> The non-UPF and UPF test meals were closely matched on meal weight, energy, energy density, macronutrients, available carbohydrate, glycaemic index and load, total dietary fibre, sodium and water (all ≤1.6% deviation between meals; Fig. 1b).
So they did match glycemic index, which the article omits.
Another option is that it's affected by the order of consumption.
I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.
Looking at the two meals in the study: if I sat down to eat the processed one, I'd probably start with the veggie straws. If I saw down to eat the unprocessed one, I'd almost certainly start with the egg or the cheese.
And yet another option: I notice that the unprocessed one is completely grain-free. I don't know if that makes it more or less healthy, but it's a significant difference nutritionally.
If you look up how to calculate the glycemic index of a meal, the formula treats each meal component's glycemic index as a proportion of the total meal's glycemic index.
But the above example shows that the body doesn't treat food in that manner - the relatively low carb, higher fat cheese didn't smooth out the higher proportion carb count of the toast.
In the paper, the largest carbs for the ultraprocessed meal was instant mashed potatoes, while the non-processed meal had bananas as the largest carb source followed by craisins/cranberries.
The high carb foods in the unprocessed meal are paired with fiber.
The high carb foods in the ultraprocessed meal are NOT paired with fiber.
The fiber slows the rate of carb intake.
Same thing occurs with protein - same amount of ground beef and steak, ground beef meal will result in faster amino acid ingestion than the steak meal. No idea if there are any pros/cons of the faster ground beef ingestion, but there is a difference in how the digestive system processes the two meals.
> I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.
This is what I read in a book about glucose. So I went ahead and measured. I found it not true, at least in my case. The recommendations of eating salad before your meal do nothing measureable for my glucose spikes.
Not only psychology, but training. If your body gets a load of sugar every time it tastes UPF additives, it learns to release insulin on taste to protect itself.
Grandparent post is talking about the connection between taste and insulin, which would be a different mechanism from when a given food causes a spike in blood glucose based on its composition. Meaning that you'd get a different insulin response if you ingested something bypassing taste receptors vs being able to taste that food.
I was about to comment that the physical structure of the food and the fiber content also make a difference. For instance, rolled oats are available in different thicknesses, and the thicker ones don’t digest as easily. Brown vs white rice is another example.
But these examples have different glycemic indexes, which the study matched for.
They matched water content between the meals, so I guess only the ultra processed one required additional water to match the natural water content of the less processed one.
Before we come to a final conclusion on this, we need to reexamine the NOVA food classification system. It holds some rather baffling contradictions. For instance, if you buy a deep fryer and a mandolin slicer to make your own potato chips at home, they're classified as processed foods. But if you buy a bag of plain potato chips (ingredients: potatoes, oil, salt) they're classified as ultra-processed.
This whole concept doesn't make sense - this study included peanut butter and jelly as part of the "highly processed" meal and cheese as part of the "minimally processed" meal. I don't think that either peanut butter or jelly is more processed than cheese.
I suppose it's partly because it's the whole meal that is being represented and they match it for nutrients.
I'd guess they wanted to include store purchased bread, hence the pb&j.
The other thought i had was that most peanut butter includes (at least) palm oil (ultra processed) and sometimes other emulsifiers to prevent separation. Though you can buy pb that is just peanut and salt.
The jelly would contain quite a bit more in the way of preservatives, regulators and flavour enhancers etc than the jelly i'd make at home (if i did such a thing)
I'd guess it's just regular cheese which does require quite some processing to make but unless it's got extra additives to extend shelf life, change texture or taste it's just processed.
Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates. To get that permanent creaminess you get from the store it's going to have various sorts of chemical additives - emulsifiers, stabilizers, etc. You also generally want to add some sort of a sweetener. I use honey, but with store bought stuff you're looking at all sorts of stuff including e.g. high fructose corn syrup.
By contrast cheese is completely natural outside of a few exceptions like American cheese. You take milk, add something to curdle it like an acid (e.g. vinegar) or rennet - an enzyme obtained from the stomach of young calves, separate the coagulated stuff, salt it, dry it, age it - you now have cheese. Ricotta can even be made straight from raw milk with no additives. Cheese's long shelf life is natural.
Well the peanut butter I get from the store is just peanuts and salt and there is plenty of brands available. It does have to be stirred because it separates. But yes the Jiffy and Skippy that most people refer to as peanut butter is really just peanut flavored palm oil.
I think you mean peanuts, salt, and oil, because otherwise there's nothing to separate. The oil is already usually going to leave it something as either high or ultra high processing.
> Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates.
False, peanuts contain their own oil. Nothing needs to be added, not even salt.
Anything containing more than peanuts and salt should be referred to as something else, like peanut spread.
> Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates.
Depends on how you make it - it's definitely trickier at home to get a creamy texture without extra oil, but with the right machine (i.e. peanut butter maker) it comes out smooth with just peanuts (and salt if you like); some wholefoods shops have the machine where you can make it yourself.
Many store-bought peanut butters use oil as an additive as the peanut oil is more expensive, so they remove that to sell as peanut oil, and replace it with cheaper oils
Yeah the other response to you is right. As someone who’s gone down the UPF (ultra processed foods) rabbit hole, it’s based on the additive ingredients.
And at least in America, most peanut butter has additives, and most store-bought bread has 40 different UPF ingredients. Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
Depending on the cheese you buy, many are very simple, and rarely have weird additives. But if you buy a block of cheese or even usually the sandwich-sized slices, it’s not ultra-processed.
>As someone who’s gone down the UPF (ultra processed foods) rabbit hole, it’s based on the additive ingredients.
So if you add enzymes that completely change the characteristics of the food (aka "industrial reformulation") that's perfectly fine but you add an emulsifier to improve the mouthfeel and texture now it's suddenly a "ultra processed" food and is pure evil and should be regulated like cigarettes? Now it has "crazy ingredients" and "weird additives"? I'm sorry but this stance is totally and completely illogical. You aren't going to convince me that this makes sense.
>Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
For fucks sake, jelly requires pectin to be jelly. Sure, you can rely on the naturally occuring pectin in fruit, but adding additional pectin makes it so you have a consistent product and can add less sugar and don't have to cook it as long - aka healthier and less processed.
It’s not a religious belief. There is a mountain of scientific evidence supporting the idea that ultra processed foods are bad for you, including the study linked in this HN submission, for reasons linked to the biological effect of specific ingredients and processes.
