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Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" and a lot of "avoid processed anything". While I'm sure

Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" and a lot of "avoid processed anything". While I'm sure there's some arguable benefits to these things, I think it's paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being "processed". What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss. Maybe I just have no sense for quality, but I've tried paying double for "organic" products and similar - only to be repeatedly disappointed with products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker - I'll never buy them again, it just doesn't make sense to pay more for it.

aaron695 10y ago
Although I totally agree, per the op article > but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed. It might be an ok rule of thumb. Highly processed food can of course be good for you, but mostly isn't. It's bad science but a working stereotype. Organic is of course a marketing gimmick and as per the article > you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
markatkinson 10y ago
Yes I am inclined to agree. There are a few lines in what I read that shoot up red flags (I only read the first 25% and last 10%). However I agree with the overall advice. I read somewhere that its best to avoid any food that is sold in packaging. I try to stick to that within reason.
- schiffern 10y ago
  Pollen gave a fascinating interview on Democracy Now! talking about how food companies began cleverly gaming the metrics, marketing smaller numbers of ingredients and real sugar (yes, sugar!) as though they were health claims. His new advice? "Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised." https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_author_michael_pollans_new https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_aut...
  - acchow 10y ago
    Well, real sugar at least is better than the HFCS crap.
agumonkey 10y ago
It's a shortcut driven by paranoid defense against the food industry habits to tweak or replace nutrients for economic reasons. I had to cut anything but veggies for a while, and I have to say the lack of sugar and fat was pretty obvious. Processed food are like starring at the sun, it feels good because it's all bright, but you're blind to the world. Eating raw veggies makes you see all the subtleties of tastes and retriggers brain threshold you forgot long ago (sugar, salt, sauce they all make cover the nutrients, your brain just keep wanting to eat more, try eating 3 carrots in a row, you'll probably feel sick of it)
DanBC 10y ago
> What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss. I hope it means something like: Take a chicken and roast it, with potatoes and vegetables. Add some gravy. Now take the same chicken. Remove most of the meat and sell it. Mechanically recover the rest of the meat, and form it into small popcorn size bites. Bread those, deep fry them, serve them with a sugar sauce. The roast chicken is a good meal. It's healthy, it's slow to prepare and slow to eat. The popcorn chicken? It's hyper-palatable. It's been engineered to be cheap to make, and to hit all the points of salt, fat, and sugar that humans seek out in food. It's not a satisfying meal because it lacks the fibre from the vegetables. And it's very easy to eat. It's a much worse choice, but it's a much easier, and more tempting, choice. > products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker We see that (in the UK) with ketchup. People used to keep it, opened, in a cupboard and it would last for months. But now you're supposed to keep it in a fridge and use it within 8 weeks after you've opened it. The modern version has much less salt, and doesn't have sodium benzoate.
- dTal 10y ago
  Huh. Ketchup bottles have always told you to keep them refrigerated as far back as I can remember (across decades, in the US and the UK) and I have always disobeyed. I have never, ever known ketchup to spoil. I just checked and none of the ketchup in the house now (several brands) have any "chemical" preservatives. But they do contain lots of vinegar. I am sure that the delivery mechanism of squeezy bottles helps prevent infection as well.
dagw 10y ago
My personal rule of thumb with "processed" food is: Would I be happy to do the same process in my own kitchen if I had the time and equipment?
- mac01021 10y ago
  What's an example of a process done by the food industry that you would not be happy to do yourself if you could do it for free?
  - afandian 10y ago
    Not parent commenter but these are things I wouldn't want to do to my own food, even if I could. - peroxide bleaching of flour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_bleaching_agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_bleaching_agent - acid-enzype process for HFCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Proce... - de-oxygenation of orange juice for long term storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice#Not_from_concentrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice#Not_from_concentr... (I'm sure these are nominally safe and possibly beneficial but I'd just rather not eat them)
    - problems 10y ago
      I actually really like the deoxygenation of orange juice thing. The result tastes better than fresh squeezed, more of a sour taste that I prefer. Maybe it just amounts to dumping more citric acid in it or something, but it's delicious in any case.
      - pmoriarty 10y ago
        Store bought orange juice does not taste better because of the deoxygenation. In fact, quite the opposite. "Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it's all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these "flavor packs" to make juice taste like, well, juice again."[1] [1] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/100-percent-orange-juice-artificial_n_913395.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/100-percent-orange-...
coldtea 10y ago
>While I'm sure there's some arguable benefits to these things, I think it's paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being "processed". What the heck does that mean anyway? It mostly means, "a whole industry of greedy scum that added all kinds of useless and often harmful crap to the food it sells to make it last longer -- and increase their margins--, be more addictive --and increase their margins--, be prettier looking --and increase it's margins--, be more sugary and/or salty --and increase their margins. People that will outright lie about what they sell you all the time [1]. People that would add melamine to infant milk if it made a profit and they could get away with it [2]. People that would sponsor fake science [3]. Unfortunately a lot of people are so naive as to think that corporations are basically ethical and would never do those things, or that if something involves technology (e.g. food chemistry) it is necessarily good, even if said technology is used against them to pad profits. [1] https://priceonomics.com/the-truffle-oil-shuffle/ https://priceonomics.com/the-truffle-oil-shuffle/ ("Despite the name, most truffle oil does not contain even trace amounts of truffle; it is olive oil mixed with 2,4-dithiapentane"). [2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/why-is-melamine-in-baby-formula-you-2008-09-24/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/why-is-melami... [3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is-gaslighting-us-on-the-harms-of-sugar/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is...
