4 ms·

> don't eat boxed foods or foods that went through multiple stages of processing What's wrong with cheese, or butter? Or sauerkraut and pickles? All processe

> don't eat boxed foods or foods that went through multiple stages of processing What's wrong with cheese, or butter? Or sauerkraut and pickles? All processed food. Also, powdered mashed potatoes and puffed rice are just conveniently preserved starch. They're perfectly healthy. The "processed food" and "mostly plants" stuff is just marketing psychology that taps into SWPLs' inner hippie. The real diet rules aren't mystical: * Avoid sugar, especially fructose * Avoid vegetable oils * Don't be afraid of saturated fat * Prefer rice and potatoes to wheat/rye/etc * If you're fat, try cutting out starch, but don't worry about it if you're not fat.

bane 16y ago
A couple years ago I worked on a market research contract for a food grower that tried to answer the opposite, "what does all natural mean" (or some set of synonyms)? Turns out it's virtually impossible to define it. Here was one of the exercises we went through: 1) Take an orange, grown in the wild without being touched in any way by the hand of man. 2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"? 3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"? 4) If you strain the juice to eliminate pulp, through a handwoven cloth (or a mat of grass or some other "all natural straining device") is it still "all natural"? 5) If you heat the juice and drink it, ie cook it, is it still "all natural"? 6) How about if you heat it long enough to boil off some of the water? 7) How about long enough to boil off all of the water? 8a) What if instead of boiling you simply dry out the juice in the sun? 8b) What if in addition to boiling it, you dry the remains in the sun? 9) What about drying it in an oven? 10) Suppose I take the dry particles left and through any conceivable natural operation sort them by density? Say, putting the particles into an all natural basket and shake it vigorously until my arms are tired? 11) Now how about I remove particles of a certain density? Is the remaining product natural? 12) Now suppose I add water to the remaining sorted particles, fresh from a mountain spring. 13) Suppose I do the same (#1-12) with other plant sources? 14) Suppose I mix the results into either a mix of powders or a mix of reconstituted liquids? This is an actual replication of a process for producing an artificial sweetener (not with fruit, but a different plant source). That sweetener is generally not called "all natural" but the process is more or less the above. At every point in the process we haven't done anything that's not natural. There's some analogy to every step that you probably have to do with any food source to make it edible. Nobody thinks squeezing, chopping, cutting, cutting plants creates a processed food. Or straining liquids or really any of the above. We've been doing all of the above as a species since before writing. But many people think the result of the specific combination of the above, #14, is a "processed food". How about cheese? Most cheese, even modern cheese is just milk and bacteria in a controlled spoilage environment. As natural as dirt. And in general the result of very few steps. Defining "processed food" from "natural food" ultimately ends up trying to set some kind of arbitrary definition delineating the two -- "processed food is any food that has undergone more than 3 processing steps" I have news, chopping and peeling fresh picked garlic takes more than 3 steps. 1) Wash the dirt from the bulb 2) Dry the bulb 3) Remove the outer layers of onion skin 4) Separate the cloves out of the bulb 5) Cut the hard connective bits 6) Peel the layers of onion skin from the cloves 7) Chop to size Now if I include it in a recipe I'm including it in even more processing steps. I may boil it, grill it, bake it, or some other cooking process. I may strain it from a broth if all I care about is the flavor. Before I can actually get the garlic into my mouth, through even an elementary recipe, I've had to process it at least 8 times, likely a dozen.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"? 3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"?" The In Defense of Food argument is not so much about whether or not the food is still "natural" at that point. The point is you are throwing out much of the orange, and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you. Pollan talks about how at one point a scientist thought he had isolated all of the necessary parts of nutrition: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Then they discovered vitamins. Oops. If you actually believed what that first scientist said, you probably died of scurvy. So, let's take our food stuff made from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and inject some vitamins in them! Should be all good now, right? Except, we continue to discover stuff in the food that grows out of the ground and on trees that turns out to be good for us. (I forget the more recent examples he mentions in his book, but you get the idea.) So your choice is basically to take the chance that the scientists have finally found all the parts of plants and animals that are good for us, synthesized or extracted them, and injected them into that box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs you are eating. Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.
  - bane 16y ago
