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.
I consider myself a seasoned dieter (meaning I can manipulate my weight +/-10kg fairly easily). Over at least a dozen weight cuts/bulks, the most effective practice I've found is writing a meal plan, and writing down everything you put in your mouth.
Many people have started losing weight just by doing this - without actively changing their diet. It has a really profound subconscious impact on what/how much you put in your mouth.
The psychological/hormonal aspect of food is fascinating.
my weight is probably going +/-6kg, on a semi-week basis. When I eat, I eat a lot (fruits at will, legumes, fish vapor-cooked, honey, Camargues rice living in France, lentils). I think it's useless to weight yourself, it's easy to feel how much fat you've built, you then need to consume it first before re-eating (I'm around 60-62kg, 1.83m, with a thin morphology so it's not underweight)
I feel really well with that "lower-frequency" diet cycle, it's of course easier when working remote.
+/- 6kg is basically water. 1kg of fat is 8800kcal - 4 days of average adult's caloric intake. There's no way to lose 6kg in a week unless what you've lost is almost entirely water.
It's not very likely to happen with water either. 6kg of water is 6 liters, which is probably more than the amount of blood in their body. I have to question the measurements on the 6kg fluctuations, going from 60kg to 54kg in a week is serious.
That's true, but there is a lot of water in the body aside from the blood.
While most people will feel physical effects after losing 5% of their body weight in water, many can lose up to 8-10% without significant adverse physical or mental impact. Loss over 10% is considered serious dehydration.
World champion marathon runner Haile Gebrselassie famously won the Dubai marathon in 2005 with a 10% body weight loss during the race:
It's pretty common to cut 5-10kg in preparation for wrestling/judo competitions.
A natural 6kg fluctuation isn't inconceivable. I'm fairly sure I could get there starting dehydrated/carb-depleted and pounding a carb-heavy meal with a lot of fluids.
I've fluctuated about that much in 48 hours just going from eating a lot of food constantly -> fasting (no food, no water). Think about all the food and liquid you can pack into your stomach and intestines.
Seems crazy, but try it. I went from like 180lbs to low 160s. Of course, it comes back when you start eating and drinking again.
This isn't what people typically mean when they talk about weight loss, though. Which is why normally you hear recommendations for measuring your weight at the same time every day with an assumption that your eating patterns are roughly constant.
This, i find i can lose like around 2.5kg by fasting 2 days
1.5kg is usually water weight and 0.5 kg feels like food mass and the other 0.5kg fat loss. The water and food mass weight will come back once you start eating again.
I'll try to measure it, it's something like 58-59kg, after a long bike ride the sunday and 64-65kg after eating - I buy 10-12kg of fruits/legumes twice a week - so yes it's 80% water
Completely agree - but as a counter point too, this for me also led to anorexia (not going vegan, but a restricted, over-analysed diet). I changed my diet and started monitoring and analysing everything, combined with what must've been a vulnerable mental state, meant I couldn't rationalise eating anything. I'm talking under 700 calories a day for months on end.
One minute you're being mindful about your intake, the next you're stood paralysed in the chilled aisle physically unable to choose a meal as they're all "so bad".
If you're in tip-top mental health, then restricted diets can work. But for anyone reading who's dealing with proper body image or any other food related issues - just be careful please.
About a year ago I started being hypervigilant on my food intake: Three meals a day, no snacks, take a picture of everything. No other restrictions. In the past year I've lost 75 pounds...
> 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.
SO true. It's all about altering those marginal decisions that add up to something noticeable.
When I went vegetarian ~4 years ago I didn't feel noticably better either. But I eat meat when I go overseas - and after a week meat one or two meals a day I feel properly rubbish.
Being vegetarian has made my weight much easier to manage too - which is a helpful additional benefit.
Yeah. I have cut my meat intake by 99%+ - and for simplicity I describe myself as a vegetarian. But if I am overseas I will order a vegetarian menu option if there is one but I'm not going to drag my friends across town to find somewhere I know will suit me, so sometimes it means ordering a meat dish, especially in east-Asian countries.
It depends on the country, and sometimes city, of course.
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.
In weight lifting you have this concept of "hard gainers," who are generally men who want to gain muscle mass / weight, but can't seem to, "no matter how much they eat." A common refrain from them is something like "I ate a whole pizza on my own, and still nothing!"
Well, the moment they start actually counting their calories, it's the same story you just told. Sure, they ate a whole pizza on Saturday, but also nothing much else that day, and they ended up short of their caloric needs, and then every other day that week was even less, minus the occasional splurge that also didn't bring their average up high enough.
This goes for people who "can't" lose weight too -- when they start counting calories they are surprised to find that they eat a shitload of calories they didn't know about, most of which are empty of nutrition.
One way to reframe the question of calories is to start considering calories per week, instead of per day. You start to get the picture either way--whether you're trying to gain or lose--when you're thousands off your goal by day 3 and realize what a big adjustment you'll have to make during the next 4 days to make your count right.
I have seen this so many times anecotally too. It’s not even “metabolism” so much as it is how hungry people naturally get. It varies so much from person to person. I could easily eat 4000kcal a day and feel hungry if I have anything less than 2200 or so whereas I know “hard gainers” who struggle to eat more than 1000kcal in a single sitting.
However I don’t think it’s purely genetic/intrinsic. At least personally I have seen that after a period of dieting my natural hunger reduced to about as much as I had been eating.
Anyway, I agree that these restrictive diets work in general by making it easier/necessary to count calories and eliminate some junk food. Really, eliminating dense addictive foods and counting calories is probably all the vast majority of people need to do to lose weight
I am pretty sure it has mostly to do with your blood glucose level. Keto and Fasting are all about getting your blood glucose levels low enough and when you reach it your hunger usually goes away. I suspect people who eat a lot of processed foods also snack a lot. Every meal raises your blood sugar and makes you more hungry.
I thought this was me. I started tracking calories, sure enough I just plain old wasn't eating enough. Actually eating the calories planned made all the difference, although I felt stuffed pretty much all the time.
My pet theory-without-evidence is that diets like keto or vegan succeed largely because they force people to radically reconsider every single thing they're eating. When you impose harsh restrictions like "no animal products" you have to pay very close attention to everything you consume, which likely leads to more mindful eating and less passive consumption/overeating.
It's plenty easy to find vegan junk food. Pretty much any potato chip that doesn't have the name of a dairy product featured prominently on the label is going to be vegan. Go to most natural food stores, including Whole Foods, and you'll find far more shelf space being devoted to processed and junk foods than food that's actually healthy. Most of it with labels that work very hard to imply that sugar only has calories if it's made from something other than sugar cane.
That said, you're not likely to find the vegan equivalent of Twinkies at your local bodega, and that is worth something. But I'm guessing that a bigger factor is that choosing to go vegan or low-carb or whatever is tantamount to deciding to join a food culture that places a much higher value on making better food choices, and there's nothing quite like peer pressure for changing one's behavior.
True I have noticed a lot of girls who are vegetarian / vegan and still quite fat. I found it quite strange as I am a bit skinny and when I tried going vegetarian I lost weight. Turns out they eat a lot of chocolate and other crap food.
It's not just sugar. There's the occasional vitamin in there, probably hunkered down in a bunker to hide from all the roving hordes of monosaccharides, like a sort of kindergarten health class film strip version of I Am Legend.
But, as far as its culinary purpose goes, I suspect it ends to end up in processed foods because it's an additive you can use to sweeten the food while still being able to prominently claim "no sugar added" on the front of the box. I think legally you do have to cross your fingers behind your back while you do it, but it's not enforced.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a trick that even works well on people who like to hang out on the internet talking about how fructose is the devil.
This is the frustrating thing about diet research. Almost every diet works to help you lose weight, even the really stupid and unhealthy fad diets, but when a study is released about some diet, the media often reports that it doesn't seem to work very well, even if the differences are driven entirely by compliance.
I get that the research is often done from a medical or public health perspective, not a biological one, so compliance is an important factor to consider, but when I talk to people, I find the conclusion they draw from reading these results in the media is not that most people in these studies fail to follow the diet. The conclusion they draw is that a lot of people will not lose weight if they follow the diet successfully. This happens over and over again every time a new study comes out, and the belief a lot of people internalize from it is that we really have no fucking clue what the connection is between what people eat and whether they're overweight, and we don't know what if any change in how they eat will result in them losing weight.
That leaves them vulnerable to unscrupulous and/or unwitting opportunists hawking diet systems backed by complicated theories about toxins or hormones or genetic types.
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.
I've been here (in the US) 3 months now, working in a near identical environment.
