| ▲ | Hnrobert42 2 hours ago |
| I've heard this objection a lot, even from folks I respect. Its ubiquity makes me wonder it is astroturfed. The definition I have heard is "food made with ingredients or processes not commonly used in ghome Unfortunately, when I looked to leading scientific orgs, they are dithering on releasing formal definitions, but all say something like what I'd heard. Conflicting information doesn't mean an abysmal situation. I'd argue the opposite. Everyone "knew" the sun orbited Earth. |
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| ▲ | oytis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| How should using processes not used at home make something harmful? If we make the same processes commonly available to use at home, will these foods become less harmful? I know there is science around it, but the very concept looks very unscientific, it's almost like talking about "unnatural food" |
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| ▲ | svpk an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The idea is that you could ban any set of "unhealthy" inputs and give the big food companies some time and they'll come out with something just as unhealthy that complies with your rules. The underlying issue is some mix of what industrial processes make possible combined with food scientist working with taste test panels to hyper optimize food. When you spend all this time and effort trying to create a snack where people are always left craving just a bit more you end up with the kinds of junk food that we have. We want there to be some simple answer of "it's these ingredients, or this specific combination" but the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't. Food health science has always had difficulties with just how complicated the actual processing of food in our bodies is and the more we look the more complex it gets. But the "ultra-processed foods" test seems to be working out as a successful heuristic to identify especially unhealthy foods. Given the issues health science has had with coming up with exact answers a heuristic that's pretty reliable (even if imperfect) is a pretty big win! | | |
| ▲ | breezybottom an hour ago | parent [-] | | >the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't. That's not an answer at all. You need to explain why an industrial mixer would create less healthy food than a kitchen mixer. The scale shouldn't matter. |
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| ▲ | sithadmin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >How should using processes not used at home make something harmful? Well, for starters - the refined sugars, carbohydrates and oils that seem to be the main culprits behind the obesity epidemic are mostly things that wouldn't be efficient (or in some cases, even possible) to create in a home cooking environment. Sure, you could order some grain milling or oil extraction equipment on Alibaba and DIY it, but 99.999% of households aren't going to do that. | | |
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| ▲ | breezybottom 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yes, you got me, I get paid $50 Soros bucks for every snarky post. It couldn't possibly be that "not commonly used in the home" is a vague and unhelpful definition, which varies across time and cultures. Or that these researchers still haven't explained the theoretical basis linking all these wildly different "UPF"s to the negative health consequences they're supposed to explain. |
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| ▲ | margalabargala an hour ago | parent [-] | | Soros bucks? You're spouting a right wing position, not a progressive one. | | |
| ▲ | breezybottom an hour ago | parent [-] | | I didn't know right-wing means rejecting bad science and progressive means accepting it. | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala an hour ago | parent [-] | | It doesn't, so there's something you're correct about! But certainly pro-processed-foods stuff gets pushed by the right, and Soros is on the left, so there's the contradiction. | | |
| ▲ | breezybottom an hour ago | parent [-] | | Huh? You're on the side of RFK Jr and the MAHA nutjobs. This is the kind of "science" they believe in. | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala an hour ago | parent [-] | | Sometimes among large groups of people there are varying opinions, you'll see this more as you grow up. The american right wing is one such group. | | |
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