This is a market that traditionally derives most of its profits from a close relationship with the government, for subsidies (the #1 source of profit for farms, maybe for the whole agricultural sector) and health guidelines (the cheapest, and therefore highest RoI advertising). Beyond Meat enjoys none of these advantages and its equities wildly outperformed e.g. Tyson.

I am not saying that marketing does not play a role in health outcomes. Just that the nutrition discourse is overwhelmingly marketing budget driven, that actual nutritionists struggle against consumers immensely, and that once you’ve heard one ad campaign you easily become jaded of all of them. Well meaning people get coopted by all of this.

There are a lot reasons to hate the meat lobby and factory farming, but sticking up for industrial labs cranking out the most addictive chemicals that they can legally push on us is completely unnecessary.

This sentence risks framing industrially manufactured food products as equally nutritious to meat and dairy (and fruit and vegetables, beans and pulses, eggs and fish, etc. etc.).

Yes, it's a new term in the literature, but the fact that it Beyond and Impossible are also newish products is a correlation at best.

Most content online I see that refer to 'ultra-processed' are usually referring to items like potato chips, soft drinks or coloured breakfast cereals.

I'm a strict health food eater but I have to be realistic and concede that preparing healthy meals is more work.

For example, I have a green smoothie drink made from raw vegetables every day for breakfast for more than 10 years. I'm pretty efficient at it but it still takes more work (and time) than just putting an unhealthy Pop Tart in the toaster.

And my dinners of lentil soup or tofu are more prep work than tossing a frozen pizza into the oven. I have a diabetic friend who often "cheats" with junk food (McDonald's burger) because cooking supposedly "simple" healthy meals is still too much of a hassle even for him.

Yes, cooking healthy may be "easy" but it's still more work than junk food. Convenience junk foods are just... more convenient.

Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day cold when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly naturally so this factors into it.

Now I do live in Louisiana and Mardi Gras is right around the corner which means King Cake. Is this healthy for me? No, not at all. But it's once a year and we buy them from the local bakeries, where each bakery has their own recipe. Does this it make anymore healthy? Probably not, but they are good.

Of course people would rather open an app and order some delicious fast food which arrives in about 20 minutes. It's not healthy but it wastes less time.

Also, sauces. 1 day making bolognese is 3 days of main courses.

Ideally you are only making 2 or 3 main courses during the week.

I was one of your early sign ups when you first announced on reddit. I came back this year and resumed my usage.

So, originally, I was a single guy looking to put on muscle. ETM works great for that! Like, super duper well. Baring a few issues.

But now, it isn't just me! And I can't get away with arguing "well the meal is nutritionally balanced."

So, from a wife acceptance factor, whole meals, more than 1 course.

Next, ETM gives wacko shopping amounts sometimes. I know that the math may work out, but 25 cups of spinach is too much. The amounts listed to buy are so far off reality that I am not going to trust the delivery option, which, well, totally sucks because that'd be nice. I think it had me buy 6 heads of lettuce one week.... I did. I ended the week with 4 heads of lettuce in my fridge.

For that matter, the entire UI around "original serving size, servings to make" is confusing as hell.

I should sign up for a new account to give a real FRE feedback, but the UI for existing users to configure meals and such is both absurdly powerful and also hard to manage in regards to "types of meals" and "meal plan". I totally get why the UI is how it is (except for why menus are where they are, separate topic) but I wouldn't ever suggest someone who isn't technically inclined, and also very dedicated, to even try to get started.

Which sort of sums up ETM: It is a power user's tool.

Oh and adding a recipe sucks. After doing one I gave up. I currently have a one note of "recipes from ETM except fixed so they taste like food." No offense (since I fit in this category) but a lot of the recipes are obviously written by gym bros to be as efficient as possible. Like, some of the recipes are easily transformed from meh to good by the addition of basic seasonings.

On the topic of recipes write some sort of import tool so I can point you at a website and you just scrap that shit. Or even let me paste it in and you parse it.

Even if I had to take the parsed results and verify each ingredient, it's be 10x better.

I need to be clear, I like ETM, it saves me a ton of money and makes meal planning easier, but if I didn't know how to cook, estimate amounts of food I need to buy, and if I wasn't able to on the fly figure out other courses for the meals, it would be far less useful to me.

But, as a tool for gym bros to meet their macros, bloody amazing. And gym bros will learn any UI if it promises gains, none of the other tools I use are exactly user friendly.

At the end of the day, if you had a slick onboarding process of "select 5 meals from NYT cooking that we legally slurped up because recipes have no copyright protection, and we'll ship you all the ingredients you need to cook them", well that's be an awesome product.

Oh and pay attention to when certain proteins are cooked. Buying $40 of fish on Sunday for Friday dinner is stupid. Either I freeze $40 of fish and hate you, or the fish goes to waste and I hate you. Both are shitty options.

I chose C, ignore the schedule and I cooked the Halibut on Monday.