Type any enzyme or emulsifier off an ingredient list into Google and you can easily find a study about its health impact.
We have been using emulsification for centuries, dude. This is fully a religious belief about purity. The fact that the package the food comes in is considered in the nova classification just makes me double down on this stance, you don't eat the packaging.
I mean there are different levels of processing, yes, and many of the additives that have been researched do have negative effects. Maybe minor negative effects, but over time the combination of a lot of chemicals with minor negative effects can absolutely affect your health and cognition in a perceptible way.
There is research for a lot of additives, but many have limited evidence or small studies that aren’t replicated. Usually the result is either “it doesn’t affect health either way” or “it is negative to health”. Very rarely is there an ultra processed ingredient with a large body of science that says “we should eat more of this specific thing, it has a positive effect on longevity!”.
So I think you have to stretch your reasoning that the practice as a whole is probably negative, but I feel like I’ve personally seen enough negatives of certain UPF that I limit my intake whenever reasonably possible.
Obviously having small amounts isn’t going to be horrible but they’re in everything now
So you bring up emulsifiers and in my opinion, that is one of the big baddy's in UPF. Yes, we have been using emulsifiers for centuries, but the effectiveness of modern emulsifiers is on another level then something like lecithin from soybeans. The strength and ubiquity of modern emulsifiers has completely changed the food we eat. They are almost literally in everything we eat today.
Why are they bad? What do emulsifiers do? They combine substances that don't want to be combined. What in your body might this affect? Your mucosal lining. Emulsifiers don't break down in your gut as they pass through. They just emulsify everything as they move through. Including your mucus. That layer is extremely important for a normally functioning gut. Lose it and then chime will contact the gut lining. This disrupts the microbiota and allows things to get through your gut that are not supposed to. It causes inflammation.
UPFs contain many bad things, but they HAVE to be categorized to fully appreciate the levels of badness. Some things are just not that big of deal, and the "health industry" does everyone a disservice by not clarifying it.
I guess i can see how packaging makes a difference to the desirability / convenience of the food.
I guess i'm less likely to eat chips if i have to make them myself compared to grabbing a bag and more likely to over eat them if it's super convenient.
There's also some interesting science with stuff like MREs, where I have significant water content but it has somehow been made non-bio-available to smaller organisms.
> Something is making us fat, and it sure looks like its the UPFs.
A couple of years ago I lost 20kg (~40lb) of body weight.
I find this phrasing odd. -- Should I say "something made me lose 20kg of body weight", or should I say "I was able to improve the food I ate, and I lost 20kg of weight".
I tend to think that even without scientific literature, people know that e.g. lettuce is "healthier" than chocolate cake and fried chicken.
The term "UPF" seems like a weird term that puts the moral responsibility on the food manufacturers, rather than on "us" who are fat and want to lose weight.
"Moral responsibility" feels like a weird term to use here.
From an epidemiological standpoint, something changed in the environment that caused obesity rates to start rising in the 70s and 80s. There are many theories as to exactly which environmental change is the cause. Figuring out what that change was would be a good thing.
If your concern is about your own health as an individual? I want to lose weight now? I think it's useful to say "I have agency, I can lose weight". If you have the agency to lose weight, it makes sense you can take on the responsibility for having gained weight.
"Why did society in general get fatter?" is a different question. And if your main concern is "how can I lose fat?" it's not directly interesting.
American cheese slices, Velveeta, Cheese Whiz, cheese spreads, nacho cheese are all NOVA group 4 ultra processed because they are industrial reformulations with added ingredients (like emulsifiers). Your average cheddar isn't.
group 4 ultra processed is basically food fraud in my opinion. There is so much complex industrial scale chemistry going into it that it's mind boggling that it's actually legal. On the other hand, the process for making real cheese is simple and relies on a natural process.
> “The two meals are matched within 1 percent of carbs, fat, proteins, calories, water, and salt,” said Zach Hutelin, a researcher at the institute and the study’s first author.
Note that fiber is not part of that list. Stripping out fiber essentially means that our gut microbiome is starved. Not coincidentally, it also means that these foods are much less prone to spoilage.
The study itself (linked at the bottom) does mention fiber (though they spell it "fibre", if you go looking for it). What I do notice is that they use "total dietary fibre", so there could be a difference between soluble and insoluble fiber content.
I hope the ultra processed food industry will come to be viewed similarly to the tobacco industry over time.
The human body is evidently not able to safely consume these products over the course of a lifetime and the ultimate toll on society and healthcare is already evident.
They are addictive and harmful to the body’s mechanisms.
It’s time to control the promotion, labelling and taxation of these products the same way we do cigarettes.
It was the tobacco industry! Big tobacco began buying food companies in the 1960s. Companies like Kraft and Del Monte where bought by tobacco companies R.J Reynolds and Philip Morris. These buyouts continued through the 90s. They applied their science of addiction engineering to food. And in cooperation with the USDA and farmers, they pushed a low-fat, high-carb diet, creating a market built on dirt-cheap grains.
For the purposes of this conversation - let’s think of it as pre chewed food.
The body evolved to eat foods that take a lot of chewing and digesting. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest problems with food that is “too” processed is that it’s absorbed far too quickly and early in the tract.
Food that makes it all the way through has a slower and more even absorption rate so we don’t get hungry again as fast.
That doesn't help define a useful understanding at all.
There will likely never be a satisfactory definition, and doesn't need to be. Instead we define what foods are causing health problems and which aren't.
Look in this study, cheese is on the unprocessed side. That is an absurdity of language.
In the end they may figure out that the key difference here isn't processing at all, but fiber, or some particular ingredient added to floud based products on the processing side.
Good rule of thumb: If you’re eating things you couldn’t make in your own kitchen using ingredients that were available 200 years ago… they might not be great for you.
Look into “the food matrix” and you’ll see what I mean.
Many ultra processed ingredients have been so pulverised that there’s no structure left to help regulate the speed at which your body can break it down and absorb it.
So it absorbs nutrients too quickly, blood sugar spike, blood sugar crash, hunger pang, and you end up eating more than you would have otherwise during your waking hours.
Multiply that by years and you get metabolic issues.
You have canines for cutting flesh and yet you cook your brisket until it melts apart in your mouth. I don’t think pre chewed is much an argument. All cooking is “pre chewing” in a sense. You are dumping energy into this food. It’s going to do something to it.
