I’ve been fascinated by the fact that I know several people who have become vegan, lost weight, and feel better. But I also know many people who have gone low carb, or even eat nothing but meat, and are also losing weight and report feeling much better. I’ve been wondering what they both share in common, and suspected that both forms of dietary restriction mean cutting out most hyper palatable ultraprocessed foods.
It’s an interesting article, I hope to see more research on the subject.
Another anecdote: I went completely vegan ~3 months ago. I don't really "feel better". It's always the first thing someone asks when I say I went vegan.. "Do you feel better?" - I feel basically the same.
Although my weight has been trending downward, slowly, which is great since that's happening without trying to limit the amount I eat at all. That's very different from when I wasn't vegan, my weight would always trend slowly upward unless I was making a deliberate effort to cut back on calories.
BUT: I think the real reason I'm slowly losing weight on a vegan diet is the simple fact that eating a restricted diet (ANY restricted diet) requires you to think about and analyze absolutely everything that enters your mouth. It introduces a level of mindfulness that just wasn't there when eating an unrestricted diet. For me, this has had the side effect of also cutting out most processed food (read: junk food) from my diet, even though most junk food is vegan. I'm convinced this is the biggest value of being vegan.. it just makes you think about everything you buy at the grocery store, everything you order when out to eat, etc.
Another commenter calls this "paying attention to what you eat" - I think that's right on target, however cliche it may sound.
Paying attention to what you eat really goes a long way.
I remember watching a video of two women, one skinny, one overweight, who were good friends. They said that the skinny one always eats way more food, but doesn't gain any weight.
They had a camera crew follow them both around and it was true that the skinny woman ate larger meals. The difference was all the time in between. The skinny woman didn't eat anything, while the overweight woman was snacking regularly.
The total calorie counts for the day were much larger for the overweight woman.
It's much healthier when it's bound up in a lot of fiber, as you find it in unprocessed fruit. The soluble and insoluble fiber form a protective barrier that reduces the total amount and rate at which it is absorbed.
Confirmation bias: people who try new diets and hate them probably talk about it a lot less.
Placebo: people getting caught up hearing about how everyone with their diet feels so much better are convinced they feel better too
Gut fauna: any change, regardless of what it was, causing a population shuffling inside the gut
Avoiding "something": any change, regardless of what it was, involved exclusion of one specific thing which was a sensitivity/allergy/poorly digested/feeding a particular gut bacteria
Thoughtfulness: any change required people to be much more conscientious about what they ate which led to different habits, one of which was critical to feeling better
Lies and exaggerations: diet and nutrition has become a kind of religion replacing God in an increasingly atheist society, some people act with strange quasi-religious zeal for their personal health belief set
I tend to not believe anything anybody says about nutrition. Evidence for anything fits into three categories: guessing, anecdotes, extremely specific cause-and-effect studies without real-world conclusions. The fourth category of believable, properly blinded, controlled, long term human studies does exist but the volume is very low.
Except going vegan often involves massive increases in ultraprocessed foods. Realistically, vegan food prep takes a long time, so meat substitutes end up in the diet for convenience if nothing else - and meat substitutes are pure processed food.
I mean we have one group handwriting about gluten and meanwhile one of the tastiest vegan foods is pure gluten.
I’ve followed a vegan diet for 6 weeks now, and it’s really obvious why I’m losing weight: because I’m no longer eating all the junk that is on offer everywhere - cakes, biscuits, chocolates... I would previously have eaten these things mindlessly, but now I have a simple rule that cuts them out.
To reinforce the overeating-junk-food theory, my weight loss has slowed as I have discovered alternative vegan treats and snacks.
It also makes sense why stringent reading caloric information and then calorie counting (not just guessing, but weight scale & knowing the calories) would lead to weight loss as well - if you are cognizant of the hyper palatable foods it'll be harder (you'll want to), but it's not due to the food being magic, it's due to the disconnect between sensation and calories.
I wouldn't discount the impact of the variety of food. I think it has just as much to do with its palatability. We know that people will consume substantially more calories when served multiple types of food, rather than just one dish[1].
I suspect this also works across meals as well. For example traditional Thai, Mexican or Italian food tends to be very caloric and palatable. Yet traditional societies in Thailand, Mexico and Italy tend to be much thinner than their counterparts that start consuming a typical American diet.
I think the explanation is that if you have lasagna on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, and curry on Wednesday, each meal is novel and delicious. In contrast if you eat tacos on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, and tacos on Wednesday, well tacos start to lose some of their appeal.
This suggests a diet, that I've yet to hear of. First cut out side dishes in favor of one-pot meals. You can still have a lot of variety of ingredients, but they're blended together in a homogenous, so that every spoonful is nearly identical. That eliminates the buffet effect.
Second, do something like meal-prep Sunday. Give yourself fairly wide latitude when picking out your meals. However, whatever you pick out, you're going to eat that same dish for pretty much every meal for a week straight. Even with your favorite your dish, my guess is that by the end of the week you'll find it barely appetizing.
A less drastic approach might be using variety as a pump to shift consumption across food groups. Strictly restrict variety in the least healthy food groups, while allowing it for healthy food. People who love desert can still eat their favorite desert, but you pick one single desert dish and that's the only desert you can have for a month. In contrast give yourself unlimited freedom to enjoy whatever green vegetable strikes your fancy.
There are important differences. Losing weight is almost always a good thing, however you also have to look on the inside of the body. What makes ateries clog? And here comes meat and diary into play. Ppl tend to look on a lean muscular body but do not consider what makes the body work.
Pls have a look into Michael Greger's How not to die, or Colin Campbell China Study.
Vegan is not always healthy. Plant based, unprocessed food does the trick. Fatty and salty french fries are technically vegan. There is a lot of junk food on the vegan side, which is also highly processed and features lots of sugar. It is not enough to stop eating dead animals, drinking milk or eggs.
However dismissing meat is inevitable for a healthy diet.
Meat only diets are exceptionally good at weight loss, because your body gets into ketosis (it takes anywhere from 1-2 days to weeks, usually with hangover-like symptoms to adapt fully, but it takes no time to snap out of it), and naturally you cut out most of the calorie sources from your diet.
You can't neglect reversion to the mean here. People with below-average diet end up with below-average results. If you stop eating your below-average diet and replace most foods in it with anything else, it'll probably be a closer-to-average diet and give you better results.
Personally I went on a diet of mostly pasta and eggs, lost weight and feel better. (Lots of processed meat like pancetta, guanciale, or speck in those pasta dishes.)
I think you need to look at people on an individual basis. I start to get skeptical that what turned out to worked for me can work for everybody else. For me I think portion size and increased physical activity were big.
Recent studies (citations not handy) have shown that high-carb or high-fat diets don't lead to weight gain, but high-carb AND high-fat diets do (at least in mice, a big caveat).
One thing to consider is that fructose is a metabolic poison that is poorly regulated by metabolism. Fructose bypasses all of the controls that glucose is subject to and forces lipid biogenesis in the liver (by mass action for the chemists). Consuming fat and fructose is large amounts is nearly guaranteed to give you a fatty liver.
On the other hand, anyone choosing to follow an "extreme" diet is likely to be more aware of their food intake than the average person and adjust behavior in various ways.
It annoys me to no end that nearly all dietary advice boils down to "losing weight". I have this metabolism where I can eat literally anything, or nothing at all, and my weight maintains exactly the same. I've never gained any, I've never lost any.
The way I've developed my diet is by observing energy level, mood, ethic, cost, convenience, and allergic-ish reactions, which my skin is prone to.
But there is near zero actionable advice on diet available to me, because weight is never an issue.
I've been thinking the same thing from those around me who have started diets and "felt better" or lost weight.
From my observation, it seems that people go on a diet because they know what they're eating isn't good for them or its too high in calories or it goes against their beliefs or something. So people are already suspicious of what they're eating but aren't overly thinking about what they're eating. By going on a diet you now need to think about what you're eating in order to meet the requirements of the proposed diet and therefore you are being more conscious about what you will and won't eat.
By doing this you are already a step ahead of people who might eat whatever they feel like which may include lots of highly processed high fat and/or high carbohydrate foods every now and then or more than they realise.
So when people say they went keto, or went paleo, or cut out sugar, or cut out fat and lost weight and/or felt better. I always ask them was it actually the diet, or was it because you were simply conscious and considerate about what you were eating due to the fact that you were trying to fit to a particular diet.
The answer is always that someone has found some sort of program to follow that helps them eat less calories. I've not seem anyone ever try the approach of "avoid foods that taste good" but its not a bad idea probably. Just never ever bring good tasting, easy to prep food into the house.
Now you gotta work for food you don't really want.
> I’ve been fascinated by the fact that I know several people who have become vegan, lost weight, and feel better. But I also know many people who have gone low carb, or even eat nothing but meat, and are also losing weight and report feeling much better.
I have had a similar experience, but I've also known several people who have tried various diets and quickly dropped off them because it wasn't working for them. So while it's true that if you ask all your vegan friends if they enjoy being vegan, they'll probably mostly say yes, there's a huge possibility for selection bias/survivor bias.
The lesson I've drawn is not "pick a restrictive diet and you'll feel better", but more "some things work for some people but not others, and we have no idea why". :-/
In truth, science seems to be still very far from understanding the complexity of how our bodies process food.(One recurring constraint seems to be the difficulty in controlling for "real life eating").
