It can't because per Nova for something to be "ultra-processed" it has to be "industrially manufactured". Unless you're involved in cottage industry I guess.

"Ultra-processed" is a ridiculous categorization, a bit like some compounds artificially being labeled as "chemicals" and some not.

"Highly palatable" foods do this. One way to create those is through "highly processed" techniques.

> but I've yet to see any credible evidence for it.

Obesity is more common in the world where highly processed foods are more common. There is evidence. There is no RCT. This has nothing to do with "credibility" it's just "non-standard analysis."

So it's not just an issue of chemical composition but how we respond to these foods behaviorally.

A 7.5oz bag of potato chips is made using around 6-8 medium sized potatoes. Eating a whole bag of potato chips in one sitting is frighteningly easy to do. But I challenge anyone to eat 6-8 medium potatoes at once, despite being around the same amount of calories.

Going on a whole foods diet often results in weight loss without any increased hunger sensation.

You need something more rigorous than "there is a correlation" to support something that important.

As to why people eat more, it's probably due to higher energy density food, advertising (especially to children) and lost norms about eating (e.g. sugary stuff is not "proper food"). As to why we move less is less manual labor, more sedentary entertainment and increased use of vehicles.

The obesity discussion seems to somehow deliberately try to avoid the obvious.

A brief sample, though their whole argument is more complex:

"People in the 1800s did have diets that were very different from ours. But by conventional wisdom, their diets were worse, not better. They ate more bread and almost four times more butter than we do today. They also consumed more cream, milk, and lard. Our great-grandparents (and the French) were able to maintain these weights effortlessly. They weren’t all on weird starvation diets or crazy fasting routines. And while they probably exercised more on average than we do, the minor difference in exercise isn’t enough to explain the enormous difference in weight. Many of them were farmers or laborers, of course, but plenty of people in 1900 had cushy desk jobs, and those people weren’t obese either."

Honestly, have you looked at a 100 year old cookbook? Most of the recipes are… crude in their implementation, to put it mildly.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-...

Because they couldn't afford to eat more. In 1900, the average American household spent 43% of their income on food.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/how-ame...

I don't know what's causing obesity, but it doesn't seem to be income, given everyone worldwide exploded into fatness around 1980.

And I'm not satisfied with flimsy hypotheses, such as a historically unprecedented worldwide diminution in human "willpower."

https://opendataforafrica.org/atlas/Guatemala/topics/Food-Se... https://data.worldobesity.org/country/guatemala-85/#data_tre...

But people differ in their incomes. While there always were fat rich people, if food prices were the limiting factor, your average noble from the House of Lords of 1930 would be as fat as average people are today. And yet if you look at those black and white photos of important politicians, businesspeople etc., they were way less fat than an average contemporary student.

This is the Pacific War Council in the early 1940s. Do you believe that those people, decision makers whose decisions affected lives of millions, couldn't afford to eat ad libitum?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Wood,_1st_Earl_of_Halif...

Today, they would weigh +15 kg each at least, and asking their doctors for tirzepatide.

Animals, wild and lab, are probably affected by human food production.

I do know one thing people used to jump on that coincides with this timing, but I don't know how likely it is to be a/the culprit - high-fructose corn syrup. It's the green line on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Sweetener_consumption,...

If I make a roast chicken dinner, not breast but full fat chicken, chuck some butter in the mashed potatoes, salt up the broccoli/carrots etc, it's still significantly lower in calories and higher in nutrients than lots of things people eat today.

It sounds to me that their "conventional wisdom" is more like, well, veganism or something. Milk, butter, cream, great.

Lard is a bit more marginal, sure. But I'd still rather eat lard than random seed oil deep fried whatever.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1724823/pdf/v03...

To the gist - its supremely easier to be or move into position of weakness and victim, look for external blame, while staying very deep in comfort zone, aka fix my shit as long as I don't have to change anything in my life, I'll even throw a lot of money on it. Massive resistance to change that's not convenient nor pleasant at first sight. People throwing tons of money on diet fads, experiencing jojo effects, depressed about their self-image and feeling helpless, binging in anxiety attacks. Yet nobody taking gym ownership, personal trainer, throwing out all that chocolate and other junky food, amking any self-improvement plan that 5 year old can put together and sticking with it. And of course almost everybody moves much less, but gist of the issue is food, quantity and quality.

