Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

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> processed foods

> whole ingredients

These are utterly meaningless terms. You "process" food by cutting and cooking it. Everything is processed. Everything is GMO -- have you seen what corn looked like before humans bred it? Everything is organic. Everything is "whole". Nutrition is too complicated and too individualized for these nonsense labels.

> I'm getting the maximum amount of nutrients from my food

This is utter nonsense. Some processing steps remove some nutrients from some foods. Other processing steps add nutrients that you need. Plenty of foods have nutrients that are completely unavailable for your body until you cook it (many veggies) -- PROCESSING! Other nutrients are destroyed by too much cooking (Vitamin C, I believe). You better be glad the salt you eat is "processed" by adding iodine to it. The water you drink is "processed" by adding fluoride to it. Those last 2 are some of the biggest public health successes in human history.

I'm glad you're feeling better, but it's 100% from paying attention to what you're eating, and 0% from this bullshit about "whole" or "unprocessed" foods with "maximum nutrients". Stop spreading this bullshit.

What a weird hill to die on. I think you might be reading more "woo" into the comment you're responding to than is necessary. It's fine if you keep eating your microwaveable factory slop and keep convincing yourself it's identical to cutting a carrot or cooking vegetables but I'm skeptical you'll convince many people of this

"Stop spreading this bullshit."

Looking at the entirety of your comment, you should really apply this advice to yourself.

Highly processed or ultra-processed food is absolutely a meaningful term. The United Nations published so-called NOVA food classification which divides food into four categories by the amount of processing it received.

Category 4 is what OP was talking about. Industrially processed stuff full of preservatives, artificial coloring, hydrogenated oils, protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar etc. Unlike the other three categories, this sort of industrial processing is a relative newcomer, it wasn't even a thing 100 or 150 years ago, so it is entirely plausible that our guts and our gut biome may not be happy about it.

> Highly processed or ultra-processed food is absolutely a meaningful term.

And yet nobody said "avoid ultra-processed food as defined by NOVA". They said "avoid processed foods" and "eat whole foods". It's extremely generous to assume everyone reading the former translates that in their head to "avoid ultra-processed food as defined by NOVA". And the latter is meaningless.

Even if that is what they really mean, that's really surface-level advice. There are foods in Tier 4 that are just fine. There are foods in Tier 4 that are more nutritious than "whole foods" are. Note that if you add whey protein to your soy milk, you have just created an ultra-processed food!

It sounds like you're expecting others to provide complex-but-accurate advice when OP and most of the responders are happy with simple-and-implementable advice. A lot of the discourse around diets comes down to tension between these two.

Simple-and-implementable is something you can deploy in the moment without knowing things beforehand. If you're at a grocery store, you can ask yourself "is this really processed?" as a simple filter that will largely steer you right. Similarly, Michael Pollan's advice to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants" resonates with a huge number of people because it's a simple, actionable, not very fussy way to approach eating.

Complex-but-accurate advice is stuff like 'let me look up if this follows the definition of tier 3 or 4 processed', or 'I have to have 5g net carbs today and this is 1.2g so I have 3.8g left'. This has a much higher cognitive load, requires a lot of research and pre-planning, and is unlikely to be implemented in the moment nor sustained long term. It's also a place where people can develop unhealthy psychological relationships with food and eating by being hypervigilant about complex rules.

Most people find their lives work best with simple-and-implementable rules of thumb for food.

> ” You "process" food by cutting and cooking it. Everything is processed”

No one means that cutting a carrot make it into “processed food”. You are changing a mostly commonly understood definition to a new wanna-be-technically-correct one you just made up only to suit your argument.

There is a grey area in the definition of processed foods, but it’s not close as large as your definition maintains.

There is no commonly understood definition of processed foods. That is the problem. People throw the term around like it does mean something but they can't define it.

Please show me I'm wrong and give a concise definition of what makes some food processed. The internet needs a good definition as these conversations always just end up with hand waving as there is no consensus of what food is what.

My dictionary says ”industrially produced food”, i.e. frozen and ready to eat meals, snacks, confections, etc.

The issue is that the plastics and non-stick coatings leach off plasticizers and forever-chemicals which cause hormone and neurotransmitter disruption in humans, which cause obesity, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, cancer and other serious disease.

This is a first. I've never even heard of a definitions of processed foods that is based on their packaging. But what you're saying is that it is not the food or things added to the food but the packaging that makes it processed?

Bread is processed food, and yet that’s insufficient to qualify it. I guess we need better words or less shortcuts.

The UN has a well defined categorization of foods according to the amount and type of processing [1]. You can identify the processing level of many food item by using this search engine [2].

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

[2] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3017620422003/nutell...

Thank you for these links. If nothing else, the UN document at least defines what it's talking about. It's 3rd tier, "processed food", is basically: watch out, they added oil, salt, or other preservatives. The same people worried about "processed foods" are adding their own oil to foods (rightly so, usually!). But when a factory does it, LOOK OUT!. I mean, yes: watch your salt intake if you eat a lot of canned foods. That's real advice.

It's not until you get to Tier 4 (ultra-processed foods) that you start to see anything legitimately concerning. And indeed if the advice everyone was parroting was "avoid ultra-processed foods as defined by the FAO", then I'd care a lot less about it. Even still, the FAO says that ingredients added to ultra-processed foods include:

> varieties of sugars (fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose, lactose), modified oils (hydrogenated or interesterified oils) and sources of protein (hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein, and ‘mechanically separated meat’).

Avoid sugars and foods with high glycemic indices. Absolutely avoid high-fructose corn syrup. Avoid hydrogenated fats; there is clear evidence they are harmful. Those sources of protein? Health nuts add that stuff to their soy milk all the time! Details matter!

My point is that there are specific processing steps that affect specific foods. Advice on how to identify and avoid those foods is fine. But that's not what anyone is saying: they're saying "avoid processed foods" and "eat whole foods". Those terms are meaningless as they use them. It's non-advice. It's water-muddying bordering on misinformation.

Highly processed foods tend to have higher caloric value and lower values of fiber and simple sugars or adding excessive amounts of sugars and fats.

I'm with you most of the way, but a lot of the long life prepackaged foods that are marketed to us are maximizing the bad and minimizing the good for the purpose of efficiency and profit.

Being forced to prepare foods from "wholefoods" (i hate this classification/tag as well) tends to make us more mindful of what we're eating and how much of it we're consuming.

Except that the term "processed foods" is a colloquial term that is ubiquitously used to describe only those foods that are industrially processed, thus often being stripped of many nutrients that you get from non-processed foods. Context is important.

I appreciate your comment in that it has made me think about what a processed food actually is, and I think it's true that it's a bit of a gray area. Personally, I think my own definition of processed food would be things like Cheetos, Pizza from 7-11 or Pizza Hut, cookies, cakes, etc.

I did a quick google search and found that some countries use "NOVA" groups to classify how processed a food is, and I think it's a helpful guideline. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova

That's a little pedantic. Of course all foods that aren't fresh picked and shoved into your mouth are "processed". But clearly the term as used here is processed with chemicals and fillers and preservatives and anti-caking agents, and the like.

Since virtually all the food we get at our stores is processed in this way it is leading to serious widespread health problems.

You’re nitpicking

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