Implications of ultra-processed plant origin foods on cardiovascular risk
thelancet.com
thelancet.com
Once nuance is that they seem to have grouped together all ultra-processed plant foods into one category, everything from tomato sauce to tofu to sodas (see supplement: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...). The nutritional profile of tofu and soda are quite different, but the study measures total consumption in calories, so sodas are going to heavily skew that number.
I wonder if that makes enough of a difference (e.g. is someone who eats a lot of ultraprocessed noodles with tofu and tomato sauce going to have similar cardiovascular outcomes as someone who chugged a 2L of coke a day?)
I'm someone who's been vegan for 15+ years, but lately I shifted about 50%-70% of my meals to a super-artificial ultra-processed food product (https://huel.com/products/huel-instant-meal-pots) that is supposed to "healthy" in that it contains all the macro and micro nutrients a person supposedly needs, in a relatively tasty and satiating 400kcal meal. I wonder if that would still have the same risk as drinking 400kcal of soda or eating potato chips? Heh, maybe it'll save me from diabetes only to kill me from heart disease. Alas.
I was unable to find an authoritative source on what the NOVA classification of tofu actually is, or how the NOVA classification system methodology even works. Secondary and tertiary sources on the internet disagree with each other, and ChatGPT cites Brazilian institutions like "NUPENS" whose websites are on Google but seem to be either dead or inaccessible from the US.
Edit: There seems to be a third-party database, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/cgi/search.pl?search_terms=t..., that lists many tofus in category 3, "processed" (because they have salt and oil added) or 4, "ultraprocessed" (because of gelling agents).
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But even excluding tofu, they also consider things like bread (yeast and wheat?) to be ultra-processed, or potato wedges, or fruit juices, or canned vegetable soups, along with ketchup.
To be sure, many of those CAN be commercially processed, but I think this particular study might be trying a bit too hard to lump together a bunch of ambiguous foods in order to try to find power in their stats? It's hard to trust a dietary analysis that treats sugary sodas the same as pasta sauce or whole-grain bread...
Try to recall everything you ate in the last 24 hours, including quantities of calories by food group. Accurate? Now, imagine trying to correlate this with a health outcome a decade from now. On top of that, imagine that your study participants can just skip reporting anything at all if they don't feel like it. Do you think there might be a bias in the people who respond? That there might be a bias in the people who "remember" eating large quantities of plant-based foods? That there might be a bias in the people who respond to follow-up?
In a just world, these kinds of nutritional epi papers wouldn't be publishable. No matter how many co-variates you put in the regression, there's simply no way to eliminate the bias.
Small complex long-term effects in humans are fundamentally inaccessible to the kind of science that collects and analyzes data. Either the necessary data cannot be collected at all, or collecting it would be too expensive, time-consuming, and/or unethical to be worth it.
When the truth is inaccessible, science focuses on establishing the boundaries of what can be known. You collect the data that can be collected and see what can be determined from that. Or you reuse data that already exists and try to make new justifiable conclusions from that.
That requires reliable data. If the only data you have is hopelessly confounded, then you don't just shrug and accept it as "truthy" because it's dressed up like science and is published in a journal, and hey, that's the best you can do anyway.
Science is about the quality of the methodology you use, not the grandeur of the institution that surrounds it. If your data doesn't answer the question, then it doesn't answer the question.
(For whatever it's worth, I'm biased in favor of the hypothesis, but crap experiements are crap no matter what I believe.)
Biobanks are about collecting more detailed data on more individuals than would be possible for any particular study, and spending a lot of effort to ensure the quality and consistency of the data. Any conclusion you can make from biobank data is a hypothesis likely worth investigating. And publishing, because further studies would likely take years.
You would then collect new data designed to answer the specific question in your subsequent study. But due to financial constraints, that new data would likely be less detailed, smaller in scale, and of lower quality.
> UPF, the fourth group of the Nova classification system, are industrial formulations made by deconstructing whole foods into chemical constituents, altering and then recombining them with additives into products that are alternatives to the other three Nova groups and freshly prepared dishes and meals based on them.12 While these three Nova groups (unprocessed/minimally processed foods, culinary ingredients, and processed foods) include foods commonly found in traditional diets worldwide, some of which are associated with health and longevity, UPF is identified as a distinct group that poses health risks.
Its the Nova classification, something that I have previously only noticed in comments on news articles, rather than in the news articles themselves.
I would love Nova disclosure requirements for packaged food and restaurant menus. Maybe add it as a label on Yelp and Beli?
Or Crisps as we British call them :-)
The other interesting thing is that soft drinks & confectionary were in the same category as packaged breads/buns. Are they so similar in terms of nutrition?
