7 ms·

I welcome some research in to this if only to put some credible evidence behind whether or to what extent processing of foods affects their nutritional value. I

by RevEng 2y ago

I welcome some research in to this if only to put some credible evidence behind whether or to what extent processing of foods affects their nutritional value. I constantly see assertions that highly processed foods are killing us and causing obesity, but I've yet to see any credible evidence for it. Even reading the Nova classification, the scientific verbiage describing the ultra processed category could easily describe making egg noodles at home. Extrusion is how we get noodle shapes. Molds are how we get cakes and muffins. Emulsifiers are everywhere and are a common reason for adding egg to a recipe. Specific protein isolates less so, but we isolate compounds all the time when brewing and stewing. The only significant difference I see between group 3 and 4 is that they are spoken about in completely different registers that make one sound familiar and the other foreign. So please, put some sincere research behind this so we can finally get useful clarification on this subject.

sabbaticaldev 2y ago
this is processed food. Processed food is fine. Ultra-processed food is processed food put into a plastic bag, shipped far away to be consumed 6 months after it was produced.
- maccard 2y ago
  So tinned, or frozen veg?
  - sabbaticaldev 2y ago
    if it is full of preservatives, yes. Obviously, just frozen vegetables isn’t ultra processed.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - bloaf 2y ago
      This is not at all obvious. Freezing veggies involves washing, cutting, and blanching processes and vegetables may be subjected to ultrasound during freezing to accelerate the process.
  - ufo 2y ago
    No, those do not count as ultra processed.
- gizmo686 2y ago
  Fruits and vegetables get processed, put into plastic bags, and shipped far away to be consumed 6 months after being produced all the time. None of that makes them ultra processed.
- hinkley 2y ago
  Ultra processed food is foods broken down into base chemicals and stored in vats or boxes like it’s baking soda for years before being turned back into food. Many things we make from corn in particular, and I would probably include commercial orange juice in this as well. I don’t drink the stuff anymore. That’s gross.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
dboreham 2y ago
I have/had similar thoughts. For example: it's all just various hydrocarbons that are going to be chopped up by enzymes, so what's the difference exactly which atom is where? My guess that the "processed food is poison" people are only by chance hitting on something. They have zero evidence and zero supporting data. However, I've come to suspect that the gut is a very complex thing, with a computer in it, and highly connected to the brain. Once you start to go down that line of thinking, I think it's plausible that they've identified a real problem. One possibility among many is that "corporate food" is the result of a giant A/B test series over a hundred years that has machine-learned the model embodied in the gut-computer. It's essentially a DoS attack. And so on. Suggest folk consider what if the gut has a neural network with various sensors and subject to training data.
- bloaf 2y ago
  That's why I gravitate towards the 'hyper-palatable' label vs 'hyper-processed', to me it captures a more plausible set of criteria (engineered via fat/sugar/salt addition to maximize its appeal, etc) that cause a more plausible and specific set of problems (hijacking reward pathways to cause overeating, etc)
  - nick3443 2y ago
    There is a Peter Attia interview with Michael Easter that explores this concept and anecdotally supports it, where he investigates a tribe (Tsimane tribe) with low obesity and cardiovascular disease, and his personal experience eating their plain and unseasoned diet compared to normal western foods. I normally dislike the typical podcasters/podcasts because of their self promoting and low information density nature but I thought this one was ok to recommend.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      If you want it from an industrial perspective, I suggest checking out “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us“ by Michael Moss, and “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” by David A. Kessler, former head of the FDA.
gxs 2y ago
I get your point and I agree, but for me I perhaps inaccurately use processed as a proxy for calorie density. Working at a restaurant in college, I saw that a single plate of pasta they made during a busy night when it was hard to keep up could easily wind up an entire stick of butter. That’s on top of the cream. Soda - tons of sugar packed into 12 oz. When you don’t eat restaurant/processed foods at home, it does shock you a bit just what a giant volume of good 2,000 calories can be. This is all it means to me. I’m not out here trying to prove science, just trying to stay healthy.
jampekka 2y ago
> Even reading the Nova classification, the scientific verbiage describing the ultra processed category could easily describe making egg noodles at home. It can't because per Nova for something to be "ultra-processed" it has to be "industrially manufactured". Unless you're involved in cottage industry I guess. "Ultra-processed" is a ridiculous categorization, a bit like some compounds artificially being labeled as "chemicals" and some not.
- Symmetry 2y ago
  There are certainly certain categories of chemical that might be of interest. For instance you don't normally find emulsification agents in non-processed food but you do in industrial food, whether the particular chemical is made in a lab or extracted from some plant or other. But many, many other ways that we industrially manufacture food are obviously no worse than making our own noodles at home.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    E.g. agar-agar is an emulsifying agent. It's ground seaweed. As is chickpea wash. Both used for at least centuries.
    - throwup238 2y ago
      Even the more exotic sounding stuff like xanthan gum are often stuff like fermentation byproducts. Totally organic!
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Xanthan on the other hand is a bacterial wash, isn’t it? And we use it because guar got priced up by fracking.
      - musicale 2y ago
        I was excited when I found that I could actually buy xanthan gum in the grocery store; now I can make delicious foods at home!
thoughtFrame 2y ago
