[mchannon]

The article name is "Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you", the opposite of this thread's title.

Everyone's ignoring the elephant in the room: fiber.

Fiber locks up calories and makes the body miss a lot of them, or absorb them later in the digestion process. If we reduce the word "processed" to a single action, it's removing fiber. It's turning wheat berries into flour. It's ripping off rice husks to make white rice. It's crushing nutritious apples and oranges into sugar water.

Western countries use calories as a metric, and it's a very hackable metric. If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body. If I turn those whole oats into oatmeal, fewer are. If I'm McDonald's I'll pulverize them to get all 1000 calories into my health-conscious deluded customer's bloodstream, so they buy more food from me.

Of course you can add 100g of Metamucil fiber to a processed meal, but the original fiber's function was to lock in the sugar, which the new stuff can no longer do. So it doesn't help.

Why are processed foods bad for you? Follow the fiber.

[xnx]

Agree completely. "Processing" is mainly the act of removing fiber so more food can be eaten faster and more often. Fiber satiates, which is not a good thing for companies that are trying to sell as much product as possible.

[orev]

Using a blender is also processing, but it doesn’t remove the fiber. It does, however, break open the cells and makes the nutrients and sugars more easily available separately from the fiber.

Eating healthy is just as much about the shape/structure of the items being consumed as it is about the nutritional stats it has.

[snapcaster]

This is something not talked about enough. I think it's one of those things where people really struggling with weight should be told CICO (calories in calories out) just to get their head in the right place but it's not strictly true for all the reasons you mentioned and others

[hgomersall]

FWIW, this sort of thing is constantly being talked about on the Zoe blog: https://zoe.com/blog

[zahlman]

> If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body.

Humans are extremely efficient at extracting energy from food, regardless of the fiber content. We owe our survival as a species to it, as food was much less plentiful in the ancestral environment.

I've heard of fiber meaningfully affecting insulin response to food, satiety, and some other things - perhaps even gut microbiomes - but not metabolic efficiency.

[paulpauper]

Yeah he's posting nonsense. If it were true you'd be passing huge chunks of undigested food and be sick. Very little of the calorie content of oats and other so-called fiber rich food is actually undigestible. Sorry...beating obesity is not as easy as eating cereal and oats all day. wish it were.

[hgomersall]

Your reading is overly simplistic. You're also feeding a huge diversity of disparate microbes when you eat, all of which produce a huge array of different chemicals during their normal life processes, all within our digestive tract. The question then is the interaction of all these different microbes and chemicals with the food and the human and the other microbes.

[nritchie]

Another way to say this: Eat foods with low glycemic index. Avoid foods that spike blood-sugar levels.

[mchannon]

That's a completely different thing.

Honey, for instance, has a high glycemic index. Watermelon has a high glycemic index. They will not get you fat the same way cane sugar and watermelon juice will.

A juice made of celery, kale, and spinach, will still have a low glycemic index. But it's still nowhere near as good for you as unprocessed celery, kale, and spinach.

[zahlman]

>Honey, for instance, has a high glycemic index. Watermelon has a high glycemic index. They will not get you fat the same way cane sugar and watermelon juice will.

Aside from not being evidenced, this is irrelevant to your hypothesis. Watermelon contains little fiber even on a per-calorie basis (https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/167765/wt1) and honey (https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Honey_nutritional_value.html) contains almost none.

[paulpauper]

Of course if you add water it will lower it the index. All food that is not diluted in water will trigger an insulin response. That is how digestion works. Otherwise you'd have type 1 diabetes.

How is possible for people to crave steak and eat lots of steak despite having no sugar if the theory is that sugar causes a huge reaction and people to crave more sugar after eating it?

Blaming sugar ignores that all food triggers a spike of dopamine and insulin reaction, unless it's diluted in a lot of water. This is why vegetables are safe for diabetics, due to being so diluted. Jason Fung, Taubes and other fitness/health influencers keep spreading this carbs-insulin nonsense.

[paulpauper]

Yeah this is wrong. Very little of oats and other grains is indigestible fiber. Otherwise you'd be shitting it out undigested.