We might never know the truth about ultra-processed foods | Hacker News Reader

We might never know the truth about ultra-processed foods

bbc.com

16 pointsyawz16 comments

> Most are high in fat, sugar or salt

Yeah. It's this. For all the media obsession about a new "ultra-processed" category, it's the same old boring dietary conclusions: salt is bad, sugar is bad, saturated fat is mostly bad.

You don't have to know anything about how food was "processed", you can still just look at the label.

While all these are bad, I feel that preservatives, artificial flavours, smootheners, etc have to play a role there as well.

The processing does matter, and the more processed it is the more fat, sugar, and salt companies can put in.

Or, viewed another way, the more processed it is, the more everything else is processed out, so that fat, salt, and sugar are almost all that's left.

It also tends to indicate that the main ingredients aren’t very nice unprocessed; otherwise they wouldn’t need so much processing.

Or in some cases when they remove one component they have to up the others. See low-fat "yogurts", which end up adding lot of sugar to compensate for the fat content...

What about protein bars? Those are processed foods where they add artificial sugars, protein whey, and artificial coloring.

I'd recommend you read these two books "Ultraprocessed people" and "Metabolical". They go into depth of how and why processing of food at industrial scale is bad for your mental and psychical health and the environment as well.

Care to summarize?

Talk to keto fans, even doctors, and they’ll tell you saturated fat is better. The problem is the combination of saturated fat with simple carbs. shrug

Whenever I point out no cardiologists seem to agree on or recommend keto, these same people say “oh they will eventually, they’ll see they’ve been wrong”

It’s a little annoying how something as basic as food produces such large disagreements among experts. Makes me wonder what we really know.

> You don't have to know anything about how food was "processed"

IMHO that's an oversimplification on two counts: one being that people are different. I think I can remember that factor being denied in the past by medical practitioners, but I could be wrong. The view was, it's a physical fact that there's so-and-so many calories in a given piece of food, and the outcome will be identical for everyone. I don't think we believe that to be true any more.

The other can be explained with oatmeal. Oatmeal is a traditional way to get something readily edible out of oats. Oatmeal comes in any number of variations, and if you like to, you can grind them down to a powder. Do you think that all these different forms have the same nutritional effects?

Oats will differ from oatmeal slightly because of the steaming involved in production, but other than that, they're just altered in physical shape: they're flattened and they differ in particle size. Essentially, the smaller the particles, the less digestive work the body has to perform on a given amount of intake, and one should fully expect different effects although their nutritional components—fats, carbohydrates, proteins—will remain constant (assuming proper processing).

Different types of oatmeal will lend themselves to different culinary methods, and I think just as in the kitchen, so in the stomach they will behave differently.

One aspect of Ultra-Processed foods—and I myself am not sure at all whether this is just the next food scare or something to be taken serious, as a category—would appear that the industry has all the incentives to favor small particle sizes. I think the ultimate dream of a food processing engineer must be to assemble all products from reliable streams of standardized small particles, preferably liquids really. It's not unlike boards pressed from wood chips being cheaper than boards from solid wood (the more affordable of which are really assembled from slats these days).

Your analogy with oats doesn’t really make sense. For the exact same amount of input material of oats vs oatmeal should result in the exact same nutritional outcome. The more processed version may potentially be less satiating, just like a fruit smoothie vs a whole fruit has very different satiety, but that doesn’t change how fat it will make you.

Now, satiety is a huge component for the general public maintaining a healthy weight. But it’s not the same mechanism as them somehow being different nutritionally. It’s the reason why GLP1 antagonists work. They don’t somehow make you burn more calories, they just make you feel full easier. Foods that naturally have that effect will have the same benefit.

To get smaller particles you have to do some work, whether inside your stomach or outside of it. When you eat cold whole oatmeal with milk then bigger colder particles reach your stomach which then will have to perform more work, spend more energy, on breaking that down than when you, say, eat finely-ground porridge that you have cooked for a minute with the same amount of milk. How will that not be different for the body? Of course you can always define 'nutritional effect' such that by definition such effects are excluded but that's probably no what you want to say.

Thermic effects of food are very marginal. Especially if you’re comparing something like oats and finely ground oatmeal instead of two wildly different foods like oats vs meat. I’d suspect the difference is at most 5%, likely much lower, which is within the margin of error for caloric reporting of labels. Humans are very efficient at extracting nutrition from food.

No. Diet Induced Thermogenesis (DIT) can vary from 0-3% (for fat) to 20-30% (for proteins). Carbs usually vary between 5 and 30%, depending on the amount of fiber. A fiber-rich oat would likely be around 30%,and a fiberless oatmeal 10-20%.

Please read the context again. If the only difference is oats vs finer ground oats, fiber would not be removed and nutrition content would be the same. Simply grinding up something doesn’t destroy its fiber content. If there’s additional processing to remove something such as fiber content then that would have an effect, but now we’re not just making particles smaller.

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