My worry with processed food is that precise manufacture opens up the doors to producing all sorts of foods with an unhealthy imbalance of components. Specifically, that the unnatural surplus of, say, hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup, or whatever, is something that will have disastrous nth order consequences we can't predict, so it looks promising in the short term and corporations looking to maximize their profit will all doubtlessly do more of this. I only have slightly more than a passing interest in food science and nutrition, but from all I've learned my gut feeling is that I ought to avoid this stuff, and rely on cooking my own food as much as possible so I don't get into any imbalances (it's very hard to get a surplus of any macro or any other component via "natural" products) I don't have any evidence on the nutrition side, but it's certainly not an experiment I'd like to do with my only body. And in the psychological side, it's definitely something to avoid if we value our physical and mental health
thucydides 2y ago
there are some fascinating hypotheses on what's caused the worldwide exponential increase in obesity in humans (and also some wild animals). here is the best summary i've seen: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
- jampekka 2y ago
  Is this really a mystery? People eat more energy wise and move less. As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food"). As to why we move less is less manual labor, more sedentary entertainment and increased use of vehicles. The obesity discussion seems to somehow deliberately try to avoid the obvious.
  - cinntaile 2y ago
    Why do you think none of the thousands of researchers within nutritional scientists have considered your explanation? That to me seems extremely unlikely.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      Many do and have a similar view. Maybe restating the obvious just doesn't make the news (or bring in grants)? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v038p00360.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v03...
      - hgomersall 2y ago
        Nutritional science has come on a little in the last 21 years. Do you have anything more recent?
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      "probably"
d0mine 2y ago
More research wouldn’t hurt but is not like there is none e.g., here’s video on seed oil that does cite some research https://youtu.be/XJ_uyV-ER_g https://youtu.be/XJ_uyV-ER_g tl;dr seed oil is better than butter (saturated fat-wise), it is ok to heat it at home upto 200 Celsius, not ok “ultra processed” fastfood fries due to more heat, reheating (trans fat-wise)
akira2501 2y ago
> I constantly see assertions that highly processed foods are killing us and causing obesity, "Highly palatable" foods do this. One way to create those is through "highly processed" techniques. > but I've yet to see any credible evidence for it. Obesity is more common in the world where highly processed foods are more common. There is evidence. There is no RCT. This has nothing to do with "credibility" it's just "non-standard analysis."
- emseetech 2y ago
  And highly palatable means processed foods are easier to consume in large quantities. So it's not just an issue of chemical composition but how we respond to these foods behaviorally. A 7.5oz bag of potato chips is made using around 6-8 medium sized potatoes. Eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting is frighteningly easy to do. But I challenge anyone to eat 6-8 medium potatoes at once, despite being around the same amount of calories. Going on a whole foods diet often results in weight loss without any increased hunger sensation.
  - lkirkwood 2y ago
    Sorry but that comparison is nonsense. Potato chips are just fried slices of potato. How would you squeeze 6-8 medium potatoes (each weighing 5-10oz according to top Google result for "average medium sized potato weight") into a 7.5oz bag.
    - throwaway59148 2y ago
      [dead]
    - viewtransform 2y ago
      Potato is 80% water which is vaporised in the frying process.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- RevEng 2y ago
vintermann 2y ago
I agree. To me it always seemed a bit like insisting that foods from the first half of the alphabet are bad for you. Are they? Maybe! Alcohol, Burgers, Croissants, for all I know there are more bad-diet things in the first half of the alphabet than the last. It could even be that if we convinced people to buy less high-alphabet food, they'd be healthier. But that doesn't mean it's a sensible category. We don't "need more research into high-alphabet foods", we need a causal theory of what makes food healthy or not. It's pretty clear it isn't alphabetic priority, and it's also pretty clear it's not simply "processing". Most food needs to be processed in some way or another to be edible. I read a terrible catalog many years ago, from an alternative magazine, listing a ton of weird diets and questionable health practices. There were only a handful of things in that catalog of hundreds of things that even they warned against, and one of them was the "raw food diet". If it's benzopyrene from frying that's the problem, talk about frying. If it's micronutrients being lost from soaking or boiling or long storage with preservatives, talk about that! But don't dumb us down by putting it all in a box and refusing to engage with what actually makes it bad.
spatalo 2y ago
upf is known to be bad for the microbiome and increases gut issues
ufo 2y ago
Arguably the whole point of the ultraprocessed classification is to spend less time micromanaging the nutritional value. The purpose is to separate the kinds of food that you can prepare and cook at home, from the kinds of food that only exist in a highly industrial setting. The latter optimizes for using the cheapest possible ingredients, with the longest shelf life, and to be hyper palatable. Part of the problem is that, to achieve those goals, industrialized food tends to be high in sugar, fats, salt, and calories in general. But looking at only those nutritional numbers is shortsighted. In the last decades we have seen all sorts of junk food that used their nutrition labels to masquerade as healthy food: diet colas without added sugar, sugary breakfast cereals that are "rich in vitamins", and so on. And those did little to stop the obesity epidemic.
iamthemonster 2y ago
It reminds me of the food processor salesman who came to our house to demonstrate how you can avoid processed food by making it at home... in a food processor.
geoduck14 2y ago
The definition of "ultra processed food" that a nutritionist gave me was "high amount of sodium". Which kind of makes sense to me. The conversation came about because she was encouraging me to reduce lunch meats from my diet. Lunch meat is a staple in many diets, but there are a lot of salts