Learning from "traditional" diets and cuisine might be the best practical way to go about eating healthy. A bit of a black hole approach, but practical for most people.
>I’ve been wondering what they both share in common, and suspected that both forms of dietary restriction mean cutting out most hyper palatable ultraprocessed foods.
It can also be combination of the two food categories that causes issues. Insulin spikes from carb intake and dietary fat are not a good combination. At least according to diets like "Keto". Both of those diets tend to have lopsided intake of fats and carbs.
> I’ve been wondering what they both share in common, and suspected that both forms of dietary restriction mean cutting out most hyper palatable ultraprocessed foods.
I'm back on the weight loss train (lost 60 pounds about ten years ago, and have to take 40 off again that I put back on slowly) and like last time, I mostly avoid these ultraprocessed foods simply because they're all way over my calorie budget.
Ever since Taylors time and motion studies (if not earlier) we've known that if people are being observed they tend to behave differently. I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to diets also. That could involve avoiding ultraprocessed foods, or it could involve having a healthy drink with your meal, having a salad or whatever.
>I’ve been wondering what they both share in common, and suspected that both forms of dietary restriction mean cutting out most hyper palatable ultraprocessed foods.
I would suggest that it's rather about setting a goal, working hard towards achieving it, and seeing measurable results of your work.
Just another anecdote, but I lost a lot of weight and felt a lot better after switching to low-carb, without ever eating a lot of processed food before.
My pet theory is that all these diets make you way more conscious of what you are eating and all you need to do is find one you are happy with.
I would be surprised if those who go vegan and lost weight did not go low(ish) carb (whether intentionally or not) e.g. mostly nuts/plants/fruits and not filling up with a lot of chips or bread.
Doesn't matter what you eat. As long as you follow a simple formula you will lose weight: Calories In < Calories Out.
I can eat McDonalds everyday for a month and still lose weight.. how?
Order a small fries and a double patty cheeseburger. Eat nothing else during the entire day, drink plenty of water, and exercise for at least 30 minutes.
Why is whole milk considered ultraprocessed and skim milk considered unprocessed? Whole milk is literally what you would get if you didn't process milk.
Why are canned corn and green beans ultraprocessed? They contain nothing but corn/beans and a touch of salt. If the salt is the problem, why do the unprocessed meals have added salt?
It looks like for the unprocessed meals, they chose a bunch of high in vegetables and whole grains, high fiber meals and chose a bunch of high calorie foods for the ultraprocessed meals [1]. No surprise people ate more calories when given the high calorie foods.
They say "dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories", but also that people were told to each as much as they like. What does that even mean? The calories can only be the same if you fix the quantity.
They don't define "ultraprocessed" or provide any mechanism for weight gain that would apply to their very varied selection of "ultraprocessed" foods.
The term "processed" is used to scare people about food, but the term is so broad that there can't possibly be a single mechanism by which various processed food would be unhealthy. Processing includes cutting, grinding, heating, cooking, mixing, adding ingredients, drying, deboning... basically anything you do to food. It's one thing to say a specific process, like adding sodium nitrite, is harmful. Making a blanket statement that all cutting, cooking and combining of foods is bad should raise a bit more skepticism.
If the article has a more specific definition of processed, they should mention it because their choices seem pretty arbitrary.
>They say "dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories" but also that people were told to each as much as they like. What does that even mean? The calories can only be the same if you fix the quantity.
It looks like they were going for energy density (and composition, for that matter).
BUT: They absolutely botched that one. While overall density was the same between the two groups, the energy density without beverages was almost twice as high in the ultraprocessed group. TBH, I'm a bit baffled how this huge discrepancy managed to remain in there.
I mean, they even admit as much:
However, because beverages have limited ability to affect satiety(DellaValle et al., 2005),
the ~85% higher energy density of the non-beverage foods in the ultra-processed versus unprocessed
diets (Table 1) likely contributed to the observed excess energy intake (Rolls, 2009).
Edit: Looking at the referenced paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182946/), it directly supports both these points: that food energy density quite significantly impacts total intake, and that using beverages instead doesn't (even in contrast to using liquid ingredients which _does_ work). Hoo boy.
(standard disclaimers apply; I am not a dietician or otherwise formally qualified to have any opinion at all on this topic)
It looks like they're using the NOVA classifications[0]; there have been a couple of other articles relating to the same system posted here recently, e.g. [1].
The NutriSource in "Whole milk (Cloverland) with NutriSource fiber" is apparently 100% partially hydrolyzed guar gum[2], which I believe would qualify the combination as ultraprocessed under this part of the definition from [0]: "Substances only found in ultra-processed products include some directly extracted from foods, such as casein, lactose, whey, and gluten, and some derived from further processing of food constituents, such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils, hydrolysed proteins, soy protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar and high fructose corn syrup.". By contrast, skim milk (as used in the unprocessed menu) has nothing added, only removed, and so would fall under their Group 1 "unprocessed or minimally processed foods".
As for whether this is actually a useful classification system, I don't know. I have no reason to believe any of the studies are bogus, but taken as a whole, it does seem like an attempt to launder the naturalistic fallacy into some scientific respectability.
edit: referenced article includes daily menu and in ultraprocessed menu you can find "Whole milk (Cloverland) with NutriSource fiber". I think it's not the milk, it's the addition of fiber what makes it ultraprocessed.
Have you ever milked a cow? That milk doesn’t look at all like the “whole” milk you get at the shop. Besides pasteurization they put it through filters and other industrial procedures. Dairy plants are very complex.
One experiment [1] with rats, which made sense to me, went like this: Some rats got a lot of sugar and did not gain weight. Another group got a lot a fat and gained some weight. A third group got a 50:50 ratio of sugar and fat and gained a substantial amount of weight.
This is one of the reasons why some people (like me) can eat cake made of 50% sugar and butter nearly endlessly. It's an unnatural combination and somehow transitions our brains into zombie mode where we never feel satiated.
For that reason you can find that combination in a lot of processed food...
Put a bag of sugar in front of me, meh. Or a stick of butter, meh. Those sugar-butter coated cashews from Trader Joe's (or just caramel) and I'll eat half the bag.
Sugar in isolation makes me feel lightheaded and a bit nauseous. Fat in isolation fills me up immediately. But together... yeah, I'll take that second (and third, and fourth) slice of cake.
Mother's milk contains ~4.5% fat, ~7% sugar and ~1% protein. It's not exactly 50:50 sugar/fat ratio, but it's pretty close, so I wouldn't call the combination unnatural. Maybe we've been "trained" from birth on what the "optimal" combination is...
I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that eating lots of sugar and fat is a worst-case metabolically for gaining bodyfat. Your body will prioritize sugar for energy while it's in your blood stream, so if you have lots of both, your body will just store the fat.
One (older) theory to support this is the Randle cycle [1], according to which, glucose and fatty acids can not be metabolized simultaneously. So, the presence of glucose will lead to any available fatty acids to be stored away.
This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It's hard to not feel you've eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you've eaten a lot of roast beef, but it's much easier to lose track of how many chips you've eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed.
> This seems to make a lot of sense, and removes that ridiculous notion that somehow removing a single element from our diet is what will lead to weight loss - the foods that people gain weights on are the foods that give us mixed signals to their quality and quantity of calories. It's hard to not feel you've eaten a lot of calories roast beef when you've eaten a lot of roast beef, but it's much easier to lose track of how many chips you've eaten, and harder to match that to the relative amount of calories consumed.
It doesn't make sense at all.
There is quite a bit of research on satiety - how full foods make you feel. It's actually quite straight forward: Protein, water and fiber make you feel full. Carbs do not. Mostly fat does not (you need a certain minimum amount of fat in your diet).
You feel full after eating a lot of roast beef, because it's got tons of protein in it, not because it's not "processed".
You can gorge on chips because they are carbs and fat and have almost no protein, not because they the process of creating the chips confuses your body.
Guess what? You can gorge just as heavily on homemade 4-ingredient bread (technically slightly less if you use bread flour, which is high in protein).
Makes sense. I'm on a low-carb diet for almost 10 years, it was the only one that worked for me, as has worked for my dad (he follows it since he was 33, now he is 73 and strong as an ox). One side-effect of this diet is look for better food - most if not all processed foods have carbs, so you are forced to eat vegetables, different meats, etc. to avoid food boredom. I ate more fish and lettuce in the first year of diet than in my whole previous life.
A category of food that had escaped me as highly processed was food at specific kinds of restaurants. David Kessler has an eye opening chapter "A visit to Chili's" in his book, The End of Overeating.
Everything they serve at chili's, even seemingly innocuous things like a chicken breast meal have been made or modified to make them hyper-palatable, easy to chew, swallow, and overeat.
For non-American's, chili's is a sit down chain restaurant where you order off a menu. Other comparable restaurants are Applebee's, and TGI Fridays.
Indigenous people of South America chewed on coca leaves for 1000s of years. Then humans started processing it into cocaine. It became a problem then. We have effectively done the same thing to foods. Extracted the sugars and fats into refined form and combined them to create tasty but energy dense food with not much other nutrition.
Agreed. Seems to me the simplest explanation is that our bodies were calibrated over years of evolution eating "real" foods. Processed foods of any kind are significantly less likely to have the correct energy/satiety ratio.
Is 'ultraprocessed' a matter of physical processing? Chemical? Or is it actually about superstimuli, which may or may not actually experience a lot of processing? Cheese is a great example: all cheese is chemically processed milk, pasteurized cheese is also heat treated, aged cheese has more chemical changes, and finally "processed" cheese is also emulsified. Where's the line?