1) Sweet things like muffins or cakes are generally unbearably sweet to me in comparison to what I expect in similar products in other countries (Australia, EU)
2) The cultural integration of the consumption of these foods appears to be higher in the USA; donuts at morning meetings, krullers and bearclaws on desks and tables for all-hands, quarterly meetings, etc - feels very high given that I am working in a culturally and socio-economically comparable environment relative to my home countries.
Of course, commonwealth and european countries have their own culture-driven consumption patterns (cakes for birthdays, croissants, scones for morning teas in Australia/NZ/UK) - but it doesn't appear to reach a similar level of 'saturation' as in the US.
> Sweet things like muffins or cakes are generally unbearably sweet
I have that problem eating some items here even as a native. For some items you risk buying something lethally sweet I don't want to eat. Things like lemon cake seem basically guaranteed to be inedible (I assume making even sweeter to offset lemon).
That said, the bigger issue just seems to be serving size. A traditional British cookie/biscuit is fairly small. American cookies have grown larger and larger.
>Sweet things like muffins or cakes are generally unbearably sweet to me
Seriously!! Sometimes I go to the bakery of my local grocery store and check out the muffins, they tend to have more sugar than I'd expect cupcakes to have.
> Sweet things like muffins or cakes are generally unbearably sweet
It didn't used to be like this. Back forty years ago, muffins and cupcakes were pretty different things. Now it's just a matter of how much frosting is on the top.
As an American raised on typical things you find at an average grocery store, I had to kick sugar like an addict as an adult. Now I can't bear pretty much any kind of soda or processed food without tasting an overwhelmingly gross level of sweetness. I can't believe I liked this stuff as a kid, but I just was never exposed to anything else.
As a kid you grow very tolerant to high sugar intake, to the point that even a Coke or Pepsi tastes only very mildly sweet. You don't really realize just how much sugar you're consuming. Most of the cheap food is loaded with sugar (to hide the fact it otherwise tastes bad, maybe? I don't know why), and many families avoid paying for anything more natural because they can't afford it; or even if they can, they feel it's a rip-off compared to the plentiful, cheap food at their local grocery store. Generations are being raised on that garbage. It certainly beats malnutrition for families who would otherwise just go hungry, but it ingrains such awful tastes and habits.
Agreed! After moving to the US I particularly remember how hard it was to find sausages that do not contain any sugar (I can't stand the taste of sweet grilled meat, yuck!). We looked at what must have been 30+ different types of _packaged_ sausages until we found some "kosher" product that indeed didn't list any sugary ingredient. It was eye opening!
That is not just the US. Over here in the EU if you go through the ingredient list of prepared meat products, you will discover that 98% of those have some sugar added.
That is not to say there is no difference. When I travel to the US I find most if the food really unbearably sweet. Strange exception is fresh fruit, which seems to be a lot less flavorful in the US than over here.
I agree, was in the US recently and so many foods are much sweeter than in other countries.
USA is really good at sugar.
Even the ice cream was much sweeter - looking at you Ben and Jerry's.
I bought some organic almond butter, and it had sugar in it! Why?!
> I agree, was in the US recently and so many foods are much sweeter than in other countries.
I wish there was an easy way to compare foodstuffs across countries. Too many of these discussions turn into anecdote battles with little hard data.
> I bought some organic almond butter, and it had sugar in it! Why?!
What brand? I know sugar is fairly common in peanut butter, but I don't know much about almond butter. I did a cursory search, and the three brands I checked (Justin's, Barney's, and 365 Organics) do not use any kind of sweetener.
That said, I can barely stand sweetened peanut butter now that I have switched to Smucker's Naturals (which is just ground peanuts and salt). I can only guess that the sugar is added to increase appeal.
Supposedly, in the 20s and 30s, some of the immigrants thought the white bread they were given in immigration was cake, as they'd only eaten black bread.
I believe that considerably predated the fluffy wonderbread style of white bread.
Sometimes I make an oatmeal cookie that is traditional in my family. It can be considered a healthy cookie, not very sweet, but I'm always impressed with the amount of sugar that goes with it. I wonder how much goes in the really sweet ones.
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.
I also read the point once that sort of by definition, if a person is overweight, then the person's current diet is not working. So changing to basically anything else is likely an improvement.
I think scientists use something called the NOVA food classification. If you do some google searches, you can find information, but I haven't found anything that feels really definitive.
I'm challenging it as nonspecific, unhelpful name-calling.
What is the difference between "processed" and "cooked" food?
Can you really draw a non-arbitrary line between the two?
Does it just have to be cooked by someone else? Are there techniques which are kosher and are just "cooked" while others make it "processed"? Is it a set of ingredients which make the distinction?
Does baking soda make a food processed? Sodium citrate? Soy lecithin?
Could you go through Modernist Cuisine and classify each recipe as "processed" or not?
> Can you really draw a non-arbitrary line between the two?
No, I can't. That doesn't mean there is no distinction between the two. I cannot draw an arbitrary line where "low altitude" becomes "high altitude", but there are many differences between them.
> What is the difference between "processed" and "cooked" food?
Cooked is food you would make yourself. Processed is what a company would make to sell to maximise money.
Cooked is heating to make digestible and tasty. Processed is trying to find a hyperstimulus to make more-ish.
Cooked is food taken as a whole. Processed is treating food as resource to be refined into separate components, then ignore all the non-profitable components and concentrate the obviously useful ones.
Cooked is food you bought fresh yesterday and eat leftovers of tomorrow. Processed is food that entered the supply chain two weeks ago and is best before two weeks away.
Cooked is food that you trimmed the manky parts off while peeling. Processed is 5 tons of tomatoes dumped onto the ground by a truck.
Cooked is food with color. Processed is yellow and white crunchy flour.
Cooked is stuff a human can make. Processed is filtered by what fits in a factory process.
Cooked uses whatever ingredients are available now. Processed uses only ingredients are available in bulk year round.
Cooked is food of different varieties and textures. Processed is the same experience every time.
Again, I'm not saying this is automatically bad, I'm saying there is clearly some distinction between "chicken breast bought from a butcher and grilled" and "mechanically recovered processed chicken style textured sandwich filling packaged in a protective atmosphere in plastic with a weird smell to it use within 24 hours of opening", even if I can't pinpoint a non-arbitrary line.
> No, I can't. That doesn't mean there is no distinction between the two. I cannot draw an arbitrary line where "low altitude" becomes "high altitude", but there are many differences between them.
"Altitude" refers to height above sea level. It is measured with an altimeter. The unit it is measured at is feet (or a convertible unit, like meters). Based on the context being discussed, "high altitude" represents an altitude in the upper portion of the distribution of altitudes; for example, very few cities on earth are above 5,000 feet, but Boulder CO is, so it is high altitude. Humans might consider any flight in a plane high altitude, but if we're comparing many flights, a high altitude flight implies a flight above the regular cruising feet of 30,000-ish feet.
I can't personally think of an answer similar to what I said above about processing. There's some notion that processed foods involve a lot of sugar, and salt, and fat, and calories, and maybe artificial sweeteners (themselves a class of many unrelated products), and also sometimes it means GMOs, and sometimes it seems to mean "includes stabilizers or ingredients normally used only at scale like xanthan gum", but it's also a non-biological statement about the way the food was produced or sold. I don't know how to relatively measure the importance of those components in "processing". If I have a bunch of data in a matrix and apply PCA or something, will the first principal component be a latent measure of processing?
This is a definition sufficient enough for me to tell you the steak I ate last night is not processed but the Hungryman at the grocery store is, but not sufficient for me to understand the causal link between processing and obesity, which is what the article is proposing. What about the Hungryman makes people fat?
I personally would like to understand -- are you arguing that a food being yellow makes people obese? That fresher food is metabolized different than less fresh? That the blade of the mechanical separator affects how nutritional the meat is? That the company's profit margin drives obesity? I don't think so. It's not quite that, right?
This speaks to the fact that processing here is a bit of an nebulous concept, and that's probably why the article seems unsatisfying to the parent comment you're replying to and to me. In part because one of the best definitions of processing seems to be "food that's high in calories but doesn't make you feel full so you eat more", which is sort of tautological -- yes, food that makes you fat makes you fat. So let's try to come up with a definition that lends itself more to the kind of proposal the parent article is making.
Someone says "I like oak tables, but I don't like processed wood like MDF or cardboard".
And the parent commenter is nitpicking that oak tables are processed, with the implications that a) there is no distinction between oak tables and cardboard, and b) the important thing is to beat the person down on precise word use to win internet points. "But they're all processed! Ha! Gotcha!", yes yes Mr Intelligent you win for being technically correct, the best kind of correct.
