6 ms·

That's too vague. You can't just handwave and say 'better food' and 'junk food'. For decades junk food was thought by many as food with lots of fat instead o

• maxxxxx 8y ago
  How about "processed food" or "fresh food"?
  • craftyguy 8y ago
    Cooking is a form of processing food, so are you saying "cooked food" or "raw food", or what, exactly?
    • jjoonathan 8y ago
      Home-cooked food that sacrifices taste for nutrition and leverages the virtuous halo of home cooking to the hilt in order to prevent people from acknowledging that taste was, in fact, sacrificed.
      • maxxxxx 8y ago
        I think it's a misconception that home cooked food tastes worse. I much prefer the food we make at home and don't think we sacrifice anything.
        • WalterSear 8y ago
          The parent isn't arguing that it tastes worse. They are arguing that people just end up cooking unhealthy food at home.
          • loco5niner 8y ago
            His statement was misleading.
        • jjoonathan 8y ago
          Home cooked food tastes great if you don't cut down on the sugar, salt, and fat -- but then it's not health food. Home cooking lets you cut down on the sugar, salt, and fat -- but then it doesn't taste great.
          • loco5niner 8y ago
            > Home cooking lets you cut down on the sugar, salt, and fat -- but then it doesn't taste great. Not true. You don't need sugar, salt, and fat for food to taste good. You also don't need to eliminate them for food to be healthy.
            • jjoonathan 8y ago
              > You don't need sugar, salt, and fat for food to taste good. I'll believe it when I see (taste) it. In a context where I'm not socially forced to pretend.
              • loco5niner 8y ago
                Do you not eat apples? Pears? Peaches? Corn? How about steak? Do you drink milk? Eggs? Rice? All these things taste great all by themselves. Some need the proper application of heat, some don't. Some taste great BOTH ways. *One super helpful thing to know is how food reacts to heat. for instance... sugars carmelize, intensifying sweetness. If you've only eaten perfectly ripe peaches raw... yes, you've had one of the worlds greatest treats, but you're missing out on what a grill can do! (cut in half, lightly oil the surface, place on low grill for a long time :-) Sweet potatoes? Man... stick one of those in a 425 oven for over an hour. (place directly on rack with tin foil on rack below to collect juices) Comes out sweet as candy. No additives needed. If it sounds like I'm obsessed with good food... I am! I guess I'm just unusually lucky to like vegetables. Check out this guy for inspiration: kenji alt lopez https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab He's no health nut. He's just serious about good food.
          • maxxxxx 8y ago
            When I cook I use much less sugar and salt than foods bought in store or at restaurants without losing taste. Taste buds also adjust. I find a lot of the food I buy way too salty and sweet now.
      • loco5niner 8y ago
        Oh man, I can't tell you just how much more I like home-cooked food. Do yourself a favor and start learning how to cook. I took a week of vacation and went to a cooking boot camp. It was great. It's certainly possible to make food badly at home, and often people do make taste sacrifices for nutrition, but it doesn't have to be that way. Learn to cook and you have total control over the nutrition and taste of your food. You can have BOTH!
        • jjoonathan 8y ago
          Your accusation that I can't cook is unfounded and more than a little amusing given your stated level of training. I am not a chef, with the high level of professional attainment that entails, but I'm still orders of magnitude beyond a weeklong cooking bootcamp. The anticorrelation between taste and nutrition is real. Not universal, but real enough that "tasty and healthy" is a pipe dream used to sell cooking books and overpriced prepared food. Want your couscous to taste good? Add salt and fat. Want your veggies to taste good? Salt, fat, possibly a sear -- you can occasionally dodge this with an acid, but if you try to do that all the time the result is miserable (ask me how I know). Want your tomato dish to taste good? Sugar. These, of course, are absurdly broad generalizations, and any stage in this journey you are free to remove the sugar/salt/fat and cook health food, but you will tend to work a lot harder and still come up with less tasty dishes. IME, everyone who has claimed to cook tasty+healthy and who I have subsequently had the chance to evaluate has sacrificed in one or the other while deluding themselves into believing they have achieved both. Not being a jerk, I smile and play along, but the facts remain.
          • loco5niner 8y ago
            > I'm still orders of magnitude beyond a weeklong cooking bootcamp As am I. Perhaps the problem is due to the assumption that cooking with salt, fat, and sugar is unheathly. Used within reason, it's not. You also don't have to add salt, fat, and sugar to everything to make it taste good. Learning to use herbs and spices helps a lot with that. It's important to start with good ingredients too. Take your tomatoes example. Sure, if you start with standard store bought tomatoes, you'll have to fix them. But get some nice heirloom tomatoes from someones backyard, cut thick with olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and basalmic? Fantastic. And theres a reason tomato sauce recipes start with onion... sweetness. No need for sugar. I LOVE microwaved/steamed/boiled corn on the cob with or without salt or butter. I will admit that I have one health related problem with all this food... portion control. Cause it's all SO good.
