ok light reading time. "why is the american diet so deadly?" from the new yorker. paywalled but i javascript falsed it and it's fine. reading this because my dad keeps talking about ultra-processed food recently lol
Hall ended up refuting his own hypothesis. When participants were on the ultra-processed diet, they ate five hundred calories more per day and put on an average of two pounds. They ate meals faster; their bodies secreted more insulin; their blood contained more glucose. When participants were on the minimally processed diet, they lost about two pounds. Researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite-suppressing hormone and a decline in one that makes us feel hungry.
i think my problem with this article is that it fails to effectively define what constitutes "ultra-processed" and what doesn't... like the majority of foods are processed nowadays because most carbs are processed in some way or another. but what constitutes the "ultra" in ultra-processed isn't made super clear until the last third of the article or so
article mentions caloric density and taste as reasons that people are more drawn to eating ultra-processed foods which makes sense!! people want to eat things that are tasty and also the body craves energy, so it's more interested in food that has More Food Per Square Food in it. the article is very concerned with the obesity epidemic but i think what's missing is the fact that FOOD THAT ISN'T ULTRA-PROCESSED TENDS TO BE MORE EXPENSIVE!!!!! health is a POLITICISED LUXURY!!!!!!
When people were fed an ultra-processed diet that was calorie-dense and hyper-palatable, they ate around a thousand calories more per day than they did on the minimally processed diet. When the team served foods that were calorie-dense but less palatable, participants still ate about eight hundred calories more. But when the team served ultra-processed foods that were neither calorie-dense nor hyper-palatable—for example, liquid eggs, flavored yogurt and oatmeal, turkey bacon, and burrito bowls with beans—people ate essentially as much as they did on the minimally processed diet. They even lost weight. A murmur rippled through the crowd. Calorie density, probably the feature of food that had the biggest impact on our ancestors’ survival, now seemed to be among the most responsible for making us overeat. “Weight gain is not a necessary component of a highly ultra-processed diet,” Hall concluded. He had, in a sense, refuted his hypothesis again.
also worth pointing out that historically humans process food through cooking and whatnot because it improves the caloric absorption of the food and our ability to get nutrients from it better... what about food that is tasty but isn't calorie dense also. the magic food.
i think any conversation about food additives needs to be concerned with the politics of why those additives come into play when feeding people in industrialised (and non-industrialised) nations on mass scales. also the flaws of calories as a measure of nutrients etc etc. then again why should i be expecting anything else from the fucking new yorker
In the dairy section, Nestle compared a whole-fat yogurt (milk, bacterial cultures) with a low-fat version (milk, bacterial cultures, cornstarch, and pectin, among other things), whose emulsifiers and thickeners improved creaminess and mouthfeel. “See, it can be tricky,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to me that yogurt with more fat could be healthier than yogurt with less. Still, Nestle told me, “it matters how ‘ultra’ the ultra-processing is. This yogurt will never be a bag of Doritos.” The former was food—it retained the links between taste and nutrients which our bodies evolved to expect—with some additives. The latter (corn, vegetable oil, maltodextrin, a string of flavorings and other additives) seemed to be substantially made up of industrial ingredients and only partly made of food.
maybe this is a definitional problem but i'm not... exactly sure where the line is drawn here for food vs industrial ingredients. like i get what the author is trying to say in a general sense but it's a lot of gesturing to "things we all understand" and not. like. definitions lol
frowns. not sure i learnt anything from reading this. i think it's kind of lacking but again it's literally the new yorker and i shouldn't have such expectations lmaoooooo
