Is this the real start of processed food and the obesity crisis?
This was, however, the start of a radical change in food culture in the US. WWII introduced refrigerated food transport, improvements in canning, and developing frozen and shelf-stable meals. The result was 2-3 decades of Americans eating TV dinners and canned foods, as well as the rapid expansion of fast food restaurants. The growth of supermarkets and year-round produce then shrank the available variety of foods, and intensive ag practices reduced the nutritional quality of those foods.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.
I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
I strongly suggest you don't take the information from a documentary, which is focused on engaging story telling in order to make money, with a balanced and complete view of the situation.
There was no effort to dissuade further research yourself or to not engage with other mediums. I also don't believe they were supposing your only source of information should come from their casual suggestion. "I strongly suggest" you go ahead and link the research papers you've personally vetted like the poster above you trying to contribute to the discussion did that covers these topics indepth if you feel passionate about the lacking information.
Documentaries tell stories. They often leave out facts that run counter, rarely try and provide a balanced view and their intent is to make money.
But they junked that in 2011 and replaced it with a trivial pursuit-looking thing called MyPlate. More details at choosemyplate.gov.
the most prominent example of this is Heinz ketchup, where Heinz lobbied for the FDA and essentially got most of its competitors out of the market as a result; Heinz was the only major ketchup producer not using preservatives. https://archive.ph/1y8f5
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IIRC the major problem in food science is that most of the people willing to pay for food studies are food makers.
> vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad.
I think you’re referring to the vegetarian who sued Buffalo Wild Wings for still using beef tallow in their fryers, even after the restaurant industry had mostly switched to industrial seed oils.
https://www.drovers.com/news/vegetarians-lawsuit-over-beef-t...
Part of the reputational risk at McDonald’s was that at the time they were heavily communicating that the standard items were standardized everywhere, so the revelation that US McDonalds used beef in fries did not go down particularly well in South Asia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Sokolof
I said McDonald's was 'tricked' in ~1990 into switching to vegetable oil. This was trickery both because the fries became less healthy (Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, etc), and less tasty. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast McDonald's Broke My Heart is about how the fryer oil switch made McDonald's fries soggy: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonald...
The 2002 article you linked to is about how vegetarians believed the switch to using seed oils as the fryer oil made McDonald's french fries compatible with their dietary philosophy. Those lawsuits were in the late 1990's or early 2000's, which was well after the 1990/1992 fryer oil switch.
Thanks for bringing up the early 2000's lawsuit against McDonald's by vegetarians - I was not aware of that. My point was that Ancel Keys' holy war against saturated Fat was an important part of the cascade of science-mistakes that resulted in the obesity epidemic which took off around 1980 (weight started inching up in the "post WWII" period, but didn't take off until ~1980).
why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.
I find it quite strange that people think home-cooked meals have to be calorie-dense. It's food. Where you cook it doesn't matter. And if you have to keep your food from being delicious to control your portions... the problem isn't the food.
[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-many-calories-a-day-s...
Assuming you have 3 meals a day, and assuming you have 600 kcals per meal, and assuming your nutritionist has prescribed a diet with a 50/20/30 carb/fat/protein ratio, and assuming one of those meals (dinner?) has 100 kcals from fat, that means 16% of the meal was fat. If you eat a lean protein (with a tiny amount of incidental fat) and carbs with that meal, that's actually the perfect amount of fat.
You can also mix up your meals so that, say, breakfast has very little fat, and dinner has more fat, or vice versa. It's all about balance.
Yeah, but only anorectic are able to keep eating this long term. Until they get to hospital with all kinds of body damage.
Nuts, sugar, cheese, eggs, actually also fruits ...
Cigarettes.
You know what really started getting phased out in the 80’s?
While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.
Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.
If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.
[1]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3266980891411/filet-...
[2]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/8410789140118/tofu-f...
It is extracted, yes, but the actual thing that you eat has its original consistency, therefore is unprocessed.
Is it a perfect categorisation method? No, such does not exist. Is it immensely more useful than the other categorisation methods that we have, and does it correlate with negative health effects ? For sure.
The idea about ultra processed food cause overconsumption just because of their hyperpalatability is questionable and questioned, as ultra processed food contains a myriad of novel molecules that our digestive system has never encountered. A leading theory is that these molecules circumvent our satiation detection mechanisms, along with their hyperpalatability.
This kind of processing has been done industrially for thousands of years, e.g. with the production of meal or flour from seeds or the extraction of oil from oily fruits or oily seeds.
As long as care is taken to prevent changes in the parts of the food that are separated (e.g. by using cold pressing or sCO2 extraction instead of hot pressing for oil extraction), such processing methods cannot have any detrimental effects on food, but they can greatly reduce the costs needed for the storage and for the transport of food.
The second class of food processing methods mix various food ingredients and/or transform the food in various ways, by using heating, whipping etc.
When food processing methods of the second class are used industrially, as opposed to being performed at home by the end consumer, they almost always result in unhealthy food, because the interest of the food vendor of obtaining a maximum profit conflicts with the requirements that have to be observed in order to make a healthy food.
Terms like "highly-processed food" or "ultra-processed food" make sense only when applied to food processed with methods of the second class.
Chicken breast separated from bones and skin is not more processed than an apple separated from its tree.
"Ultra-Processed" and "causes obesity" are two massively different claims. If the claim is that said tofu is ultra-processed, obesity rates in countries where it is eaten are completely unrelated and do not work as argument.
Also, it is perfectly fine to define "non processed" group in a way that wont put every single meat into it. If you say that everything that requires killing or cleaning is ultra processed, then the whole term is meaningless.