Why? ultra-processed food.
Then you need to explain why the Japanese diet, also filled with ultra-processed food, is vastly healthier.
Why is the American diet so deadly?
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Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#12A useful analogy is the Coca plant. Chewing its leaves will give a mild stimulant and is relatively benign. But if you extract and concentrate the active ingratiate it becomes highly addictive. This is pretty much what we have done with our food.
I think this is an accurate point. I would also add preservatives. Companies have an incentive to increase shelf-life, so they pump these products full of them, despite their effects on health.
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#13Lot’s of people are chosing an healthy diet:
https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped...
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#14> Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? Too much sugar. Too carb heavy. Not enough fiber (fruits, veg). Fats demonized for a long spell. No time for preparing whole foods in daily lives. No easy access to cheap, prepared whole foods. Edit: car-focused culture and zoning laws/planning that result in more sedentary day-to-day lifestyle that magnifies the effect of the poor diet.
It's the carbs.
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#15hope this doesn't hijacked by "WhAt Is EvEN UltRAPorCESSED FooD" crowd.
you could pre-empt them by defining ultraprocessed food instead of mocking them with the spongebob text if it's so easy to do so. go right ahead.
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#16Why? ultra-processed food.
I thought this was fascinating:
"The term “ultra-processed food” was introduced by a Brazilian epidemiologist named Carlos Monteiro. In the early seventies, Monteiro was a primary-care doctor in the Ribeira Valley, an impoverished part of rural Brazil, and he treated many plantation workers with swollen bellies, stunted growth, and exhaustion. He started to think that they needed better food, in larger quantities, more than they needed medicine. He relocated to São Paulo, hoping to study malnutrition. Then he learned that around a million Brazilians were growing obese each year. Strangely, a shrinking number of people were buying ingredients that doctors blamed for the obesity epidemic, such as salt, sugar, and oil." - he went to São Paulo to study malnutrition, he found malnutrition - just not the type he expected.
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#17A useful analogy is the Coca plant. Chewing its leaves will give a mild stimulant and is relatively benign. But if you extract and concentrate the active ingratiate it becomes highly addictive. This is pretty much what we have done with our food.
I think this is an accurate point. I would also add preservatives. Companies have an incentive to increase shelf-life, so they pump these products full of them, despite their effects on health.
What evidence is there of preservatives having detrimental effects on humans (in the doses we actually receive)?
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#18A useful analogy is the Coca plant. Chewing its leaves will give a mild stimulant and is relatively benign. But if you extract and concentrate the active ingratiate it becomes highly addictive. This is pretty much what we have done with our food.
Even worse, our food has been specifically engineered to be as addictive as possible without increasing manufacturing costs.
I agree.
However, don't we grow tolerant to pleasures? For instance, the first time you have a salty chip, its great. The 100th time you had one, its not great.
Also, curious if you are limiting it to processed foods, or are making claims that potatoes are more addictive than before.
The first, obvious, but it has manufacturing and inventory costs. The latter is happening on such a tiny scale, its not noteworthy.
Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#19Re: Why is the American diet so deadly?
#20I think a big part of the problem is that even prepared foods are packed with garbage. There are a lot of Americans who can't/don't cook mainly for time reasons, and instead eat lots of prepared foods, whether that be from restaurants, shops, or grocery stores.
If you are not cooking it from scratch yourself, it is almost guaranteed to be brimming with fat, salt, and sugar. This is true regardless of the source. Whether it be a frozen meal from the grocery store, a sandwich from the local deli, a dish from the bistro, or a quick bite from the coffee shop.
All of it is maximized fat, salt, sugar.
Seriously, I live in a major metro are and if you put a gun to my head and said "You have 20 minutes to pick-up an unmodified meal that is filling, mildly flavored, and healthy", I'd have to eat the bullet.
(And this doesn't even get into all the processed food ingredients)