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Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition

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

#141

Post by jriot »

selimthegrim wrote: post #118
jriot wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking in general is time consuming. You and I appear to eat vastly differently, yet we both make our own food from scratch. For breakfast I eat 10oz whole milk, 2 - 3 strips of bacon, 2 - 3 eggs, and grits with butter (at time I'll have potatoes or toast depending). Our other other meals will include roasted vegetables, potatoes and meat. Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view as the best investm…

Are you a Randazzo’s devotee? Also curious about data science prospects in the area or remote, tbh

Randazzo's is currently my favorite! Though I pre-ordered a Dong Phong's this morning as I was unable to get one last year.

Local Data Science prospects are low to non-existent. I work remotely and remote prior to Covid. Companies reach out and don't seemed concerned about my location so I don't foresee being remote an issue.

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

#142

Post by jriot »

vram22 wrote: post #128
jriot wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking in general is time consuming. You and I appear to eat vastly differently, yet we both make our own food from scratch. For breakfast I eat 10oz whole milk, 2 - 3 strips of bacon, 2 - 3 eggs, and grits with butter (at time I'll have potatoes or toast depending). Our other other meals will include roasted vegetables, potatoes and meat. Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view as the best investm…

You seem to have missed some words in your second paragraph. What were they? One, I guess, is doctor.

Ah, sorry about that.

Edit -

Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view it as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day (a cold) when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the doctor for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly active naturally so this factors into it.

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

#143

Post by chubot »

dragontamer wrote: post #101
tobyhede wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second ingredient of Grain Berry cereal is sugar.

The first ingredient of Lard is... Lard. Which is "non-processed" by this strange designation. Would you say that Lard is more, or less healthy than a high-fiber cereal?

It seems like you think that Lard is axiomatically unhealthy, which may have been a common view 20 years ago, but no longer is.

Lard doesn't contain trans fats, which is what fast food is full of.

Lard is a time-tested animal product that has been used by many long-lived civilizations. "trans fats" wasn't a thing until ~20 years ago, so basically science is catching up with the implicit knowledge people have had for thousands of years.

https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/nutrition/2013/...

Lard is definitely healthier than processed oils, e.g. vegetable oil in the supermarket.

I eat food cooked with lard before I eat fast food or industrial cooking, every time. (and I lost significant weight in the last 3 years, so I'm medically "normal", which is 20-30% percentile -- i.e. most people are heavier than me)

Ditto for butter -- natural, whole fats were "out of fashion" 20 years ago because of incorrect nutritional knowledge foisted upon you by interested parties. Again, there are many mainstream books that cover these topics, like Pollan's.

---

And as much as these comparisons make sense, I would say that lard is also healthier than a cereal with the following ingredients:

Whole Oat Flour, Wheat Starch, Sorghum Berry Bran, Modified Corn Starch, Brown Sugar, Salt, Tricalcium Phosphate, Tripotassium Phosphate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E) added to maintain freshness.

The sugar, salt, and preservatives gives me pause. I believe that unprocessed sugars like honey, maple syrup, and dried fruit are easier for the body to metabolize, and I don't think that's very controversial these days.

So I eat granola without preservatives or much added sugar instead (although you can be tricked by concentrated apple or pear juice, etc. which is basically sugar). You have to pay about double, and it rules out about 50% of what's on the shelves at Whole Foods, and maybe 80% at Safeway. But I think it's cheaper in the long term.

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

#144

Post by another_sock »

pkaye wrote: post #96
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

This statistic from the article is mind-boggling: > 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. Note that they aren't just referring to processed foods. They classify ultra-processed foods as a step beyond what we typically think of as processed foods: > Ultra-processed foods and beverages ca…

So would a beyond meat be ultra processed while ground meat is not?

Yes because one is meat and the other is not meat.

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

#145

Post by robotnikman »

acuozzo wrote: post #130
inglor_cz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just watching the British "Supersize Vs Superskinny" series. The heavy articipants have serious addiction problem, obviously. The question is whether some foods are inherently addictive, at least for some people who are more predisposed to food addiction. There are some obvious commonalities in the diets of the superfatties: pretty much every one of them consumes a lot of pizza, fries, soft drinks and various fa…

I'm sure some foods are inherently addictive, but I hesitate to put the blame on specific foods because I gained most of my weight from eating sushi rice… a pot at a time. My experience suggests to me that food addiction is primarily psychological in nature and is often the result of a history of "experience coupling" (examples to follow) and a genuine misunderstanding of what feeling "full" truly feels like. Most ob…

I have been one of those "Experience coupling" eaters (eating while reading) and decided to try and experiment on myself last month. I decided to no longer eat while reading, watching TV, browsing my phone, etc.

I noticed I ate much less than I would usually eat, enough to stick to 1500 calories a day rather easily.

