From the article:
> Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a recent observational study from Harvard University, for example, found that whereas some upfs, such as sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. Dr Astrup warns that the current classification risks “demonising” a lot of healthy food. Insights from Dr Hall’s work could therefore help refine the understanding of upfs, paving the way for more balanced and useful guidelines.
This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless. I look forward to the study noted in the article comparing high-density vs. hyper-palatable. I strongly suspect the study will show its a combinatorial effect... but we'll see.
I think there's some fudging of the terms here. When the article is talking about "bread" being healthy- well, there's bread, and then there's bread. Supermarket bread (sliced, packaged) typically lists a couple dozen ingredients. Ordinary bread... you know, bread-bread, like the one some of us bake at home, is made of: flour, water, salt, leavening agent (yeast or sourdough for those as have the patience). Bread-bread is probably healthy especially if you make it with (expensive) wholemeal flours. But supermarket bread? I don't think so.
Same goes for breakfast cereals and breakfast cereals. e.g. there's oatmeal and weetabix that are basically just a bit of fiber, not the healthiest thing you can eat but won't kill you. And then there's ... well my favourite poison is Kellog's Smacks and it's basically just as nourishing as eating cardboard with sugar on top.
Nova makes this distinction already. “Freshly made” bread is considered category 3 (processed). That said, what distinguishes supermarket bread from freshly made bread?
Literally the only difference is typically some sort of preservatives, some added vitamins, and possibly a dough conditioner.
In general, bread is just not that healthy if you make the fluffy white kind. The preservatives and slicing have little to do with it. If anything, the added vitamins may make it healthier than something you make at home.
The biggest nutritional change in bread in what type of flour is used (and if any other grains/seeds are used). The bran and germ of the wheat berry contain a decent part of it's nutritional value in protein, fat and insoluble fiber. The more refined a flour is the less of those parts it contains. Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins from the endosperm.
What really sets apart the typical white flour seen in most processed products in the US is the bleaching process, which mostly serves to make the flour more visually appealing. It also destroys a large percentage of the micro-nutrients. For many flour products the added vitamins you mention are added back in making the flour "enriched", but really this is just trying to match the nutrient profile of unbleached white flour. It's unlikely the added vitamins you see in the nutrition label alone would make a bagged, commercial pan loaf healthier than even the equivalent you would make at home.
> Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins
That doesn't match my experience, at least in the US. Per 1/4 cup:
KA organic unbleached white flour - 0 vitamins or minerals
Arrowhead Mills organic unbleached white flour - 5 mg calcium, 36 mg potassium
Bob's Redmill organic unbleached white flour - 7 mg calcium, 41 mg potassium
Caputo 00 - 9 mg calcium, 0.2 mg iron, 48 mg potassium
These levels aren't remotely close to decent.
Lack of whatever mythical micro-nutrition you speak of in bleached white flour is not going to meaningfully make any difference in folks dietary outcomes. It's certainly not what is making people fat, or what is making them crave to eat too much bread.
the root cause, at least for bread, is pretty simple; US supermarket bread has a lot more sugar than freshly baked bread, because sugar is a preservative.
You’d be wrong about that, though.
Wonder bread white has 140 calories, 1.5g of fat, 5g of protein, and 29g of carbs for two slices. 5g of claimed added sugar.
In comparison, a recipe I’ve used to make very good white bread (the zojirushi recipe for their bread maker, for reference) has, for an equivalent weight of bread: 137 calories, 2.2g of fat, 3.9g of protein, and 24.8g of carbs. The recipe has roughly 2.5g of “added sugar” per that bread weight.
I wouldn’t consider 4g more of carbs per equivalent weight, or 2.5g more sugar, to be a “lot” more sugar.
You can't really tell how much sugar there is in baked bread simply based on the amount added in a recipe.
Yeast ferment sugar, so depending on how much yeast you have, how active they are and the fermentation time, a small amount of sugar can easily be long gone by the time the bread comes out of the oven.
I mean, that’s double the added sugar. The US recommends only 50g of added sugar per day. And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread; in the US breakfast mainstay that is peanut butter and jelly, both the peanut butter and jelly also usually have sugar.
> And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread;
Aren't you? What meal typically has more than 2 slices of bread? A sandwich is two. Breakfast meals where toast is used is typically 2 slices.
And, if we limit ourselves to the 50g of added sugar a day, I'd say 10% of that for a component of one meal is pretty reasonable.
I was regularly eating around 8 to 10 thick slices per day of bread at one point
* 4 for breakfast as toast
* 4 for lunch to make 2 sandwiches (1 sandwich would be too small and I would be hungry all afternoon)
* sometimes another 2 with soup or an evening snack.
I think that speaks more to your diet than anything else. Regardless of the amount of added sugar, that’s an absurd amount of carbs to be getting just from bread and cannot be particularly healthy, no matter the type of bread.
That is a surprising assertion, given that eating the majority of one's calories in the form of bread was the normal human experience for thousands of years - practically since the beginning of agriculture - throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa!
"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.
Let’s not use thousand year old traditions based on poorly understood nutritional science to guide today’s practices.
If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).
What is your point? That doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Thousands of years is literally nothing on an evolutionary scale. Modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years.
Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.
My point? If you think a staple food vast numbers of human beings have relied on for literally all of recorded history (not to mention thousands of years prior) is "not particularly healthy", then perhaps your definition of "healthy" is a little too exalted for everyday use.
Again, “literally all of recorded history” is literally meaningless. I also find it bizarre that you would find something as simple as a well balanced diet (i.e. one humans enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution) as an “exalted” definition of healthy.
I can't eat supermarket bread for that reason. I didn't grow up in the US and find the bread here too sweet. (i.e. any added sugar)
I bake my own bread (can't remember the last time I bought some) without sugar.
You don't need sugar if you use sourdough starter with an overnight fermentation in the fridge.
most definitely not. sugar doesn’t even make top-10 list
Subway "bread" had too much sugar to be classified as a bread in Ireland
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/03/919831116/irish-court-rules-s...
Not saying it’s the top ten ingredients of supermarket bread but it certainly has more added sugar than homemade bread
There's a cool book I didn't finish White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. It talks about the history of store bought bread supplanting home baked bread, and the marketing wars waged both for and against store bought bread. I'm gonna start it up again and I recommend it.
> But supermarket bread? I don't think so.
Why? The point of the quotation was to question if this was a problem in the quantities listed. I know I’d rather eat whole grain enriched supermarket bread than refined white flour bread from some low protein source wheat.
The whole grain bread is definitely preferable, but it is still very likely to have added oils, gums, and/or preservatives. I think their main point is that supermarket bread is rarely made of just bread. There are exceptions but that requires one to first take the time to identify them and then fork up the extra dough (punintended).
In Australia, our supermarket bread almost always has “vegetable oil” in the ingredients. They can’t even be bothered sticking to one type of vegetable oil or listing which ones they use.