by RevEng 2y ago

sabbaticaldev 2y ago

this is processed food. Processed food is fine. Ultra-processed food is processed food put into a plastic bag, shipped far away to be consumed 6 months after it was produced.

maccard 2y ago
So tinned, or frozen veg?
- sabbaticaldev 2y ago
  if it is full of preservatives, yes. Obviously, just frozen vegetables isn’t ultra processed.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bloaf 2y ago
    This is not at all obvious. Freezing veggies involves washing, cutting, and blanching processes and vegetables may be subjected to ultrasound during freezing to accelerate the process.
- ufo 2y ago
  No, those do not count as ultra processed.
gizmo686 2y ago
Fruits and vegetables get processed, put into plastic bags, and shipped far away to be consumed 6 months after being produced all the time. None of that makes them ultra processed.
hinkley 2y ago
Ultra processed food is foods broken down into base chemicals and stored in vats or boxes like it’s baking soda for years before being turned back into food. Many things we make from corn in particular, and I would probably include commercial orange juice in this as well. I don’t drink the stuff anymore. That’s gross.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

dboreham 2y ago

I have/had similar thoughts. For example: it's all just various hydrocarbons that are going to be chopped up by enzymes, so what's the difference exactly which atom is where? My guess that the "processed food is poison" people are only by chance hitting on something. They have zero evidence and zero supporting data. However, I've come to suspect that the gut is a very complex thing, with a computer in it, and highly connected to the brain. Once you start to go down that line of thinking, I think it's plausible that they've identified a real problem. One possibility among many is that "corporate food" is the result of a giant A/B test series over a hundred years that has machine-learned the model embodied in the gut-computer. It's essentially a DoS attack. And so on. Suggest folk consider what if the gut has a neural network with various sensors and subject to training data.