In Taiwan, many people eat out because it is quite cheap and convenient to do so (and for other cultural and social factors). Most homes have very small kitchens and refrigerators. Yet the rate of obesity is quite low for a high income country (Japan even lower) [0]
But something that is different is how much of the food is prepared at the vendor from whole ingredients. Ingredients often acquired whole day-of from nearby markets. Ingredients that have a shorter supply chain and higher freshness due to the smaller geography.
Reading this study, I wonder how much cheap ease of access to less processed foods contributes to the lower level of obesity and higher lifespans.
Do Taiwanese get as fat on average as African Americans on average when they eat an average American diet?
>In 2017–March 2020, non-Hispanic Black adults had the highest obesity prevalence (49.9%) followed by Hispanic (45.6%), non-Hispanic White (41.4%), and non-Hispanic Asian (16.1%) adults.
When comparing ant asian country to the US we should always keep physical activity and portion size in mind. A single cookie here in the US is massive and you always drive around just to get that cookie in the first place
Exactly. If you are eating chips it’s very hard to stop until the pack is over.
There are 3 options in order of effort: eat the next snack from a pack in your hand, decide and stop eating the cookie that is in the pack; get another pack to continue eating.
It requires more effort to get another pack and that biases towards the “stop eating” outcome.
If packages are large the the easiest action is continue eating.
In designing my own portion-control diets, I found this to be an important lesson. The very size of our dishes and plates and glasses control for how much we are served, to begin with. So, if you've got a family-sized bag of chips or cereal, dole it out into a small bowl. Even if you overeat, you will consciously see how much you have eaten during that sitting, and it should have a psychological effect on you. In contrast, sitting on the sofa with the Netflix on and plunging your hand into a bag of Doritos while you gulp directly from a 2L Cherry Pepsi bottle, not going to win any diet awards. Seeing how much you will eat, seeing how much you have eaten, and reaching the bottom of the dish, needing to get up and refill it, these are all inflection points, and opportunities to pause and consider.
Dieting as a bachelor presented challenges. Your frozen meals and pizzas are often one size that's too large or small. Your recipes are not going to be calibrated for one person, one meal, one sitting. Literally, every can in my pantry is too much soup or fruit to prepare for a single meal...
Restaurant eating makes portion control so difficult. Delivery, doubly so. The only recourse is to find a place that has tapas, appetizers, small plates that can be likewise doled out.
And yes, I am certain that food is engineered to foster addiction and dependencies. It's right there in the slogans, yes? "Once you pop, you can't stop!" "Betcha can't eat just one!"
The average dinner plate today is 11.5 inches. Fifty years ago, it was 9.5in. A hundred years ago, it was 9 inches. In the 1700-1800s, it was 8 to 8.5 inches. For centuries before that, the common "trencher" was 4-6 inches square. And say ~2000 years ago, food was served for the entire dinner party on a single 12-16inch communal platter.
Dinner plates have gotten huge, historically speaking.
My diet would verge on the definition of extreme by most people given the lengths I go to avoid UPFs, additives and microplastics but that doesn't mean I don't like eating. If I have a bag of chips I'll easily gorge the whole thing before even making it back to the couch so keep them out of the house, out of sight and out of mind.
Snacks are truly a sin - they're just seasoning sprinkled on empty calories, engineered to deliberately leave you not satiated. Such a waste to blow your calorie budget on them while also eating a laundry list of chemicals - I'd rather hold off and eat more pasta or steak at dinner.
And if I really can't hold off, there are plenty of easy snacks you can prepare at home like eggs or toast. "a slice of buttered toast" is rated pretty high as a final meal...
An apple, banana or nuts also does pretty well if you can deprogram yourself from the conditioning of the snack industry.
n=1 but when I was visiting the US I was amazed how expensive real food ingredients were and how cheap fast food. I was kinda broke back then and could rarely afford real food and mostly ate fast food.
Where I live it’s mostly the other way around.
Never really understood how that works
Processed food ingredients in the US are highly subsidized by the US government. The resulting processed foodstuffs are shelf stable, widely distributed, and trounce local options in the market place through sheer scale. More often than not, "real food" == "health food" == "luxury item". It's unfortunate and unhealthy.
Fast food isn’t actually cheap compared to real food. Large fry at mcd is like $4-5 now. That gets you a lot of russets at the grocery store in comparison.
Most people don’t grocery shop for base ingrediants in the US. Produce section and base ingredients are like a small fraction of the grocery store by shelf area. Most people don’t know how to cook for themselves. Price out lean chuck from costco and estimate how many 1/8th lb big mac patties you can make from that.
I wonder how they managed to put in same amount of salt in the low processed meal. That cheese must be super salty.
I'd also wonder what would happen if they didint use heat treated carbs in the ultraptocessed one. If I were to guess I think they might be main offenders.
good study with, entirely expected results? Variances in bioavailability are well known no? A block of wood has calories but you can't live off it. As for processing there's been papers describing "roasting meat and veggies" as a gateway to our larger brains because cooking makes calories in food more available.
Does a cooked steak and a raw steak actually show different values when measured with a calorimeter?
their chosen dishes also seem to conflate a lot of factors, like processing, vs flavor. it's known that artificial sweeteners can elicit insulin responses despite not being a digestible sugar, I've heard studies showing that "Tasting" in the gut can perceive the sweetness.
For anyone who hasn’t read it, I highly recommend the book “Ultraprocessed People.” It's a scientifically literate and yet quite readable overview of research into ultraprocessed foods.
FWIW there are four categories:
1 is whole foods (eg fruits, nuts)
2 is stuff that is processed but still basically an ingredient (eg maple syrup)
3 is combinations of 1 and 2 (most restaurants are here)
4 is ultraprocessed food (UPF): things that were not food that have been turned into food (modified starches, artificial flavors, etc). Also, anything containing UPFs is a UPF, so most breakfast cereal (food coloring, flavors)
The basic thesis (which this research challenges, interestingly) is that UPFs aren’t inherently bad, but food scientists are shockingly good at creating highly specific and desirable flavors and textures (the book gives the example of a food company creating "ice cream" out of various modified starches and flavors so that it doesn't melt during shipping), and foods that come out of this process have generally been engineered to overwhelm our natural feedback mechanisms against overeating in order to sell more product.
My reading of Ultraprocessed People was more that the author was very careful to only pin on UPF's what could be proved to be true. The between the lines read certainly felt like "you should probably not eat UPFs".
I would humbly add that any of Michael Pollan's books, especially "In Defense of Food" are a good answer to how we should eat if we can't eat McDonald's. I have certainly found restarting the dining table tradition to have incalculable benefits for my family.