I’ll take the home bread
Because they use the oil for how it changes the texture, not for the taste. So corn oil is just as good as soy oil is just as good as canola... and they're going to use whatever is cheapest.
Yup. This is standard in the US for most product ingredient listings I'd say.
In NZ pretty much every supermarket bakes their own bread which to me seems same like bakery or home bread.
Where I live, our supermarkets bake "bread-bread" every morning and once in the afternoon! We also have bakeries here that do the same.
I bake bread at home nearly weekly, it goes stale and crumbly in about 3 days at room temperature and moldy by 7. I bought some pita and didn't use it all up. It was still soft, pliant, mold-free after 2 weeks. I tossed the thing, never going to buy it again.
Why? Are you scared of perfectly good products?
If you added preservatives to your bread it wouldn't stale quickly either. Add a small amount of white vinegar to your bread and it will stale much less quickly.
The question is what kind of preservatives. Formaldehyde is a preservative. Acetic acid is a component of long-ferment lean dough such as sourdough, and an insignificant component of short-ferment (~2 hours) enriched dough, such as sandwich bread. It will not help with enhancement and preservation of texture, in this case the gelatinization of starch in the finished product.
Unless you're suggesting that the pita bread you threw out was preserved with formaldehyde, there isn't much of a question here. Taking issue with bread keeping its freshness is in-and-of itself no bad. If you have issue with a specific preservative, perhaps discuss that specificity.
Let us go back to the beginning. Are you saying home-bake bread which molds in 7 days is comparable to store-bought bread which does not mold in 7 days. OK then, in which we have nothing to argue about. I have no scientific source to cite one is better or worse than the other. By all means, buy and consume bread that does not mold for a long time. That sounds good.
When Carlos Monteiro decided to operationalize UPFs by giving them a definition (laymans terms: UPF is one ingredient you wouldn't find in a traditional kitchen and wrapped in plastic) Kevin Hall from the US had the same reaction as you and decided to make a multi-million dollar experiment to disprove the definition proposed by Dr. Monteiro. Result: People who ate unprocessed lost weight, and the other group gained weight. (Groups were exchanged after 2 weeks and saw similar effects).
A link for other people who are interested in this: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...
Obesity and diabetes are western societies biggest health issues and the best research we have is a small n for a 4 week trial. Clearly there’s regulatory capture at play here.
Once we better understand what is driving the poor health outcomes we can work back and better classify problem foods and ingredients. Right now it’s all a bit unknown and doesn’t seem to have the right resourcing. There’s research that shows that UPFs are so simple that the body gets all the bad stuff in all its unfettered glory. Compare that to a date fruit, very high in sugar, but packed with fiber, the body metabolizes the date much more slowly, no sugar spike and gets some nutrition
I agree it leaves a lot to be desired but i wouldn't say it's totally worthless. It's clearly identifying something and even a poorly understood adherence to avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier. Overall though we obviously need to come up with better terms for this
> avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier
UPFs are defined in a way where you could replace them with essentially identical foods that only count as "processed" by swapping out a couple ingredients with nutritionally identical ingredients (e.g. replace HFCS with sucrose).
The research on UPFs doesn't actually compare ultra-processed food with similar "processed" foods.
So if you replace a pie containing HFCS with a kale salad, yeah it's probably healthier, but there isn't really evidence that replacing an "ultra-processed" pie containing HFCS with a home-made "processed" pie containing sucrose that otherwise has the same nutritional content is healthier (there is some researching showing that fructose can be harmful but the glucose/fructose content of HFCS isn't significantly different from sucrose).
If there is no direct comparison between similar ultraprocessed foods and processed foods, the research doesn't actually show that ultraprocessed foods are bad in a way that homemade processed foods aren't, in which case I'm not sure what the point of defining ultraprocessed foods as a separate category is.
> there is some researching showing that fructose can be harmful but the glucose/fructose content of HFCS isn't significantly different from sucrose
Indeed a lot of people ignore this. Still it is worth pointing out that
a) a higher glucose content due to sucrose based sweetness helps absorbing fructose in a home-made cake.
b) the ultra-processed cake likely got added a fair share of sugar alcohols (keeping it moist) which for a single digit percentage but still significant portion of the population interferes with fructose absorption leading to fermentation in the gut.
c) the longer and cold storage of the industrial cake will lead to an increase of recombined starch which is harder to digest.
(a, b due to fructose transport from gut less efficient than for glucose and the transport part relying on presence of glucose. Some people suffer from fructose mal-absorption where the main transport mechanism is not working and the backup mechanism can be blocked by sugar alcohols)
Adherence to avoiding UPFs, by the current Nova classification, would lead to most people having to radically change their diets, assuming you actually follow the Nova classification of UPFs to a tee. And assuming they're already reasonably healthy, there would be no meaningful health benefits I suspect.
Potentially there could no noticable health improvements but potentially far less health degradation over time when you think about things like risk of type-2 diabetes with high sugar and high-UPF diets.
But it's true that we mustn't focus only on UPFs but it is looking more and more like a significant factor (even if the definitions could be improved).
Again, I’m not saying “all UPFs are safe/healthy”. I’m saying the definition is worthless when you include potato chips and protein bars in the same category.
> sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.
I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.
Likewise breakfast yogurt could be either yoplait “yogurt” or plain unsweetened actual yogurt, or anything in between.
One is basically gelatinized sugar and the other is pretty healthy. If one’s classification doesn’t easily distinguish those two, that’s absurd.
one has added sugar and the other not, it’s clear which one is ultra processed
That doesn't make any sense. If I have a bowl of oatmeal, and I sprinkle sugar on top, it does not magically become ultra-processed.
Well if the sugar is ultra-processed, yes it does, doesn't it?
No, it does not, since ultra-processed, though not a strictly defined term, does not include household ingredients like granulated sugar or brown sugar. If you happen to have a jar of HFCS in your cabinet then that would quality.
Well then it is a worthless term. Both granulated sugar and HFCS are processed foods. Corn syrup is a household ingredient. No idea why you think a bit higher percentage of fructose changes anything.
Corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup are two different ingredients, although they share some words. One is 100% glucose and the other also contains fructose (usually 42% or 55% fructose), produced by chemically altering the corn syrup. We process glucose and sucrose differently and it affects taste, satiation, digestion, and more. I agree that the terminology is useless, by institutional intention.
> chemically altering the corn syrup.
And where does corn syrup come from? From squeezing corn? The sugars in corn don’t start as glucose either (they’re starches).
Besides, at home, bakers easily make “HFCS” themselves by adding any weak acid to table sugar to make invert sugar (an HFCS 50 equivalent).
> We process glucose and sucrose differently
Tell that to some southerners about their sweet tea. This simple distinction isn’t that metabolically interesting for day to day life (or explaining the prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndromes). Concentrations in a serving and mode of delivery are far more important. You can pretty easily get metabolic syndrome from excess glucose as well as sucrose. Altering smell and moisture content are more impactful variables.
