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Comment by desert_rue | Hacker News Reader

My mom continues to buy heavily processed food. My dad periodically tries to nag her about eating healthier, but she takes that as a personal attack. She does eat veggies and fruit, but she also likes rice a roni (as do I- it tastes great, but I don’t buy it myself).

If you want to eat healthfully on the go, it generally means that you have to bring food along and ideally cook it, too. It is hard to do.

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Is this actually true? Here in Europe where I live or travel you can buy dozens of great fresh salads at every supermarket, they cost reasonably and most folks dont need much bigger lunch.

The bigger issue I see is folks having weak will - why take that salad when next to it is well cooked sausage or pizza slice. When talking about it, few admit they lost the battle of will with themselves, most come up with some made up version of reality where its actually almost ok.

In America, salads are much more difficult to find — let alone good ones. They're also priced accordingly, thanks to the magic of supply and demand.

So, even after an epic lunchtime quest of hunting/gathering, you might end up out 20-30 bucks for a depressing pile of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and shredded cheese. (In America, this is often called a "Caesar salad." Yes, really.)

Even if you do happen to be in the rare neighborhood that has a good salad connection, you're still committing to spending your lunch break furiously chewing raw vegetables in whatever few minutes you have left after running to go get your meal. This is what I did every day for months when I worked in an office, but let's not pretend it's ideal.

The dream would be fresh, cooked vegetables, so that one could get the best bioavailability. [1] But that is largely a fever dream, even in major cities. For example, I can count on 1 hand the number of restaurants I know where I could order a simple plate of steamed/roasted broccoli for less than 20 dollars.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878450X1...

You might be surprised how many Chinese takeout places will happily part with some steamed broccoli and brown rice for a reasonable price. Sure, it's not on the menu, and most of what is may well be covered in sugary sauces, but at least in my experience, they tend to be a pretty reasonable bunch when it comes to just selling what they have for the right price.

Though I'm in the Northeast -- your access to wildly abundant Chinese takeout may vary.

"So, even after an epic lunchtime quest of hunting/gathering, you might end up out 20-30 bucks for a depressing pile of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and shredded cheese."

Depressing indeed! Where I live, it's like €1.50 per ~500g chunk of raw broccoli (just the vegetable, harvested, possibly washed and wrapped in plastic, transported to supermarket). Other vegetables in similar range, and no problem finding stores with a decent selection of veggies & fruit.

Are US farmers somehow unable to grow broccoli <$1.50/lb? Or food stores incapable of selling raw veggies @ reasonable prices?

I can easily find fresh broccoli for around $1.50/lb at several grocery stores near me here in the US. There's loads of stores with a variety of vegetables that are decently cheap and are also eligible under my state's food stamp/child food supplement programs for low income people.

Looking at price indexes from the US Fed it might just be cheap for me here. The average seems close to $2/lb.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000712412

I am hungry fairly quickly after eating that salad and have trouble to focus then. I can go by them, if the team I work for does not care about my output. But if I actually need to produce, I need different lunch.

Healthy and "have as little calories as possible just above the eating disorder line" are two different things.

You can supplement given salad, literally any salad, with something chunkier but still reasonably healthy that will keep you satiated for long. Can be anything from whole bread, chunk of some quality cheese, boil few eggs at home and just bring them, slices of good quality ham/sausages etc.

If you have some big blood glucose swings (which end up in cravings for example), I would recommend tackling that as underlying issue, great improvements of quality of your life lie there. You can train your body to almost any regime including healthier ones, the only requirement is a bit of discipline in the beginning.

I can also eat a bacon and spoon of sugar with it. Or steak. That is not the point.

And no, I can't train my body to almost any regime. My body needs nutrients and calories. When food does not have it, it is not healthy food.

My point was, people do not eat just salad as their only food, because despite having Fibre and vitamins, it does not contain what your body needs. And that "any calories baad" thinking is an eating disorder.

Aldi salads.. Cheap and good

Idk about Europe, but the US has a lot of so called "food deserts" where fresh food is miles away (like 20miles /32 km or more). These areas aren't just rural but often in poorer areas of Major cities and population centers. Plus, premade salad that isn't just lettuce can be relativily expensive.