> I have certainly found restarting the dining table tradition to have incalculable benefits for my family.
I would love to hear more of your experiences here if you would care to share? It is something I have been thinking about a lot recently (the slow erosion of this practice and its benefits that we're giving up)
We have a small child so eating at the table is almost a default for some meals. But we went from basically never eating together at home to deliberately sitting and talking while eating for breakfast and dinner. There's no rules around not having devices available and we don't force the conversation. I think being relaxed about it has helped make the practice stick. Mostly its just semi-guaranteed time to talk and do something together every day.
>foods that come out of this process have generally been engineered to overwhelm our natural feedback mechanisms against overeating in order to sell more product.
That's the point at which it becomes highly speculative.
It seems to invoke an assumed knowledge of human biology that either does not exist or is known by some select few in some form of conspiracy (somewhat unlikely)
It reminds me of raw foodists that argue that cooking is bad because humans harnessed fire only after we'd mostly evolved. Or a magnet bracelet peddler claiming that since we started wearing shoes, that separation from the earth's magnetic field means we need the bracelets now.
It didn’t take an advanced understanding of reward pathways to realize that things like nicotine and cocaine were highly addictive and that aspect could be concentrated (e.g. crack).
> That's the point at which it becomes highly speculative.
The “…in order to sell more product” part is scientifically speculative, I agree—the book makes the claim, but the scientific research it references does not, IIRC. The book’s author imputes it from interviews and the like.
The “overwhelm…feedback mechanisms” part is mainly substantiated by a 2019 study by Kevin Hall where, similar to TFA, they had people essentially live inside a calorimeter and eat calorie- and nutrient-matched meals that were UPF or not. They found that when given UPF, the same people ate more and faster, and gained weight at a pace that surprised the study authors (who were initially skeptical of the theory and had constructed the study to try and disprove it. The study author is interviewed and explains why he found it compelling).
Whether you find the evidence compelling is, of course, up to you :-), but I felt the book did a good job interviewing members of the obesity research community and tracing the history of the theory.
For one, for achieving fat loss, it's surely simpler to focus on factors like calories & how full the food makes you. -- With that perspective, yeah it's obvious that fried chicken and sugary chocolate aren't great for your health when eaten frequently.
For another, e.g. it seems that nutritionally, something like "diet coke" is strictly better than the sugar drinks it replaces: you get the same taste, but zero calories. -- I mean, zero-calorie drink is clearly UPF but also nutritionally beneficial. I don't see "UPF" as a practical way to look at it.
The book discusses this a bit, actually. It basically credits the UPF theory to one Brazilian researcher, Carlos Monteiro, and discusses how he developed the theory by applying epidemiological techniques to the obesity epidemic in Brazil. It gives the specific example that, in Monteiro's research, if a family bought sugar at the grocery store, it actually reduced the likelihood that they were obese because, even though sugar is not healthy, it meant they were still cooking at home.
My understanding is that he would probably make similar predictions about your examples: people who eat fried chicken and chocolate as part of a mostly home-cooked diet are less likely to be obese than people who drink diet coke as part of a diet that mostly comes out of wrappers. He would probably also say that there's nothing inherently bad about diet coke, but there is something bad about getting all your food from people trying to make money instead of from people who love you.
I thought that aside from the social context above, there is a theory that artificial sweeteners actually cause paradoxical effects in the metabolism because of triggers associated with the sweetness not the glucose/sucrose content. Ie specifically "diet" soda aside from eating out a Lot, may not be helping.
I'd say "calorie dense food that's highly palatable makes it easy to consume more calories than you expend, and that makes you fat". -- I mean, that's a mechanical model explaining how you get fat.
I think that UPF mostly aligns with that in that the food that's "UPF" is generally calorie dense, highly palatable, low satiation.
But...
> He would probably also say that there's nothing inherently bad about diet coke, but there is something bad about getting all your food from people trying to make money instead of from people who love you.
At this point, it seems more a discussion of morals and social values rather than a scientific "how to lose fat".
> At this point, it seems more a discussion of morals and social values rather than a scientific "how to lose fat".
He uses language like that in the book (and I was speculating about “what he would say”).
I think the reason is that when people hear the theory “UPFs caused the obesity epidemic,” their brain sometimes goes to “well what is in UPFs that causes obesity?” His answer is “nothing.” He’s trying to emphasize that the issue isn’t some toxic ingredient, but that UPFs are a technology that are being used in a way that leads to this outcome.
(though the research in TFA might actually challenge the “nothing,” by showing that there is some kind of toxicity)
Zero calories doesn’t mean it’s healthy, as all those drinks are loaded with artificial sweeteners that do have a strong insulin response and are also associated with cancer.
Zero-calorie drinks like coke zero provide a no-calorie alternative to the full sugar drinks.
If you habitually drink 3 cans of coke a day, and want to lose weight, then switching to coke zero is practically the same benefit, but consumes 430kcal less. Since coke zero is like a zero sugar replacement for typical coke, it makes sense to use "compared to coke" as the baseline.
That's what I meant by "clearly .. nutritionally beneficial". If you'd prefer a different term, then sure.
(I think the proposed alternative of "just eat whole foods and water" is surely going to be even more beneficial, but also requires a change in habits. If "change habits" was easy, I don't think there'd be any discussion around "Ultra Processed Food")
Most of the “chemicals” in so-called ultra-processed food aren’t added so customers overeat, they’re added to improve things like shelf-life or product quality (modified starch thickeners).
I’d find it hard to believe there are evil food scientists in big food companies who are nefariously designing food for overeating.
What is more likely is they are creating food that taste good, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Now if the claim is they work towards this goal without much concern about things like sugar content or glycemic index, I could believe that.
But at the same time nobody thinks eating a whole bag of five servings of Doritos is a healthy food choice. If you’re designing good tasting food and assuming people will eat one serving as a part of a healthy diet, then no nefarious goals are required.
Lol the entire junk food industry would like to hire you for PR
You know cigarette companies have existed for 100 years and bought food companies right? You know their stuff is blatantly toxic and kills millions of people a year and they advocated ads and stuff and paid doctors to say it's not harmful right?
Like what world do you live in?
You really think hanlon's razor or any other thing like that remotely applies here?
They came out with a new coke can for the first time in my life some years ago. Its smaller than the old cans, not bigger. How does that fit the thesis of these companies fattening us up?