Sucrose readily hydrolyzes to glucose and fructose via sucrase in the small intestine, it and HFCS become equals (no, Mexican coke isn’t healthier you dumb hipsters, just eat a piece of fruit already). If it wasn’t you’d get massive diarrhea from eating it. So sucrose vs HFCS isn’t nearly as distinct.
> and it affects taste, satiation, digestion, and more.
The most important distinctions go beyond the relative concentrations of the simple sugars. A fresh fruit doesn’t have the same insulin spiking and metabolic syndrome inducing potential as plain Karo syrup or a (Mexican) Coke, even though its relative percentage of fructose is higher or similar.
it's pretty processed compared to sugarcane at least
So homemade bread is ultraprocessed because the wheat was processed into flour?
From what I understand, technically yes.
I think there’s a lot of work to be done on categorisation but the underlying principle tends to be fairly decent: the more stuff you do to your raw ingredients, the less healthy they become.
No, homemade bread would be NOVA group. 3. The flour itself is group 2 (processed culinary ingredients.) Mixing the group 2 ingredient (flour) with group 1 ingredients (water, yeast, salt) and baking it makes it group 3 (processed food.)
If you added something like Xanthan Gum to your "homemade bread", that would make it group 4 (ultra processed foods.)
Thanks for the correction!
Homemade bread is a processed food, not an ultra processed food.
You can process wheat into flour at home. You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.
>You can process wheat into flour at home. You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.
That statement seemed off, so I poked around a little and, yes you can make granulated sugar from sugar cane at home[0].
[0] https://shuncy.com/article/how-to-make-sugar-from-sugarcane-...
>You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.
That's obviously false.
The refined sugar you buy in the store ('table sugar') is clarified with phosphoric acid and bleached using a number of other chemicals. In addition to this, it goes though a number of other industrial processing steps that you would not be able to perform at home. Hence, it is 'highly processed'.
So you can make it at home using scary chemicals that you can easily buy online. You can't just say 'industrial processing' and 'chemicals' and be believed.
It does make sense if we're talking about yogurt. The sugary yogurts sold at super markets etc don't have sugar sprinkled on top, but mixed in. Normally, you can't do that.
If you make yogurt the standard way [1] and try to add sugar to it while it's still a fluid, it will all sink to the bottom and then you'll just have some yogurt with a layer of sugar on the bottom. If you add it when it's not a fluid anymore, then you'll have a layer at the top. If you try to mix it up in between you'll break it up [2] and end up with mush; with sugar mixed in.
The only way I can think of to add sugar to yogurt and ensure it is evenly mixed throughout its mass is to use some additive, probably some kind of stabiliser. I suspect that's what makes this kind of yogurt qualify for the ultra-processed category.
Check the ingredients on your favourite yogurt. They should say: milk, yogurt culture. End of transmission. If there's anything else in it, then I would say there's a good claim it's been over-processed.
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[1] Bring milk to boil or use UHT. Let cool to 45° C (113° F). Add lactic ferments (Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus - readiest source: yogurt). Keep warm. Do not disturb. Wait. Enjoy. Scales up to industrial level (and is dirt cheap to boot).
[2] That's called syneresis - that's when you put a spoon in and then find a little puddle of milky fluid in its wake a few hours later. You've broken apart the jell'0 like structure of the yogurt's curd, i.e. the coagulated milk solids, and caused the milk fluids to leak out.
There are many brands of yogurt with "fruit on the bottom" or otherwise unmixed that use plain sugar. Not every store-bought product is the worst possible version of a store-bought product. There's a huge variation.
>> Not every store-bought product is the worst possible version of a store-bought product.
I agree with that for the general case but my intuition is that if someone's selling you something ready-made and pre-packaged, that you can easily make yourself (yogurt with fruit mixed in), then that's because they want to charge you extra and force you into a choice -of ingredients- you possibly wouldn't make.
For example, the yogurts with fruit I've had in the UK were just not very good yogurts, and the fruit were just not very good fruit. The yogurts were the thin and tasteless stuff that seems to be typical of anywhere outside the Balkans (I'm Greek) and the fruit were basically preserve, with added sugar. Why do you need added sugar with fruit? Because the fruit is under-ripe and probably too sour to eat in the first place.
You have to think of the economics a bit. Yogurt is cheap to make and most people won't pay a premium for it. Also it's sour and many people (again, outside the Balkans) don't like that. So companies will add sweeteners and sweet admixtures, like jam, honey or fruit to make it more palatable. And of course to make that financially viable they have to drop the quality of the ingredients. And that's where the additives come in: they improve packaging, transport and distribution, even as they degrade taste and nutrition.
I think you're ignoring the hundreds of higher-end brands that are trying to appeal to people like us. Some are still shit, some are, by all possible accounts, actually amazing.
> If you try to mix it up in between you'll break it up [2] and end up with mush; with sugar mixed in.
Are you sure? Won't the sugar just dissolve into the water that is part of the yogurt? Or if a granule texture remained, just mix in sugar syrup?
I've definitely mixed honey into yogurt and put it in the fridge and it was fine the next day, no separation or anything. Why do you think you'd need a stabilizer?
>> Are you sure? Won't the sugar just dissolve into the water that is part of the yogurt? Or if a granule texture remained, just mix in sugar syrup?
Nope. The fluid you're trying to mix the syrup in is milk, already a stable emulsion of proteins, sugars and water. Try mixing sugar (well, corn) syrup in that and see how long it stays mixed in. Once you stop mixing and the mixture comes to rest, the syrup starts sinking to the bottom. Better drink fast, and it sure sets faster than it takes for yogurt to set.
Check out the ingredients on any chocolate milk. There's always a stabiliser, usually a caragenaan. That's to keep the corn syrup and chocolate powder from separating from the milk. Back Home in the Old Country (when I was a kid in Greece) the stores sold a chocolate milk which was just milk with cocoa and some sugar. When you bought it from the store you could see that the milk and solids had separated, and there was a darker layer at the bottom, where all the chocolate and sugar had set. So you had to shake it well before drinking. Nobody makes that anymore, now all the chocolate milks have a stabiliser, so you don't need to expend your precious energy shaking the bottle. All those wasted calories. We don't want that. I guess.
For similar reasons, when you mix honey in your tea you need to keep a spoon in to stir it often, or it all goes to the bottom.
>> I've definitely mixed honey into yogurt and put it in the fridge and it was fine the next day, no separation or anything. Why do you think you'd need a stabilizer?
Because I know yogurt. I basically eat yogurt every day. I even make it myself some times (see my recipe above). Are you sure your yogurt did not have stabilisiers in it?
Thanks for the info! Fascinating. It's the explanations like these that keep me on HN.
This is an incredibly bizarre comment - I buy unsweetened yogurt and sometimes mix honey in before I eat it.