I heard someone make the point that these "deserts" exist because their residents don't buy that sort of food .

I also live in Europe and also in my experience healthy salads are often an available choice. However, "salads" are often tricky, because the calorie count can go up very fast (eggs, cheese, side bread, crumbles, etc.), while thinking of eating "only a salad"

Eh, when you say a salad in Europe, there's a 90-95% chance that its only dressing is olive oil (and not much of it, just for the texture) and not heavy stuff like ranch or french dressing.

A teaspoon of olive oil is 120 kcal. 3-4 teaspoons is the calorie content of a meal. That's the equivalent of a liter of soda.

A teaspoon is 5ml. At 0.92g/ml and 9kcal/g that would mean about 40kcal per teaspoon.

I think you mean table spoon, which is often enough dressing for one person, in my experience.

You're right.

Sure, but the rest of the stuff (in what I consider salad base - tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe peppers?) is really small so it doesn't matter. A greek salad has cheese, yeah, that's a high calorie input but you don't eat much of it

If you buy it in a supermarket, the calorie count is always given on the packaging.

There's a lot of shaker-meals these days, like Huel, that you can easily bring anywhere and prepare on the spot. Including meal-bars.

You folks must be joking. Clever marketing doesn't make extremely processed food healthy.

"Processing" is way too general. It includes boiling, frying, stirring, cutting, freezing, drying, soaking etc. Most food requires some sort of processing to be edible.

I never saw the point of reducing all this into a single thing and declare that too much of is it bad.

That's why I'm glad to see "hyper-palatable" gaining currency. "Ultra-processed" has always been a too-ambiguous term that fails to convey what's actually problematic about some foods. It's used to scare instead of inform. Find ten articles about "ultra-processed" food and nine of them will be pure clickbait - the junk food of nutrition advice. "Hyper-palatable" is far from perfect, but at least it's a little bit less ambiguous and scare-inducing.

P.S. In many ways "junk food" is still better than either, despite the pejorative tone.

There is a spectrum of processing, from minimal chopping or boiling that you might do at home, to more involved processes that significantly transform the food, which changes how your body processes it.

Meal replacement shakes like Huel would be considered “ultra processed” because they contain various industrially produced ingredients (artificial sweeteners, gums, extracts etc).

The evidence seems to suggest that less processed are healthier, particularly when it comes to these ultra-processed items, not just boiling/frying/cutting etc.

Personally I see these meal shakes being marketed as healthy/for athletes and think of how everyone 50 years ago though margarine was so much healthier than butter.

Fair point about the gums. But my Huel Unflavoured and Unsweetened powder does not have any artificial sweetener in it. It’s not very palatable on its own, but half a banana and a little peanut butter and it’s great.

I don’t pretend huel is perfect, but it’s definitely a meal. I feel good after eating it. Also, I alway have time at work to eat it, even if it’s only 7 minutes (which is quite often), and time to make it in the morning.

For me, huel is definitely better than the meals it replaced, and the other things that I could make/consume with the time and budget available.

Because people want to eat unprocessed bread? /s

Well there’s bread (flour, water, yeast, salt) and there’s bread (Enriched Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% Or Less Of: Soybean Oil, Salt, Monoglycerides, Calcium Propionate And Sorbic Acid To Extend Freshness, Malted Barley Flour, Whey, Soy Lecithin, Datem, Wheat Gluten).

My point is that you should worry about specific ingredients, and specific types of processing. What do you think is bad here?

I don't know much about enriching ingredients in the US, but where it's done, it's to prevent diseases you can get from missing them, or which can cause other health problems. Folic acid, which is in your list, is well known as a recommended supplement for pregnant women, since it dramatically reduces incidence of spina bifida in newborns. Niacin is better known as vitamin B, and it's a similar story.

How do we determine which specific ingredients to worry about? I can’t keep up with all of the various additives in highly processed products–it’s simpler to reduce the number of ultra processed products I buy.

In this case the enriched flour in the commercial bread presumably isn’t concerning, but I would prefer bread without added sugar and all of the various preservatives and emulsifiers.

Research is ongoing but shows some potential impact re emulsifiers and their impact on the gut: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331555/

And some indication that one of the preservatives can have behavioral effects in kids: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12173999/

Well, hopefully we can keep up with the help of some uncorrupted public health experts who can read the studies, commission studies and meta-studies etc.

