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Ultra-processed food targets bone quality via endochondral ossification

126 points by myth_drannon 5y ago

grendelt 5y ago
What are the official definitions of the varying degrees of food processing? When does food become processed and then move into "highly processed" and then on to "ultra processed". High fat and high calorie doesn't seem clear cut and scientific enough.
- stronglikedan 5y ago
  Looks like even the "official" definitions vary. Definitions vary, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture says anything that changes the fundamental nature of an agricultural product – heating, freezing, dicing, juicing – is a processed food. "Those little baby carrots that you get in a supermarket – that's a processed food," said Penny Kris-Etherton, registered dietitian and distinguished professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University's Department of Nutritional Sciences. So are frozen vegetables, or even broccoli that's been cut into florets. Ultra-processed food takes things further. Nutritionists started using the term about 10 years ago, and again, definitions vary. One diet classification system called NOVA sums it up as "snacks, drinks, ready meals and many other products created mostly or entirely from substances extracted from foods or derived from food constituents with little if any intact food." From here: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-processed-food-and-why-it-matters-to-your-health https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-...
  - artful-hacker 5y ago
    Yeah, I feel there is no way we can have a clear definition on it. Even these citations (thank you for extracting them by the way) require more definitions. What exactly is a "intact food"? Does that mean a plant or animal that could exist in nature? Cause thats approximately zero percent of what I buy or eat. It's all subjective, feels very much like a "you know it if you see it" kind of thing.
    - macNchz 5y ago
      It's definitely not always obvious but I think the categories of "minimally processed" / "processed" / "ultra processed" make some intuitive sense: Raw fish filet / Canned Fish / Frozen Fish Fingers Corn on the cob / Frozen Corn / Corn Chips Raw chicken breast / Rotisserie Chicken / Chicken patty Peanuts / Peanut Butter / Peanut M&Ms Milk / Cheese / Powdered cheese sauce mix Brown rice / White rice / Rice Krispies Wheat / Simple bread / Chocolate chip cookies
      - ianai 5y ago
        I think ultra processed includes things like high fructose corn syrup-which basically has nothing else from corn within it. It’s pretty much a naked solution at that point. This is tough. Maybe a good definition could involve how the food hits your blood sugar levels compared to its completely whole equivalent.
      - asiachick 5y ago
        Most of those make no sense to me. Why does chopping up a chicken (a chicken patty) make any difference? Same with fish. If I chop it and roll it in bread crumbs and freeze it it's suddenly "ultra processed"? So if I freeze raw fish is that "ultra processed". If I grind the raw fish with my teeth before swallowing has it suddenly become "ultra processed"? Even corn chips, they're just corn meal, oil, and salt. Unless you mean something like favored Doritos, normal corn chips are aren't remotely "ultra processed". If I was to go by gut feelings on unprocessed to processed on your list, assuming I was making each of them myself, on a scale of 1 to 10 1 Raw fish filet 1 Canned Fish 2 Frozen Fish Fingers 1 Corn on the cob 1 Frozen Corn 2 Corn Chips 1 Raw chicken breast 2 Rotisserie Chicken 1 Chicken patty (it's chopped chicken) 1 Peanuts 2 Peanut Butter 3 Peanut M&Ms 1 Milk 2 Cheese 10 Powdered cheese sauce mix (unless this is easier to make than I understand) 1 Brown rice 2 White rice 3 Rice Krispies 1 Wheat 2 Simple bread 3 Chocolate chip cookies Basically only 1 item on your list would even fit "processed" for me. I think many of those numbers are also misleading. I wouldn't put white rice as 2x processed over brown rice. More like 1.25. Same with cheese, rotisserie chicken
        5y ago
  - asiachick 5y ago
    So olive oil is a processed food (pressing is the same a juicing). Bread is a processed food. Most salads with diced tomatoes and onions are processed food. Like most similar classifications (eg. organic) it's mostly nonsense.
  - smnrchrds 5y ago
    > freezing, dicing, juicing I know it's not the correct interpretation in reality, but it's fun thinking that by this definition, all beef is processed unless you buy the whole live cow.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  The experiment itself only seems to consider imbalanced macros and additional sugar inside water. I too wish to know what exactly is meant by the term “processed” and whether, say, an industrial sausage is any worse than “all natural” shake having exactly the same macros (- preservatives)
- hombre_fatal 5y ago
  Ready-to-eat foods high in fat and refined sugars doesn’t seem as nebulous as this sort of cookie cutter HN comment seems to assert though.
- okareaman 5y ago
