I'm curious, what's your cut off point for processed food? Just things that are ready to eat besides fruits and veggies? What about white flour and rice as opposed to whole grains?
After some time (a week?) you get a pretty good idea of what takes what. An apple is 100. "Boring foods" like boiled potatoes are circa 100 calories per 100 grams. "Fun foods" like chicken breast or ikea meatballs are 200 calories per 100 grams. Oil - 10 calories per ml.
And then you look at <younameit> cheesy crackers and realize that something is wrong: no way 30 grams of human food should be 200 calories.
Someone on HN said you’ll easily lose weight if you stick to foods less than one calorie per gram.
I believe it but I can’t find many foods ...
Twinkies and Oreos: signicant quantities of novel ingredients that have only existed in the last 150 or so years; high quantities of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats.
Eat carbs that are coal, not jet fuel.
E.g., lots of people eat a whole lot of white rice and seem to do quite well on it. The Hadza, a tribe in africa, at certain times of the year, get about half their calories from honey, and they are very healthy. And fruit would certainly also have to be in the rocket-fuel category, no?
(If you're already unhealthy (e.g. type II diabetic), there seems to be a lot of benefit in going very-low or no-carb.)
They aren't eating the honey that your or I eat. Not to mention, they're probably far more physically active.
So I remain convinced that the main problem with modern processed food is not the amount or makeup of the carbs, but more likely the novel ingredients and quantities of fats.
The Hadza do move a lot, but not a crazy amount: about 2 hours per day of "moderate to vigerous physical activity."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/01/03/5075628...
I would predict that 2 hours of exercise a day are not going to save you from a diet of twinkies and oreos; exercise is great, but eating healthy food is critical.
Anyway, at the end of the day calories in/calories out is a hard limit. Sure, they may be getting even 50% of their diet from "rocket fuel". But if they're calorie constrained by a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, why would that matter?
No doubt calories in/calories out must ultimately be obeyed, and you could w/ strictly controlled feeding achieve any weight you want by titrating calories, but I think people often misinterpret this fact to mean that any two isocaloric diets will result in the same weight; that's untrue because the "out" side of the equation is not constant -- different foods have different effects on your metabolism.
(And also appetite, which from a pratical perspective, is also hugely important -- most people don't rigerously eat X calories, they eat until they don't feel like eating anymore.)
Potatoes have glucose, and aren’t sweet.
Twinkies and the like are full of sugar aka sucrose (which is half fructose) which is the real issue.
Avoiding all food with fructose is a good idea. Not only is it bad because only your liver can process it (none of your other cells can use it, unlike glucose) but fructose is in some emerging studies to prohibit lepton signaling. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re full and no longer need to eat. Many obese people have impaired signaling.
Food addition is not a good term. Food addictive addiction is better. No one would eat the cookies if it wasn’t for the sugar. Or get addicted to coffee without the caffeine.
Sugar is the same as alcohol - it has calories, sure, so could be considered an energy source. But it has no other nutritional value. Yet it is regarded as a food.
One cigarette is not harmful, yet we know smoking everyday will cause you some ill effects. It’s the same with sugar. An acute dose in itself is not dangerous. But over time it does.
Unless you eat them dried, in the form of juice or in other "processed" form.
Not if you make your bread yourself from unbleached flour. It's cheaper (except for the really industrial sliced junk) and better than most that you can buy and if you let it ferment overnight there is not work involved in kneading it.
My usual recipe is 500 g plain flour (flour here is about 11.5% protein), 400 g water, 8 g salt, 1 g dried yeast. Mix, leave overnight, fold over a couple of times, wait one hour, heat a conventional oven and a cast iron casserole with a lid until it reaches 230 C, drop the dough in the pot, put on the lid, cook for 35 minutes at 230 C, take off the lid cook further for 20 minutes. Total time I spend actually working is probably less than ten minutes. You can use any container suitable for cooking dry at that temperature. Keeping the lid on keeps the moisture in and helps develop the crust.
Adjust the times depending on how brown you like the crust.
if (foodItem.ingredientList.size()>9) {return false;} else if (foodItem.inventedYearsAgo()<100) {return false;} else{ return true;}
So I can eat a baguette prepared traditionally, and a few brands of prepared bread from the grocery store.
