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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

The human body is pretty resilient for most foods. While fortifying "ultra-processed" foods with simple sugars and hydrogenated fats have negative health effects, people have been consuming processed proteins for a while now without that much negativity.

Problems arise when these faux meats are themselves over-fortified with simple sugars and trans fats, in order to mimic real meat. Then you're losing health benefits of eating the real thing, and you should be careful.

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This is the Soylent hypothesis. "Processed food" as such is not the problem—it's processed food used as a delivery vehicle for as many addictive sugars, fats, and simple carbs as possible. I would guess that the bad kind of processed food is much more common because it's both easier to make and more profitable (flour is cheap; oil is cheap; protein is expensive).

The same hypothesis (that we can reclaim the idea of processed food for nutritionally complete foods) is also on display in a product like Vite Ramen which explicitly patterns itself after a nutritionally dubious staple food (i.e., instant ramen). I would expect to see more startups in this space in the next few years.

Does the current state of society not give you pause when you state that our bodies are so resilient to most foods? US obesity rates have nearly tripled in way less than a single generation, there are skyrocketing rates of mental illness, reduced academic achievement, and even evidence of a decline in IQ in developed nations.

I find it challenging to attribute this entirely to lifestyle changes and the internet. In the mean time we have been increasingly introducing manufactured substances and products into our food systems that fit the timeline extremely well. Of course perhaps one problem is that we've introduced so many things that it's become impossible to discern cause from effect. Because while I find it difficult to attribute all change to lifestyle changes, that's undoubtedly played and is playing some role.

You're correct, but I feel like that's a huge question that may be partially answered by processed foods, but not fully.

For instance, work/life pressure results in stress, which could result in overeating which is easy to do given that not only is fast food more readily available than ever, but now so is restaurant quality foods though Uber. By ordering Uber at home you aren't going out, therefore you are being less social, which by being less social may lead to mental health issues. All the while not exercising and watching Netflix and sitting on social media looking at the lives of others.

Very out there example, but I think it's all intertwined

Sure, I think all of that is completely reasonable - and quite likely. The only thing that gives me concern in addition to this is leaded fuel and similar such stories over time. We now know longterm exposure to leaded fuel causes all sorts of nasty things including reduced IQ and reduced impulse control. Of course lead is a neurotoxin but neurotoxicity is all about the amount of exposure -- fluoride, for instance, is also a neurotoxin in sufficient quantities. The amount of lead fumes people were being exposed to was negligible on a parts per x basis. Try to put your mindset into a time before we knew this, and when governments and substantial amounts of industry funded research were mostly all declaring leaded fuel safe. The idea that exposure to negligible ambient levels of fumes could, over time, lead to lowered IQ, reduced impulse control, and other factors sounds really just quite absurd.

In the past several decades now we've seen a huge array of companies now rushing to introduce all sorts of engineered consumables into the marketplace. This is not just genetic engineered food products, but also purely chemical compounds such as aspartame (first introduced in 1981), sucralose (first introduced in 1998), etc. And now factor in the recent discovery that our gut biome seems to be connected to far more than we ever thought in our body. And we have mostly no real clue whatsoever how these things are affecting people. Safety trials tend to be short term and only concerned with overt physical affects - a standard by which leaded fuel was also deemed harmless.

This was what stood out to me about your comment. I think there are quite a large number of questions yet to be answered about how what we're eating in recent decades has been affecting us. And we're only just beginning to be able to pursue these answers at the same time that an ever greater number of engineered products are being introduced for consumption.

Totally agree, especially with such additives like aspartame, sucralose etc.

> even evidence of a decline in IQ in developed nations

Can you expand on this? Only thing I've heard is the Flynn effect, which is probably longer-term... And the only other thing I think of in association with "long-term, potentially worrisome, population-wide unexplained decline" is testosterone levels.

Sure, it's a fairly recent discovery. Like you know of course the Flynn effect was the observation that 'real' IQs were increasing over time. They're always normalized such that the mean is 100 with a 15 point standard deviation, but that 100 market kept representing a higher and higher 'real' score.

This has been observed to have reversed in many developed nations. By reversed it's not like it's reaching an asymptotic zero rate of growth, but genuinely decreasing. This was first observed in Scandinavian countries in the mid nineties. Outside of Scandinavia this decline has been corroborated in at least the UK, Australia, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It's probably reasonable to hypothesize that the reason it's yet to be corroborated elsewhere is a mix of the lack of testing or a lack of earlier testing to compare against. Scandinavia, for instance, has compulsory enlistment which, in turn, entails compulsory IQ testing which is then made publicly available. The declines are also extremely significant. For instance in the extreme case, Denmark IQ's dropped by 1.5 points on average in just 5 years.

For now the exact cause(s) are not agreed upon and it's a topic that isn't receiving anywhere near the attention deserves due to people's sensitivity to the topic. Dysgenic factors are almost certainly playing some role, but a decline has also been observed even between brothers. Again, yet another mystery of society somehow deteriorating for no apparent reason. In this case, I do think us inadvertently poisoning ourselves (yet again) in some way or another is probably the best case scenario.

Wiki has a decent paragraph on the topic [1]. Searches or things like Google Scholar can turn up far more as well.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...

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