  I had the same question: food we eat every day that has been significantly changed from its original state, with salt, sugar, fat, additives, preservatives and/or artificial colours added. https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-processed-food https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-process... It's not clear to me what attribute of UPF is bad. I know sugar is not good. But fat? Additives, preservatives and/or artificial colors?
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    There are issues with heat treatment in those foods that create advanced glycation end products. Fats in ultra-processed tend to be low quality industrial seed oils, like soybean, sunflower, etc.
    - symlinkk 5y ago
      And this “low quality seed oil” is bad…why? It seems to me that all of food science besides the basic “calories and macronutrients” that everyone knows is complete pseudoscience bullshit.
      - deleted 5y ago
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  - ianai 5y ago
    It’s usually got a huge amount of fat or sugar compared to a healthy amount of a whole food. So chips are soaked with fat-on par with nuts. But unlike nuts, chips often come with less protein, no fiber, and fats that have been refined highly. Additives/preservatives/artificial colors can be of dubious safety as the standards for “safe to eat” are very lax.
  - jfengel 5y ago
    It's more about concentration than about special ingredients, and to a lesser extent about missing nutrients. These foods tend to be very calorie-dense, which encourages you to eat too much of them. They provide those calories without a lot of other things (fiber, calcium, and possibly other unknown micronutrients). There's some suggestion that their high concentrations also throw off the complex balance of gut flora, but that's harder to pin down. The additives, preservatives, colors, etc. are probably safe in and of themselves. They've generally passed at least some basic level of safety testing (including being fed in megadoses to rats). They tend to be added to convenience foods to make them even more appealing and available. So they're correlated with negative health outcomes, but without being the cause of it. It's still possible that there's something wrong with the additives themselves, but if you avoid them by eating less-processed products, you'll likely do better regardless of the additive safety. Generally, that means doing more cooking yourself, or at least selecting menu items that more closely resemble home cooking.
- mattmcknight 5y ago
  Exactly. Why isn't the control for this experiment a high sugar diet without the "processing"? It's very unclear what "processing" refers to. What the data suggest is that in combination the elements are bad, but they were unable to isolate which one was the cause and there is nothing to suggest processing was the cause. (For example, the rats eating processed corn oil or processed sucrose did fine.)
- datameta 5y ago
  I presume what sets apart food in its "natural", "prepared" or cooked state is the increased level (though industry regulated) of potential contaminants introduced during separation of protein, fat, and sugar from all the other constituent compounds that may not have caloric value but have nutritional or protective effects. I would like to find the written definition myself.
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  In this specific study > The diet chosen here exemplifies the Western UPD with unbalanced levels of micro- and macronutrients Generally speaking, "unprocessed" foods are raw whole foods. "Processing" means cooking, cutting, adding stuff, etc. (of course none of this is bad in any way). "Highly processed" and "ultra processed" mean there's high calorie density without protein, fiber, micro-nutrients, etc. AKA it's very easy to overeat and throw your nutrient balance off. Of course products like Soylent are technically highly "processed" but that's rarely what these articles mean.
- grawprog 5y ago
  I like to go with, if it's something that no longer resembles food that's possible to make with unprocessed ingredients or if more than half the ingredients in a product are chemicals. It's probably ultra processed. Say burgers. A home made Burger made of freshly ground meat is a 'processed food.' A Patty created in a factory out of a slurry of smooshed up animal, parts, binders and preservatives then flash frozen and shipped to various places where it's then thawed and cooked using an industrial grill and assembled by a teenager for minimum wage...that's ultra processed.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    You're defining 'processed' as 'not unprocessed', there. Obviously a cyclic definition. And how are you defining 'chemical'?
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    > chemicals Do you have some special definition of that which wouldn't include "everything".
    - rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
      Come now: there is energy, and probably dark matter too. And space-time. And black holes. And neutron stars.
      - TchoBeer 5y ago