bloaf 2y ago
That's why I gravitate towards the 'hyper-palatable' label vs 'hyper-processed', to me it captures a more plausible set of criteria (engineered via fat/sugar/salt addition to maximize its appeal, etc) that cause a more plausible and specific set of problems (hijacking reward pathways to cause overeating, etc)
- nick3443 2y ago
  There is a Peter Attia interview with Michael Easter that explores this concept and anecdotally supports it, where he investigates a tribe (Tsimane tribe) with low obesity and cardiovascular disease, and his personal experience eating their plain and unseasoned diet compared to normal western foods. I normally dislike the typical podcasters/podcasts because of their self promoting and low information density nature but I thought this one was ok to recommend.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    If you want it from an industrial perspective, I suggest checking out “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us“ by Michael Moss, and “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite” by David A. Kessler, former head of the FDA.

gxs 2y ago

I get your point and I agree, but for me I perhaps inaccurately use processed as a proxy for calorie density. Working at a restaurant in college, I saw that a single plate of pasta they made during a busy night when it was hard to keep up could easily wind up an entire stick of butter. That’s on top of the cream. Soda - tons of sugar packed into 12 oz. When you don’t eat restaurant/processed foods at home, it does shock you a bit just what a giant volume of good 2,000 calories can be. This is all it means to me. I’m not out here trying to prove science, just trying to stay healthy.

jampekka 2y ago

> Even reading the Nova classification, the scientific verbiage describing the ultra processed category could easily describe making egg noodles at home. It can't because per Nova for something to be "ultra-processed" it has to be "industrially manufactured". Unless you're involved in cottage industry I guess. "Ultra-processed" is a ridiculous categorization, a bit like some compounds artificially being labeled as "chemicals" and some not.

Symmetry 2y ago
There are certainly certain categories of chemical that might be of interest. For instance you don't normally find emulsification agents in non-processed food but you do in industrial food, whether the particular chemical is made in a lab or extracted from some plant or other. But many, many other ways that we industrially manufacture food are obviously no worse than making our own noodles at home.
- jampekka 2y ago
  E.g. agar-agar is an emulsifying agent. It's ground seaweed. As is chickpea wash. Both used for at least centuries.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    Even the more exotic sounding stuff like xanthan gum are often stuff like fermentation byproducts. Totally organic!
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Xanthan on the other hand is a bacterial wash, isn’t it? And we use it because guar got priced up by fracking.
    - musicale 2y ago
      I was excited when I found that I could actually buy xanthan gum in the grocery store; now I can make delicious foods at home!

thoughtFrame 2y ago

My worry with processed food is that precise manufacture opens up the doors to producing all sorts of foods with an unhealthy imbalance of components. Specifically, that the unnatural surplus of, say, hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup, or whatever, is something that will have disastrous nth order consequences we can't predict, so it looks promising in the short term and corporations looking to maximize their profit will all doubtlessly do more of this. I only have slightly more than a passing interest in food science and nutrition, but from all I've learned my gut feeling is that I ought to avoid this stuff, and rely on cooking my own food as much as possible so I don't get into any imbalances (it's very hard to get a surplus of any macro or any other component via "natural" products) I don't have any evidence on the nutrition side, but it's certainly not an experiment I'd like to do with my only body. And in the psychological side, it's definitely something to avoid if we value our physical and mental health

thucydides 2y ago

there are some fascinating hypotheses on what's caused the worldwide exponential increase in obesity in humans (and also some wild animals). here is the best summary i've seen: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...