We can all agree that oak tables are processed wood, but we can also see clearly that there is a scale of processing which takes wood further and further away from things we typically know as 'wood', despite still having the same plant cells in the construction somewhere. We can see that the use cases, costs, strength, texture, appearance, changes. We know from life experience that things cannot be repaired back to original condition, and that more repairs deteriorate condition more over time, and similarly wood cannot go through infinite 'processes' and stay like new.
It is easy to argue that sliced, dried, planed, mortice-tenon joined wood is processed, and that anyone calling it 'unprocessed' is being deceitful. But to do that and focus on that, to imply that MDF, cardboard, papier mache, 1-ply toilet roll are all the same because 'processed' must be just one binary thing, is way more disingenuous.
Am I arguing that toilet paper being bleached is what makes it less-nice for a table material than oak is? No. But bleach is part of what makes it toilet paper instead of oak planks.
Yellow aspect is not something which makes people obese, but it's pretty clear from a glance at many cooked food selling places that chips/chisps, pastry, pizza dough, pasta, noodles, bread buns, in the yellow-pale-brown-white colour range show up enormously more often than cabbage green does, and the reason why they show up more often is that flour is easier to fit through a repeatable process, more shelf stable, easier to preserve, easier to get a consistent result every time with simple procedures, cheaper to work with, and hooks taste buds more strongly than fresh mixed fruits and vegetables.
> That fresher food is metabolized different than less fresh?
Dead things decay and denature, cabbage leaves taken from the cabbage and left on the side will wilt and then rot in days. The fact that you get Little Debbie Cakes in a box with a three month use by date, but you don't get Little Cabbage Cakes with fresh cabbage leaves in a box for three months, says something about the ability of preservatives. If it didn't matter what was in the cabbage leaves and denaturing, we'd simply eat six month old cabbage leaves through the non-growing season without bothering about preservatives. Since we do have to preserve food, there must be things in it worth preserving, and refining plants as if they were only made of 3 things which can then be kept and combined into foods must have some effect on what is and isn't preserved.
> In part because one of the best definitions of processing seems to be "food that's high in calories but doesn't make you feel full so you eat more", which is sort of tautological -- yes, food that makes you fat makes you fat. So let's try to come up with a definition that lends itself more to the kind of proposal the parent article is making
But it's only tautological because you're refusing to see that it's not "food which is high in calories" which people on My 600lb Life TV show are gorging on. They are never eating beef dripping on pure starchy sweet potatoes and drinking buttermilk - all high calorie food. They are always eating take-out pizza, chips, candy bars, cake bars, ice cream - all food which has been built to be the equivalent of clickbait. They all have things in common - longer path from food to mouth, more processing, adjusted to be tuned to maximise hooking people in order to maximise profit, lack of things which are hard to fit through industrial processes like interesting vegetable colour and fresh leaves.
Since there is no single thing in common, and there is no word for the distinction between a potato and Lays potato chips, and frozen potato starch dinner accompaniements, the word 'processed' fits as well as any word. English is fine with a lot of word overloading.
> I don't know how to relatively measure the importance of those components in "processing"
I don't either. Therefore I must conclude that they are the same, and that apples from the market and McDonald's apple pie are no different?
> Cooked uses whatever ingredients are available now. Processed uses only ingredients are available in bulk year round.
So if I make tomato sauce in the winter out of imported tomatoes from south america, is it processed?
>Cooked is stuff a human can make. Processed is filtered by what fits in a factory process.
If I build a robot to make me breakfast, is the food going to be "processed" instead of cooked?
>Cooked is food that you trimmed the manky parts off while peeling. Processed is 5 tons of tomatoes dumped onto the ground by a truck.
I once went to a super foodie restaurant and ordered something like a $20 appetizer which included some kind of braised carrots that were not pealed and still had the stems and a bit of grit from the soil on them. Were my disappointing carrots "processed"?
>Cooked is food taken as a whole. Processed is treating food as resource to be refined into separate components, then ignore all the non-profitable components and concentrate the obviously useful ones.
If I go to a restaurant and get some food prepared by ordinary line cooks that don't give a shit about their job besides just getting it done, is that food processed?
>Cooked is food you would make yourself. Processed is what a company would make to sell to maximise money.
If I get really good at making cookies and start selling them do they automatically become "processed"?
What would I have to do to avoid that "processed" label?
What would I do that would tip me over from delicious home-cooked cookies to worthless processed cookies? How big the ovens and mixers are? Where I source my ingredients? A specific kind of oven? Cooking machinery?
I've explained what I see and what I think many people see when they talk about 'processed foods' in a way that makes a fuzzy but usefully coherent classification.
If you think there is no worthwhile distinction to be made between a boiled egg and a Cadbury creme egg, say that.
If you think there is a potentially meaningful distinction to be made, choose a word which you like instead of 'processed'.
> I've explained what I see and what I think many people see when they talk about 'processed foods' in a way that makes a fuzzy but usefully coherent classification.
No you haven't and you won't because their isn't one.
You made hand-wavhing non-explanations that revolved around ambiguous feelings about the person making the food that you couldn't possibly turn into a system to classify food as processed or not processed.
I asked many many questions about what your definition of processing was or if it applied in specific scenarios and you wouldn't or couldn't answer.
It's past the point where I'm interested in continuing, I don't see anything coming of this.
You asked a lot of obviously trap styled bad-faith questions to try and force a clear edge boundary which I already said I cannot provide.
I also cannot provide a clear boundary between 'delicious' and 'disgusting', and those are also hand wavy and ambiguous and guided by risible feelings, but there is still merit and usefulness in describing them.
I, too, can ask tons of careful trick questions about "if I take a delicious cookie, then put a drop of pig blood in it, but you don't know it's there, does it THEN become a disgusting cookie? What if it was three drops and a snail but they were boiled and minced first? AH GOTCHA you can't draw a clear precise measurable line between delicious and disgusting, so there can't be a difference".
It's past the point where I'm interested in continuing, I don't see anything coming of this."
If it was true that you were past the point of continuing, you wouldn't have continued. Guess you do understand the idea of a fuzzy boundary after all.
And yet distinctions made based on the average of feelings about a bunch of related things are used every day, to great avail, and are absolutely critical to everyone--and I do mean everyone--'s decision-making ability and common sense.
Just because it cant be rendered into a perfect line in the sand or measurable, objectively-defined system of classification doesn't mean it's not useful.
It seems to me that the relevant distinction between a boiled (chicken) egg and a Cadbury creme egg lies in its nutritional content -- grams of sugar, starch, fat, and protein -- rather than in the mechanism by which they are produced.
If chickens laid Cadbury creme eggs, they would still be just as unhealthy.
And yet a raw egg and a cooked egg have the same grams of protein, but different amounts of human-usable protein if eaten. Trans fat is associated with an increased risk for heart disease and the FDA says that it is no longer "generally recognised as safe". Two grams of trans fat vs two grams of other fat is "the same quantity of fat" but not the same effect on human health[1]. If we reduce the amount of sugar in a creme egg, so it has the same mass of fat and protein as a boiled egg, is it then equally healthy as a boiled egg?
The reduction of food to a quantity of sugar, starch, fat, and protein, is part of what I am objecting to; as if you could say that all products containing 20 grams of metal, 12 grams of plastic, and 2 grams of glass are the same product, or that all programs with 147k lines of code are the same program. "fat" isn't one thing. "sugar" isn't one thing. Fat and sugar are not the only classes of things in plants and animals.
The relevant distinction is all the things which are different, which is a lot more things than people casually talk about. Is it the quantity in grams of saturated vs unsaturated fat? Mono or polyunsaturated? Omega 3 quantity? Ratio of omega 3 to omega 6? Quantity of EPA, DHA or ALA fat overall, or ratio between them? Trace quantity of magnesium, or trace quantity of bio-available forms of magnesium in balance with an amount of medium chain triglycerides? And what about all the countless other potential distinctions with macronutrients and smaller trace compounds, each also denaturing in different ways over different time periods? Many words I don't understand, but understand enough to know that they describe differences which are measurable and worth naming.
There are enough potential distinctions which could be made, that saying "you can crush fresh almonds, extract the oil, put it in cookies, leave them in a box for a month, and as long as there is an equal quantity of oil in grams to the original almonds then they are exactly as healthy as eating the original fresh almonds" is very suspiciously simplified.
If we had an exhaustive list, or if we had a known complete understanding of the effects of all compounds in all combinations, it would be a lot more convincing. "It doesn't kill you, your body can survive on it for a bit longer" is not the same as "optimal thing to consume for optimal long term health".
