Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/11/25/scientists-are-learning-why-ultra-processed-foods-are-bad-for-you

by Brajeshwar • 2 years ago

220 426 2 years ago

economist.com

goles• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/EfaFI

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

tldr hint: the last 5 paragraphs get to the point, and are worth reading.

dukeofdoom• 2 years ago

Don't they add food coloring from ground bugs sometimes. In case of sausage they add preservatives to make it last longer. Actual poison if you were just to eat a lot of it. Generally companies are liable if they make you sick right after eating their product. So they do everything they can to prevent that. Nobody is going to held liable if they give you cancer 10 years down the line. Super hard to prove. So not a worry for them. Backlash after the failed covid vaccine makes some reform more likely now.

psunavy03• 2 years ago

Why do we need these kinds of sensationalist names for things? Why is it so important that they be "ultra-processed" foods? Can't they just be "overprocessed" or perhaps use some other more neutral term?

It's like the 90s when everything had to be "EXTREME!!"

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

I think it's partly due to the people (this site is full of them) that would read any other term and go "what is processing? Cooking and cutting is processing hurr durr"

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

I have had this exact argument on HN at least a half dozen times.

2OEH8eoCRo05• 2 years ago

Olive oil, steel cut oats, and dried beans, are processed. It's to differentiate from things like Coca-Cola or TV dinners.

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

It's funny that it's only the high IQ types that have difficulty distinguishing beans from coca cola.

user_7832• 2 years ago

Just as a side note/for info, there’s a specific definition (I think by the FAO?) used for them. The tldr is that when you’re extracting/reacting something to use as an ingredient (eg hydrogenated oil), it becomes ultra processed.

rsynnott• 2 years ago

Well, it's only _over_-processed if we assume it is _bad_. A consensus does seem to be emerging that it _is_ bad, but building that right into the name seems unhelpful. And as alluded to in the article, what the point is after which something is 'over'-processed is not particularly clear.

TheBigSalad• 2 years ago

Proce-X'ed foods

willcipriano• 2 years ago

some other more neutral term

Nutrient dense/high calorie is probably more accurate.

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

This would encompass eggs and is leaving out what might be key components (engineered by food scientists and produced in factory)

ninalanyon2• 2 years ago

Ultra-processed foods are broadly speaking foods that cannot be produced in a normal domestic or restaurant kitchen.

csours• 2 years ago

Nobody knows = there is wide disagreement

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/

My personal feeling is that I can eat like a king every day of the week. If I only had access to one kind of dessert, I'd be fine. I'd get tired of it. Oh, vanilla ice cream again.

But we have access to a wide variety of highly palatable foods, each with distinct flavor profiles; and advertisements reminds us how much better we'll feel after a snack!

Big recommend for Guyenet's "The Hungry Brain"

(randomly chosen podcast interview)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1g8l-MdZk

thrawa12354325• 2 years ago

I always take "Nobody knows!" "Nobody could have predicted!" as a warning for either something really dumb, biased, or uneducated take is about to follow.

hunglee2• 2 years ago

Surely not that mysterious - the adulterants added processed foods in order preserve it longer for the shelf, disguise the looks, mask the taste or simply bulk it out for max profit generally do not provide additional nutritional value

tpm• 2 years ago

Simply not providing nutritional value would be neutral from health perspective. We are looking for something that provides negative effects, either direct (something toxic) or indirect (like causing us to eat more which causes obesity...).

Kirby6412• 2 years ago

From the article:

Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a recent observational study from Harvard University, for example, found that whereas some upfs, such as sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. Dr Astrup warns that the current classification risks “demonising” a lot of healthy food. Insights from Dr Hall’s work could therefore help refine the understanding of upfs, paving the way for more balanced and useful guidelines.

This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless. I look forward to the study noted in the article comparing high-density vs. hyper-palatable. I strongly suspect the study will show its a combinatorial effect... but we'll see.

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

I agree it leaves a lot to be desired but i wouldn't say it's totally worthless. It's clearly identifying something and even a poorly understood adherence to avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier. Overall though we obviously need to come up with better terms for this

Kirby6412• 2 years ago

Adherence to avoiding UPFs, by the current Nova classification, would lead to most people having to radically change their diets, assuming you actually follow the Nova classification of UPFs to a tee. And assuming they're already reasonably healthy, there would be no meaningful health benefits I suspect.

resoluteteeth• 2 years ago

avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier

UPFs are defined in a way where you could replace them with essentially identical foods that only count as "processed" by swapping out a couple ingredients with nutritionally identical ingredients (e.g. replace HFCS with sucrose).

The research on UPFs doesn't actually compare ultra-processed food with similar "processed" foods.

So if you replace a pie containing HFCS with a kale salad, yeah it's probably healthier, but there isn't really evidence that replacing an "ultra-processed" pie containing HFCS with a home-made "processed" pie containing sucrose that otherwise has the same nutritional content is healthier (there is some researching showing that fructose can be harmful but the glucose/fructose content of HFCS isn't significantly different from sucrose).

If there is no direct comparison between similar ultraprocessed foods and processed foods, the research doesn't actually show that ultraprocessed foods are bad in a way that homemade processed foods aren't, in which case I'm not sure what the point of defining ultraprocessed foods as a separate category is.

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated.

You can't reliably draw any conclusions from them. You have to use common sense and rules of thumb.

2OEH8eoCRo05• 2 years ago

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

vixen99• 2 years ago

Can you please give your reference for that definitive statement. And what are 'nutritional studies'? Why wouldn't they include the research that led to the list of nutrient recommendations issued by USDA and similar publications in the UK, Norway, France, Australia and many other countries. No conclusions from them? I think there are. There is a truly vast literature on subjects nutritional so it's vital to be very specific.

Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.

workflowing2• 2 years ago

40-60% - that's a pretty large p-value and reasonable proxy for thumbs and sense.

atombender4• 2 years ago

But some are better than others. The NIH is currently running a study (N=36, expected to complete in 2025) on ultra-processed foods where the participants are sequested as inpatients at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center's research facility and strictly monitored 24/7. They can't leave without a chaperone that ensures they're not cheating. They've done prior studies such as this one [2] (N=20) in 2019. In these studies, they switch the person's diet halfway through, in order to see if the effect is real. The participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the diets had the same amount of calories total, and the same calorie density. The results are striking; participants eating ultra-processed foods consumed more calories and gained weight while the other group lost weight. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/well/eat/ultraprocessed-f... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/

nox101• 2 years ago

"use common sense" lol - the same common sense that people use when confronted with dyhydrogenoxide? the same common sense that people used if asked about sodium chloride? The same common sense about that tomato, mushroom, seaweed extract called MSG?

hu3• 2 years ago

sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.

I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.

mint2• 2 years ago

Likewise breakfast yogurt could be either yoplait “yogurt” or plain unsweetened actual yogurt, or anything in between.

One is basically gelatinized sugar and the other is pretty healthy. If one’s classification doesn’t easily distinguish those two, that’s absurd.

PittleyDunkin3• 2 years ago

I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health.

You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout.

Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've gone much too far in demonizing it.

moomin• 2 years ago

Strong agree. The Nova classification is extremist and heavily useless. Yes if you come up with two classifications and one includes McDonalds burgers and the other doesn't you'll be able to show a health effect. Doesn't mean your categorisation is useful.

anonym294• 2 years ago

Do you really think it's not useful at all to know you can protect your health proactively with one classification system of UPFs, that is deemed a bit extreme?

Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, they're just not known to be healthy within one of many frameworks.

Instead of tearing down what we know works because it doesn't include the foods you deem healthy, why not advocate for more research into the foods in question specifically?

blackeyeblitzar3• 2 years ago

The poor categorization may be a purposeful obfuscation. If you have bad labels it becomes easy to have poor studies that are easily criticized, and entire movements or research fields for food safety can be dismissed. Instead of labels we need transparency on every last ingredient and process applied.

ifyoubuildit• 2 years ago

others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.

This surprises me. A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy, and I would have assumed are heavy contributors to poor health.

Jensson2• 2 years ago

A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy

Apparently "basically candy" is not the same thing as candy. That is a great find, lets us eat basically candy without the health consequences.

sfink• 2 years ago

I don't see where your assumption is being challenged. "Breakfast cereals" is a very loose category. I would not conclude that Froot Loops lower risks of cardiovascular disease just because Ezekiel's Gravel Bits have been shown to do the same.

chrchr3• 2 years ago

Wait until you learn about The Ice Cream Paradox:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

drcongo• 2 years ago

Brit here: the idea that "ultra-processed foods" are really bad for you is definitely something that's entered the general consciousness here, but I don't think I know anybody who has any kind of meaningful answer to what "ultra-processed foods" actually are.

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

If it couldn't be made outside a factory, it's ultra processed.

tlb2• 2 years ago

Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.

But yes, I'd rather have a classification that clearly separates Coke and Cheez Doodles from actual foods. There are some multi-billion dollar lobbies to prevent that happening, though.

wyldfire• 2 years ago

Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.

I eat a lot of (plain) yogurt. But my kids often eat sweetened yogurt, which I've suspected is not-at-all-healthy. So I went to check the ingredients of several sweetened brands. I could be wrong but I don't see any of those you're concerned about explicitly mentioned. I do see "fructose" which seems like it could be just about as bad as HFCS? Or maybe the terms you use are generic and there's some specific ingredients that qualify? Or did I just get lucky with these examples I picked?

Examples:

Yoplait GoGurt Protein Berry Yogurt Tubes contains: Grade A Reduced Fat Milk, Ultrafiltered Skim Milk, Sugar, Contains 1% or Less of: Kosher Gelatin, Modified Food Starch, Fruit and Vegetable Juice (for Color), Tricalcium Phosphate, Potassium Sorbate Added to Maintain Freshness, Natural Flavor, Carrageenan, Yogurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus), Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3.

Danimals Smoothie Strawberry Explosion And Mixed Berry Dairy contains: Cultured Grade A Low Fat Milk, Water, Cane Sugar, Modified Food Starch, Contains Less Than 1% Of Milk Minerals, Natural Flavors, Fruit & Vegetable Juice (For Color), Lemon Juice Concentrate, Vitamin D3, Active Yogurt Cultures S. Thermophilus & L. Bulgaricus.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

I agree. Classification of UPFs seems more to be a "religious purity" discussion than actuall classification of good/bad

Univariable classifications are usually not helpful, and this seems to just confirm it. In the same way "sugar free" or "fat free" make little sense

rpdillon• 2 years ago

It's like the 'screen time' of the food industry.

kelipso• 2 years ago

breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease

Breakfast cereals? That sugary stuff? Someone else said 40-60% of nutritional studies are not replicable. Sounds more like the whole field is BS.

Scream naturalistic fallacy all you like but I would absolutely avoid all chemical additives and go natural all the way. If humans haven't been eating it for thousands of years, I would absolutely avoid it.

blackeyeblitzar3• 2 years ago

Yep. It’s hard to trust anything, especially because in the US things that aren’t banned are allowed by default. Companies add new substances to products constantly, often just minor variations of something that was banned.

JoshTko• 2 years ago

This is the best advice. Also proportion should match historical proportion, ie. very little sugar most of the time.

slt2021• 2 years ago

not all cereals have added sugar, I dont buy 40% added sugar, but rather 0% and 14% added sugar cereals

blackeyeblitzar3• 2 years ago

What we need first is transparency. Complete information about every ingredient, its supplier, where it was grown, what process it went through, etc. then we can perform research without confusing and conflicting results. Unfortunately I’ve seen people fight state or local level labeling laws by falling for corporate propaganda, particularly from companies in the GMO industry.

standardUser8• 2 years ago

One hundred percent agree. Companies should be obligated to provide comprehensive information on the ingredients they use in producing the food they sell us. It seems so basic, but even small steps in that direction are always met with maximum industry resistance.

e_y_• 2 years ago

I think adding labels to the product is only useful to a certain extent. There's a few things that stand out, like if a product has 70% DV sodium that's usually a bad sign, or "cheese product" tells you that it's not real cheese (for better or worse). But stopping to look at the ingredient list of every product you buy is time consuming.

This is where online food databases might work better. Scan the UPC/EAN with an app and the app can tell you which ingredients are generally safe, which ones to avoid. The recommendations could be personalized to your dietary needs or allow ratings from different organizations that might have varying criteria for what they consider OK vs bad.

Such apps exist but usually requires someone (volunteer crowdsourcing or paid) to input products into the system so it may not be complete or fully up to date. And as you suggested, supplier information and more detail on the processing isn't available. Having an international, public database of that information (with an API for app makers) could help make nutrition label apps -- or maybe even built into Google Lens -- much more accessible to the general public.

slothtrop• 2 years ago

It's not hard to intuit, but yes it can be less useful owing to ambiguity and confusion. It would be less difficult to settle on a definition that does not lean so hard on "processing" and actually conveys what is problematic.

For example, "shelf-stable packaged foods with a large flour component, wherein the flour component is stripped of all fiber, with added fat, salt, and sometimes sugar". You can also include candy, soft-drinks and juice.

That doesn't tell you something is "ultra-processed", but it identifies more meaningful factors. These are typically non-satiating snack foods, very low in protein and fiber, but very savory with added salt and fat. The combination of refined flour, salt and fat seems to be of particular note (and sugar regardless).

blablabla123• 2 years ago

This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless.

It's quite funny that even 15 years after labeling UPF as such there's still a struggle to "officially" mark it as unhealthy and I don't understand why it should be challenged. I would think that most children growing up are being told that candy, fries and Gatorade aren't healthy foods. Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.

As mentioned in the article there are statistics that under the UPF classifications people are way more unhealthy both physically and even mentally. Shouldn't that be enough? Now a new study is needed to benchmark UPF that is low in fat, sugar and salt. Basically against a product class that hardly exists. I mean nobody eats like that. Most people put extra salt on their food, the Mediterranean diet somewhat the gold standard in good yet healthy food contains tons of fat and various cuisines from the region have rather sugary desserts.

I'd be fine classifying UPF as unhealthy and calling it a day. If food businesses want to explore "healthy" UPFs they should probably do so and take the burden to re-classify it as healthy. This seems like a quite Kafka-esque endeavor.

andybak2• 2 years ago

Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.

(From a quick 30 second search) E300 is Vitamin C, E101 is Vitamin B2

And yes - I'm aware that vitamins that are naturally present are probably better than "fortifying" food - but still.

pizzathyme• 2 years ago

The best exception is high quality protein powder. Additional protein consumption is extremely healthy for you, short and long term. But it's technically an ultra-processed food.