Local Data Science prospects are low to non-existent. I work remotely and remote prior to Covid. Companies reach out and don't seemed concerned about my location so I don't foresee being remote an issue.

Edit -

Preparing each meal everyday is time consuming but I view it as the best investment in my family's life. We rarely get sick, if so its a day (a cold) when the weather changes. We sleep a solid 8 hours a day, and only go to the doctor for our yearly health check-ups. We also highly active naturally so this factors into it.

If you are two or a family, cooking for the others to enjoy is a pleasure. If someone lives alone, I can see why they rather eat something quick-and-dirty.

This is a lot more common[0] than one might think, and arguably hits the worst demographic for it - university students and fresh out of university students, where the only affordable place is $2-3k for barely a hundred square feet with a microwave and minifridge.

There is a fair amount of places near tech companies where it's quite common that someone renting there pre-COVID would just have been getting meals catered at work or similar.

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/rent-...

When I was a student, I did a fair amount of cooking in shared kitchens in dorms, mainly because I enjoyed it and it helped me relieve stress. My goto strategy was to pick an unpopular time (middle of the week during the day, ideally) and meal prep for 2-3 hours, then mix those meals in with restaurant/cafeteria meals for the next week. I was able to make that work reasonably well.

Restaurant code and permits are notoriously difficult and in San Francisco expensive ..a nightmare actually. If restaurants can do without a stove..cooking in a dorm is easy peasy.

Our neighbor who moved to the East coast sent me a bag of wild rice from her state. I made a wild rice and mushroom soup in less than half an hour. The same would have been a production earlier as wild rice takes longer to cook than regular rice. I was also able to make it a larger batch and freeze it for later.

I am used to flash freezing having worked in restaurants and I am not a fan of freezing left overs in a home freezer and probably won’t be doing this again if this fails the texture test.

The smaller instant pot was perfect to make a nice roux for thickening and it doesn’t burn. And clean up is a breeze.

One advantage of intermittent fasting is that it's much less burdensome to make a single, large healthy than it is to make three healthy meals plus snacks.

(Though this can be a double-edge sword. If you wind up eating junk food, like pizza, for your large meal, then it becomes the equivalent of eating junk food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

If I'm in a hurry, there are lots of things I can make in 30 min or less. More often if I'm busy I'll make something that doesn't require much interaction; e.g. 10-15 min prep and 60 nearly untouched in a 500 degree oven for a roast chicken with root veg in one pan. I do other things in that hour.

Honestly, I've been doing this long enough I'm pretty efficient. I could save a little time buying more prepared food, but my meal quality would go way down so I don't mind. Shopping is pretty efficient too, as I mostly don't shop by recipe.

To be fair though, I find cooking relaxing as a way to wind down after work, so sometimes I'll do something more involved just for the hell of it on a random Wednesday.

I mostly cook German stuff, some French, a little Chinese and a fair few BBQs in the summer. I have quick and easy things I make, and more elaborate stuff that tastes unlike anything you can buy ready-made.

I shop at local markets where you get to know the farmers, smallholders who sell what they grow. Food is way too important to me to not put the effort into it that I do.

Lastly, I'm not a health nut. I don't go to the gym. I see my GP once a year and age usually tells me to try get more sunlight in the winter but otherwise gives me a clean bill of health. I'm approaching 50 and sleep 8 hours most nights.

As I was until recently working in a food startup, producing "ready to cook" products (organic fair trade delicious mixes of grain, dried vegetables and spices), I can testify of a strong society injonction towards healthier food AND at the same time a rejection of this pressure.

The 2 bulk ingredients are kale and tomato. To save time, you can use canned tomatoes (half can of diced tomatoes). Then add for flavor... basil, olive oil, lemon/lime juice. I sometimes add spoonfuls of ground flax seed and hemp. The purpose of olive oil is to add some fat to satiate the appetite and also give it a buttery flavor. The purpose of lemon/lime juice is to mask the bitterness of raw greens.

If you prefer sweet smoothies, there are lots of youtube videos showing recipes with bananas/apples/blueberries/cherries/yogurt, etc.

EDIT ADD: you can try spinach instead of kale or mix kale+spinach. To add even more flavor, you can try sun-dried tomatoes (in jar of oil) but that ingredient makes it more expensive to drink every day.

Breakfast cereal is "ultraprocessed" by the definition of the article. But Grain Berry cereal is going to be grossly different from a nutritional perspective than Frosted Flakes. For both to be lumped into the same category of "ultraprocessed" is a bit ridiculous.

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Its not like "processing" makes something more or less poisonous. 100% all natural fully organic death cap mushrooms will kill you.

Now high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt, high-preservative stuff is probably bad. Those things have clear science and nutrition issues associated with them. But the nutrition in "processed" canned corn (picked and canned at peak ripeness) is often found to be superior to "fresh" ears of corn (which loses nutrition the longer it sits in the food aisle).