    Not to entirely disagree with you but Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it. You don't just grab a potato out of the ground and eat it whole. Or jump out into a field of cattle with a fork and knife ready to go. You can do that with some foods, not so much with others. If the metric is "you must be able to eat it right out of the wild with 0 processing" you're going to eat a lot of raw tomatoes and peppers and not a whole lot else. In many cases, you have to process the food source to make it edible. Rhubarb for example has poisonous leaves that will kill you. The green bits of the tomato can surpress cardiac functions. For most animals you can't just start biting chunks out of them. You may have to remove internal organs that are inedible, bones (I don't see many paleo eaters advocating cracking open thigh bones to get at the marrow very often btw), etc. http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruits-and-vegetables http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruit... In some cases, edible parts may contain bad stuff, pork meat for example is well known to be unsafe raw. I'm pretty sure cavemen ate pigs (or at least boar). Cow brains may contain prions. etc. I do agree with you that food manufacture from chemical components on up is likely not complete, but there's not really much of that in the industry. Even highly "processed" foods like hotdogs or McDonald's chicken McNuggets are just ground up and cooked scrap meat and connective tissue (all paleo friendly!). They have all the stuff that's in meat anyways. The process to make imitation cheese doesn't generally fall under that kind of manufacturing process. Many common and cheap foodstuffs also don't contain much nutrition. Vitamin fortified rice has probably improved the lives of a billion people. People also get all kinds of scared when the chemical names for common food components are used. Should I use "salt" or "sodium chloride"? Should I avoid all foods with Monosodium Glutamate (good luck with that)? But like anything it all just comes down to moderation. Nutmeg is great and natural, but if you eat too much of it you'll get have hallucinations and may die. Who knows what's in a clam, perhaps if you eat clams 3 times a day for a year (a completely possible scenario for a caveman) you'll have serious health problems like mercury poisoning or some other issue. Who knows? and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you. You may also be throwing out stuff that's very bad for you. It's all conjecture.
SageRaven 16y ago
So, you're telling us that a couple of Slim Jims is no worse for a person than a serving of steak? I think the poster you replied to was making the point that industrial mangling of our food likely has some detriment to our health. Sure, cheese and kraut are processed (we make both at home, btw), but they're more natural processes than, say, turning corn into corn syrup. In fact, the end products of these natural processes are often argued to be healthier (or at least offer more bioavailble/digestible nutrition) than the original material. Look at the ingredients list of your average loaf of store-bought wheat bread. All of the continuant ingredients have been refined, had preservatives added, then re-mixed to make "bread". The list is typically a mile long! Take my wife's home-made bread, as a counter example: whole wheat flour (ground minutes before making, from home-grown wheat), salt, maybe a dash of sugar or honey, water, and our sourdough starter.
dkobryn 16y ago
Cheese, butter, sauerkraut and pickles are all products of fermentation. Fermentation is how people preserved and enhanced the nutritional composition and digestibility of many foods. Process's like canning, freezing, refrigeration, dehydration, bleaching(flour,sugar,salt) and pasteurization, to name a few, are all examples of modern food process's that typically alter the food in some way that favors shelf life, cost or convienence over nutrient density.
enjo 16y ago
This recalls a conversation I had with a highly noted doctor of nutrition at University of Colorado @ Denver. He was the first to admit that nutrition sciences were largely confused. All of those years of studying cholestrol and various other substances in isolation had led to a ton of barely viable nutrition advice that didn't seem to work in practice. He has come to believe that the research continues to point in a single direction. It's more or less what the OP said, with a bit of twist. The problem isn't processing in the traditional sense... it's processing in the industrial sense. Modern processed foods contain a whole litany of preservatives that seem to have a profound impact on food in two ways. 1. It often more or less removes much of the health benefit of actually eating. Vitamins, minerals, and a whole range of amino acids magically disappear. Post-processing foods tend to be left high in carbs and so called "empty calories". This is why, in his mind, McDonalds and the like are so damaging. It's why TV dinners (even the 'healthy' ones) are terrible for you. By eating more "whole" foods (as the OP suggested) you avoid so much of this. 2. Those preservatives themselves trigger body processes that cause all sorts of strangeness. Why can you drink Coke Zero everyday and not lose weight (or Stevia, Splenda, etc..)? Because your body has a natural metabolic reaction to the sweetness. It's still calorie-in/calorie-out, your just sabotaging the calorie out. The prevailing theory about this has something to do with energy storage back in our caveman days. When eating sweet fruits and the like, our bodies would go into energy storage mode for the coming winter. In those days fruits represented one of the few times that we would experience a calorie surplus. Apparently many common preservatives trigger that same response. For the last couple of years I've essentially followed the OP's advice. I eat as close to "whole" as I can. I eat quite a bit more meat than he's advertising, but I try to make sure it as unprocessed as possible. I eat a lot of whole vegetables and a bit of fruit. Nuts and the like are a staple. I eat fewer refined carbs, but I don't necessarily try to stay far away from them either. I'm healthier, fitter, and all around in better shape then I ever have been.
- ilovecomputers 16y ago
  Of course, the experts have a better sense of why these advices work (that's why I trust Marion Nestle's advice more than Michael Pollan's). You're right, I meant processed in the industrial sense (you can consider tofu processed out of that context).
draebek 16y ago
Wait, what's wrong with vegetable oils now? Last I heard things like olive oil were supposed to be healthy.

