9 ms·

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 micronu

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."
  - mod 5y ago
    My best friend and his wife are the best parents I've ever seen in practice, in many ways. Quality time, attention, simulating activities etc. They're both schoolteachers. BUT! Their kids eat 3 meals for dinner: pizza, chicken nuggets with French fries, or easy Mac. For lunch they have pb&j, for breakfast eggs or cereal. Chips and candy for snacks. Throw in some applesauce you suck out of little pouches. That's it. I'm pretty much appalled. The kids seem healthy, although I'm not an expert. But man, they're missing out on literally all the good stuff. I hope they come around in a couple years. I haven't asked them their plan or anything. I'm firmly in the camp of not cooking around kids unless they really hate one particular thing, or it's too spicy perhaps, or an allergy.
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      I became an extremely picky eater suddenly around age 4. I literally didn't eat a single vegetable or fruit that wasn't an onion or tomato sauce until age 20, and my diet consisted mostly of "kid food" - hamburgers, hot dogs, breakfast cereal, milk, etc. Meanwhile, my family was eating lots of home cooked mediterranean meals. I can't count the number of times I'd be eating a hot dog while they were enjoying something like stinky artichokes. My parents cooked around me. Never forced me to eat anything I didn't like. Never insisted I "just try" a food that was going to make me gag. Shortly after I turned 20, something just clicked and I started eating everything. Now my diet is more varied than the rest of my family. Don't force your kids to eat stuff they hate. If they're not actually malnourished or obese, they'll likely turn out fine. The last thing you want to do is establish a pattern of stress and anguish re: meals and food. That probably never turns out well in the long run.
      - 5y ago
- dragontamer 5y ago
  > I know many humans who have diets not far off from that. The minute you add Tomatoes + Cheese (found in pizza), you're suddenly fixing a major vitamin A deficiency (that Hamburgers / Potatoes lack). Like, at least round out the meal with other ultraprocessed foods if you want to prove something. ----------- What causes bone deficiency? Well, a lack of calcium (also found in cheese) and Vitamin D (needed to process calcium more efficiently), which potatoes also lack. Pizza, Tacos, and Ice Cream would fix that, no joke, if I'm thinking about the "worst foods" that still hit those vitamins.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    Remember that pizza cheese is often not cheese, but a substitute called Analogue Pizza Cheese, made of casein (the protein in milk), starch, vegetable fats, emulsifiers, stabilisers, preservatives, colourings and flavourings. Burger cheese is either the same stuff or "processed cheese" which means scraps of cheese with the same additives. There's very little in the way of nutrition in any of this. I'm not sure about the tomato paste either, but if the majority of the paste is the additives and the tomatoes have been heat treated and salted and sugar'd to an inch of their lives, you're not getting anything but calories, like mywittiname's comment suggests. That's something to keep in mind with any processed foods: many of the materials in them are not there to provide nutrition, and don't.
    - dragontamer 5y ago
      The majority of Pizzas in the USA use mozzarella from Leprino Foods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprino_Foods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprino_Foods > Leprino supplies cheese to 85% of the pizza market, including Pizza Hut, Domino's, Little Caesars, Papa John's, Hungry Howie's, Tombstone, Tony's, Jack's, and Digiorno.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    So I looked up the Vitamin A contents of Heinz ketchup and Kraft Singles (the highly processed "cheese" used in fast food cheeseburgers). Each say 2% RDV per serving, that's roughly 20mcg per serving. I'm not sure below what level constitutes deficiency. Perhaps that small amount is enough.
- wyager 5y ago
  Most green vegetables have barely any nutritive content. Babies naturally find them disgusting as well - this is an example of instinctive flavor preference actually working correctly. The problem is that evolved palatability is not well-calibrated for things like widely available sugars (including starches)
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    To be nitpicky, startch is a polysaccharide, i.e. a long chain of sugars. Although it's ultimately made of glucouse, polysaccharides are normally not considered sugars, perhaps partly because they're usually not sweet, but also because of their complexity that sets them apart from their constituent sugars. So a bit like we don't call a house "brick".
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    You're getting downvoted, but this is correct. Most green veggies have high oxalates and high phytic acid (antinutrients) that actively prevent the absorption of certain nutrients. For example, Spinach has calcium oxalate that prevents the absorption of calcium (it binds to calcium instead and passes through your digestive system). Unless those veggies are soaked & boiled, fermented, or sprouted, chances are they're adding little nutritional value to your diet and can even cause anemia or other issues if you're just eating them raw.
