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Comment by fatfingerd | Hacker News Reader

Lack of bioavailability analysis and links between processed meat and cancer are fears... of the established scientific community.

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Sure. This thread is talking about bread. Processed wheat products like bread and seitan are nutrient dense foods usually caught in the social media meme diet crossfire.

Bread is ultra processed.

Yes, so is chocolate and tofu. Why should I care unless it's bad for me?

Using processing as an end-all heuristic loses sight of the characteristic that the heuristic is trying to approximate.

Bioavailability isn't the while story: some foods can be too bioavailable (and not great for you when consuming too much) such as sugars which can cause your body to form inappropriate hormonal signals and disrupt normal satiety. (Looking at you, fructose!) Additionally, there are literally thousands of antinutrients, toxins, carcinogens, and endocrine disruptors that simply aren't accounted for in normal nutritional analyses.

To make things even worse, on the other side of your last sentence, a lot of so called toxins and antinutrients are just orthorexic memes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7600777/ ("Is There Such a Thing as “Anti-Nutrients”? A Narrative Review of Perceived Problematic Plant Compounds")

And an example of a nutrient that can be too bioavailable for some people is heme-iron, yet if you were to follow nutrition influencers online you might think that heme-iron was essential. A young man doesn't necessary want it. Yet anemic women might.

Very confusing space to navigate which I think is one of the main reasons we tend to get sucked into diet camps, all of them promising to cut through the BS while coming to vastly different conclusions.

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