bane 16y ago

A couple years ago I worked on a market research contract for a food grower that tried to answer the opposite, "what does all natural mean" (or some set of synonyms)? Turns out it's virtually impossible to define it. Here was one of the exercises we went through: 1) Take an orange, grown in the wild without being touched in any way by the hand of man. 2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"? 3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"? 4) If you strain the juice to eliminate pulp, through a handwoven cloth (or a mat of grass or some other "all natural straining device") is it still "all natural"? 5) If you heat the juice and drink it, ie cook it, is it still "all natural"? 6) How about if you heat it long enough to boil off some of the water? 7) How about long enough to boil off all of the water? 8a) What if instead of boiling you simply dry out the juice in the sun? 8b) What if in addition to boiling it, you dry the remains in the sun? 9) What about drying it in an oven? 10) Suppose I take the dry particles left and through any conceivable natural operation sort them by density? Say, putting the particles into an all natural basket and shake it vigorously until my arms are tired? 11) Now how about I remove particles of a certain density? Is the remaining product natural? 12) Now suppose I add water to the remaining sorted particles, fresh from a mountain spring. 13) Suppose I do the same (#1-12) with other plant sources? 14) Suppose I mix the results into either a mix of powders or a mix of reconstituted liquids? This is an actual replication of a process for producing an artificial sweetener (not with fruit, but a different plant source). That sweetener is generally not called "all natural" but the process is more or less the above. At every point in the process we haven't done anything that's not natural. There's some analogy to every step that you probably have to do with any food source to make it edible. Nobody thinks squeezing, chopping, cutting, cutting plants creates a processed food. Or straining liquids or really any of the above. We've been doing all of the above as a species since before writing. But many people think the result of the specific combination of the above, #14, is a "processed food". How about cheese? Most cheese, even modern cheese is just milk and bacteria in a controlled spoilage environment. As natural as dirt. And in general the result of very few steps. Defining "processed food" from "natural food" ultimately ends up trying to set some kind of arbitrary definition delineating the two -- "processed food is any food that has undergone more than 3 processing steps" I have news, chopping and peeling fresh picked garlic takes more than 3 steps. 1) Wash the dirt from the bulb 2) Dry the bulb 3) Remove the outer layers of onion skin 4) Separate the cloves out of the bulb 5) Cut the hard connective bits 6) Peel the layers of onion skin from the cloves 7) Chop to size Now if I include it in a recipe I'm including it in even more processing steps. I may boil it, grill it, bake it, or some other cooking process. I may strain it from a broth if all I care about is the flavor. Before I can actually get the garlic into my mouth, through even an elementary recipe, I've had to process it at least 8 times, likely a dozen.

jimbokun 16y ago
"2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"? 3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"?" The In Defense of Food argument is not so much about whether or not the food is still "natural" at that point. The point is you are throwing out much of the orange, and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you. Pollan talks about how at one point a scientist thought he had isolated all of the necessary parts of nutrition: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Then they discovered vitamins. Oops. If you actually believed what that first scientist said, you probably died of scurvy. So, let's take our food stuff made from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and inject some vitamins in them! Should be all good now, right? Except, we continue to discover stuff in the food that grows out of the ground and on trees that turns out to be good for us. (I forget the more recent examples he mentions in his book, but you get the idea.) So your choice is basically to take the chance that the scientists have finally found all the parts of plants and animals that are good for us, synthesized or extracted them, and injected them into that box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs you are eating. Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.
- bane 16y ago
  Not to entirely disagree with you but Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it. You don't just grab a potato out of the ground and eat it whole. Or jump out into a field of cattle with a fork and knife ready to go. You can do that with some foods, not so much with others. If the metric is "you must be able to eat it right out of the wild with 0 processing" you're going to eat a lot of raw tomatoes and peppers and not a whole lot else. In many cases, you have to process the food source to make it edible. Rhubarb for example has poisonous leaves that will kill you. The green bits of the tomato can surpress cardiac functions. For most animals you can't just start biting chunks out of them. You may have to remove internal organs that are inedible, bones (I don't see many paleo eaters advocating cracking open thigh bones to get at the marrow very often btw), etc. http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruits-and-vegetables http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruit... In some cases, edible parts may contain bad stuff, pork meat for example is well known to be unsafe raw. I'm pretty sure cavemen ate pigs (or at least boar). Cow brains may contain prions. etc. I do agree with you that food manufacture from chemical components on up is likely not complete, but there's not really much of that in the industry. Even highly "processed" foods like hotdogs or McDonald's chicken McNuggets are just ground up and cooked scrap meat and connective tissue (all paleo friendly!). They have all the stuff that's in meat anyways. The process to make imitation cheese doesn't generally fall under that kind of manufacturing process. Many common and cheap foodstuffs also don't contain much nutrition. Vitamin fortified rice has probably improved the lives of a billion people. People also get all kinds of scared when the chemical names for common food components are used. Should I use "salt" or "sodium chloride"? Should I avoid all foods with Monosodium Glutamate (good luck with that)? But like anything it all just comes down to moderation. Nutmeg is great and natural, but if you eat too much of it you'll get have hallucinations and may die. Who knows what's in a clam, perhaps if you eat clams 3 times a day for a year (a completely possible scenario for a caveman) you'll have serious health problems like mercury poisoning or some other issue. Who knows? and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you. You may also be throwing out stuff that's very bad for you. It's all conjecture.

