicated bakery
That said, a DIY/health POV, what's given here (no yeast) can be relatively quick.
However there is some amount of time commitment that I think might be hard if you don't have the luxury of working from home or being/having a stay at home partner.
The second best thing might be using a bread baking machine, that takes most of the work from you. It doesn't taste as good, but it's similarly healthy I'd guess.
A tiny bit of practice and perspective change to get something you like and you can have fresh bread daily for the rest of your life.
Talking about processed bread, here is an example from Sam's Club [0] for sourdough boules, at $6 for four (about 1kg total). The ingredient list contains nothing ultra-processed.
[0]: Soudough boules at Sam's Club https://www.samsclub.com/p/members-mark-sourdough-boules-4-c...
That is the problem, people aren't going to take the effort to look.
That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into the country and that MIGHT have an impact long term. They have legitimate and affordable fresh bread.
https://www.walmart.com/tp/bread
This is Walmart's store brand (as cheap as possible): https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Wheat-Sandwich-Bread-...
Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Whole Wheat Flour, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% or less of the following: Soybean Oil, Wheat Bran, Salt, Vital Wheat Gluten, Molasses, Calcium Propionate (Preservative) Vinegar, Dough Conditioners (Monoglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Sulfate, Enzymes), Potassium Iodate, Monocalcium Phosphate
I just don't even understand how that works, even if you have enough income, how do you have enough space to like store all the trash for the week?
Don't you just get tired of restraunt food at some point?
In most cities there are usually many options for restaurants nearby and Uber Eats for anything further out. For everyone else there's McDonalds and friends: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/ranking-top-50-fast-food...
They charge a fee if you do that in my county, and the "flat rate" is dependent on the size of your bin, as a proxy for how much trash you generate. If you have more trash than fits in your bin you have to buy stickers for the extra bags to pay for them to be picked up.
Where are you? I'm in the US
Garland TX, a suburb of Dallas, has a flat rate per bin, with free curbside large item/landscaping waste twice a month. Throw your old washing machine on the curb and move on with your life!
My mother in law, lives about 50 miles outside the DFW Metroplex and pays a flat rate based on the average of her trash usage. She rolls 2 bins up to the curb once a week. She can put more out and they will take it, but if she consistently puts out more trash, they will bill her extra when it comes time to renew every year. The guys on the trash truck keep a rolling tally of your "usage" and then the office works out who needs to pay more if the customer skews towards more usage than they signed up for.
I live in Europe now and moved here last year. I pay $12 PER PICKUP for residential trash here in the Netherlands. The catch? They pickup that bin ONCE every TWO MONTHS. If I want to throw more stuff away, I need to somehow transport all my trash to the local dump, pay a fee, and unload and sort it all myself.
On a more positive note though, recycling plastic is free. Some of my neighbors generate an entire large bag of plastic every day. My wife and I fill up one bag a week. Our "normal trash" bin is usually half full when it's time for pickup.
Pricing for waste is largely dependent on the municipality as well here in the Netherlands.
My household typically throws away 3 or 4 ten gallons bags per week leaving the bin maybe a quarter full. The neighbors across the street are constantly having food delivered and routinely fill two bins.
Besides asking for studies that may or may not be there, what was your experience with this? I hadn't heard of this before.
Not OP, but I've lost >100 lb. three separate times in my life, so I suppose I qualify.
It affects you in ways that are analogous to overindulging in adult entertainment.
You need higher peaks (e.g. more salt) and, in my experience at least, you gradually lose the ability to pick out subtle flavors.
You start to prefer food that you can scale as you see fit. Lots of rice. Lots of potatoes. Lots of popcorn.
> Today, 82 percent of the meals Americans eat are prepared at home, a much higher percentage than a decade ago, according to research from NPD Group Inc. cited by Bloomberg.
Uncited comments on HN are frequently confidently incorrect, especially when they are descriptions of average American culture
Maybe if you're a highly paid SWE in California with endless takeout options you never cook but that's an absurd proposition for flyover country
https://www.foodnetwork.com/fn-dish/news/2018/9/americans-ar...