The article gives us "industrial food formulations made up mostly or entirely of ingredients... that are not found in a similar form and combination in nature." So a wedge of aged Parmesan is clearly ultraprocessed - even the natural lactose is gone! Somehow, I don't think that's what they're blaming obesity on.
It also references "frosted snack cakes and ready-to-eat meals from the supermarket freezer", which is one of the least helpful examples I've ever seen. Frosted snake cakes probably date back a few hundred years, but this obviously means to include Ho-Hos and exclude what you'd get at a tea shop. Ready-to-eat stir-fry can be normal stir-fry tossed in the freezer, perhaps with a stabilizer to sell it in stores. Or you could have a TV dinner with chicken nuggets, fitting exactly the same description.
The study described is interesting, and does control for some suspects like energy density. But "ultraprocessed" is not a chemical, or even a defined term. It's hard to see this as anything but preliminary work showing that there's a problem somewhere in a large set of foods, which now needs to be narrowed down.
> Unfortunately, there's no clear definition of ultraprocessed. Like is factory-made whole wheat break ultraprocessed? Canned pinto beans? Artisan cheese? Factory cheese?
The article defines "processed" and "unprocessed":
Processed foods add a few substances such as sugar, fat, and salt to natural food products, with the goal of improving preservation or sharpening taste. The category includes canned vegetables and fish, cured and salted meats, cheeses, and fermented drinks such as wine and beer.
Unprocessed foods are the edible parts of plants (such as seeds or roots or leaves) and animals (such as meat and eggs). The main processing of this food type is freezing, drying or pasteurizing to extend storage life. Salts, sugars, oils and fats are not added.
And the nature of ultraprocessed food:
Ultraprocessed foods often contain a combination of nutritive and nonnutritive sweeteners that, Small says, produces surprising metabolic effects that result in a particularly potent reinforcement effect. That is, eating them causes us to want more of these foods.
Another likely cause is that highly-processed foods often contain seed oils, which usually have high levels of linoleic acid. One of the effects of linoleic acid (amongst many others) is to increase appetite:
It seems like the typical "macronutrient analysis" does not provide a good metric for a food being "ultraprocessed" because in order to get the fat/carbohydrate/protein numbers, we essentially ultraprocess (in fact burn) the food while measuring it! Fat is extracted, protein is recorded by nitrogen content, and carbohydrates are counted by the weight difference in a calorimeter.
A few commenters have pointed to "dietary fiber" as that number on a food label which might warn of "ultraprocessing". This is reasonably close because the definition of fiber is actually dependent on digestion. It might be important to remember that fiber is properly understood as a metric, i.e. "indigestible fraction", rather than as a substance per se. For example, pureeing a piece of fruit reduces the satiety effect of consuming it:
This is a rather simple and compelling demonstration that simple substance-content analysis does not tell you everything you need to know about what you're eating.
TFA also comes close to explaining, in my opinion, the strange phenomenon with fad diets where they seem to work well for early adopters and not so well after they catch on. In the early stages of a fad diet, food manufacturers haven't caught on, and dieters are forced to prepare food from scratch. In the later stages, you buy the frozen bag of "paleo" chicken nuggets from the freezer aisle or you unseal a quart of "vegan" milk in the morning when you have coffee. These products are not the same thing eaten by someone who cut up raw chicken and rolled it in cashew flour, or someone who blended their own almond-milk.
"the strange phenomenon with fad diets where they seem to work well for early adopters and not so well after they catch on. In the early stages of a fad diet, food manufacturers haven't caught on, and dieters are forced to prepare food from scratch. In the later stages, you buy the frozen bag of "paleo" chicken nuggets from the freezer aisle or you unseal a quart of "vegan" milk in the morning when you have coffee. These products are not the same thing eaten by someone who cut up raw chicken and rolled it in cashew flour, or someone who blended their own almond-milk. "
This is a great hypothesis that's worth testing. I'd love to see some market research evaluating how many people at the real thing in specific amounts vs shifted to processed foods that merely had the label. Then, also if they overate those foods due to the convenience or taste.
The mechanism is plausible and the preliminary studies seem suggestive, but I read the article and I still can't tell you a workable definition of "processed", nor what the mechanism is beyond "artificial sweeteners screw with satiety" and "junk supermarket food is high in calories". The latter is clearly irrelevant since the studies referenced presumably keep caloric intake constant in an inpatient hospital setting. The former is a result I remember reading about as a teenager literally decades ago. So what is the article pitching?
What is "processing" and how does it contribute to confusing gut-brain signalling? The article lists kinds of food that we all agree are "processed", but I have no idea why I think they're "processed" the same way a dumb ML model might correctly classify something as a cow while having a nonsense mapping from feature space to outcome.
Not trolling. Can someone list a set of specific ingredients or techniques which are constituent of "processing", and how these things are connected to the article's mechanism? I am aware of past mixed research on artificial sweeteners and satiety, but clearly that's both an older finding and a mixed one, so the article is alluding to something more that isn't explained.
I read the article very carefully for that definition, and found that the conclusion of the study is nothing more and nothing less than "processed foods make you want to eat more" and that's what caused them to gain weight. They didn't control for calorie intake at all.
I feel dumber having bothered to read it. News flash, food that tastes good makes people want to eat more of it and that will make you gain weight. Film at 11.
Shit I could have told them that. Every last Cajun in Lafayette is bigger than a whale, why? Because Cajun food is the best damn tasting food in the whole country.
They should have added in my grandma's rice dressing and seafood gumbo as a third category. Would have blown 'processed food' right out of the water.
After a rather surprising amount of digging, I found the underlying study and the menu they used, and it seems there was no set of rules or ingredients. The "ultra-processed" diet included:
Canned corn
Deli turkey
Refried beans
Sour cream
Whole milk
Canned peaches
Scrambled eggs
Sausages
Blueberry yoghurt
Bagels
Cream cheeese
Canned chili
Frozen macaroni and cheese
Canned green beans
Peanut butter
Non-fat greek yoghurt
And so on. All major brands, but it's hard to detect a theme; a lot of the items are not especially "processed" in any way, and don't seem especially unhealthy. And many specific items seemed difficult to distinguish from items in the unprocessed menu. Is canned corn less healthy than fresh or frozen corn in some way? How? Some studies have shown that canned corn contains more available nutrients than fresh corn, so what is the theory here?
For another example, the ultra-processed menu had scrambled eggs made with liquid, pasterurized eggs from a carton; the unprocessed menu had an omelette made from fresh eggs. Does pasteurizing eggs make them unhealthy? If so, how, and what studies support this? If not, why bother including different egg dishes in the menus?
Or for another example, some of the ultra-processed meals used as a protein source Tyson brand steak; some of the unprocessed meals used Tyson brand "beef tender roast". What is the difference between these, and why do we think Tyson steak is bad and Tyson beef roast is good? Alternatively if we don't think there's a difference why use different products in the two menus?
If if we accept that the study did show an effect, it almost seems designed to obscure the underlying cause, since it was so aggressively scattershot.
One could also quibble about the choice of foods; the ultra-processed menu leaned hard into meat and carbs with little or no greens, while the unprocessed menu had lots of broccoli and other green veggies. But obviously you could construct a much healthier diet from the ultra-processed menu, or a much less healthy diet from the unprocessed menu. I love broccoli, but if you drown it in rich sauces, it's not going to do your diet many favours.
Similarly, why is it the unprocessed diet snack selection had unsalted nuts? Salt doesn't count as processed (right?) so was this just picked to try and make the snacks taste less good so people would eat less, or...?
I'm curious how it is that the bag of flour and the box of pasta ended up in the "unprocessed food" photo, but the loaves of bread ended up in the "processed food" photo.
Some bread is basically [flour, water, yeast] which wouldn't count as ultraprocessed, but the top hits for whole-weat and white bread respectively for bread at on instacart have ingredients listed below (notice both contain sweeteners, oils and salt, with the whole-wheat bread having 3 different sweeteners and the white bread just good-old HFCS). The first hit for dried pasta contained two types of flour, plus typical flour fortifications.
"Sure, meal portions today are larger, food more abundant, and many of us are eating more calories than people did decades ago. But with temptations so plentiful, almost all Americans could be overeating—yet a good number do not. That, Hall thinks, is the real nutrition mystery: What factors, for some people, might be acting to override the body’s inborn satiety mechanisms that otherwise keep our eating in check?"
1) everything they listed, 2) food tasting good > "my body is adequately satiated". This is not a mystery. We just don't want to admit that our food is very tasty, we're serving our people too much food, and that we have no self control.
The body may have an "inborn satiety mechanism", but that doesn't mean it rules our brain. My body sends me pain when I run too much and my knees hurt. Do I stop running? Not if running makes me feel good.
I would love to read the original publication. I'm curious if/how they factored in the use of high fructose corn syrup which is known to suppress satiation response and is common is processed foods.
Allas; the original paper is paywalled behind elsevier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31269427 You'd think that since it was publicly funded the public should be able to read it..
They pointed out also artificial sweeteners causing confusion in the response. It's not one smoking gun, it's a ton that end up all counting as "ultraprocessed food". I'm sure if we dumped out HFCS something else in there would end up performing the same function.
> Dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories, energy density, fat, carbohydrate, protein, sugars, sodium and fiber.