GP missed the major point. Its not even about engineering tastier food. Its about shelf stable food that isn’t going to give you botulism in 3 weeks.
But food sciences are, other than maximizing the utility of food, also largely focused on finding the point where food tantalizes but doesn't satisfy so that at a very base level people who eat a processed food are physiologically induced to eat more of it without ever getting enough.
"The difference between a watermelon and something processed by a large company is that, for the latter, those foods are altered in ways to make them literally irresistible. This happens when companies use a combination of salt, sugar and fat to create foods that overstimulate the taste buds — and yet are designed to never quite leave you feeling satisfied. Even though saturating foods in salt, sugar and fat fuels the obesity epidemic — and does not necessarily provide consumers with the best culinary experience — it guarantees that customers will keep coming back for more by overstimulating one's feeling of taste pleasure in exactly the right ways. Since the companies' view their foremost responsibility as being to their shareholders, that is in itself a good enough reason to continue preparing foods with excessive salt, sugar and fat."
Food scientists are very much devising addictive food:
"The difference between a watermelon and something processed by a large company is that, for the latter, those foods are altered in ways to make them literally irresistible. This happens when companies use a combination of salt, sugar and fat to create foods that overstimulate the taste buds — and yet are designed to never quite leave you feeling satisfied. Even though saturating foods in salt, sugar and fat fuels the obesity epidemic — and does not necessarily provide consumers with the best culinary experience — it guarantees that customers will keep coming back for more by overstimulating one's feeling of taste pleasure in exactly the right ways. Since the companies' view their foremost responsibility as being to their shareholders, that is in itself a good enough reason to continue preparing foods with excessive salt, sugar and fat."
> those foods are altered in ways to make them literally irresistible. This happens when companies use a combination of salt, sugar and fat to create foods that overstimulate the taste buds — and yet are designed to never quite leave you feeling satisfied
This seems entirely made up. Are you telling me food companies test their food for "never feeling satisfied"?
Just _two distinct_ meals and such a vast conclusion?
Yeah... is that even science?
It's on par with "nutrition science" stating that potatos should be left out of meals, all the while you could _provable_ live the longest with just potatos (don't try it, just means the least deadly deficits).
It does not take a metabolic chamber to guess that the plate on the right is choked full of added sugar, while the one on the left has none. The plate on the left has some fiber while the one on the right has none, and fiber act as a sponge for sugar release.
They should have compared natural and ultra processed food matching the same glycemic indexes to understand if there is some kind of procedure in manufacturing that changes it significantly even the same amount of sugar and fiber
An obvious flaw in this study is that the meals were not anything like equivalent.
The minimally processed food consisted mainly of cheese, egg, and pieces of whole fruit: No unbound simple carbohydrates.
The ultra processed food included jelly, turkey, chips, a cookie, cereal, instant mashed potatoes: Lots of unbound simple carbohydrates and much less fiber.
Of course insulin would spike higher with such a meal. There’s nothing at all non-obvious about that.
Also, the protein wasn’t equivalent. The turkey roll is meat protein and cheese is dairy protein. Also, the salt content was probably higher in the ultra processed foods, and that was not controlled for.
If this could be replicated using exact equivalents that are either processed or not processed, I would be more convinced. But I really doubt that it would replicate.
Right if it was literally the processing they make the claim about and not the molecular ingredients. Then they basically have a result that points to there being something fundamentally wrong with our model of physics.
You cant have a non mediated cause according to our current model of physics.
How many turns and twists have we seen regarding egg consumption? I don't put a lot of faith in these studies. They offer a bit of an indication, but nothing more.
Am I missing something or article just say that body reacts “differently” on processed food and not. They are not really saying which one is better, just mention that processed food gives more insulin spike and different response in brain.
The fallacy of the KETO diet is that significant consumption of saturated fats eventually leads to arteriosclerosis and cardiovascular disease, whereas the VETO diet employs the same high protein, low carb principles using only plant based proteins, which will achieve better long term health results. Also, based on the proven theory of biomagnification, a carnivore diet accumulates more pesticides, poisons and toxins that are commonly applied to crops in modern agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnification
I looked up the VETO diet and I intrigued as its similar to what I've eaten in the past or the ideal diet for me (plant based, low carb) but I just about had an aneurism when it claimed that diary was a "plant-based" protein source. Bro what.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 79.6 ms ] thread> The non-UPF and UPF test meals were closely matched on meal weight, energy, energy density, macronutrients, available carbohydrate, glycaemic index and load, total dietary fibre, sodium and water (all ≤1.6% deviation between meals; Fig. 1b).
So they did match glycemic index, which the article omits.
I bet a lot of this is psychosomatic, you expect some food will give you fast energy so your body thinks that means you need it and releases insulin.
plus all of the options that are complete unknowns which, in biology, is probably close to 99.999%
I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.
Looking at the two meals in the study: if I sat down to eat the processed one, I'd probably start with the veggie straws. If I saw down to eat the unprocessed one, I'd almost certainly start with the egg or the cheese.
And yet another option: I notice that the unprocessed one is completely grain-free. I don't know if that makes it more or less healthy, but it's a significant difference nutritionally.
But the above example shows that the body doesn't treat food in that manner - the relatively low carb, higher fat cheese didn't smooth out the higher proportion carb count of the toast.
In the paper, the largest carbs for the ultraprocessed meal was instant mashed potatoes, while the non-processed meal had bananas as the largest carb source followed by craisins/cranberries.
The high carb foods in the unprocessed meal are paired with fiber.
The high carb foods in the ultraprocessed meal are NOT paired with fiber.
The fiber slows the rate of carb intake.
Same thing occurs with protein - same amount of ground beef and steak, ground beef meal will result in faster amino acid ingestion than the steak meal. No idea if there are any pros/cons of the faster ground beef ingestion, but there is a difference in how the digestive system processes the two meals.
This is what I read in a book about glucose. So I went ahead and measured. I found it not true, at least in my case. The recommendations of eating salad before your meal do nothing measureable for my glucose spikes.
On the flip side I seem to gain the same amount of weight regardless of what my blood sugar does.
But these examples have different glycemic indexes, which the study matched for.
for instance, matching "peanut butter" as generic, but eating a certain brand with some added sugar.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-026-01619-4
I'd guess they wanted to include store purchased bread, hence the pb&j.
The other thought i had was that most peanut butter includes (at least) palm oil (ultra processed) and sometimes other emulsifiers to prevent separation. Though you can buy pb that is just peanut and salt.