Because this study is huge if that's the case.
Now, from an individual’s and philosophical perspective, given probability of death is 1, of what use is small changes in cross-sectional rates of mortality?
"as well as a substantial reduction in impacts on the environment. ... high-carbon meat and dairy products..."
Your advice will probably work for some age groups, but it doesn't for mine, unfortunately.
I eat much healthier than my grandparents.
Most people's grandparents were running households in the middle of the 20th century or later, and were already deep in the transition towards processed foods. Box cake, TV dinner, casseroles made from canned soup, canned/bottled soda, margarine... it all starts with the boom of consumerism, advertising, and expanded workforce in the second quarter of the 20th century and essentially becomes completely normalized by the fourth.
Your grandparents may still have known how to cook and eat the old way, and might have done it sometimes. but they were told they didn't need to bother and that the days of needing to were behind them, so they didn't do it as much and they didn't make sure their kids or grandkids even knew how.
Edit to add: I guess people are down voting this because they’re misinterpreting what I’m saying. I’m not saying that you can eat all the calories you want, but you can’t metabolize calories if you don’t have the nutrition that powers the enzymes for the metabolism of the calories.
Vitamins and minerals can be replaced with supplements, the more interesting result is "are the foods we get a large portion of our calories from actively bad, why, and can we fix that like we did for trans fats?
Many nutrients require other nutrients to even be absorbed in the first place. Many vitamins are fat-soluble, meaning they get to you through something fatty. Calcium is worthless if you don't get the vitamin D to help put it to use, things like that
and even further: some can't be absorbed by us directly at all and the bacterial flora in our gut must do that for us before we can benefit from it. Those bacteria must be supported and replenished, too.
Yes, the microbiotia need feeding, mainly via fiber. They synthesize whatever else they need on their own.
Is there some sort of readily available system/metric/standard that a normal consumer can use to evaluate the bio-absorbability in a bottle of vitamins? I know some of them have higher-than-recommended FDA daily values, presumably to make up for the availability, but... as with so much of the supplements industry, it all seems like mostly untrustworthy marketing?
Shouldn't it be possible to calculate (and label) dosage * absorbability of a particular source in pill form = effective dosage?
The FDA doesn't set the values, and be glad they don't because they're very corrupt in ways you wouldn't realize. If it were up to the FDA, every product that doesn't pay the FDA a bribe of $1 million for "certification" would be banned, and then everything would cost the consumer 10x. You would also then have to pay a useless licensed practitioner for the privilege of buying anything, typically at a dose that would be too low to improve health. The NIH ODS sets them, and you can read them at https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/
There is no standard because each vitamin and mineral is unique and special. There are some heuristics, but they only go so far. For example, an ideal dose is often (but not always) close to the average of the minimum and maximum limits.
And believe me when I say that I do my best to keep the cost as low as possible while keeping the quality good enough.
No, you can't. Supplements often have either bad absorption or risk of overdose, because need to be associated with some other nutrient (fat, fiber, etc) or the absorption is regulated by something else.
I've just been accumulating daily supplements from dr recommendations over the years — the good fish oil for my dry eyes, b12 because I don't eat much meat, high-dose turmeric because mild jaw inflammation, d3 because I'm light sensitive and don't go out in the sun enough, and a women's multivitamin.
I don't really think about my diet at all outside of roughly total calories and haven't gotten a bad bloodwork yet.
* Dry vitamin A: 6667 IU per day in the summer, and 10k IU per day in the winter. Test its blood level every two years.
* Taurine: 2g/day before bed.
* Vitamin D3: 4000-5000 IU per day to prevent further damage to tear glands due to subclinical autoimmune attacks. Test its blood level every year or two.
Scientists during that period naively distilled hugely complex food traditions and foodstuffs to a conveniently quantifiable, finite list of essential "nutrients". Meanwhile, product designers began to call themselves food scientists and formulated consumer products that could be honestly said to deliver these nutrients and their marketing teams took that vision straight to the bank. Science figured out what all you really needed, and Nestle (et al) had product that gave it to you with the most convenience and flavor.
That sweeping and extensive cultural reprogramming, which came at the expense traditional food practices and the generational transfer of them, doesn't just shake off again because a few research studies suggest that gut biomes matter, or that whole foods matter, etc
It took 2-3 generations for it to normalize processed food and it'll likely take at least 2-3 generations to meaningfully recover. Hundreds of millions of households now exist without someone who even knows how to cook being a part of them. Trying to convince those households to give up on cans and boxes of convenient, tasty mush in favor of food that they have to actually handle and prepare is a big big task.