> "rather than in the mechanism by which they are produced."
The things chickens lay must promote the growth of healthy chicks - if chickens laid creme eggs, we'd be in a world where creme eggs were healthy. But the use of 'healthy' as a boolean toggle property which food has or does not have, and which a behaviour is or is not, is something I grumble about as well.
You cannot classify food as processed or cooked without handwaving and saying it's some "other" without any real way to decide what to label a food. It's nonsense virtue signaling adjective soup.
And it is still unclear if I make meatloaf to freeze and am in a bad mood whether or not that food is processed. Maybe I have to use a really big oven to make sure it's processed instead of cooked.
You've now gone from "everything is processed" to "processing is not real" to "maybe processing depends on my mood" to "whether it's processed is unclear".
And you say I'm talking nonsense.
It is unclear whether your meatloaf is processed or not. Welcome to the world, lots of things are unclear, but still exist.
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.
10 weeks vegan here. Easiest diet ever, no cravings. I'm down 19 lbs (193-174, 6' tall). Dropping the chips and oreos took a few weeks, I just thought anything vegan was ok until I realized junk food is junk food. I cook twice a week and make enough to last a few days. It takes about an hour to cook. I sautee vegetables and put them on rice and quinoa or pasta. For breakfast I have a banana and a Larabar. For dessert I have grapes or watermelon. Before this I rarely ate healthy food. Chipotle is decent fast food when you aren't cooking.
This seems like a good diet, but it also doesn't seem like the vegan part is what is helping you out here, if you had ceased eating junk food and still ate meat you probably would have seen similar/the same results.
Stick with it! A vegan diet like you're eating has benefits far beyond weight loss -- you're less likely to get heart disease, cancer, and a whole bunch of other chronic diseases than omnivores.
I think they were saying that, despite being vegan, they took a bit to cut them out after realizing they wouldn't help with weight loss, since they are still junk food.
Rereading that again, I see how that could be the take-away now.
My first go through was how some people switching to a vegetarian diet say things like 'quitting bacon was the hardest, I kept going back to it for the first month".
Coming up to 20 year vegetarian. If you haven't, think about getting a pressure cooker. Beans / lentils chickpeas just became viable and quick. Soups / stews can be cooked in a few minutes and can be frozen and last forever
Second the pressure cooker. I can go from zero to an amazing lentil soup on the table in about 15-20 mins. I'm super lazy so for flavoring I use bouillon and dry seasonings. Everyone loves it.
> Realistically, vegan food prep takes a long time,
I don't think vegan food prep takes significantly more time than other food prep from raw sources, at least on average over a varied diet, though I guess "becoming vegan" might be the impetus for a lot of people to start making their own food for the first time.
Anecdotal: The difference between being able to buy a pack of chicken breasts at Costco vs having to make my own seitan is definitely a huge difference in time.
My wife and I tag-team the parts we hate most (I don't like working with dough, but she hates steaming it) and we end up with enough for a week to cook into actual recipes without too much headache, but I can't just buy a protein ready to go like I used to be able to.
I hear you and I do think there are more "shortcuts" (on the other hand, breaking down a chicken is work too but probably an improvement for the meat eater over packaged breasts).
But beans and legumes are very little work and store for ages, etc. Quinoa and the like too, easy/ Depending where you live you may have good sources of fresh tofu & seitan, etc.
If you are looking for "same meal, but X instead of chicken" it's more work, granted. That's hardly the only option though, and learning a range of dishes from traditionally vegetarian or near vegetarian cuisines can help generate a list of easy & tasty alternatives.
I agree with you on beans and legumes! I'm currently trying to maintain a calorie deficit while hitting a protein target that seitan makes very convenient (though I also have been using some protein powders that help recently, and gave in and started buying that new Silk protein milk as a shortcut). Beans and Legumes are great, and we cook a lot of indian, thai, and mexican dishes with them, but the combination of calorie deficit and protein target make it a bit tough to do without some almost-pure-protein foods. Seitan is also delicious.
All too true. I'd guess that short of relying on protein shakes, 70% of my meals are based around legumes, it should definitely be a go to for more people, regardless of whether they keep a vegan diet or not.
I'm not vegan, but I think that going vegan just to eat seitan sounds really awful. There are plenty of foods that are completely vegan that would make a great main entree. Obviously, you're going to have to eat processed stuff if you are trying to imitate something that is not actually part of the set of foods you are willing to eat. That's like if I wanted to give up potatoes for beef but still eat tater tots -- I'm going to have settle for something heavily processed.
On the other hand, if you just ate food that was naturally vegan, like lentils and rice. You would do just fine, and it is actually much easier to cook than chicken, since you don't need to worry about contamination, etc.
I don't just eat seitan at all, in fact we have it maybe 2 weeks out of every 4, tops, partially because of the effort to prep it.
I also didn't really specify, but there's times we cook with nutrition and health as the main factors, and times we cook for indulgence or for cravings, and I definitely blurred the line some in my original response.
This seems odd to me. I mostly eat vegan just because my wife can't have dairy and I try keep my meat consumption low and I don't notice a difference in time cooking vegan vs non vegan. There are plenty of vegan sources of proteins like beans that don't take any extra time.
It wasn't captured very well in my original comment, but I was just talking about a subset of our cooking, and I was more comparing like-to-like as far as imitating a dish, chicken vs seitan, and less so all vegan cooking.
It was meant to be one example, we cook bean and lentil dishes a hefty majority of the time and usually those I can set and forget in an instant pot.
In my experience cooking (which I do a lot, for a large family), it's generally faster to produce a high umami meat-based meal than it is to create a vegetarian or vegan one. The main reason I find is that I have to cook vegetables for much longer (with sauces, etc.) to develop the rich flavors that are "built-in" to something like a steak (which I can cook in 10 minutes).
If you are vegan, you aren't eating meat substitutes at all. That's more of the line along a vegetarian don't you think? A vegan is against using animals for consumption, therefore does not want to eat meat or eat fake meat that tries to taste like meat. At least this is my experience with vegans.
> If you are vegan, you aren't eating meat substitutes at all.
That's not my experience at all. I'm not one but I've known vegans to like various meat substitutes, from Buddhist style proteins/meals to fake-meat burgers and hot-dogs. Others don't want anything do with them.
FWIW most vegans I've met more broadly object to the use of animal products or labor too, hence it's not just steaks but leather and honey, etc.
People do not go vegan because they do not like the taste of meat. Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.
Some people miss the taste of meat and the dishes prepared from it; that's why they buy meat substitutes.
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.
I am eternally fascinated by this. A couple years back paleo diets were all the rage and I started hearing people talk about things like "paleo waffles" and "paleo brownies". I never said anything, but I could not believe how much work people would put into "eating healthy" only to reconstruct the same unhealthy things that made them say, "man, I really need to start eating healthy!"
Most of the paleo junk food I've seen has been variations on a theme of dark chocolate and coconuts. I don't have any nutrition labels to hand (paleo junk food is expensive), but I wouldn't write it off as unhealthy without seeing what's in it.
Then again, the reason I can't stick to paleo is the slippery slope from 95% dark chocolate to Toblerones, so maybe it's better to cut chocolate out altogether.
They are trying to reconstruct tasty food (who would have thought?) in what they perceive to be a healthy way (which it might be, you've just assumed "paleo brownies" are unhealthy without any supporting argument).
No, there are plenty of paleo recipes that are tasty. They're trying to reconstruct junk food.
And you've only assumed that I've assumed they're unhealthy. But don't take my word for it; if you'd like supporting arguments, I'd suggest you read paleo devotees who criticize the practice. E.g., the Whole 30 folks: https://whole30.com/sex-with-your-pants-on/
That article argues that paleo reconstructions of junk food are not tasty and therefore not worth it, not that they are unhealthy. So will you now change your mind, since the article yourself provided doesn't even support what you claimed?
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.
Counting calories/meal tracking has been the best thing to ever happen to me. When you just "try to eat better" or "don't drink this month", or whatever, there's a disconnect between the input and the result.
When I was able to see, in realtime, for example, I had a 500 calorie deficit today, and should hence lose 1lb in 1 week at this rate, and see it actually HAPPEN, it created a positive feedback loop. For the first time in my life, over many types of eating, some vague diet attempts, some periods working out more, some periods working out less, I could FINALLY see a direct result from my activities.
I had avoided it for a long time because I thought it would be miserable and tedious to track what I eat, but it's actually made it much easier to be disciplined, and see which foods are 'worth it' and which aren't.