It's probably better to each 4-5 chicken breasts per day instead of protein powder. But as far as I know there hasn't been a measured difference.

UncleMeat• 2 years ago

A fries ultra processed? Potatoes cut into strips, cooked in oil, and salted. Is the deep frying what makes it ultra? Or is a pan fried chicken breast ultra processed since it is cooked in the same oil?

tugdual• 2 years ago

When Carlos Monteiro decided to operationalize UPFs by giving them a definition (laymans terms: UPF is one ingredient you wouldn't find in a traditional kitchen and wrapped in plastic) Kevin Hall from the US had the same reaction as you and decided to make a multi-million dollar experiment to disprove the definition proposed by Dr. Monteiro. Result: People who ate unprocessed lost weight, and the other group gained weight. (Groups were exchanged after 2 weeks and saw similar effects).

317070• 2 years ago

A link for other people who are interested in this: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...

wnevets3• 2 years ago

People don't understand that basic task like washing is "processing" the food and can be frustrating when talking to them about this subject.

tremon3• 2 years ago

That's not about understanding, that's deliberate obfuscation. If people cannot (or don't want to) distinguish between a faucet and a blender, there is no further discussion to be had.

chrchr3• 2 years ago

Food that is merely washed might be processed, but is not ultra-processed according to the Nova classification [1]. There's an actual criteria that's being applied in these studies that concern ultra-processed food.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

YeGoblynQueenne6• 2 years ago

I think there's some fudging of the terms here. When the article is talking about "bread" being healthy- well, there's bread, and then there's bread. Supermarket bread (sliced, packaged) typically lists a couple dozen ingredients. Ordinary bread... you know, bread-bread, like the one some of us bake at home, is made of: flour, water, salt, leavening agent (yeast or sourdough for those as have the patience). Bread-bread is probably healthy especially if you make it with (expensive) wholemeal flours. But supermarket bread? I don't think so.

Same goes for breakfast cereals and breakfast cereals. e.g. there's oatmeal and weetabix that are basically just a bit of fiber, not the healthiest thing you can eat but won't kill you. And then there's ... well my favourite poison is Kellog's Smacks and it's basically just as nourishing as eating cardboard with sugar on top.

troyvit• 2 years ago

There's a cool book I didn't finish White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. It talks about the history of store bought bread supplanting home baked bread, and the marketing wars waged both for and against store bought bread. I'm gonna start it up again and I recommend it.

goalieca• 2 years ago

But supermarket bread? I don't think so.

Why? The point of the quotation was to question if this was a problem in the quantities listed. I know I’d rather eat whole grain enriched supermarket bread than refined white flour bread from some low protein source wheat.

devchix3• 2 years ago

I bake bread at home nearly weekly, it goes stale and crumbly in about 3 days at room temperature and moldy by 7. I bought some pita and didn't use it all up. It was still soft, pliant, mold-free after 2 weeks. I tossed the thing, never going to buy it again.

Kirby6412• 2 years ago

Nova makes this distinction already. “Freshly made” bread is considered category 3 (processed). That said, what distinguishes supermarket bread from freshly made bread?

Literally the only difference is typically some sort of preservatives, some added vitamins, and possibly a dough conditioner.

In general, bread is just not that healthy if you make the fluffy white kind. The preservatives and slicing have little to do with it. If anything, the added vitamins may make it healthier than something you make at home.

johnisgood• 2 years ago

Where I live, our supermarkets bake "bread-bread" every morning and once in the afternoon! We also have bakeries here that do the same.

navaed012• 2 years ago

Obesity and diabetes are western societies biggest health issues and the best research we have is a small n for a 4 week trial. Clearly there’s regulatory capture at play here.

Once we better understand what is driving the poor health outcomes we can work back and better classify problem foods and ingredients. Right now it’s all a bit unknown and doesn’t seem to have the right resourcing. There’s research that shows that UPFs are so simple that the body gets all the bad stuff in all its unfettered glory. Compare that to a date fruit, very high in sugar, but packed with fiber, the body metabolizes the date much more slowly, no sugar spike and gets some nutrition

resonious• 2 years ago

Why on earth do they include the word "ultra" when the definition is "literally any amount of any additive"?

Spooky23• 2 years ago

Because the whole premise is being bike-shedded out of existence.

On paper, fruity pebbles and Cheerios are pretty similar. But the dyes, sugar, etc make it a very different product. Sorta how we pump sugar into yogurt, spray it on as a frosting and peddle it like it’s actual, healthy yogurt.

A great way to undermine the argument is to make the terminology and classification impossible.

HPsquared• 2 years ago

Is there even a proven causal link? It could just be another case of "poor people do thing X, and poor people have higher mortality".

hyeonwho42• 2 years ago

The highlight of this article is the Randomized controlled trial:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/

So yes, causal for obesity.

taeric4• 2 years ago

Looking at the amount of processed food available in Japan, it is hard to think it is just the processed food that is to blame.

I think it is a cheap observation, such that I expect people to push back on me, but it is hard to ignore portion sizes. Will try and take a dive on some of the data around that. But a personal level, it is hard to grapple with the fact that I just got less food per place that I went.

And it is frustrating, as getting the food, I would want a large burger/sandwhich/whatever. But waiting a small amount of time after a small snack/meal works.

burnte2• 2 years ago

There have been experiments that control for portion size, processed food still spikes glucose more, etc.

taeric4• 2 years ago

Isn't that some of what this article was challenging?

nightski3• 2 years ago

I honestly think stress and work obsession along with sedentary lifestyles has a lot more to do with anything health related than ultra processed foods.

coding123• 2 years ago

Very true, someone that has time to make a meal from scratch is clearly not stressed, has money and time. Maybe not all, but from a category view, there are so many factors on those two different worlds that affect health, that focusing on just food is crazy.

presentation2• 2 years ago

Plenty of stressed and work obsessed people in Japan too, and yet the obesity rate is tiny.

bee_rider3• 2 years ago

What’s special about Japan in this context?

bilekas• 2 years ago

They do have a particularly high life expectancy.

https://data.who.int/countries/392

zeroCalories2• 2 years ago

Good health outcomes compared to other first world countries?

makeitdouble6• 2 years ago

Japan isn't special IMHO, but overweight rate is on the low side.

Now, trying to understand why is can of worm (social pressure and bullying probably plays a role for instance, which have other adverse effects possibly worse than just being overweight)

taeric4• 2 years ago

Possibly nothing. Was just recently able to observe it directly.

loeg• 2 years ago

Much lower rate of obesity. Like 5% instead of 40% (US).

AmVess• 2 years ago

In the US, portion size, calorie density, frequency of eating high calorie foods are contributing to people getting a lot fatter a lot faster than before. We now have instant gratification in food delivery services. Get anything you want without leaving home.

In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.

It is amazing to see how much more obese people have gotten in the last decade, and the % of fat people has gone up a lot, too.

Restaurants of all types serve massive portions, and people eat it without thinking or realizing they are eating a day's worth of calories in one meal, and I haven't touched on the amount of fat, sugar, and sodium they are packing away.

The fact that people today have shorter lifespans than their parents should be sounding alarms everywhere, but there is nothing but silence.

throwup2384• 2 years ago

In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.

