Thickeners and emulsifiers are subject to basic biochemical tests in vivo and in vitro before being allowed in food, and those tests have generally proven them to be safe. But what worries me sometimes is that people focus too much on the chemistry of these compounds and not so much on the mechanics. Thickeners thicken liquids and emulsifiers mix them. The gut is not just a reaction flask; it's sheathed in muscle and innervated in such a way as to be responsive to the forces within it -- to continue peristalsis.
Then again, a surprising amount of irritation can be traced back to a single, innocuous, natural and very popular ingredient that happens to be a lot more irritating -- specifically, it produces gas -- than people give it credit for: garlic powder.
https://www.monashfodmap.com/blog/cooking-with-onion-and-gar...
Sometimes I think people just overthink it. Stop eating food that is clearly junk, and enjoy all the health benefits.
It's not the people eating a chicken breast, mixed veggies and a side of rice who are obese and unhealthy.
I see people go through all sorts of rationalizations to eat a cookie, and then stress over the glycemic index of a bit of rice. Sigh.
But I suppose, your general assertion is fair. People who don't have a good sense of GI for food can't easily make some more complex decisions around food. For those people I tend to tell them to avoid processed ingredients. Anything that makes it easier for your body to digest, probably isn't helping with weight.
There are other factors -- dramaticaly increased affordability and abundance of food, and mass use of taste enhancers in food (such as sugar and salt) that make people overeat, but that's another story.
Edit: arsenic concentrations in rice has more to do with where the rice is geown than the type of rice. For example, I don't buy rice from Arkansas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#International_...
To bring it back to HN, switching rice types is optimizing an already fast function to make it a bit faster while leaving the obvious bottleneck untouched.
This is thought process is exactly what my earlier comments were addressing. Worrying about white rice when consuming cookies and soda all day. A person should worry about things like rice and fresh potatoes after getting rid of all the garbage from their diet.
But I didn't say that. In fact, I carefully qualified my statement, saying that the majority of the obesity problem is caused by junk food. And note, I never said brown rice is a "cure", I actually said it would help. The implication was clearly that by itself (without reducing a diet of processed foods and soft drinks), it's not going to be effective. I just can't fathom how you got "cure" out of my comment.
You know, I'm getting a bit tired of commenting here on HN if this is the sort of conversation I'm going to have, where I'm cautious about making sweeping and unsupported statements, and where I take pains to qualify my comments so that people don't get the wrong idea. It's too bad that no matter how much I try to head such comments off at the pass, someone will reply reflexively without reading carefully.
> But if they switched to brown rice it would help a lot.
I don't think changing rice colors is going to help at all if they are eating like crap. That was my point. White/brown rice is the least problematic part of their diet.
If you were implying that cleaning up the rest of their diet and then switching rice would help, then yeah we are in agreement.
See that's a much better line of reasoning than the one I was objecting to.
As for obesity in Asia. My main question there would be total calories intake. I mean you can stay thin on McDonalds if you calorie count it...
Fructose. HFCS. Sucrose. Enriched wheat flour. Polished white rice. Potato.
Basically, anything with a high glycemic index and little nutritional value beyond the carbohydrate macronutrient.
I personally start putting weight on very quickly with even pretty minimal amounts of carb, natural or processed. My wife is more tolerant of processed carbs, and in fact needs more natural carbs than I can personally tolerate.
Come to think of it, this probably applies to more than just food.
I'm stealing this from somewhere, and I don't recall the source. But someone said "enriched" flour is like this: You're walking down the street. A mugger steals your watch, your wallet (including credit cards), your belt, and your glasses. Then he gives you back your belt and $20 from your wallet, and says, "There, I've enriched you".
I've got strong source amnesia and am probably misremembering details: maybe it was from "Grain Brain"? [0]? At any rate, my experience has been pretty similar to yours.
[0] https://www.drperlmutter.com/about/grain-brain-by-david-perl...
My hunger level has much more to do with amount of food consumed and timing than anything else.
The "stone age bread" looks more like a granola bar. Not bad, mind you, but I don't think it would fulfill that craving very well.
It's important to know what works for you, other people eat the exact opposite with similar results: https://www.onnit.com/academy/the-carnivore-diet/
The no. 1 piece of advice he gave me.... "If you can't grow it or kill it, don't eat it". I've been in incredible shape for over a decade following this simple rule and its also exposed to me just how hard it is to follow this rule when traveling in the US.