        Generally don't eat of that though
  - tomjakubowski 5y ago
    In case anyone is wondering how McDonalds beef patties are made, they're minced from large whole cuts of meat and fat. At industrial scale for sure, though not quite so harrowing as parent's description. https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factory-and-saw-how-the-burgers-are-really-made-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...
- teddyh 5y ago
  I think it’s the same as “chemical”. When something’s bad, it’s a chemical. When something’s good, it’s not. I.e. nobody knows what “processed” means, they just know it’s bad somehow.
- 6foot4_82iq 5y ago
  Real meat to plant-based "meat" is one instance.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Have you have seen the food source the way it comes out of the ground or the womb?
lambdaba 5y ago
> Only in the US does UPF comprise 57.9% of energy intake, of which 89.7% is derived from added sugars. It should be no mystery that refined sugar is devastating to bones.
- Filligree 5y ago
  This definition of “refined sugar” includes starch, I guess?
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    Starch breaks down into glucose, while sucrose is glucose + fructose. Refined fructose is uniquely harmful.
    - Filligree 5y ago
      I’m aware. But the numbers given imply that Americans get fifty percent of their energy from sugar, which fails the sniff test — it’s completely unbelievable.
      - freeflight 5y ago
        > it’s completely unbelievable Is it tho? High-fructose corn-syrup is ever-present in most convenient foods in the US down to such basics like bread and the hilariously oversized sodas, while obesity and diabetes rates have reached epidemic proportions [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887150/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887150/
      - lambdaba 5y ago
        Yes, might be an issue with more restrictive definitions of added sugar. The number I found is 70-80g/day, which is a lot but if you count things like fruit juices which only have "natural" sugars... Made me think about: > Oatly has voluntarily agreed to stop marketing its oatmilks as containing 'n added sugars' in ad campaigns followir a complaint by Campbell Soup drawing attention to its oatmilk production process, which breaks down oat starch into simple sugars.
hatsunearu 5y ago
*in mice
pella 5y ago
+"Nutritional Dark Matter" "“We are what we eat,” but do you really know what’s in your food? Our first paper on the Nutritional Dark Matter is in Nature Food, about the 26,000+ chemicals that are in our diet, and their impact on our health. " (2019) https://twitter.com/barabasi/status/1204413768987361282 https://twitter.com/barabasi/status/1204413768987361282
zwieback 5y ago
Looks like there were rats being fed with a "recommended rat diet" and other rats being fed burgers, fries and a soft drink, e.g. the typical fast food meal.
aszantu 5y ago
Makes sense in hindsight. When i cut it all out, all kinds of joint and back pain went away
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Same for me. I also recently started eating mainly pasta or potatoes with some boiled or sautéed vegetables. Rarely any bread or other processed foods. Comparing to most other people I already had a very good diet before but now I am dropping some more pounds and my joints feel much better. Seems we are really poisoning us with the typical diet of most people.
jimrandomh 5y ago
Hidden in the supplementary material (which you have to import an MS Word doc to read): the "ultra-processed diet" they fed the rats has multiple severe micronutrient deficiencies, probably because rather than being a mixed diet of many different ultraprocessed foods, it's: a hamburger and fries and soda, and nothing else ever, in a blender. Which is not remotely representative of any human diet.
- jimrandomh 5y ago
  Control: 1000mg calcium/100g Intervention: 62mg calcium/100g OMG PROCESSED FOOD CAUSES BONE PROBLEMS </s> They even avoided including cheese, to increase the size of the calcium deficiency.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    This is the sort of study that just feels like animal abuse without the justification. They pursued a study where they knew the results beforehand -- an intentional macronutrient deficiency yields, unsurprisingly, a deficiency. And they knew it would earn press because it serves a particular worldview. One could contrive a "zero processed food" study that yielded identical results.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  > Which is not remotely representative of any human diet. I know many humans who have diets not far off from that. Maybe deep fried chicken tenders as a substitute for hamburgers. Granted, most of them eat ketchup, which is a serving of vegetables in some states. Seriously though, this problem is more common that I think a lot may realize. Something about a high-sugar, high-salt, fast food diet has the long-term effect of destroying peoples' ability to eat other foods. I've seen kids grow up on fast food who find the idea any green vegetable completely revolting.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Of all the things my mother did for me, the one I'm second most grateful for was not catering to my childish tastes. I see some of my friends not far beyond chicken fingers for every meal and shudder... So thanks, Mom! You were right. Here's to "Dinner is what I cooked, and if you want something else then breakfast is in 12 hours."
