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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Good piece, and makes sense, but some examples would be helpful -- there's a lot of talk about foods engineered to taste like protein but that have carbs.

Anyone have some examples? Chicken and Beef are, in their un-seasoned form, pretty bland, so I'm not sure what "engineered to taste like chicken" actually means....?

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Engineered to taste like chicken means pretty much that - they try to reproduce some of the texture and mouthfeel. They make it a bit bland and chicken-like, then use it for something that would have chicken.

Not sure about your first paragraph. I know tha. If you take a rel chicken and roast it, and serve it with vegetables, that you'll have a tasty nutritious meal. But if you take that same chicken you can take the breast meat off and sell that as fillets; same with the legs; the wings get sold too. You do that with all the bird. Eventually you have a carcass from which you mechanically recover as much meat and meat-like protien as possible. That gets sold off for low value meat style products.

So, you take some meat and chop it and re-form it into small lumps. You cover those in a salty spicy coating (which will soak up fat) and you fry those. You serve them with a sweet sauce (ketchup; bbq; anything with sugar).

Now you have a low value bit of meat that you can sell in high volume to many many people for incredible markup. It is really tasty - some people think there aee combinations of sugar / salt / fat that are hyper paletable - and really easy to eat.

This kind of popcorn chicken will have less protien, but more salt and fat and carbs than a regular chicken.

"(ketchup; bbq; anything with sugar)"

Sadly those don't even have sugar in them for the most part, it's all high fructose corn syrup these days. HFCS along with trans fats have been linked to inflammation and should be avoided.

I'm in the UK. We use sugar, not HFSC.

We also have obesity over here. Drinking 42 oz drinks is going to cause problems whether they're using HFCS or regular sugar.

We do have HFCS in the UK, but we call it glucose-fructose syrup. I've noticed it in the ingredients of an increasing number of beverages.

One of the biggest factors might be what people are eating in addition to their proteins. Chicken nuggets and popcorn chicken aren't all that bad by themselves, but when they are paired with french fries and a soda, your protein to calorie ratio is extremely low.

You need to buy better chicken and beef (usually meaning organic chicken and grass-fed beef), since both absolutely have flavor when properly raised.

Grass fed beef is worth every penny you'll spend on it if you are somewhere where you can find it.

When you have it for the first time though, prepare it some way with a minimum of seasonings, maybe like a simple burger patty. If you first prepare it in something beef is just a part of, say something like a chili, you won't necessarily taste why it is worth a little more.

And that's not talking about any possible health benefits it just tastes great.

They mean that they've added umani (savouryness) to their product. Most famously/commonly done with MSG.

Also soy sauce and some other fermented sauces (Worcestershire sauce, e.g.) hydrolyzed vegetable protein, hydrolyzed yeast, soy extracts, and the ever popular "natural flavor".

Chicken with just a little salt has good flavor. And beef is pretty good by itself.

If your chicken and beef taste bland try eating some less industrial food. Good beef tastes amazing, and chicken is pretty good.

Simply put, bad is: Anything ready made, pasta, bread, and anything not visibly grown or sliced in one piece.

Good is: Everything that's noticably not been processed in any way. And if you want to stay off carbs, stay away from potatoes, rice, corn, etc.

> bad is: ... pasta, bread ...

Yep, those French and Italians are dropping like flies.

> stay away from ... rice

Ah yes, Asia, the poster child of poor dietary health in the world.

Well, there's a reason why modern Japanese raised on a more Western diet average something like 6" taller than Japanese raised on a traditional diet.

The same holds true for medieval Europeans and their all-natural diet.

Go look at some old suits of armor some time -- those guys were tiny, and they were the biggest, strongest men of their time.

Europeans also used to be quite short. The whole world is getting taller.

Actually, the world is getting to the height of how humans were pre-agriculture, at around 6 feet. As Asia and ancient Rome has proven, high carb low protein diets do not make for great height.

There is also reason to believe that a height in great excess of 6 feet is not optimal, however. Our physiology - bones and joints - don't allow for it.

I am not advocating traditional diets, I am pointing out the silliness of demonizing pasta, bread and rice when many groups of people that basically live on these things do not have the problems that staying away from these foods supposedly solves.

> those guys were tiny

Diet was hardly their only problem.

My general sense with keto and the carbs-are-evil philosophy is that it's a handy solution for relatively quick weight loss. It really does work for that.

But it's not at all clear if shunning carbohydrates is a healthier option in the long term, compared with a more diverse diet with similar total calories. As you suggest, there's considerable evidence that grains are not evil.

You're equating bread and pasta that the food industry puts on supermarket shelves, with the bread and pasta people used to make themselves from flour they got directly from the local mill for grains they got from a local farmer. Not the same thing at all.

"Diet was hardly their only problem."

In terms of growth, it was definitely the major problem.

People did not evolve to get the majority of their calories from carbs.

Now, the "carbs are absolute evil!!!!" people do take it to an extreme, but it's just a fact that signs of nutritional deficiency (e.g., stunted growth) appear in the archeological record as soon as a group of people move from a high-protein, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a high-carb agricultural lifestyle.

If there are any exceptions to this, I'm unaware of them.

Past and bread are grain that has been processed before you eat it. Your body doesn't have to work as hard to turn it into glucose -- zoom. The more your body has to work at processing its carbs the better (but don't eat mulch).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index#Disease_prevent...

That's not the problem with pasta and bread. The problem is what the food industry does to flour and kernels, and that it's become a fools errand to even attempt to buy pasta or bread that's not stuff full of processed carbohydrates.

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