[boston_clone]

Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health?

Public health experts contend that enriched foods have improved baseline quality of life. Wheat breads with iron, folate, and B vitamins in the US is an easy example.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Could you provide some evidence to support your assertion that highly enriched foods are degrading health?

Getting nutrients from whole foods is generally superior, for absorption and balance and avoiding overdosing, than getting it from supplements, whether taken directly or via enrichment.

That said, getting a nutrient any way is better than running a deficiency. For most of agricultural human history, in most societies, most of the population was nutritionally sufficient [1]. That changed with enrichment. It’s healthier to eat whole over enriched food; it’s better to have enriched food versus a vitamin decency.

It’s ahistoric to claim we’re unhealthier today than we’ve been over most of human history. But we can do better. In that way, Roman pipes brought clean water to its populations in a way that made them healthier than people had been in cities to date. But it also gave them lead poisoning, which while better than cholera, is worse than no lead.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9460423/

[boston_clone]

> That changed with enrichment.

You’re close. According to the paper, that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that changed with agriculture some 480 generations ago; enrichment is merely the solution

Whoops, typo—I meant nutritionally deficient.

Hunter-gatherers had a varied but volatile diet. Agriculture solved the volatility at the expense of variety. Most agricultural humans across history were nutritionally deficient.

Enrichment (a/k/a fortification) started to solve for the lack of variety, though it’s been historically stymied by our lack of understanding what e.g. vitamins are; modern farming, biology and logistics enable us to actually solve for the problems agriculture introduced to society for the first time.

[slumberlust]

If interested in Ultra Processed Foods, of which enriched foods usually are UPF, you can check out a good book called Ultra Processed People. It's not definitive, but it makes a compelling argument that while we don't know why exactly, processed foods containing the same nutrients as their whole brethren have deterious effects on our long term health.

[boston_clone]

I don’t think that’s a compelling argument; salt, for example, is also a common ingredient in “UPF”s (caveat emptor - there is no settled definition on that term).

The crux is that adding vital minerals to food is good. We can certainly distinguish between that and a Dorito.

[cpursley]

Trace those public health experts funding sources...

Hint: it's the farm-bill dependent carb farmers who apparently need our money via farm subsidies and want poor people hooked as they get it from the other end in the form of SNAP.

[boston_clone]

No; this is a deliberately misleading non-sequitur with decades of evidence to refute.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10609867

[cpursley]

The American waistline disagrees. The idea that highly processed sugar added white bread with all fiber and nutrients stripped with token vitamins added are added is a good thing is ludicrous. Why not just promote eating real food, including real bread?

[boston_clone]

It sounds like you're hypothesizing / gish galloping / strawmanning until you find something that "sticks".

Instead try researching things that support your claim, like the notion that sugary beverages are the main culprit to the obesity epidemic, even though most health experts don't have the evidence to isolate that as the core factor.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611578/