7 ms·
Yeah the whole definition is bogus. i.e. "mechanically separated meat" is considered ultraprocessed food? Why? By this logic putting apples into mixer and creat
by general1465 11mo ago
Yeah the whole definition is bogus. i.e. "mechanically separated meat" is considered ultraprocessed food? Why? By this logic putting apples into mixer and creating pyre is ultraprocessed food too.
- _aavaa_ 11mo agoAnd even if you want to define it as such, why is that bad for health?
- zug_zug 11mo agoIt’s bad for health because the science says so. You’re welcome to do your own years of research to learn more (everything, cooking, freezing, drying, blending, adding acids affects amino acids and certainly bacteria in the food) but until then stick with what the studies prove
- JoeAltmaier 11mo agoI guess a reasonable person can question the science, when ordinary words are used wildly inappropriately. E.g. 'ultra-processed' to mean things that are far from that. If 'the science' is so conclusive, then maybe a single link to a single study would be an appropriate response.
- zug_zug 11mo agoHow about responding to the one in the article…?
- IAmBroom 11mo agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=studies+of+ultra-processed+foods&rlz=1C1VDKB_enUS1150US1150&oq=studies+of+ultra-processed+foods&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDU3MTlqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=studies+of+ultra-processed+f...
- UncleMeat 11mo agoThe science is messy. The UPF definition includes a ton of very distinct things. It is unlikely that emulsifiers, preservatives, food dyes, added sugar, and removed fiber all produce the same health responses. Science showing correlations between UPF consumption and health outcomes also don't tend to show a dose response, which is odd. We'd expect lots of UPF consumption to be very bad and for some UPF consumption to be kind of bad, but we don't tend to see this in the data. Nutritional research is also enormously difficult to perform. Any sort of controlled study is necessarily over short periods of time. Long term studies come with all of the messy confounds that make it remarkably difficult to determine causation.
- zug_zug 11mo agoThe one in the article is dose dependent… And I really don’t understand your point at all. All science starts with observing a correlation and deducing a cause years to centuries later. But you don’t wait for newton to start believing in gravity
- UncleMeat 11mo agoI don't have free access to the paper and dose response findings are not present in the summary. Can you reference the dose response findings for me? Existing published research has not consistently found a dose response. The authors are also not just saying "hey here is some science." They are advocating for policies that say that plain potato chips can be in schools but sour cream and onion potato chips cannot.
- Lord-Jobo 11mo agoTangent because I do think you are asking a pretty clear question, but I find it’s much more helpful in these discussions to specify why(mechanical explanation) from why(elaborate on known info) from why(what is the human reason for an action). Because you really can interpret any of these in a lot of the situations where someone is asking “why”.
- metalman 11mo agoit's not food,thats why it is a food substitute. food is composed of recognisable ingedients. what comes from factorys has no connection or relation to that. the unspoken premise is that pre prepared stuff with a label is somehow part of a continuity. , pared= to cut/divided prepared=cut/divided~for you pre prepared= wtf?
- stephen_g 11mo agoI’ve seen one theory that it might be something to do with not needing as much chewing and how quickly you can eat it. I can’t remember exactly the article I was reading but apparently there is a massive difference (e.g. insulin spike, etc.) eating apple purée of one apple vs. eating an apple. Needing to chew less processed food may help just by being kind of rate-limiting (slowing down how fast you can get the food in), but also the enzymes in your saliva have time to start working on the food before you swallow it. If I recall correctly I have also read (perhaps the same article, but maybe somewhere else) that some processes related to digestion might be triggered when you start eating (chewing), so the fact that you can eat so many calories so quickly before those processes get going might make a big difference too.
- lentil_soup 11mo agoas I understand, it's also the fiber. The fiber acts as a barrier that slows down the speed at which you absorb the food which leads to a smoother insulin spike (in case of carbs) and a faster feeling of satiation. When you blend the apple all that fiber is broken down do it loses those properties
- UncleMeat 11mo agoNobody knows. This is one of the things that makes efforts to regulate UPFs frustrating. Some people say that it is lack of fiber. Some people say that it is inflammation caused by preservatives and/or stabilizers. Some people say it is the hyperpaletability, which encourages people to overconsume calories. Some people say it is just the high amounts of sugar and salt. And it is unlikely that all of these things contribute equally such that they should all be regulated the same.
