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Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

economist.com

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Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#261

Post by willy_k »

klik99 wrote: post #205

Putting aside the vague hand wavy definition of what "highly processed foods" literally means, my suspicion is that there are two things making processed food worse for you. I've heard drinking juiced fruits is worse for you than eating the equivalent fruits, as the sugars in the fruit are wrapped in fiber that make the sugars "slow release" into your body, and those are broken down when juiced so the sugars hit you…

The chips not satiating you is more likely to be the effect of the obligatory seed oils in chips; IIRC the linoleic acid that they are high in impedes satiety (and also promotes inflammation).

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#262

Post by swatcoder »

cgh wrote: post #252
swatcoder wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a clear exception at all. Within some mental model, isolated protein powder is healthy because we generally treat high protein consumption as low-risk for most people and recognize that protein isolates can be very effective for professional and amateur athletes to consume a lot of while building muscle. In no way does that imply that these protein isolates are "extremely healthy" for the general public or…

Protein isn't bad for you and 4-5 chicken breasts is around 120g a day, a healthy amount for an adult. By way of comparison, indigenous people where I live ate hundreds of grams a day in their traditional diets. I've run into this whole "don't eat too much protein, oh man you will die!" nonsense meme before and I wonder where it came from.

> 4-5 chicken breasts is around 120g a day

Bad math? Per USDA standards, a single boneless skinless chicken breast has ~54 grams of protein; so 4-5 would be ~200-250g of protein.

Because that's grossly outside the norm for the general public, you're not going to find any evidence to support the idea it's a healthy amount for a typical person to consume for a long period of time. And likewise, you'll find little evidence saying what negative consequences it might have, if any.

You're welcome to make whatever assumptions you want to in that case, but there's not a lot of ground for anyone to convince skeptics who disagree with them. It's tenuous assumptions all the way down.

Regardless, in the real world, that also represents 1200-1500 calories of absurdly (mind-numbingly) high-satiety food and quite a lot of slow digestive bulk. Most people simply wouldn't be able to consume that while also eating a varied diet that provides them with adequate long-term nutrition. So it's probably a pretty bad idea for them to dedicate themselves to it, unless -- like some athletes and gym bros -- they have the further discipline to also stuff themselves of all the other stuff they need to eat while also not eating so much that they become overweight. Do you know many people like that? I'm not sure I've met more than a handful in my lifetime.

Whatever the impact of the very high protein consumption itself in some abstract theoretical kind of way, which we're far from having evidence into understanding, it's just terrible advice for the general public because of the secondary effects we might reasonably expect in practice.

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#263

Post by watwut »

marcuskane2 wrote: post #90
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout. Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've…

Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it. Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history. Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, no…

That is just eating disorder kind of thinking. Stop spreading it. You can eat sugar, it wont harm you. Pretty much anything harms you in super large quantities.

Sacharids are good for you in general, just like faits, protein and everything else.

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#264

Post by johnyzee »

cogman10 wrote: post #115
marcuskane2 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it. Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history. Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, no…

While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it. Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very…

Refined sugar is extremely concentrated compared to the natural sources. You need like 50 kilos of sugar cane to produce one kilo of refined sugar, and through multiple steps of heavy industrial processes.

You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#265

Post by watwut »

bityard wrote: post #226
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary? Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people shoul…

> Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary? You mean, is there any evidence aside from every person who manages their diabetes through diet alone? Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their…

> Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?

We have longer life span. We are healthier then them. And we have also bigger muscles for those fitness oriented.

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#266

Post by watwut »

samaltmanfried wrote: post #220
snapcaster wrote: post #170

From reading these comments, i wish nobody was allowed to post on threads like this without posting a pic of their body so we can calibrate their opinions

Agreed. It's clear that most people don't understand basic nutrition, and most people have a very distorted view of what the human body should actually look like. The average American is very overweight. If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

That is not health advice, that is "how to be anorectic" advice. If you are at the weight with longest lifespan, you are somewhere at the top of "normal" bmi range and wont see ribs. You wont seen them in the middle of "normal" range and plenty of thin wont see them either.

Otherwise said, for quite a lot of people accomplishing this would mean underweight.

Underweight is less healthy the overweight.

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#267

Post by rdedev »

klik99 wrote: post #205

Putting aside the vague hand wavy definition of what "highly processed foods" literally means, my suspicion is that there are two things making processed food worse for you. I've heard drinking juiced fruits is worse for you than eating the equivalent fruits, as the sugars in the fruit are wrapped in fiber that make the sugars "slow release" into your body, and those are broken down when juiced so the sugars hit you…

The lack of fibre also contributes to lack of satiety which is another driving factor that makes people eat more processed food.

The potato chip satiety issue is also investigated in a few studies. Baked potato is some of the most satiating foods. But when you fry it in oil it just does something to your brain that makes you crave for more

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324078#boiled-or-b...

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#268

Post by dekhn »

duckmysick wrote: post #238
dekhn wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I'm a scientist and thoroughly trained in statistics, the idea that we can to sequester 36 people and monitor diet 24/7 and made general conclusions doesn't sound completely right to me. Partly in the technical sense and partly in the "why do the folks working on human health get away with sample sizes that would be laughed about in any other field?"

Do these other fields also study humans in controlled experiments? I think it has to do with the sample to staff ratio. It's not enough to observe human subjects. You have to actively prevent them from going off the rails. It doesn't scale well when you increase the sample size. I guess we could replicate a similar experiment n-times and then do a meta study, but it's not ideal either. How would you tackle the logist…

Yes, the most common example would be clinical trials for drugs and other medical treatments- often have thousands of patients (with recruitment being the limiting factor). There are tons of ways that studies can go wrong, for example when patients don't take the treatment and lie (this is common) or have other lifestyle factors that influence the results, which can't be easily smoothed out with slightly larger N.

I don't know how to fix the nutritionist studies- I'm still pretty skeptical that you could ever control enough variables to make any sort of conclusion around things with tiny effect sizes. This isn't like nutritional diseases we've seen in the past, for example if you look at a disease like pellagra (not getting enough niacin), literally tens of thousands of people died over a few years (beri beri, rickets, scurvy are three other examples; these discoveries were tightly coupled to the discovery of essential nutrients, now called vitamins).

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#269

Post by epcoa »

standardUser wrote: post #198
digging wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if the sugar is ultra-processed, yes it does, doesn't it?

No, it does not, since ultra-processed, though not a strictly defined term, does not include household ingredients like granulated sugar or brown sugar. If you happen to have a jar of HFCS in your cabinet then that would quality.

Well then it is a worthless term. Both granulated sugar and HFCS are processed foods. Corn syrup is a household ingredient. No idea why you think a bit higher percentage of fructose changes anything.

Re: Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

#270

Post by cynicalpeace »

vel0city wrote: post #149
cynicalpeace wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally would avoid pretty much everything that comes out of a bakery.

Ok, so when does a butcher shop become a factory? When does a fruit farm become a factory? Is candied bacon an ultra-processed food? And even then, things made in a bakery can be made at home so I don't get how your above standard still makes any sense. Is homemade bread with flour milled at home ultra-processed as well? Candied bacon can be made outside of a factory as well. If so, it's not really a "was it made in…

Ah yes, the ol' I can't tell a fruit farm from a factory shtick
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