Ingredients: ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, NIACIN, IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, COOKED BEEF PATTIE CRUMBLES (BEEF HAMBURGER, WATER, TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN [SOY FLOUR, CARAMEL COLOR], SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING: SALT, SPICE, NATURAL FLAVORS, DEXTROSE, YEAST EXTRACT, ONION POWDER, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE), REDUCED FAT CHEDDAR CHEESE (PASTEURIZED PART SKIM MILK, SKIM MILK, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, CULTURES, SALT, FLAVORS, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, ANNATTO, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, ENZYMES, INGREDIENTS NOT IN REGULAR CHEDDAR CHEESE), KETCHUP (TOMATO PUREE [TOMATO PASTE, WATER], CORN SWEETENER [HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORN SYRUP], VINEGAR, SALT, SEASONING [SPICES, SALT, NATURAL FLAVORS, ONION POWDER, GARLIC POWDER], DEHYDRATED ONION), VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR CORN OIL), ONIONS, 2% OR LESS OF DILL PICKLE RELISH (PICKLES, WATER, DISTILLED VINEGAR, SALT AND NATURAL FLAVORS), NON-FAT DRY MILK, BUTTERMILK POWDER, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, SUGAR, VINEGAR, TOASTED SESAME SEEDS, FRACTIONATED PALM OIL, YEAST, DOUGH CONDITIONER BLEND (CALCIUM SULFATE, SALT, L-CYSTEINE HYDROCHLORIDE, GARLIC POWDER, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, ENZYMES [WHEAT]), SALT, SOY LECITHIN, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, METHYLCELLULOSE, WHEY, SOY FLOUR, DRIED EGG WHITES.
- flour, water, beef, soy, cheese, ketchup, corn syrup, vinegar, salt, onion.
- the rest is "2% or less" which we can ignore for the first order approximation
To my taste it's too much salt and I also don't like sugar in my food, but other than that the ingredients are pretty benign.
It's 250 calories per 100 grams, close to my personal upper limit of "reasonable foods".
If eating one or two of these for breakfast make you feel full and happy until lunch - why not?
(edit: reformatting)
Most of the list is regular food ingredients or vitamins/minerals added to the "enriched flour". The stabilizers and emulsifiers with scary chemical names are present in tiny amounts regulated by various health departments.
If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie; too much or too little of some nutrients. Not because of some magical consequence of being too processed or having too many ingredients.
Sorry to pick on you, but this confusion that a Hot Pocket is the same as a homemade meat pie is a great demonstration of the food corporations' capture of nutritional intuition and discourse.
The public has been convinced that there's nothing concerning about increasingly replacing, for example, a nutritious, real meat or cheese (milk, cultures, and rennet) with cheaper analogues that are so empty that modified food starch, emulsifiers, and textured soy have to be added to the product for no other purpose than to masquerade as the texture you expect of real ingredients.
You're eating a replica of food and you've been persuaded that the only difference is some "scary chemical names".
The food corporation has a new breakthrough, figures out how five more cheap ingredients can be used to create the texture of some chicken, and you have somehow told yourself that it's the ingredient count that people must be making a fuss over rather than what the growing list represents.
My point was that their nutritional value rests on the same qualities as any other food. Overabundance or lack of certain nutrients. Say lack of fibre, or too much saturated fat.
Excepting certain unequivocally harmful ingredients like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (which could just as easily be added to homemade meat pies in the form of shortening), I don't think the number of ingredients or processing steps will materially affects the nutritional value of a food independent of its nutrient quantities.
NINETEEN EIGHTY TWO!?! I had no idea that was so new. That's interesting. I wonder what else is out there I just assume has been around forever like that.
[1]https://nutritionfacts.org/video/which-is-a-better-breakfast...
Obviously, if you had been some poor peasant and 80% of your food consisted of cereals, then eating whole grains would have been immensely better than eating just white rice or white flour.
On the other hand, if you eat a wide variety of foods, you can get any minerals, vitamins and proteins that you need from much better sources than whole grains.
Above satisfying your basic necessities with other nutrients, you can add enough fatty foods and starchy foods to satisfy your energy needs, depending on how much physical activity you do.
As starch sources, sweet potatoes, potatoes, bananas, maize, white rice, white flour and others are preferable to whole grains.
If you cook yourself with white rice or white flour, the food should be OK.
Unfortunately, if you buy modern bread or similar industrial products made with flour, looking at the composition you will see a huge number of substances beyond the traditional recipes.
Those substances may or may not have some deleterious effect, but, at least in my experience, one certain effect is that with processed food that I buy I am never satiated for long and I have the tendency to eat too large quantities.
Since I have switched to eating only food that I am cooking myself from raw ingredients, I have never felt again the need to overeat.
Can you elaborate as to why the more processed variants are preferable? What is inherently we worse about whole grains and why do the general recommendations get it wrong?