The vast majority of the people I see actually buying produce at the grocery store are older people and immigrants. Almost everyone else is buying the processed crap in the aisles.
This is the crux of the matter: we can only buy what is on our shelves. If we have to start looking at ingredients lists, I think we've already lost the plot. Why are these questionable things on our shelves in the first place? Likely because they're cheaper to make, or worse, there's some government subsidy involved. And I don't mean "questionable" as in plain junk food, because even then, we have to decipher labeling like chocolate vs "chocolate flavored candy". It can be hard to try to be reasonably healthy once you leave the the edge of the super market.
Here in Southern California there are plenty of food desserts that sit adjacent to immigrant enclaves that provide critical mass for amazing grocery stores with a wide variety of higher quality, cheap produce and a diverse collection of nutritious processed and ultraprocessed food simply because that's the stuff that their communities demand. Replacing such a supermarket with a McDonalds would never work within these communities because most families simply don't consider fast food an alternative to their existing diets. These are huge supermarkets that are often similar in size to Costco or Walmart stores (see Shun Fat, 99 Ranch, Zion Market, etc).
We could do with a little more culinary elitism among consumers in my opinion.
If you think American cuisine consists of massive chains; TGI Fridays, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Hooters, Texas Roadhouse, etc, then no wonder you don't think highly of American cusine. But if you branch out from there, there's a ton of food culture, and Southern California's a great place to experience it.
If people want to stay ignorant and economically and nutritionally disadvantaged it’s not something I pity. I can’t but help feeling disgusted and scornful toward people with these attitudes. Cave people made bread.
You can prepare and freeze meals.
It also costs $5+ a loaf when you can get the cheap stuff for $1-$2, so a lot of people just wouldn’t spend the money anyways because they don’t know or care about the difference.
Other than that I agree with your critique. It's as unhelpful as a typical California proposition 65 warning.
CICO would have you believe there is no difference in 100 calories of coke and 100 calories of raw spinach, but the coke is going to have nearly instant uptake and the spinach will take hours to digest.
I'm using classification system called [NOVA]<http://archive.wphna.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WN-2016-...> that was developed by an international panel of food scientists and researchers. It splits foods into four categories:
Unprocessed or minimally processed foods: Think vegetables, grains, legumes, fruits, nuts, meats, seafood, herbs, spices, garlic, eggs and milk.
Processed foods: When ingredients such as oil, sugar or salt are added to foods and they are packaged, the result is processed foods. Examples are simple bread, cheese, tofu, and canned tuna or beans. These foods have been altered, but not in a way that’s detrimental to health.
Ultra-processed foods: These foods go through multiple processes (extrusion, molding, milling, etc.), contain many added ingredients and are highly manipulated. Examples are soft drinks, chips, chocolate, candy, ice-cream, sweetened breakfast cereals, packaged soups, chicken nuggets, hotdogs, fries and more.
You can, you've just prioritized taste/convenience over your health. Going into a supermarket and looking at what people put into their carts pretty much confirms this.
> a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed
Maybe read the labels? Also buying the cheapest thing there (w/o reading the labels) is also not a good idea.
If you're buying nuts and it has nut-x, plus a whole bunch of salt, a whole bunch of sugar, plus a whole bunch of chemicals that one glosses over, then there's a big chance that it's ultra-processed and/or something you shouldn't eat/buy.
Buying nuts in bulk is probably the best. Adding you're own spices/favors will make it super apparent on what you're consuming.
Food companies are trying to maximize profits, shelf life by adding crap to make the cheapest product. It's been obvious for a very long time.
To me it is more counterproductive not to label it as such, regardless that it may be highly nutritional, due to the fact that people like me who are not able to eat processed food and information like this is a literal life saver.