- vmateixeira 10y ago
  Couldn't have said better!
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  >Unfortunately a lot of people are so naive as to think that corporations are basically ethical and would never do those things, or that if something involves technology (e.g. food chemistry) it is necessarily good, even if said technology is used against them to pad profits. I've never actually seen people like this, in fact I've only seen people who are the exact opposite - and you seem to give off such vibe - where something is "evil by default" because it's not "natural/organic/whatever buzzword here". You can get crap from your "organic local natural farmer", just from the top of my head a few years back here in EU people were dying from ecoli caused kidney failure because the organic farm manure contained the bacteria. Corporations will do unethical things for money but individuals will not ? Who do you think spends more on quality control - people who shipping millions of units of something and have billions invested in capital to produce said thing or some random farm ? Who do you think gets more regulatory oversight ? And about the biased sponsored science - so we just discard science and go for something because of how it feels ? I mean I'm all for eating quality and fresh stuff if you can get it but the arguments like this are just nonsense paranoia.
didibus 10y ago
To me, the most plausible reason for no processed food advice, is that it's all new. Processed food hasn't been consumed for that long, and they keep changing the techniques, so individually, each technique didn't exist for that long. That means that you don't know if it's good, bad or neutral to your health. Given that you don't need to eat processed and can easily feed yourself on unprocessed foods, a lot of people prefer the if its not broken don't fix it approach. Now, in theory, nothing prevents a processed food from ending up being healthier then non processed, it's just people tend to believe that's the less likely gamble.
Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
The idea here is following: - Processing food, even in chemical ways does not necessarily mean it will be bad for your health. - However, a lot of examples have shown that food that has been processed by the current realities of the food industry is often very bad for your health. Many times it's shown to be bad, many times they don't even check it. - Basically if you process the food, the chances are very good that it is going to be bad. You have to be very careful when you do that (and back it with a lot of research) in order to do it safely. - Food industry do not have a direct interest of doing it safely in the long run. They have an interest to make money and not get caught by existing regulations. And finally: - For you as a consumer it's very hard to know whether specific processing is safe or not. - Many times it's hard for the producer to even know. But they don't really care, as long as regulations are followed (sometimes not even that). - This leads to you knowing that if the food has been processed, the chance is very good that it's bad for you. Not because "processing" is some weird satanic black magical non-christian sinful process. But because it's currently implemented in such a way that it lets through a lot of bad. - There is no reliable way for you to distinguish between good processed and bad processed. -> If you wanna eat healthy, in 2017 you should stay away from processed.
- mathattack 10y ago
  That's exactly it. His suggestion is a heuristic that is good 80% of the time. But if you can't check for the other 20% that the processing is bad, why not avoid? Even if we follow his guidelines most of the time, fewer exceptions means fewer dietary risks.
- lukeschlather 10y ago
  People tend to conflate a lot of different things when they say food is "bad for you." Processed food of all varieties is definitely bad for your stomach. It usually has high sugar, high fat, and will generally contribute to heart issues if you aren't exercising enough. (Here there's a question of whether the food is bad for you, or it's not exercising that's bad for you. I'd lean on the latter rather than the former.) Preservatives, etc. also may be bad for you, depending. But processed foods are just plain bad for your stomach. Your stomach is better off eating things that need some digesting. (Veggies, fruits, etc.)
bogomipz 10y ago
>Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" Indeed, quinoa and acai - two super foods before they became Whole Foods staples would have met this criteria.
- criddell 10y ago
  I really hate the pronunciation test because it seems anti-intellectual. By all means, read the labels on your food and if something is unfamiliar, find out what it is and why it was added.
  - problems 10y ago
    This usually results with going to wikipedia and then going "man, these preservatives are pretty cool shit" while I eat them.
ska 10y ago
What you refer to aren't conclusions, they are heuristics. An awful lot of processing reduces the value of food, avoiding it in general is an easy heuristic that can help you eat better. Is it the only way? No, of course not - but it's easy. Here is another one: If you are buying from a supermarket and it was shipped a significant distance, the quality is probably mediocre regardless of organic labeling etc. This one is hard to do much about for most people. If food is out of season and/or shipped significant distances the quality almost always suffers quite a bit. We have made significant technological and breeding advances on the shelf life, ship-ability, consistency and color of a lot of fresh foods, but most of those advances have had costs as well - typically in flavor and/or nutritional value. "Organic" labeling isn't very helpful for food quality or taste these days. It can tell you something about pesticides etc. that you might care about (e.g. what might be in the lemon skins you are zesting into your cookies). It's largely a marketing exercise. Which isn't to say this is right or wrong, exactly, after all people vote with their dollars. However you have to be aware: you can have fresh tomatoes all year long but the reality is that you can probably only have really good tomatoes for a few weeks. Somewhat depressingly because of wholesale distribution contracts etc., you may not even be able to get those really good tomatoes at your usual store when they are available. Nothing sadder than a bunch of bright red watery tasteless tomatoes being all that is on offer in the middle of your local tomato season.
pmoriarty 10y ago
"avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" I would definitely avoid dihydrogen monoxide.

