4 ms·

I think this retort is sorta factually correct but missing the author's point. Totally true that by mass the preservatives aren't a lot, but that doesn't mean

by c54 5y ago

I think this retort is sorta factually correct but missing the author's point. Totally true that by mass the preservatives aren't a lot, but that doesn't mean the refined products of naturally occurring plants are 'real foods' in the sense the author intends it. One way to think of this is that a food which is refined moves further and further away from the original 'real food' as it naturally occurs. ~80% of a wheat 'corn' is the white part, ~20% of a soy bean is oil, and 15-20% of a beet is sugar. Similarly, one apple yields about 1/3c of juice. Drinking 2c worth of juice (in an hour?) is fairly common but nobody ever eats 6 apples in an hour

crazygringo 5y ago
The quoted epidemiologist says "These substances would not be found in our kitchen." I'm not disagreeing at all about refinement or the health. I'm just saying these refined substances are absolutely found in our kitchen, and used in quantity. They're nothing special or unique to processed foods. If you bake bread or cake or brownies, for basic recipes it's nutritionally virtually identical to processed crackers, cookies, and bars.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  This is the other half of that quote, if we want to take it in context: "Usually, they contain little to no proportion of real foods." And those sentences were likely in a larger context but chosen by the author as a way to say something the reader could relate to.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  Simple truth - anything made with flour and sugar is literally poisoning you, whether quickly or slowly. Doesn't matter how much love your Nana added to the cookies; they still give you diabetes.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    They potentially give you diabetes.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
It's not missing the author's point because the entire idea of ultra-processed foods is to draw a distinction between normal processed foods (which are things like home baked products) and ultra-processed foods (which are produced in factories but are arguably effectively the same thing). There is clearly a meaningful distinction between unprocessed and processed foods, as indicated by your example of apple juice, but by various definitions, apple juice is just a processed food, not an ultraprocessed food.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  Apple juice is actually a clear example of the problem. Industrially produced fruit juices aren't at all like fresh-squeezed juice; the production process eliminates the actual juice flavor, requiring it to be manually added back just before bottling. If you see a juice bottle that lists "flavors" as an ingredient, that's what happened. You can find a bunch of articles on this (e.g. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingredient-worries https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingre...), although they tend to discuss orange juice as the example. I don't want to claim that the popular concept of "ultra-processed foods" is super coherent, because I do agree there's not much sense in which a Twinkie is more processed than tofu or cheese. But there is a real problem that it seems like the researcher here is pointing at.
  - resoluteteeth 5y ago
    > Apple juice is actually a clear example of the problem. Industrially produced fruit juices aren't at all like fresh-squeezed juice; the production process eliminates the actual juice flavor, requiring it to be manually added back just before bottling. If you see a juice bottle that lists "flavors" as an ingredient, that's what happened. You can find a bunch of articles on this (e.g. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingre https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingre...), although they tend to discuss orange juice as the example. My impression is that they don't actually need to list "flavors" or anything special on the label when they do this, because they are just adding additional orange juice back, and it is highly unlikely that the result is nutritionally any different from fresh-squeezed juice. The other argument for distinguishing ultra-processed foods is that even if the additives that wouldn't be found in normal processed foods aren't nutritionally significant in themselves, the resulting food is more palatable, so people consume more of it, but I don't think most people would say that bottled orange juice is more palatable than fresh-squeezed orange juice. Anyway, it is theoretically possible that bottled "ultra-processed" orange juice is somehow less healthy than normal "processed" fresh-squeezed orange juice, but the point the parent comment was trying to make was that juice may be in itself unhealthy because the amount you consume is so much more than you would consume from eating fruit directly, and I was just trying to clarify that although true, this argument about juice in general is somewhat separate from the distinction between processed and ultraprocessed foods because fresh juice has that issue and can already be considered processed.

by c54 5y ago

crazygringo 5y ago

The quoted epidemiologist says "These substances would not be found in our kitchen." I'm not disagreeing at all about refinement or the health. I'm just saying these refined substances are absolutely found in our kitchen, and used in quantity. They're nothing special or unique to processed foods. If you bake bread or cake or brownies, for basic recipes it's nutritionally virtually identical to processed crackers, cookies, and bars.

drewcoo 5y ago
This is the other half of that quote, if we want to take it in context: "Usually, they contain little to no proportion of real foods." And those sentences were likely in a larger context but chosen by the author as a way to say something the reader could relate to.
hallway_monitor 5y ago
Simple truth - anything made with flour and sugar is literally poisoning you, whether quickly or slowly. Doesn't matter how much love your Nana added to the cookies; they still give you diabetes.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  They potentially give you diabetes.

resoluteteeth 5y ago

It's not missing the author's point because the entire idea of ultra-processed foods is to draw a distinction between normal processed foods (which are things like home baked products) and ultra-processed foods (which are produced in factories but are arguably effectively the same thing). There is clearly a meaningful distinction between unprocessed and processed foods, as indicated by your example of apple juice, but by various definitions, apple juice is just a processed food, not an ultraprocessed food.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
Apple juice is actually a clear example of the problem. Industrially produced fruit juices aren't at all like fresh-squeezed juice; the production process eliminates the actual juice flavor, requiring it to be manually added back just before bottling. If you see a juice bottle that lists "flavors" as an ingredient, that's what happened. You can find a bunch of articles on this (e.g. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingredient-worries https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingre...), although they tend to discuss orange juice as the example. I don't want to claim that the popular concept of "ultra-processed foods" is super coherent, because I do agree there's not much sense in which a Twinkie is more processed than tofu or cheese. But there is a real problem that it seems like the researcher here is pointing at.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  > Apple juice is actually a clear example of the problem. Industrially produced fruit juices aren't at all like fresh-squeezed juice; the production process eliminates the actual juice flavor, requiring it to be manually added back just before bottling. If you see a juice bottle that lists "flavors" as an ingredient, that's what happened. You can find a bunch of articles on this (e.g. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingre https://abcnews.go.com/Health/orange-juice-moms-secret-ingre...), although they tend to discuss orange juice as the example. My impression is that they don't actually need to list "flavors" or anything special on the label when they do this, because they are just adding additional orange juice back, and it is highly unlikely that the result is nutritionally any different from fresh-squeezed juice. The other argument for distinguishing ultra-processed foods is that even if the additives that wouldn't be found in normal processed foods aren't nutritionally significant in themselves, the resulting food is more palatable, so people consume more of it, but I don't think most people would say that bottled orange juice is more palatable than fresh-squeezed orange juice. Anyway, it is theoretically possible that bottled "ultra-processed" orange juice is somehow less healthy than normal "processed" fresh-squeezed orange juice, but the point the parent comment was trying to make was that juice may be in itself unhealthy because the amount you consume is so much more than you would consume from eating fruit directly, and I was just trying to clarify that although true, this argument about juice in general is somewhat separate from the distinction between processed and ultraprocessed foods because fresh juice has that issue and can already be considered processed.