If you cook all-natural brown rice with fresh pork-belly all day every day, and you'll have a heart attack from all that fat you're eating. It doesn't matter if that pork-belly is ultraprocessed bacon or freshly cut from a squealing pig in your backyard: pork-belly contains a ton of fat and is just innately unhealthy.

I completely agree with this. There's nothing inherent to processing food that makes it less healthy. In fact it could potentially make it even more healthy, e.g. adding fiber or protein to a starch. Heck, even just like at the original processing technique. Cooked vegetables are more nutritious than raw vegetables.

But the reality is that 99% of processing is directed at making foods hyper-palatable, calorically dense, and easy to digest. Because that's what consumers crave. If someone's investing the capital necessary to process foods, it would not be smart to do it such a way to make their product less appealing.

So the reality is that avoiding processed foods in favor of whole foods winds up being a pretty good heuristic. The only real exception I can think of are products marketed explicitly as health food, and even a lot of times they're not actually that healthy.

> But the reality is that 99% of processing is directed at making foods hyper-palatable, calorically dense, and easy to digest. Because that's what consumers crave.

Yes, people want unhealthy foods.

You can buy a perfectly organic, fully unprocessed meal from Panda Express. Its called rice stir-fry, and as long as you hold back the soy sauce its "unprocessed".

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A friend of mine went vegetarian for better health. He ended up eating potato chips and gaining weight. Yes, there's a general "vegetables are usually better for you than meat", but, there's no guarantee that following such vague advice helps anyone.

You need to think harder, and eat smarter than that if you want a better diet. This "unprocessed vs ultraprocessed" designation is too vague, too unhelpful. It will just cause people to eat Panda Express all day every day.

Butter, sesame/vegetable oil and white rice are all processed foods. An unprocessed version would consist of brown rice, eggs, and the chopped veggies. Which would be an improvement on 95% of the typical meals Americans consume.

I do get your point though. There's an aspect of Goodhart's law here. When we come up with some sort of diet management heuristic, over time our personal habits and eventually the market will find exploits. We'll look for the most unhealthy/tasty food that complies with the ostensible rules of the diet.

The article is clearly using NOVA's definition of unprocessed vs ultraprocessed. Under NOVA's definition of unprocessed: butter, vegetable oil are "Group 2" (ingredients) while white rice is "Group 1" (unprocessed / minimally processed).

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As such, fresh Stir Fry from a restaurant with white rice, oil, and butter is Group2.

Group3 and Group4 are the "problematic" (allegedly) groups of high-processing.

Anyway, it's perfectly healthy to eat meat; vegetarianism isn't healthier. What's healthier is being deliberate and thinking about the food you consume.

(For reference, I became vegetarian because I ha concerns about factory farming's environmental impact and slowly just started to dislike the idea of having to sacrifice another animal for my benefit when it became clear to me that not doing so isn't actually that difficult.)

*Vaidya is the title for an Ayurvedic doctor.

I have not read his Aghora series. That could be esoterica or even a spoof, who knows. I have only read his Ayurveda book. Doubt that that book is wrong, since my family has some background in Ayurveda as users for two generations or more. Also read his bio on his site - says he was gold medals winner in his Ayurveda degree exams from the Pune university he studied at. I know of that school. Unlikely to be fake info, could easily be verified.

that Sri Ramakrishna got throat cancer by wish of some female guru as punishment for wanting to learn Tantra out of turn

Abbottabad is hottest place in Asia (it’s Jacobabad near where my mom grew up)

Wajid Ali Shah died soon after he was sent to Calcutta by British

Confuses Shamse Tabrez and Shamsuddin Sabzawari (RA)

Again, on the other hand, some foods require processing to extract necessary nutrients(i.e. nixtamalization of corn).

Why? Just because we consume a lot of it does not mean it is not "ultraprocessed". We should be afraid of a name just because a lot of modern food falls into the definition.

* Are there good foods that are ultraprocessed? (Ex: Grain Berry)

* Are there good foods that are unprocessed? (Ex: Brown Rice)

* Are the bad foods that are unprocessed? (Ex: Pork Belly)

If "ultraprocessed" fails to distinguish good from bad, then the word itself is worthless.

It is puzzling to me why low-fat cereal would be some kind of win or automatically should be considered great thing. You get energy from fat, sugar and proteins. Healthy human can and should eat all three, but I really dont understand why specifically amount of low-fatness of some cereal box would be advantage.

The issue with nutrition is that it is complicated. Food is rarely straight in the "good" and "bad" category. If distinguising between processed and ultraprocessed allows us to simplify it enough to reason about stuff in contemporary stores, then it is useful.

Dietary fiber is a huge part of nutrition and you're ignoring it in your above analysis. In particular, dietary fiber allows you to feel full without consuming ludicrous amounts of calories.

A high-fiber, low-sugar, low-fat cereal provides "stomach filler", so to speak. It makes you feel full, it provides vitamins, minerals, and fiber (important nutrients to live).

