Industrially processed pizzas, cereals, and convenience foods are responsible for a host of diseases. Policymakers and doctors need to lead the food fight.
Industrially processed pizzas, cereals, and convenience foods are responsible for a host of diseases. Policymakers and doctors need to lead the food fight.
Washington Post had an article about this with a lot more facts, a couple days ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/27/ultra-processed-foods-predigested-health-risks/
(temporarily free article on a mostly-paywalled site.)
@sinnerman That article is much better, thanks for sharing it! I’d never thought of ultraprocessing as predigestion before.
Fascinating.
To say that this makes processed foods bad for you however is kinda ridiculous imo. Might as well tell people to only eat raw things because it has the least calories / most filling.
Bad food is bad for you, eating junk food is known to be a giant waste of calories and how it’s prepared doesn’t make it better or worse.
Outside of increased calories I have not seen any evidence that food being more “processed” is actually bad for you.
I’m not sure when this movement against junk food became a movement against processed foods but it’s moving in the wrong direction. Plenty of shitty junk foods can have very little processing involved. And I’m convinced it’s exactly those “low processed” junk food providers that are pushing all this bullshit.
“High consumption of ultra-processed foods has been linked to health concerns ranging from increased risk of obesity, hypertension, breast and colorectal cancer to dying prematurely from all causes.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/25/1178163270/ultra-processed-foods-health-risk-weight-gain
With respect, I think you’re ignoring the facts. How it’s prepared absolutely makes a difference in how it tastes, how easy it is to eat, etc. and there is a resulting effect on how much people eat.
Freshly grilled chicken and frozen chicken patties are both chicken. But the chicken patty is ground, pre-seasoned, pre-cooked, etc. This makes it easier to get ready and easier to eat than a fresh chicken breast.
The poison is in the dose, as they say. 500 calorie surplus every day is a pound a week of weight gain.
And as dieticians have shown us over and over again, you can eat shitty food and be healthy, you just have to eat an appropriate amount of it. There are diets based on cookies and snack cakes, if you eat at your maintenance and cover a few basics with supplements, you can easily thrive on them.
I say this in jest: but as someone who has run the gamut between elaborate home cooking and “fuck it, it’s frozen pizza night” I can’t help but laugh that people who eat unprocessed meals eat more slowly. I’ve often realized I can’t scarf down my delicious home cooked meal in 10 minutes since it took me 90+ minutes to make it! Just wouldn’t be right!