Hopefully they accounted for bioavailability of nutrients. The way I've seen this framed is you'll get more energy from powdered rice than an equivalent amount of whole rice.
That's my opinion too. In many cases 'processing' is basically pre-digestion, it makes things more available. Simple to process (for our bodies) often means tastier since it's preferable in a calorie-poor environment.
I didn't see preservatives in that list. Though some of the items like salt and sugar are preservatives, added preservatives also abound in processed foods. Since the goal of preservatives is to basically kill bacteria/fungus to prolong shelf life that would presumably have an impact on our gut flora, which recent studies have shown is actually fairly important to our digestion and weight gain.
I think it's more that ultra-processed foods typically have high amounts of sugars and carbs. Any diet where you remove sugar and carbs, you'll see weight loss. Diabetics demonstrate that our relationship with food is much more complex than most people think - for example, diabetics don't have to inject insulin if eating white cheddar cheese.
People should generally eat more protein in the form of meat, eggs, fish, nuts, cheese, etc. You feel fuller and with a little exercise you can quite easily turn it into muscle.
An important area on which a lot of nonsense is published. By some analyses over 80% nonsense. (When I look at the other material you often can't take any action based on it anyway.)
Some interesting observations in these comments, much better than you usually see.
Could even kick off an HN diet study? Detailed recording of everything that can be sensibly noted, you pick the dietary changes and do it for a long, long time. Something like that might cut through the clutter?
There's one aspect of this that's very lazily written: what exactly they mean when they say people ate "more" food.
The big open question for me - and what I've long thought was one of the main contributors - is caloric density. Were these people eating roughly the same volume of food, which just happened to have more calories when ultraprocessed? Or is the density about the same, and they are actually consuming a larger volume?
I think they mean total calories. My understanding is that the body has a sense of the caloric density of unprocessed foods, and adjusts the appetite accordingly (as in the example given for honey or other natural sugars; the taste prepares the body for the calorie load). But ultraprocessed foods confuse the body's ability to do this, causing people to eat more overall calories than they otherwise would, regardless of density.
But this begs the question for me, if you can count the calories of these ultraprocessed foods can they still contribute to a healthy lifestyle? I mean, let's consider that I eat ultraprocessed all the time, but in my calorie range, so I don't get obese; is it less healthy than for example vegan diet, or it doesn't matter that much?
That's the difficult part--the insulin spikes from ultraprocessed food will make you hungrier and eat more as well as lower your basal metabolism. "Calorie range" is a moving target.
It's not just calories, if you mostly ultraprocessed foods you're also probably lacking in vitamins, minerals, healthy fats, fiber, phytochemicals, get too much sodium, etc.
The multi-trillion dollar world ultraprocessed food industry is going to go into high gear to try to trick the public into believing that eating ultraprocessed foods is just fine and the fault for the obesity epidemic lies entirely elsewhere. In fact, I would say it is already doing it.
The obvious quick test to this question would be to look at countries where they have a lot less processed foods.
India as I understand has rising levels of obesity, yet their food seems a lot less processed than western diets - though someone may have more accurate information than me.
This seems like nonsense. There's baby formula in the top right corner: were they really feeding baby formula to grown adults in the lab trials?
Or did the authors of this piece just grab a bunch of foods from the grocery store and assumed they were related to the study?
I want a link to the actual study. Pictures like the above just piss me off. There's a lot of issues in health-reporting and diet reporting. Lots of "Ultraprocessed" discussion going on, but there's no definition of what "ultraprocessed" is.
Are you seriously telling me that __canned peas__ are highly processed? That's ridiculous. Especially in the face of highly-refined, enriched, white-flour in the "unprocessed" food picture.
Look: I get that Spam and frozen-pizza are "ultraprocessed" foods. But canned peas and Goya chickpeas are processed? Who made these photographs? They fed Spam to people in hospital, and these images are drawing conclusions about canned peas.
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I think there's something to be said about "Spam is bad for you" (actual study) vs "We fed Spam to 20 people in a hospital for 2 weeks, and we've concluded that Frosted Flakes and canned peas are bad for you". Unfortunately, this article feels a lot like the latter conclusion.
There's a PDF of the actual menu, although it's just as random. Apparently wheat flour pasta is unprocessed, but a wheat flour tortilla is ultra-processed, sure, okay.
Fiber has been one of the top factors in my own weight control. I've been vegan since the mid 90s, but was slowly adding extra pounds each year. I decided to go on an "if it doesn't have fiber, don't eat it" diet a few years back and lost 60 lbs in 6 months. It massively cut down the sugar and oil in my diet and has consistently helped me control my blood sugar.
One thing I learned is that satiety isn't just about the meal you just ate or how full your stomach just got. If your blood sugar spikes, no matter how big a meal you had or if you ate 4000 calories in one sitting, you'll be hungry again in 3 or 4 hours. Eating a high fiber diet, I can just eat one meal a day or even skip a few days of eating without ever feeling the kind of gnawing hunger I used to get within a few hours of having a full meal.
Aside from blood sugar, fiber is also important because high fiber foods, especially ones with any water content, are usually the lowest calorie density foods and you can eat much larger quantities than you can with highly processed foods. You have to be more careful of highly dehydrated ones like whole grain crackers and dried fruit, but they're still far better and harder to abuse than chips & candy.
I don't know why people concentrate on the amount of processing and de- and re-construction of food when it seems obvious that many foods are engineered to make them easy and compelling to consume in large quantities.
Ice cream is not heavily processed compared to the kind of protein bars that aspiring bodybuilders eat, but you can easily binge thousands of calories of ice cream in a single sitting. It's not so easy to binge protein bars, despite companies doing their chemical best to make them taste like candy.
Or compare those protein bars to the sweet, easy-to-eat bars (can't find brand names now) at Whole Foods that brag about having a small number of minimally processed ingredients. If you cram something full of honey or figs you can make it dangerously easy to feed your demons with while still being "natural" and "minimally processed." You won't see expensive bars sold to health-conscious well-off people implicated in the obesity epidemic, but that's a matter of class, not nutrition.
Why bother obsessing over abstract, ill-defined distinctions like "processed" or "ultraprocessed" instead of teaching people to recognize that companies are systematically and scientifically exploiting our human weaknesses for profit and ruining our health in the process? Educate people to look at a Snickers bar, or a bar full of honey and dried fruit from their fru-fru grocery store, and see a cold, calculated, predatory attack. Food companies attack the weaknesses in our eating behavior the way a lion seeks out the neck of a wildebeest. The lion doesn't specifically want the wildebeest to suffer and die; it just wants to eat its flesh. Likewise, Mars Inc. does not specifically want Americans to suffer from obesity and diabetes; it just wants to sell a lot of candy bars.
I suspect the obsession with these distinctions is motivated by the desire to find a positive story to address the obesity crisis with. Negative stories about food and eating are hard to sell to the public, who by and large (heh) just want to enjoy their food in an uncomplicated way. Not to mention that many people working in public health see them as a risk factor for eating disorders. Stigmatizing a category of food is a positive story because it promises us that once this subset of food is out of the picture, we can have an easy, healthy, uncomplicated relationship with food, without any need to address our own behavior. It locates the entire problem in a category of inanimate substances that can be purged from our world. It's a much happier story than saying we have desires and tendencies that don't always serve us, and that some of the most powerful forces in our society seem bent on making sure those desires and tendencies lead us to the worst possible place. But I suspect that eventually we'll have to face up to that, like we did with the tobacco industry, except that we'll have to accept the existence of the food industry and an indefinite, partly adversarial relationship with it.
> It's not so easy to binge protein bars, despite companies doing their chemical best to make them taste like candy.
Amusing anecdote - for some reason, after a night on the town in Hong Kong, I ended up back in my hotel room, ravenous, with nothing to eat but a box of 10 protein bars that had been gifted to me.
I tore through the whole box in under 10 minutes. My stomach did not thank me.
Is it a new theory tho? There is a chapter about this topic in The 4-Hour Body (2010). And I'm pretty sure Tim Ferriss isn't the author of the theory so it was known before this book.
Reading through most of the comments, a common theme for weight loss, seems to be cut out snacking in between meals and be mindful of what you eat (vegan or vegetarian or meat)
An important distinction in the article: It doesn't say that you gain more weight by eating processed foods, but that eating processed foods makes you want to eat more. In other words, calories from processed foods are not more powerful weight gainers, the impact on obesity is related to how it effects satiety & appetite.
The problem is control, especially when there is an over abundance of food, mostly crap (it takes some effort to find the good food) that is tasty and addictive.
Then you have alcohol, alcohol advertising and culture, food eating in culture (from dating at restaurants, to pizza for the team, visiting someones house and they make a 3 course meal and it's rude not to finish).
Basically losing weight or not drinking alcohol requires some degree of pushing aside social norms and not fitting in. Arguing with people and making them slightly confused, angry or concerned. Being an asshole (even though really you are not, you just want to choose what to eat).
In the UK it's madness. Not drinking at Friday lunchtime would be seen as weird if you have been seen drinking before.
It also means literally throwing away food in the bin to go to landfill. Someone gave you chocs for your birthday? In they go.
Yeah "smaller portion size" is simple but not easy!
This is not new at all. Ultraprocessed foods are usually supplemented with oils that increase inflammation and cause a variety of health issues. The guy who opened me up to this is PD Mangan, who I found out about from Taleb.