The psychology of a full stomach has a huge effect on whether or not someone is going to overeat later in the day. If you eat high-calorie foods like lard (_unprocessed_ fat from pork belly), you're simply not going to have as full of a stomach as someone who was filling up on fibers (even if those fibers are "ultraprocessed").

Unfortunately many people are so used to eating nutritionally bankrupt food that the connection between satiety and nutrition is broken, and many people exist in such a constant state of hunger that only fullness can temporarily stop them from eating more. The people I've met who overeat fiber to keep themselves from overeating caloric food have typically not been very healthy.

This "psychology of a full stomach" is not a requirement to live. In moderation, fiber is fine, but so is lard. You don't have to eat until you are full, you can simply stop eating when you have consumed enough nutrients. The body can give good feedback if one chooses to listen. Unfortunately this innate animalian skill is easy to forget in a world of soda and cheetos.

If you want a more thorough exposition of this idea, consider the book "Why Diets Make us Fat" by Sandra Aamodt, especially if you are interested in the psychology of eating. Please stop hating on pork belly. It is fine in moderation.

I know I can finish an entire pound of pork belly tonight if I am given the opportunity. I'm not going to do it, because I know that's not "in moderation".

The amount of nutrition you get from 1-lb of pork belly will be miniscule compared to a properly balanced meal. But its so damn tasty that you really can just keep shoving that sort of thing into your mouth.

Anything in moderation is healthy. Saying "X is healthy in moderation" is almost not useful at all. That's why serving sizes and yes, religious dedication to weighing foods and portion control is a thing that serious people do when they're seriously dieting.

Oxycodon in moderation is healthy. That's how unhelpful that "in moderation" statement is for dietary health.

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As for "Pork Belly", I'm really saying Lechon kawali, which is a particular Filipino preparation of Pork, which is probably the best tasting pork in the world. Its very good stuff. I just don't think the general English-speaking audience will know what "Lechon kawali" is, so I'm using a rough translation.

"X in moderation" is pretty good advice for most X. It just turns out many people are quite bad at moderation, prefering instead to "shove X into their mouth" or otherwise consume in ways that promote overindulgence. Usually, these habits deserve scrutiny more than X. It possible to choose to eat in a different way.

Seriously, read that book. If you've studied "serious diets," you should know their medium- and long-term success rates are absolutely dismal. Luckily it is not the only way. Working with the hard-to-modify aspects of food psychology is easier, more sustainable, more enjoyable, and more effective than fighting against them.

If you have a point to be made, you can make it here and now without the need of a hundred-page reference. I understand you put a lot of work into reading books about diets or whatever, but I also make my arguments based on the findings supported by a large body of research.

I'm not going to ask you to read through all of the reference material I'm using to build up my arguments. At best, I'm going to point out the FDA + Department of Agriculture studies on health and nutrition which inform my decisions and arguments.

But anyone who says "my argument is in a book elsewhere" is just... going to be ignored by me. Just an FYI. That's also why I'm not shoving FDA or Department of Agriculture whitepapers into your face.

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The mainstream science of food, eating, and nutrition is pretty simple and straightforward. Have a balanced meal (multiple forms of fruits and vegetables. Roughly 1/2 the meat of the average American. Grossly lower sugar intake compared to the average American). That's it.

These papers on "ultraprocessed foods" or "alternative diets" may have something about them, but it is the job of its advocates to make solid arguments about why the mainstream thought is insufficient or inadequate.

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What can I say about diets? Some people have a strong ability to stick to diets, while others do not. Studying the psychology of "what makes people feel full" is an important part of the equation.

Some people just can't help themselves. For those people, you teach them psychology, so that they trick themselves into healthy eating.

I'm really not sure what the "mainsteam science of food" is. Studies linking food to health outcomes are notoroiously low quality, and there isn't strong consensus on most things, other than basic stuff like "eat more vegetables." And it wasn't that long ago that the USDA was saying "eat more grains, less veggies." If you think it is simple I would suggest you read a larger variety of sources. Human health is a very complex subject and there is a lot we still don't know.

I would rather we teach people how to help themselves, rather than teaching them ways to trick themselves. It's hard to trick yourself for long periods of time, especially when you are up against biological imperatives. People who's strategies don't rely on tricks are more successful.

If you don't like it, that's fine. I'm just saying... it works. And it works very well. Predict your own behaviors, be honest with yourself, and then nudge yourself into improving yourself through greater reasoning.

If you know that X will make you overeat, then avoid X from the start. If you know that Y makes you feel full, then eat Y. Etc. etc. That reduces the amount of measuring you need to do when dieting, because you can start to trust the nerve-cells in your stomach and/or brain chemistry for when you feel full and/or hungry.

That's the problem with a lot of diets: they don't recognize the efficacy that a little bit of psychology and prediction can do. Everyone's psychology is slightly different: what works for one person doesn't work for everyone else. So you need to customize it to each person.

But once you figure out someone's psychology, you really can "manipulate them to better themselves". That includes yourself. And its a lot less stressful than trying to "willpower" your way throughout the hours, days, or weeks.

