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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

#81

Post by natdempk »

jaggederest wrote: post #22

So even beyond the factors in the article (calorie density and hyper-palatability) there's other contributing factors in processed food. First of all, the processing itself introduces several factors: mechanical and heat energy changing the structure (but not composition) of the food, usually into smaller particle sizes; and the potential introduction of new contaminants - one that has been discussed before is lithiu…

The Slime Mold Time Mold article is maybe an interesting starting point, but really not great analysis... see this thorough rebuttal around the Lithium stuff that has not been responded to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

TBH a lot of the discourse around this annoys me because it ignores sort of fundamental obvious stuff like food/snacks got way tastier, access to unhealthier food is higher, we live a way more sedentary lifestyle, takeout got more affordable, studies show that people overall consume more calories from unhealthier sources, you can go to the grocery store and see you should basically avoid much of the food there, food spikes your glucose higher, more artificial ingredients, switch from fat to sugar, more processed ingredients, etc. and yet everyone says "well it can't just be that" because XYZ specific study of some quality and timeframe took one of those axis in some degree of isolation and showed that _maybe_ it's not that specific thing only. Kind of a missing the forest for the common sense trees aspect. Obviously we don't understand the whole picture of obesity, but there's a degree of denial around common sense health stuff that's really weird in the kind of "rationalists try to figure out obesity" writing. I really think we should work more from a place of "you don't see people who do moderately intense exercise regularly and eat healthily being overweight/obese" as a baseline...

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

#82

Post by vixen99 »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #35
Kirby64 wrote: post #17

From the article: > Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a r…

40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated. You can't reliably draw any conclusions from them. You have to use common sense and rules of thumb.

Can you please give your reference for that definitive statement. And what are 'nutritional studies'? Why wouldn't they include the research that led to the list of nutrient recommendations issued by USDA and similar publications in the UK, Norway, France, Australia and many other countries. No conclusions from them? I think there are. There is a truly vast literature on subjects nutritional so it's vital to be very specific.

Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.

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

#83

Post by PittleyDunkin »

hu3 wrote: post #46
Kirby64 wrote: post #17

From the article: > Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a r…

> sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.

> 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 gone much too far in demonizing it.

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

#85

Post by thrawa1235432 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #20

The end of the article gets the point. The problem isn't that food is processed; the problem is that extremely processed foods are much harder to moderate yourself on and present a much, much more appealing food to overeat on, which in turn causes health problems and is why so many people are so fat, along with other factors like people being lonely and depressed, and food being a quick and cheap way to make yourself…

In that case we can just take Ozempic or whatever guys!

Just kidding, no that's not the problem. The problem is processing destroys/alter many molecules we do not even know about or know it's full "purpose"/role in nutrition and digestion. The commonly talked about vitamins and RDA and such are just the bare minimum so a broad population does not get sick, but does not mean optimum health for a given individual.

Cf. eating 10mg of iron in a steak, readily bioavailable vs eating 10mg of iron from cereal. One is bound in easily digestible compounds, the other is iron shavings or rust.

e.g The British Navy discovering that scurvy is fixed by eating fresh food; ensuring to add citrus to sailors diets, then forgetting about how it worked. Then retrying citrus, but cooking it one using copper vessels, which destroy much of the vitamin C content.

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

#86

Post by thrawa1235432 »

ptero wrote: post #29

TLDR: According to the article, people eat more calories when they eat ultra-processed foods. The reason is unknown, one possibility is more calories per bite as manufacturers remove water and some other ingredients during processing. Overall, a pretty underwhelming article. Not surprising, unfortunately -- I have been subscribing to the Economist for over 15 years since late 1990s until the slow erosion of quality m…

Yes, I agree with you, the Economist from the 90s was a different animal. If you ask me the above article is just paid shilling for Ozempic et. al. Not directly obviously, but in the mindset and viewpoint it wants to develop in readers

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

#87

Post by pjc50 »

anonym29 wrote: post #77
moomin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong agree. The Nova classification is extremist and heavily useless. Yes if you come up with two classifications and one includes McDonalds burgers and the other doesn't you'll be able to show a health effect. Doesn't mean your categorisation is useful.

Do you really think it's not useful at all to know you can protect your health proactively with one classification system of UPFs, that is deemed a bit extreme? Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, t…

The history of nutritional advice studies is extremely noisy and full of questionable, later reversed discoveries that have been p-hacked into existence. I think people are right to be very, very wary of rejecting the null hypothesis about anything without extremely solid clear evidence.

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

#88

Post by 0xEF »

0xEF wrote: post #66

Living in the US, my takeaway is this: Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor. But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they wo…

In retrospect, I realize the food industry probably took a page out of the cigarette industry's playbook. Or was it the other way around?

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

#89

Post by robnado »

Evolution has selected animals that, when they have access to foods with high caloric density, will gorge on them. This has been advantageous to their survival, because the history of life has been characterized by famine feast cycles for most species. Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today. The rest is probably additives that affect our hormones that control hunger/satiety signals in the body.

In my opinion, effective regulation would control the caloric density as food as well as ban any additives that can affect hormonal hunger/satiety.

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

#90

Post by marcuskane2 »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #83
hu3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.

> 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, not pumped into every product at every meal.

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