My comment is about adding sugar to yogurt during production. Please read more carefully (e.g. the part of the comment that explains how it's made and why sugar can't be added at that moment).
>The only way I can think of to add sugar to yogurt and ensure it is evenly mixed throughout its mass is to use some additive, probably some kind of stabiliser. I suspect that's what makes this kind of yogurt qualify for the ultra-processed category.
What?? I can't be the only one that gets plain greek yogurt and adds a tablespoon of honey or agave syrup and mixing it evenly before adding some granola + fruit. It's not that hard, and it's definitely not ultra-processed.
Honey and agave syrup have oligosaccharides that act as stabilizers. Fructans in agave, specifically.
As does molasses like when making refined sugar. Most unrefined sources of sugar naturally contain chemicals that act as stabilizers because it’s a side effect of many polysaccharides.
Right, but honey and agave syrup can also act as mild adhesives. I'm not sure anyone would consider them an adhesive any more than they would a stabilizer.
Also "Greek yogurt" is normally strained so it's already stabilised and is less subject to syneresis.
Note that even with the stabilising effect of straining and honey, real Greek yogurt (the stuff without additives) is never sold with admixtures. Once you mix stuff in you really are changing the consistency of the product and therefore its storage and transportation profile.
There's a scene in Silicon Valley [1] where Elrich Bachman is complaining that people keep taking his narrow spoons that he needs to mix in the jam in the little tub attached to his "Fa-Yeeh yogurt" (spelled "Fage". Surprisingly he pronounces it right! I'm Greek).
Bachman is talking about this product, Fage's split-cup Total yogurts:
https://gr.fage/total-2-split-cup
The reason there's a little tub and you have to tip it in and mix it up after you buy it is exactly because once you've disturbed the yogurt by mixing things in it, you don't have yogurt anymore but a gloopy goo with the consistency of thick cream and that just doesn't travel very well, especially if you want to be exporting your yogurt from Greece (where Fage has its plants) to the US (where Bachman complains about his spoons).
Also that gooey gloop is not what yogurt is supposed to be like. But I suppose that's just a matter of habit.
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Oats also don't grow as individual flakes, they are processed too. Separating and concentrating a single ingredient is "processing" it. If you want the healthiest oats, you probably need to grow them yourself and eat them directly off the stalk. I'm joking, of course - sort of.
There is a difference between processing an oat and the derivative ‘ingredients’ that are used to simulate the mouth feel of ‘ice cream’ - which includes a type of mold.
I agree the distinction is murky and can be easy to mock but at the end of the day something associated with these foods is making societies deeply sick and that should encourage us all to care about a solution. Even if you take a libertarian approach to diet, the economic cost of caring for a society with rampant obesity and diabetes impacts us all
> I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health.
You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout.
Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've gone much too far in demonizing it.
Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it.
Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it.
Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.
That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.
> That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic
there is no way to separate the discussion, doing so it’s just to avoid solving the issue that is to regulate refined sugar
Refined sugar is extremely concentrated compared to the natural sources. You need like 50 kilos of sugar cane to produce one kilo of refined sugar, and through multiple steps of heavy industrial processes.
You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.
Sugar is literally evaporated sugar cane juice. You need a lot of cane to make a little sugar because water is heavy. "refinining" is just separating out the molasses to make it white and so the molasses can be sold separately. You only need "heavy industrial processes" to make it profitably at scale.
The refined sugar you buy in the store ('table sugar') is clarified with phosphoric acid and bleached using a number of other chemicals. In addition to this, it goes though a number of other industrial processing steps that you would not be able to perform at home. Hence, it is 'highly processed'.
> You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.
In the natural environment, said other ingredients would be the angry swarm of bees?
Actually carbs are necessary and carbs are sugars. In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long. Personally I am not sure I am buying the narrative about fructose - but it is plausible that it might be bad - but glucose you'll have in your blood even if you don't eat any sugar - because your own body produces it if you don't get it from the food directly.
I wonder why nobody has started sweetening stuff with glucose as a 'healthy sweetener'. It is maybe 3 times more expensive than normal sugar - but I guess this is mostly because it is not a common product - cane sugar in Poland is of the same price - and the impact on the price of the end product would be marginal.
> Actually carbs are necessary
This is NOT true. Carbs are ONE form of energy that the body can use for fuel. Fat is the other one.
> people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.
I guess you're saying I don't exist?
For about 10 years, I haven't eaten carbs beyond the VERY rare cookie or two every other month and the insignificant trace amounts in above-ground leafy vegetables and the like. I'm not alone, there are lots of us who eat this way. Whole online communities, full of people who each have their own reasons. I did it for general health and fitness reasons, others do it to reverse their type 2 diabetes.
In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.
The planet used to be dotted with cultures that eat animals and fish primarily or exclusively for hundreds to thousands of years. The Inuit, Mongolian nomads, tribes in the Amazon, etc. They mostly don't exist anymore. (But not because of their diet.)
It's not a big group, but there ARE modern people who live on a carnivore diet for years on end and don't appear to suffer any notable long-term effects. Generally these are either extreme keto/paleo adherents, bodybuilders, or those who are trying to manage a medical condition.
> Angus Barbieri
So far as I can tell, he consumed yeast extract, which all my suppliers of assure me does in fact contain carbohydrates.
But perhaps Barbieri ate a special kind that didn't?
> In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.
Read a little about this on Wikipedia, that's insane! I'm still being stubborn and halfway refusing to believe there were no bad side effects, though lol
OK - I stand corrected on the point of consuming carbs.
But our body produces glucose anyway - so consuming or not does not change much. Brain needs glucose.
> Brain needs glucose.
That is actually incorrect, just a common misconception. You might want to read up on ketogenic diets, and specifically the state of ketosis itself.
If you have an ultra-low carb diet (<30 g/day) with only moderate protein consumption (<30% of daily required calories), then the body can’t produce enough glucose to power the brain. Instead, it starts to convert fats to ketones in the liver, and the brain actually runs fine on ketones as well. Alternatively, if you’re not underweight, you can fast for 24 hours with a moderate activity level, and should enter ketosis regardless of diet (as you start converting stored body fat into ketones to power the brain).
Interestingly, you then notice that the “low blood sugar” mental haze disappears as your brain switches over to ketones, and you kinda avoid the rollercoaster between mental highs and lows throughout the day that you usually get with a carb-based diet – instead, mental energy is kinda just at a constant “medium” throughout the day. It’s also easy to measure more objectively, if you pick up a glucose monitoring device + “keto sticks” from a pharmacy.
I saw this randomly the other day - what do you make of it?
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2020/10/excessive-ketone-me...
have you ever actually tried to read about indian diet on Amazon? ... it's not because they hunt(ed) fish and capybaras that you can make such a claim, go figure
i also tried to find a link for a paper here but it's been a long time but basically the population we have the smallest register of disease is an indian tribe around the coast of South America that mostly has a super high carbohydrate consumption compared to the rest of the world (will edit and comment if i find it)
edit: yeah, doubt i'll find but another counterpoint, go look at the rate of disease of Eskimos... they eat meat only!