I've never met a food with this kind of psychic power. Even if pigs did have this dramatic power at some point, surely it is lost after they are cooked.

I can get on board with being honest with yourself and trusting your stomach, but I wouldn't call that a psychology or a trick/hack. I would simply call that listening to the signals your body has been sending all along. But if you are interested in psychological manipulation in other contexts maybe it can be helpful to frame it that way.

"Willpower" methods are usually set up to fail because they approach the problem from a bad angle. It takes sustained effort to look at a delicious food while abstaining. It takes less effort if the food is far away, out of sight. It takes no effort if you decide it's not that delicious after all. But if you have something that works for you by all means stick to it.

People don't like ultra-processed in an partake-abstain framing (like many do with illegal drgus), but they could just apply a how-often, or frequency framing, (like they do with alcohol).

People are just uncomfortable with the responsibility being theirs and are exercising their denial.

The demand for a narrative about evil-FDA or evil-food-corp is HIGH. Everyone could just eat like the healthiest among their friends and family, but you can't sell a story without a villian.

Which is non-helpful. A stir-fry dish from Panda Express and/or Noodle's and Co is entirely "group 2 unprocessed" by this designation. Is eating Panda Express all-day, every day healthy?

You can literally see them cut the veggies and meats as they make the stir-fry. Its fresh and out in the open.

That is just not how nutrition works either. And honestly, the processed/unprocessed distinction will end up with better result then "fat is bad".

Aren't we more interested in health outcomes associated with food rather than moralistic rules or labels?

The leap from "this general rule has some exceptions" to "this is worthless" is unwarranted.

You still personally expect people that eat less processed foods to be slimmer on average than those that eat more, right?

Not if you consider low-fat low-sugar cereals like "Grain Berry" as "ultraprocessed". All you're doing is making it harder for people to craft a useful diet.

Would you say that Lard is more, or less healthy than a high-fiber cereal?

Lard doesn't contain trans fats, which is what fast food is full of.

Lard is a time-tested animal product that has been used by many long-lived civilizations. "trans fats" wasn't a thing until ~20 years ago, so basically science is catching up with the implicit knowledge people have had for thousands of years.

https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/nutrition/2013/...

Lard is definitely healthier than processed oils, e.g. vegetable oil in the supermarket.

I eat food cooked with lard before I eat fast food or industrial cooking, every time. (and I lost significant weight in the last 3 years, so I'm medically "normal", which is 20-30% percentile -- i.e. most people are heavier than me)

Ditto for butter -- natural, whole fats were "out of fashion" 20 years ago because of incorrect nutritional knowledge foisted upon you by interested parties. Again, there are many mainstream books that cover these topics, like Pollan's.

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And as much as these comparisons make sense, I would say that lard is also healthier than a cereal with the following ingredients:

Whole Oat Flour, Wheat Starch, Sorghum Berry Bran, Modified Corn Starch, Brown Sugar, Salt, Tricalcium Phosphate, Tripotassium Phosphate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E) added to maintain freshness.

The sugar, salt, and preservatives gives me pause. I believe that unprocessed sugars like honey, maple syrup, and dried fruit are easier for the body to metabolize, and I don't think that's very controversial these days.

So I eat granola without preservatives or much added sugar instead (although you can be tricked by concentrated apple or pear juice, etc. which is basically sugar). You have to pay about double, and it rules out about 50% of what's on the shelves at Whole Foods, and maybe 80% at Safeway. But I think it's cheaper in the long term.

The FDA has banned partially hydrogenated oils (artificial trans-fat) in the US. The phase-out process won't be 100% complete until January 1 (certain specifically exempted products containing trace amounts can still be sold until then), but for the vast majority of PHO-containing foods, 2018 was the last year that they could be manufactured and 2019 was the last year that they could be sold (in the US).

but from the linked article...

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For everyone else, choose liquid oil high in monounsaturated fats, such as olive oil or organic, non-GMO canola oil, which are trendy now and healthy, says Lindzon, even for baking your next birthday cake. “The bottom line is change your grandmother’s recipes that call for butter and lard,” she says.

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by 'vegetable oils', do you mean processed oils like margerine and shortening?

Nope. Just less healthy than a high-fiber, low sugar, low-fat breakfast cereal.

If you disagree: explain to me how 1-bowl of lard is possibly any healthier than 1-bowl of Grain Berry breakfast cereal.

At scale, processing food often introduces challenges only solvable by introducing chemicals and practices that are considered harmful to humans.

Phthalates become more common in foods the more times it changes hands. Sterilized environments necessary for processing must be sanitized by using chlorine, some of which is exposed to the food itself. Most processed foods have ingredients that are also processed, so the effects of this are compounded. Many preservatives, past and present, have positive correlations with various types of cancer and neurological diseases.

I agree with base premise — you don't automatically start eating healthily by choosing whole foods. But I think it's harmful to consider processing as benign.

Citation needed. Not all fats are created equal.

