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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

#251

Post by bonoboTP »

hogFeast wrote: post #152
icandoit wrote: post #38

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 worl…

Yes, according to the article that kind of science (i.e. the basic logic of energy usage) was invented by Coca-Cola. This is what happens when you combine weak knowledge of science with a credulous mind (you think everything is a conspiracy theory invented by group of people you dislike ). Maybe "processed food" (whatever that means, according to the article it is everything not produced in an "artisinal restaurant")…

1. Yes, if you got fat, you consumed more calories than you used up. The solution will require getting closer to balance.

2. The actionable way to achieve that is non-trivial. Different foods with same amount of calories have different physiological effects, including which hormones are produced with what timings and what neural circuitry is activated. This leads to different degrees of psychological fullness, cravings and potential for addiction. They may also promote more laziness or more fidgety behavior which itself can make more difference than often imagined. Moving your hands around, rocking your legs, standing up more often etc.,being more "restless" feeling the need to "get it out of your system" by going for a walk vs feeling like a slob.

CICO and thermodynamics are true as an observation but aren't actionable long term advice. You can lose weight on just eating small amount of crappy pizza, but you'll feel like crap and will have more cravings than eating food with more volume, and various other properties. Even the crunchiness of a food has effects in the brain. CICO is too reductionist as advice.

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

#252

Post by Aerroon »

bonoboTP wrote: post #240
bergstromm466 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For many people, the idea of cooking a meal has been elevated to a special occasion event, as a treat or a date night. This is partially due to the fact that boring, everyday meal recipes just aren't as flashy as a 15-ingredient, hour long recipe that results in a stunning picture for someone's blog or instagram. I think the root is that everyone's rents and other costs are way higher. Many folks are barely getting…

Barely getting by in America means being rich for much of the world including many European countries. How is it that the economics works out so differently in, say, Eastern Europe where poor people's best choice is to buy staples in bulk and cook and can't afford packaged convenience food and eating out? It's because American people's time is priced much higher and they earn much more overall.

When I was a kid, eating at McDonald's was considered to be like going to a restaurant. A moderately fancy one at that. The limiting factor was cost.

It's not the case anymore. While McDonald's is still certainly more expensive than food people regularly eat, but the gap seems to be closing. People just aren't satisfied with eating basically potatoes and sometimes some meat. They make fancier meals, but this increases cost. At some point the cost isn't all that different from what fast food charges.

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

#253

Post by phonypc »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #73
dilap wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bread, pasta, fruits, and vegetables: all things we've been eating for at least a couple thousand years; no fat or mostly saturated fats. Twinkies and Oreos: signicant quantities of novel ingredients that have only existed in the last 150 or so years; high quantities of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats.

True, but there's also a distinction to be made among kinds of carbohydrates. I think of it in two categories, coal and jet fuel. Coal is stuff like potatoes - it's fuel, but it lasts a long time. Twinkies, white bread, and even white rice are jet fuel - they burn really fast, and then they're gone. Eat carbs that are coal, not jet fuel.

Except, of all your examples potatoes are the fastest burning fuel. Twinkies the slowest.

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

#254

Post by hombre_fatal »

phonypc wrote: post #72
froasty wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot Pockets are not a rebranding. Hot Pockets are economically adulterated putrescence masquerading as a meat pie. Ingredients: ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, NIACIN, IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, COOKED BEEF PATTIE CRUMBLES (BEEF HAMBURGER, WATER, TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN [SOY FLOUR, CARAMEL COLOR], SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING: SALT, SPICE…

I'm no fan of hot pockets, but what exactly is the point here? That the list of ingredients is long? Most of the list is regular food ingredients or vitamins/minerals added to the "enriched flour". The stabilizers and emulsifiers with scary chemical names are present in tiny amounts regulated by various health departments. If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade me…

> If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie

Sorry to pick on you, but this confusion that a Hot Pocket is the same as a homemade meat pie is a great demonstration of the food corporations' capture of nutritional intuition and discourse.

The public has been convinced that there's nothing concerning about increasingly replacing, for example, a nutritious, real meat or cheese (milk, cultures, and rennet) with cheaper analogues that are so empty that modified food starch, emulsifiers, and textured soy have to be added to the product for no other purpose than to masquerade as the texture you expect of real ingredients.