It helps that other countries have them too. It's hard to corrupt the entire world. I wouldn't worry (yet) about individual studies claiming some possible interaction, especially if they bunch up manky things (say, aim to study all emulsifiers at once, or all processing at once).

I would worry if, say, an additive was banned in many countries. And there's much that we know is bad, which is permitted for cultural reasons, and which therefore many people assume can't be that bad (smoked food in particular).

You realize you need "sugar" for the yeast so that the bread can rise, right? This isn't the middle ages and people like fluffy bread.

Bread will rise just fine without sugar! There are plenty of commercial loaves sold with no sugar, and I’ve been making bread for like 15 years and have only ever used sugar to make something like brioche.

https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/45587/how-did-pe...

Um. I’ve ground wheat with rocks and cooked it over a fire. I can promise you it won’t rise. Your super-processed flour that you buy in the store has all the magic in it to work though.

Ever made wheat milk? It tastes sweet because wheat naturally contains water soluble sugars. They are more than enough to make the bread rise. The problem with your medieval bakery experience probably rested with too coarse grinding, too little hydrolize, not enough yeast and probably a combination of them.

Nah. Malted barley contains enzymes which break down the starches into sugars for the yeast to eat. This is brewing 101 type stuff.

I’m talking about wheat. But now I want to go read Bronze Rank Brewer again…

They do, to a certain extent. It's called whole wheat.

people eat plain wheat seeds?

I guess you eat fish raw, with skin and bones then?

Huel (standard) is grinded seeds, oats, tapioca, brown rice, pea protein, flaxseed, coconut, sunflower, and kombucha to be specific

It's not more processed than any other "healthy" food.

Don't you lose all the fiber grinding it up like that? Like when you make a smoothie instead of eating fresh whole pieces of fruit?

How is grinding by a blender any different than grinding by teeth?

You don't chew food until it is totally liquid right?

blender make juices, teeth can't easily.

What,? First time I hear the idea that a whole apple smoothie would lose the fiber of an apple.

Where do we suppose the fiber goes to?

It's more that it's so broken up that is moves through the digestive system quicker and has a different effect as it is effectively pulverized.

Not an expert.

Better than a chocolate bar I guess. But that’s setting the bar very low

How does Huel help avoid processed food?

I think the distinction between "processed food" and "ready food" is important here. Not all processed foods are bad - I am not paid to say this, but after doing a lot of preliminary research into Huel some 3 years ago, I've lived off it for weeks at a time when time-constrained or lazy. I usually feel better overall for it (fuller, prolonged energy), which for me, meant less snacking.

On account of the higher carbs, I can't speak so much to their "instant meals", but the powders are a pretty even split of carbs/fats/protein, with the black powder being primarily protein for a slightly higher cost.

the poison is in the dosage.

Processed foods are great and small amounts at infrequent times. But we tend to see them as a fast easy way to fill a hole.

We can't live on raw food. I read a catalog from an "alternative" magazine once, which listed an enormous number of diets and self-help therapies. All raw diet was one of the extremely few (even) they warned against.

It's damn near impossible to not harm your health with an all raw diet.

"Processing" is not the issue. Food seeing the inside of a factory is not what will make you sick. It's what gets put in it. It's the sugar.

I'm pretty sure at this point that the word "processed food" was also a stroke of marketing genius by the shit suggary food lobby. Avoids putting front and center what is it that makes the food bad (it's the sugar), and replace it with a generic scary-sounding word that can be applied to everything, so it diffuses responsibility and hides the actual problem ("See, this shit food uses unprocessed brown cane sugar as its addiction additive. Healthy!")

Well it's not just the sugars. Processed food gets a lot of preservatives (some natural, some made in a lab) which make the food last longer and "look better". In Bulgaria (I think this is an EU directive though) you can see the preservatives on the nutrition info and they all have an ID (E###). Typically the more Es that something has, the more processed it has been and is seen as less healthy.

Although that’s typically true, a lot of very natural ingredients also have “E numbers” (as we call them in the UK).