Absolutely. Calorie counting was hard for the first bit, but pretty soon you determine your "regulars" and just go off those. I also found that it was nice to know "ok, I went light today, so I can have some extra dessert" and know that was an option because I had the calories, instead of experiencing guilt with the assumption that dessert and losing weight couldn't exist together.
> they're paying more attention to what they eat, meaning they take in more reasonable amounts of calories as a side effect.
That doesn't necessarily follow. The vegans could end up eating huge amounts of soda and potato chips, and the low-carb people could go crazy on bacon.
The difference is that if all you ate was 4,000 calories of bacon a day, you’d lose weight. That many calories of soda and chips and you’d get ill fast.
I assume OP did not choose 4000 randomly, it is meant to be a _high_ number (about 2x what an average person needs). Implying that you could eat twice as much calories and stay lean _if the calories came from bacon_.
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.
> However dismissing meat is inevitable for a healthy diet.
I dont think this is true. There seem to be many people that have (in some cases greatly) benefitted from a carnivore diet. Take Mikhaila Peterson as an example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znGkfrl_F5s).
> 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.
I've been a junk food vegan for long enough (in a city that makes it easy) to prove to just about anyone that being vegan won't automatically make you healthier. It's way too easy to scarf half a bag of oreos in a day.
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.
For what it's worth, this mostly doesn't actually happen. There is some good science behind maintaining ketosis in children under careful monitoring by a physician. Most of the empirical evidence in adults is that it's hard to achieve and harder to maintain. The weight loss some people achieve on "keto" diets is mostly just due to caloric restriction when it's been measured carefully.
The upside is you don't really want to have your body in ketosis anyway.
I haven't heard this before, that it doesn't actually happen. Are those ketosis test strips you pee on not accurate?
I've ketoed before for weight loss (and am starting again soon) and when I was quite strict with it I'd be well into the ketosis range on those pee strips.
If it's not a sign the body's in ketosis, what is it a sign of?
Also, fwiw, I lose significant weight on keto without moderating my calorie intake at all; fatty meats, cheeses, butter, oil, etc., plus a lot of vegetables. If it's not ketosis, what is it?
> Also, fwiw, I lose significant weight on keto without moderating my calorie intake at all; fatty meats, cheeses, butter, oil, etc., plus a lot of vegetables. If it's not ketosis, what is it?
Unless you were very carefully tracking calorie intake before and on the keto diet, it is not justifiable to assume same caloric intake, even if keto food seems very calorie rich.
It absolutely does happen. If you stop eating carbs for several days, you will go into ketosis. You can tell because your glycogen will be depleted, temporarily dropping your weight by a few pounds in a short time period. Also, your breath and urine will start to smell. If this isn't ketosis, then what is it?
There's a little bit of a disconnect on the definitions people use. Usually when people talk about ketosis, they are implying the body has some kind of "fat burning" mode where you will burn the fat you have stored, and that you can trigger this mode without changing the number of calories you eat just by getting rid of carbs. This is for all intents and purposes a myth.
Of course you're right, in the other sense, that if you don't eat any carbs your body will be burning the fat you ingest instead, and that this will show up in your bloodstream. You also won't burn any weight this way unless you have a calorie deficit (as you note, it's "temporary").
Note that when OP said that "it doesn't happen", they didn't mean ketosis doesn't happen. They meant that meat-heavy diets don't result in weight loss because of ketosis.
Indeed, it's complicated, because urea is toxic, so long term living on protein is not that amazing for your health, plus slipping into ketoacidosis is a small risk (high ketone and high blood sugar levels at the same time) if people are not strict about their diet (and we know strict dieting is hard anyway).
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.
For me if I eat pasta I’ll feel kinda foggy and tired. Happens every single time. I’ll generally take a nap for an hour or two, even if I just woke up. Same if I eat biscuits and gravy.
I can eat a big 2 pound ribeye and not feel like that at all. I definitely am starting to think that the only way to lose weight is to figure it out yourself. I lost 75 lbs eating sauerkraut and Johnsonville brats for 5 months, kept at that weight for several months, then went back to eating “normally” and gained back 50 over the course of the next year.
Try and get some whole-wheat pasta, it's much healthier than plain old white pasta, and it does not make you feel so tired after. You'll probably eat much less of it too since it's much more filling.
I never eat more than 2 oz of dried noodle. Even Italian recipes call for more than that. But here in the US, when people eat pasta, they tend to do much more of that.
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.
> 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).
I thought it was agreed upon that if you consume more calories than you burn regardless of their fat/protein/carbohydrate profile, you were going to gain weight?
On their own fat or sugar aren't very palatable. Imagine trying to eat a pot of cream or a bowl of sugar with nothing else. Mix them together to make ice cream and it's the complete opposite.
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.
Check out wellness, sports and bodybuilding forums for some insight on diet improvement not specifically concerning weight. Much will focus on optimum protein levels, glucose-influenced insulin levels, and hormone precursors. Many discussions can delve down in to the minutae of the actual metabolic processes that govern the conversion of interesting or problematic compounds. Your 'metabolism' is actully just a very smart management of cravings, coupled with an ability to regularly break down many things in the body.
Curious what foods seem to boost or depress mood and reactions that you have discovered.
Thanks, will look into that. Expanding on my findings:
Grains -- Wheat, barley, oats, rye and spelt cause mild depression and psychosis. Yeast causes skin infection. These combined, rule out all bread. Maize, rice and maybe teff seem ok so far.
Meats, red and white, feel like falling into a coma for hours after consumption, simply for being so tough to digest. In contrast, plant foods give an energetic feeling -- there's no immobilizing digestion period.
Milk and cream products cause a kind of.. tension in my head. Like a silent headache. I feel much clearer not consuming these. Includes organic and lactose-free varieties. Experiments on cheese still ongoing.
Sugar appears harmless, but I've noticed it eats a significant portion of my food budget if I permit myself to buy any. Super addictive. Hard pass all food that contain any added sugar whatsoever. It's a food industry dark pattern designed to make you crave their product. Can get rid of sugar addiction by substituting it entirely for honey.
Similar to sugar, I vehemently avoid all food products containing any artificial flavorings and additives whatsoever. These are designed to fool your body into thinking you're eating something you're not. Some of them are downright dangerous -- sodium laureth sulfate, an additive to toothpaste that makes it foam, causes lacerations in the mouth. After I switched to a toothpaste without it, all spontaneous wounds of the mouth stopped appearing completely.
Of course, the effects of diet is very sensitive to your gut microbial environment. If you're used to eating certain things, their effects are... hidden, at least, if not lessened. And it takes time to adjust, time to experiment.
How I perform my food experiments: I eat the same thing for a month, almost to exclusion of everything else, to see how it makes me feel. I stop eating something completely for months, to see how going without it makes me feel; then see what happens when I do eat it again periodically.
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.
This is also related to replacing simple sugars with more complex metabolites. Having your blood sugar go way up and down leads to metabolic stress and feeling hungry all the time. On the other side are fats and fibers which have a comparatively high capacity to sate hunger per calorie. Eating 2000 calories of donuts every morning may be correct from an energy balance perspective (and indeed you won't get fat doing it), but that's clearly a very painful way to live.
Insulin and blood glucose drive obesity and metabolic damage, but they don't make it hard to stay on diets. The difficulty of staying on a diet is due to a separate system in your brain that takes other factors in to account to decide if you should eat. Every successful diet boils down to finding foods that make your brain happy while keeping excessive levels (and durations) of sugar and insulin out of your blood[0].
If you had access to unlimited candy, you might eat too much and damage your body - and indeed many people do just that. If you had access to unlimited non-starchy vegtables your stomach capacity probably wouldn't be enough to maintain obesity. If you had access to unlimited sticks of butter, you would probably get sick of the very concept of butter before you ate an unhealthy number of sticks. Vegan and carnivorous diets largely rely on the last two facts.
[0] There are other things involved in your body's metabolic signaling system, but blood glucose and insulin are especially well-researched and easy to measure.
I think the question for me is how these various things help people eat less calories. E.g., my mental model of hunger used to be like the "E" light on a car dashboard. But through various experimentation, I've noticed that the nature of hunger is very different for me depending on things.
E.g., if I avoid eating refined carbs (sugar, white flour, etc) for a month or so, suddenly hunger is this mild, easily tolerable sensation. I just end up eating less. If I go back on them for a while, hunger returns to being MUST EAT NOW.
I used to hear people talk about forgetting to eat, and I would always think, "How is that even possible?" But now I know: we might use the same word, but the experience can be very different.
I've had similar experience with trying intermittent fasting, I expected that fasting was supposed to be a challenge to put up with a mildly unpleasant experience because it's good for you.
