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Comment by seanhandley | Hacker News Reader

I hope the ultra processed food industry will come to be viewed similarly to the tobacco industry over time.

The human body is evidently not able to safely consume these products over the course of a lifetime and the ultimate toll on society and healthcare is already evident.

They are addictive and harmful to the body’s mechanisms.

It’s time to control the promotion, labelling and taxation of these products the same way we do cigarettes.

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It was the tobacco industry! Big tobacco began buying food companies in the 1960s. Companies like Kraft and Del Monte where bought by tobacco companies R.J Reynolds and Philip Morris. These buyouts continued through the 90s. They applied their science of addiction engineering to food. And in cooperation with the USDA and farmers, they pushed a low-fat, high-carb diet, creating a market built on dirt-cheap grains.

edit: see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332 "US tobacco companies selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the US food system: Empirical evidence and current implications"

Wtf. Thanks for sharing.

Ultra processed doesn't mean anything.

For the purposes of this conversation - let’s think of it as pre chewed food.

The body evolved to eat foods that take a lot of chewing and digesting. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest problems with food that is “too” processed is that it’s absorbed far too quickly and early in the tract.

Food that makes it all the way through has a slower and more even absorption rate so we don’t get hungry again as fast.

That doesn't help define a useful understanding at all.

There will likely never be a satisfactory definition, and doesn't need to be. Instead we define what foods are causing health problems and which aren't.

Look in this study, cheese is on the unprocessed side. That is an absurdity of language.

In the end they may figure out that the key difference here isn't processing at all, but fiber, or some particular ingredient added to floud based products on the processing side.

Cheese is not unprocessed. It's not ultra-processed. There's no absurdity in that.

Good rule of thumb: If you’re eating things you couldn’t make in your own kitchen using ingredients that were available 200 years ago… they might not be great for you.

That's an absurd and completely arbitrary rule.

But it works.

No it doesn't. Lots of Asian people eat tofu without negative health effects.

But it's been around a lot longer than 200 years, so...

Look into “the food matrix” and you’ll see what I mean.

Many ultra processed ingredients have been so pulverised that there’s no structure left to help regulate the speed at which your body can break it down and absorb it.

So it absorbs nutrients too quickly, blood sugar spike, blood sugar crash, hunger pang, and you end up eating more than you would have otherwise during your waking hours.

Multiply that by years and you get metabolic issues.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...

Soup seems to be different - it's more satiating than a solid version of the same ingredients, and keeps you fuller longer.

You have canines for cutting flesh and yet you cook your brisket until it melts apart in your mouth. I don’t think pre chewed is much an argument. All cooking is “pre chewing” in a sense. You are dumping energy into this food. It’s going to do something to it.

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