> In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.
What is “long?” There are people living years on no carbs at all.
Who is living years without any carbs?
The Inuit, for starters. Oh, and me.
So far as I can tell, Inuit get about 15–20% of their calories from carbohydrates, because of all the glycogen from the raw meat they consume.
But I am only looking at summaries outside a bunch of paywalls, so I can't confirm the quotes on the wikipedia page.
There are no essential carbohydrates. Essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids, yes. Essential carbohydrates, no.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Emphasis on refined sugar.
Most food products, even meat in trace amounts, has some level of some form of sugar in it.
Added sugars are not needed in mass amounts for sure.
That is just eating disorder kind of thinking. Stop spreading it. You can eat sugar, it wont harm you. Pretty much anything harms you in super large quantities.
Sacharids are good for you in general, just like faits, protein and everything else.
If you don't eat sugar directly your body will produce it. And unless you plan on eating no fruits or vegetables I can't imagine a diet devoid of all sugar.
Maybe you can't imagine it, but lots of people do it all the same.
What you are referring to would be something akin to a hyper-strict keto diet, which I think nearly all medical professionals would consider ill-advised if not outright dangerous.
There is a lot of stuff I can't eat because the amount of added sugar is disgusting.
Yeah, but even a cup of celery contains a gram of sugar. Eating "no" sugar is preposterous. You could never eat any fruits or vegetables! But lots of people avoid excess sugar, me included.
> Eating "no" sugar is preposterous.
This is relatively easy for anyone on a carnivore diet.
It's actually not hard to eat a diet that doesn't have a lot of fructose. More difficult to avoid heavily processed carbohydrates that are absorbed too quickly.
Almost correct, except sugar consumption has been declining for decades. The peak was prior to 2000 IIRC
Yeah there used to be a children’s breakfast cereal called Super Sugar Crisp and the cartoon character promoting it in commercials was named Sugar Bear. Foods in the ‘70s and ‘80s were loaded with sugar.
Pretty sure this still exists and in the US it is called "Golden Crisp". I personally always loved it :)
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful.
The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol,
Alcohol is a literal poison that you should not consume at all. Sugar is a basic dietary requirement. Of course, all nutrients should be consumed in moderation, but that's not unique to sugar in any way.
> Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
How do you go from "Sugar should be consumed in moderation" to "Sugar should be ripped out of all foods and the body doesn't need carbohydrates"?
Why jump from a reasonable and sound observation to some ridiculous extreme nobody asked for?
I interpret it to mean that we shouldn't be adding sugar to any of our foods. The natural sugar in the foods we eat is plenty.
I wouldn't even go that far. A slice of birthday cake won't kill someone. Added sugars have their place, but we shouldn't be adding them where they aren't needed and we should consume them in moderation. It's wild how much random stuff has added sugar. I've even seen deli meat with added sugar. Who is asking for corn syrup to be pumped into their roasted turkey?
In side by side taste tests more people like the version with added sugar. That’s why they add it; it sells.
> Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.
> The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
Again, the body does not :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet
Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?
Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.
> Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?
You mean, is there any evidence aside from every person who manages their diabetes through diet alone? Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?
> It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.
You seem to be confusing the ketogenic diet with starving. That's not how it works. If you deplete your fat body's stores and get hungry, you simply eat some fat and then your body will burn it for fuel. If you decide to eat much more fat than your body needs, your body will store the fat as fat. But it won't do it quite as readily as with sugar/carbs, and you won't get food cravings mere hours after eating.
> Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?
We have longer life span. We are healthier then them. And we have also bigger muscles for those fitness oriented.
That article starts with
> The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate dietary therapy
Keto diet is low-carbs - not completely carbs free.
To split hairs, "low carb" means different things to different groups of people. Lifelong adherents of the keto diet put the limit at around 20g of carbs per day. But you can find research studies and the like where they take a normal Western diet (75-90% carbs) and reduce it to say, 60% carbs and then refer to THAT as "low carb."
It's not splitting hairs. Unless you are extremely physically active, even ~100g of carbs a day will inhibit ketosis where the liver converts fats into ketones for powering your brain and body. This is easily seen by using ketone strips to detect ketones in urine.
>The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.
Only in so much as that it will built glucose out of other things you eat if you don't eat carbs separately. Your body runs on glucose which is a carbohydrate.
Strong agree. The Nova classification is extremist and heavily useless. Yes if you come up with two classifications and one includes McDonalds burgers and the other doesn't you'll be able to show a health effect. Doesn't mean your categorisation is useful.
The poor categorization may be a purposeful obfuscation. If you have bad labels it becomes easy to have poor studies that are easily criticized, and entire movements or research fields for food safety can be dismissed. Instead of labels we need transparency on every last ingredient and process applied.
> Instead of labels we need transparency on every last ingredient and process applied.
Why not both? Let's list every ingredient on the label along with info on the processes involved.
I need something so that when I go get some food I know if it is good or bad for me. Bad is a range, somethings are bad enough to never eat, some are fine as a treat. Some are good in specific circumstance but bad in others. Somehow I want to cut through all that to know how to eat.
Do you really think it's not useful at all to know you can protect your health proactively with one classification system of UPFs, that is deemed a bit extreme?
Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, they're just not known to be healthy within one of many frameworks.
Instead of tearing down what we know works because it doesn't include the foods you deem healthy, why not advocate for more research into the foods in question specifically?
The history of nutritional advice studies is extremely noisy and full of questionable, later reversed discoveries that have been p-hacked into existence. I think people are right to be very, very wary of rejecting the null hypothesis about anything without extremely solid clear evidence.
I don't disagree at all, but is there anything ambiguous about the health benefits of avoiding UPFs as defined by the Nova classification system? It seems the criticism I was responding to was more about the classification system being too strict, rather than lacking clear evidence of health benefits.
Nova does not make any judgment on the healthiness of foods, to my knowledge. The problem is that people take the extremely broad classification of UPFs by Nova, infer health detriments, and then cast judgment on the overly broad UPF classification as if everything in that category is equally as bad.
Here's a reminder of the Nova UPF classification:
> Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.
A few items that stick out like a sore thumb to me regarding healthiness:
* How could sophisicated packaging, usually with synthetic materials impact health?
* How does making something highly profitably necessarily impact health?
* Nova's definition of something with 'no culinary use' is extremely biased in my view. How do specific sugars (each with specific properties that are useful) have no culinary use? How are protein mixes not culinarily useful?
* Nova's definition of 'cosmetic function' is also just.. stupid in my view. Flavors are cosmetic? Emulsifiers are cosmetic? By this definition, adding MSG to a food makes it UPF.
