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I enjoyed this article, and it mostly confirms my mental model: the worst part about processed foods is how easy and enjoyable they are to eat. Avoiding them ma

I enjoyed this article, and it mostly confirms my mental model: the worst part about processed foods is how easy and enjoyable they are to eat. Avoiding them may have ancillary benefits for health (like fiber or vitamin intake), but mostly it's about being satiated and not overconsuming.

ianand 2y ago
This has been my mental model as well. I often use two analogies to describe this. The processed a food is the more likely you’re eating a “Product”, i.e. something that’s been designed to consumed and enjoyed. I don’t say that as a necessarily bad thing. We’ve making foods more enjoyable for the history of civilization (broccoli was bred by humans from a wild cabbage) but industrialization has given us an ability to create new things faster than our biology can adapt. The other analogy is to think of UPF, especially nominally nutritious ones like protein bars, as the nutritional equivalent of power tools. They can be really powerful for dialing in your macros or taste desires. But must be used carefully and are potentially dangerous if untrained.
jcutrell 2y ago
In other words it's not necessarily about some scary sleuth carcinogen or some oil that's gonna wipe out your cardiac health... it's about calories and the body's response to too many of them, and the ancillary "ratio" of calories to nutrition being too high.
sanitycheck 2y ago
Yeah, pretty much my thoughts too. There needs to be some good (not 20 people for 2 weeks) studies which compare the effects of "ultraprocessed food" vs "really tasty food", keeping total kcals constantly high. My guess is that a high proportion of the negative effects come from an excess of salt, sugar and fat (and too many calories in general) - which is precisely how they get the food tasting so nice in fancy restaurants. I'm also sure there definitely are chemicals we're consuming in UPFs which are bad for us, but a lot of them are probably fine. Lumping everything together so it's possible for people to get the idea that an organic yogurt is somehow just as bad as a tube of Pringles seems counterproductive.
somenameforme 2y ago
There's one problem you face with issues like this. One reason it took so long to prove, beyond significant doubt, that cigarettes cause cancer is because it's something that happens over many decades and with high variance. Fewer than 20% of smokers will get lung cancer over their whole lives. You cannot experimentally prove side effects that happen only over such prolonged periods of time. So you're left with observational correlations that, to this day, are even scrutinized by some eccentric scientists. When you look at society today, it's going downhill in terms of overall health in a multitude of ways across both the physical and mental/psychological domains. Lowered testosterone, increased obesity, increased mental illness, decreasing IQs [1], and so on endlessly. And if something like e.g. processed foods ends up being one of the factors in this, it may well be another one of those things that's basically impossible to actually prove - outside of extremely long-term correlations which can be endlessly challenged, exactly like this article is doing. And the correlations in this case will be even easier to challenge. Like you mentioned processed foods are enjoyable to eat. They're made to generate profit and so hone in on every little receptor, desire, and impulsive (or even addictive) tendency in our bodies. People are only going to avoid this if they're already substantially health conscious, so even observational correlations can be trivially challenged. So how can we ever hope to prove anything, especially when there may be every reason to expect absolutely zilch will show up in short controlled experimental trials? [1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...

ianand 2y ago

This has been my mental model as well. I often use two analogies to describe this. The processed a food is the more likely you’re eating a “Product”, i.e. something that’s been designed to consumed and enjoyed. I don’t say that as a necessarily bad thing. We’ve making foods more enjoyable for the history of civilization (broccoli was bred by humans from a wild cabbage) but industrialization has given us an ability to create new things faster than our biology can adapt. The other analogy is to think of UPF, especially nominally nutritious ones like protein bars, as the nutritional equivalent of power tools. They can be really powerful for dialing in your macros or taste desires. But must be used carefully and are potentially dangerous if untrained.

jcutrell 2y ago

In other words it's not necessarily about some scary sleuth carcinogen or some oil that's gonna wipe out your cardiac health... it's about calories and the body's response to too many of them, and the ancillary "ratio" of calories to nutrition being too high.

sanitycheck 2y ago

Yeah, pretty much my thoughts too. There needs to be some good (not 20 people for 2 weeks) studies which compare the effects of "ultraprocessed food" vs "really tasty food", keeping total kcals constantly high. My guess is that a high proportion of the negative effects come from an excess of salt, sugar and fat (and too many calories in general) - which is precisely how they get the food tasting so nice in fancy restaurants. I'm also sure there definitely are chemicals we're consuming in UPFs which are bad for us, but a lot of them are probably fine. Lumping everything together so it's possible for people to get the idea that an organic yogurt is somehow just as bad as a tube of Pringles seems counterproductive.

somenameforme 2y ago

There's one problem you face with issues like this. One reason it took so long to prove, beyond significant doubt, that cigarettes cause cancer is because it's something that happens over many decades and with high variance. Fewer than 20% of smokers will get lung cancer over their whole lives. You cannot experimentally prove side effects that happen only over such prolonged periods of time. So you're left with observational correlations that, to this day, are even scrutinized by some eccentric scientists. When you look at society today, it's going downhill in terms of overall health in a multitude of ways across both the physical and mental/psychological domains. Lowered testosterone, increased obesity, increased mental illness, decreasing IQs [1], and so on endlessly. And if something like e.g. processed foods ends up being one of the factors in this, it may well be another one of those things that's basically impossible to actually prove - outside of extremely long-term correlations which can be endlessly challenged, exactly like this article is doing. And the correlations in this case will be even easier to challenge. Like you mentioned processed foods are enjoyable to eat. They're made to generate profit and so hone in on every little receptor, desire, and impulsive (or even addictive) tendency in our bodies. People are only going to avoid this if they're already substantially health conscious, so even observational correlations can be trivially challenged. So how can we ever hope to prove anything, especially when there may be every reason to expect absolutely zilch will show up in short controlled experimental trials? [1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...