- macNchz 11mo agoDoes anybody eat mechanically separated meat as-is? I imagine it’s basically only available to end users as a final product like chicken nuggets or hot dogs, mixed with many additives.
- glitchc 11mo agoSo the additives are unhealthy?
- macNchz 11mo agoI don’t think anybody has a concrete answer yet, I’ve seen speculation that the texture of the food may be a component, and the extreme palatability that causes people to eat more than they otherwise would. There are so many potential root causes that it will take time to pinpoint specific ones, but what is becoming clear that eating lots of foods with additives and highly altered basic ingredients (like mechanically separated meat) is not good for you.
- glitchc 11mo agoI have a hard time understanding how the act of mechanically separating meat from bone and gristle renders it unfit for consumption. Texture certainly matters for taste, but once masticated, all food is roughly the same texture. Digestion is a biochemical process, and if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoAgain, no one is claiming that every component of every ultra-processed food is bad. As an aggregate, the category of foods appears to be bad for us. And we aren't sure why yet.
- hexaga 11mo ago> if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad? To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go. It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers. It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback. The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.
- throwaway89201 11mo agoI'm not sure you are replying knowing what "mechanically separated meat is", as it isn't just cutting / separating pieces of regular meat using machinery. It's the sieving of a ground up bone/flesh mix into a meat paste. The result product is not something you would normally call meat, and called 'white slime' by some.
- lentil_soup 11mo agoApples are actually a great example. Think of eating an apple vs drinking apple juice. The amount of entire apples you can drink is immense compared to eating the apple whole. So the mechanical process does affect how we consume the food.
- mr_mitm 11mo agoIf you are asking the question whether UPF is bad, surely you got to control for the amount. Of course you can say that people tend to eat too much of UPF simply because it is easier to prepare and eat, but that doesn't mean it's the processing that is bad for you. It's still just the amount.
- sigwinch 11mo agoSo rather than apple juice, consider watermelon juice. The nutrition and fiber are unchanged, the volume is close to 1:1. But you can drink more than you can eat.
- lentil_soup 11mo agoBut that's part of it. There's a part to do with the nutrient quality, which can also be talked about, but also a part that has to do with how UPF are consumed. The act of processing the food a certain way makes you eat more of it without realising it. Same with fat and sugar, eating a stick of butter on its own is hard, same with pure sugar, mix them up and it's delicious and addictive which leads to health problems.
- Concrete3286 11mo agoSeems like a reasonable definition? It's not referring to tissue you put through a grinder yourself. From wikipedia: Mechanically separated meat (MSM), mechanically recovered/reclaimed meat (MRM), or mechanically deboned meat (MDM) is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing pureed or ground beef, pork, mutton, turkey or chicken under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. When poultry is used, it is sometimes called white slime as an analog to meat-additive pink slime and to meat extracted by advanced meat recovery systems, both of which are different processes. The process entails pureeing or grinding the carcass left after the manual removal of meat from the bones and then forcing the slurry through a sieve under pressure. The resulting product is a blend primarily consisting of tissues not generally considered meat, along with a much smaller amount of actual meat (muscle tissue).
- emchammer 11mo agoDisgusting and disrespectful to the animal.
- UncleMeat 11mo agoIf we are going to kill an animal to eat it then we should use all of it.
- UncleMeat 11mo agoBut what's the issue? I can eat beef and beef tendon separately but if they are blended together it suddenly becomes bad?
- alkyon 11mo agoMechanically separated meat is a marketing term. It's neither 100% meat (in fact it contains tons or fat and joints) nor a good quality meat (this one is sold separately). I don't buy any products that list it among its ingredients. Ground beef its not the same thing
- 11mo ago
- IAmBroom 11mo agoFirst, I think you're misreading it. The Wikipedia article lists "mechanically separated meat" as one of the ingredients that are used in ultra-processed foods. The other point is already covered by other replies. "Mechanically separated meat" is not a term for your mother's chicken salad remake of last Sunday's roast chicken.