    - klipt 5y ago
      This seems like a good argument for eating varying things over the day. E.g. you don't have to have greens with your breakfast, but it's probably good to eat them every so often for fiber. And yes fermented greens like sauerkraut or kimchi may be better in many ways.
      - soperj 5y ago
        If you don't have problems with constipation, what's the point of fiber?
- SomewhatLikely 5y ago
  The hamburger in the study had tomatoes and lettuce (but they explicitly pointed out no pickles or onions). So there was some vegetable material there already.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  It isn't a question of whether eating only burgers, fries, and soda is a common problem or not. It is a question of a paper going on about Ultra Processed Foods as if that is a well defined thing, when it should have said "eating only a burger, fries, and soda causes rats problems"
6foot4_82iq 5y ago
> Which is not remotely representative of any human diet. People don't come to weigh 350lbs eating vegetables daily.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Fries and soda is a vegan meal. Some vegans eat like crap and gain weight, suffer malnutrition, or both.
  - 6foot4_82iq 5y ago
    Sure, there are very few (if any) 350lb vegans though. Vegetables (even processed and deep fried) are too light on calories. The most redeeming ingredient in a burger, fries, and soda combo is the meat patty.
Animats 5y ago
Yes, the "ultra-processed" claim seems way off. It's not the processing in this experiment, it's the choice of raw materials.
mrandish 5y ago
I agree that the study really doesn't support what the headline conveys nor does it support the opposite. Thanks for doing the work of downloading the supplemental data and pointing out the rather important details. A few years ago I decided to get serious about my many years of chronic obesity and started deep-dive studying nutrition science. I was appalled by the pervasive lack of scientific rigor in most nutrition science. Even widely accepted parts of public health policy, like the "food pyramid" that was preached to kids in elementary school, were based on shockingly weak observational studies with many uncontrolled confounding variables. Most of the "Large N" studies are based on "diary data." Essentially, asking people via written surveys to estimate what they typically eat and extrapolating that over years. Yeah, not kidding. In short, I used to assume "nutrition science" was a somewhat rigorous field akin to biology or chemistry but discovered, for the most part, it's not. My N=1 experience has been that cutting out most carbs was tremendously effective for my metabolism type and I lost 85 pounds in 7 months without increased exercise. Since then I've kept it off for four years by sticking to a rigorous low-carb diet. It was difficult for the first few months but my palette and preferences adapted and now I plan to never go back. Eating low carb has the side benefit of cutting out most processed foods which may have helped improve my health. However, I don't recommend what I did for everyone because I've learned that metabolisms vary enough that what worked great for me may not work great for you. Instead, my advice is to do your own reading, develop hypotheses and experiment on yourself until you find a combination that works for your body, lifestyle and goals. Ultimately, weight loss is obviously a function of calories in vs calories out but in practice there are different ways of achieving the necessary caloric deficit. For me, low carb worked because it altered my blood sugar-driven hunger cycle. In all my years of failed dieting I'd never tried cutting carbs before cutting calories. Turns out it's much easier to cut calories when you're not hungry!
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  >> Most of the "Large N" studies are based on "diary data." Essentially, asking people via written surveys to estimate what they typically eat and extrapolating that over years. Yeah, not kidding. That is one kind of study. There are also studies that measure the amounts of nutrients, or their byproducts, excreted by study subjects. These usually have small study populations or are restricted to hospital patients etc. There are also in vitro studies or in-vivo interventional studies that are most commonly conducted on animal models, like the study in the article. So like you say, many of the studies that have the largest populations are questionnaire studies, or have populations that are not very representative of the general population. But it's very difficult, if not impossible in practice, to do any other kind of study on a large population, because it's very difficult to observe what a few thousand people eat day-in, day-out. The logistics of such a study would be absolutely mad. The results of such large-scale diary studies do not have great statistical power, but you are not right to say that there is a "pervasive lack of scientific rigor". A study can be rigorous while having low statistical power. Neither does a study absolutely need to conduct double-blind RCTs to be considered rigorous. For