The jelly would contain quite a bit more in the way of preservatives, regulators and flavour enhancers etc than the jelly i'd make at home (if i did such a thing)
I'd guess it's just regular cheese which does require quite some processing to make but unless it's got extra additives to extend shelf life, change texture or taste it's just processed.
By contrast cheese is completely natural outside of a few exceptions like American cheese. You take milk, add something to curdle it like an acid (e.g. vinegar) or rennet - an enzyme obtained from the stomach of young calves, separate the coagulated stuff, salt it, dry it, age it - you now have cheese. Ricotta can even be made straight from raw milk with no additives. Cheese's long shelf life is natural.
Peanut oil is commonly used for all kinds of frying. It's hilarious that you're trying to lecture people without knowing this basic fact.
False, peanuts contain their own oil. Nothing needs to be added, not even salt.
Anything containing more than peanuts and salt should be referred to as something else, like peanut spread.
Depends on how you make it - it's definitely trickier at home to get a creamy texture without extra oil, but with the right machine (i.e. peanut butter maker) it comes out smooth with just peanuts (and salt if you like); some wholefoods shops have the machine where you can make it yourself.
Many store-bought peanut butters use oil as an additive as the peanut oil is more expensive, so they remove that to sell as peanut oil, and replace it with cheaper oils
And at least in America, most peanut butter has additives, and most store-bought bread has 40 different UPF ingredients. Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
Depending on the cheese you buy, many are very simple, and rarely have weird additives. But if you buy a block of cheese or even usually the sandwich-sized slices, it’s not ultra-processed.
So if you add enzymes that completely change the characteristics of the food (aka "industrial reformulation") that's perfectly fine but you add an emulsifier to improve the mouthfeel and texture now it's suddenly a "ultra processed" food and is pure evil and should be regulated like cigarettes? Now it has "crazy ingredients" and "weird additives"? I'm sorry but this stance is totally and completely illogical. You aren't going to convince me that this makes sense.
>Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
For fucks sake, jelly requires pectin to be jelly. Sure, you can rely on the naturally occuring pectin in fruit, but adding additional pectin makes it so you have a consistent product and can add less sugar and don't have to cook it as long - aka healthier and less processed.
Type any enzyme or emulsifier off an ingredient list into Google and you can easily find a study about its health impact.
There is research for a lot of additives, but many have limited evidence or small studies that aren’t replicated. Usually the result is either “it doesn’t affect health either way” or “it is negative to health”. Very rarely is there an ultra processed ingredient with a large body of science that says “we should eat more of this specific thing, it has a positive effect on longevity!”.
So I think you have to stretch your reasoning that the practice as a whole is probably negative, but I feel like I’ve personally seen enough negatives of certain UPF that I limit my intake whenever reasonably possible.
Obviously having small amounts isn’t going to be horrible but they’re in everything now
Why are they bad? What do emulsifiers do? They combine substances that don't want to be combined. What in your body might this affect? Your mucosal lining. Emulsifiers don't break down in your gut as they pass through. They just emulsify everything as they move through. Including your mucus. That layer is extremely important for a normally functioning gut. Lose it and then chime will contact the gut lining. This disrupts the microbiota and allows things to get through your gut that are not supposed to. It causes inflammation.
UPFs contain many bad things, but they HAVE to be categorized to fully appreciate the levels of badness. Some things are just not that big of deal, and the "health industry" does everyone a disservice by not clarifying it.
from bad to not as bad:
- Emulsifiers (e.g., Polysorbate 80/60/40, carboxymethylcellulose)
- some stabilizers/thickeners (e.g., carrageenan)
- artificial sweeteners
- refined sugars
- artificial colors/cosmetics
- other stabilizers/thickeners/emulsifiers (e.g., xanthan gum, guar gum, pectin, cellulose, lecithin)
I guess i can see how packaging makes a difference to the desirability / convenience of the food.
I guess i'm less likely to eat chips if i have to make them myself compared to grabbing a bag and more likely to over eat them if it's super convenient.
Though I admit to being a bit lazy like that.
Science can be patient but those of us who eat should act now. Something is making us fat, and it sure looks like its the UPFs.
A couple of years ago I lost 20kg (~40lb) of body weight.
I find this phrasing odd. -- Should I say "something made me lose 20kg of body weight", or should I say "I was able to improve the food I ate, and I lost 20kg of weight".
I tend to think that even without scientific literature, people know that e.g. lettuce is "healthier" than chocolate cake and fried chicken.
The term "UPF" seems like a weird term that puts the moral responsibility on the food manufacturers, rather than on "us" who are fat and want to lose weight.
From an epidemiological standpoint, something changed in the environment that caused obesity rates to start rising in the 70s and 80s. There are many theories as to exactly which environmental change is the cause. Figuring out what that change was would be a good thing.
If your concern is about your own health as an individual? I want to lose weight now? I think it's useful to say "I have agency, I can lose weight". If you have the agency to lose weight, it makes sense you can take on the responsibility for having gained weight.
"Why did society in general get fatter?" is a different question. And if your main concern is "how can I lose fat?" it's not directly interesting.
It's very likely you're not going to finish your plate.
Note that fiber is not part of that list. Stripping out fiber essentially means that our gut microbiome is starved. Not coincidentally, it also means that these foods are much less prone to spoilage.
(Assuming a mechanical clock with a 12-h dial or flip display.)
The human body is evidently not able to safely consume these products over the course of a lifetime and the ultimate toll on society and healthcare is already evident.
They are addictive and harmful to the body’s mechanisms.
It’s time to control the promotion, labelling and taxation of these products the same way we do cigarettes.
The body evolved to eat foods that take a lot of chewing and digesting. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest problems with food that is “too” processed is that it’s absorbed far too quickly and early in the tract.
Food that makes it all the way through has a slower and more even absorption rate so we don’t get hungry again as fast.
There will likely never be a satisfactory definition, and doesn't need to be. Instead we define what foods are causing health problems and which aren't.
Look in this study, cheese is on the unprocessed side. That is an absurdity of language.
In the end they may figure out that the key difference here isn't processing at all, but fiber, or some particular ingredient added to floud based products on the processing side.
Many ultra processed ingredients have been so pulverised that there’s no structure left to help regulate the speed at which your body can break it down and absorb it.
So it absorbs nutrients too quickly, blood sugar spike, blood sugar crash, hunger pang, and you end up eating more than you would have otherwise during your waking hours.