While I can't speak to all of your questions / criticisms, food packaging is responsible for releasing a wide range of chemicals that are either known or suspected to be harmful to some (men, pregnant women, etc) or all humans, including BPA, phthalates, xenoestrogens, per- and poly-fluorinated substances, and microplastics. I'm sure there are many others, those are just the ones that come to top of mind for me.
It's not hard to intuit, but yes it can be less useful owing to ambiguity and confusion. It would be less difficult to settle on a definition that does not lean so hard on "processing" and actually conveys what is problematic.
For example, "shelf-stable packaged foods with a large flour component, wherein the flour component is stripped of all fiber, with added fat, salt, and sometimes sugar". You can also include candy, soft-drinks and juice.
That doesn't tell you something is "ultra-processed", but it identifies more meaningful factors. These are typically non-satiating snack foods, very low in protein and fiber, but very savory with added salt and fat. The combination of refined flour, salt and fat seems to be of particular note (and sugar regardless).
Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.
But yes, I'd rather have a classification that clearly separates Coke and Cheez Doodles from actual foods. There are some multi-billion dollar lobbies to prevent that happening, though.
> Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.
I eat a lot of (plain) yogurt. But my kids often eat sweetened yogurt, which I've suspected is not-at-all-healthy. So I went to check the ingredients of several sweetened brands. I could be wrong but I don't see any of those you're concerned about explicitly mentioned. I do see "fructose" which seems like it could be just about as bad as HFCS? Or maybe the terms you use are generic and there's some specific ingredients that qualify? Or did I just get lucky with these examples I picked?
Examples:
Yoplait GoGurt Protein Berry Yogurt Tubes contains: Grade A Reduced Fat Milk, Ultrafiltered Skim Milk, Sugar, Contains 1% or Less of: Kosher Gelatin, Modified Food Starch, Fruit and Vegetable Juice (for Color), Tricalcium Phosphate, Potassium Sorbate Added to Maintain Freshness, Natural Flavor, Carrageenan, Yogurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus), Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3.
Danimals Smoothie Strawberry Explosion And Mixed Berry Dairy contains: Cultured Grade A Low Fat Milk, Water, Cane Sugar, Modified Food Starch, Contains Less Than 1% Of Milk Minerals, Natural Flavors, Fruit & Vegetable Juice (For Color), Lemon Juice Concentrate, Vitamin D3, Active Yogurt Cultures S. Thermophilus & L. Bulgaricus.
Added fructose seems bad for you. Specifically, a high ratio of fructose:glucose (which doesn't occur in nature) does something weird to your metabolism. Your gut uses some hack like detecting only glucose to trigger intermediate steps in the metabolism of both, and consumption of high fructose:glucose foods causes weight gain.
High fructose:glucose ratios definitely exist in nature.
Agave syrup is 4:1. Apples and pears are around 2:1.
Moreover, high fructose corn syrup is a bit of a misnomer. Most HFCS used in food are 42% fructose, 58% glucose. The ones used in soda are typically 55:45.
That makes even the latter's ratio lower than say, watermelon, papaya, pears, apples, mango, blackberries, etc.
> This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless.
It's quite funny that even 15 years after labeling UPF as such there's still a struggle to "officially" mark it as unhealthy and I don't understand why it should be challenged. I would think that most children growing up are being told that candy, fries and Gatorade aren't healthy foods. Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.
As mentioned in the article there are statistics that under the UPF classifications people are way more unhealthy both physically and even mentally. Shouldn't that be enough? Now a new study is needed to benchmark UPF that is low in fat, sugar and salt. Basically against a product class that hardly exists. I mean nobody eats like that. Most people put extra salt on their food, the Mediterranean diet somewhat the gold standard in good yet healthy food contains tons of fat and various cuisines from the region have rather sugary desserts.
I'd be fine classifying UPF as unhealthy and calling it a day. If food businesses want to explore "healthy" UPFs they should probably do so and take the burden to re-classify it as healthy. This seems like a quite Kafka-esque endeavor.
> Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.
(From a quick 30 second search) E300 is Vitamin C, E101 is Vitamin B2
And yes - I'm aware that vitamins that are naturally present are probably better than "fortifying" food - but still.
I've never seen Vitamin C listed as E300 on a label. So while you are correct, the heuristic (avoid E-numbers) works in practice.
OK but then why would a manufacturer ever use a E number - considering the stigma attached? Only when the other name "sounds worse"?
Is there a legal threshold where you have to use the E number?
Indeed, they’ll use E numbers to shorten the chemistry catalogue part of the list. Note the law requires sorting ingredients by weight, so these additives end up clumped together. You’ll end up with half a line instead of half a page.
Limited space on the label maybe :D Some of the real names of the E's are very long.
Yeah, anything good wont be listed as an E number, you use the name people recognize.
The best exception is high quality protein powder. Additional protein consumption is extremely healthy for you, short and long term. But it's technically an ultra-processed food.
It's probably better to each 4-5 chicken breasts per day instead of protein powder. But as far as I know there hasn't been a measured difference.
That's not a clear exception at all.
Within some mental model, isolated protein powder is healthy because we generally treat high protein consumption as low-risk for most people and recognize that protein isolates can be very effective for professional and amateur athletes to consume a lot of while building muscle.
In no way does that imply that these protein isolates are "extremely healthy" for the general public or even for anyone in the long term. There's just not any data to say that specifically (it's too niche to perform those kinds of studies), and far too little reason to make that assumption with confidence.
(And it's almost certainly a terrible idea for most people to eat 4-5 chicken breasts per day -- or a comparable amount of protein isolate powder. Please remember that most people are not living a gym bro lifestyle and shouldn't be following gym bro nutritional advice in the first place.)
Protein isn't bad for you and 4-5 chicken breasts is around 120g a day, a healthy amount for an adult. By way of comparison, indigenous people where I live ate hundreds of grams a day in their traditional diets. I've run into this whole "don't eat too much protein, oh man you will die!" nonsense meme before and I wonder where it came from.
> 4-5 chicken breasts is around 120g a day
Bad math? Per USDA standards, a single boneless skinless chicken breast has ~54 grams of protein; so 4-5 would be ~200-250g of protein.
Because that's grossly outside the norm for the general public, you're not going to find any evidence to support the idea it's a healthy amount for a typical person to consume for a long period of time. And likewise, you'll find little evidence saying what negative consequences it might have, if any.
You're welcome to make whatever assumptions you want to in that case, but there's not a lot of ground for anyone to convince skeptics who disagree with them. It's tenuous assumptions all the way down.
Regardless, in the real world, that also represents 1200-1500 calories of absurdly (mind-numbingly) high-satiety food and quite a lot of slow digestive bulk. Most people simply wouldn't be able to consume that while also eating a varied diet that provides them with adequate long-term nutrition. So it's probably a pretty bad idea for them to dedicate themselves to it, unless -- like some athletes and gym bros -- they have the further discipline to also stuff themselves of all the other stuff they need to eat while also not eating so much that they become overweight. Do you know many people like that? I'm not sure I've met more than a handful in my lifetime.
