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Comment by MrPatan | Hacker News Reader

"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!")

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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.

> 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.

>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.

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

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