A Western-like fat diet is sufficient to induce a gradual enhancement in fat mass over generations. This study used mice and bred them over 4 generations. Each generation became fatter than the previous one.
http://www.jlr.org/content/51/8/2352.full
What was the key element of this “Western-like fat diet”? A high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. The omega-6 is due to a high amount of linoleic acid, of which seed oils contain a large amount.
The results show that high-fat diets, when that fat is composed largely of linoleic acid, made mice fat and that epigenetic changes likely drove the increase in fat mass over generations.
Notably, at a time where overweightness and obesity have steadily increased over generations in most industrialized countries, consumption of LA and ARA has increased. In France, an increase of 250% and 230%, respectively, occurred from 1960 to 2000.
The consumption of large amounts of linoleic acid, mainly from seed oils, is something new in the world. Humans didn’t evolve eating that much, which is around 10-fold higher than dietary requirements.
Decreasing the linoleic acid content to 1% of the diet reversed the obesogenic property of the high-fat diet.
Adding omega-3 fatty acids of the type in fish and fish oil also reversed the obesogenic properties of the diet.
Excess linoleic acid induces inflammation, a key factor in chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2012.38
The modern Western diet has been consumed in developed English speaking countries for the last 50 years, and is now gradually being adopted in Eastern and developing countries. These nutrition transitions are typified by an increased intake of high linoleic acid (LA) plant oils, due to their abundance and low price, resulting in an increase in the PUFA n-6:n-3 ratio. This increase in LA above what is estimated to be required is hypothesised to be implicated in the increased rates of obesity and other associated non-communicable diseases which occur following a transition to a modern Westernised diet.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269696521_A_high_fa...
Soybean oil and other seed oils are in almost all ultra-processed foods.
They might also be linked to the depression epidemic.
Men in the highest tertile (third) of linoleic acid intake had more than double the risk of depression.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19427349?dopt=Abstract
We saw above that linoleic acid leads to fat accumulation and insulin resistance.
People in the highest tertile of visceral fat had 6 times the risk of colorectal cancer as those in the lowest. Insulin resistance was associated with up to 4 times the risk.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19837793
The average American eats more than half of calories as ultra-processed food.
To stay lean and healthy, you must avoid the ultra-processed junk that passes for food among average people.
Eat whole, minimally processed foods. Meat, fish, eggs, fermented dairy, non-starchy vegetables.
And there you go making the same mistakes that a lot of people are. You're looking at the article, going "ok, this part confirms my bias that it's <one thing I'm passionate about>" and then not learning from the article.
Under capitalism, food is produced to be sold in as great quantity as possible, and therefore is designed to be addicting by their producers, large and small. It is possible to design food production to be healthy instead of craving driven.
Why inject the politics? Are you saying that all our problems would go away if we just had someone taking away our choices and telling us what to eat? They could plan out food production centrally. In five year plans. And people would would definitely no longer over eat.....
Your premise is true, but drastically oversimplified. And your conclusion doesn't follow at all. It's clear that there's a huge public health problem with obesity that needs to be corrected. In order to correct it, we need to know why it's happening. Is something causing people to consume more calories than before? Is something causing them to use fewer calories? The "classic" answer is that people are lazy and gluttonous, but there's a distinct possibility that other factors are in play making people crave food more.
Here, for example is a recent study by Harvard Medical School detailing how partipants on a low-carb diet burned more than 250 calories more then people on a high-carb diet.
Falling down faster than you go sideways causes crashes.
Falling down slower than going sideways causes getting into orbit.
This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed.
Except, well, if you want to actually do any rocketeering.
Vegan or Meat eater doesn't matter. It is always the amount and type (processed or non-processed/fresh) food that we consume is what makes an individual to gain or lose weight. I have reduced my weight without altering the type of food that I take with the following steps
1. Eat when you are hungry
2. Even when you are hungry, eat only a medium portion(your stomach can be half filled).
3. Reduce sugar in take (any form of sugar)
4. Include physical activities in your daily work / home life. Walking via stairs, cycling or walking to work etc.. you don’t necessarily need to do any dedicated exercise routines (well if u have time, its good to do).
5. Do not consume food after 7 pm. ( can take small portion of regional fruit if you are really hungry).
6. Most importantly, get a good sleep (10pm to 5am).
7. Get rid of all the measuring apps that you have in your phone, fitness, calorie calculator.. these are useless. Every human is unique in their nature and each individual needs certain amount of energy to do a work(differs from individual to individual) .. so we cannot set a common standard (BMI ) for all.
Always have time to cook fresh food on daily basis. I am from southern part of India and its very easy here to get fresh fruits, veggies, meat on daily basis. Mostly importantly, we buy on daily means and cook for the day. We never carry/food for the next day. Almost zero processed/frozen food. I believe processed food are the root cause for most of the health related issue that we face now a days.
wincy|6 years ago
It’s an interesting article, I hope to see more research on the subject.
cj|6 years ago
Although my weight has been trending downward, slowly, which is great since that's happening without trying to limit the amount I eat at all. That's very different from when I wasn't vegan, my weight would always trend slowly upward unless I was making a deliberate effort to cut back on calories.
BUT: I think the real reason I'm slowly losing weight on a vegan diet is the simple fact that eating a restricted diet (ANY restricted diet) requires you to think about and analyze absolutely everything that enters your mouth. It introduces a level of mindfulness that just wasn't there when eating an unrestricted diet. For me, this has had the side effect of also cutting out most processed food (read: junk food) from my diet, even though most junk food is vegan. I'm convinced this is the biggest value of being vegan.. it just makes you think about everything you buy at the grocery store, everything you order when out to eat, etc.
Another commenter calls this "paying attention to what you eat" - I think that's right on target, however cliche it may sound.
RandallBrown|6 years ago
I remember watching a video of two women, one skinny, one overweight, who were good friends. They said that the skinny one always eats way more food, but doesn't gain any weight.
They had a camera crew follow them both around and it was true that the skinny woman ate larger meals. The difference was all the time in between. The skinny woman didn't eat anything, while the overweight woman was snacking regularly.
The total calorie counts for the day were much larger for the overweight woman.
maxharris|6 years ago
It's much healthier when it's bound up in a lot of fiber, as you find it in unprocessed fruit. The soluble and insoluble fiber form a protective barrier that reduces the total amount and rate at which it is absorbed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yda8RtOcVFU
colechristensen|6 years ago
Confirmation bias: people who try new diets and hate them probably talk about it a lot less.
Placebo: people getting caught up hearing about how everyone with their diet feels so much better are convinced they feel better too
Gut fauna: any change, regardless of what it was, causing a population shuffling inside the gut
Avoiding "something": any change, regardless of what it was, involved exclusion of one specific thing which was a sensitivity/allergy/poorly digested/feeding a particular gut bacteria
Thoughtfulness: any change required people to be much more conscientious about what they ate which led to different habits, one of which was critical to feeling better
Lies and exaggerations: diet and nutrition has become a kind of religion replacing God in an increasingly atheist society, some people act with strange quasi-religious zeal for their personal health belief set
I tend to not believe anything anybody says about nutrition. Evidence for anything fits into three categories: guessing, anecdotes, extremely specific cause-and-effect studies without real-world conclusions. The fourth category of believable, properly blinded, controlled, long term human studies does exist but the volume is very low.
Pxtl|6 years ago
I mean we have one group handwriting about gluten and meanwhile one of the tastiest vegan foods is pure gluten.
jl6|6 years ago
To reinforce the overeating-junk-food theory, my weight loss has slowed as I have discovered alternative vegan treats and snacks.
SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet|6 years ago
It's pretty simple really: they're paying more attention to what they eat, meaning they take in more reasonable amounts of calories as a side effect.
Ultimately it is all about calories. Source: lost and kept off 150lbs, no thanks to fad diets.
dcolkitt|6 years ago
I suspect this also works across meals as well. For example traditional Thai, Mexican or Italian food tends to be very caloric and palatable. Yet traditional societies in Thailand, Mexico and Italy tend to be much thinner than their counterparts that start consuming a typical American diet.
I think the explanation is that if you have lasagna on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, and curry on Wednesday, each meal is novel and delicious. In contrast if you eat tacos on Monday, tacos on Tuesday, and tacos on Wednesday, well tacos start to lose some of their appeal.
This suggests a diet, that I've yet to hear of. First cut out side dishes in favor of one-pot meals. You can still have a lot of variety of ingredients, but they're blended together in a homogenous, so that every spoonful is nearly identical. That eliminates the buffet effect.
Second, do something like meal-prep Sunday. Give yourself fairly wide latitude when picking out your meals. However, whatever you pick out, you're going to eat that same dish for pretty much every meal for a week straight. Even with your favorite your dish, my guess is that by the end of the week you'll find it barely appetizing.
A less drastic approach might be using variety as a pump to shift consumption across food groups. Strictly restrict variety in the least healthy food groups, while allowing it for healthy food. People who love desert can still eat their favorite desert, but you pick one single desert dish and that's the only desert you can have for a month. In contrast give yourself unlimited freedom to enjoy whatever green vegetable strikes your fancy.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4376392/
_the_inflator|6 years ago
Pls have a look into Michael Greger's How not to die, or Colin Campbell China Study.
Vegan is not always healthy. Plant based, unprocessed food does the trick. Fatty and salty french fries are technically vegan. There is a lot of junk food on the vegan side, which is also highly processed and features lots of sugar. It is not enough to stop eating dead animals, drinking milk or eggs.