Whatever the impact of the very high protein consumption itself in some abstract theoretical kind of way, which we're far from having evidence into understanding, it's just terrible advice for the general public because of the secondary effects we might reasonably expect in practice.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...
> Moreover, epidemiological studies show that a high intake of animal protein, particularly red meat, which contains high levels of methionine and BCAAs, may be related to the promotion of age-related diseases. Therefore, a low animal protein diet, particularly a diet low in red meat, may provide health benefits.
It's possible to die of "protein poisoning" but you really have to be in a survival situation with no sources of fat. Hunters and trappers are known to have died this way when only lean meat was available in far northern winters. Maybe this is where the idea came from.
Consuming high amount of animal protein was pointed out by the urologist as one of the things I should evade. Apparently that contributes to development of kidney stones. So there’s at least one way in which it’s bad for you.
A high-protein diet can increase calcium and uric acid levels in the urine, raising the risk of urinary stones. I have experienced this, and got the cystoscopy to prove it. It sucked
A fries ultra processed? Potatoes cut into strips, cooked in oil, and salted. Is the deep frying what makes it ultra? Or is a pan fried chicken breast ultra processed since it is cooked in the same oil?
I agree. Classification of UPFs seems more to be a "religious purity" discussion than actuall classification of good/bad
Univariable classifications are usually not helpful, and this seems to just confirm it. In the same way "sugar free" or "fat free" make little sense
Why on earth do they include the word "ultra" when the definition is "literally any amount of any additive"?
Because the whole premise is being bike-shedded out of existence.
On paper, fruity pebbles and Cheerios are pretty similar. But the dyes, sugar, etc make it a very different product. Sorta how we pump sugar into yogurt, spray it on as a frosting and peddle it like it’s actual, healthy yogurt.
A great way to undermine the argument is to make the terminology and classification impossible.
> others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.
This surprises me. A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy, and I would have assumed are heavy contributors to poor health.
I don't see where your assumption is being challenged. "Breakfast cereals" is a very loose category. I would not conclude that Froot Loops lower risks of cardiovascular disease just because Ezekiel's Gravel Bits have been shown to do the same.
> A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy
Apparently "basically candy" is not the same thing as candy. That is a great find, lets us eat basically candy without the health consequences.
Wait until you learn about The Ice Cream Paradox:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...
40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated.
You can't reliably draw any conclusions from them. You have to use common sense and rules of thumb.
But some are better than others. The NIH is currently running a study (N=36, expected to complete in 2025) on ultra-processed foods where the participants are sequested as inpatients at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center's research facility and strictly monitored 24/7. They can't leave without a chaperone that ensures they're not cheating. They've done prior studies such as this one [2] (N=20) in 2019. In these studies, they switch the person's diet halfway through, in order to see if the effect is real. The participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the diets had the same amount of calories total, and the same calorie density. The results are striking; participants eating ultra-processed foods consumed more calories and gained weight while the other group lost weight. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/well/eat/ultraprocessed-f... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/
Even though I'm a scientist and thoroughly trained in statistics, the idea that we can to sequester 36 people and monitor diet 24/7 and made general conclusions doesn't sound completely right to me. Partly in the technical sense and partly in the "why do the folks working on human health get away with sample sizes that would be laughed about in any other field?"
I don't know enough about medical statistics to say, but I often see small sample sizes in studies where the effect size is expected to be high. That may be the case here.
There are too many variables in diet. If they study steak every meal vs rice and beans every meal they can come up with one. However most people are not that one-tracked either way. Sometimes the rich eat rice and beans, sometimes even poor manage to afford steak. For steak, did I mean beef, lamb, goat, pork... - this might or might not matter. There is also chicken, turkey, snake, deer, elk - and dozens more animals people eat which might or might not be healthy. OF each of the above there are different cuts (does it matter?), different fat levels (does it matter?). And that is just meat, how many varieties of beans are there, what about rice? What about all the other things people eat?
Do these other fields also study humans in controlled experiments?
I think it has to do with the sample to staff ratio. It's not enough to observe human subjects. You have to actively prevent them from going off the rails. It doesn't scale well when you increase the sample size. I guess we could replicate a similar experiment n-times and then do a meta study, but it's not ideal either.
How would you tackle the logistics of scaling up the above experiment?
Yes, the most common example would be clinical trials for drugs and other medical treatments- often have thousands of patients (with recruitment being the limiting factor). There are tons of ways that studies can go wrong, for example when patients don't take the treatment and lie (this is common) or have other lifestyle factors that influence the results, which can't be easily smoothed out with slightly larger N.
I don't know how to fix the nutritionist studies- I'm still pretty skeptical that you could ever control enough variables to make any sort of conclusion around things with tiny effect sizes. This isn't like nutritional diseases we've seen in the past, for example if you look at a disease like pellagra (not getting enough niacin), literally tens of thousands of people died over a few years (beri beri, rickets, scurvy are three other examples; these discoveries were tightly coupled to the discovery of essential nutrients, now called vitamins).
From my reading, that's not generally true. It all depends on the methodology. Safety or feasibility studies can use very small sample sizes. I've been reading safety studies on monoclonal antibodies like Cimzia, for example:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29030361/ (N=16)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28814432/ (N=17)
https://ard.bmj.com/content/83/Suppl_1/1145.2 (N=21)
Of course, these are not nutritional studies.
You should try reading the FDA approval for the drug; it was already approved before these publications (which aren't so much clinical trials as just medical research). The FDA approval has a whole paragraph about how the effect size was too small to demonstrate statistical significance, and the trials had n=300.
It's also indicated for use in a disease we don't understand, for people who didn't respond to all the previously approved drugs. Not a good example at all.
I'm not comparing these to the FDA approvals process, but to your claim that trials use thousands of patients. These three studies are ascertaining the pregnancy safety of a drug, irrespective of whether we understand the disease or what the response rate is.
Cimzia has been well-studied, and we understand why it works on autoimmune diseases like inflammatory arthritis. It has 6 FDA approvals for different indications, so your description of the drug itself is incorrect.
The sample size doesn't concern me as much as what does that force on their lifestyle and in turn do they apply. They probably are not getting the same exercise as a normal person (which runs the range from "gym rat" who gets too much to "couch potato" who barely walks).
> why do the folks working on human health get away with sample sizes that would be laughed about in any other field?
Because it's really hard and expensive to do such studies with more participants
>The participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the diets had the same amount of calories total, and the same calorie density. The results are striking; participants eating ultra-processed foods consumed more calories and gained weight while the other group lost weight. [1]
Did they eat the same amount of calories or more calories? People will eat more of tasty food and less of bland food. You could get the inverse result by giving bland ultra-processed food and tasty unprocessed food.