dukeofdoom 5y ago
My personal anecdotal position on this, is there's something with the wheat in America. European wheat tastes different. Wheat is the number one component of food that is over eaten by those that are obese.
- occamrazor 5y ago
  Arandom fact: most durum wheat used to make pasta in Italy is imported from Canada.
  - kortex 5y ago
    That'll be a fun one to throw at my kooky aunt, who insists that pasta in America gives her problems, but the stuff in Italy does not. She thinks it's GMO. I told her "GMO wheat" isn't even a thing. > As of 2020, no GM wheat is grown commercially, although many field tests have been conducted, with one wheat variety, Bioceres HB4, obtaining regulatory approval from the Argentinian government. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_wheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_wheat https://grainstorm.com/blogs/blog/is-wheat-genetically-modified#:~:text=The%20short%20answer%3F,that%20is%20technically%20genetically%20modified https://grainstorm.com/blogs/blog/is-wheat-genetically-modif....
londons_explore 5y ago
Lots of dietary science seems to study "processed food", but none seems to break down the effects they find to the specific food ingredients or processing steps. For example, a hot dog is ultra processed by most definitions. But if you feed mice the raw ingredients that go into a hot dog, but not yet ground up into a hot dog, do they have the same health effects? How about when you start adding and removing ingredients? I suspect a specific processing step or ingredient causes many of these developmental issues, yet no study seems to attempt to find it
kortex 5y ago
* in rats Rats are pretty good models for humans, but they are a leaky abstraction like all models. Obviously no one is arguing junk food is good for you, but rats have rather different dietary and metabolic needs than humans. Both Homo sapiens and Rattus norvegicus are garbage disposals of the animal kingdom, but believe it or not humans are actually a little better equipped to handle extreme diets vs rats. Feeding lab rats ultra-high fat diets is pretty much guaranteed to result in obesity, insulin resistance, and all the problems that come with it, but Inuits and other groups have survived thousands of years with exactly such a diet for large parts of the year. Also, rats are wicked smart and even the "human" conditions for lab rats are likely insufficiently stimulating physically and mentally.
mrfusion 5y ago
The concept of processed foods seems so vague that it’s hard to study or reason about. Is oatmeal considered Processed, what about ground beef, canned vegetables, olive oil?
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  >The concept of processed foods seems so vague that it’s hard to study or reason about. Is it? Or is that what the food companies want you to believe. They have a history of obfuscating the facts to make processed food sound like its good for you - e.g. yoghurt with sweetened fruit added. My rule of thumb - did it exist 100 years ago? Then it's fine. There are a few corner cases - hummus comes to mind, its processed but by hand (traditionally), and is high in fat so don't eat too much of that, and it is hard to eat a lot of hummus imho. Packet Potato chips are high in fat and didn't exist a hundred years ago so ultra processed.
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karaterobot 5y ago
Do they define (or is there a commonly understood) definition of what makes a food ultra-processed, vs. processed, vs. not processsed? A quick cmd-f does not tell me what this means in the context of the study.
adrr 5y ago
Wouldn't we see the increase in broken bones over the last 100 years if this was the case in humans? Also it seems to affect bone size. Wouldn't this result in the population getting shorter but we're getting taller. Not that eating hamburgers every day is healthy and increases diabetes and heart disease. i don't see study results manifesting in on our population.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  Your speculations might be true if all other variables were held constant, but obviously there are many other variables which have changed in that time too.
rapjr9 5y ago
Is it what is in processed food that is bad for us or what is lacking in fast foods that is bad? If it is what is lacking then supplements (maybe based on blood tests) could help. If it is what is in the food the only thing that would help is to stop eating them. It's probably both, but identifying what is missing could at least let us repair some of the harm. Beyond vitamins and fiber what else does processed food lack? Specific forms of protein? Variety? Bacteria for your microbiome? Long term energy providing complex carbs to keep you active?