The UK had a reality TV show called Secret Eaters where they signed up people to be monitored 24/7 by cameras and private investigators which tracked every single thing they put in their mouth and counted up the calories.

It was really informative to see how some people eat and it is not pretty. Even the people who didn't regularly eat fast food or go out to chip shops ate way more than is healthy with fatty sausages, fried things, and little fruit or vegetables, all in huge portions.

chrisweekly• 2 years ago

Sedentary lifestyles are a huge factor too.

cush3• 2 years ago

These people you describe are experiencing very real eating disorders. Even if they aren’t counting calories, they are keenly aware that they’re destroying their body. They aren’t silent, they’re addicted.

presentation2• 2 years ago

As someone who lives in Japan I can attest that portion sizes are smaller, and seasoning is much less rich and sweet than it is in the USA - this checks out for me.

gdjskshh2• 2 years ago

As someone that often eats one large meal a day, I appreciate large portion sizes ar restaurants. If its the only thing I eat that day, a 3000 calorie meal is what I need.

4gotunameagain2• 2 years ago

You cannot imo use Japan as an argument for anything. There are so many unique and localised factors at play in Japan, that it could be something as obscure as incredible self limiting eating due to fear of social stigma.

Japan is a basket case.

dzhiurgis2• 2 years ago

Japanese people are much smaller so explains smaller portions.

But I am too surprised how processed (but tasty) their convini food is.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

The end of the article gets the point. The problem isn't that food is processed; the problem is that extremely processed foods are much harder to moderate yourself on and present a much, much more appealing food to overeat on, which in turn causes health problems and is why so many people are so fat, along with other factors like people being lonely and depressed, and food being a quick and cheap way to make yourself happy, the broad availability of unhealthy food and the sometimes restricted availability of healthy food, the fact that people are too damn busy to find time in their schedules to prepare their own food, etc. etc.

Which itself ties into other systemic incentives. Processed food is shelf stable, fresh often is not, so it's friendlier to logistical systems that deliver everything we eat, which means less of it gets wasted, which means the prices are lower and availability is virtually guaranteed. Put simply: it is far easier and more profitable to ship, stock, and sell potato chips than it is to sell potatoes, and because everything in our system is profit driven, the better things map onto that, the more they occur. Ergo we're drowning in potato chips and still starving.

thrawa12354325• 2 years ago

In that case we can just take Ozempic or whatever guys!

Just kidding, no that's not the problem. The problem is processing destroys/alter many molecules we do not even know about or know it's full "purpose"/role in nutrition and digestion. The commonly talked about vitamins and RDA and such are just the bare minimum so a broad population does not get sick, but does not mean optimum health for a given individual.

Cf. eating 10mg of iron in a steak, readily bioavailable vs eating 10mg of iron from cereal. One is bound in easily digestible compounds, the other is iron shavings or rust.

e.g The British Navy discovering that scurvy is fixed by eating fresh food; ensuring to add citrus to sailors diets, then forgetting about how it worked. Then retrying citrus, but cooking it one using copper vessels, which destroy much of the vitamin C content.

jumpoddly• 2 years ago

Excessively editorialized headline for the post to the point of trying to make the opposite point as the original.

jaggederest2• 2 years ago

So even beyond the factors in the article (calorie density and hyper-palatability) there's other contributing factors in processed food. First of all, the processing itself introduces several factors: mechanical and heat energy changing the structure (but not composition) of the food, usually into smaller particle sizes; and the potential introduction of new contaminants - one that has been discussed before is lithium grease[1].

The other thing that processed food does, partially discussed in the article, is sit on shelves much longer. I wonder whether we've detected the acute effects of spoilage (e.g. food-borne illness) but missed some chronic effect.

[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2024/07/27/lithium-hypothesis-...

julianeon• 2 years ago

This is a great point and one that I think would change many minds.

If you say "more calories" or "hyperpalatable", many people will think "I can control that with portion control - I just won't binge them."

But if you say "it changes the physical form of the food" or "it has contaminants in it," it's clear that no amount of portion control can fix that.

Dylan16807• 2 years ago

Well that depends on what the form change does. Most form changes are just fine.

And whether portion control can fix contamination depends on what the contaminant is. A lot of things are only potentially harmful above a certain level.

natdempk• 2 years ago

The Slime Mold Time Mold article is maybe an interesting starting point, but really not great analysis... see this thorough rebuttal around the Lithium stuff that has not been responded to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

TBH a lot of the discourse around this annoys me because it ignores sort of fundamental obvious stuff like food/snacks got way tastier, access to unhealthier food is higher, we live a way more sedentary lifestyle, takeout got more affordable, studies show that people overall consume more calories from unhealthier sources, you can go to the grocery store and see you should basically avoid much of the food there, food spikes your glucose higher, more artificial ingredients, switch from fat to sugar, more processed ingredients, etc. and yet everyone says "well it can't just be that" because XYZ specific study of some quality and timeframe took one of those axis in some degree of isolation and showed that _maybe_ it's not that specific thing only. Kind of a missing the forest for the common sense trees aspect. Obviously we don't understand the whole picture of obesity, but there's a degree of denial around common sense health stuff that's really weird in the kind of "rationalists try to figure out obesity" writing. I really think we should work more from a place of "you don't see people who do moderately intense exercise regularly and eat healthily being overweight/obese" as a baseline...

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

Seems pretty obvious to me. Humans didn't have factories until a couple hundred years ago.

This means we are not adapted to factory made food.

This entire debate is hilariously overcomplicated by smarty pants "show me the study" or "aren't cooked carrots processed?" types.

40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated. It's called the "replication crisis". Google it.

Rules of thumb are greatly underrated on HN. Here's one: if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it.

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it." i follow this as well it's a great rule. I have no idea on the internet, but in real life nobody who's ever been the smarty pants saying "aren't cooked carrots processed?" has health or a body i'm envious of

makeitdouble6• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

Good thing I didn't make that argument :)

xooxies• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

mihaic• 2 years ago

Always using the appeal to nature is a fallacy, but a more refined heuristic is to simply consider that the burden of proof for a processed meal is much greater than that for an unprocessed one.

I remember a movie from the 1950s, where a character was arguing that "margarine is just like butter", and the response was that "butter needs no explanation".

antihero2• 2 years ago

When industrial food producers decided their priorities are making stuff extremely cheap that appeals to our more addictive side so they can make as much money as possible, without any regard for our health, this is quite obviously going to create a problem.

yurishimo• 2 years ago

There’s a woman on YouTube that I watch sometimes who recreates popular sweets/snacks/desserts but using fresh ingredients and home friendly (usually) cooking techniques. What always blows me away is just how long is takes to make something like a Little Debbie Oatmeal cream pie from scratch.

If we as a species could no longer rely on industrialization to create junk foods and instead had to make them from scratch, we’d spend 100x as long making them as we do shoving them down our throats and therefore savor the few that we do make and likely eat less.

The subconscious power of availability and plenty on the human psyche is enormously underestimated.

blurri• 2 years ago

And yet science doesn't have an clear answer here. Just conjecture and theories like the ones you stated.

Aloisius4• 2 years ago

Here's one: if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it.

I'm not sure I understand. Every food made in a factory was first made outside one.

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

Margarine? Fruit loops? Canola oil? Snickers?

I dare you to make actual snickers with the same ingredients outside a factory. Refining the sugar alone is a huge industrial process.