How so? I eat organic veggies, organic meat, nothing with added sugars, from time to time I drink a glass of organic wine. It's absolutely not difficult to avoid anything "ultra-processed" (I dislike this term which is ehnancing something not strictly defined) or even store-bought "processed".
In fact, the only, in any way, "processed" food I eat are things I make myself: veggies baked with turkey, chicken and beef, blended, portioned and frozen. No preservatives other than fat and reasonably small amounts of salt (and with sodium, I also ingest potassium). Eating healthy is fairly easy (although more expensive) and avoiding shitty food is really not hard to achieve.
You can easily double or triple your food costs if you're getting most of your calories from organic veggies and non-grain-fed animals.
Maybe at the beginning of this lifestyle it was somewhat difficult and there was some fight inside me (hard not to buy sweets at the store counter etc) but it fairly quickly turned into subconscious, almost mechanical way of doing things.
It's similar to addiction detox: when I ditched smoking (after 20+ years), it was hard at the beginning, there was this feeling of lacking something "important" but it diminished over time. There's no way I'd even consider smoking a cigarette or eating sugary and fatty sweets after few years. I stopped being compatible with those things.
We are in the 1960s smoking phase of bad diets. It is hard to escape terrible junk foods at just about any place that serves anything edible.
I believe that time and energy are what many Americans are running in too short of supply on to transition to more wholesome diets. Most have so much on their plates to deal with already that the idea of thinking about additional things they technically don't have to is unappealing, even if it's at the cost of their own health. It's why ultraprocessed foods became so common in the first place.
It's just another microcosm of a culture that's obsessed with productivity and has little resembling proper work-life balance.
Agreed.. A thought pattern I've tried to adopt is "Best time to fix your health is today rather than when you've had a heart attack or diagnosed with type-2 diabetes"
Too many people are getting health related diseases (because of diet/exercise)
this is 'ultra processed' food that is defined by NOVA classification system.
https://educhange.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NOVA-Classi...
It's a classification system promoted by a single research group in Brazil (Monteiro et al).
> A singular feature of NOVA is its identification of ultra-processed food and drink products. These are not modified foods, but formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes (hence ‘ultra-processed’). All together, they are energy-dense, high in unhealthy types of fat, refined starches, free sugars and salt, and poor sources of protein, dietary fibre and micronutrients. Ultra-processed products are made to be hyper-palatable and attractive, with long shelf-life, and able to be consumed anywhere, any time.
Previously we would just call this "junk food" rather than make some insinuation about "processing," which is still undefined and without meaning.
Processed can be fine as long as you use healthy ingredients. Ultra-processed is never fine.
Well, that's because they are. The question is why they are unhealthy.
Take an Apple. You eat it, it is healthy.
Slice it. You eat the slices, it's not making much of a difference. You are still eating whole chunks.
Make juice out of it. NOW it is no longer healthy. Not only because you have shredded fibers (so the fructose will absorb faster) but you are probably going to drink many more apples than you otherwise would. And your gut bacteria will be unhealthy. You are probably still fine if you drink a small amount.
Add sugar to it - now it's extremely unhealthy and it's basically a coke but with more nutrients and it's not healthy in any amount.
Or take rice. Cook the rice - fine. Polish the rice before cooking so you have white rice: no longer fine.
Food that's unprocessed, there's very little restrictions. You are going to get full eating them anyway, so it's fine. As you increase the amount of processing, you should eat less and less of them.
> high calorie soda
Note that calories are only relevant to laboratories. Living organisms work very differently. Calories are not fungible. An almond has a similar calorie content as a soda can, but it doesn't matter: we do not absorb all the calories in an almond. It's a similar thing when you eat an avocado: it's very calorie-dense, but a lot of it is in fats that will be absorbed very slowly.
Even simple sugars work very differently from one another. Our cells can readily use glucose(that will require insulin). Our cells, with very few exceptions, cannot use fructose. It goes straight to your liver to be processed by fructokinase. Most of it will actually become triglycerides and you will only burn that when you are burning fat. That process also takes a lot of energy(basically you get into debt to be repaid later). There's also a limited amount your liver can process and that's why people are getting fatty livers even without drinking - from the point of view of your liver, you might as well be drinking.