It doesn't have to be about junk food per se, same is with parents basically giving up on raising kids and leaving screens and ad companies to do the work. Then complaining how young suck and are horrible and have no respect etc. While they themselves are glued to phones every day, addicted to the core, half laughing about it while scrolling further. Telling them to put it down for a day, spend time with them and kids (if they are still little, not much point pushing teenagers suddenly against their well-trodden addictive habits).

Comfort zone is death of one's 'fighting' spirit, I mean in fighting-as-hard-as-possible-for-best-life-possible. No good stuff comes without some form of a fight, at least it didn't in my life. It just doesn't happen in that damned zone, not with social media showing folks what they could have been if they tried. I don't mean some artificial celebrities faking / pretending how everything is glorious, I mean your schoolmates or childhood friends who were not spectacular in any way, yet rewind 10-20 years and there is abyss in how their vs yours life looks like.

I've 'lost' quite a few close people to such envy exactly because I was nobody special in any way yet somehow made it way further than most, from environment which expected very little from me. One way would be 100% quiet about everything good in my life or fake complain about everything, thats how many successful or rich folks live. I refuse to go over the board with that just to keep such, at the end subpar relationships. Rather accept people change, and one of benefits of non-family relationships is that you can finish them and create better ones as you change if it feels like the opposite is a mistake. I am currently in the process of losing my best childhood friend in same way too, not the greatest experience but unfortunately at this point unavoidable one.

/end a bit off topic rant

Unless you think they literally just don't make people like they used to, if you swapped the babies in the cradle of the current generation with previous generations, we'd be thinner and they'd be fatter.

So saying the problem is people is kind of meaningless.

You can maybe blame individual differences in outcomes on personal character weakness, if you really want to, but when millions on millions of people fall to the same character weaknesses that very similar people didn't fall for before, then "personal" is exactly what it isn't.

This leads to the obvious conclusion it's peoples inability to manage how much they eat that leads to their obesity. What else could it be?

Granted, this isn't necessarily their own moral failing... but the environment they're put in does not set them up for success.

While it's rather obvious that obesity is caused by excess energy intake, it is not obvious how to change this. I'm getting weight (luckily not at an alarming speed) and I know exactly why I am and how I could stop it, but I don't. Knowledge that it's a "character flaw" doesn't change that.

I smoked for decades, knowing full well it's waste of health and money, and stopped only when smoking was made more difficult than not smoking (smoking bans, introduction of nicotine replacement products). I occasionally eat animal based products knowing they are destroying our environment, but eat them less now because of better plant based options.

Humans are not rational agents and our free will is at most limited.

My guess that the "processed food is poison" people are only by chance hitting on something. They have zero evidence and zero supporting data.

However, I've come to suspect that the gut is a very complex thing, with a computer in it, and highly connected to the brain. Once you start to go down that line of thinking, I think it's plausible that they've identified a real problem. One possibility among many is that "corporate food" is the result of a giant A/B test series over a hundred years that has machine-learned the model embodied in the gut-computer. It's essentially a DoS attack. And so on. Suggest folk consider what if the gut has a neural network with various sensors and subject to training data.

Consider that nutrition labels are largely focused on macronutrients. Carbs, fat, protein. Calories in and calories out.

What processed food tends to lack are micronutrients found in fresh, high-quality produce. This goes beyond vitamins (which are becoming scarcer due to agricultural practices). Anthocyanins, carotenoids, and other phytochemicals are produced by plants as protective agents. Those same chemicals help mitigate the entropic forces the body is subjected to over time.

Going back to macros, not all of them are created equal. Glucose syrup can have the same carbohydrate content as a sweet potato, but their glycemic index (how it impacts the functioning of the body) will vary. That doesn't get into the value of the fiber for the gut microbiome.

The differences are there when looking beyond the surface.