example, cosmologists cannot conduct experiments on black holes. Anyway "rigor" is not well-defined, whereas statistical power is an objective measure that can be calculated from the elements of a study. Whether this is done right is another matter and it depends on the study, but nutrition science is not exceptional in this. Btw, I'm not a nutritional scientist. But I hear your complain often and while I understand your frustration, I think you're allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. We know some things about nutrition, many with low certainty. But, what are we going to do? Ignore all the knowledge and evidence we have because it's not as much or as good as we'd like, and instead ignore the important questions about the food we eat? Edit: another thing I've noticed is that your comment accuses nutritional science of not being rigorous but at the same time it freely uses concepts from nutritional science, such as "carbohydrates" and "calories". Even grouping foods together in particular groups like "carbs" is a practice that comes from nutritional science. And nutritional science will certainly tell you that carbohydrates are high-energy foods that can cause weight gain if eaten in excess. So you, too, must accept that there is something in the work of nutritional scientsts that is useful to you. In that case, if I were you (if I was trying to adress some problems in the way I eat that is) I'd be very careful not to allow myself to selectively pick only those parts of nutritional science I like, and dismiss all the rest as "sloppy science". It's important to be aware that we all have very strong confirmation biases when it comes to food (me, for example, I make cheese so I'll never, ever believe it can be bad for you).
virtue3 5y ago
That's basically been my depression diet during this whole pandemic. :/ n=1 applies to you ya know.
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
Minus the soda, that’s actually not a badly balanced diet depending on the hamburger toppings.
gameswithgo 5y ago
Man I kept reading that whole thing looking for a definition of what Ultra Processed Food even means, and didn't see it. It has been such a pet peeve of mine that we use "processed foods" as a category that is bad. There are lots of different foods that get processed, they get processed in many ways! Is oatmeal made from steel cut oats processed? Is steamed broccoli processed? You steamed it. Is bread a processed food? Cooked meat? It is just this vauge idea, "no you know what I mean by processed foods, the bad stuff, stuff in a package". Raw carrots come in a package, are they bad? "no the bad stuff".... so bad food is bad, ok.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  Harvard School of Public Health has a guide for the general pubic: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods... Unprocessed or minimally processed foods Unprocessed foods include the natural edible food parts of plants and animals. Minimally processed foods have been slightly altered for the main purpose of preservation but which does not substantially change the nutritional content of the food. Examples include cleaning and removing inedible or unwanted parts, grinding, refrigeration, pasteurization, fermentation, freezing, and vacuum-packaging. This allows the food to be stored for a greater amount of time and remain safe to eat. Many fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, meats, and milk fall into this category. Processed culinary ingredients Food ingredients derived from a minimally processed food by pressing, refining, grinding, or milling. They are typically not eaten on their own but used to prepare minimally processed foods. Examples include oils from plants, seeds, and nuts, or flour and pastas formed from whole grains. Processed foods Foods from either of the two previous groups that have added salt, sugar, or fats. Some canned fruits and vegetables, some cheeses, freshly made bread, and canned fish are examples. These foods usually are made from at least 2-3 ingredients and can be readily eaten without further preparation. Ultra-processed foods Also commonly referred to as “highly processed foods,” these are foods from the prior group that go beyond the incorporation of salt, sweeteners, or fat to include artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability. Several processing steps using multiple ingredients comprise the ultra-processed food. It is speculated that these foods are designed to specifically increase cravings so that people will overeat them and purchase more. They are typically ready-to-eat with minimal additional preparation. Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients. Examples are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, chips, and breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets. One study using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that ultra-processed foods comprised about 60% of total calories in the U.S. diet. [4] An association has been suggested between the increasing sales of ultra-processed foods and the rise in obesity. [3] My rule of thumb is that "processed food" is the food cooked in one's kitchen, made from base ingredients with added salt, fat or sugar. "Ultra processed food" is the stuff that is not normally made in a kitchen, but in a factory.

