Can we stop bitching about UPF? They are tasty, so you eat a lot of them and get fat. Simple as that.
The definition itself is stupid. Bread is ultra processed. Protein powder is ultra processed. Can we focus on calory-density and taste?
Also as someone with ADHD I regularly forget to eat lunch. If I couldn’t eat 2 pizzas for dinner, I would loose even more weight. This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
That’s the thing. It’s not as simple as that. Same amount of calories is going to hit differently between UPF and low or unprocessed. And what in some places is called bread is in other places legally defined as cake or rubber squeaky toy.
The calories hit basically the same. The carbs might be closer to sugar and combined with the missing fiber you’ll get a big insulin spike. Gotta watch out for those to not build resistance.
But there is this obsession with the “chemicals” like the Red dye 40 scare recently. Those are like 0.5% of the problem, but distract from the real problem of too many calories.
The point at which you should care about Red40 is when you’re a professional athlete or bodybuilder on contest prep. No normal human has health issues from these “chemicals” (allergies notwithstanding) anywhere comparable to the issues of too many calories.
Edit: As a German I do agree that American “Bread” should be classified and sold as dishwashing sponges.
Ultra-processed food, particularly carbohydrates, is digested differently and causes objectively sharper glucose spikes which do harm to your organs and body over time, even if you’re not diabetic. But if you have any chance of developing diabetes, this effect will get much worse.
If eating two pizzas every night helps compensate for your ADHD, that’s fine, but you need to talk to your doctor about what long-term consequences that will have on your body or consider different methods of managing your ADHD if your doctor predictably says that’s a bad idea. You are not trapped in your way of living, you are comfortable in your way of living. And you most definitely should not speak for everyone.
This isn’t propaganda and your eating problems with ADHD are your own. Stop skipping lunch instead of eating 2 pizzas for dinner and blaming UPF articles. Plenty of us have ADHD
Over 70% of America is overweight and UPFs are one of the primary drivers of that
No, that’s the current problem. Growing up my parents believed that a vegetarian diet of 80% vegetables was healthy. While I probably got all the micro nutrients I could not physically fit the needed amount of calories in the form of vegetables into my stomach.
The primary driver is eating too much. There are people who are starving but we’re supposed to act like the ones who overindulge are the victims? Get real.
No, it’s scientifically proven that eating too much isn’t necessarily the problem; rather, it’s the quality of the food you consume that determines obesity. If you eat too much unprocessed food, you won’t gain as much weight as you would from eating processed food.
Many Americans visit Europe and are amazed that they can eat a lot without gaining weight.
The human body simply cannot process processed food. It’s simply unnatural.
Can we stop bitching about UPF? They are tasty, so you eat a lot of them and get fat. Simple as that.
That’s literally the issue? They’re engineered that way on purpose so you eat more and more of it in the cheapest way possible. They’re calorie dense but don’t fill you up the same as as non-ultra processed foods.
The definition itself is stupid. Bread is ultra processed. Protein powder is ultra processed.
That’s not the problem with the definition, it’s the problem that most supermarket bread is ultra processed.
It’s driving obesity and causing a whole host of health problems.
If you don’t have a lot of freezer space, go buy one. You can get a model that holds a lot of food and is the same side as a kitchen chair. Costs about the same as a week’s worth of pizzas.
It takes the same amount of time to cook ten portions as it does to cook one. I like to make a huge pot of chili or stew or soup and freeze it in pint size containers. Five minutes to cook in the microwave. A big pan of lasagna will give you a dozen meals. Or you can cook a whole roast chicken on Sunday and eat it all week. Chicken and rice on Sunday, chicken tacos on Monday, green salad with chicken on Tuesday…
Don’t get me wrong, I do mealprep, just forget or don’t have time for lunch some days. Then I eat “junkfood” because I can’t eat 2000 calories in one go, when I eat rice and lentils.
Not being able to eat 2000 calories in a sitting is a feature, not a flaw of healthy eating. Set a reminder to eat lunch, or just meal prep your snacks.
How ironic that you’re defending ultra processed food when you’re benefiting from a medication’s side effect. Aside from that, being skinny isn’t necessarily healthy.
They raise your heart rate a little bit. But mostly suppress hunger and impulse-eating. For some they can cause weight loss. But they mostly stabilize your diet by making it easier to follow a schedule.
I have been taking them for 2 years and those have been the years I actually gained weight. But I can see how they could make loosing weight easier too.
Bread and pizza are not per se ultra processed. They can be depending on how you bought them.
Right like an apple is a plant. Harvesting, washing, slicing, and cooking it into a pie in your own kitchen is technically processing it, but it’s still a whole food as the slices are in their whole unaltered form.