SageRaven 16y ago

So, you're telling us that a couple of Slim Jims is no worse for a person than a serving of steak? I think the poster you replied to was making the point that industrial mangling of our food likely has some detriment to our health. Sure, cheese and kraut are processed (we make both at home, btw), but they're more natural processes than, say, turning corn into corn syrup. In fact, the end products of these natural processes are often argued to be healthier (or at least offer more bioavailble/digestible nutrition) than the original material. Look at the ingredients list of your average loaf of store-bought wheat bread. All of the continuant ingredients have been refined, had preservatives added, then re-mixed to make "bread". The list is typically a mile long! Take my wife's home-made bread, as a counter example: whole wheat flour (ground minutes before making, from home-grown wheat), salt, maybe a dash of sugar or honey, water, and our sourdough starter.

dkobryn 16y ago

Cheese, butter, sauerkraut and pickles are all products of fermentation. Fermentation is how people preserved and enhanced the nutritional composition and digestibility of many foods. Process's like canning, freezing, refrigeration, dehydration, bleaching(flour,sugar,salt) and pasteurization, to name a few, are all examples of modern food process's that typically alter the food in some way that favors shelf life, cost or convienence over nutrient density.

enjo 16y ago

This recalls a conversation I had with a highly noted doctor of nutrition at University of Colorado @ Denver. He was the first to admit that nutrition sciences were largely confused. All of those years of studying cholestrol and various other substances in isolation had led to a ton of barely viable nutrition advice that didn't seem to work in practice. He has come to believe that the research continues to point in a single direction. It's more or less what the OP said, with a bit of twist. The problem isn't processing in the traditional sense... it's processing in the industrial sense. Modern processed foods contain a whole litany of preservatives that seem to have a profound impact on food in two ways. 1. It often more or less removes much of the health benefit of actually eating. Vitamins, minerals, and a whole range of amino acids magically disappear. Post-processing foods tend to be left high in carbs and so called "empty calories". This is why, in his mind, McDonalds and the like are so damaging. It's why TV dinners (even the 'healthy' ones) are terrible for you. By eating more "whole" foods (as the OP suggested) you avoid so much of this. 2. Those preservatives themselves trigger body processes that cause all sorts of strangeness. Why can you drink Coke Zero everyday and not lose weight (or Stevia, Splenda, etc..)? Because your body has a natural metabolic reaction to the sweetness. It's still calorie-in/calorie-out, your just sabotaging the calorie out. The prevailing theory about this has something to do with energy storage back in our caveman days. When eating sweet fruits and the like, our bodies would go into energy storage mode for the coming winter. In those days fruits represented one of the few times that we would experience a calorie surplus. Apparently many common preservatives trigger that same response. For the last couple of years I've essentially followed the OP's advice. I eat as close to "whole" as I can. I eat quite a bit more meat than he's advertising, but I try to make sure it as unprocessed as possible. I eat a lot of whole vegetables and a bit of fruit. Nuts and the like are a staple. I eat fewer refined carbs, but I don't necessarily try to stay far away from them either. I'm healthier, fitter, and all around in better shape then I ever have been.

ilovecomputers 16y ago
Of course, the experts have a better sense of why these advices work (that's why I trust Marion Nestle's advice more than Michael Pollan's). You're right, I meant processed in the industrial sense (you can consider tofu processed out of that context).

draebek 16y ago

Wait, what's wrong with vegetable oils now? Last I heard things like olive oil were supposed to be healthy.