aaron695 10y ago

Although I totally agree, per the op article > but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed. It might be an ok rule of thumb. Highly processed food can of course be good for you, but mostly isn't. It's bad science but a working stereotype. Organic is of course a marketing gimmick and as per the article > you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

markatkinson 10y ago

Yes I am inclined to agree. There are a few lines in what I read that shoot up red flags (I only read the first 25% and last 10%). However I agree with the overall advice. I read somewhere that its best to avoid any food that is sold in packaging. I try to stick to that within reason.

schiffern 10y ago
Pollen gave a fascinating interview on Democracy Now! talking about how food companies began cleverly gaming the metrics, marketing smaller numbers of ingredients and real sugar (yes, sugar!) as though they were health claims. His new advice? "Don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised." https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_author_michael_pollans_new https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/14/omnivores_dilemma_aut...
- acchow 10y ago
  Well, real sugar at least is better than the HFCS crap.

agumonkey 10y ago

It's a shortcut driven by paranoid defense against the food industry habits to tweak or replace nutrients for economic reasons. I had to cut anything but veggies for a while, and I have to say the lack of sugar and fat was pretty obvious. Processed food are like starring at the sun, it feels good because it's all bright, but you're blind to the world. Eating raw veggies makes you see all the subtleties of tastes and retriggers brain threshold you forgot long ago (sugar, salt, sauce they all make cover the nutrients, your brain just keep wanting to eat more, try eating 3 carrots in a row, you'll probably feel sick of it)

DanBC 10y ago

> What the heck does that mean anyway? All our food is processed in one form or another and nothing about something being more processed necessitates any loss. I hope it means something like: Take a chicken and roast it, with potatoes and vegetables. Add some gravy. Now take the same chicken. Remove most of the meat and sell it. Mechanically recover the rest of the meat, and form it into small popcorn size bites. Bread those, deep fry them, serve them with a sugar sauce. The roast chicken is a good meal. It's healthy, it's slow to prepare and slow to eat. The popcorn chicken? It's hyper-palatable. It's been engineered to be cheap to make, and to hit all the points of salt, fat, and sugar that humans seek out in food. It's not a satisfying meal because it lacks the fibre from the vegetables. And it's very easy to eat. It's a much worse choice, but it's a much easier, and more tempting, choice. > products that taste worse or equal and spoil quicker We see that (in the UK) with ketchup. People used to keep it, opened, in a cupboard and it would last for months. But now you're supposed to keep it in a fridge and use it within 8 weeks after you've opened it. The modern version has much less salt, and doesn't have sodium benzoate.

