we need population control. a good way is to let people enjoy life fast, work harder, and pass away earlier. hence, processed food, stressful lives, high mortgages etc etc all create a good and compliant workforce. the billionaires need u guys to work for them.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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I think most people are missing the sarcasm here
I think the problem is deeper than what food is available. It’s in what time is available. We have to work so many hours to be able to afford to live. At the end of the day I am tired. My spouse is tired. We end up choosing something we can make quickly that’s affordable. Oftentimes, that’s something with processed ingredients, because we aren’t eating a salad every meal. You want a healthier population? Give them time to cook without losing all their free time.
Processed is a useless word. You gonna get sick from the pre-chopped broccoli?
Hence, they use the term ultra processed.
What about riced cauliflower? The issue is the type of processing, but I'd submit that is a distractio to the bigger issue. The problem is that the processing often results in foods that are easier and tastier to eat, resulting in over consumption.
I'm also wondering if portioning isn't also at play here with ultra processed foods.
For a snack, I might eat a bag of baked potato chips (pulling this from the above quoted article) or apple slices. I think for many people, it's natural to eat the whole portion in front of you, even past the feeling of satiated (not to be confused with the feeling of being full). Like, I don't know many people who throw away a bag of chips with just 2 chips left in it. So even if the flavoring of the chips is no longer even appealing to me (I got just enough saltiness fix), I'm likely to finish the bag because it seems weird to "waste" those last 2 chips. And now, I've consumed an extra 15+ calories that I didn't even enjoy. Compare to an apple for which, even if I'm kind of sick of it but still feel compelled to eat the whole thing, may be an extra +2 calories.
Multiply over multiple snacks per week.
Washington Post had an article about this with a lot more facts, a couple days ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/27/ultra-processed-foods-predigested-health-risks/
(temporarily free article on a mostly-paywalled site.)
@sinnerman That article is much better, thanks for sharing it! I'd never thought of ultraprocessing as predigestion before.
For a time, Kevin Hall, a nutrition and metabolism scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was also skeptical that ultra-processed foods were harmful.
To test the idea, he designed a study that compared what happened when men and women were recruited to live in a lab and fed different diets. In one phase of the study, the participants ate mostly ultra-processed foods for two weeks. Their daily meals consisted of things like honey nut oat cereal, flavored yogurt, blueberry muffins, canned ravioli, steak strips, mashed potatoes from a packet, baked potato chips, goldfish crackers, diet lemonade and low-fat chocolate milk.
In a second phase of the study, the participants were fed a diet of mostly homemade, unprocessed foods for two weeks that was matched for nutrients like salt, sugar, fat, and fiber. Their meals consisted of foods such as Greek yogurt with walnuts and fruit, spinach salad with grilled chicken, apple slices, bulgur and fresh vinaigrette, and beef tender roast with rice pilaf, steamed vegetables, balsamic vinaigrette, pecans and orange slices.
In both cases, the participants were allowed to eat as much or as little of the foods and snacks as they wanted.
“If it was really about the nutrients — and not about the processing — then there shouldn’t be any major difference in calorie intake between these two diets,” said Hall. “I thought that was going to be the result of the study.”
But, he added, “I was hugely wrong.”
When people ate the ultra-processed diet, they consumed substantially more calories — about 500 more calories a day compared to when they ate the mostly unprocessed diet. The result: They gained weight and body fat.
The researchers also noticed a difference in how quickly the participants consumed their food. They ate the ultra-processed meals significantly faster, at a rate of about 50 calories per minute, compared to just 30 calories per minute on the unprocessed diet.
Fascinating.
To say that this makes processed foods bad for you however is kinda ridiculous imo. Might as well tell people to only eat raw things because it has the least calories / most filling.
Bad food is bad for you, eating junk food is known to be a giant waste of calories and how it's prepared doesn't make it better or worse.
Outside of increased calories I have not seen any evidence that food being more "processed" is actually bad for you.
I'm not sure when this movement against junk food became a movement against processed foods but it's moving in the wrong direction. Plenty of shitty junk foods can have very little processing involved. And I'm convinced it's exactly those "low processed" junk food providers that are pushing all this bullshit.
I bought a bunch of expensive microwave meals on sale (6 or so that were originally $6 each, but bogo’d, so $3 each) for times I have to drop what I’m doing and be busy or gone for an extended period. Nice ones like beef and broccoli, mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, umami bowls. Imagine my chagrin when they ranged from 350-600 calories each, and nutrients were so minimal, they didn’t list a percentage of rda, but added sugar, sodium content and carb count were of the chart and besides for fat content, were the only things memorably listed.