Taking millions of apples, grinding them, emulsifying them and separating them into constituent components, enzymatically pre-digesting them then pressing that concoction into a mould shaped vaguely like apple slices and adding in a barrage of artificial flavors and sweeteners to make it resemble the taste of apple pie? These apples have been ultra processed. It’s done for the sake of corporate profit. Pies made in this fashion make more product per ingredient and are longer lasting on the shelf.
Research is showing foods like this are making us fat not just because they’re tasty and we naturally binge, but because they’re literally interfering with our body’s ability to self regulate hormonally.
The calories from these foods, while not breaking the laws of physics or anything, also come with baggage. The food is already extensively broken down by mechanical and chemical processes; things that our teeth and gut normally have to do. The result if you eat them often is having a bunch of meals that hits your system fast, basically like a runner’s energy gel packet. It’s taken us a long time to discover but research is indicating that this is inherently very bad for us.
This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
That all being said, I agree with you, and I expect all of the nuance around this to get twisted and lost into yet another bead in the endless string of worthless diet fads and hacks that nobody can stick to and do more harm than good. I literally already see “wholesome” aisles popping up in some stores where they use all the same harmful processes to make the food but game their ingredients list to only be things that people can pronounce.
Create and maintain a regular daily routine, with the power of the expectations of others, if necessary.
This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
Your failure to appropriately manage your ADHD has kept you underweight. Unless you are literally on death’s door, no one with any sense would tell you the solution to your problem is to eat two pizzas every night.
I am still waiting for someone to standardize a definition that passes scientific rigor. The definition right now feels like “You’ll know it when you see it”. We’ve done a lot of stuff to this heavily processed item but it doesn’t count, but then this minimally processed one does… When will the focus shift to the specific processes themselves that are causing issues and not a generic ‘feeling’ that some food or another has reached the point that it is probably not good for you.
Right now these studies are just “Food we personally feel like maybe might be bad for you proven bad” which is usually true but also not really useful. I feel like some day I’ll wake up to an expose on how the whole thing is a large scale ad for the Paleo diet.
Check out the school lunch law that California passed recently, it has a pretty robust definition and even includes a list of exceptions for things that are ultra-processed but are considered worth it
It’s probably going to form the basis of a lot of research and policy going forward
Can we stop bitching about UPF? They are tasty, so you eat a lot of them and get fat. Simple as that.
The definition itself is stupid. Bread is ultra processed. Protein powder is ultra processed. Can we focus on calory-density and taste?
Also as someone with ADHD I regularly forget to eat lunch. If I couldn’t eat 2 pizzas for dinner, I would loose even more weight. This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
What a bizarre take
That’s the thing. It’s not as simple as that. Same amount of calories is going to hit differently between UPF and low or unprocessed. And what in some places is called bread is in other places legally defined as cake or rubber squeaky toy.
It’s a huge issue to a very select demographic known as “People who are aren’t you.”
The calories hit basically the same. The carbs might be closer to sugar and combined with the missing fiber you’ll get a big insulin spike. Gotta watch out for those to not build resistance.
But there is this obsession with the “chemicals” like the Red dye 40 scare recently. Those are like 0.5% of the problem, but distract from the real problem of too many calories.
The point at which you should care about Red40 is when you’re a professional athlete or bodybuilder on contest prep. No normal human has health issues from these “chemicals” (allergies notwithstanding) anywhere comparable to the issues of too many calories.
Edit: As a German I do agree that American “Bread” should be classified and sold as dishwashing sponges.
Nobody is talking about food dye.
Ultra-processed food, particularly carbohydrates, is digested differently and causes objectively sharper glucose spikes which do harm to your organs and body over time, even if you’re not diabetic. But if you have any chance of developing diabetes, this effect will get much worse.
If eating two pizzas every night helps compensate for your ADHD, that’s fine, but you need to talk to your doctor about what long-term consequences that will have on your body or consider different methods of managing your ADHD if your doctor predictably says that’s a bad idea. You are not trapped in your way of living, you are comfortable in your way of living. And you most definitely should not speak for everyone.
This isn’t propaganda and your eating problems with ADHD are your own. Stop skipping lunch instead of eating 2 pizzas for dinner and blaming UPF articles. Plenty of us have ADHD
Over 70% of America is overweight and UPFs are one of the primary drivers of that
No, that’s the current problem. Growing up my parents believed that a vegetarian diet of 80% vegetables was healthy. While I probably got all the micro nutrients I could not physically fit the needed amount of calories in the form of vegetables into my stomach.
Sounds like you needed more healthy oils in your diet, not UPFs.
The primary driver is eating too much. There are people who are starving but we’re supposed to act like the ones who overindulge are the victims? Get real.
No, it’s scientifically proven that eating too much isn’t necessarily the problem; rather, it’s the quality of the food you consume that determines obesity. If you eat too much unprocessed food, you won’t gain as much weight as you would from eating processed food.