dTal 10y ago
Huh. Ketchup bottles have always told you to keep them refrigerated as far back as I can remember (across decades, in the US and the UK) and I have always disobeyed. I have never, ever known ketchup to spoil. I just checked and none of the ketchup in the house now (several brands) have any "chemical" preservatives. But they do contain lots of vinegar. I am sure that the delivery mechanism of squeezy bottles helps prevent infection as well.

dagw 10y ago

My personal rule of thumb with "processed" food is: Would I be happy to do the same process in my own kitchen if I had the time and equipment?

mac01021 10y ago
What's an example of a process done by the food industry that you would not be happy to do yourself if you could do it for free?
- afandian 10y ago
  Not parent commenter but these are things I wouldn't want to do to my own food, even if I could. - peroxide bleaching of flour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_bleaching_agent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_bleaching_agent - acid-enzype process for HFCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup#Proce... - de-oxygenation of orange juice for long term storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice#Not_from_concentrate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice#Not_from_concentr... (I'm sure these are nominally safe and possibly beneficial but I'd just rather not eat them)
  - problems 10y ago
    I actually really like the deoxygenation of orange juice thing. The result tastes better than fresh squeezed, more of a sour taste that I prefer. Maybe it just amounts to dumping more citric acid in it or something, but it's delicious in any case.
    - pmoriarty 10y ago
      Store bought orange juice does not taste better because of the deoxygenation. In fact, quite the opposite. "Once the juice is squeezed and stored in gigantic vats, they start removing oxygen. Why? Because removing oxygen from the juice allows the liquid to keep for up to a year without spoiling. But! Removing that oxygen also removes the natural flavors of oranges. Yeah, it's all backwards. So in order to have OJ actually taste like oranges, drink companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make perfumes for Dior, to create these "flavor packs" to make juice taste like, well, juice again."[1] [1] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/100-percent-orange-juice-artificial_n_913395.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/100-percent-orange-...

coldtea 10y ago

>While I'm sure there's some arguable benefits to these things, I think it's paranoid or stupid to dismiss something just for being "processed". What the heck does that mean anyway? It mostly means, "a whole industry of greedy scum that added all kinds of useless and often harmful crap to the food it sells to make it last longer -- and increase their margins--, be more addictive --and increase their margins--, be prettier looking --and increase it's margins--, be more sugary and/or salty --and increase their margins. People that will outright lie about what they sell you all the time [1]. People that would add melamine to infant milk if it made a profit and they could get away with it [2]. People that would sponsor fake science [3]. Unfortunately a lot of people are so naive as to think that corporations are basically ethical and would never do those things, or that if something involves technology (e.g. food chemistry) it is necessarily good, even if said technology is used against them to pad profits. [1] https://priceonomics.com/the-truffle-oil-shuffle/ https://priceonomics.com/the-truffle-oil-shuffle/ ("Despite the name, most truffle oil does not contain even trace amounts of truffle; it is olive oil mixed with 2,4-dithiapentane"). [2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/why-is-melamine-in-baby-formula-you-2008-09-24/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/news-blog/why-is-melami... [3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is-gaslighting-us-on-the-harms-of-sugar/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is...

vmateixeira 10y ago
Couldn't have said better!
rubber_duck 10y ago
>Unfortunately a lot of people are so naive as to think that corporations are basically ethical and would never do those things, or that if something involves technology (e.g. food chemistry) it is necessarily good, even if said technology is used against them to pad profits. I've never actually seen people like this, in fact I've only seen people who are the exact opposite - and you seem to give off such vibe - where something is "evil by default" because it's not "natural/organic/whatever buzzword here". You can get crap from your "organic local natural farmer", just from the top of my head a few years back here in EU people were dying from ecoli caused kidney failure because the organic farm manure contained the bacteria. Corporations will do unethical things for money but individuals will not ? Who do you think spends more on quality control - people who shipping millions of units of something and have billions invested in capital to produce said thing or some random farm ? Who do you think gets more regulatory oversight ? And about the biased sponsored science - so we just discard science and go for something because of how it feels ? I mean I'm all for eating quality and fresh stuff if you can get it but the arguments like this are just nonsense paranoia.

didibus 10y ago

To me, the most plausible reason for no processed food advice, is that it's all new. Processed food hasn't been consumed for that long, and they keep changing the techniques, so individually, each technique didn't exist for that long. That means that you don't know if it's good, bad or neutral to your health. Given that you don't need to eat processed and can easily feed yourself on unprocessed foods, a lot of people prefer the if its not broken don't fix it approach. Now, in theory, nothing prevents a processed food from ending up being healthier then non processed, it's just people tend to believe that's the less likely gamble.