126 points by myth_drannon 5y ago

What are the official definitions of the varying degrees of food processing? When does food become processed and then move into "highly processed" and then on to "ultra processed". High fat and high calorie doesn't seem clear cut and scientific enough.

stronglikedan 5y ago
Looks like even the "official" definitions vary. Definitions vary, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture says anything that changes the fundamental nature of an agricultural product – heating, freezing, dicing, juicing – is a processed food. "Those little baby carrots that you get in a supermarket – that's a processed food," said Penny Kris-Etherton, registered dietitian and distinguished professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University's Department of Nutritional Sciences. So are frozen vegetables, or even broccoli that's been cut into florets. Ultra-processed food takes things further. Nutritionists started using the term about 10 years ago, and again, definitions vary. One diet classification system called NOVA sums it up as "snacks, drinks, ready meals and many other products created mostly or entirely from substances extracted from foods or derived from food constituents with little if any intact food." From here: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-processed-food-and-why-it-matters-to-your-health https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-...
- artful-hacker 5y ago
  Yeah, I feel there is no way we can have a clear definition on it. Even these citations (thank you for extracting them by the way) require more definitions. What exactly is a "intact food"? Does that mean a plant or animal that could exist in nature? Cause thats approximately zero percent of what I buy or eat. It's all subjective, feels very much like a "you know it if you see it" kind of thing.
  - macNchz 5y ago
    It's definitely not always obvious but I think the categories of "minimally processed" / "processed" / "ultra processed" make some intuitive sense: Raw fish filet / Canned Fish / Frozen Fish Fingers Corn on the cob / Frozen Corn / Corn Chips Raw chicken breast / Rotisserie Chicken / Chicken patty Peanuts / Peanut Butter / Peanut M&Ms Milk / Cheese / Powdered cheese sauce mix Brown rice / White rice / Rice Krispies Wheat / Simple bread / Chocolate chip cookies
    - ianai 5y ago
      I think ultra processed includes things like high fructose corn syrup-which basically has nothing else from corn within it. It’s pretty much a naked solution at that point. This is tough. Maybe a good definition could involve how the food hits your blood sugar levels compared to its completely whole equivalent.
    - asiachick 5y ago
      Most of those make no sense to me. Why does chopping up a chicken (a chicken patty) make any difference? Same with fish. If I chop it and roll it in bread crumbs and freeze it it's suddenly "ultra processed"? So if I freeze raw fish is that "ultra processed". If I grind the raw fish with my teeth before swallowing has it suddenly become "ultra processed"? Even corn chips, they're just corn meal, oil, and salt. Unless you mean something like favored Doritos, normal corn chips are aren't remotely "ultra processed". If I was to go by gut feelings on unprocessed to processed on your list, assuming I was making each of them myself, on a scale of 1 to 10 1 Raw fish filet 1 Canned Fish 2 Frozen Fish Fingers 1 Corn on the cob 1 Frozen Corn 2 Corn Chips 1 Raw chicken breast 2 Rotisserie Chicken 1 Chicken patty (it's chopped chicken) 1 Peanuts 2 Peanut Butter 3 Peanut M&Ms 1 Milk 2 Cheese 10 Powdered cheese sauce mix (unless this is easier to make than I understand) 1 Brown rice 2 White rice 3 Rice Krispies 1 Wheat 2 Simple bread 3 Chocolate chip cookies Basically only 1 item on your list would even fit "processed" for me. I think many of those numbers are also misleading. I wouldn't put white rice as 2x processed over brown rice. More like 1.25. Same with cheese, rotisserie chicken
      - 5y ago
- asiachick 5y ago
  So olive oil is a processed food (pressing is the same a juicing). Bread is a processed food. Most salads with diced tomatoes and onions are processed food. Like most similar classifications (eg. organic) it's mostly nonsense.
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  > freezing, dicing, juicing I know it's not the correct interpretation in reality, but it's fun thinking that by this definition, all beef is processed unless you buy the whole live cow.
yoz-y 5y ago
The experiment itself only seems to consider imbalanced macros and additional sugar inside water. I too wish to know what exactly is meant by the term “processed” and whether, say, an industrial sausage is any worse than “all natural” shake having exactly the same macros (- preservatives)
hombre_fatal 5y ago
Ready-to-eat foods high in fat and refined sugars doesn’t seem as nebulous as this sort of cookie cutter HN comment seems to assert though.
okareaman 5y ago
I had the same question: food we eat every day that has been significantly changed from its original state, with salt, sugar, fat, additives, preservatives and/or artificial colours added. https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-processed-food https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-process... It's not clear to me what attribute of UPF is bad. I know sugar is not good. But fat? Additives, preservatives and/or artificial colors?