Even the US's entire grain supply is sprayed with folic acid. So pretty much all wheat and rice that you find at the grocery store is also disqualified.

ptero• 2 years ago

TLDR: According to the article, people eat more calories when they eat ultra-processed foods. The reason is unknown, one possibility is more calories per bite as manufacturers remove water and some other ingredients during processing.

Overall, a pretty underwhelming article. Not surprising, unfortunately -- I have been subscribing to the Economist for over 15 years since late 1990s until the slow erosion of quality made me drop it.

thrawa12354325• 2 years ago

Yes, I agree with you, the Economist from the 90s was a different animal. If you ask me the above article is just paid shilling for Ozempic et. al. Not directly obviously, but in the mindset and viewpoint it wants to develop in readers

swasheck2• 2 years ago

ultra-processed people by chris van tulleken hypothesizes that it's because the food is less nutritionally dense through extraction and reconstitution to more palatable and economically expedient forms. additionally, these forms require less effort to process by chewing so we're able to ingest more calories more quickly before our biochemistry can catch up and signal that we've consumed what we need. finally, the processing of food breaks down the original nutrient "matrix" in the way that our metabolism evolved to process it. we evolved to metabolize an apple, i believe was his example, by eating it raw and in its original form, together with all that constitutes an "apple" and not simply the composite of nutrients that we can extract from an apple. the hypothesis is that the whole apple influences our biochemical response differently than the extracted nutrients that have been reconstituted in a different form.

im3w1l• 2 years ago

My guess is water. Natural foods have a lot of water compared to processed foods.

Consider dried fruit. Quite minimally process wouldn't you say? Yet as snackable as candy.

mewpmewp23• 2 years ago

There's currently a lot of DHMO in all of those foods, which can be quite dangerous for humans and has been a cause for numerous deaths in the World, including young children.

lifeisstillgood• 2 years ago

I sometimes wonder if there are lessons from British period of WWII rationing. Huge numbers of people were enabled to have for free the right amount of nutrients instead of the malnourishment of the 1920s/30s. And millions more found it hard to get the excess sugars and fats.

If we created a new rationing, with no processed foods, feeding the whole population what would happen tomorrow and in ten years?

Imagine how unpopular the Prime Minister who started this would be. Then imagine ten years later when he would be the guy that got millions of people thinner, fitter and having more sex (I am told that’s what thinner fitter people do!)

Imagine that election :-)

makeitdouble6• 2 years ago

The jump from a Brazilian doctor classifiying food to a British study tracking consumption under that classification, to end on a US study with 20 adults, waiting for another one with 36 members ending next year, kinda illustrate how hard it is to come with relevant data.

And now that we've more and more ultra-processed diet food, we'll need a few more decades to have an idea of their actual effect at any scale.

s3p• 2 years ago

...people in Brazil were buying less sugar and oil than in the past. Yet rates of obesity and metabolic diseases were still rising. This coincided with the growing popularity of packaged snacks and ready-made meals, which were loaded with sugar, fats and other additives.

What. So they were buying less sugar and fat. But they were actually buying more sugar and fat?

philipkglass• 2 years ago

They were buying less sugar and oil as ingredients to cook at home with. They were substituting home cooking by buying more ready-made foods and snacks that contained fat and sugar as components.

dismalaf• 2 years ago

I mean, look at the ingredients list on most processed foods. Much higher quantities of various sugars and starches. More processed foods are rarely 1:1 ingredients compared to less processed foods...

ninalanyon2• 2 years ago

According to the BBC Inside Health podcast I recently listened to they are often bad for you because the processing removes fibre and vitamins and also makes sugars more available. And that to make them int4eresting enough to eat excess salt is added.

a3w• 2 years ago

WHO says "eat 30 grams of fibre every day". Which is a lot, unless you use whole grains without sweeteners, fat or meat on top (which reduces fibre per calorie). Or eat lots of roots or cabbage, and salads. Especially since you have to think of eating until 30 grams of pure fibre content is reached every. Single. Day. Of. A. Year.

iterance• 2 years ago

This strikes at a problem with the definition of "processing" foods. Nixtamalization is "processing," but is mandatory to ensure one does not develop a vitamin deficiency on a maize diet.

bobajeff• 2 years ago

To me it looks like it could be something of a plucebo effect. Like they are bad for us because we expect them to be bad. Minucebo effect?

mchannon2• 2 years ago

The article name is "Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you", the opposite of this thread's title.

Everyone's ignoring the elephant in the room: fiber.

Fiber locks up calories and makes the body miss a lot of them, or absorb them later in the digestion process. If we reduce the word "processed" to a single action, it's removing fiber. It's turning wheat berries into flour. It's ripping off rice husks to make white rice. It's crushing nutritious apples and oranges into sugar water.

Western countries use calories as a metric, and it's a very hackable metric. If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body. If I turn those whole oats into oatmeal, fewer are. If I'm McDonald's I'll pulverize them to get all 1000 calories into my health-conscious deluded customer's bloodstream, so they buy more food from me.

Of course you can add 100g of Metamucil fiber to a processed meal, but the original fiber's function was to lock in the sugar, which the new stuff can no longer do. So it doesn't help.

Why are processed foods bad for you? Follow the fiber.

xnx• 2 years ago

Agree completely. "Processing" is mainly the act of removing fiber so more food can be eaten faster and more often. Fiber satiates, which is not a good thing for companies that are trying to sell as much product as possible.

orev• 2 years ago

Using a blender is also processing, but it doesn’t remove the fiber. It does, however, break open the cells and makes the nutrients and sugars more easily available separately from the fiber.

Eating healthy is just as much about the shape/structure of the items being consumed as it is about the nutritional stats it has.

nritchie• 2 years ago

Another way to say this: Eat foods with low glycemic index. Avoid foods that spike blood-sugar levels.

mchannon2• 2 years ago

That's a completely different thing.

Honey, for instance, has a high glycemic index. Watermelon has a high glycemic index. They will not get you fat the same way cane sugar and watermelon juice will.

A juice made of celery, kale, and spinach, will still have a low glycemic index. But it's still nowhere near as good for you as unprocessed celery, kale, and spinach.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

Of course if you add water it will lower it the index. All food that is not diluted in water will trigger an insulin response. That is how digestion works. Otherwise you'd have type 1 diabetes.

How is possible for people to crave steak and eat lots of steak despite having no sugar if the theory is that sugar causes a huge reaction and people to crave more sugar after eating it?

Blaming sugar ignores that all food triggers a spike of dopamine and insulin reaction, unless it's diluted in a lot of water. This is why vegetables are safe for diabetics, due to being so diluted. Jason Fung, Taubes and other fitness/health influencers keep spreading this carbs-insulin nonsense.

zahlman3• 2 years ago

If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body.

Humans are extremely efficient at extracting energy from food, regardless of the fiber content. We owe our survival as a species to it, as food was much less plentiful in the ancestral environment.

I've heard of fiber meaningfully affecting insulin response to food, satiety, and some other things - perhaps even gut microbiomes - but not metabolic efficiency.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

Yeah he's posting nonsense. If it were true you'd be passing huge chunks of undigested food and be sick. Very little of the calorie content of oats and other so-called fiber rich food is actually undigestible. Sorry...beating obesity is not as easy as eating cereal and oats all day. wish it were.

paulpauper3• 2 years ago

Yeah this is wrong. Very little of oats and other grains is indigestible fiber. Otherwise you'd be shitting it out undigested.