I buy raw meats, cheese, some yogurt and a bit of bread and that's about it. Sometimes I break down and get some hot sauce. It's cheap, I eat like a king, and I'm effective at weight management aside from the occasional restaurant visit or party with friends. The only downside is the time I spend cooking - while it's an enjoyable hobby for me, I suspect most people can't dedicate that kind of time to meal prep or dinner.
Jam a bunch of peppers of your desired heat, a few cloves of garlic, and salt water in a mason jar. Close it and keep it on the counter and it will lacto-ferment. Let the CO2 out every morning for a couple weeks, then just let it hang out.
They’ll become delicious pickled peppers after a couple weeks, and become unbelievably complex and delicious after a couple months. When they taste how you want, blend it up for sauce or eat the peppers whole (I’d do a couple jars at once so you don’t have to choose)
You can add a little bit of vinegar at the end to stop the fermentation and make it shelf-stable—and maybe a little xantham gum to thicken if you’d like—or just keep it in the fridge.
Great for your gut flora and you’ll be shocked it came out of your kitchen with such little effort.
[0] http://phickle.com/we-can-phickle-that-hot-pepper-sauce/
Education, public awareness, these kind of initiatives I can get behind. Regulation of food intake, is a step too far.
FWIW, I've eaten processed, fried, GMO foods my whole life (and consume fast food drive thru at least 5-6 times a week) and have no health issues whatsoever. But I try to not eat to excess and I exercise regularly.
This canned "the government shouldn't choose what I eat" argument is reductionist to the point of deficiency at best, and disingenuous at worse.
The fact is an unregulated free market forces choices on us no different than government regulation. The quality and type of food a consumer has access to is highly dependent on market decisions — that is the food demanded by other consumers — not individual decisions. The problem is consumers in the US at large are either ignorant about health/nutrition or just plain don't prioritize the future (sustainable health) over the present (what I'm eating was iteratively designed in a lab to maximize my immediate dopamine hit).
Good regulation isn't binary. You can regulate the food industry to protect consumers from predatory/harmful practices (such as engineering food so that consumers overeat by "growth hacking" food via salt/sugar/fat in order to drive revenue growth) while still allowing an abundance of dietary choices.
>FWIW, I've eaten processed, fried, GMO foods my whole life (and consume fast food drive thru at least 5-6 times a week) and have no health issues whatsoever. But I try to not eat to excess and I exercise regularly.
Some people smoke two packs a day and die at the ripe old age of 100. The vast majority of smokers die significantly earlier than average. Much like you wouldn't consider a lottery ticket a wise investment even if it pays off, you shouldn't interpret your personal health and dietary experience to much other than good fortune. Your experience is an outlier in the face of mountains of data that tell a different and honestly quite depressing story.
Lastly, I know sometimes tone can be misinterpreted easily in text. So if my comment came off as brash or an attack etc, please re-read it with a polite and friendly tone in mind. I'm passionate about this topic because I want to help.
Carbs are carbs. Protein is protein. Fat is fat. Sure, some types of foods (including fried foods) have excessive calories for the average American lifestyle. That's been known for decades. But there is no evidence that calories from broccoli are any less or more cancerous than calories from potatoes or bread or vegetable oil.
My experience is not an outlier.
This guy has eaten 30,000 Big Macs, perfectly healthy: https://people.com/food/mcdonalds-big-mac-supersize-me-don-g...
Studies on diets with a variety of macros (but the same calories): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246357 CONCLUSIONS: Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17413101 CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide more detailed evidence to suggest that diets differing substantially in glycemic load induce comparable long-term weight loss.
It isn’t that simple.
That said, that’s absolutely no argument for regulation. People should be free to entirely destroy themselves seeking short-term dopamine hits—if they so choose. It is staunchly immoral to impede them.
This ignores the entire premise of my comment, which is that people's choices in this context are not made in a vacuum.
If the market demands unhealthy food, then that is what the food industry will supply, and thus be the option made generally available to all.
The food industry has exploited human evolutionary traits (cravings for salt/sugar/fat and other nutrients that are high-value in moderation but detrimental in excess) to push the market in a direction that boosts consumption (and thus revenue growth) at a cost to our health.
Grocery stores still sell broccoli and chicken. People choose to buy oreos and croissants and other refined carbs. That’s not “the food industry”.
It’s variously described, but “consumer choice” and “market demands” don’t really capture it. It boils down to other adult humans, just like you and I, choosing what they want to spend their money on, choosing what foods they want to eat.