Many Americans visit Europe and are amazed that they can eat a lot without gaining weight.
The human body simply cannot process processed food. It’s simply unnatural.
That’s literally the issue? They’re engineered that way on purpose so you eat more and more of it in the cheapest way possible. They’re calorie dense but don’t fill you up the same as as non-ultra processed foods.
That’s not the problem with the definition, it’s the problem that most supermarket bread is ultra processed.
It’s driving obesity and causing a whole host of health problems.
Here are some solutions.
If you don’t have a lot of freezer space, go buy one. You can get a model that holds a lot of food and is the same side as a kitchen chair. Costs about the same as a week’s worth of pizzas.
It takes the same amount of time to cook ten portions as it does to cook one. I like to make a huge pot of chili or stew or soup and freeze it in pint size containers. Five minutes to cook in the microwave. A big pan of lasagna will give you a dozen meals. Or you can cook a whole roast chicken on Sunday and eat it all week. Chicken and rice on Sunday, chicken tacos on Monday, green salad with chicken on Tuesday…
This is great advice. Just be careful not to heat it back up in a plastic container. Dump it into glass or ceramic before reheating.
Don’t get me wrong, I do mealprep, just forget or don’t have time for lunch some days. Then I eat “junkfood” because I can’t eat 2000 calories in one go, when I eat rice and lentils.
Not being able to eat 2000 calories in a sitting is a feature, not a flaw of healthy eating. Set a reminder to eat lunch, or just meal prep your snacks.
Are you medicated for your ADHD?
I really should get a refill XD
How ironic that you’re defending ultra processed food when you’re benefiting from a medication’s side effect. Aside from that, being skinny isn’t necessarily healthy.
What? I’m trying to gain weight. The meds help me remember to eat.
And stimulants cause weight loss. I’m surprised you didn’t know that…
They raise your heart rate a little bit. But mostly suppress hunger and impulse-eating. For some they can cause weight loss. But they mostly stabilize your diet by making it easier to follow a schedule.
I have been taking them for 2 years and those have been the years I actually gained weight. But I can see how they could make loosing weight easier too.
Bread and pizza are not per se ultra processed. They can be depending on how you bought them.
Right like an apple is a plant. Harvesting, washing, slicing, and cooking it into a pie in your own kitchen is technically processing it, but it’s still a whole food as the slices are in their whole unaltered form.
Taking millions of apples, grinding them, emulsifying them and separating them into constituent components, enzymatically pre-digesting them then pressing that concoction into a mould shaped vaguely like apple slices and adding in a barrage of artificial flavors and sweeteners to make it resemble the taste of apple pie? These apples have been ultra processed. It’s done for the sake of corporate profit. Pies made in this fashion make more product per ingredient and are longer lasting on the shelf.
Research is showing foods like this are making us fat not just because they’re tasty and we naturally binge, but because they’re literally interfering with our body’s ability to self regulate hormonally.
The calories from these foods, while not breaking the laws of physics or anything, also come with baggage. The food is already extensively broken down by mechanical and chemical processes; things that our teeth and gut normally have to do. The result if you eat them often is having a bunch of meals that hits your system fast, basically like a runner’s energy gel packet. It’s taken us a long time to discover but research is indicating that this is inherently very bad for us.
That all being said, I agree with you, and I expect all of the nuance around this to get twisted and lost into yet another bead in the endless string of worthless diet fads and hacks that nobody can stick to and do more harm than good. I literally already see “wholesome” aisles popping up in some stores where they use all the same harmful processes to make the food but game their ingredients list to only be things that people can pronounce.
*calorie
*lose
Create and maintain a regular daily routine, with the power of the expectations of others, if necessary.
Your failure to appropriately manage your ADHD has kept you underweight. Unless you are literally on death’s door, no one with any sense would tell you the solution to your problem is to eat two pizzas every night.
I am still waiting for someone to standardize a definition that passes scientific rigor. The definition right now feels like “You’ll know it when you see it”. We’ve done a lot of stuff to this heavily processed item but it doesn’t count, but then this minimally processed one does… When will the focus shift to the specific processes themselves that are causing issues and not a generic ‘feeling’ that some food or another has reached the point that it is probably not good for you.
Right now these studies are just “Food we personally feel like maybe might be bad for you proven bad” which is usually true but also not really useful. I feel like some day I’ll wake up to an expose on how the whole thing is a large scale ad for the Paleo diet.
Check out the school lunch law that California passed recently, it has a pretty robust definition and even includes a list of exceptions for things that are ultra-processed but are considered worth it
It’s probably going to form the basis of a lot of research and policy going forward
We can use the glycemic index for the insulin spikes and calorie density for how much you can fit. But the taste isn’t really measured I think.