plant based alternatives are pretty good for reducing calories or inflammation in my experience.

Ultra processed foods are unsurprisingly (but disappointingly) still bad.

  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
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    17 days ago

    Yeah I fucking hate it. There’s got to be something going on because the results are real but I don’t see why taking say a corn kernel apart and then reconstuting it could transform it into something unhealthy.

    It has to be about some sort of chemical change, additive, contaminate, or removal (perhaps structural, fibre structure?) which is inducing these harms. Or at least some cluster of them.

    Identifying that is the key, for now weird foods you can’t make in a kitchen should probably be tentatively minimised in your diet but it’s not because of the number of manufacturing steps per se but because something that links oreos, burger rings, and meat pies is waiting to be found.

    • piecat@lemmy.world
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      17 days ago

      You’re all overthinking it.

      When they say “ultra processed foods” they usually mean that all the healthy (yucky) parts were removed.

      White bread is “unhealthy” compared to whole because they’ve taken out the parts that are nutritional and provide fiber. Corn syrup is less healthy than corn because they’ve taken out the fiber and nutrients and boiled it to make a syrup.

      You could put kale in a food processor and call it processed, but that isn’t what they mean.

      • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.comM
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        17 days ago

        No I’ve actually read the studies of the scientist that started all this. She groups stuff by the number of processing steps and ingredients, making no effort (due to difficulty, I have no reason to believe she’s a hack) to identify the specific reasons.

        Her research groups foods which are essentially deconstituted, separated, and reconstituted in the same category as sauces made from 5 base veggies and 40 stabilisers, texture modifiers, flavour additives, and preservatives.