"use common sense" lol - the same common sense that people use when confronted with dyhydrogenoxide? the same common sense that people used if asked about sodium chloride? The same common sense about that tomato, mushroom, seaweed extract called MSG?
Can you please give your reference for that definitive statement. And what are 'nutritional studies'? Why wouldn't they include the research that led to the list of nutrient recommendations issued by USDA and similar publications in the UK, Norway, France, Australia and many other countries. No conclusions from them? I think there are. There is a truly vast literature on subjects nutritional so it's vital to be very specific.
Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.
The RDA and nutrient recommendations are the bare minimum so you do not die. Vast literature is ad populum fallacy.
Also consider that genetic background matters in nutritional matters and well... The populations under study have changed, and that's assuming you have a fairly similar background to a population and not very mixed.
And we are not even getting into how these things go down in practice, with heavy industry lobbying and what not...
TLDR, you are on your own in terms of optimal nutrition but as another commenter said "eat food, not too much, mostly plants"
They are not, they are recommended averages.
RDA for vitamin C is 60mg, but you can survive without getting sick on 5-15.
Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
My favorite plant is wheat, deep friend in peanut oil, covered in corn(syrup).
That's pretty good. Though it should be balanced with avoiding factory made food.
I personally think non processed meat is good for you, but that's a minor point compared to ultra processed vs not really processed foods.
I once argued with med students that Oreos (which are vegan) are not healthier than a steak.
Absolutely crazy and tbh frightening that anyone (let alone med students!) would think Oreos are healthier than a steak.
The reasoning of course is that processing and sugar content don't matter as much as any level of saturated fat.
The avoidance of factory food is part of the point. GP is invoking Michael Pollan from the Omnivore's Dillema, among others. By 'Food', Pollan specifically means to exclude the sorts of chemical-engineered vague nutrient simacrula you're talking about.
is the last one even widely accepted anymore
40-60% - that's a pretty large p-value and reasonable proxy for thumbs and sense.
What we need first is transparency. Complete information about every ingredient, its supplier, where it was grown, what process it went through, etc. then we can perform research without confusing and conflicting results. Unfortunately I’ve seen people fight state or local level labeling laws by falling for corporate propaganda, particularly from companies in the GMO industry.
I think adding labels to the product is only useful to a certain extent. There's a few things that stand out, like if a product has 70% DV sodium that's usually a bad sign, or "cheese product" tells you that it's not real cheese (for better or worse). But stopping to look at the ingredient list of every product you buy is time consuming.
This is where online food databases might work better. Scan the UPC/EAN with an app and the app can tell you which ingredients are generally safe, which ones to avoid. The recommendations could be personalized to your dietary needs or allow ratings from different organizations that might have varying criteria for what they consider OK vs bad.
Such apps exist but usually requires someone (volunteer crowdsourcing or paid) to input products into the system so it may not be complete or fully up to date. And as you suggested, supplier information and more detail on the processing isn't available. Having an international, public database of that information (with an API for app makers) could help make nutrition label apps -- or maybe even built into Google Lens -- much more accessible to the general public.
One hundred percent agree. Companies should be obligated to provide comprehensive information on the ingredients they use in producing the food they sell us. It seems so basic, but even small steps in that direction are always met with maximum industry resistance.
People don't understand that basic task like washing is "processing" the food and can be frustrating when talking to them about this subject.
That's not about understanding, that's deliberate obfuscation. If people cannot (or don't want to) distinguish between a faucet and a blender, there is no further discussion to be had.
I don't know if that is true when speaking to the general public about this. They usually think processed food means toxic chemicals were added.
Certain podcasters/influences/etc are absolutely misleading people either for the views or to sell people a "detox" tea they can drop ship from China.
Food that is merely washed might be processed, but is not ultra-processed according to the Nova classification [1]. There's an actual criteria that's being applied in these studies that concern ultra-processed food.
Brit here: the idea that "ultra-processed foods" are really bad for you is definitely something that's entered the general consciousness here, but I don't think I know anybody who has any kind of meaningful answer to what "ultra-processed foods" actually are.
If it couldn't be made outside a factory, it's ultra processed.
At what point does a bakery become a factory?
I personally would avoid pretty much everything that comes out of a bakery.
Ok, so when does a butcher shop become a factory?
When does a fruit farm become a factory?
Is candied bacon an ultra-processed food?
And even then, things made in a bakery can be made at home so I don't get how your above standard still makes any sense. Is homemade bread with flour milled at home ultra-processed as well? Candied bacon can be made outside of a factory as well. If so, it's not really a "was it made in a factory" argument now was it?
Ah yes, the ol' I can't tell a fruit farm from a factory shtick
Uninformed Average Joe here and I'm with GP. If bakeries are out of the question then I'd be questioning fruit and meat shops as well
Bakeries load their goods with sugar.
Typically you don't mix sugar with meat. Though I think that practice is unfortunately becoming more frequent.
> Typically you don't mix sugar with meat.
You're joking right? There's tons of meat dishes with fruit sauces in them dating back thousands of years. It's almost Thanksgiving, think adding cranberries to turkey is really just a product of 1950's marketing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fesenj%C4%81n
http://historicalrecipes.blogspot.com/2017/02/patina-de-pers...
Ah yes, the old completely ignore the question shtick.
And yeah, most fruit around me went through various inspection, sorting, washing, labeling, packaging, and potentially even cold storage places that are in big buildings with loads of trucks moving pallets of materials around with loads of automated machines. All things that seem very "factory". What is the final delineation where it goes from some guy in his backyard to a factory operation?
And I still ask, is candied bacon still a processed food if I slaughter my own pig and press my own sugar cane? What if I buy a pig belly and cure it myself? What if I get it pre-cured? At what point is my own kitchen a factory? I guess it's the point I get an oven because then I've got the equipment necessary for it to be a bakery and we all know bakeries are off limits too!
This guidance you're giving me isn't making much sense.
You can make bread at home.
with ultra processed flour and pressed seed oils :)
What separates "ultra processed" from regular flour? Isn't "regular" flower "ultra processed"?
Also, I'm not sure what bread you make at home but when I do make bread at home its pretty much just flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe a touch of honey. Maybe sometimes some extra herbs or other stuff, but not usually any oil.
> breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease
Breakfast cereals? That sugary stuff? Someone else said 40-60% of nutritional studies are not replicable. Sounds more like the whole field is BS.
Scream naturalistic fallacy all you like but I would absolutely avoid all chemical additives and go natural all the way. If humans haven't been eating it for thousands of years, I would absolutely avoid it.
This is the best advice. Also proportion should match historical proportion, ie. very little sugar most of the time.
Yep. It’s hard to trust anything, especially because in the US things that aren’t banned are allowed by default. Companies add new substances to products constantly, often just minor variations of something that was banned.
not all cereals have added sugar, I dont buy 40% added sugar, but rather 0% and 14% added sugar cereals