For example Inuits consume 50% of their calories from fat [1]. They do not have the "western diet disease" (obesity, heart disease, etc.)

It really IS the processed fats that are bad for you. You can see this all over the world when Aboriginal peoples are introduced to industrial cooking / ultra-processed foods / "western corporate diet".

They literally get addicted, and their body size increases by double digit percentages within a generation. This also happened in the US, but happens faster around the world. The average body weight for a man in the US increased from ~166 in the 1960’s to ~196 today [2].

This is an amazing fact that needs an explanation if you don't believe it's a result of the rise in industrial cooking.

And if you believe in capitalism, you would have to explain how this would NOT happen. Why wouldn't companies gradually develop cheap, consistently manufactured, addictive foods? The profit motive would lead them there, even if it weren't intentional.

I suggest reading some of Michael Pollan's books like Omnivore's Dilemma or Cooked; they talk about this (and probably talk about Inuits specifically as far as I remember)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/12/look-...

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Another anecdote: I know someone from the Midwest with "industrial cooking disease" who dropped from 350 lbs to 200 lbs in a year by going on the "carnivore diet", where he ate exclusively beef and chicken (yes, literally).

I remember someone else remarking the same thing on HN, and observing that going vegan can have the same effect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19177116 (not sure if this is the thread but there are many of them on HN)

Hypothesis: Both the carnivore diet and a vegan diet are BOTH suboptimal. The reason that they help many people with "western diet disease" is that you eliminate industrial cooking / ultra-processed foods from your diet.

The human body is extremely flexible and can metabolize a wide variety of things in the environment. What it apparently can't metabolize is addictive foods that corporations have created...

Filipino diet, consisting of fresh chicken, fresh pork, fresh fish, and fresh rice will lead to heart attacks at relatively young ages.

Nothing against my family or heritage. But these things are known. Balancing it out with some "processed" canned veggies for +Fiber intake can grossly help and improve overall health. And cutting out the fatty Lechon (aka: "Island Pork" with the apple in the mouth) helps too.

Also bad air quality, bad water quality, etc. etc. lead to other issues. But diet is clearly a problem IMO. Even if it is a fresh chicken and/or fresh Lechon/Pig (which really is quite tasty, and barely processed at all)

Worse, everyone (even americans) tend to agree that "ordinary" Filipino food is less healthy (and less tasty) than basically anyone elses. Compare your experience at jolibees to at McDonald's. I claim that almost everyone (even people who hate both) will prefer the food at McDonalds, and that the average item from McDonalds is healthier than from Joliebees

Filipinos trying to bring up their good food and "somehow were still having bad health outcomes" is pinoy pride going wrong. And who can forget about THIS delicacy? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagpag

That's what's so ridiculous about this "unprocessed" vs "processed" label. Lumpia is just flour + water for the wrappers, and then fillers (beef+rasins is pretty common, but maybe you're a veggie-lumpia person). Ultimately, its just flat + fresh dough wrapping fresh foods. Nothing processed about it at all.

I bet you that frying your food and filling it up with oils and salts probably has more to do with your health than how "processed" those foods are.

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If you've been to the Philippines, you can watch people literally rip the plantain (a bananna-like fruit) from a tree, wrap it, and deep fry it for you. Its about as fresh and "unprocessed" as it gets. Literally, these people just sit on the side of the road selling this stuff. Its kind of awesome. (Or they'll climb a tree and cut a fresh Buko / Coconut for you. Etc. etc.)

That doesn't make it any healthier. Now it makes it really, really tasty and a really good experience. But no way in hell am I going to call that healthy eating.

That's not to say we shouldn't cook our food (and in some cases cooking can make food more nutritious by destroying anti-nutrients like phytic acid), but we should be aware of how the cooking time, temperature, and method affect nutrient content. Boiled vegetables are generally going to be less nutritious than steamed vegetables, for example.

And of course, frying tends to use industrially produced oils which are highly processed. Oily foods like avocados that you find in nature are going to have some fiber and other nutrients; the process of removing all that to produce pure oil is a form of processing.

You're not familiar with this new "unprocessed" vs "processed" vs "ultraprocessed" designation then.

https://worldnutritionjournal.org/index.php/wn/article/view/...

Oils are a "Group 2", low-processed food. Page 5:

> Group 2 items are rarely consumed in the absence of group 1 foods. Examples are salt mined or from seawater; sugar and molasses obtained from cane or beet;honey extracted from combs and syrup from maple trees; vegetable oils crushed from olives or seeds; butter and lard obtained from milk and pork; and starches extracted from corn and other plants

Group 2 foods are apparently NOT processed. For some reason, I didn't make this designation, I just make fun of it on the internet.

Group 3 foods are "processed", and Group 4 foods are "ultraprocessed". This designation is completely and utterly meaningless in regards to health.

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That's why something like LOL Lumpia + Stir Fry dinners is at worst... "Group 2", unprocessed by this designation (Both Oil and Flour are just Group2 designations, the most processed items in Lumpia). But if you eat a low-fat cereal + yogurt + applesauce, you're eating ultraprocessed stuff.

