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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

I've been arguing for years with vegans who drink copious amounts for thyroid-damaging kale and kidney-stone-forming spinach juices. Many of the plants are rich in anti-nutrients and natural toxins to weed off predators. Having a normal-size salad is one thing, drinking 2 pounds of kale is something else. People should learn more abou Hormesis and why too much of the bad thing is bad and too little of it is a good thing. Every nutrient and intervention has an optimal range - below and over it turns detrimental to health. Drink too much water and you die from brain swelling; drink too little and you dry from dehydration - everything works around this example although ranges may dynamically vary from day to day. Things are not as simple as we want them to be (for our convenience).

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The thing to me that is so ironic about juicing is that most people who are super into things like juicing and "juice cleanses" (whatever the hell that means) are totally against "processed" foods.

I'm like "What do you think a juicer is??" You just took that natural plant that's loaded with healthy fiber, removed all the fiber and concentrated it so it's mostly sugar and water.

If you process it at home it's still processed.

This is arguing semantics really. When people say "processed" they don't mean run through a blender, or mashed in a bowl, etc. They mean food that is processed industrially with a bunch of (usually unnecessary) chemicals added to stabilize or enrich the food. Oreos are a processed food. Cake you make at home from whole ingredients is not processed. You are correct technically (the best kind of correct) but in every day speech they are different.

Your greater point I agree with though. People who drink vegetable smoothies don't realize all that delicious sugar those vegetables have is now streamlined because they destroyed the fiber. But hey! It's healthy!

Which ingredient in Oreos make them different than a home made cake?

https://www.mondelezinternationalfoodservice.com/Product/Pro...

Like the flour you use to make a cake has been altered from its whole state more than a little bit. So has the sugar. And of course, both ingredients are used in Oreos, for roughly the same reasons you'd use them at home.

I suppose most people don't cook with palm oil and soy lecithin.

oreos have titanium dioxide as coloring.

high fructose corn syrup, palm oil, vanillin

<< Vanillin – natural or synthetic? – secrets of science 99 % of vanillin flavor is produced synthetically (petrochemical origin) or biotechnologically (e.g. from ferulic acid, eugenol).>>

Not going to bother with reformatting (on my phone):

PALM OIL, SOYBEAN AND/OR CANOLA OIL…HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP…SOY LECITHIN…ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR

Yeah, vegetable oil and corn syrup are common ingredients in home baking. So are artificial flavors (for example artificial vanilla).

Soy lecithin isn't, but it isn't a significant nutritional component or particularly questionable (it's a vegetable extract used as an emulsifier).

I mostly do cookies, quick breads, and cakes, but I don't think I've ever used corn syrup in my baking (not even for frosting) and definitely not high fructose corn syrup!

Your other points seem sound, and are things that I would not be surprised to find in homemade cake (except maybe the lecithin; what use does a cake have for an emulsifier?)

Regarding cakes and emulsifiers, could it be part of the industrial process to ensure the large volume of liquid ingredients are properly mixed before adding to the dry ingredients? In a small bowl it isn't hard to get the oil and eggs distributed but I can see it getting more difficult at scale.

Corn Syrup, while I hate the ingredient, is EXTREMELY common in home baking especially if you want to do confectionaries.

I’ve used high-fructose corn syrup in making marshmallows, it’s just corn sugar

Grocery store corn syrup you might use for baking is just corn syrup, not high-fructose corn syrup.

Corn syrup is made by converting starches to glucose. HFCS is made by converting some of that glucose to fructose.

There might be some significant nutritional impact from that, but it's more or less a similar process to make it (with an additional reaction to convert some of the glucose to fructose).

The original point discussed was this:

> They mean food that is processed industrially with a bunch of (usually unnecessary) chemicals added to stabilize or enrich the food. Oreos are a processed food. Cake you make at home from whole ingredients is not processed.

The ingredients I listed aren't whole ingredients - which I would take to be e.g. flour, eggs, milk, butter, etc. If you're cooking with high-fructose corn syrup then you're not cooking with whole ingredients.

This is "flour is a whole ingredient because I say so".

The properties of flour are in fact quite different than the properties of whole wheat. And of course there is then a continuum, from whole wheat flour to white flour to bleached white flour.

I grew up with a countertop electric flour mill...I'm fully aware there's a continuum. And whole wheat flour is a far cry from heavily processed high fructose corn syrup.

