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I'm saying grouping all of those things together is dumb and meaningless. As a taxonomical choice. "this food was processed" is not a useful category for analys

I'm saying grouping all of those things together is dumb and meaningless. As a taxonomical choice. "this food was processed" is not a useful category for analysis.

thereisnospork 3y ago
I would concur: specifically the taxonomy doesn't offer any indication of mechanism, how is the 'processing' negativily affecting my biology? There's nothing in the naming to create a rule from. Unlike say glycemic index: high glycemic index > releases glucose fast > body can't compensate fast enough > bad (diabetes, poor satiety, etc.) right now it's just processed > ???? > bad (in unspecifiable ways, by unspecifiable means).
- stakhanov 3y ago
  I agree as well. "Processing" food is literally what people do in their kitchens. But that's presumably not what they mean. Certain kinds of processing have to be applied to food to make it safe for consumption. But that's presumably not what they mean either. Certain kinds of processing make the nutritional contents of food more bioavailable. Not what they mean. Certain kinds of processing are required to preserve food. If humans stopped doing it, their environmental footprint would be orders of magnitude higher than it now is. Presumably, that's not what anyone is suggesting who is opposed to processed foods. Fermenting is a kind of processing, and fermented foods may be playing a role in a healthy microbiome. ...whoops. Again: Not what they are talking about. So what exactly are they trying to say? ...surely, picking a word other than "processed" would help in clarifying.
- tornadofart 3y ago
  I don't like that your comment and the parent both got negative reviews. It is a valid contrarian question. However I would suggest researching about cirrhosis and fatty liver in children. It is a new disease that was unknown up until the 90s and is now common in developed countries. And it has to do with the following: your digestive system has the ability to process nutrients at a certain rate, depending on how hard they are to break down. For example sugar. The cells have a certain rate at which they can metabolize nutrients. The temporary excess is stored in the liver. Then it becomes not a question of quality rather than quantity. The question then is not "how high is the glycemic index of food X" but "at which rate (i.e. mg of sugar per minute) can this food X be processed by our digestive system, and is this rate too fast for our cells to metabolize, which in turn causes our liver to store the temporary excess?" Then the boolean variable "is this food X highly processed " becomes a plausible proxy variable, IMO, since refined sugar is something else than whole bread, when we talk about the rate at which nutrients enter the blood stream. Do I make sense?
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    You make sense, but whats needed is a word that isn't 'processed' that means: 'proxy variable for rate at which nutrients enter the bloodstream' and an objective measure for that word[0]. To put up a bit of a strawman: By what empirical measure, is an apple different (healthier) than an apple-equivalent of raw glucose/fructose + multi-vitamin + fiber supplement? The latter is obviously more processed, but I literally lack the means[1] to say how, why, and to what degree, one is 'healthier' than the other. [0]Regardless of name, afaik there is no meaningful way to say e.g. kraft mac and cheese is '80% processed, where as homemade with box pasta, fresh cheddar and bechamel, is 50%, and homemade w/ hand-pulled noodles is 25%. [1]e.g. a test of 'rate of which simple sugars leach in a ISO standardized simulated stomach'.
daemonologist 3y ago
I think the category is intended to be useful as a rule of thumb, which people can apply to make snap decisions at the pantry or grocery store. It might make analysis noisier than precisely defined mechanistic categories but if it gets people to act on the research maybe that's worthwhile. (Of course research into better defined categories and the underlying mechanisms of their health impact is also necessary and extremely valuable.)
- katzenversteher 3y ago
  I believe in most cases processing means (by choice or accidentally) making faster digestible. Most processes kind of destroy the food (blending, crushing, popping, juicing, extruding) and increase it's surface area so in the digestive tract it digests faster. In case of carbohydrates that often causes a bigger insulin spike and since this is a "growth" hormone it makes the body take in all the other stuff faster as well. However, I'm also wondering if we have any processing that makes food less digestible and that decreases it's surface area. If so, it would probably be interesting to compare this kind of processing with the other.
imjonse 3y ago
You need to find a middle ground between a high level and easily labeled category and scientific rigor. If the aim is raising awareness in consumers, erring on the side of generality and dumbing down is preferred.
- card_zero 3y ago
  What if my aim is to raise awareness of how harmful dumbing down is?
  - imjonse 3y ago
    It may not be harmful overall, that is the point. You can get people to eat less of the stuff that makes them ill without requiring them to have time for or interest in science and details. Anyone with enough energy to care will pick the subset of processed foods that they feel are healthy or harmless. What you call dumbing down is in line with how science works. Rough and inaccurate models first, refined in time or on demand.
    - card_zero 3y ago
      Terry Pratchett advocated something called "lies-to-children" to communicate science. I saw that, and was ashamed of him. Richard Dawkins wanted "consciousness raising" about certain issues around atheism (in fact, around lying to children), and this activist attitude made me uneasy, because it seemed manipulative, with its inbuilt assumption of correctness and the expected outcome of changing minds in a specific way. Various politicians endorse "nudge theory" with greater or lesser degrees of openness about it. I can't approve of any of this coercion, or your apologetics on the grounds of "it does them good". Having said that, I think all communication is inescapably slightly manipulative, starting from the mere fact of grabbing the audience's attention. But that doesn't mean we should double down on it.
      - imjonse 3y ago
        I don't think this is about principles, manipulation or anything that is usually a subject of heated and never settled debates. Saying processed food causes illness is a generalization which is very largely true, and considering that a large percentage of the population does not even think of food on the healthy/harmful axis, stating this as publicly as possible is actually the opposite of dumbing down. It is raising awareness for many people, or solidifying a message that others have already heard, and it's raising eyebrows in a smaller percentage of the population, who either already know this and are nitpicking about the message detail, or are generally bothered by the state/media/influencers interfering in how one leads their own life, or fear that such generalizations incorrectly put some traditional food in a bad light (see above comment about cured meats).