I bet you that "Group 4 Ultraprocessed" Low-fat fortified cereal + yogurt + applesauce meals are healthier than "Group 2 Unprocessed" Lumpia + Stir Fry dinners with fresh Lechon + Rice.

The distinction is accurate: These are unprocessed oils, and there is a big difference between them and the processed oil that fast food is fried in, and that industrial cooking uses.

The same plaintains fried in ultraprocessed vs. unprocessed Oils is going to be worse for you. See for example "The Dental Diet" for its effects on your teeth, but there are other nutritional reasons as well. (Anecdotally, I think lack of nutrients in the fat makes you hungrier; it makes it "addictive". If you cooked in real fats, you feel sated with very few fried plaintains.)

The way I think of this is: "Food is not a linear combination of macronutrients". All fats aren't equivalent; some fats are very good for you. Again Pollan's books are very good on this subject.

I'm not very familiar with the ingredients in Filipino cooking, but since it was an American colony in 1898, I would guess the habits are strongly influenced by industrial cooking (spam being popular, etc.) It's a mix of local ingredients and cheap ingredients bought from Western corporations.

You can see it in a Chinese-American family pretty clearly: the grandparents eat fatty cuts of meat (but small portions), fish heads, etc. and live until 100 years old. The parents are mixed -- they eat some traditional foods (fish and vegetables), but cook with American vegetable oil instead of soybean oil, and got addicted to McDonald's in the 80's. They have more health problems in their 60's and 70's a result (hypertension, heart disease), and they're not going to live until 100. Even without obesity, they still have these problems. Their kids are fatter than both generations, and as a result less healthy, at least without a change in diet in adulthood, etc.

I suspect it's clearer in the Chinese case because there was less western influence (fewer occupying armies and less trade). Whenever Western processed food companies take hold in a foreign market, the health of the population suffers. This is well known. And I would guess it happened earlier and to a greater degree in the Phillipines than in other countries.

I'm not claiming to be an expert here, but it seems suspicious, and some Googling reveals that people are studying that issue. That is, because of history you may not remember what is "traditional", but I can more or less see what was traditional (non-Western) from my grandparents born in 1916.

Five Guys uses pure peanut oil for their fast-food frying. Does that make their burgers / fries any healthier than alternatives?

Or is the innate carbohydrates + oil combination a high-calorie, fundamentally unhealthy thing to consume, no matter how "Fresh" the potatoes are or how "unprocessed" the oils are?

I think the root is that everyone's rents and other costs are way higher. Many folks are barely getting by. I don't think it's Instagram or vanity - I think that might reveal your personal privilege and position in society. That isn't meant in a demeaning or derogatory way, it's just that it surprises me how today people from different classes do not often 'meet' each other anymore, in their day to day lives. Propably due to rising inequity. I think a lot of working class people buy quick meals because they have so little time.

> Everyone should learn how to cook some boring, staple meals using basic ingredients from the store.

100% agree. Shame we're still letting corporations brainwash the general population, not to mention kids.

How is it that the economics works out so differently in, say, Eastern Europe where poor people's best choice is to buy staples in bulk and cook and can't afford packaged convenience food and eating out?

It's because American people's time is priced much higher and they earn much more overall.

It's not the case anymore. While McDonald's is still certainly more expensive than food people regularly eat, but the gap seems to be closing. People just aren't satisfied with eating basically potatoes and sometimes some meat. They make fancier meals, but this increases cost. At some point the cost isn't all that different from what fast food charges.

That hardly matches the narrative that this is caused by people barely getting by and being poor.

I think so too, but that's just my perspective. I'm from a former Soviet Union country and grew up after its collapse. Perhaps the (relative to the US) poverty we had ended up being treated differently from the poverty that's in the US? Eg we were poor enough that fast food wasn't abundantly available. Maybe once we're as rich as the US is right now we will have the same problem as the US does with poverty and fast food.

That being said, shen people are really poor they still get by. They will find a way. 200 years ago almost everyone (excluding nobility) lived on about $2-3 a day in 1990s money. That's like two coffees at a coffee shop. People just lived differently and usually worse lives. Also, coffee shops weren't really a thing here until about the last decade or so. You could buy coffee at gas stations, but there weren't these fancy coffee shops.

Barely getting by in America means incredible poverty, homelessness, an inability to get medical care, and visits to food banks. I'm curious to understand what you are basing your claims/arguments on - would you be willing to share any sources that have shaped your perspective on these issues? My own arguments are based on socialist organizers who are on the ground and organizing in the US, as well as the paper this thread is discussing.

> How is it that the economics works out so differently in, say, Eastern Europe where poor people's best choice is to buy staples in bulk and cook and can't afford packaged convenience food and eating out?

> It's because American people's time is priced much higher and they earn much more overall.