      • poulsbohemian 8y ago
        Maybe you are just being provocative, but do you really feel this way? I've been in world-class restaurants, and honestly the best meals I've had have been at home, with food made by family, friends, or neighbors. I can still recall a plate of food I had when I was about ten years old - steak, corn, salads, all from local farms or family gardens. One of the reasons I so seldom go to restaurants is that I find what I can make at home is superior to the average in a restaurant. Yes, there are amazing restaurants and there are certain cuisines that I go out to eat because they are laborious or I do not have the skills / equipment to make at home. Do you have something in mind that you have not been able to replicate at home, re: taste?
    • piffey 8y ago
      A better term is probably "engineered foods" for what they are talking about. Processing via cooking or baking is one thing, but the kinds of foods that are factory made for a long shelf life via tons of additives and unnecessary ingredients if they were fresh are another.
    • yorwba 8y ago
      "Processed food" seems to be used as a proxy for "optimized for consumption". Food made from ingredients picked by someone else to make it tastier (by adding more sugar, salt and fat than you might expect) and carefully prepared to require almost no chewing (liquid food like juices obviously, but most processed meat products are reconstructed from ground up meat, certainly without any bones or tendons). If you process your food yourself, you're unlikely to have the industrial equipment necessary (and you probably won't dissolve dozens of sugar cubes in a glass of water to make a drink), so food cooked from fresh ingredients is more likely to be healthy.
      • maxxxxx 8y ago
        "and you probably won't dissolve dozens of sugar cubes in a glass of water to make a drink" That's actually something I have been thinking about. When I read the sugar content of a lot of soda, bottled teas, milk shakes and others I wonder how they actually do manage to get that much sugar into it. When I put 13 teaspoons of sugar into a drink, it barely dissolves and is so sweet it's undrinkable.
        • yorwba 8y ago
          This mixer is claimed to achieve 66% sugar content at ambient temperature by essentially grinding the sugar particles to smaller size while mixing them with water: http://www.silverson.com/images/uploads/documents/F_Soft_Drinks_-_Sugar_Syrups_2016_US.pdf http://www.silverson.com/images/uploads/documents/F_Soft_Dri...
        • nradov 8y ago
          Just heat up the water before adding the sugar, and stir vigorously.
        • dogma1138 8y ago
          High salt content and acidity to balance the sugar and keep it from dropping out of solution.
      • craftyguy 8y ago
        > and you probably won't dissolve dozens of sugar cubes in a glass of water to make a drink) You'd be surprised what some recipes for 'home cooked food' calls for. My SO and I have been on a global culinary 'adventure' in our kitchen for the past few months and we are constantly having to ignore when recipes call for cups (with an 's') of sugar for things like stews, breads (not cakes..), etc. While food cooked at home can be healthy, it's important to understand that not all food cooked at home is healthy. And more to your comment: you've obviously never had homemade southern (US) sweet tea, which is basically a bucket of sugar with a bit of tea added for flavor.
    • maxxxxx 8y ago
      "Home cooked food from raw/simple ingredients?"
  • piffey 8y ago
    I'd say that works. The article states "whole foods" which I assume would mean "unprocessed foods" which would fit in line with fresh as well. The major thing I realized when I did ketogenic for a year (and lost 65lbs doing so) was that I basically could not eat to a caloric threshold. I'm a relatively active person (run 3 times a week, walk everywhere), but if you're just consuming spinach and meats you can't consume enough to cross 2500 calories a day. When I went off keto I was still tracking my diet and found a huge caloric jump when eating the same proportions of food, but not in the low carbohydrate realm. A 100g serving of zucchini noodles versus a 100g of spaghetti has a huge caloric difference.
  • martin-adams 8y ago
    I suspect they mean highly refined carbohydrates, such as white bread, white rices, pasta, etc. Basically where the fibrous and nutritious parts are removed.
• Delmania 8y ago
  Based on the evidence so far, the main culprit seems to be sugar and HFCS which has the same effect on the body as sugar.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    I think it's a mistake to try to reduce the problem to a single factor. Sugar plays a role, portion sizes play a role and probably a lot of other things.
• noxxten 8y ago
  I think what he's getting at is more along the lines of people losing weight and being healthier on any form of diet because before going on any diet, some people are drinking soda by the gallon and eating whatever the body wants, when it wants. Doing that means that for most people, they're consuming far more than 2k calories a day, most from "craving" sources like fat, sugar, and/or other emotionally rewarding food groups. Going on any sort of diet sort of controls all that, and makes the person more vigilant of what's going into their body. So going from consuming wildly more than 2k calories a day, they might be consuming something closer to what their body actually needs, or less even. Metabolism catches up, and if the person is dieting, then they usually tack on some extra exercise too and that further helps their overall health etc.