AJ007• 2 years ago

Who made up this word? Before 2022 it more or less doesn't exist (per Google Trends.)

code_biologist2• 2 years ago

The phrase as originally coined is from the Nova classification system, proposed in 2009 by researchers at the University of São Paulo, Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

anonym294• 2 years ago

Dukeofdoom's original comment: ``` Don't they add food coloring from ground bugs sometimes. In case of sausage they add preservatives to make it last longer. Actual poison if you were just to eat a lot of it. Generally companies are liable if they make you sick right after eating their product. So they do everything they can to prevent that. Nobody is going to held liable if they give you cancer 10 years down the line. Super hard to prove. So not a worry for them. Backlash after the failed covid vaccine makes some reform more likely now. ```

My response:

Several food colorings (e.g. Red 40, Yellow 10) are synthetic dyes derived from crude oil and other petrochemicals.

At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.

Reality is complex. We are basically one step removed from cavemen still, and need to remain humble, curious, and intellectually honest about the sheer extent of that which we do not know. That's missing in so many people these days. I think more (but not all) people would benefit from undergoing an ego death and reintegration experience that so many others have found in psychedelics, which are nonaddictive and generally safer than legal drugs like alcohol and various combinations of amphetamines (ADHD medication).

nobody99992• 2 years ago

At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.

That's not actually how it works in the US. The standard is "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS)[0], which requires the manufacturer to "confirm" that an additive is "safe."

At least that's been the requirement since 1958, although some 700 existing additives were declared exempt from the potentially biased/unconfirmed testing of the manufacturer.

If, as you suggest, "...many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe", those folks are woefully misinformed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe

0xEF2• 2 years ago

Living in the US, my takeaway is this:

Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor.

But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they would stop making them. But their snack cakes are designed to make you want to eat the whole package and sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix, making the consumer's choice almost a moot point since consumers tend to trade their own best interests for convenience and "saving" money.

And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.

But I do hate it. I have to put a stupid amount of effort into eating healthy because I don't have room for a garden and healthier alternatives are often more expensive. I can see why most people just reach for the snack cakes and call it done.

0xEF2• 2 years ago

In retrospect, I realize the food industry probably took a page out of the cigarette industry's playbook. Or was it the other way around?

filipheremans• 2 years ago

There is a clear link between the two industries: https://neurosciencenews.com/hyperpalatable-foods-big-tobacc...

feoren• 2 years ago

This game theory problem, where consumers are buying unhealthier options because they're cheaper, and companies are producing unhealthier options because they're more profitable, is exactly what regulation is for. I don't understand why we've all collectively forgotten why regulation exists and become so cynical that it can actually work! Actually I do understand: it's industry interests spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intentional misinformation and government capture for a half century.

A reasonable counter-argument is "but the science is extremely muddy here, so effective regulation is especially difficult", which is unfortunately true, but I'd point out that the science is extremely muddy largely because of industry efforts to intentionally poison our understanding of nutrition.

aboodman• 2 years ago

It's even (often) in company's selfish interest to have regulation so that they aren't forced into a race to the bottom.

specialist• 2 years ago

Yes and: "regulations" is just a scary words for "rules".

Yes and: Policy proceeds rule making. Rules try to encode incentives and disincentives to achieve those policies. For better or worse.

Yes and: Surplus, and therefore overuse of, unhealthy foodstuffs (eg HFCS) is the result of pro Big Ag policies. Which are often in opposition to public health interests. So we (taxpayers) are paying to create lifestyle diseases at the same time we're paying to mitigate those same diseases.

I know you know all this. I hate to go meta on the UPF debate; but there really is an easily identified root cause.

The very first priority to mitigating lifestyle diseases should be:

Stop making it worse.

/rant

singularity2001• 2 years ago

this is why I'm always very astonished when European regulation is frowned upon by reflex

code_biologist2• 2 years ago

It's not in the food industry's interest to harm us beyond pursing profit margin, but it is in the health and pharmaceutical industry's interest to harm us — treatable chronic disease is recurring revenue. The more chronic disease, the more revenue. Pharma companies are making fistfuls of money from GLP1 agonists.

This incentive to harm is translated into the food system when captured groups like the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association help write dietary guidelines (for school systems for example) that look good optically but actually create disease and future recurring revenue for the health industrial complex. Groups like the ADA and AHA are also captured by major funding from the food industry, so that cheap high margin food products fit into their dietary guidelines.

The incentives are synergistic and exactly aligned to push food products with a veneer of health that cause long term disease.

mft_2• 2 years ago

I think you're wrong about the food industry not slowly harming people, for two reasons.

1) For "unhealthy" food (i.e. not something that's acutely poisonous) the link between ingestion and harm is in the long-term; it would be very difficult to blame harm on a particular group of foods, let alone a specific product. Maybe in a couple of decades there will be hand-wringing and governmental investigations, but in the short term, there's no negative incentive for food companies.

2) Most executives are directly incentivised to think in the short term - this bonus cycle, this year's results, the two-three years until LTIs vest, or a next promotion or change of job. Short of something catastrophic, there will almost never be a comeback for those individuals, meaning they have all of the positive incentives to chase profit, and it's very unlikely that they'll ever personally experience anything negative from their decisions.

---

Also, I don't really want to engage with quasi-conspiracy theories, but if you think that pharma companies have a hand in influencing dietary advice to be unhealthy so they can sell more drugs, IME you're vastly overestimating the competence of the pharma industry.

hyeonwho42• 2 years ago

The word "captured" was very apt, as food companies make donations to the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association in return for their stamps of approval. This is not a conspiracy theory, but has been documented:

ADA takes money to promote Splenda: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ex-director-accuses...

AHA takes money to promote foods like ham which raise heart disease risk: https://huffpost.com/entry/health-news_b_4398304

AHA advisory cherry picks trials to reference, on the back of funding from Procter & Gamble (Crisco) and Bayer (soybean oil): https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-saturated-...

carlosjobim• 2 years ago

sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix

Sorry for sniping, but the alternative is to not buy a snack. You don't have to eat snacks.

mft_2• 2 years ago

And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.

It's not this simple.

Marketing isn't just about making an existing product attractive to consumers - it's also about creating new products and even new product categories, and then creating a desire amongst consumers leading to purchases.

Where do you think all of the ultra-processed food has come from in the past decade? It didn't always exist...

DevX101• 2 years ago

A side effect of maximizing profit is harming our health. Doesn't really matter to me whether it's malicious intent or in the pursuit of shareholder value.

rbranson• 2 years ago

tl;dr is that "ultra-processed foods" are engineered to be more palatable and that tends to result in more caloric density.

giantg2• 2 years ago

Generalization is the real issue here. You can't just say "processed" food is bad. There are tons of definitions and different forms of processing. It would be much better to look at individual ingredients. A good start would be to change the GRAS process. There's no real investigation being done on many food additives and the evidence many use for GRAS is flimsy at best.

arichard123• 2 years ago

Ultra processed people by Dr Chris van tulliken and for for life by Dr Tim Spector are good reading on this. The first is more focused on this issue.

swasheck2• 2 years ago

was going to reference ultra-processed people. i walked away with some of the same general sentiments that are here -

1. nova classification is imperfect, but is better than what we had before it and i hope that we can iteratively find something more refined

2. so many nutrition studies are so woefully biased because of sponsorship (and antipathy) that it's laborious to extract meaning from them because much of the effort is tracing the money and potential bias.

blackoil• 2 years ago

I find two principles work best. First, grandma's wisdom is mostly correct so prefer home-cooked culturally aligned food.