You’re missing the other good stuff in a sweet potato (vitamins, fiber, some protein even), but carbs for carbs it’s all gonna do the same thing.

The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that it’s much easier to eat a liter of glucose syrup than a few pounds of sweet potatos. If you could resist and turn off your body’s hunger response, you’d be equivalently overweight. That’s basically why GLP1 antagonists work. It turns that hunger response and makes it easier to say no to that extra slice of pizza.

Reasoning by analogy, most would accept that some people are better suited to extended release medication versus instant. A drug is defined as something that has an effect upon the body when it's ingested, especially in the context of the central nervous system.

Carbohydrates are the preferred fuel source of the body, the brain included. Glucose syrup is simple (C6H12O6). A simple carbohydrate like glucose needs minimal processing to become "active," and it tends to be provided without fiber which would ordinarily buffer the overall glycemic index (impact upon the body). As a result, a spike in blood sugar and insulin occurs.

The subsequent drop in blood sugar can lead to craving and excess consumption, and eventually insulin resistance over the long term. The reason why my initial comment seemed dismissive of "calories in calories out" is because it takes a myopic view of a complex system.

If we view insulin sensitivity (among other factors) as either a positive or negative multiplier of the "calories in calories out" metric, I believe we'd be closer to an accurate view of metabolism and its impact on human health. Sure, we can just take GLP-1 antagonists to curb that appetite, but we could curtail it at the source as well.

Just eat the damn sweet potato!

I normally dislike the typical podcasters/podcasts because of their self promoting and low information density nature but I thought this one was ok to recommend.

tl;dr seed oil is better than butter (saturated fat-wise), it is ok to heat it at home upto 200 Celsius, not ok “ultra processed” fastfood fries due to more heat, reheating (trans fat-wise)

Working at a restaurant in college, I saw that a single plate of pasta they made during a busy night when it was hard to keep up could easily wind up an entire stick of butter. That’s on top of the cream.

Soda - tons of sugar packed into 12 oz.

When you don’t eat restaurant/processed foods at home, it does shock you a bit just what a giant volume of good 2,000 calories can be.

This is all it means to me. I’m not out here trying to prove science, just trying to stay healthy.

I only have slightly more than a passing interest in food science and nutrition, but from all I've learned my gut feeling is that I ought to avoid this stuff, and rely on cooking my own food as much as possible so I don't get into any imbalances (it's very hard to get a surplus of any macro or any other component via "natural" products)

I don't have any evidence on the nutrition side, but it's certainly not an experiment I'd like to do with my only body. And in the psychological side, it's definitely something to avoid if we value our physical and mental health

Are they? Maybe! Alcohol, Burgers, Croissants, for all I know there are more bad-diet things in the first half of the alphabet than the last. It could even be that if we convinced people to buy less high-alphabet food, they'd be healthier. But that doesn't mean it's a sensible category. We don't "need more research into high-alphabet foods", we need a causal theory of what makes food healthy or not. It's pretty clear it isn't alphabetic priority, and it's also pretty clear it's not simply "processing".

Most food needs to be processed in some way or another to be edible. I read a terrible catalog many years ago, from an alternative magazine, listing a ton of weird diets and questionable health practices. There were only a handful of things in that catalog of hundreds of things that even they warned against, and one of them was the "raw food diet".

If it's benzopyrene from frying that's the problem, talk about frying. If it's micronutrients being lost from soaking or boiling or long storage with preservatives, talk about that! But don't dumb us down by putting it all in a box and refusing to engage with what actually makes it bad.

The latter optimizes for using the cheapest possible ingredients, with the longest shelf life, and to be hyper palatable. Part of the problem is that, to achieve those goals, industrialized food tends to be high in sugar, fats, salt, and calories in general. But looking at only those nutritional numbers is shortsighted. In the last decades we have seen all sorts of junk food that used their nutrition labels to masquerade as healthy food: diet colas without added sugar, sugary breakfast cereals that are "rich in vitamins", and so on. And those did little to stop the obesity epidemic.

The conversation came about because she was encouraging me to reduce lunch meats from my diet. Lunch meat is a staple in many diets, but there are a lot of salts