I don’t really know much about this topic but I always assumed additives were a much greater problem than white rice, white bread, etc.
I eat mostly fish/veggies/fruit/rice, but sometimes I have pasta (and worse, sometimes I have cookies). In general, I've worked to shift my diet to unprocessed (or processed but not ultra) foods over time. Being cognizant of it is helpful at restaurants, too - I love all kinds of food, so more often than not, going with the least processed option is a helpful decider among menu items.
Can you explain a bit why? Isn't what you eat your choice? What's the problem, exactly, I really don't understand why you have nearly zero chance.
You also have to want to do it; it's far easier to eat whatever is convenient than to put effort into finding ingredients and cooking them. The problem is that what is convenient is _not_ good for you long term, at least in the US (and at least several other western countries). A good diet is fundamental to good health (both physical and mental) - you'd think this would be axiomatic, but there are plenty of people who don't care enough for whatever reason.
It's not that it's hard to understand, it's just hard to stick to it.
My mother has early onset dementia. Her habits were very healthy for 30+ years (quit drinking, quit smoking, daily exercise, lifetime healthy BMI, moderate diet) and otherwise physically she is in extremely good shape for her age. But one of the early, subtle signs of her cognitive decline was a reluctance to cook real meals. She now has progressed to a state where she can still use a smartphone or laptop for basic tasks, but isn't able to cook any sort of complex recipe from scratch, even one she previously did from memory. Seems pretty obvious to me that it's just as likely that cognitive decline causes an inability in older adults to plan and cook healthy meals, not the other way around.
In her case, retirement and being unmarried/socially isolated during COVID lockdowns obviously contributed to a more rapid progression in decline. But you would never say that social isolation causes Alzheimer's. There are many other people with active social lives and happy marriages who get early dementia. The same is almost certainly true with diet.
How much "processing" a potato chip gets (slice, fry, salt) is a whole lot different than one of the meat substitute burgers.
It seems like anything done on an industrial scale is evil and anything done in your kitchen is fine, despite the two being very similar in many cases.
Either there's a problem with specific ingredients or people are just getting very poor nutrition by eating diets very heavy in fortified grain based foods and the "daily value" suggestions for micronutrients aren't being appropriately satisfied by the vitamin powder they put in these foods or the list of requirements is missing many things.
Studies like this aren't so helpful because they don't actually point to anything specific. We need to find actual mechanisms not vague hints at what might be wrong.
> For example, you could eat a burger and fries from a fast food chain, which would be high in fat, sugar and salt as well as being ultra-processed. You could make that same meal at home, which could also be high in fat, sugar and salt but would not be ultra-processed. More research is needed to determine whether one is worse than the other.
source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S247529912...
There may be additional steps when a factory makes potato chips. [1]
1 When the potatoes arrive at the plant, they are examined and tasted for quality. A half dozen or so buckets are randomly filled. Some are punched with holes in their cores so that they can be tracked through the cooking process. The potatoes are examined for green edges and blemishes. The pile of defective potatoes is weighed; if the weight exceeds a company's preset allowance, the entire truckload can be rejected.
2 The potatoes move along a conveyer belt to the various stages of manufacturing. The conveyer belts are powered by gentle vibrations to keep breakage to a minimum.
3 The potatoes are loaded into a vertical helical screw conveyer which allows stones to fall to the bottom and pushes the potatoes up to a conveyer belt to the automatic peeling machine. After they have been peeled, the potatoes are washed with cold water.
4 The potatoes pass through a revolving impaler/presser that cuts them into paper-thin slices, between 0.066-0.072 in (1.7-1.85 mm) in thickness. Straight blades produce regular chips while rippled blades produce ridged potato chips.
