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It’s Time to End the Tyranny of Ultra-Processed Food
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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To say that this makes processed foods bad for you however is kinda ridiculous imo. Might as well tell people to only eat raw things because it has the least calories / most filling.
Bad food is bad for you, eating junk food is known to be a giant waste of calories and how it's prepared doesn't make it better or worse.
Outside of increased calories I have not seen any evidence that food being more "processed" is actually bad for you.
I'm not sure when this movement against junk food became a movement against processed foods but it's moving in the wrong direction. Plenty of shitty junk foods can have very little processing involved. And I'm convinced it's exactly those "low processed" junk food providers that are pushing all this bullshit.
With respect, I think you're ignoring the facts. How it's prepared absolutely makes a difference in how it tastes, how easy it is to eat, etc. and there is a resulting effect on how much people eat.
Freshly grilled chicken and frozen chicken patties are both chicken. But the chicken patty is ground, pre-seasoned, pre-cooked, etc. This makes it easier to get ready and easier to eat than a fresh chicken breast.
The poison is in the dose, as they say. 500 calorie surplus every day is a pound a week of weight gain.
And as dieticians have shown us over and over again, you can eat shitty food and be healthy, you just have to eat an appropriate amount of it. There are diets based on cookies and snack cakes, if you eat at your maintenance and cover a few basics with supplements, you can easily thrive on them.
If that's true, then the issue isn't that processed foods are bad on their own, but a side effect of the processing is that they are easier to overeat on. That's a very different issue that what type of food is being eaten. It's possible to overeat on grilled chicken and vegetables, it's just that it's harder to do.
"High consumption of ultra-processed foods has been linked to health concerns ranging from increased risk of obesity, hypertension, breast and colorectal cancer to dying prematurely from all causes."
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/25/1178163270/ultra-processed-foods-health-risk-weight-gain
Wake me up when an actual legit study shows it. And yes obesity is bad and does all the negative things you put in your comment. So does eating too much red meat or consuming too much sodium or.... so on and so forth.
The 2nd article goes into more details
"Ultra-processing degrades the internal structure or “food matrix,” the complex internal structure that not only holds the corn together, but influences the bio-availability of the nutrients, how our bodies use the food and whether we feel full after eating it."
...
"But the process also appears to accelerate the speed at which our digestive tracts absorb glucose and other nutrients from food, causing greater spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, studies show."
...
“"Extrusion cooking at very drastic pressures and temperatures is a kind of predigestion of your food,” said Anthony Fardet, a nutrition scientist at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment who studies the effects of food processing on health."
Source
I also agree that a study of 20 adults is absurd.