jampekka 2y ago
Is this really a mystery? People eat more energy wise and move less. As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food"). As to why we move less is less manual labor, more sedentary entertainment and increased use of vehicles. The obesity discussion seems to somehow deliberately try to avoid the obvious.
- cinntaile 2y ago
  Why do you think none of the thousands of researchers within nutritional scientists have considered your explanation? That to me seems extremely unlikely.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    Many do and have a similar view. Maybe restating the obvious just doesn't make the news (or bring in grants)? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v038p00360.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v03...
    - hgomersall 2y ago
      Nutritional science has come on a little in the last 21 years. Do you have anything more recent?
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    "probably"

d0mine 2y ago

More research wouldn’t hurt but is not like there is none e.g., here’s video on seed oil that does cite some research https://youtu.be/XJ_uyV-ER_g https://youtu.be/XJ_uyV-ER_g tl;dr seed oil is better than butter (saturated fat-wise), it is ok to heat it at home upto 200 Celsius, not ok “ultra processed” fastfood fries due to more heat, reheating (trans fat-wise)

akira2501 2y ago

> I constantly see assertions that highly processed foods are killing us and causing obesity, "Highly palatable" foods do this. One way to create those is through "highly processed" techniques. > but I've yet to see any credible evidence for it. Obesity is more common in the world where highly processed foods are more common. There is evidence. There is no RCT. This has nothing to do with "credibility" it's just "non-standard analysis."

emseetech 2y ago
And highly palatable means processed foods are easier to consume in large quantities. So it's not just an issue of chemical composition but how we respond to these foods behaviorally. A 7.5oz bag of potato chips is made using around 6-8 medium sized potatoes. Eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting is frighteningly easy to do. But I challenge anyone to eat 6-8 medium potatoes at once, despite being around the same amount of calories. Going on a whole foods diet often results in weight loss without any increased hunger sensation.
- lkirkwood 2y ago
  Sorry but that comparison is nonsense. Potato chips are just fried slices of potato. How would you squeeze 6-8 medium potatoes (each weighing 5-10oz according to top Google result for "average medium sized potato weight") into a 7.5oz bag.
  - throwaway59148 2y ago
    [dead]
  - viewtransform 2y ago
    Potato is 80% water which is vaporised in the frying process.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
RevEng 2y ago

vintermann 2y ago

I agree. To me it always seemed a bit like insisting that foods from the first half of the alphabet are bad for you. Are they? Maybe! Alcohol, Burgers, Croissants, for all I know there are more bad-diet things in the first half of the alphabet than the last. It could even be that if we convinced people to buy less high-alphabet food, they'd be healthier. But that doesn't mean it's a sensible category. We don't "need more research into high-alphabet foods", we need a causal theory of what makes food healthy or not. It's pretty clear it isn't alphabetic priority, and it's also pretty clear it's not simply "processing". Most food needs to be processed in some way or another to be edible. I read a terrible catalog many years ago, from an alternative magazine, listing a ton of weird diets and questionable health practices. There were only a handful of things in that catalog of hundreds of things that even they warned against, and one of them was the "raw food diet". If it's benzopyrene from frying that's the problem, talk about frying. If it's micronutrients being lost from soaking or boiling or long storage with preservatives, talk about that! But don't dumb us down by putting it all in a box and refusing to engage with what actually makes it bad.

spatalo 2y ago

upf is known to be bad for the microbiome and increases gut issues

ufo 2y ago

Arguably the whole point of the ultraprocessed classification is to spend less time micromanaging the nutritional value. The purpose is to separate the kinds of food that you can prepare and cook at home, from the kinds of food that only exist in a highly industrial setting. The latter optimizes for using the cheapest possible ingredients, with the longest shelf life, and to be hyper palatable. Part of the problem is that, to achieve those goals, industrialized food tends to be high in sugar, fats, salt, and calories in general. But looking at only those nutritional numbers is shortsighted. In the last decades we have seen all sorts of junk food that used their nutrition labels to masquerade as healthy food: diet colas without added sugar, sugary breakfast cereals that are "rich in vitamins", and so on. And those did little to stop the obesity epidemic.

iamthemonster 2y ago

It reminds me of the food processor salesman who came to our house to demonstrate how you can avoid processed food by making it at home... in a food processor.

geoduck14 2y ago

The definition of "ultra processed food" that a nutritionist gave me was "high amount of sodium". Which kind of makes sense to me. The conversation came about because she was encouraging me to reduce lunch meats from my diet. Lunch meat is a staple in many diets, but there are a lot of salts