But no, the fasting periods were merely times when I wasn't eating, and that includes pushing them out to 30+ hours and going a day without eating and without much hunger on a couple of occasions.
Occasionally, I've had experiences where running was light and energeising and fun, during that intermittent fasting time. I suspect now that the people who say they can't live without exercise and "exercise should be a celebration of what you can do" feel this the majority of the time. In the past, almost always a drag to push through.
I've been on a 16:8 IF schedule for around 10 months now and I have lost around 10 kgs, without any exercise. I don't feel stuffed all the time now and my mind has become clearer. But that could also be because I replaced alcohol with weed and started meditating. I haven't done any checkups but I think my health has improved vastly.
I worked with a woman at a medium sized food service company who was responsible for labeling items as “good” and “bad” on all our products to help people to eat “healthy”. (Hard boiled eggs bad, high carb high calorie roasted peas good that kind of stuff) We chatted a lot but she told me one day that her diet strategy was just eating the blandest foods possible. I mean I guess it worked, she wasn’t overweight. Explains why everything she rated healthy tasted like cardboard, I guess.
> I've not seem anyone ever try the approach of "avoid foods that taste good"
This is what I do, or try to do. This seems high on the self-denial scale but in my case I noticed that simple foods taste better than you think they as you learn to appreciate them, especially if you let yourself get hungry first. I tend to not over-eat such food as much.
> 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.
It does matter what you eat. Not in the sense of "calories in, calories out" - which, as you mentioned, is simple biology.
But it is important in the sense of "which diet is easiest to follow?".
That will vary person to person. But for many people, the answer is low-carb/intermittent-fasting. It eliminates the blood sugar/hormonal response, requires less effort than regular eating, and still lets you eat palatable food.
High carbs high protein works just fine for me. Hell, there was the time (in college) where my diet consisted of ramen and chocolate and it still worked. I am with the op, as long as your weight dynamic is acceptable, you can eat whatever you want.
That's not really the point. Your diet works for you - great! Noone's saying it's biologically impossible.
But most people won't find it easy to regulate their caloric intake eating ramen and chocolate. They will find it much easier with vegetables, lean protein and high fat.
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.
Ah, that makes sense for the milk, and clears up how they're classifying ultraprocessed. Like you, I'm skeptical that this classification system is useful for determining healthiness. I can't see why you'd expect, for example, adding casein to a food to have similar health effects as adding soluble fiber or corn syrup or any other unrelated substance.
I have a personal theory that to me seems like the simplest explanation for why junk food is fattening. It's not processing per se. It's simply that people will eat more calories when offered delicious, high-calorie foods. Put a bunch of bland highly processed tofu in front of me and I won't eat many calories. Give me some mostly unprocessed peanuts and raisins to munch on and I'll eat much more. Raw, unseasoned ingredients aren't optimized for taste and convenience, while processed foods often are. I'd also expect people eat more calories at a fine French restaurant (or any restaurant) for the same reason: they design their meals to be delicious. But no one is going to write an article saying delicious and convenient calorie-dense foods cause weight gain.
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.
To OP's point, neither does the skim milk. The question is: which is more or less ultraprocessed? Intuitively you'd think the whole milk is closer to the real thing by any measure, even if both varieties are processed.
Nonetheless I tend to agree with your point that there are probably better examples of food that are closer to ground truth in nature.
Your point is well taken, but OP's complaint is still valid. At the very least, whole milk from your local store is less processed by definition than skim milk from your local store...
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 sure how representative an infants metabalism is. Humans are already unique in keeping our ability to digest milk into adulthood (an adaptation that has not spread to the entire population)
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.
Buttered, salted popcorn is "unprocessed" by the standards here. It's a whole grain, mechanically churned cow's milk, and a mineral you can scrape off the ground in many places. All three ingredients have been consumed for thousands of years and over that time have only been altered by selective breeding (assuming you buy the non-GMO stuff.)
Despite being "unprocessed," it provides poor nutrition and hits the right buttons for compulsive overconsumption.
You're right, but in their raw, raw format it wouldn't work. The only piece of that that's an issue is the butter. I doubt you could eat enough salt or popcorn to get fat off either. It's the processed animal milk that's the real winner. Now this doesn't meet the "ultraprocessed" spec at all, but the processed bit is the one that's the actually an issue, especially when combined with the salt. I doubt cow's milk and popcorn would have that effect.
Like, I said, it's not terribly processed, but it's churned milk whose fat has been pulled out - it's not just churned milk - it's not the raw food stuff, it's a mildly processed deriviative.
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).
Go read the study. The data from this study doesn't support your statement. They matched the carb content (and sugar, fat, etc) of the "highly processed" and "less processed" groups' food offerings. The highly processed ate significantly more, even though both had plenty of carbs available.
> The data from this study doesn't support your statement.
I think you're wrong.
> The increased energy intake during the ultra-processed diet resulted from consuming greater quantities of carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day; p < 0.0001) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day; p = 0.0004), but not protein (2 ± 12 kcal/day; p = 0.85) (Figure 2B). The remarkable stability of absolute protein intake between the diets, along with the slight reduction in overall protein provided in the ultra-processed versus the unprocessed diet (14% versus 15.6% of calories, respectively) (Table 1), suggests that the protein leverage hypothesis could partially explain the increase in energy intake with the ultra-processed diet in an attempt to maintain a constant protein intake (Martı´nez Steele et al., 2018; Simpson and Raubenheimer, 2005).
Yes, exactly: there were plenty of carbs available to both groups, but those with the highly processed variety ate more of those carbs than those without, suggesting that it's not the availability of the carbs but rather the degree of processing that makes the person eat more of what's available.
Though I would agree that this evidence leaves the possibility that carbs in general are less sating, but that highly processed carbs are even worse, and so the degree of processing would still be linked to weight gain.
It's not clear if that's because there's some sort of stomach-brain "signal" that's getting confused, or because highly processed foods are designed to taste maximally good versus less processed and so people eat more.
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.
And I had luck with calorie counting - by actually weighing and recording everything I didn't overeat (though I was hungry), even though the food I ate was partially ultra processed.
I know that the net calories consumed/burned is what determines my weight, but the benefit of a low carb diet (only speaking for me) is that I am not hungry. I lost 50 pounds in the first six months and have been at the same weight for 18 months.
First, it's calories absorbed, not consumed. That is, if I eat calories in a form that's harder to digest, my body may not get all the calories out of it that are in the food. I think that this is one of the deals with processed food - the processing makes it easier for your body to extract the calories from the food. The calories were already there, but they're processed into a form that your body can use more easily.
Second, some foods (at least for some people) have some effect on metabolism, so that calories consumed is not totally independent of calories burned.
The point is that carbohydrates are calorie dense. You don't need to eat a lot of them to get a lot of calories.
Fish is one of the least calorie dense meats. Vegetables and fruits are some of the least calorie dense foods. It's nearly impossible to eat enough lettuce in a day to go over your daily recommended calories. It just won't fit.
So, in a lot of ways, keto, paleo, vegan, Mediterranean diets are all sneaky ways to cut out a major source of calories. You don't have to count them because just the way you're eating is taking care of that aspect.
But if you want to eat Twinkies exclusively, you can do that as long as you eat only so many.
Fat is more calorically dense than sugar, and your examples are all low in fat as well - vegetables and fruits have more carbs than either protein or fats - and the high calorie examples (ie. Avacado) of those categories are high in fat. Fish has few fats and no sugars. The most calorific cuts of meat aren't that way because they are sugary, it's because they are fatty. It's just that fats lead to satiety quicker than carbs, but I'll bet if you ate pork belly for every meal you'd find that you could and would get fat on that.
I didn't say they excluded all major source. I said a major source.
Yes, paleo and keto (I think) don't exclude fat, but they are excluding a major source of calories. Because we do need some fat in our diet or else we go into rabbit starvation.
There's nothing really in bread or refined sugar that we need that we aren't getting from somewhere else.
Not the op here, but I have been doing low-carb off and on (i get into deep ruts of depression frequently enough that messes with it and I occasionally fall off the wagon) for the past 2 years, and for me personally the strictness of the carb count works for me better than the healthiness of the food I am eating.
I limit myself to 30g of total carbs (minus fiber) a day so it forces me to be more honest with myself. If I am at 25g for the day and I need to make dinner for instance, it basically forces me to always pick the low carb version of a meal (veggies + meat).
I hope to one day be able to transition to a diet with more healthy carbs, but in the process I am focusing on working on better habits and losing weight.
That's something like under 5% of your calories from carbs, assuming a 2500 calories per day diet. Have you tried other amounts between that and 60% or so that is typical in the United States?