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."
- mod 5y ago
  My best friend and his wife are the best parents I've ever seen in practice, in many ways. Quality time, attention, simulating activities etc. They're both schoolteachers. BUT! Their kids eat 3 meals for dinner: pizza, chicken nuggets with French fries, or easy Mac. For lunch they have pb&j, for breakfast eggs or cereal. Chips and candy for snacks. Throw in some applesauce you suck out of little pouches. That's it. I'm pretty much appalled. The kids seem healthy, although I'm not an expert. But man, they're missing out on literally all the good stuff. I hope they come around in a couple years. I haven't asked them their plan or anything. I'm firmly in the camp of not cooking around kids unless they really hate one particular thing, or it's too spicy perhaps, or an allergy.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    I became an extremely picky eater suddenly around age 4. I literally didn't eat a single vegetable or fruit that wasn't an onion or tomato sauce until age 20, and my diet consisted mostly of "kid food" - hamburgers, hot dogs, breakfast cereal, milk, etc. Meanwhile, my family was eating lots of home cooked mediterranean meals. I can't count the number of times I'd be eating a hot dog while they were enjoying something like stinky artichokes. My parents cooked around me. Never forced me to eat anything I didn't like. Never insisted I "just try" a food that was going to make me gag. Shortly after I turned 20, something just clicked and I started eating everything. Now my diet is more varied than the rest of my family. Don't force your kids to eat stuff they hate. If they're not actually malnourished or obese, they'll likely turn out fine. The last thing you want to do is establish a pattern of stress and anguish re: meals and food. That probably never turns out well in the long run.
    - 5y ago
dragontamer 5y ago
> I know many humans who have diets not far off from that. The minute you add Tomatoes + Cheese (found in pizza), you're suddenly fixing a major vitamin A deficiency (that Hamburgers / Potatoes lack). Like, at least round out the meal with other ultraprocessed foods if you want to prove something. ----------- What causes bone deficiency? Well, a lack of calcium (also found in cheese) and Vitamin D (needed to process calcium more efficiently), which potatoes also lack. Pizza, Tacos, and Ice Cream would fix that, no joke, if I'm thinking about the "worst foods" that still hit those vitamins.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  Remember that pizza cheese is often not cheese, but a substitute called Analogue Pizza Cheese, made of casein (the protein in milk), starch, vegetable fats, emulsifiers, stabilisers, preservatives, colourings and flavourings. Burger cheese is either the same stuff or "processed cheese" which means scraps of cheese with the same additives. There's very little in the way of nutrition in any of this. I'm not sure about the tomato paste either, but if the majority of the paste is the additives and the tomatoes have been heat treated and salted and sugar'd to an inch of their lives, you're not getting anything but calories, like mywittiname's comment suggests. That's something to keep in mind with any processed foods: many of the materials in them are not there to provide nutrition, and don't.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    The majority of Pizzas in the USA use mozzarella from Leprino Foods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprino_Foods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprino_Foods > Leprino supplies cheese to 85% of the pizza market, including Pizza Hut, Domino's, Little Caesars, Papa John's, Hungry Howie's, Tombstone, Tony's, Jack's, and Digiorno.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  So I looked up the Vitamin A contents of Heinz ketchup and Kraft Singles (the highly processed "cheese" used in fast food cheeseburgers). Each say 2% RDV per serving, that's roughly 20mcg per serving. I'm not sure below what level constitutes deficiency. Perhaps that small amount is enough.
wyager 5y ago
Most green vegetables have barely any nutritive content. Babies naturally find them disgusting as well - this is an example of instinctive flavor preference actually working correctly. The problem is that evolved palatability is not well-calibrated for things like widely available sugars (including starches)
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  To be nitpicky, startch is a polysaccharide, i.e. a long chain of sugars. Although it's ultimately made of glucouse, polysaccharides are normally not considered sugars, perhaps partly because they're usually not sweet, but also because of their complexity that sets them apart from their constituent sugars. So a bit like we don't call a house "brick".
- chrisco255 5y ago
  You're getting downvoted, but this is correct. Most green veggies have high oxalates and high phytic acid (antinutrients) that actively prevent the absorption of certain nutrients. For example, Spinach has calcium oxalate that prevents the absorption of calcium (it binds to calcium instead and passes through your digestive system). Unless those veggies are soaked & boiled, fermented, or sprouted, chances are they're adding little nutritional value to your diet and can even cause anemia or other issues if you're just eating them raw.
  - klipt 5y ago
    This seems like a good argument for eating varying things over the day. E.g. you don't have to have greens with your breakfast, but it's probably good to eat them every so often for fiber. And yes fermented greens like sauerkraut or kimchi may be better in many ways.
    - soperj 5y ago
      If you don't have problems with constipation, what's the point of fiber?
SomewhatLikely 5y ago
The hamburger in the study had tomatoes and lettuce (but they explicitly pointed out no pickles or onions). So there was some vegetable material there already.
gameswithgo 5y ago
It isn't a question of whether eating only burgers, fries, and soda is a common problem or not. It is a question of a paper going on about Ultra Processed Foods as if that is a well defined thing, when it should have said "eating only a burger, fries, and soda causes rats problems"