5 The slices fall into a second cold-water wash that removes the starch released when the potatoes are cut. Some manufacturers, who market their chips as natural, do not wash the starch off the potatoes.
6 If the potatoes need to be chemically treated to enhance their color, it is done at this stage. The potato slices are immersed in a solution that has been adjusted for pH, hardness, and mineral content.
7 The slices pass under air jets that remove excess water as they flow into 40-75 ft (12.2-23 m) troughs filled with oil. The oil temperature is kept at 350-375°F (176.6-190.5°C). Paddles gently push the slices along. As the slices tumble, salt is sprinkled from receptacles positioned above the trough at the rate of about 1.75 lb (0.79 kg) of salt to each 100 lb (45.4 kg) of chips.
8 Potato chips that are to be flavored pass through a drum filled with the desired powdered seasonings.
9 At the end of the trough, a wire mesh belt pulls out the hot chips. As the chips move along the mesh conveyer belt, excess oil is drained off and the chips begin to cool. They then move under an optical sorter that picks out any burnt slices and removes them with puffs of air.
10 The chips are conveyed to a packaging machine with a scale. As the pre-set weight of chips is measured, a metal detector checks the chips once more for any foreign matter such as metal pieces that could have come with the potatoes or been picked up in the frying process.
11 The bags flow down from a roll. A central processing unit (CPU) code on the bag tells the machine how many chips should be released into the bag. As the bag forms, (heat seals the top of the filled bag and seals the bottom of the next bag simultaneously) gates open and allow the proper amount of chips to fall into the bag.
12 The filling process must be accomplished without letting an overabundance of air into the bag, while also preventing the chips from breaking. Many manufacturers use nitrogen to fill the space in the bags. The sealed bags are conveyed to a collator and hand-packed into cartons.
13 Some companies pack potato chips in I O cans of various sizes. The chips flow down a chute into the cans. Workers weigh each can, make any necessary adjustments, and attach a top to the can.
1 Grains and vegetables are loaded into separate machines for thorough cleansing to remove dirt, bacteria created by spoilage, chemical residue, and any other foreign materials that may exist. Some factories have conveyer belts that move the food products under high-pressure sprayers. Others use hollow drums that tumble the food while water is sprayed on it.
2 The base grain, whether it be whole wheat, rice, or beans, is cooked in large vats of water until softened. The resulting puree is strained, separating the product from excess water, and any remaining foreign matter.
3 The vegetables are diced into tiny pieces. In some factories, this is done by a machine that is calibrated to slice the vegetables into uniform sizes. Other, smaller companies, still do this by hand.
4 Pre-measured amounts of the grain puree and the diced vegetables are combined into an industrial mixing bowl that blends the ingredients thoroughly.
5 The mixture is then loaded into an automatic patty-making machine, or press. The press is a cylindrical device with several stacks of round molds topped by a plunger. When the plunger is depressed, the ground mixture is formed into patties.
6 The patties are loaded onto perforated baking trays, then placed in an oven for about an hour and a half at a preset temperature. Patties are quick-frozen
7 The trays are loaded into a freezing chamber in which the temperature is below the freezing point of 32° F (0° C). The goal is to freeze the patties in 30 minutes or less. Because vegetables contain a jelly-like protoplasm, the speedy processes promotes the formation of ice crystals through the tissues. When the patties are cooked, the water is reabsorbed as the ice crystals melt.
8 The patties are conveyed to a vacuum-packing machine which envelopes the patties in pre-measured plastic sleeves, drawing out the excess air and sealing each end. Then, they are loaded into pre-printed cardboard packages, usually four patties to a package. The frozen varieties are kept in temperature-controlled refrigerated compartments before and during shipment.
Seitan for example, is just plant based protein (flour), veggie stock and soya sauce, maybe baking powder and nutritional yeast for extra flavour & structure. 3-5 ingredients, mix & cook for a while, then use in any recipe instead of meat.
Deli meat? Just tofu and plant based protein, spices, cook & let cool down in the fridge.