Personally, I found that about 35% gave me most of the same benefits people claim for the much lower carb diets, without the hassle of having to put a lot of work into food choice to achieve it.
At 35%, a lot of "ordinary" foods can be tweaked easily to fit. Sandwich is 50%? Get it with regular mayo instead of lite mayo, or make it double meat, or both...and you can get it to under 35%.
At 5%, that sandwich is right out. As are burgers, pizza, pasta...basically most of the mainstream diet is out, and since most food infrastructure is geared toward serving people on the mainstream diet, that can be a big pain.
I have played around with the amount of carbs, right now my level is where it's at for weight loss, but I am planning on scaling up once I get closer to my goal weight.
But yes, food can be a pain (I have been craving pizza and fries for the longest damn time). My other goal aside from losing weight is learning what foods I _do_ like since having been a picky eater, means I defaulted to the mainstream diet and never strayed far from it which was negatively impacting my health and weight.
On the plus side, while it can be slightly more expensive grocery wise, it basically closes any eating out for the most part, so I can save money.
Not OP but my own experience with being low-carb for years is that for me, there is no such thing as healthy carbs. Fruits and whole-grain breads and other things that the mainstream nutritionists regard as "healthy carbs" still spike my blood sugar and cause food cravings for up to 48 hours even after a single tiny serving.
If I stick resolutely to a high-fat, medium-protein diet, I am almost never hungry and have plenty of energy. And after 7 years, it has kept 45 lbs of excess weight off me. I was never truly obese, but others have shed hundreds of pounds permanently doing the same thing.
Not the OP, but I've ketoed for months at a time in the past, also for weight loss, and I can describe the lack of cravings like this: when I get hungry on keto, it doesn't demand my attention. It's something I know I can take care of at some point soon, but it doesn't make me distracted, give me pangs of hunger, or make me feel weak or irritable. I don't get "hangry." Eating a regular diet, hunger takes over much more of my conscious experience. It's something I need to address. Keto breaks that, and it's actually a wonderful experience.
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.
I'm curious as to how fast food being highly processed escaped you. It's fairly obvious just by the texture and taste of most food at those places that it's highly processed into some form far from what it originally was. If you take a bite into just about any chicken Burger, nugget, strip, boneless wing, whatever, from any fast food place and inside is just a formless, whitish pinkish mush. That's not what chicken's supposed to look like. It's also something that's been repeatedly said in media and other places since at least I was a kid in the 90's.
Most things in fast food places come premade and frozen from some factory somewhere and usually just fried up either in oil or on a 'grill'. Almost nothing is actually prepared in those places.
Though, if you're in Canada, A&W serves real eggs and Bacon and stuff for breakfast and their onion rings are actually cut and prepared in store(though the batter and breading aren't). Everything else though came preprepared.
> I'm curious as to how fast food being highly processed escaped you.
I'll read this as a genuine question and you not just calling me out for being an idiot.
I of course, saw A&W/McDonald's/Wendy's as highly processed junk.
1) But a Chili's or an Applebee's where I can order a chicken entree that looks like chicken, that I can get with a side of vegetables, that comes on a real plate, with real silverware--I guess my mind put that in a different category with expectations that it was more like 'real' food.
2) I hadn't seen how the "sausage was made" so to speak. Yes, I know food is processed, frozen, prepared off site, but the book I referenced peeled back so many curtains on just what that looks like, even for that seemingly benign chicken breast I talked about in my first point.
Here's one excerpt pulled from a sea of them:
The uncooked chicken had been in a marinade that combined orange juice, tequila, triple sec, sweet-and-sour mix, and artificial color, thereby including sugar, two kinds of oil, and salt. It was shipped frozen in twenty-five-pound bags, each containing about fifty pieces of meat, plus whey protein concentrate and modified tapioca starch.
Nick Nickelson, a chief scientist at the Dallas-based Standard Meat, a supplier to Chili’s, said that the chicken and marinade were tumbled together in a piece of equipment that resembled a cement mixer. “It pulls the marinade into the muscle,” said Nickelson, breaking down the cellular structure of the meat and tenderizing it in the process.
Another common way to get marinade into meat is through needle injection. Hundreds of needles are used to pierce the meat, tearing up the connective tissue. “It’s been prechewed,” said Billy Rosenthal, former president of Standard Meat.
For all that, very little in the appearance or flavor of Chili’s food suggests how much sugar, fat, or salt it contains, or how easily it goes down.
It was a genuine question, sorry if it came off as insulting. I dunno, I've been learning to cook my own food since I was a kid, so I've got a pretty good idea of what meat and other food should look and taste like, to the point where most processed food doesn't really look or taste like 'real food' to me and I don't even look at it as food. Even those bottom tier just above fastfood style restaurants. I've always thought people realized this but just didn't really care. It's just never really came to mind there are people who just never realized.
I didn't notice either until my 30s. The reason for me is that I grew up on highly processed and packaged foods, and places like Chilis seemed to serve more "whole" foods in comparison to a lot of the junk I was eating. It wasn't until I did a lot of reading and cooking that I understood the difference.
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.
Industrial farming also produces less nutritious food generally. Plants can uptake 20+ minerals from the soil, but industrial farms only add the 3 that directly fuel growth - Nitrogen, Potassium, and Phosphorus. You get taller, faster, less nutrient-rich crops.
Gabe Brown mentioned it in this lecture on regenerative agriculture. Sorry, but I don't have a timestamp, it's been a few weeks since I watched it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
I'm not an expert in farming, but I do know a little bit of plant biology. My understanding of what he said was that the combination of atmospheric CO2 and fertilizer increases the growth rate of the plant, but the plant doesn't uptake a proportionately larger amount of other micro nutrients, either because it is biologically rate limited or doesn't have access.
Other Googling suggests that it could be a result of selective breeding picking crops that grow faster but are less nutritious, but that would seem to be a correlated problem. Those crops tend to be selected for their ability to grow with synthetic fertilizer and *-cides, with the lack of nutritional value being an unintended consequence.
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.
This... doesn't really define ultraprocessed. The article tries several times, but the definitions conflict with each other and with the examples given.
The first definition of ultraprocessed is "industrial food formulations made up mostly or entirely of ingredients... that are not found in a similar form and combination in nature". That includes a lot of merely 'processed' foods. A highly aged cheese will have basically no naturally-occurring ingredients left, and any bread with leavening and refined flour fails "form and combination found in nature". Similarly, the fat and salt flavors of strong cheese, or the sweetened flavors of a pastry with sugar, go beyond "sharpening taste" to creating entirely new nonnatural flavors.
We can all apply the Potter Stewart test to say that Twinkies are ultraprocessed and sharp cheddar isn't, so I don't meant to be pedantic here. But I think this loose definition points to genuinely important unresolved questions.
Where on the scale from sausage to Twinkie does the problem start?
Is it really true that an Entenmann's coffee cake causes vastly different eating habits than equal access to a home-made version? Can we isolate the difference?
Above all, which differences actually drive this? 'Ultraprocessed' is not a food additive but a loose class of recipes, and it'd be nice to reduce that to a distinction we could put on a label.
The problem probably doesn't isolate to any one additive or alteration, but we should be able to find something more concrete than a vague naturalistic appeal. The study in question has some promising work in that direction, like controlling for energy density. Outright added calories are a long-standing suspect (since we're likely to use the same amount of e.g. spaghetti sauce despite store-bought versions having far more sugar), but Hall's work suggests that the problem persists even without that. I'd very much like to see more of these studies to replicate the effect and extract a more substantive definition of 'ultraprocessed'.
It's a lot easier to define unprocessed than processed. Unprocessed is just how it is from plants or animals with little or no alteration. Processed is altered, like through mechanical action or chemical alteration, and also different things mixed together that are not in nature. The problem here is there are so many directions to go doing that, and so many degrees.
But in the end it doesn't matter, since it is becoming so overwhelmingly clear that it is best to stick with unprocessed.
> Unprocessed is just how it is from plants or animals with little or no alteration. Processed is altered, like through mechanical action or chemical alteration, and also different things mixed together that are not in nature.
That's a clear definition, but it's extremely sweeping! It's also very clearly not the definition being used by this study, which had an "unprocessed" menu that including wheat flour pasta, cooked food, frozen food, food with herbs and spices from all over the world, food that had undergone chemical changes, etc.
> But in the end it doesn't matter, since it is becoming so overwhelmingly clear that it is best to stick with unprocessed.
By your definition, this study does not support that conclusion.
>By your definition, this study does not support that conclusion
Not this study alone, but a great many studies to which this study adds one more bit of evidence. Which is how it generally goes in research.
