It’s Time to End the Tyranny of Ultra-Processed Food

Sinnerman, 10 months ago

Washington Post had an article about this with a lot more facts, a couple days ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/27/ultra-processed-foods-predigested-health-risks/
(temporarily free article on a mostly-paywalled site.)

DarkGamer, 10 months ago

@sinnerman That article is much better, thanks for sharing it! I'd never thought of ultraprocessing as predigestion before.

For a time, Kevin Hall, a nutrition and metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was also skeptical that ultra-processed foods were harmful.

To test the idea, he designed a study that compared what happened when men and women were recruited to live in a lab and fed different diets. In one phase of the study, the participants ate mostly ultra-processed foods for two weeks. Their daily meals consisted of things like honey nut oat cereal, flavored yogurt, blueberry muffins, canned ravioli, steak strips, mashed potatoes from a packet, baked potato chips, goldfish crackers, diet lemonade and low-fat chocolate milk.

In a second phase of the study, the participants were fed a diet of mostly homemade, unprocessed foods for two weeks that was matched for nutrients like salt, sugar, fat, and fiber. Their meals consisted of foods such as Greek yogurt with walnuts and fruit, spinach salad with grilled chicken, apple slices, bulgur and fresh vinaigrette, and beef tender roast with rice pilaf, steamed vegetables, balsamic vinaigrette, pecans and orange slices.

In both cases, the participants were allowed to eat as much or as little of the foods and snacks as they wanted.

“If it was really about the nutrients — and not about the processing — then there shouldn’t be any major difference in calorie intake between these two diets,” said Hall. “I thought that was going to be the result of the study.”

But, he added, “I was hugely wrong.”

When people ate the ultra-processed diet, they consumed substantially more calories — about 500 more calories a day compared to when they ate the mostly unprocessed diet. The result: They gained weight and body fat.

The researchers also noticed a difference in how quickly the participants consumed their food. They ate the ultra-processed meals significantly faster, at a rate of about 50 calories per minute, compared to just 30 calories per minute on the unprocessed diet.

Fascinating.

cooljacob204, 10 months ago

To say that this makes processed foods bad for you however is kinda ridiculous imo. Might as well tell people to only eat raw things because it has the least calories / most filling.

Bad food is bad for you, eating junk food is known to be a giant waste of calories and how it's prepared doesn't make it better or worse.

Outside of increased calories I have not seen any evidence that food being more "processed" is actually bad for you.

I'm not sure when this movement against junk food became a movement against processed foods but it's moving in the wrong direction. Plenty of shitty junk foods can have very little processing involved. And I'm convinced it's exactly those "low processed" junk food providers that are pushing all this bullshit.

RickRussell_CA, 10 months ago

With respect, I think you're ignoring the facts. How it's prepared absolutely makes a difference in how it tastes, how easy it is to eat, etc. and there is a resulting effect on how much people eat.

Freshly grilled chicken and frozen chicken patties are both chicken. But the chicken patty is ground, pre-seasoned, pre-cooked, etc. This makes it easier to get ready and easier to eat than a fresh chicken breast.

The poison is in the dose, as they say. 500 calorie surplus every day is a pound a week of weight gain.

And as dieticians have shown us over and over again, you can eat shitty food and be healthy, you just have to eat an appropriate amount of it. There are diets based on cookies and snack cakes, if you eat at your maintenance and cover a few basics with supplements, you can easily thrive on them.

Maeve, 7 months ago

I bought a bunch of expensive microwave meals on sale (6 or so that were originally $6 each, but bogo’d, so $3 each) for times I have to drop what I’m doing and be busy or gone for an extended period. Nice ones like beef and broccoli, mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, umami bowls. Imagine my chagrin when they ranged from 350-600 calories each, and nutrients were so minimal, they didn’t list a percentage of rda, but added sugar, sodium content and carb count were of the chart and besides for fat content, were the only things memorably listed.