Multiply that by years and you get metabolic issues.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But something that is different is how much of the food is prepared at the vendor from whole ingredients. Ingredients often acquired whole day-of from nearby markets. Ingredients that have a shorter supply chain and higher freshness due to the smaller geography.
Reading this study, I wonder how much cheap ease of access to less processed foods contributes to the lower level of obesity and higher lifespans.
[0] https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/
>In 2017–March 2020, non-Hispanic Black adults had the highest obesity prevalence (49.9%) followed by Hispanic (45.6%), non-Hispanic White (41.4%), and non-Hispanic Asian (16.1%) adults.
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult-obesity-facts/
That site does control for diet.
Which is the second argument of OP, regional/fresh/not long distances etc.
> Do Taiwanese get as fat on average as African Americans on average when they eat an average American diet?
Average American diet is problematic, especially if you control for family background
There are 3 options in order of effort: eat the next snack from a pack in your hand, decide and stop eating the cookie that is in the pack; get another pack to continue eating.
It requires more effort to get another pack and that biases towards the “stop eating” outcome. If packages are large the the easiest action is continue eating.
Dieting as a bachelor presented challenges. Your frozen meals and pizzas are often one size that's too large or small. Your recipes are not going to be calibrated for one person, one meal, one sitting. Literally, every can in my pantry is too much soup or fruit to prepare for a single meal...
Restaurant eating makes portion control so difficult. Delivery, doubly so. The only recourse is to find a place that has tapas, appetizers, small plates that can be likewise doled out.
And yes, I am certain that food is engineered to foster addiction and dependencies. It's right there in the slogans, yes? "Once you pop, you can't stop!" "Betcha can't eat just one!"
Dinner plates have gotten huge, historically speaking.
This shouldn't even be a remarkable POV - the industry has been open about it for decades[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
My diet would verge on the definition of extreme by most people given the lengths I go to avoid UPFs, additives and microplastics but that doesn't mean I don't like eating. If I have a bag of chips I'll easily gorge the whole thing before even making it back to the couch so keep them out of the house, out of sight and out of mind.
Snacks are truly a sin - they're just seasoning sprinkled on empty calories, engineered to deliberately leave you not satiated. Such a waste to blow your calorie budget on them while also eating a laundry list of chemicals - I'd rather hold off and eat more pasta or steak at dinner.
And if I really can't hold off, there are plenty of easy snacks you can prepare at home like eggs or toast. "a slice of buttered toast" is rated pretty high as a final meal...
An apple, banana or nuts also does pretty well if you can deprogram yourself from the conditioning of the snack industry.
whole and fresh prepared foods are pricey in the US.
The government subsidizes the crops used in processed foods, specifically corn, soybeans, wheat, sugar crops.
But these crops also supply animal feed, fuel, exports, and ordinary foods.
Most people don’t grocery shop for base ingrediants in the US. Produce section and base ingredients are like a small fraction of the grocery store by shelf area. Most people don’t know how to cook for themselves. Price out lean chuck from costco and estimate how many 1/8th lb big mac patties you can make from that.
I'd also wonder what would happen if they didint use heat treated carbs in the ultraptocessed one. If I were to guess I think they might be main offenders.
Does a cooked steak and a raw steak actually show different values when measured with a calorimeter?
their chosen dishes also seem to conflate a lot of factors, like processing, vs flavor. it's known that artificial sweeteners can elicit insulin responses despite not being a digestible sugar, I've heard studies showing that "Tasting" in the gut can perceive the sweetness.
I noticed it keeps me less full than if I had the ingredients as a whole.
FWIW there are four categories:
1 is whole foods (eg fruits, nuts)
2 is stuff that is processed but still basically an ingredient (eg maple syrup)
3 is combinations of 1 and 2 (most restaurants are here)
4 is ultraprocessed food (UPF): things that were not food that have been turned into food (modified starches, artificial flavors, etc). Also, anything containing UPFs is a UPF, so most breakfast cereal (food coloring, flavors)
The basic thesis (which this research challenges, interestingly) is that UPFs aren’t inherently bad, but food scientists are shockingly good at creating highly specific and desirable flavors and textures (the book gives the example of a food company creating "ice cream" out of various modified starches and flavors so that it doesn't melt during shipping), and foods that come out of this process have generally been engineered to overwhelm our natural feedback mechanisms against overeating in order to sell more product.
My reading of Ultraprocessed People was more that the author was very careful to only pin on UPF's what could be proved to be true. The between the lines read certainly felt like "you should probably not eat UPFs".
I would humbly add that any of Michael Pollan's books, especially "In Defense of Food" are a good answer to how we should eat if we can't eat McDonald's. I have certainly found restarting the dining table tradition to have incalculable benefits for my family.
I would love to hear more of your experiences here if you would care to share? It is something I have been thinking about a lot recently (the slow erosion of this practice and its benefits that we're giving up)
That's the point at which it becomes highly speculative.
It seems to invoke an assumed knowledge of human biology that either does not exist or is known by some select few in some form of conspiracy (somewhat unlikely)
It reminds me of raw foodists that argue that cooking is bad because humans harnessed fire only after we'd mostly evolved. Or a magnet bracelet peddler claiming that since we started wearing shoes, that separation from the earth's magnetic field means we need the bracelets now.
The “…in order to sell more product” part is scientifically speculative, I agree—the book makes the claim, but the scientific research it references does not, IIRC. The book’s author imputes it from interviews and the like.
The “overwhelm…feedback mechanisms” part is mainly substantiated by a 2019 study by Kevin Hall where, similar to TFA, they had people essentially live inside a calorimeter and eat calorie- and nutrient-matched meals that were UPF or not. They found that when given UPF, the same people ate more and faster, and gained weight at a pace that surprised the study authors (who were initially skeptical of the theory and had constructed the study to try and disprove it. The study author is interviewed and explains why he found it compelling).
Whether you find the evidence compelling is, of course, up to you :-), but I felt the book did a good job interviewing members of the obesity research community and tracing the history of the theory.
For one, for achieving fat loss, it's surely simpler to focus on factors like calories & how full the food makes you. -- With that perspective, yeah it's obvious that fried chicken and sugary chocolate aren't great for your health when eaten frequently.
For another, e.g. it seems that nutritionally, something like "diet coke" is strictly better than the sugar drinks it replaces: you get the same taste, but zero calories. -- I mean, zero-calorie drink is clearly UPF but also nutritionally beneficial. I don't see "UPF" as a practical way to look at it.