- lambdaba 5y ago
  There are issues with heat treatment in those foods that create advanced glycation end products. Fats in ultra-processed tend to be low quality industrial seed oils, like soybean, sunflower, etc.
  - symlinkk 5y ago
    And this “low quality seed oil” is bad…why? It seems to me that all of food science besides the basic “calories and macronutrients” that everyone knows is complete pseudoscience bullshit.
    - deleted 5y ago
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- ianai 5y ago
  It’s usually got a huge amount of fat or sugar compared to a healthy amount of a whole food. So chips are soaked with fat-on par with nuts. But unlike nuts, chips often come with less protein, no fiber, and fats that have been refined highly. Additives/preservatives/artificial colors can be of dubious safety as the standards for “safe to eat” are very lax.
- jfengel 5y ago
  It's more about concentration than about special ingredients, and to a lesser extent about missing nutrients. These foods tend to be very calorie-dense, which encourages you to eat too much of them. They provide those calories without a lot of other things (fiber, calcium, and possibly other unknown micronutrients). There's some suggestion that their high concentrations also throw off the complex balance of gut flora, but that's harder to pin down. The additives, preservatives, colors, etc. are probably safe in and of themselves. They've generally passed at least some basic level of safety testing (including being fed in megadoses to rats). They tend to be added to convenience foods to make them even more appealing and available. So they're correlated with negative health outcomes, but without being the cause of it. It's still possible that there's something wrong with the additives themselves, but if you avoid them by eating less-processed products, you'll likely do better regardless of the additive safety. Generally, that means doing more cooking yourself, or at least selecting menu items that more closely resemble home cooking.
mattmcknight 5y ago
Exactly. Why isn't the control for this experiment a high sugar diet without the "processing"? It's very unclear what "processing" refers to. What the data suggest is that in combination the elements are bad, but they were unable to isolate which one was the cause and there is nothing to suggest processing was the cause. (For example, the rats eating processed corn oil or processed sucrose did fine.)
datameta 5y ago
I presume what sets apart food in its "natural", "prepared" or cooked state is the increased level (though industry regulated) of potential contaminants introduced during separation of protein, fat, and sugar from all the other constituent compounds that may not have caloric value but have nutritional or protective effects. I would like to find the written definition myself.
armchairhacker 5y ago
In this specific study > The diet chosen here exemplifies the Western UPD with unbalanced levels of micro- and macronutrients Generally speaking, "unprocessed" foods are raw whole foods. "Processing" means cooking, cutting, adding stuff, etc. (of course none of this is bad in any way). "Highly processed" and "ultra processed" mean there's high calorie density without protein, fiber, micro-nutrients, etc. AKA it's very easy to overeat and throw your nutrient balance off. Of course products like Soylent are technically highly "processed" but that's rarely what these articles mean.
grawprog 5y ago
I like to go with, if it's something that no longer resembles food that's possible to make with unprocessed ingredients or if more than half the ingredients in a product are chemicals. It's probably ultra processed. Say burgers. A home made Burger made of freshly ground meat is a 'processed food.' A Patty created in a factory out of a slurry of smooshed up animal, parts, binders and preservatives then flash frozen and shipped to various places where it's then thawed and cooked using an industrial grill and assembled by a teenager for minimum wage...that's ultra processed.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  You're defining 'processed' as 'not unprocessed', there. Obviously a cyclic definition. And how are you defining 'chemical'?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  > chemicals Do you have some special definition of that which wouldn't include "everything".
  - rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
    Come now: there is energy, and probably dark matter too. And space-time. And black holes. And neutron stars.
    - TchoBeer 5y ago
      Generally don't eat of that though
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  In case anyone is wondering how McDonalds beef patties are made, they're minced from large whole cuts of meat and fat. At industrial scale for sure, though not quite so harrowing as parent's description. https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factory-and-saw-how-the-burgers-are-really-made-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...
teddyh 5y ago
I think it’s the same as “chemical”. When something’s bad, it’s a chemical. When something’s good, it’s not. I.e. nobody knows what “processed” means, they just know it’s bad somehow.
6foot4_82iq 5y ago
Real meat to plant-based "meat" is one instance.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
Have you have seen the food source the way it comes out of the ground or the womb?