6foot4_82iq 5y ago

> Which is not remotely representative of any human diet. People don't come to weigh 350lbs eating vegetables daily.

klyrs 5y ago
Fries and soda is a vegan meal. Some vegans eat like crap and gain weight, suffer malnutrition, or both.
- 6foot4_82iq 5y ago
  Sure, there are very few (if any) 350lb vegans though. Vegetables (even processed and deep fried) are too light on calories. The most redeeming ingredient in a burger, fries, and soda combo is the meat patty.

Animats 5y ago

Yes, the "ultra-processed" claim seems way off. It's not the processing in this experiment, it's the choice of raw materials.

mrandish 5y ago

I agree that the study really doesn't support what the headline conveys nor does it support the opposite. Thanks for doing the work of downloading the supplemental data and pointing out the rather important details. A few years ago I decided to get serious about my many years of chronic obesity and started deep-dive studying nutrition science. I was appalled by the pervasive lack of scientific rigor in most nutrition science. Even widely accepted parts of public health policy, like the "food pyramid" that was preached to kids in elementary school, were based on shockingly weak observational studies with many uncontrolled confounding variables. Most of the "Large N" studies are based on "diary data." Essentially, asking people via written surveys to estimate what they typically eat and extrapolating that over years. Yeah, not kidding. In short, I used to assume "nutrition science" was a somewhat rigorous field akin to biology or chemistry but discovered, for the most part, it's not. My N=1 experience has been that cutting out most carbs was tremendously effective for my metabolism type and I lost 85 pounds in 7 months without increased exercise. Since then I've kept it off for four years by sticking to a rigorous low-carb diet. It was difficult for the first few months but my palette and preferences adapted and now I plan to never go back. Eating low carb has the side benefit of cutting out most processed foods which may have helped improve my health. However, I don't recommend what I did for everyone because I've learned that metabolisms vary enough that what worked great for me may not work great for you. Instead, my advice is to do your own reading, develop hypotheses and experiment on yourself until you find a combination that works for your body, lifestyle and goals. Ultimately, weight loss is obviously a function of calories in vs calories out but in practice there are different ways of achieving the necessary caloric deficit. For me, low carb worked because it altered my blood sugar-driven hunger cycle. In all my years of failed dieting I'd never tried cutting carbs before cutting calories. Turns out it's much easier to cut calories when you're not hungry!