Second moderation, you can have one can of drink and one meal outside power week of anything. So burger and coke or Indian sugary desserts all are good if you can control frequency.

robnado• 2 years ago

Evolution has selected animals that, when they have access to foods with high caloric density, will gorge on them. This has been advantageous to their survival, because the history of life has been characterized by famine feast cycles for most species. Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today. The rest is probably additives that affect our hormones that control hunger/satiety signals in the body.

In my opinion, effective regulation would control the caloric density as food as well as ban any additives that can affect hormonal hunger/satiety.

cynicalpeace17• 2 years ago

Why the insistence that these foods are only unhealthy because of the calories?

Have you heard of poison? 0 calories. Can kill you in the right doses.

Food factories contain dozens of these toxins in the form of plastics, lubricants, agents, flavorings, colorings, etc.

Calories are important. But the insistence that it's simply calories feels almost conspiratorial to me.

zahlman3• 2 years ago

Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today.

It's been possible to buy prepared pure sugar (even granulated) and pure oils and fats for centuries, and eat them straight out of the container if one wished. Yet the obesity epidemic is much newer than that, and hardly anyone gorges themselves in that particular manner even today. There is clearly far more to it than "had most of their non-caloric content removed".

stuaxo• 2 years ago

Some part of it must be how small all the parts get when processed so you take in everything really quickly.

VeejayRampay• 2 years ago

don't we though? they're known to contain very little nutritional value, to be stuffed with salt, fat, sugar, to feature next to no vitamins and natural fibers, which naturally corral sugar to the stomach instead of letting it go through the intestinal barrier freely

so basically it's food that promotes poor variety in gut bacteria and inflammation

that we pretend like we don't know is very surprising to me, it's not exactly shocking that the american diet is bad after some 50 years of it running amok across the world

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

Given standard home kitchen equipment and techniques, could you prepare this item? Yes -> not UPF; No, requires a factory -> UPF.

This is kind of like the Jeff Foxworthy jokes.

If you remove so many of the nutrients that you have to try to spray vitamins back on... you might make a UPF.

If your product has ingredients where there is no evidence that those ingredients can actually be digested by the human body... you might make a UPF.

If you have to add dyes so your product doesn't look like sawdust or poop, you might make a UPF.

...

sabbaticaldev3• 2 years ago

lots of people know but they don’t advertise on the economist

workflowing2• 2 years ago

Indeed, you need scientists to simply pronounce the ingredients that are processed into, and into, food.

Horffupolde• 2 years ago

My fast rule is to only eat food that’s been around for 1000 years or so.

peterashford• 2 years ago

Oooohhh... not so sure. Bound to be a little moldy by now

cupantae• 2 years ago

Summary: we still don’t know why, but definitely don’t eat UPFs.

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

From reading these comments, i wish nobody was allowed to post on threads like this without posting a pic of their body so we can calibrate their opinions

nitwit0052• 2 years ago

Smokers are often experts on why cigarettes are bad for you.

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

I don't meet smokers arguing smoking isn't actually bad though...

samaltmanfried• 2 years ago

Agreed. It's clear that most people don't understand basic nutrition, and most people have a very distorted view of what the human body should actually look like. The average American is very overweight. If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

cthalupa• 2 years ago

If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

This is kind of an absurd metric. You can be at ~20% BF (which is by any standard a healthy percentage - some studies show best all cause mortality outcomes in men at 22%) and still not have visible ribs or lats with one arm above your head.

Different people carry weight differently as well, no visual test like this is going to be blanket accurate.

watwut3• 2 years ago

That is not health advice, that is "how to be anorectic" advice. If you are at the weight with longest lifespan, you are somewhere at the top of "normal" bmi range and wont see ribs. You wont seen them in the middle of "normal" range and plenty of thin wont see them either.

Otherwise said, for quite a lot of people accomplishing this would mean underweight.

Underweight is less healthy the overweight.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

And what will it tell you? Let's say you have one guy who is morbidly obese, another who is visibly in top shape, a seriously underweight fashion model, and an average guy. Who are you going to trust the most?

The obese guy obviously has some problem with nutrition, but he may also the one who is most interested the subject and the most knowledgeable. Obesity is also a mental disorder and while he may know a lot about nutrition, he has trouble applying this knowledge.

The guy who is in top shape most likely has good nutrition, but he may also simply have good genetics, do a lot of physical activity, and not care much about what he eats.

The fashion model probably knows how to lose weight, which may be as simple as not eating enough. But how much she knows about health is completely unknown.

As for the average guy, that's the most "no idea" you can get.

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

I think you're misunderstanding why posting the body would be useful. It isn't so we know who to listen to, it's so we know who _not_ to listen to

cmiller13• 2 years ago

Here you go: https://imgur.com/M3xoe2c

My opinions:

The amount of "processing" or "chemicals" is a red herring and it really comes down to prepared meals and snacks that have been engineered to make people want to eat more of them. We've gotten so good at this that it seems to override the natural hunger/satiety system which causes people to gain weight.

I eat a mostly vegetarian diet with lots of protein, massive amounts of sugar in the form of fresh fruit, and lots of whole grains.

4gotunameagain2• 2 years ago

A quick mention of your staple vegetarian protein sources ? :)

ragazzina• 2 years ago

Do you need the picture of the person speaking in front of you to "calibrate their opinions" very often?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_personam

snapcaster13• 2 years ago

Just on this topic, it's a great filter to know whose opinion you can discard without consideration

edit: also posting a link to a logical fallacy on wikipedia really makes you look like a dork would recommend avoiding it

00N8• 2 years ago

So when I mix whey protein isolate into pineapple juice with plain Greek yogurt, is that considered an ultra-processed food? It seems like it would be, but I doubt the criticisms of UPFs really apply here. My understanding is that these are healthy ingredients, in a blend that's fairly optimal for strength training, despite one of them being highly processed.

Is there actually anything wrong with whey protein? Or can we find a better definition of the problematic UPFs?

hnpolicestate• 2 years ago

The children were served some bizarre meat substitute chicken nuggets today during lunch. Tastes one once. Literally just matter. Flavorless.

If they want to do meatless days they should serve well seasoned lentils or something.

DidYaWipe• 2 years ago

"Robert F. Kennedy junior, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health, has likened processed food to 'poison'"

Wow, a bright spot.

klik992• 2 years ago

Putting aside the vague hand wavy definition of what "highly processed foods" literally means, my suspicion is that there are two things making processed food worse for you.

I've heard drinking juiced fruits is worse for you than eating the equivalent fruits, as the sugars in the fruit are wrapped in fiber that make the sugars "slow release" into your body, and those are broken down when juiced so the sugars hit you at once. I suspect processed foods "mainline" nutrients in ways that unprocessed foods don't.