However dismissing meat is inevitable for a healthy diet.
pas|6 years ago
ThrustVectoring|6 years ago
asveikau|6 years ago
I think you need to look at people on an individual basis. I start to get skeptical that what turned out to worked for me can work for everybody else. For me I think portion size and increased physical activity were big.
biomcgary|6 years ago
One thing to consider is that fructose is a metabolic poison that is poorly regulated by metabolism. Fructose bypasses all of the controls that glucose is subject to and forces lipid biogenesis in the liver (by mass action for the chemists). Consuming fat and fructose is large amounts is nearly guaranteed to give you a fatty liver.
On the other hand, anyone choosing to follow an "extreme" diet is likely to be more aware of their food intake than the average person and adjust behavior in various ways.
limomium|6 years ago
The way I've developed my diet is by observing energy level, mood, ethic, cost, convenience, and allergic-ish reactions, which my skin is prone to.
But there is near zero actionable advice on diet available to me, because weight is never an issue.
dawzy1|6 years ago
From my observation, it seems that people go on a diet because they know what they're eating isn't good for them or its too high in calories or it goes against their beliefs or something. So people are already suspicious of what they're eating but aren't overly thinking about what they're eating. By going on a diet you now need to think about what you're eating in order to meet the requirements of the proposed diet and therefore you are being more conscious about what you will and won't eat.
By doing this you are already a step ahead of people who might eat whatever they feel like which may include lots of highly processed high fat and/or high carbohydrate foods every now and then or more than they realise.
So when people say they went keto, or went paleo, or cut out sugar, or cut out fat and lost weight and/or felt better. I always ask them was it actually the diet, or was it because you were simply conscious and considerate about what you were eating due to the fact that you were trying to fit to a particular diet.
gameswithgo|6 years ago
Now you gotta work for food you don't really want.
Lazare|6 years ago
I have had a similar experience, but I've also known several people who have tried various diets and quickly dropped off them because it wasn't working for them. So while it's true that if you ask all your vegan friends if they enjoy being vegan, they'll probably mostly say yes, there's a huge possibility for selection bias/survivor bias.
The lesson I've drawn is not "pick a restrictive diet and you'll feel better", but more "some things work for some people but not others, and we have no idea why". :-/
blue_devil|6 years ago
In truth, science seems to be still very far from understanding the complexity of how our bodies process food.(One recurring constraint seems to be the difficulty in controlling for "real life eating").
Learning from "traditional" diets and cuisine might be the best practical way to go about eating healthy. A bit of a black hole approach, but practical for most people.
evv555|6 years ago
It can also be combination of the two food categories that causes issues. Insulin spikes from carb intake and dietary fat are not a good combination. At least according to diets like "Keto". Both of those diets tend to have lopsided intake of fats and carbs.
technothrasher|6 years ago
I'm back on the weight loss train (lost 60 pounds about ten years ago, and have to take 40 off again that I put back on slowly) and like last time, I mostly avoid these ultraprocessed foods simply because they're all way over my calorie budget.
benj111|6 years ago
john_moscow|6 years ago
I would suggest that it's rather about setting a goal, working hard towards achieving it, and seeing measurable results of your work.
newnewpdro|6 years ago
They tend to eat a lot of bread.
Semaphor|6 years ago
My pet theory is that all these diets make you way more conscious of what you are eating and all you need to do is find one you are happy with.
tempsy|6 years ago
taneq|6 years ago
Both groups cut a significant fraction of their intake calories and lost weight as a result?
dominotw|6 years ago
confirmation bias about "feeling better"?
bena|6 years ago
Mikeb85|6 years ago
toephu2|6 years ago
I can eat McDonalds everyday for a month and still lose weight.. how?
Order a small fries and a double patty cheeseburger. Eat nothing else during the entire day, drink plenty of water, and exercise for at least 30 minutes.
nearbuy|6 years ago
Why are canned corn and green beans ultraprocessed? They contain nothing but corn/beans and a touch of salt. If the salt is the problem, why do the unprocessed meals have added salt?
It looks like for the unprocessed meals, they chose a bunch of high in vegetables and whole grains, high fiber meals and chose a bunch of high calorie foods for the ultraprocessed meals [1]. No surprise people ate more calories when given the high calorie foods.
They say "dietitians scrupulously matched the ultraprocessed and processed meals for calories", but also that people were told to each as much as they like. What does that even mean? The calories can only be the same if you fix the quantity.
They don't define "ultraprocessed" or provide any mechanism for weight gain that would apply to their very varied selection of "ultraprocessed" foods.
The term "processed" is used to scare people about food, but the term is so broad that there can't possibly be a single mechanism by which various processed food would be unhealthy. Processing includes cutting, grinding, heating, cooking, mixing, adding ingredients, drying, deboning... basically anything you do to food. It's one thing to say a specific process, like adding sodium nitrite, is harmful. Making a blanket statement that all cutting, cooking and combining of foods is bad should raise a bit more skepticism.
If the article has a more specific definition of processed, they should mention it because their choices seem pretty arbitrary.
[1] Study meals: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachme...
dahauns|6 years ago
It looks like they were going for energy density (and composition, for that matter). BUT: They absolutely botched that one. While overall density was the same between the two groups, the energy density without beverages was almost twice as high in the ultraprocessed group. TBH, I'm a bit baffled how this huge discrepancy managed to remain in there.
I mean, they even admit as much:
Edit: Looking at the referenced paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182946/), it directly supports both these points: that food energy density quite significantly impacts total intake, and that using beverages instead doesn't (even in contrast to using liquid ingredients which _does_ work). Hoo boy.Pete_D|6 years ago
It looks like they're using the NOVA classifications[0]; there have been a couple of other articles relating to the same system posted here recently, e.g. [1].
The NutriSource in "Whole milk (Cloverland) with NutriSource fiber" is apparently 100% partially hydrolyzed guar gum[2], which I believe would qualify the combination as ultraprocessed under this part of the definition from [0]: "Substances only found in ultra-processed products include some directly extracted from foods, such as casein, lactose, whey, and gluten, and some derived from further processing of food constituents, such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils, hydrolysed proteins, soy protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar and high fructose corn syrup.". By contrast, skim milk (as used in the unprocessed menu) has nothing added, only removed, and so would fall under their Group 1 "unprocessed or minimally processed foods".
As for whether this is actually a useful classification system, I don't know. I have no reason to believe any of the studies are bogus, but taken as a whole, it does seem like an attempt to launder the naturalistic fallacy into some scientific respectability.
[0] http://archive.wphna.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/WN-2016-...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19930970
[2] https://www.nestlehealthscience.us/brands/nutrisource/nutris...
rootusrootus|6 years ago
vertigolimbo|6 years ago
alecco|6 years ago
zubspace|6 years ago
This is one of the reasons why some people (like me) can eat cake made of 50% sugar and butter nearly endlessly. It's an unnatural combination and somehow transitions our brains into zombie mode where we never feel satiated.
For that reason you can find that combination in a lot of processed food...
[1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/43673/5050-sugar...
dehrmann|6 years ago
chrisco255|6 years ago
And that study conflicts with this study, which shows a high-carb diet does have an impact on rat obesity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4497311/
jdm2212|6 years ago
nuxi|6 years ago
skohan|6 years ago
AlexTWithBeard|6 years ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
leethargo|6 years ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randle_cycle
SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago
I also won't eat a 50/50 lard/sugar mix. It's the fact that processing the food made it more palatable.
SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago
nordsieck|6 years ago
It doesn't make sense at all.
There is quite a bit of research on satiety - how full foods make you feel. It's actually quite straight forward: Protein, water and fiber make you feel full. Carbs do not. Mostly fat does not (you need a certain minimum amount of fat in your diet).
You feel full after eating a lot of roast beef, because it's got tons of protein in it, not because it's not "processed".
You can gorge on chips because they are carbs and fat and have almost no protein, not because they the process of creating the chips confuses your body.
Guess what? You can gorge just as heavily on homemade 4-ingredient bread (technically slightly less if you use bread flour, which is high in protein).
epx|6 years ago
heymijo|6 years ago
Everything they serve at chili's, even seemingly innocuous things like a chicken breast meal have been made or modified to make them hyper-palatable, easy to chew, swallow, and overeat.
For non-American's, chili's is a sit down chain restaurant where you order off a menu. Other comparable restaurants are Applebee's, and TGI Fridays.
https://www.chilis.com/
specialp|6 years ago
markk|6 years ago
_the_inflator|6 years ago
adrianN|6 years ago
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...
capableweb|6 years ago
joker3|6 years ago
badfrog|6 years ago
Bartweiss|6 years ago
Is 'ultraprocessed' a matter of physical processing? Chemical? Or is it actually about superstimuli, which may or may not actually experience a lot of processing? Cheese is a great example: all cheese is chemically processed milk, pasteurized cheese is also heat treated, aged cheese has more chemical changes, and finally "processed" cheese is also emulsified. Where's the line?
The article gives us "industrial food formulations made up mostly or entirely of ingredients... that are not found in a similar form and combination in nature." So a wedge of aged Parmesan is clearly ultraprocessed - even the natural lactose is gone! Somehow, I don't think that's what they're blaming obesity on.
It also references "frosted snack cakes and ready-to-eat meals from the supermarket freezer", which is one of the least helpful examples I've ever seen. Frosted snake cakes probably date back a few hundred years, but this obviously means to include Ho-Hos and exclude what you'd get at a tea shop. Ready-to-eat stir-fry can be normal stir-fry tossed in the freezer, perhaps with a stabilizer to sell it in stores. Or you could have a TV dinner with chicken nuggets, fitting exactly the same description.