Cheese? Plant based milk, starch/agar, spices, cook & fridge.
I don't think we need to parcel out the exact moment in processing where something becomes "ultra processed" since it's just a euphemism. It's like overly scrutinizing an analogy for contradiction instead of considering the point it's trying to make.
An obvious mechanism would be nutrient displacement as people fill up on calories without nutrients.
If you look at the nutrients that are good for our brain like foods that promote BDNF, those are the foods these people aren't eating. Look up any of the mechanisms where diet can improve cognitive function, cardiovascular health, brain health, and then consider that someone who displaces these foods with hyperpalatable trash will not get these benefits.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstr...
Of course, the scourge of paywalls prevents me from actually checking what definition the paper used.
What exactly does this mean? The potential energy in food measured by calories is in its macronutrients. No macronutrients, no calories.
Is it some kind of reference to micronutrients, phytochemicals, and the like which are reduced by processing activities like blanching?
Go to the supermarket and only buy things with one ingredient, cook and eat those things.
What qualifies? Vegetables, fruit, rice, beans, meat, etc.
ONE ingredient only.
(Technically raw sugar or lard qualify to be on my list, but I think most people who passed high school know those aren't food)
EDIT: well, yes raw sugar and lard are food, what I meant was you shouldn't be eating either in large quantities.
I'm with you on refined sugar, though, which is what I think you probably meant by raw sugar.
Knowing how to cook doesn't solve the underlying problem driving someone to use food as a drug.
I had laid many pots of Boeuf Bourguinon on my family's dinner table before I started shoving Big Macs into my face every night when I hit rock bottom.
I suppose this is something I mainly notice with people < 30. Chipotle is about the healthiest thing they eat & they legitimately have no idea how to cook. I didn’t really begin to learn or do it until I was 27 and pre-diabetic & that started turning things around for me pretty much immediately.
(Metabolical - Robert H. Lustig) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53240367-metabolical
(Drop Acid - David Perlmutter) https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57505860
They are both new books, by two different authors, they both rally against processed food (and talk at length about what processed food IS) and, crucially, they are adamantly against dietary sugar.
The tone of both of them was a bit off-putting to me at first: they try to spend time convincing you that the food we have today is terrible and, if you are already convinced of that like I was, it's a bit grating. But keep going, there's good nuggets all over.
I drink water, black coffee, and tea.
There might be a way to prepare food without additives at scale. Basically, prepare food traditionally like a human cook but use robotics. Pick and place in parallel instead of pushing food through pipes. Not sure if viable, but I'd be more willing to eat such food even if it'd be more expensive.
Lots of ingredients, minimal nutrition
Another way to look at it: You are not likely to find the ingredients that make up most of these foods in your home kitchen.
A general rule of thumb:
The longer the list of ingredients and the more words most people would need to look up, the less likely it is to be good for you.
The shorter the list and the more normal food words on it (potatoes, oil, salt), the more likely it is to be real food and not some over processed food product.
Seems simple enough to me.
May not.
We're publishing anyway because that's how low the bar is. Welcome to health.
As the article says, ultra-processed food tends to be low in nutrients. Given the little we know, that seems as likely a cause as anything else here.
Also, these are not randomized studies, as they also mention. So it is possible that, say, frozen meals are used more by a higher-risk population for other reasons (like cost), and this is just a correlation.
This is good news! If a food is low in macronutrients like protein, fats, and carbohydrates, then it's low in calories by definition. Score!
Processed foods end up with more contaminants in them — for example, there are 4x more phthalates in Kraft mac and cheese powders than in block cheese, string cheese, and cottage cheese. Another example are these results from the FDA, as reported by the AP. In terms of explaining why the cafeteria diet is so fattening, it’s especially illustrative that grocery store chocolate cake was an extreme outlier, with concentrations of PFPeA more than 100 times higher than chocolate milk.”
Granted, that’s about phthalates, which are widely used as plasticizers, but the same routes apply for PFAS.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-p...