I'm curious, have you been able to read the BMJ paper/article? This is absolutely not meant in a derogatory way. I am genuinely curious to understand where you are coming from or what your statement is based on.

From my understanding the paper argues that people's perceptions of which foods are nutritional has been distorted and negatively manipulated by corporations. In other words, people have come to believe low-nutritional food (or even non-nutritional food) is somehow nutritional, when in fact it actively contributes to ill-health and chronic disease/conditions.

From the first paragraph of this paper:

"In 2015 the New York Times revealed that Coca Cola was covertly funding the Global Energy Balance Network based at the University of Colorado, a research network set up to promote the message that all calories are equal.1 The network’s aim was to show that sugar sweetened beverages are no more responsible for the rise in obesity levels than any other foods or a lack of physical activity.2 In doing so, Coca Cola was copying and adapting the corporate political activities and scientific strategies that have been pioneered and perfected by tobacco, alcohol, and drug companies to defend and promote their products.34

Corporate food and beverage companies such as Coca Cola have engaged in what I will refer to as “corporate scientific activities.” These activities are designed to produce and influence the scientific knowledge used to evaluate, promote, legitimise, and regulate their products. Such activities include funding and conducting in-house nutrition research related to their products; sponsoring scientific seminars and expert meetings; involvement in scientific standards and policy committees; publishing in scholarly journals; funding scientific front groups; and delivering nutrition education programmes.2" [1]

[1] same as the link at the top of the page: https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4601

I think the population under concern here is the lower middle class, who have disposable income but are strongly marketed to and manipulated so they use their disposable income in ignorant ways that come back to hurt them and help corporations. Including taking credits to buy stuff they don't need, getting another credit card to pay off the previous one, eating marketed and advertised junk food, consuming junk media, having no financial literacy etc.

They still aren't poor, they have cars and all kinds of household appliances (perhaps more than they need, from TV shop etc) and so on.

Unfortunately when so many people buy into it, it impacts those who don’t. Lately I’ve noticed that basic bags of frozen vegetables are being replaced with “ready to steam” bags that contain half as much quantity for the same price.

That is incredibly broad though? Not sure what "processed foods" would be then.

I've been baking cornbread from scratch a lot recently. Is that bad because the cornmeal has thiamin, riboflavin, and folic acid added and the milk has vitamin D added?

The steak bowls are a little more cost effective, but for the price of one chicken bowl, you seriously could make at least 4 chicken bowls if you simply went to the grocery store instead of Chipotle. The time to cook and prepare is quite similar to Chipotle as well, especially if you go to Chipotle instead of delivery.

Rice, beans, salsa, lettuce, cheese, chicken. Everything that goes into a burrito/bowl is quite cheap. You could prepare everything in half an hour and then make bowls at the same speed Chipotle does just pulling containers out of the fridge.

It takes me much longer to cook the chicken and rice, even if the 'prep' is done, and I still have to clean up!

I have what I'd consider a healthy diet, and I've been avoiding restaurant and prepared meals throughout the pandemic, but cooking everything has been a huge time-sink.

Unless you live on top of Chipotle it's very likely the time actually invested cooking will be less than traveling to Chipotle and coming home again.

And beyond that, your simply overpaying for a meal that can be made at home. It's a waste of money, you can save it and waste it on something else you couldn't just make at home.

a) Walk into Chipotle, walk out. $10, 10 minutes.

b) Prepare a list of ingredients. Go to the grocery store. Find and select those ingredients. Go home. Cook and prepare ingredients. Clean dishes and cookware. $7, 2 hours.

Is your time worth so little that you’d spend hours to save $3?

Its honestly the exact response I expect from people who eat at Chipotle.

Even if we assume you never go to the grocery store, making a specific trip to the grocery store instead of Chipotle can likely be assumed to take the same amount of traveling time. And next time you go to Chipotle, think for a moment the complexity of the ingredients your getting. Rice? It's rice. Black beans? You could buy them canned, you won't taste the difference in a bowl. Salsa? You can just buy salsa, it's a dollar or so and lasts ages in the fridge. Cheese is cheese. Lettuce is lettuce. Now all that's left is cooking some chicken breast, your choice how to do it.

If it takes you hours to cook chicken... I don't know how to help you. Perhaps Google how to bake chicken, how to pan fry chicken, how to cook chicken in an instant pot. Literally anything.

Also, many people don't live 10 minutes walking from a Chipotle. If it was a 15-20 minute drive instead of a 10 minute walk, cooking becomes obvious.

Defrost some fish or meat. Do other stuff while it thawes.

Chop some vegetables, cook some water, cook & fry. 30 minutes while I do other stuff.

Pasta, rice, beans, potatos, fresh vegetables and meat & fish, I have plenty of stock. And I live really small.

More difficult than it sounds. Most people want to eat healthier but when they research it they'll get fad diets and pseudoscience. Just look at Keto, paleo, whole 30, etc.

Any of those are a big improvement over Five Guys and In N Out and other takeaway or fast food...

The food you are fed is just one small way you are exploited.