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What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar

• ponector 1y ago
  Treating food with chemicals usually it's not good. Also you simply don't know what exactly are they doing. Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
  • mistercow 1y ago
    Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
    • mandmandam 1y ago
      Particularly pointless pedantry. We all know what they mean, and are to assume the best reading of what they're saying. Bread, the example they used, is a particularly stark example where Americans are subjected to stuff that is rightly banned in most of the rest of the world.
      • const_cast 1y ago
        It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals. When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria. Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
        • fakedang 1y ago
          > When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. And didn't they teach you at school to soak all vegetables for a couple hours in water after buying them and before storing/using them? As for injected hormones, in my part of the world (Asia and Europe), we reject such produce if we're trying to eat healthy. My family literally grows pineapples in our backyard (which I bring to Europe) because industrial pineapples are injected with ripening stimulators. > When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria. In most of the civilized world, we typically ensure humane conditions as much as possible even in industrial farming, so that chicken need not be drugged and bleach washed. Like basic hygiene and humanity such as animals not being made to live in their own shit. > Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it? Again, in most of the civilized world, we don't take issue with preserving minced garlic with citric acid. In fact, I regularly preserve a lot of veggies and sometimes even fruit this way. But I do have an issue when some industrial company decides to add sodium benzoate to their pickle to preserve it for months on end.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
        • mandmandam 1y ago
          > It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals. That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context. > Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it? I never said they are. Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc. Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.
      • mistercow 1y ago
        Actually, no, we don’t know what they mean. This is the foundation of the great motte and bailey that so much nutrition nonsense is based on. People say “chemicals”, and then they can gesture at a food label with a few obscure sounding ingredients and say “ooh, look how scary”. But for the vast majority of these “chemicals”, there is absolutely no reason to think that consuming them is a problem. Anyway, since “we all know”, why don’t you go check out the ingredients for beyond burgers, and report back which “chemicals” you think are so disastrous.
  • birn559 1y ago
    Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general. European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory. Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
    • ayuhito 1y ago
      “Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements. For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns. Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
      • wizzwizz4 1y ago
        And there are a handful of chemicals banned in the US for health concerns that the EU is fine with.
        • wizzwizz4 1y ago
          Individual cases are interesting. For example, Wikipedia says this of E122: > In the US, this color was listed in 1939 as Ext. D&C Red No. 10 for use in externally applied drugs and cosmetics. It was delisted in 1963 because no party was interested in supporting the studies needed to establish safety. It was not used in food in the US. > Azorubine has shown no evidence of mutagenic or carcinogenic properties and an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–4 mg/kg was established in 1983 by the WHO. Wikipedia's article on E180 is a stub. Wikipedia's article on E105 says it's now banned in both the US and EU, but it doesn't say when it was banned: did the US ever approve it?
  • chpatrick 1y ago
    I hear they even process it with dihydrogen monoxide!
    • ponector 1y ago
      I'd rather apply hot dihydrogen monoxide to my dry lentils than use compound prepared by Beyond Meat.
  • tcbawo 1y ago
    I don’t understand the downvotes. Replacing foods that have been prepared in the same way for hundreds of years with foods treated with processes that have not yet been considered harmful is inherently risky. There are plenty of examples of unknown byproducts, isomers, and side effects that take years to flesh out.
    • mandmandam 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • mixmastamyk 1y ago
        The 70s/80s want their insult back. You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it. But we still have to listen to complaints that the only choices available are Wonder, Lipton, and Budweiser. Not true—literally for decades now.
        • mandmandam 1y ago
          > You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it. I didn't say you can't buy quality bread though. I know it's possible to find nice bread. I said it's mostly inferior, and it is. The vast majority of bread in America is stuff that I would rather go hungry than eat. ... Thanks for proving my point about getting weirdly defensive.
          • mandmandam 1y ago
            And thanks to whoever flagged my initial comment for proving it even more, lol.
          • mixmastamyk 1y ago
            If you don’t like styles of corporate bread, don’t buy them. But they work for those of limited means.
            • 1y ago
• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed The processing is done with a purpose. > All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption Source? Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
  • ben_w 1y ago
    > Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. While true, this is also the case with all cooking, which makes it difficult to separate the various other things. Don't get me wrong, the older I get the more negligence I see in corporations promoting their new things, so I'm now absolutely on-board with a cautious and conservative set of testing requirements for novel foods. This is just to say that the boundary condition for such novelty isn't what most people think it is.
• giantg2 1y ago
  Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats. Edit: why disagree?
  • anon84873628 1y ago
    Well lumping packaged cookies and cured meats together is already part of the problem. The former is bad in excess because of the high calories and poor lipid profile. The latter because of colon cancer risk. The problem with processed foods is not their individual construction per se, but how overall bad diets are easily enabled by them. As far as studies go, I can't give you one that directly controls. But look at the "30 plants per week" topic, which suggests that overall diversity of fiber consumption is more correlated to health than any specific details of the diet.
    • giantg2 1y ago
      The 30 plants per week stuff looks like it's mostly based off one citizen science study that acknowledges that it focused on healthy adults, had underrepresented groups, and it didn't directly tie the diet to health outcomes or longevity. It looks like it was focused on the diversity of the microbiome. Other studies have looked at various microbiome related factors, but it doesn't look like any directly study the 30 plants per week part. Various sources even acknowledge that salty, sugary, and fatty processed foods can also be responsible for decreased microbiome diversity and increased levels of bacteria associated with negative health outcomes. Most also stress the whole foods point. It doesn't appear that any control for the source of the plant point related to processed foods - eg was there a cohort that ate non-fermented pickles, sun chips, potato chips, fruit wines, etc to compare with whole food plant based diets. So based on the studies around your 30 plants topics, even they make the point about choosing whole food or minimally processed sources.
• mind-blight 1y ago
  Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous: - Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference - The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research - Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you. One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm
  • anon84873628 1y ago
    The problem of course is looking at foods in isolation vs as part of a diet. You can always say something is fine "as part of a healthy diet." Clearly the problem is when people eat too much of their diet from processed foods. Because they are high in calories, low in micronutrients, and designed to stimulate appetite so people overeat. But to say that any processed food (like Beyond Burgers) is automatically bad because they are processed is simply and example of the naturalistic fallacy.
    • mind-blight 1y ago
      Sure, avoiding processing is just a heuristic. I just have trouble faulting people when it send to be a good one for maintaining a healthy diet. I don't know much about Beyond Meat's specific processes. I wanted to like their burger, but they smelled too much like dog food when coming and tasted worse than cheaper black bean burgers. Aside, from my personal preferences, they could be totally fine. But, of someone is trying to go through their life eating relatively healthy without having to try to keep up on the latest research, less processing is the way to go. You'll cut out things that are perfectly fine (e.g. there's a small backpack against Xanthum gum that currently makes no sense to me), but you'll also avoid a lot of the cutting edge garbage that gets added and then recalled. Whole fruits, veggies, nuts, grains, and meat is always a solid choice. I have trouble faulting people for using that as a heuristic
• mixmastamyk 1y ago
  The term is too vague. That’s different from “hysteria.”