[Certhas]

That's just a rhetorical slight of hand though:

"We don't understand how the body metabolizes what it ingests, and what is healthy and what isn't! Every theory is wrong and has been overthrown! Therefore it's impossible to say whether eating this arsenic pill will be bad for you!"

My impression is that there is pretty solid evidence that eating highly processed foods correlates with worse health outcomes.

[tsimionescu]

> My impression is that there is pretty solid evidence that eating highly processed foods correlates with worse health outcomes.

That is the conclusion of the Nutrition piece as well. But, crucially, it's important to recognize that we don't really know why that is, and we don't know many of the particulars. To take just two examples:

- Even our distant hominid ancestors had discovered fire and were using it to heat food, so it seems very unlikely that eating raw food would be significantly better for us than eating cooked food (by evolutionary arguments)

- Cutting food is often not even considered processing, and yet it's something which has a clear negative effect on our teeth at the very least (and is a much much more recent innovation than cooking)

So yeah, don't eat a Mars bar or a Chicken McNugget if you can at all help it - and gods help you if you like Spam. But beyond the worst of these foods, the story is actually quite unclear.

Edit: the specific quote about the exact point you're making:

> One of the trial new messages being tested by the nutrition establishment is “avoid processed food,” which has the big advantage (for their future credibility) that no one is likely to adopt it. Cooking has become an unacceptable hassle.[9]

> [9] Disclosure: I do avoid processed food, and most of what I eat I cook from scratch. This is not advice.

[whatscooking]

We do know why. Hyper processed foods are stimulants the same way that drugs are and can be equally addictive. We’re getting a whole food like beets and purifying it into a single substance, sugar. That is no different than how cocaine is purified from its respective plants, forming an addictive substance.

[tsimionescu]

There is no evidence that this is specific to highly processed foods, as opposed to any delicious food. It is true that highly processed foods tend to be more delicious food their price than other foods, but that's about it.

[whatscooking]

What food do you have in mind that is delicious but not ultra processed? I don’t think any whole food gets even close to competing with foods such as pizza, French fries and ice cream. I think the addictive component is one aspect of it, but I also personally believe the body has a internal mechanism that keeps track of its micronutrient and macronutrient deficiencies and induces cravings to obtain those nutrients, regulated by the memory of past foods in the microbiome, so that also can trigger overeating.

[tsimionescu]

Well, cheese is quite delicious and is not highly processed. Many kinds of seeds are delicious after a simple roasting (peanuts, sunflower seeds, pine seeds, hazelnuts, pistachio etc). Walnuts are delicious even raw. Sweet fruit such as bananas, cherries, raspberries, blueberries, mangoes, etc. are delicious. Honey is also delicious even completely unprocessed. Edit: forgot to mention steak, another lightly processed food that is one of the most delicious things you can eat.

Not to mention, there are processed staples eaten all over the world for hundreds or thousands of years without leading to widespread obesity or addiction - bread and beer being some of the oldest such examples.

[kenneth]

A steak and a piece of fish requires no other ingredients other than salt to be delicious.

Many veggies can be delicious with just some heat + salt; though adding a few spices certainly helps.

I'd much rather eat a perfectly cooked skirt steak with home made chimichuri and a side of veggies than a domino's pizza.

[whatscooking]

They might be delicious but they probably don’t hijack your serotonin and dopamine levels the way that junk food can.

[alanfranz]

Is home-baked pizza considered ultra-processed?

[tsimionescu]

Depends who you ask. Literally, yes, it is extremely highly processed: separating wheat grains from the seed pod, then turning them into a fine powder, then combining with water, yeast, and oil (which is itself a processed food, mechanically processing some seeds) then fermenting it, adding salt, adding other processed ingredients on top (mechanically processed tomatoes, cheese obtained by fermenting milk, often cured meats etc), finally baking the whole thing.

This is one of the problems of this idea of processed foods - many things which don't actually seem to be a significant problem are in fact highly processed, we just don't tend to think of them like that.

[mirko22]

It’s not cos it’s processed but cos it is usually low on fat high on sugar.

Not everything that is processed is poisonous, and most “fresh” food today is full of chemicals or lacking in nutrients, so most food you would eat is not that healthy.