For example, E164 is saffron, E290 is carbon dioxide, E901 is beeswax, E913 is lanolin.

Loads of others are also extracts of natural products.

It means it was added to the product.

>preservatives (some natural, some made in a lab) which make the food last longer and "look better"

Any reason to think they're bad aside from a vague sense of "ewww chemicals"?

That's not entirely true. Processed food requires less energy to digest and absorb. Nutritionally it can be exactly the same food but the net calorie intake will be higher for food that has been processed.

We should eat food that our pre-industrial ancestors would recognize.

>That's not entirely true. Processed food requires less energy to digest and absorb. Nutritionally it can be exactly the same food but the net calorie intake will be higher for food that has been processed.

What does this actually amount to though? You might be right in principle but if it's like 50 calories per day then it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

> Processed food requires less energy to digest and absorb

That's also just a heuristic. To take the most basic example, ice is more processed than water but requires more energy to digest and absorb.

> ice is more processed than water

depends on weather outside.

I don't eat sugar and consider stevia healthier than artificial sweeteners but still processed.

I'm betting the meat lobby, against the rising vegetarian alternatives, but yes.

In some aspects the problem is food processing. A lot of magnesium gets lost when food is processed and prepared. As a result of that magnesium insufficiency and deficiency seem to be rather prevalent.

If the problem was as simple as that, it wouldn't be a problem.

A do-everything multivitamin-and-mineral pill is pennies per day[0], so we could very easily just require them to be added — and in some cases we already have: UK cereals, back when I was there, often advertised "fortified with 7…" (or was it 8?) "…vitamins and minerals".

I got the impression it was a legal requirement they'd tried to pretend was a special feature.

[0] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/285513527

For me, it solves the "problem" of getting nutrients fast and effortlessly. When I don't feel like cooking, it allows me to get the energy I need, while avoiding fattening or, generally speaking, poorly nutrient food.

This sounds like a circular problem.

Cooking is not that hard, even if it is just for you on your lonesome.

Really, if you can't be bothered to cook, that should be the time you start scrubbing potatoes and putting together a wholesome and satisfying meal, to actually enjoy it and be incentivised to cook some more.

>Really, if you can't be bothered to cook, that should be the time you start scrubbing potatoes and putting together a wholesome and satisfying meal, to actually enjoy it and be incentivised to cook some more.

This makes no sense. We already established that the person doesn't like cooking and your solution is to... cool anyways? Has it occurred to you that some people simply don't like cooking and/or doesn't place high value on food?

+1 for Huel. Using black edition for breakfast, hot&savory for lunch, for many months now.

Basically all body needs in terms of nutrition are taken care of, including high fiber and protein, in a vegan way, quite cheaply (5-6€ per day). 900kcal in total, nearly zero effort/time spent.

Then I can freely do „whatever“ for dinner that I enjoy. Nutrition basically solved.

I would never solely trust a VC backed company to supply me with all my required nutrition.

What's the threat model here? That they'll one day make a "Our Incredible Journey" post on their company blog and you'll go hungry?

Is big agra really any better?

There’s a lot to dislike about industrial agriculture, but ultimately a potato is pretty much a potato: you know what you’re getting.

Except there might be chemicals from the environment in there that the plant absorbs, or bacteria infections or salmonella depending on the food.

Or like cheap greenhouse veggies, it’s mostly water with only a fraction of the nutritional profile the food used to have in the past.

I like to have some standardization on the baseline input without much thinking - but everyone is different here I guess!

I am English Huel is an extremely off putting name for food.

There is no way that you would say you are eating Huel.

For a Russian Huel is even more off-putting, "ohuel" (охуел) is a swear word which roughly means "out of his mind", derived from "huy" (хуй), which means "dick".

I don't want no dick in my food, thank you very much.

Does the word mean something different in England?

I think they may be correlating it with the similar sounding word “hurl”. Huel on the other hand is readily available in shops in pre-made form, and I’ve seen it in vending machines in Heathrow.

Maybe it's because it sounds like 'gruel', or the sound of vomiting.

We do breakfast by mixing frozen fruits and spinach with some extra powders like protein, collagen, Macca and add some vitamins separately. It's fast, it tastes pretty good and you know you get a base amount of essential nutrients every day.

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