I'm saying grouping all of those things together is dumb and meaningless. As a taxonomical choice. "this food was processed" is not a useful category for analysis.

thereisnospork 3y ago

I would concur: specifically the taxonomy doesn't offer any indication of mechanism, how is the 'processing' negativily affecting my biology? There's nothing in the naming to create a rule from. Unlike say glycemic index: high glycemic index > releases glucose fast > body can't compensate fast enough > bad (diabetes, poor satiety, etc.) right now it's just processed > ???? > bad (in unspecifiable ways, by unspecifiable means).

stakhanov 3y ago
I agree as well. "Processing" food is literally what people do in their kitchens. But that's presumably not what they mean. Certain kinds of processing have to be applied to food to make it safe for consumption. But that's presumably not what they mean either. Certain kinds of processing make the nutritional contents of food more bioavailable. Not what they mean. Certain kinds of processing are required to preserve food. If humans stopped doing it, their environmental footprint would be orders of magnitude higher than it now is. Presumably, that's not what anyone is suggesting who is opposed to processed foods. Fermenting is a kind of processing, and fermented foods may be playing a role in a healthy microbiome. ...whoops. Again: Not what they are talking about. So what exactly are they trying to say? ...surely, picking a word other than "processed" would help in clarifying.
tornadofart 3y ago
I don't like that your comment and the parent both got negative reviews. It is a valid contrarian question. However I would suggest researching about cirrhosis and fatty liver in children. It is a new disease that was unknown up until the 90s and is now common in developed countries. And it has to do with the following: your digestive system has the ability to process nutrients at a certain rate, depending on how hard they are to break down. For example sugar. The cells have a certain rate at which they can metabolize nutrients. The temporary excess is stored in the liver. Then it becomes not a question of quality rather than quantity. The question then is not "how high is the glycemic index of food X" but "at which rate (i.e. mg of sugar per minute) can this food X be processed by our digestive system, and is this rate too fast for our cells to metabolize, which in turn causes our liver to store the temporary excess?" Then the boolean variable "is this food X highly processed " becomes a plausible proxy variable, IMO, since refined sugar is something else than whole bread, when we talk about the rate at which nutrients enter the blood stream. Do I make sense?
- thereisnospork 3y ago
  You make sense, but whats needed is a word that isn't 'processed' that means: 'proxy variable for rate at which nutrients enter the bloodstream' and an objective measure for that word[0]. To put up a bit of a strawman: By what empirical measure, is an apple different (healthier) than an apple-equivalent of raw glucose/fructose + multi-vitamin + fiber supplement? The latter is obviously more processed, but I literally lack the means[1] to say how, why, and to what degree, one is 'healthier' than the other. [0]Regardless of name, afaik there is no meaningful way to say e.g. kraft mac and cheese is '80% processed, where as homemade with box pasta, fresh cheddar and bechamel, is 50%, and homemade w/ hand-pulled noodles is 25%. [1]e.g. a test of 'rate of which simple sugars leach in a ISO standardized simulated stomach'.

