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Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

cam.mbi.ufl.edu

81–90 of 177 posts

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint to the carb reduction is fresh baked bread is so delicious and scaling bread recipes is easy so you end up eating twice as much bread compared to store bought.

Yeah, my wife bakes bread and it's usually just her and I. Can't leave that bread overnight, so I end up eating half a loaf of bread instead of the two slices of store bought bread that I usually have each day.

The freezer is you're savior! :)

Each bread I bake is cut in half (even before I taste it) and put in the freezer for next soup time.

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#82
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day. The closest grocery store to me is 1.5 miles away up an extremely steep hill. Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert We'…

Freshly baked bread is available to _everyone_. Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it. The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.

I can only recommend flour, water, salt, yeast by Ken Forkish if you want to get amazing results.

However there is some amount of time commitment that I think might be hard if you don't have the luxury of working from home or being/having a stay at home partner.

The second best thing might be using a bread baking machine, that takes most of the work from you. It doesn't taste as good, but it's similarly healthy I'd guess.

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#83
post #5

> Even packaged breads, including those high in nutritious whole grains, qualify as ultra-processed in many cases because of the additives and preservatives they contain. However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed. These studies and press rel…

I think you just need to avoid taking an all-or-nothing attitude here. Knowing that ultra-processed foods are bad is valuable, even if you can't totally eliminate them from your diet. I do agree it's an overbroad category with stuff that ranges from abysmally terrible to stuff that's just kinda bad, but it has the upside of relatively low complexity (if you had ten different categories of processed food, most people would probably just give up on understanding the concept in general).

I eat mostly fish/veggies/fruit/rice, but sometimes I have pasta (and worse, sometimes I have cookies). In general, I've worked to shift my diet to unprocessed (or processed but not ultra) foods over time. Being cognizant of it is helpful at restaurants, too - I love all kinds of food, so more often than not, going with the least processed option is a helpful decider among menu items.

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not especially newsworthy, though.

That's what the vote buttons are for right? It's a niche nerd site nothing here is really newsworthy by design.

Notably there is no downvote for submissions, so you can't just downvote the things you think don't belong/are bad. You have to decide whether to ignore it or to flag it in the case that it egregiously doesn't belong or violates the guidelines.

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#85
post #52

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Isn't flour highly processed?

what do you mean by highly processed flour? whole wheat is not treated or anything, just dehusked if i remember and then ground down. is there something else they do to whole wheat flour these days?

'Then ground down' is a much bigger statement then you may think. If we look at the particle size of flour via historic grinding processes what did it look like? I'm sure they were far less uniform and in general larger than what we have now, which should lead to differences in the glycemic index.

CICO would have you believe there is no difference in 100 calories of coke and 100 calories of raw spinach, but the coke is going to have nearly instant uptake and the spinach will take hours to digest.

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshly baked bread is available to _everyone_. Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it. The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.

There's a reason bakeries are so prevalent in many areas. That "squish it" part is a lot of work, and you have to wait long enough that it's not available for breakfast. Making it yourself counts as hard to obtain every day.

I bake my own bread. It's very little work. The problem is the time commitment.

You need to be there for a large part of the process. The first mixing and kneading takes the longest, maybe 5 minutes. After that every 20 minutes you need to come and fold for a minute 3 times. After that, let it rest for 8-16h (depending on dough temperature, amount of yeast, environment temperature). Then you do another 2 minutes of work. Half an hour later preheat the oven. Half an hour later put it in.

Doing this over night you save a lot of time. I.e. you can start at 8pm and finish by 8am-9am if you wake up at 6am. But a lot of people can't stay home that long in the morning.

So it's very little work in essence, but it's spread over a whole day. Perfect if you work remotely. Takes less time than most coffee breaks. But you need to be home.

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#87
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day. The closest grocery store to me is 1.5 miles away up an extremely steep hill. Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert We'…

Freshly baked bread is available to _everyone_. Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it. The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.

[flagged]

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to understand what the average American consumes the answer is whatever is on the shelf of their local Walmart (they sell groceries). The average American may assemble food from time to time but generally does not cook. That said, there are hundreds of millions of people in that country, so this is obviously a generalization, and should be treated as such. That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into…

I totally believe it, but it is just so wild to me that it has gotten to the point where we can somewhat confidently say that most Americans just do not cook at all. I just don't even understand how that works, even if you have enough income, how do you have enough space to like store all the trash for the week? Don't you just get tired of restraunt food at some point?

In the US in many places trash disposal is a flat rate included in your utility bill, rolled up into your rent, or you have a common dumpster area you can throw trash into for free. This isn't Switzerland where you have to pay two bucks for a LICENSED small plastic trash bag. Here you can generate as much residential trash as you want for the same price or for free if you drive the trash to the county dump yourself. You have to call the county to schedule a pickup of huge trash like for appliances if your new appliance delivery people won't take your old stuff.

In most cities there are usually many options for restaurants nearby and Uber Eats for anything further out. For everyone else there's McDonalds and friends: https://www.qsrmagazine.com/content/ranking-top-50-fast-food...

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's commendable. It's "simple" as in not complicated and easy to understand. It's "difficult" as in it requires an incredible amount of discipline, and potentially time, compared to the alternative.

> potentially time I believe that time and energy are what many Americans are running in too short of supply on to transition to more wholesome diets. Most have so much on their plates to deal with already that the idea of thinking about additional things they technically don't have to is unappealing, even if it's at the cost of their own health. It's why ultraprocessed foods became so common in the first place. It's…

>even if it's at the cost of their own health. It's why ultraprocessed foods became so common in the first place.

Agreed.. A thought pattern I've tried to adopt is "Best time to fix your health is today rather than when you've had a heart attack or diagnosed with type-2 diabetes"

Too many people are getting health related diseases (because of diet/exercise)

Re: Ultra-processed foods may contribute to cognitive decline

#90
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day. The closest grocery store to me is 1.5 miles away up an extremely steep hill. Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert We'…

Freshly baked bread is available to _everyone_. Buy some flour, take a cup of flour, mix some water, maybe some salt, squish it some and bake it. The downfall of society will happen within arms length of wisdom and knowledge.

Bread takes hours to make and lasts for one day. So unless you wanna wake up at 3 am (or have a dedicated stay-at-home person making bread every day) it's not really a realistic option for many people.
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