The study described is interesting, and does control for some suspects like energy density. But "ultraprocessed" is not a chemical, or even a defined term. It's hard to see this as anything but preliminary work showing that there's a problem somewhere in a large set of foods, which now needs to be narrowed down.
magic_beans|6 years ago
The article defines "processed" and "unprocessed":
Processed foods add a few substances such as sugar, fat, and salt to natural food products, with the goal of improving preservation or sharpening taste. The category includes canned vegetables and fish, cured and salted meats, cheeses, and fermented drinks such as wine and beer.
Unprocessed foods are the edible parts of plants (such as seeds or roots or leaves) and animals (such as meat and eggs). The main processing of this food type is freezing, drying or pasteurizing to extend storage life. Salts, sugars, oils and fats are not added.
And the nature of ultraprocessed food:
Ultraprocessed foods often contain a combination of nutritive and nonnutritive sweeteners that, Small says, produces surprising metabolic effects that result in a particularly potent reinforcement effect. That is, eating them causes us to want more of these foods.
dilap|6 years ago
A very precise and plausible explanation of the effect at the level of specific hormones released can be found here:
https://www.bbdnutrition.com/2018/06/08/the-perils-of-food-p...
Another likely cause is that highly-processed foods often contain seed oils, which usually have high levels of linoleic acid. One of the effects of linoleic acid (amongst many others) is to increase appetite:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30261617
scythe|6 years ago
A few commenters have pointed to "dietary fiber" as that number on a food label which might warn of "ultraprocessing". This is reasonably close because the definition of fiber is actually dependent on digestion. It might be important to remember that fiber is properly understood as a metric, i.e. "indigestible fraction", rather than as a substance per se. For example, pureeing a piece of fruit reduces the satiety effect of consuming it:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566630...
This is a rather simple and compelling demonstration that simple substance-content analysis does not tell you everything you need to know about what you're eating.
TFA also comes close to explaining, in my opinion, the strange phenomenon with fad diets where they seem to work well for early adopters and not so well after they catch on. In the early stages of a fad diet, food manufacturers haven't caught on, and dieters are forced to prepare food from scratch. In the later stages, you buy the frozen bag of "paleo" chicken nuggets from the freezer aisle or you unseal a quart of "vegan" milk in the morning when you have coffee. These products are not the same thing eaten by someone who cut up raw chicken and rolled it in cashew flour, or someone who blended their own almond-milk.
nickpsecurity|6 years ago
This is a great hypothesis that's worth testing. I'd love to see some market research evaluating how many people at the real thing in specific amounts vs shifted to processed foods that merely had the label. Then, also if they overate those foods due to the convenience or taste.
notafraudster|6 years ago
What is "processing" and how does it contribute to confusing gut-brain signalling? The article lists kinds of food that we all agree are "processed", but I have no idea why I think they're "processed" the same way a dumb ML model might correctly classify something as a cow while having a nonsense mapping from feature space to outcome.
Not trolling. Can someone list a set of specific ingredients or techniques which are constituent of "processing", and how these things are connected to the article's mechanism? I am aware of past mixed research on artificial sweeteners and satiety, but clearly that's both an older finding and a mixed one, so the article is alluding to something more that isn't explained.
vinceguidry|6 years ago
I feel dumber having bothered to read it. News flash, food that tastes good makes people want to eat more of it and that will make you gain weight. Film at 11.
Shit I could have told them that. Every last Cajun in Lafayette is bigger than a whale, why? Because Cajun food is the best damn tasting food in the whole country.
They should have added in my grandma's rice dressing and seafood gumbo as a third category. Would have blown 'processed food' right out of the water.
Lazare|6 years ago
For another example, the ultra-processed menu had scrambled eggs made with liquid, pasterurized eggs from a carton; the unprocessed menu had an omelette made from fresh eggs. Does pasteurizing eggs make them unhealthy? If so, how, and what studies support this? If not, why bother including different egg dishes in the menus?
Or for another example, some of the ultra-processed meals used as a protein source Tyson brand steak; some of the unprocessed meals used Tyson brand "beef tender roast". What is the difference between these, and why do we think Tyson steak is bad and Tyson beef roast is good? Alternatively if we don't think there's a difference why use different products in the two menus?
If if we accept that the study did show an effect, it almost seems designed to obscure the underlying cause, since it was so aggressively scattershot.
One could also quibble about the choice of foods; the ultra-processed menu leaned hard into meat and carbs with little or no greens, while the unprocessed menu had lots of broccoli and other green veggies. But obviously you could construct a much healthier diet from the ultra-processed menu, or a much less healthy diet from the unprocessed menu. I love broccoli, but if you drown it in rich sauces, it's not going to do your diet many favours.
Similarly, why is it the unprocessed diet snack selection had unsalted nuts? Salt doesn't count as processed (right?) so was this just picked to try and make the snacks taste less good so people would eat less, or...?
The menu PDF is here if anyone is curious; https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008/attachme...
The methodology here seems SUPER bad.
mumblemumble|6 years ago
aidenn0|6 years ago
Whole Wheat Flour, Water, Sugar, Wheat Gluten, Raisin Juice Concentrate, Soybean Oil, Yeast, Cultured Wheat Flour, Molasses, Salt, Soy Lecithin, Grain Vinegar, Citric Acid, Soy, Whey.
Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast. Contains 2% or Less of: Soybean Oil, Salt, Soy Flour, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ammonium Sulfate, Calcium Sulfate, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Propionate (Preservative), Enzymes
Sources (for some reason instacart had some ingredient lists and ralphs' website had others but neither had ingredient list for both):
https://www.instacart.com/store/items/item_152519229
https://www.ralphs.com/p/kroger-enriched-white-sandwich-brea...
https://www.ralphs.com/p/barilla-farfalle-pasta/000768085010...
kazinator|6 years ago
What? They aren't being whacked with hammers or given electric shocks.
And, regarding "more people", whatever is unethical for 500 people is unethical for 5.
peterwwillis|6 years ago
1) everything they listed, 2) food tasting good > "my body is adequately satiated". This is not a mystery. We just don't want to admit that our food is very tasty, we're serving our people too much food, and that we have no self control.
The body may have an "inborn satiety mechanism", but that doesn't mean it rules our brain. My body sends me pain when I run too much and my knees hurt. Do I stop running? Not if running makes me feel good.
pkaye|6 years ago
pr0tonic|6 years ago
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
bjornsing|6 years ago
So this is considered a “privilege” among researchers and scientists in this day and age... It used to be what separated science from pseudoscience.
jascii|6 years ago
Edit: previous link was an erratum. Original:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31105044
SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago
dehrmann|6 years ago
Hopefully they accounted for bioavailability of nutrients. The way I've seen this framed is you'll get more energy from powdered rice than an equivalent amount of whole rice.
hnick|6 years ago
I didn't see preservatives in that list. Though some of the items like salt and sugar are preservatives, added preservatives also abound in processed foods. Since the goal of preservatives is to basically kill bacteria/fungus to prolong shelf life that would presumably have an impact on our gut flora, which recent studies have shown is actually fairly important to our digestion and weight gain.
Shorel|6 years ago
We should repeat this kind of studies. This methodology should be encouraged.
I just have a small doubt about a particular point: it mentions 'a very low carbohydrate ratio'.
But this is not clear at all.
Is 30% of carbohydrates very low? So far some studies actually claim this.
Is it 5% of carbohydrates, like the ketogenic diet proponents claim is necessary to be in a ketogenic state?
For me, the proportion of carbohydrates that can be considered very low actually makes too big a difference to not to dive further.
bArray|6 years ago
People should generally eat more protein in the form of meat, eggs, fish, nuts, cheese, etc. You feel fuller and with a little exercise you can quite easily turn it into muscle.
MikeGale|6 years ago
Some interesting observations in these comments, much better than you usually see.
Could even kick off an HN diet study? Detailed recording of everything that can be sensibly noted, you pick the dietary changes and do it for a long, long time. Something like that might cut through the clutter?
Izkata|6 years ago
The big open question for me - and what I've long thought was one of the main contributors - is caloric density. Were these people eating roughly the same volume of food, which just happened to have more calories when ultraprocessed? Or is the density about the same, and they are actually consuming a larger volume?
jgwil2|6 years ago
katsura|6 years ago
hx87|6 years ago
That's the difficult part--the insulin spikes from ultraprocessed food will make you hungrier and eat more as well as lower your basal metabolism. "Calorie range" is a moving target.
drdrey|6 years ago
xvilka|6 years ago
woodandsteel|6 years ago
collyw|6 years ago
India as I understand has rising levels of obesity, yet their food seems a lot less processed than western diets - though someone may have more accurate information than me.
dragontamer|6 years ago
This seems like nonsense. There's baby formula in the top right corner: were they really feeding baby formula to grown adults in the lab trials?
Or did the authors of this piece just grab a bunch of foods from the grocery store and assumed they were related to the study?
I want a link to the actual study. Pictures like the above just piss me off. There's a lot of issues in health-reporting and diet reporting. Lots of "Ultraprocessed" discussion going on, but there's no definition of what "ultraprocessed" is.
--------
EDIT: Here's the next photo:
https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/201...
Are you seriously telling me that __canned peas__ are highly processed? That's ridiculous. Especially in the face of highly-refined, enriched, white-flour in the "unprocessed" food picture.