lambdaba 5y ago

> Only in the US does UPF comprise 57.9% of energy intake, of which 89.7% is derived from added sugars. It should be no mystery that refined sugar is devastating to bones.

Filligree 5y ago
This definition of “refined sugar” includes starch, I guess?
- lambdaba 5y ago
  Starch breaks down into glucose, while sucrose is glucose + fructose. Refined fructose is uniquely harmful.
  - Filligree 5y ago
    I’m aware. But the numbers given imply that Americans get fifty percent of their energy from sugar, which fails the sniff test — it’s completely unbelievable.
    - freeflight 5y ago
      > it’s completely unbelievable Is it tho? High-fructose corn-syrup is ever-present in most convenient foods in the US down to such basics like bread and the hilariously oversized sodas, while obesity and diabetes rates have reached epidemic proportions [0] [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887150/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4887150/
    - lambdaba 5y ago
      Yes, might be an issue with more restrictive definitions of added sugar. The number I found is 70-80g/day, which is a lot but if you count things like fruit juices which only have "natural" sugars... Made me think about: > Oatly has voluntarily agreed to stop marketing its oatmilks as containing 'n added sugars' in ad campaigns followir a complaint by Campbell Soup drawing attention to its oatmilk production process, which breaks down oat starch into simple sugars.

hatsunearu 5y ago

*in mice

pella 5y ago

+"Nutritional Dark Matter" "“We are what we eat,” but do you really know what’s in your food? Our first paper on the Nutritional Dark Matter is in Nature Food, about the 26,000+ chemicals that are in our diet, and their impact on our health. " (2019) https://twitter.com/barabasi/status/1204413768987361282 https://twitter.com/barabasi/status/1204413768987361282

zwieback 5y ago

Looks like there were rats being fed with a "recommended rat diet" and other rats being fed burgers, fries and a soft drink, e.g. the typical fast food meal.

aszantu 5y ago

Makes sense in hindsight. When i cut it all out, all kinds of joint and back pain went away

spaetzleesser 5y ago
Same for me. I also recently started eating mainly pasta or potatoes with some boiled or sautéed vegetables. Rarely any bread or other processed foods. Comparing to most other people I already had a very good diet before but now I am dropping some more pounds and my joints feel much better. Seems we are really poisoning us with the typical diet of most people.

jimrandomh 5y ago

Hidden in the supplementary material (which you have to import an MS Word doc to read): the "ultra-processed diet" they fed the rats has multiple severe micronutrient deficiencies, probably because rather than being a mixed diet of many different ultraprocessed foods, it's: a hamburger and fries and soda, and nothing else ever, in a blender. Which is not remotely representative of any human diet.

jimrandomh 5y ago
Control: 1000mg calcium/100g Intervention: 62mg calcium/100g OMG PROCESSED FOOD CAUSES BONE PROBLEMS </s> They even avoided including cheese, to increase the size of the calcium deficiency.
- defaultname 5y ago
  This is the sort of study that just feels like animal abuse without the justification. They pursued a study where they knew the results beforehand -- an intentional macronutrient deficiency yields, unsurprisingly, a deficiency. And they knew it would earn press because it serves a particular worldview. One could contrive a "zero processed food" study that yielded identical results.
mywittyname 5y ago
> Which is not remotely representative of any human diet. I know many humans who have diets not far off from that. Maybe deep fried chicken tenders as a substitute for hamburgers. Granted, most of them eat ketchup, which is a serving of vegetables in some states. Seriously though, this problem is more common that I think a lot may realize. Something about a high-sugar, high-salt, fast food diet has the long-term effect of destroying peoples' ability to eat other foods. I've seen kids grow up on fast food who find the idea any green vegetable completely revolting.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Of all the things my mother did for me, the one I'm second most grateful for was not catering to my childish tastes. I see some of my friends not far beyond chicken fingers for every meal and shudder... So thanks, Mom! You were right. Here's to "Dinner is what I cooked, and if you want something else then breakfast is in 12 hours."