Oreos aren't bad because they're processed, they're bad because they're 40% sugar

> People who drink vegetable smoothies … destroyed the fiber

Do you have a source on this? Because I did a quick check, and at a glance it seems this is not true (and in fact blending can actually release fibers for some fruits) [1].

My understanding has always been that blending doesn’t make fruits/vegetables less healthy than their whole counterparts.

[1] https://nutritiondaily.com/does-blending-destroy-fiber-nutri...

Blending and juicing are different things. Juicers typically remove the fiber which is then discarded as a waste product.

It's very possible that blending is still worse than eating whole though because the juice is now immediately available in the gut without the whole food needing to be slowly broken down even if you also still consume the fiber. Rate of absorption makes a huge difference in nutrition. Obviously the real secret is chewing as little as possible and instead swallowing large chunks.

> Blending and juicing are different things. Juicers typically remove the fiber which is then discarded as a waste product.

Yeah, I get that. And makes sense. But I keep seeing (even in this thread) that blending is almost/just as bad.

> It's very possible that blending is still worse than eating whole though because the juice is now immediately available in the gut without the whole food needing to be slowly broken down even if you also still consume the fiber. Rate of absorption makes a huge difference in nutrition. Obviously the real secret is chewing as little as possible and instead swallowing large chunks.

In theory, but is there anything to back this up? Because it seems like there isn’t much in the way of science or studies. But yet I see plenty of claims of it.

I guess I conflated juicing with blending. Seems to be an old wives tale.

This is one of the many reasons why scientific literature differentiates between “processed” and “ultra processed”.

There’s something about the whole topic that draws pedantry out of people who think it’s a binary motion. It’s not. Blending some vegetables before you drink them isn’t the same as eating an ultra processed packaged food from the store.

Nobody who thinks about it beyond looking for “gotcha” opportunities would actually believe that.

In my opinion, people focus too much on vague science they don't understand. All we have as far as I know, are a few fairly weak studies showing a weak correlation between ultra-processed foods consumption and certain diseases like colon cancer.

They look at multiple diseases which drastically increases the odds of false positives, they use a broad definition of ultra processed food, they base their study on people's own answers and their end result only shows a marginal increase in certain diseases like for the control group they observe a tiny effect like a 20% increase in colon cancer for the processed food consumers.

This means if 5/1000 people in the control group get this disease, it's 6/1000 for processed food consumers. It's basically nothing. It is highly likely to be caused by random variance.

This type of research is not mature enough to base life decisions on. It is a hint that there might be something worth looking into but that's all there is to it.

Most people don't know nearly enough to have any sort of informed opinion on this topic. We as a society don't know whether processed food is bad, nor how bad it might be, we just think it might be so it's frustrating when people cite shitty popsci articles as if they're facts.

The one thing we can say for sure is that we haven't observed any significant effect in the studies we have done.

For all intents and purposes, eating processed food is as far as we know completely safe. Certainly much safer than consuming alcohol.

Maybe it's because processing implies adding extra/artificial things to the food but there isn't as much of a stigma from taking a natural food and only removing things from it. It allows the food to remain "unadulterated" in one's mind while still becoming unhealthier.

Fact check: Kale only has 20mg of oxalates per 100g which means 2 lbs has about 180mg of oxalates. https://e-cnr.org/ViewImage.php?Type=TH&aid=487614&id=T9&afn...

180mg of oxalates isn't that much.

Most people consume 200 to 300 mg of oxalates per day: https://www.webmd.com/diet/foods-high-in-oxalates

and with regards to water. I believe, it's when you sip on water all day that the danger of brain swelling occurs because your body looses the ability to gauge how much water is in it's system and doesn't quite know how much to excrete.

too much of anything isn't good. it's time to start embracing less. it's okay to drink a bit too much water at once because your body can excrete it without problems.

Kale has goitrogens - that's why I said "thyroid-damaging."

They highlighted spinach for the kidney stones (i.e. oxalates). Per your chart, they are at 970 mg/100g, so two pounds of spinach would be roughly 9000mg of oxalates.

One of the reason I eat raw spinach only in moderation. It’s a completely different story however if you cook it. You could blanch spinach and then crush it into your soothie and all the oxalates would be broken down.

As this disagreed with recommendation I had from a doctor, I just looked it up. Cooking spinach certainly reduces oxalates, maybe about 50%. It does not eliminate them.

We evolved to thrive on a varied diet and we do best when we have access to many different sources of nutrition from plants to animals. Trying to simplify things for the sake of some worldview or another will damage your health.

you meant plants, not plans.

am I right?

Yes, thank you!

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