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Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

bmj.com

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Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#31

Post by kazinator »

blakesterz wrote: post #24
icandoit wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally: if (foodItem.ingredientList.size()>9) {return false;} else if (foodItem.inventedYearsAgo() So I can eat a baguette prepared traditionally, and a few brands of prepared bread from the grocery store.

I think Polan said something like "If your great grandparents didn't have it, it's probably not good for you" and I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb.

Mostly limited to food though; doesn't work for items like polio vaccines and three-prong electrical outlets. :)

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#32

Post by dragontamer »

blakesterz wrote: post #20
notdang wrote: post #13

The article states that : Ultra-processed products now account for nearly half of the average dietary intake of some high income countries, with consumption rising rapidly in most other countries. I've never lived for more than 1-2 months in any of these "high income countries". What does it mean to consume "ultra-processed" food? Can someone give an example how the daily dietary intake can be 50% processed foods? Wh…

I did wonder that same thing, this breaks it down nicely: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed... One example: Corn vs Canned corn vs Corn chips Where corn is not, canned is processed, and chips are Ultra. My favorite example is Doritos. "Favorite" because they're soooo damn good, but sooo damn bad for me. Ultra Processed for sure.

> Where corn is not, canned is processed

And that's where this distinction immediately becomes ridiculous. Fresh corn vs canned corn is well studied: the nutrition in canned corn can be higher due to preserving the food at peak-ripeness.

Fresh corn loses nutrition the longer it sits around. If you're able to grab corn from a farmer's market, its really good and nutritious. But if that corn was shipped for miles, sat at the back of a warehouse for a week, then got to the grocery store, and then sat at your house for a few days before eating... well... a lot of that nutrition evaporated away

---------

Canned corn loses some nutrition into the water as its canned. But you can preserve that nutrition by integrating that water into your meals. Ex: canned corn in chili, just pour the corn AND the water into your meal, and you keep all the vitamins.

In either case, the dietary fiber of the vegetable remains in tact even though the canning process. And that's the stuff that a lot of people are missing in their diets.

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#33

Post by neogodless »

dolni wrote: post #11

People throwing out "processed food" as some catch-all term for packaged stuff that is bad for you is a major pet peeve of mine. Yes, foods that are pre-packaged tend not to be good for you. You _should_ eat fresh foods and vegetables. But saying that all "processed" foods are bad for you is a gross oversimplifcation that promotes ignorance about nutrition. In the many conversations I've had about processed foods, pe…

> teach them about the major nutrients the body needs and where you can get those

The school system teaches students about the major nutrients the body needs, and what common foods include those.

The corporations use major nutrients in advertising products that also contain lots of unnecessary ingredients, and that marketing works. That's actually a large portion of what this article describes.

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#35

Post by mike00632 »

silicon2401 wrote: post #26
mike00632 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breakfast: Cereal and milk. My favorite cereal is Trix. Lunch: Sandwich made of bread, bologna, cheese, mustard. Coca-cola or chocolate milk to drink. Dinner: TV dinner, perhaps a Lean Cuisine or Pizza rolls. Mountain Dew or Kool Aid to drink. This was a typical day of food for me as a child and through being a teenager.

Is this really what you ate like on a day to day basis? Not snarky or anything, just genuinely shocked and curious

Yes. It was actually even worse than that on most days. The portions were bigger and I didn't include snacks and desserts. My whole family was overweight and most of us were obese (myself included). This is the majority of Americans. I'm sure that this style of eating is extremely common.

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#36

Post by wongarsu »

xnx wrote: post #7
goda90 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what's your cut off point for processed food? Just things that are ready to eat besides fruits and veggies? What about white flour and rice as opposed to whole grains?

I'm not sure what approach syntaxing used, and "processed" is a fuzzy term, but bread and pasta have a lot more in common with twinkies and oreos than fruits and vegetables.

And apples are full of sugar. Drawing the line is hard.

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#37

Post by poma88 »

syntaxing wrote: post #2

I mentioned this before on HN but it still blows my mind how much weight I lost by simply not eating processed food. Thanks to COVID, I cook most of my meals now and I lost a considerable amount of weight even though I didn't cut my portions. I think the biggest problem is that processed food makes me crave food even though I'm not hungry and the stuff used is just so packed in calories (fructose syrup).

Same. I stopped going to supermarket and ordered only uncooked healthy ingredients. Lost 12 kg!

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#38

Post by icandoit »

I like what this guy has to say about nutrition (take it with a grain of salt, he is an epistemologist)

https://meaningness.com/nutrition-resigns

"Your job is to wear white lab coats while saying that food ingredients are healthy and unhealthy, and to wave charts around. That makes the ingredients authoritatively healthy and unhealthy, which covers our asses.

...

"Signed,

[The governments of every country in the world, the agriculture industry, the food processing industry, the supermarket industry, and so forth.]"

I think if you model food as energy / volume / time you'll do better. To lose weight either increase time (fast) or volume (eat more fiber, maybe the easiest to do?) and decrease energy (lower calorie options).

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#39

Post by poma88 »

goda90 wrote: post #5
syntaxing wrote: post #2

I mentioned this before on HN but it still blows my mind how much weight I lost by simply not eating processed food. Thanks to COVID, I cook most of my meals now and I lost a considerable amount of weight even though I didn't cut my portions. I think the biggest problem is that processed food makes me crave food even though I'm not hungry and the stuff used is just so packed in calories (fructose syrup).

I'm curious, what's your cut off point for processed food? Just things that are ready to eat besides fruits and veggies? What about white flour and rice as opposed to whole grains?

Raw in-gre-dients.

Re: Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

#40

Post by adrian_b »

goda90 wrote: post #5
syntaxing wrote: post #2

I mentioned this before on HN but it still blows my mind how much weight I lost by simply not eating processed food. Thanks to COVID, I cook most of my meals now and I lost a considerable amount of weight even though I didn't cut my portions. I think the biggest problem is that processed food makes me crave food even though I'm not hungry and the stuff used is just so packed in calories (fructose syrup).

I'm curious, what's your cut off point for processed food? Just things that are ready to eat besides fruits and veggies? What about white flour and rice as opposed to whole grains?

The claims that it is better to eat whole grains than white rice or white flour are very wrong (when the claims have no context).

Obviously, if you had been some poor peasant and 80% of your food consisted of cereals, then eating whole grains would have been immensely better than eating just white rice or white flour.

On the other hand, if you eat a wide variety of foods, you can get any minerals, vitamins and proteins that you need from much better sources than whole grains.

Above satisfying your basic necessities with other nutrients, you can add enough fatty foods and starchy foods to satisfy your energy needs, depending on how much physical activity you do.

As starch sources, sweet potatoes, potatoes, bananas, maize, white rice, white flour and others are preferable to whole grains.

If you cook yourself with white rice or white flour, the food should be OK.

Unfortunately, if you buy modern bread or similar industrial products made with flour, looking at the composition you will see a huge number of substances beyond the traditional recipes.

Those substances may or may not have some deleterious effect, but, at least in my experience, one certain effect is that with processed food that I buy I am never satiated for long and I have the tendency to eat too large quantities.

Since I have switched to eating only food that I am cooking myself from raw ingredients, I have never felt again the need to overeat.

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