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

#146

Post by 01100011 »

dragontamer wrote: post #22
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

This statistic from the article is mind-boggling: > 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. Note that they aren't just referring to processed foods. They classify ultra-processed foods as a step beyond what we typically think of as processed foods: > Ultra-processed foods and beverages ca…

If half of our food is ultraprocessed, then that's a problem with the definition of ultraprocessed. Breakfast cereal is "ultraprocessed" by the definition of the article. But Grain Berry cereal is going to be grossly different from a nutritional perspective than Frosted Flakes. For both to be lumped into the same category of "ultraprocessed" is a bit ridiculous. ----------- Its not like "processing" makes something m…

Mostly agree, after all, our food is heavily "processed" in our digestive system, so it's possible many of the things we think 'unprocessed' foods provide do not survive the stomach. That said, I don't think we know this 100%. Sure, we have mapped essential vitamins, minerals and nutrients enough to know what keeps an organism alive, but there may be other things gained by consuming, say, minimally processed cellular material.

Again, on the other hand, some foods require processing to extract necessary nutrients(i.e. nixtamalization of corn).

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

#147

Post by ClumsyPilot »

01100011 wrote: post #139
inglor_cz wrote: post #104

Just by comparing photos and videos from the 1980s to the situation in the streets now, it is painfully obvious that we (and by "we" I mean at least half of humanity) have a serious obesity and metabolic syndrome problem. It is breathtaking how civilized nations silently accept such an enormous slide in quality of life, when other, much smaller problems lead to civic unrest, political discussions and overhaul of old…

45 here. Here's what I've noticed since the 80s: - More wealth and more choices now. - More eating out now. Meals are bigger, sweeter, richer, etc. - Less activity now. When I was a kid, video games were just getting started and most folks didn't own computers. TV & media was less engaging. Food addiction seems more... refined these days. There is a lot less fat shaming too, although I'm not suggesting we bring it ba…

Sweeter indeed, amount of sugar im food is absolutely insane these days. I am from Russia, and food in Uk is like 3 times sweeter, there is added sugar on freaking Roasted Vegetables! Its bonkers!

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

#148

Post by jumai8 »

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 have a fructose intolerance - it is wild how hard it is to avoid fructose, and similarly how easy it is to be "healthy" and maintain my weight with literally zero energy other than avoiding fructose.

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

#149

Post by curryst »

inglor_cz wrote: post #119
acuozzo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Please forgive the scattered reply. I'm tired and I've mostly pieced this together from other discussions I've had on this topic.) I firmly believe that the problem stems from a mass unspoken refusal to address obesity as a symptom of food addiction. Food addiction is among the hardest to kick because humans not only need food to survive, but also need glucose (and/or ketone bodies) in order to have sufficient menta…

I am just watching the British "Supersize Vs Superskinny" series. The heavy articipants have serious addiction problem, obviously. The question is whether some foods are inherently addictive, at least for some people who are more predisposed to food addiction. There are some obvious commonalities in the diets of the superfatties: pretty much every one of them consumes a lot of pizza, fries, soft drinks and various fa…

> The question is whether some foods are inherently addictive, at least for some people who are more predisposed to food addiction.

In some sense, yes, because to get to extremely high weights, you need to consume extremely high amounts of food. Your stomach will grow, but I would imagine a person would struggle to eat enough carrots to weigh 500 pounds. Quick napkin math says some obese people eat 6700 calories a day. 50 calories is ~12 baby carrots. That's ~1608 baby carrots per day. If my math is right, that's about 67 one pound bags of baby carrots per day.

Carrots are probably an extreme example, but I think the point stands that to get that overweight on healthy food, both the volume of the food and the time required to eat it become astonishing. I don't even know if we can metabolize carrots fast enough to eat that many in a day without rupturing some part of your stomach.

> "Normal" cooked meals that were the staple of nutrition before the advent of fast food are almost absent from their diets.

I think this is a big part of it. Calorie dense food has always been around. The problem was that it was often difficult and/or expensive to make. How long would it take you to replicate a Big Mac combo meal, and how much would it cost? It takes a while, especially given grocery shopping, and it's probably not much cheaper. Likewise, I can go to the grocery store and buy a whole cheesecake for like $10.

Honestly, I think the best way to tackle it is not to outright ban the foods, but just add an excise tax. If we added a 10% tax to soft drinks, fries and pizza, it probably wouldn't make a huge difference to the average citizen's spending. It would be a 10% increase in your food budget if that's all you eat though. If you want to go crazy, add a program that lets you earn that back by doing healthy things, like riding a bike. We should probably do that anyways. If we want to reduce the amount of driving people do, paying them walk/bike places instead of driving isn't a bad system either.

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

#150

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #12

This statistic from the article is mind-boggling: > 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. Note that they aren't just referring to processed foods. They classify ultra-processed foods as a step beyond what we typically think of as processed foods: > Ultra-processed foods and beverages ca…

The popularity of Chipotle really says a lot to me.

The steak bowls are a little more cost effective, but for the price of one chicken bowl, you seriously could make at least 4 chicken bowls if you simply went to the grocery store instead of Chipotle. The time to cook and prepare is quite similar to Chipotle as well, especially if you go to Chipotle instead of delivery.

Rice, beans, salsa, lettuce, cheese, chicken. Everything that goes into a burrito/bowl is quite cheap. You could prepare everything in half an hour and then make bowls at the same speed Chipotle does just pulling containers out of the fridge.

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