When I said "in the end it doesn't matter" I meant having a precise definition of processed didn't matter for the question what our diet should be. I should have made that clearer.
> to which this study adds one more bit of evidence.
This study does not support your conclusion, and so adds no evidence to support that conclusion. It's not even studying the sort of diet you're talking about!
> I meant having a precise definition of processed didn't matter for the question what our diet should be
No, it really does matter. If you're trying to argue that some specific food or processing technique is bad, then a study that had all participants consume it can't be used to show that it's actually harmful. And by your definition, that's what this study did - it had everyone consume highly processed foods, and some of them had good outcomes. That undermines your conclusion; it does not support it.
Perhaps the above comment is accurate in the sense that a raw, paleo diet is healthiest for humans, or even the only truly healthy diet. (Though I've yet to see any strong studies claim that it beats a Mediterranean diet, much less a great many studies.)
But even if that's true, it's an entirely different question from "what's up with modern ultraprocessed foods?" This study was contrasting foods like "normal" pasta with canned ravioli and finding a difference. Since "everyone only eat raw food" is an unlikely and unpopular outcome, it's absolutely worth finding what's actually problematic within the enormously broad sweep of "processed".
It's much easier to define unprocesesd, definitely, but what concerns me is that processed food in general doesn't seem to be the issue. There are cuisines which have depended very heavily on processed foods for centuries, and yet the obesity question is new within the last 100 years. In particular, bread, cheese, cured meats, and pickled anything are all clearly processed. And yet historically Norwegians haven't ended up with obesity than temperate cultures eating things like unprocessed rice and fresh fish, or minimally-processed corn tortillas.
Perhaps this will just come down to modern diets having a higher percentage of processed foods and more calorie availability. Even in Norway in the winter, potatoes and some fresh game would be part of the diet. And on a ship or snowbound wheat farm with only processed food available, food might be scarce enough that people weren't freely eating to satiation.
But even wealthy urbanites with plentiful access to processed calories don't seem to have become obese with the consistency of modern people, and this study and theory aren't endorsing a raw or paleo diet. Bread, yogurt, and even pasta and butter are technically processed foods. Canned ravioli and store-bought cake are being contrasted with their home-made counterparts. And I suspect that's correct: even if a raw/paleo diet turns out to be best, 20th century ultraprocessed foods have caused new problems not seen with earlier processing. That means there's another definition worth asking about.
If the "mixed signals" theory is right, there won't be a single culprit. Sugar alcohols are pleasant and create anticipation, but don't follow through with energy. Low-fat yogurts don't trip fat-based satiation fully, and yet substituted sugar is higher-calorie per bite than fat. Perhaps the rule we'll find that degree of processing doesn't matter, but any food 'impersonating' something else is a risk for overeating.
Regardless, I'd like to know what aspect of "industrial" food is causing different outcomes than merely non-natural foods.
>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.
But the example picture includes white flour, which is wheat processed to make it more palatable. The removal of the wheatgerm does increase shelf-life, but this is only a side effect. If the processing was really intended to maximize shelf-life then it would be processed into polished grains like rice or barley is, not into flour.
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.
If you're correct and the pitch is simply that the category "processed" means "high calories relative to satiety", then the pitch is tautologically true and maybe not so useful. LOL. Thanks for confirming I'm not crazy in missing a more robust definition.
It's like all they did was look for the easiest, laziest route to a payday they could have possibly found. I have to give them props for figuring out the perfect way to state the obvious.
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.
Right, but I'm talking just processed vs unprocessed. The breads in the pictures looked like they probably weren't heavily processed, but even if they're just flour, water, salt, and yeast, I'd still count de-germing and milling the wheat to make flour as kinds of processing. The fermentation is also at least arguably a form of processing, as is kneading to develop the gluten.
"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.
Yep. In fact, in order to make it more meat-like, they added a chemical called "heme" (it's what makes meat seem "bloody"). There's evidence that heme is a carcinogen. And of course the burgers include large amounts of saturated fat in the form of coconut oil.
All that said -- it's probably no worse than a meat burger, but it doesn't hurt animals, and it doesn't contribute to global warming, so if the choice is between that and beef, go nuts!
But it might be much worse than a beef burger from a health perspective. Grass-fed beef in moderate quantities in the context of the right diet can be very healthy for you.
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if lots of sweeteners/sugars suppressed the satiation response to some degree. I guess it is beneficial to fruit bearing plants to get us to spread lots of seeds..
> 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.
Day 1 Dinner: Canned Corn (Giant brand) is considered "ultraprocessed".
Wow. I appreciate the link. Honestly, seeing the menu makes me think it is somewhat quackery. But it seems like Scientific American really did represent this study correctly.
The main thing I've noticed is that the "ultraprocessed" foods are low in fiber, and they try to make it up with large doses of "NutriSource Fiber" pretty much every day.
There are exceptions: Canned Corn (wtf?) makes it on the list of "ultraprocessed", and has decent fiber from my memory. A few days later they have beans + beef. But otherwise, the primary source of fiber in that diet is artificial Nutrisource Fiber.
Dietary Fiber is core towards feeling full. Its no secret to me (at least) that more fibrous foods (even when low in calories) fill me up quicker than fiber-free foods. I can eat 2 or 3 500+ calorie donuts for example, but trying to eat 800-calories worth of "ultraprocessed" canned corn (that's 1.5 kg / 3.3 pounds of corn) is simply infeasible in one sitting.
Or to put it another way: 800 calories in corn is roughly 3x 8.5 oz cans of corn. Still "ultraprocessed" (lol) according to this study, but its going to be way healthier than drinking diet lemonaid with Nutrisource Fiber.
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.
Can you please explain how that appears to be the case? What mistakes am I making? What bias do I have? Everything I've alluded to is drawn from data. I never had a pre-existing dislike of ALAs lol.
And I'm being genuine, because I'd like to see where I'm flawed.
> This is not new at all. Ultraprocessed foods are usually supplemented with oils that increase inflammation and cause a variety of health issues.
Your thesis statement tells me that you're focused on oils. The article identifies and discusses multiple spectrums of why the ultraprocessed food would be bad, but it seems you've excluded the larger possibilities and have decided to focus on your own personal oil-based bugbear.
I'm focused on ultraprocessed foods. Many people ask "how are highly processed foods different than regular whole foods". Thus I provide a deeper reason for ultraprocessed foods to be bad for you. They are often supplemented with fillers that are evidenced to be detrimental to health in a variety of ways.
I read the article and understand that many explanations were offered. However, none of them were more substantial than one study put together. In my opinion, the article was fairly high level and simply provided a brief overview of competing theories on obesity and processed foods.
I understand your point in that focusing on any "one thing" that allegedly drives poor health is a fool's errand, but you can't discount the facts. I also acknowledge that I could be wrong, ALA could have nothing to do with this, and we should quit all meats for maximum health. From what I have seen, the data has shown otherwise. But again, please prove me wrong.
The problem is that similar data can be found for sugars as well, so it's not just the one smoking gun, much like removing fats from the things in the 90's didn't suddenly make everyone skinny, even though there was research to suggest fat was the problem.
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.....
I injected it because there is an explanation for why our food is designed this way and it is economic in nature. I think this is a bad thing, you might think that the system is good, but it's important to point it out and not pretend otherwise.
Actually planned economies often do solve the problem of food over-abundance rather nicely... "Communism is like food -- not everybody gets it".
Funnies aside capitalism without regulation quickly devolves into oligarchy. So throwing few more regulations is fine. You can always buy bags of sugar yourself and eat it with a spoon if you prefer.
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.
> Is something causing people to consume more calories than before?
Yes. For most of human history, food was scarce. People regularly died from starvation.
Today, that is no longer the case. Despite the outrage industry's continued and tired claims that hunger is at all time highs, etc, the truth of the matter is that most people in developed countries -- far more than ever before -- have access to all the nutrition they need at a price they can afford.
Unfortunately, people are not used to that availability, and thus are not able to process it rationally. Instead we binge eat. For example, there is a free box of bagels today at work and I'm going to have one now because cream cheese... yum!
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.
> 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.
You are countering the claim that diet is about calories in being less than calories out by claiming that, because a low-carb diet causes more calories to be burned, it negates this claim.
I think you are simply trying to qualify the claim by showing also that, while it is true that you will lose weight if you consume fewer calories than you expend, it also so happens that what you eats influences the basal metabolic rate. That is certainly an interesting point, but it ultimately relies on the truth of the claim you're attempting to attack. In order to believe your counterclaim, one must believe that the relationship between rate of caloric expenditure and caloric intake is important.
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.
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It’s an interesting article, I hope to see more research on the subject.