My understanding is that he would probably make similar predictions about your examples: people who eat fried chicken and chocolate as part of a mostly home-cooked diet are less likely to be obese than people who drink diet coke as part of a diet that mostly comes out of wrappers. He would probably also say that there's nothing inherently bad about diet coke, but there is something bad about getting all your food from people trying to make money instead of from people who love you.
https://www.jofem.org/index.php/jofem/article/viewFile/547/2...
e.g. obviously not practical for everyone but Taub's "Twinkie Study" showed fat 27 lbs of fat loss even from a diet of decidedly calorie-dense food like twinkies and doritos. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/comfort-cravings/201...
I think that UPF mostly aligns with that in that the food that's "UPF" is generally calorie dense, highly palatable, low satiation.
But...
> He would probably also say that there's nothing inherently bad about diet coke, but there is something bad about getting all your food from people trying to make money instead of from people who love you.
At this point, it seems more a discussion of morals and social values rather than a scientific "how to lose fat".
He uses language like that in the book (and I was speculating about “what he would say”).
I think the reason is that when people hear the theory “UPFs caused the obesity epidemic,” their brain sometimes goes to “well what is in UPFs that causes obesity?” His answer is “nothing.” He’s trying to emphasize that the issue isn’t some toxic ingredient, but that UPFs are a technology that are being used in a way that leads to this outcome.
(though the research in TFA might actually challenge the “nothing,” by showing that there is some kind of toxicity)
Last time I looked into this, the strongest research showed "we looked and couldn't find any evidence it's not associated with cancer".
That is, to hear "artificial sweeteners = cancer, I'm better off with the sugary drinks" was the wrong conclusion to take.
> I mean, zero-calorie drink is clearly UPF but also nutritionally beneficial.
What nutrition do zero-calorie manufactured drinks like Coke Zero provide?
If you habitually drink 3 cans of coke a day, and want to lose weight, then switching to coke zero is practically the same benefit, but consumes 430kcal less. Since coke zero is like a zero sugar replacement for typical coke, it makes sense to use "compared to coke" as the baseline.
That's what I meant by "clearly .. nutritionally beneficial". If you'd prefer a different term, then sure.
(I think the proposed alternative of "just eat whole foods and water" is surely going to be even more beneficial, but also requires a change in habits. If "change habits" was easy, I don't think there'd be any discussion around "Ultra Processed Food")
I’d find it hard to believe there are evil food scientists in big food companies who are nefariously designing food for overeating.
What is more likely is they are creating food that taste good, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Now if the claim is they work towards this goal without much concern about things like sugar content or glycemic index, I could believe that.
But at the same time nobody thinks eating a whole bag of five servings of Doritos is a healthy food choice. If you’re designing good tasting food and assuming people will eat one serving as a part of a healthy diet, then no nefarious goals are required.
You know cigarette companies have existed for 100 years and bought food companies right? You know their stuff is blatantly toxic and kills millions of people a year and they advocated ads and stuff and paid doctors to say it's not harmful right?
Like what world do you live in?
You really think hanlon's razor or any other thing like that remotely applies here?
"I’d find it hard to believe there are evil food scientists in big food companies who are nefariously designing food for overeating."
Reading comprehension is important!
You really find it hard to believe that profit making companies that engineer food would engineer food for profit?
What about if they advertised it with a catchy phrase like "once you pop you can't stop"? Would you still shake your head and say "not credible"?
GP missed the major point. Its not even about engineering tastier food. Its about shelf stable food that isn’t going to give you botulism in 3 weeks.
"The difference between a watermelon and something processed by a large company is that, for the latter, those foods are altered in ways to make them literally irresistible. This happens when companies use a combination of salt, sugar and fat to create foods that overstimulate the taste buds — and yet are designed to never quite leave you feeling satisfied. Even though saturating foods in salt, sugar and fat fuels the obesity epidemic — and does not necessarily provide consumers with the best culinary experience — it guarantees that customers will keep coming back for more by overstimulating one's feeling of taste pleasure in exactly the right ways. Since the companies' view their foremost responsibility as being to their shareholders, that is in itself a good enough reason to continue preparing foods with excessive salt, sugar and fat."
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-new...
That's not what I said is it?
I said "I said I find it hard to believe food scientists are devising addictive food".
Clearly they are trying to make their food taste food (LOL, do you want them to make it taste bad?).
There doesn't have to be any conspiratorial evil food scientists to get where we are.
I agree that no conspiracy is necessary, basic market incentives dictate that addictive "once you pop you can't stop" food is just good business.
"The difference between a watermelon and something processed by a large company is that, for the latter, those foods are altered in ways to make them literally irresistible. This happens when companies use a combination of salt, sugar and fat to create foods that overstimulate the taste buds — and yet are designed to never quite leave you feeling satisfied. Even though saturating foods in salt, sugar and fat fuels the obesity epidemic — and does not necessarily provide consumers with the best culinary experience — it guarantees that customers will keep coming back for more by overstimulating one's feeling of taste pleasure in exactly the right ways. Since the companies' view their foremost responsibility as being to their shareholders, that is in itself a good enough reason to continue preparing foods with excessive salt, sugar and fat."
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-new...
This seems entirely made up. Are you telling me food companies test their food for "never feeling satisfied"?
It's on par with "nutrition science" stating that potatos should be left out of meals, all the while you could _provable_ live the longest with just potatos (don't try it, just means the least deadly deficits).
Close to worthless.
They should have compared natural and ultra processed food matching the same glycemic indexes to understand if there is some kind of procedure in manufacturing that changes it significantly even the same amount of sugar and fiber
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/early/2026/04/11/202...
The minimally processed food consisted mainly of cheese, egg, and pieces of whole fruit: No unbound simple carbohydrates.
The ultra processed food included jelly, turkey, chips, a cookie, cereal, instant mashed potatoes: Lots of unbound simple carbohydrates and much less fiber.
Of course insulin would spike higher with such a meal. There’s nothing at all non-obvious about that.
Also, the protein wasn’t equivalent. The turkey roll is meat protein and cheese is dairy protein. Also, the salt content was probably higher in the ultra processed foods, and that was not controlled for.
If this could be replicated using exact equivalents that are either processed or not processed, I would be more convinced. But I really doubt that it would replicate.
Salt is listed as among the things that was matched between the two meals.
You cant have a non mediated cause according to our current model of physics.