Look: I get that Spam and frozen-pizza are "ultraprocessed" foods. But canned peas and Goya chickpeas are processed? Who made these photographs? They fed Spam to people in hospital, and these images are drawing conclusions about canned peas.
-------------
I think there's something to be said about "Spam is bad for you" (actual study) vs "We fed Spam to 20 people in a hospital for 2 weeks, and we've concluded that Frosted Flakes and canned peas are bad for you". Unfortunately, this article feels a lot like the latter conclusion.
Lazare|6 years ago
There's a PDF of the actual menu, although it's just as random. Apparently wheat flour pasta is unprocessed, but a wheat flour tortilla is ultra-processed, sure, okay.
agentdrtran|6 years ago
pesmhey|6 years ago
oraknabo|6 years ago
One thing I learned is that satiety isn't just about the meal you just ate or how full your stomach just got. If your blood sugar spikes, no matter how big a meal you had or if you ate 4000 calories in one sitting, you'll be hungry again in 3 or 4 hours. Eating a high fiber diet, I can just eat one meal a day or even skip a few days of eating without ever feeling the kind of gnawing hunger I used to get within a few hours of having a full meal.
Aside from blood sugar, fiber is also important because high fiber foods, especially ones with any water content, are usually the lowest calorie density foods and you can eat much larger quantities than you can with highly processed foods. You have to be more careful of highly dehydrated ones like whole grain crackers and dried fruit, but they're still far better and harder to abuse than chips & candy.
moate|6 years ago
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fiber+on+satiety&hl=en&...
dkarl|6 years ago
Ice cream is not heavily processed compared to the kind of protein bars that aspiring bodybuilders eat, but you can easily binge thousands of calories of ice cream in a single sitting. It's not so easy to binge protein bars, despite companies doing their chemical best to make them taste like candy.
Or compare those protein bars to the sweet, easy-to-eat bars (can't find brand names now) at Whole Foods that brag about having a small number of minimally processed ingredients. If you cram something full of honey or figs you can make it dangerously easy to feed your demons with while still being "natural" and "minimally processed." You won't see expensive bars sold to health-conscious well-off people implicated in the obesity epidemic, but that's a matter of class, not nutrition.
Why bother obsessing over abstract, ill-defined distinctions like "processed" or "ultraprocessed" instead of teaching people to recognize that companies are systematically and scientifically exploiting our human weaknesses for profit and ruining our health in the process? Educate people to look at a Snickers bar, or a bar full of honey and dried fruit from their fru-fru grocery store, and see a cold, calculated, predatory attack. Food companies attack the weaknesses in our eating behavior the way a lion seeks out the neck of a wildebeest. The lion doesn't specifically want the wildebeest to suffer and die; it just wants to eat its flesh. Likewise, Mars Inc. does not specifically want Americans to suffer from obesity and diabetes; it just wants to sell a lot of candy bars.
I suspect the obsession with these distinctions is motivated by the desire to find a positive story to address the obesity crisis with. Negative stories about food and eating are hard to sell to the public, who by and large (heh) just want to enjoy their food in an uncomplicated way. Not to mention that many people working in public health see them as a risk factor for eating disorders. Stigmatizing a category of food is a positive story because it promises us that once this subset of food is out of the picture, we can have an easy, healthy, uncomplicated relationship with food, without any need to address our own behavior. It locates the entire problem in a category of inanimate substances that can be purged from our world. It's a much happier story than saying we have desires and tendencies that don't always serve us, and that some of the most powerful forces in our society seem bent on making sure those desires and tendencies lead us to the worst possible place. But I suspect that eventually we'll have to face up to that, like we did with the tobacco industry, except that we'll have to accept the existence of the food industry and an indefinite, partly adversarial relationship with it.
avinium|6 years ago
Amusing anecdote - for some reason, after a night on the town in Hong Kong, I ended up back in my hotel room, ravenous, with nothing to eat but a box of 10 protein bars that had been gifted to me.
I tore through the whole box in under 10 minutes. My stomach did not thank me.
ggregoire|6 years ago
woodandsteel|6 years ago
victor106|6 years ago
dmcclurg|6 years ago
ineedasername|6 years ago
acruns|6 years ago
quickthrower2|6 years ago
Then you have alcohol, alcohol advertising and culture, food eating in culture (from dating at restaurants, to pizza for the team, visiting someones house and they make a 3 course meal and it's rude not to finish).
Basically losing weight or not drinking alcohol requires some degree of pushing aside social norms and not fitting in. Arguing with people and making them slightly confused, angry or concerned. Being an asshole (even though really you are not, you just want to choose what to eat).
In the UK it's madness. Not drinking at Friday lunchtime would be seen as weird if you have been seen drinking before.
It also means literally throwing away food in the bin to go to landfill. Someone gave you chocs for your birthday? In they go.
Yeah "smaller portion size" is simple but not easy!
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
ccffph|6 years ago
https://twitter.com/Mangan150
Let me dump some info though for more discussion.
A Western-like fat diet is sufficient to induce a gradual enhancement in fat mass over generations. This study used mice and bred them over 4 generations. Each generation became fatter than the previous one. http://www.jlr.org/content/51/8/2352.full
What was the key element of this “Western-like fat diet”? A high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. The omega-6 is due to a high amount of linoleic acid, of which seed oils contain a large amount.
The results show that high-fat diets, when that fat is composed largely of linoleic acid, made mice fat and that epigenetic changes likely drove the increase in fat mass over generations.
Notably, at a time where overweightness and obesity have steadily increased over generations in most industrialized countries, consumption of LA and ARA has increased. In France, an increase of 250% and 230%, respectively, occurred from 1960 to 2000.
The consumption of large amounts of linoleic acid, mainly from seed oils, is something new in the world. Humans didn’t evolve eating that much, which is around 10-fold higher than dietary requirements.
Decreasing the linoleic acid content to 1% of the diet reversed the obesogenic property of the high-fat diet. Adding omega-3 fatty acids of the type in fish and fish oil also reversed the obesogenic properties of the diet. Excess linoleic acid induces inflammation, a key factor in chronic disease such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2012.38
The modern Western diet has been consumed in developed English speaking countries for the last 50 years, and is now gradually being adopted in Eastern and developing countries. These nutrition transitions are typified by an increased intake of high linoleic acid (LA) plant oils, due to their abundance and low price, resulting in an increase in the PUFA n-6:n-3 ratio. This increase in LA above what is estimated to be required is hypothesised to be implicated in the increased rates of obesity and other associated non-communicable diseases which occur following a transition to a modern Westernised diet. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269696521_A_high_fa...
Soybean oil and other seed oils are in almost all ultra-processed foods. They might also be linked to the depression epidemic. Men in the highest tertile (third) of linoleic acid intake had more than double the risk of depression. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19427349?dopt=Abstract
We saw above that linoleic acid leads to fat accumulation and insulin resistance. People in the highest tertile of visceral fat had 6 times the risk of colorectal cancer as those in the lowest. Insulin resistance was associated with up to 4 times the risk. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19837793
High waist circumference is associated with 2 to 3 times the risk of colorectal cancer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7847643
One of the worst ingredients found in ultra-processed food is seed oil. Soybean oil is the most common. Seed oils cause obesity and increase the risk of chronic disease, like cancer. https://blog.aicr.org/2017/06/13/processed-foods-calories-an...
The average American eats more than half of calories as ultra-processed food. To stay lean and healthy, you must avoid the ultra-processed junk that passes for food among average people. Eat whole, minimally processed foods. Meat, fish, eggs, fermented dairy, non-starchy vegetables.
SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago
asjw|6 years ago
[deleted]
tehjoker|6 years ago
merpnderp|6 years ago
magwa101|6 years ago
notadoc|6 years ago
Using more calories than are consumed causes weight loss.
This is rudimentary physics, there are no new theories needed to explain it.
badfrog|6 years ago
chooseaname|6 years ago
> “Ultraprocessed” foods seem to trigger neural signals that make us want more and more calories, unlike other foods in the Western diet
Eating more calories than burning them isn't being set aside by the new theory.
kasperni|6 years ago
Here, for example is a recent study by Harvard Medical School detailing how partipants on a low-carb diet burned more than 250 calories more then people on a high-carb diet.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-11/bch-ldc11121...
UnFleshedOne|6 years ago
Except, well, if you want to actually do any rocketeering.
hx87|6 years ago
rakeshsrr|6 years ago
1. Eat when you are hungry 2. Even when you are hungry, eat only a medium portion(your stomach can be half filled). 3. Reduce sugar in take (any form of sugar) 4. Include physical activities in your daily work / home life. Walking via stairs, cycling or walking to work etc.. you don’t necessarily need to do any dedicated exercise routines (well if u have time, its good to do). 5. Do not consume food after 7 pm. ( can take small portion of regional fruit if you are really hungry). 6. Most importantly, get a good sleep (10pm to 5am). 7. Get rid of all the measuring apps that you have in your phone, fitness, calorie calculator.. these are useless. Every human is unique in their nature and each individual needs certain amount of energy to do a work(differs from individual to individual) .. so we cannot set a common standard (BMI ) for all.
Always have time to cook fresh food on daily basis. I am from southern part of India and its very easy here to get fresh fruits, veggies, meat on daily basis. Mostly importantly, we buy on daily means and cook for the day. We never carry/food for the next day. Almost zero processed/frozen food. I believe processed food are the root cause for most of the health related issue that we face now a days.