Secondly, I think a lot micro-nutrition is ignored when comparing processed food, like the fat, carb, salt, etc is equivalent between potato chips and, say, a baked potato with butter, but there are a lot of small things that our body needs that are not part of that equivalence. At least for me, when I eat potato chips I eat more because they never quite satisfy me. I suspect this is because the micro nutrition is cooked or processed away, so I end up eating more carbs because it's not quite giving me all what I need, just the big macro needs.

disparate_dan• 2 years ago

I agree. I think there is a third thing: processed foods are more likely to contain additives like colorants, emulsifiers, preservatives and stabilisers that humans have been eating for decades rather than centuries so we don’t have the same body of knowledge about them or their health-related impacts.

kalaksi• 2 years ago

And maybe to a lesser extent the plastics in packaging.

klik992• 2 years ago

Great user name btw

tremon3• 2 years ago

that humans have been eating for decades rather than centuries

That's false btw. We humans have been eating emulsifiers and preservatives for centuries, even if we only classified them decades ago. Examples:

- Lecithin (E322): naturally found in egg yolk

- Citric acid (E330): naturally found in lemons and oranges

- Agar (E406): found in red seaweed, an edible crop from southeast Asia

- some sulphites (E221, E226) naturally occur in wines. Old wines are actually likely to contain more sulphites than modern ones since we now have a body of knowledge about them and their health-related impacts

willy_k2• 2 years ago

The chips not satiating you is more likely to be the effect of the obligatory seed oils in chips; IIRC the linoleic acid that they are high in impedes satiety (and also promotes inflammation).

rdedev• 2 years ago

The lack of fibre also contributes to lack of satiety which is another driving factor that makes people eat more processed food.

The potato chip satiety issue is also investigated in a few studies. Baked potato is some of the most satiating foods. But when you fry it in oil it just does something to your brain that makes you crave for more

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324078#boiled-or-b...

akira2501• 2 years ago

when I eat potato chips I eat more because they never quite satisfy me.

This is why I have paper bowls. Pour out a portion of chips. Eat that. If you're not satisfied after eat something _else_. This is probably as much about ingredients as it is about packaging and delivery.

udfalkso• 2 years ago

100% this. There is a wonderful book called The Dorito Effect that goes into this in more detail.

blueyes• 2 years ago

Robert Lustig has been preaching this for years:

https://www.amazon.com/Metabolical-Processed-Nutrition-Moder...

A good rule of thumb if you care about avoiding UPFs but don't want to overly limit your diet is to only buy foods with 5 ingredients in them (plus or minus 2 :).

luckycharms810• 2 years ago

I think the rub is actually here:

"The participants received either ultra-processed or minimally processed foods for two weeks before swapping diet for the next fortnight. Participants in both diets had access to the same amount of calories and nutrients like sugars, fibre and fat. People were free to eat as much or as little as they wanted. The results were striking. People on the ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories per day than those on the unprocessed one"

My understanding is that caloric intake is king.

BizarroLand3• 2 years ago

Weight loss/gain is specifically tied to calories consumed vs calories burned, yes.

But that is not the purpose of the study.

2 groups of people, 2 diets, and the 1 group given an unlimited amount of relatively healthier food, chose to eat less of it and lost weight. The other ate more junk food and gained weight.

That implies that there are non-conscious factors at play and that diets may be more naturally successful if they are comprised of healthier less-processed food even without restriction.

Additionally, this implies that there must be an X factor that takes place in the processing of foods that causes overweight people to keep eating when they have met their caloric requirements.

For context, look at the data regarding nutrient density in vegetables over the last 60 years and see that the nutrients aside from fat/carbs/protein have been on a steady decline year over year.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/

When I put these things into perspective, my hypothesis is this:

Being overweight, commonly viewed as a weakness of character or a sickness of the mind or body, is more likely a symptom of some larger issue.

Evidence of this can be found piecemeal from studies on human diets the world over.

The foods that are readily available to people are making them sick, my guess is that this is from some form of malnutrition. This may be a nutrient malnutrition or some compounding effect that the overprocessing of foods has on the human body that isn't trivial to differentiate from its non-processed counterparts.

I feel it is reasonable to assume that in general overweight and obese people on an ultra-processed diet are overeating in a non-conscious attempt to compensate for a lack of fundamental nutrition in the foods that are available to them.

Therefore, to test the hypothesis, the underlying nutritional issues should first be addressed by eliminating ultra-processed foods from the diet and replacing them with minimally processed foods, the higher in "quality" the better.

Theory: An overweight person will naturally reduce their caloric intake when their diet meets or exceeds their nutritional requirements.

The results, listed in the article above, seem to suggest that this theory is correct.

pas• 2 years ago

"processed foods" are just tastier is also consistent with the data, no?

Suppafly4• 2 years ago

Until they come up with a term that actually means something definitive, I pretty much ignore anyone going on about ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed is meaningless.

djoldman• 2 years ago

Seems like the cited studies confirm things we already know: when humans are given tasty high caloric-density foods, they consume more calories than when not given those foods.

I didn't see a cited study showing that these ultra-processed foods led to worse outcomes when caloric intake was held constant. Did I miss something?

illusive4080• 2 years ago

No you didn’t miss anything. Everyone is freaking out about “processed” and “chemicals” and ignoring the obvious answer: high calories and low nutrition.

hgomersall3• 2 years ago

The processed and chemicals may be a proxy for high calories low nutrition, but generally they are used to create hyper palatable foods that are low nutrition. In general, it's quite hard and expensive to produce high palatable foods using real ingredients; food engineering changes that and makes it easy for cheap food to mess with our senses. As far as I can tell, this is the generally accepted argument for the problems with UPFs - they make people want to eat more cheap crap food.

rexpop• 2 years ago

I haven't read the article, but research has identified several components of processed foods that are detrimental to health beyond their caloric content. *Trans fats*, often found in hydrogenated oils, raise bad cholesterol levels and are linked to heart disease and diabetes[3]. *Added sugars* and high fructose corn syrup, prevalent in many processed foods, increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease[1][3]. *Sodium* is another common additive that can lead to hypertension and cardiovascular issues[1][3]. Additionally, *refined carbohydrates* cause rapid blood sugar spikes, contributing to metabolic disorders[3]. These components collectively contribute to chronic health conditions and increased mortality risk[2][4].

Citations: [1] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/processed-foods/ [2] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-... [3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318630 [4] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f... [5] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6146358/ [6] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3781462... [7] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/ [8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/27/ultra-pro...

gdjskshh2• 2 years ago

This touches on, and then completely ignores, one of the most probable areas of concern - additives. Emulsifiers that disrupt your intestinal lining, artificial dyes/flavors/sweeteners, fillers, consistency changers, and all the other tools in a food chemist's toolbox. Those should be individually investigated and problem ingredients eliminated (e.g brominated vegetable oil).

Also, fiber. The standard american diet is lacking fiber and protein.

didibus• 2 years ago

Do I read this correctly in that the only thing they found for now is that those eating UPFs ate 500 more calories per day, thus indicating the negative health effects could just be attributed to the weight gains?

valval• 2 years ago

A Ctrl + F for “healthy” into this thread returns numerous results. I’ve never found a convincing definition for such a common word.

teleforce• 2 years ago

I'm surprised the article and nobody here is mentioning the popular the usage or the abuse of Boric Acid and Borax in processed foods mainly for preservation purposes [1].

In most countries they are banned but process food manufacturers have been using since forever.

[1] Abuse of Boric Acid and Borax in Foods:

https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...

Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

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