It is nobody’s place but the eater to tell them what they should or should not be doing. Full stop.
i could agree with you for individuals
but for corporations who are making money off of (and actively marketing) certain things (that indeed do harm people) i would say regulations should exist to at the very least mark thier products so the consumer is informed “this will most likely kill you if you take more than once a day” or “there are no proven claims in this product” etc...
after working at a few very large firms, i have little faith in companies being genuine about their products’s safety, and if one was to leave things to “the market” then being informed is the absolute minimum in my opinion... idk though maybe i am missing something...
I agree, but the government can use softer nudges like taxes and subsidies to help encourage healthier eating. A good start would be to examine existing farm subsidies and ask whether they encourage unhealthy dietary choices.
> have no health issues whatsoever
That you're aware of. What's your fasted glucose level, or A1c? What about inflammation markers? Given your lifestyle you should probably know your calcium score (heart) too.
You could be pre-diabetic and not even know it, which means without intervention, you'll be really screwed in your not so distant future. You might already have plaque and scars accumulating in your heart. Or elevated inflammation slowly damaging organs in your body. Know your numbers if you're going to eat fast food every day of the week.
That can be said about anyone.
Do you have any argument why they shouldn’t do this?
And to reiterate my point, advocating X based on "don't we already Y" instead of the actual merits of X is a big part of how dangerous slippery slopes occur, even if Y was a good thing.
"Education, public awareness, these kind of initiatives I can get behind. Regulation of food intake, is a step too far."
I merely pointed out that the thing identified as "a step too far" already exists. I wasn't advocating for anything so there isn't a slippery slope to fear.
Thanks for keeping us safe from government boogeymen though
People are dragging out this paranoid fantasy where Uncle Sam is literally spoon feeding you.
When tacitly he’s enabling you to spoon feed yourself his choices.
People seem really convinced the next step is a government assigned personal health manager.
I mean just cause you CAN view it from the perspective of concern that some G-man will show up every morning to check your pantry doesn’t mean one is on topic, or peddling reasonable discourse.
Yes, be on the lookout for government overreach. Sure. Immediately invoking paranoid nonsense and individualism (which ends being heavily constrained by social norms anyway) is just bizarre
Convince yourself you absolutely shouldn't eat pre-packed whatever, and then if your kitchen's empty you're pretty likely just to power on through it on less.
This is consistent with people who entirely incorrectly claim that sourdough bread is GF. Traditional sourdoughs give bacteria and yeasts a lot of time to eat various sugars and starches.
There is a moderately well supported theory that most "gluten intolerance" issues are actually intolerance of FODMAPs: certain fermentable sugars and short-chain starches found in a wide range of foods, most notably wheat. If you remove gluten from diet, you have likely also significantly reduced your FODMAP consumption. But gluten itself isn't a FODMAP, and I once baked an experimantal loaf of low-FODMAP bread using spelt flour and vital wheat gluten. (It wasn't very good.)
We've gone GF at our house because my wife has coeliac disease. But we use very few commercially-prepared GF products; we cook at home from basic ingredients, and simply avoid the gluten-containing grains.
If you basically went gluten free by relying on products from the supermarket "free from" section, I can imagine it's easy to gain rather than lose weight.
The weight loss was an unexpected side effect.
I imagine most people buy bread thinking that it's healthy, but they're basically just buying candy in bread form.
It bums me out.
As long as the bread dough is proofed for at least a couple hours, the vast majority of added sugar in non-sweet bread recipes will be consumed by the yeast leaving little residual sugar.
Yeast will consume sucrose, glucose and fructose first before moving onto the maltose from the broken down flour starch.
(In sweet breads where added sugar >5%, the sugar actually retards the fermentation process leaving a considerable amount of residual sugar, but you can't easily tell how much residual sugar from added sugar is in bread from the list of ingredients)
Please don't use acronyms that people might not understand.
'The GI Doc', 'I have GI issues', etc
The first 5 results on
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gi
say that it's either "Government Issue" or "General Infantry". Gastrointestinal isn't even among the results.
Google's first few results are likewise about the military.
Keep in mind that HN is a global community.
Give them some credit. Regulation (threat of force) is not the answer, unless you consider yourself inherently superior to the next guy, who couldn’t possibly figure out what you managed to.
I think what we're feeding the general public is a health hazard and should be much more strongly regulated.