dukeofdoom 5y ago

My personal anecdotal position on this, is there's something with the wheat in America. European wheat tastes different. Wheat is the number one component of food that is over eaten by those that are obese.

occamrazor 5y ago
Arandom fact: most durum wheat used to make pasta in Italy is imported from Canada.
- kortex 5y ago
  That'll be a fun one to throw at my kooky aunt, who insists that pasta in America gives her problems, but the stuff in Italy does not. She thinks it's GMO. I told her "GMO wheat" isn't even a thing. > As of 2020, no GM wheat is grown commercially, although many field tests have been conducted, with one wheat variety, Bioceres HB4, obtaining regulatory approval from the Argentinian government. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_wheat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_wheat https://grainstorm.com/blogs/blog/is-wheat-genetically-modified#:~:text=The%20short%20answer%3F,that%20is%20technically%20genetically%20modified https://grainstorm.com/blogs/blog/is-wheat-genetically-modif....

londons_explore 5y ago

Lots of dietary science seems to study "processed food", but none seems to break down the effects they find to the specific food ingredients or processing steps. For example, a hot dog is ultra processed by most definitions. But if you feed mice the raw ingredients that go into a hot dog, but not yet ground up into a hot dog, do they have the same health effects? How about when you start adding and removing ingredients? I suspect a specific processing step or ingredient causes many of these developmental issues, yet no study seems to attempt to find it

kortex 5y ago

* in rats Rats are pretty good models for humans, but they are a leaky abstraction like all models. Obviously no one is arguing junk food is good for you, but rats have rather different dietary and metabolic needs than humans. Both Homo sapiens and Rattus norvegicus are garbage disposals of the animal kingdom, but believe it or not humans are actually a little better equipped to handle extreme diets vs rats. Feeding lab rats ultra-high fat diets is pretty much guaranteed to result in obesity, insulin resistance, and all the problems that come with it, but Inuits and other groups have survived thousands of years with exactly such a diet for large parts of the year. Also, rats are wicked smart and even the "human" conditions for lab rats are likely insufficiently stimulating physically and mentally.

mrfusion 5y ago

The concept of processed foods seems so vague that it’s hard to study or reason about. Is oatmeal considered Processed, what about ground beef, canned vegetables, olive oil?

chadcmulligan 5y ago
>The concept of processed foods seems so vague that it’s hard to study or reason about. Is it? Or is that what the food companies want you to believe. They have a history of obfuscating the facts to make processed food sound like its good for you - e.g. yoghurt with sweetened fruit added. My rule of thumb - did it exist 100 years ago? Then it's fine. There are a few corner cases - hummus comes to mind, its processed but by hand (traditionally), and is high in fat so don't eat too much of that, and it is hard to eat a lot of hummus imho. Packet Potato chips are high in fat and didn't exist a hundred years ago so ultra processed.
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karaterobot 5y ago

Do they define (or is there a commonly understood) definition of what makes a food ultra-processed, vs. processed, vs. not processsed? A quick cmd-f does not tell me what this means in the context of the study.

adrr 5y ago

Wouldn't we see the increase in broken bones over the last 100 years if this was the case in humans? Also it seems to affect bone size. Wouldn't this result in the population getting shorter but we're getting taller. Not that eating hamburgers every day is healthy and increases diabetes and heart disease. i don't see study results manifesting in on our population.

tasty_freeze 5y ago
Your speculations might be true if all other variables were held constant, but obviously there are many other variables which have changed in that time too.

rapjr9 5y ago

Is it what is in processed food that is bad for us or what is lacking in fast foods that is bad? If it is what is lacking then supplements (maybe based on blood tests) could help. If it is what is in the food the only thing that would help is to stop eating them. It's probably both, but identifying what is missing could at least let us repair some of the harm. Beyond vitamins and fiber what else does processed food lack? Specific forms of protein? Variety? Bacteria for your microbiome? Long term energy providing complex carbs to keep you active?