cheese_goddess 5y ago
>> Most of the "Large N" studies are based on "diary data." Essentially, asking people via written surveys to estimate what they typically eat and extrapolating that over years. Yeah, not kidding. That is one kind of study. There are also studies that measure the amounts of nutrients, or their byproducts, excreted by study subjects. These usually have small study populations or are restricted to hospital patients etc. There are also in vitro studies or in-vivo interventional studies that are most commonly conducted on animal models, like the study in the article. So like you say, many of the studies that have the largest populations are questionnaire studies, or have populations that are not very representative of the general population. But it's very difficult, if not impossible in practice, to do any other kind of study on a large population, because it's very difficult to observe what a few thousand people eat day-in, day-out. The logistics of such a study would be absolutely mad. The results of such large-scale diary studies do not have great statistical power, but you are not right to say that there is a "pervasive lack of scientific rigor". A study can be rigorous while having low statistical power. Neither does a study absolutely need to conduct double-blind RCTs to be considered rigorous. For example, cosmologists cannot conduct experiments on black holes. Anyway "rigor" is not well-defined, whereas statistical power is an objective measure that can be calculated from the elements of a study. Whether this is done right is another matter and it depends on the study, but nutrition science is not exceptional in this. Btw, I'm not a nutritional scientist. But I hear your complain often and while I understand your frustration, I think you're allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. We know some things about nutrition, many with low certainty. But, what are we going to do? Ignore all the knowledge and evidence we have because it's not as much or as good as we'd like, and instead ignore the important questions about the food we eat? Edit: another thing I've noticed is that your comment accuses nutritional science of not being rigorous but at the same time it freely uses concepts from nutritional science, such as "carbohydrates" and "calories". Even grouping foods together in particular groups like "carbs" is a practice that comes from nutritional science. And nutritional science will certainly tell you that carbohydrates are high-energy foods that can cause weight gain if eaten in excess. So you, too, must accept that there is something in the work of nutritional scientsts that is useful to you. In that case, if I were you (if I was trying to adress some problems in the way I eat that is) I'd be very careful not to allow myself to selectively pick only those parts of nutritional science I like, and dismiss all the rest as "sloppy science". It's important to be aware that we all have very strong confirmation biases when it comes to food (me, for example, I make cheese so I'll never, ever believe it can be bad for you).

virtue3 5y ago

That's basically been my depression diet during this whole pandemic. :/ n=1 applies to you ya know.

ed25519FUUU 5y ago

Minus the soda, that’s actually not a badly balanced diet depending on the hamburger toppings.

gameswithgo 5y ago

Man I kept reading that whole thing looking for a definition of what Ultra Processed Food even means, and didn't see it. It has been such a pet peeve of mine that we use "processed foods" as a category that is bad. There are lots of different foods that get processed, they get processed in many ways! Is oatmeal made from steel cut oats processed? Is steamed broccoli processed? You steamed it. Is bread a processed food? Cooked meat? It is just this vauge idea, "no you know what I mean by processed foods, the bad stuff, stuff in a package". Raw carrots come in a package, are they bad? "no the bad stuff".... so bad food is bad, ok.

cheese_goddess 5y ago
Harvard School of Public Health has a guide for the general pubic: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods... Unprocessed or minimally processed foods Unprocessed foods include the natural edible food parts of plants and animals. Minimally processed foods have been slightly altered for the main purpose of preservation but which does not substantially change the nutritional content of the food. Examples include cleaning and removing inedible or unwanted parts, grinding, refrigeration, pasteurization, fermentation, freezing, and vacuum-packaging. This allows the food to be stored for a greater amount of time and remain safe to eat. Many fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, meats, and milk fall into this category. Processed culinary ingredients Food ingredients derived from a minimally processed food by pressing, refining, grinding, or milling. They are typically not eaten on their own but used to prepare minimally processed foods. Examples include oils from plants, seeds, and nuts, or flour and pastas formed from whole grains. Processed foods Foods from either of the two previous groups that have added salt, sugar, or fats. Some canned fruits and vegetables, some cheeses, freshly made bread, and canned fish are examples. These foods usually are made from at least 2-3 ingredients and can be readily eaten without further preparation. Ultra-processed foods Also commonly referred to as “highly processed foods,” these are foods from the prior group that go beyond the incorporation of salt, sweeteners, or fat to include artificial colors and flavors and preservatives that promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability. Several processing steps using multiple ingredients comprise the ultra-processed food. It is speculated that these foods are designed to specifically increase cravings so that people will overeat them and purchase more. They are typically ready-to-eat with minimal additional preparation. Not all but some of these foods tend to be low in fiber and nutrients. Examples are sugary drinks, cookies, some crackers, chips, and breakfast cereals, some frozen dinners, and luncheon meats. These foods may partially if not completely replace minimally processed foods in some people’s diets. One study using data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that ultra-processed foods comprised about 60% of total calories in the U.S. diet. [4] An association has been suggested between the increasing sales of ultra-processed foods and the rise in obesity. [3] My rule of thumb is that "processed food" is the food cooked in one's kitchen, made from base ingredients with added salt, fat or sugar. "Ultra processed food" is the stuff that is not normally made in a kitchen, but in a factory.