Capt-RogerOver 10y ago

The idea here is following: - Processing food, even in chemical ways does not necessarily mean it will be bad for your health. - However, a lot of examples have shown that food that has been processed by the current realities of the food industry is often very bad for your health. Many times it's shown to be bad, many times they don't even check it. - Basically if you process the food, the chances are very good that it is going to be bad. You have to be very careful when you do that (and back it with a lot of research) in order to do it safely. - Food industry do not have a direct interest of doing it safely in the long run. They have an interest to make money and not get caught by existing regulations. And finally: - For you as a consumer it's very hard to know whether specific processing is safe or not. - Many times it's hard for the producer to even know. But they don't really care, as long as regulations are followed (sometimes not even that). - This leads to you knowing that if the food has been processed, the chance is very good that it's bad for you. Not because "processing" is some weird satanic black magical non-christian sinful process. But because it's currently implemented in such a way that it lets through a lot of bad. - There is no reliable way for you to distinguish between good processed and bad processed. -> If you wanna eat healthy, in 2017 you should stay away from processed.

mathattack 10y ago
That's exactly it. His suggestion is a heuristic that is good 80% of the time. But if you can't check for the other 20% that the processing is bad, why not avoid? Even if we follow his guidelines most of the time, fewer exceptions means fewer dietary risks.
lukeschlather 10y ago
People tend to conflate a lot of different things when they say food is "bad for you." Processed food of all varieties is definitely bad for your stomach. It usually has high sugar, high fat, and will generally contribute to heart issues if you aren't exercising enough. (Here there's a question of whether the food is bad for you, or it's not exercising that's bad for you. I'd lean on the latter rather than the former.) Preservatives, etc. also may be bad for you, depending. But processed foods are just plain bad for your stomach. Your stomach is better off eating things that need some digesting. (Veggies, fruits, etc.)

bogomipz 10y ago

>Some of the conclusions seem a little quacky here to me - like "avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" Indeed, quinoa and acai - two super foods before they became Whole Foods staples would have met this criteria.

criddell 10y ago
I really hate the pronunciation test because it seems anti-intellectual. By all means, read the labels on your food and if something is unfamiliar, find out what it is and why it was added.
- problems 10y ago
  This usually results with going to wikipedia and then going "man, these preservatives are pretty cool shit" while I eat them.

ska 10y ago

What you refer to aren't conclusions, they are heuristics. An awful lot of processing reduces the value of food, avoiding it in general is an easy heuristic that can help you eat better. Is it the only way? No, of course not - but it's easy. Here is another one: If you are buying from a supermarket and it was shipped a significant distance, the quality is probably mediocre regardless of organic labeling etc. This one is hard to do much about for most people. If food is out of season and/or shipped significant distances the quality almost always suffers quite a bit. We have made significant technological and breeding advances on the shelf life, ship-ability, consistency and color of a lot of fresh foods, but most of those advances have had costs as well - typically in flavor and/or nutritional value. "Organic" labeling isn't very helpful for food quality or taste these days. It can tell you something about pesticides etc. that you might care about (e.g. what might be in the lemon skins you are zesting into your cookies). It's largely a marketing exercise. Which isn't to say this is right or wrong, exactly, after all people vote with their dollars. However you have to be aware: you can have fresh tomatoes all year long but the reality is that you can probably only have really good tomatoes for a few weeks. Somewhat depressingly because of wholesale distribution contracts etc., you may not even be able to get those really good tomatoes at your usual store when they are available. Nothing sadder than a bunch of bright red watery tasteless tomatoes being all that is on offer in the middle of your local tomato season.

pmoriarty 10y ago

"avoid ingredients you can't pronounce" I would definitely avoid dihydrogen monoxide.