daemonologist 3y ago

I think the category is intended to be useful as a rule of thumb, which people can apply to make snap decisions at the pantry or grocery store. It might make analysis noisier than precisely defined mechanistic categories but if it gets people to act on the research maybe that's worthwhile. (Of course research into better defined categories and the underlying mechanisms of their health impact is also necessary and extremely valuable.)

katzenversteher 3y ago
I believe in most cases processing means (by choice or accidentally) making faster digestible. Most processes kind of destroy the food (blending, crushing, popping, juicing, extruding) and increase it's surface area so in the digestive tract it digests faster. In case of carbohydrates that often causes a bigger insulin spike and since this is a "growth" hormone it makes the body take in all the other stuff faster as well. However, I'm also wondering if we have any processing that makes food less digestible and that decreases it's surface area. If so, it would probably be interesting to compare this kind of processing with the other.

imjonse 3y ago

You need to find a middle ground between a high level and easily labeled category and scientific rigor. If the aim is raising awareness in consumers, erring on the side of generality and dumbing down is preferred.

card_zero 3y ago
What if my aim is to raise awareness of how harmful dumbing down is?
- imjonse 3y ago
  It may not be harmful overall, that is the point. You can get people to eat less of the stuff that makes them ill without requiring them to have time for or interest in science and details. Anyone with enough energy to care will pick the subset of processed foods that they feel are healthy or harmless. What you call dumbing down is in line with how science works. Rough and inaccurate models first, refined in time or on demand.
  - card_zero 3y ago
    Terry Pratchett advocated something called "lies-to-children" to communicate science. I saw that, and was ashamed of him. Richard Dawkins wanted "consciousness raising" about certain issues around atheism (in fact, around lying to children), and this activist attitude made me uneasy, because it seemed manipulative, with its inbuilt assumption of correctness and the expected outcome of changing minds in a specific way. Various politicians endorse "nudge theory" with greater or lesser degrees of openness about it. I can't approve of any of this coercion, or your apologetics on the grounds of "it does them good". Having said that, I think all communication is inescapably slightly manipulative, starting from the mere fact of grabbing the audience's attention. But that doesn't mean we should double down on it.
    - imjonse 3y ago
      I don't think this is about principles, manipulation or anything that is usually a subject of heated and never settled debates. Saying processed food causes illness is a generalization which is very largely true, and considering that a large percentage of the population does not even think of food on the healthy/harmful axis, stating this as publicly as possible is actually the opposite of dumbing down. It is raising awareness for many people, or solidifying a message that others have already heard, and it's raising eyebrows in a smaller percentage of the population, who either already know this and are nitpicking about the message detail, or are generally bothered by the state/media/influencers interfering in how one leads their own life, or fear that such generalizations incorrectly put some traditional food in a bad light (see above comment about cured meats).