You're eating a replica of food and you've been persuaded that the only difference is some "scary chemical names".

The food corporation has a new breakthrough, figures out how five more cheap ingredients can be used to create the texture of some chicken, and you have somehow told yourself that it's the ingredient count that people must be making a fuss over rather than what the growing list represents.

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

#255

Post by selimthegrim »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #163
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…

Can't believe no one has quoted Michael Pollan yet, but his 7 rules still ring true (see #4 for your question): 1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or in…

He is referring to the Hadith saying your stomach should be 1/3 food, 1/3 water and 1/3 air (ie empty)

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

#256

Post by bonoboTP »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #75
aitchnyu wrote: post #18

They had me. I have a strong idea in my brain that a meal of chocolate bars and a healthy meal will result in same weight loss if calories are equal. Some professor lost weight eating chocolate bars! I also assumed the public knows sodas contain a nauseating amount of sugar. How will this "research" benefit Coca Cola as a soda company?

If calories in the bars are equal, and if your body can absorb the same number of calories from the food, and if your metabolism stays the same on the different kinds of foods, and if you have the self-discipline to eat only the same number of calories when the sugar rush from the chocolate bar wears off and you want another.

Some food will more likely get stored anyway and rather instruct the brain to move less to compensate, while others will be more likely to "energize" you to do things physically and expend the energy.

See Robert Lustig on sugar.

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

#257

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

dolni wrote: post #187
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't believe no one has quoted Michael Pollan yet, but his 7 rules still ring true (see #4 for your question): 1. Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan says. 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or in…

There are some good rules of thumb here, but this: > 2. Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce. This just smacks of so much ignorance as to be disgraceful. Something isn't good for you just because there's a short word for it, or bad for you because it has a scientific name. And it's definitely not bad for you just because it has more than 5 ingredients. I remember hear…

> This just smacks of so much ignorance as to be disgraceful.

This is a wildly uninformed, reactionary statement, Michael Pollan is literally an expert in this field in multiple domains (professor, journalist, consultant). If you stop and think for a second, perhaps an expert is choosing his words carefully, and consider that he is trying to make rules for people who think Arby's 7 nights a week is healthy, not folk who are health conscious and informed.

But hey, if you want to point me to all of the books you've written and research you've done on nutrition, I'll take a seat.

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

#258

Post by bonoboTP »

sumtechguy wrote: post #110
mike00632 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine had a personal trainer that would make him send a photo of everything he ate. I thought that was a good idea.

Accountability goes a long way for some people. My way is to eat less items with extra sugar in it. Oh boy do they hide that stuff in about a dozen different ways. Especially HFCS and 'apple/pear juice'. Then I track what I eat and try to hit my numbers. Someone I know is hitting nearly 40 pounds in a year with that method. Plus the accountability helped them stick to it.

Don't foods have nutrition facts printed on them? In Europe every package has a standardized label indicating the grams of macros per 100 g and grams of all sugars per 100 g. (also salt etc)

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

#259

Post by thebigman433 »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #171
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 firmly believe that the problem stems from a mass unspoken refusal to address obesity as a symptom of food addiction. Meh, it's also easy in the United States to be stuck in a lifestyle where you can't walk anywhere.

Having people be more active would help, but exercise is almost never enough to overcome bad eating habits.

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

#260

Post by bonoboTP »

mike00632 wrote: post #234
hogFeast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't work. Doing that basically encourages people to lie to you, and poisons the relationship. Everyone trying to lose weight will cheat, and it is often the response to that cheating that determines your ability to continue. By making cheating shameful, you are basically guaranteeing failure (this is a corollary of the idea that places that don't have obesity shame fat people...naturally appealing to places…

I imagine the "you" in this case to be the person losing weight. If I want to lose weight then I'm going make such a commitment and it doesn't really matter who I send the photos to. It's rather just an exercise in documenting what I eat. I'd send the photos to you if you agreed to be my accountabili-buddy.

If you want to lose weight decrease your exposure to marketing. Watch less TV, avoid aisles of supermarkets with branded packaged products, don't read celebrity gossip etc. Cook simple non-fancy foods that is not hyped by influencers.
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