Comparing Europe and the US on food choices is probably not the best choice, nutritional choices vary quite a bit in Europe. I live in Spain, and I guess I’m spoiled as I get freshly made “menu” at most local restaurants for a about 15-20$ a day… two plates, drink and espresso for desert. You get to choose the meal, usually about 5 plates for first and second, usually divided into veggies / salads / carbs and followed by a protein second. The fact we walk to the restaurant 15+ mins , eat in about 30 mins, and having light breakfast and dinners helps balance our nutrition. We consumed little if any processed food, with the exception of the sausages, jamón, and salamis which we get at our local butcher, made the night before or the weekend. Since jamón is cured in salt, so no added sugar… again, we might consume this once a week, or less. Southern Europe is very similar in this regards. Our meats, we choose freshly butchered 24h, or some specific pieces might require some aging, but it’s all clearly agreed and ordered days in advanced. The drawback is, you need to plan your meals, food last little, so we usually buy what will be consumed that evening, or afternoon.
Lots of comments on how processed foods are bad here. They are bad but it is also the frequency of eating/snacking itself. It is not healthy to constantly stimulate your insulin multiple times a day with high protein/carb foods whether processed or retained in nature's package. That goes for whole foods and processed foods, except processed foods are just a lot worse. Constantly elevated insulin is not how we evolved for millions of years. Insulin resistance can precede T2D by years and years before there is a flag raised by elevated hba1c. You should be able to eat 2 or 1 nutritionally dense whole foods meal(s) per day not crave snacks constantly. Eat until you naturally feel full and do not want to eat anymore. I quit all processed foods and 1 or 2 meals in a 4-6 hour window is normal, I've never felt better. Snack cravings are addictive cravings, not real hunger. Snack cravings can also indicate you are overresponding with insulin and crashing your blood sugar after the spike from snacking. So processed foods are bad but it's how you deliver them to your body constantly is where the damage gets done IMO.
That’s conjecture. We don’t know how much foraging humans snacked from berries, tubers and nuts all day. Prolonged insulin spikes are certainly a problem, as has been shown by research.
Just visit a tribe still living the old ways. We know lots about how people live, and how (incredibly) malnourished they are. Say what you want, but most modern humans are incredibly healthy compared to old humans.
This is actually much worse data than it is usually assumed to be. People still living the old ways today have been shoved into the most worthless and inhospitable corners of the world. Back when the old ways weren't so old, the people practicing them lived in much better environments.
(Pygmies living in the jungle are something of an exception to this - farmers cannot live in the jungle, so even if the jungle is fairly productive its residents can avoid being displaced, until the farmers start clearing the trees.)
At least many of the berries and fruit we eat today are not their wild varieties but human cultivars, which usually have both more sugar and less fibre than their wild counterparts.
How long were these ancestors of ours living, while eating this idealized diet of which you speak?
While I agree that that evolutionary context is interesting to consider for nutrition, I don't think that it stands on its own as incontrovertible evidence. Evolutionary pressure is for passing on of genes, not necessarily for longevity.
Threescore years and ten, modulo infant mortality (which was horrific) and various accidents and injuries, easily fatal if the sepsis set in. You can find scholarly treatment by searching for the biblical phrase. That number wasn't put there by accident.
Guess based on anecdotes (primitive tribes etc.) possibly well into their nineties, notably they were physically very strong well past their seventies. One really need not go that far. The 'idealized' diet often shows results in a matter of few weeks.
This is definitely arguable. Dawkins in "The selfish gene" does argue that having grandparents around greatly increases the probability that children live to reproduce, and therefore there is a genetic imperitive for longevity.
I've read The Selfish Gene. The same arguments are relevant regarding the utility? of menopause.
> having grandparents around greatly increases
How much is "greatly" -- or at least how strong does Dawkins argue is the effect? No doubt it could have some effect.
Ultimately, this is all completely contained in and consistent with my statement that "evolutionary pressure is for passing on of genes, not necessarily for longevity."
I can confirm that a policy of only eating full meals has kept me thin and healthy into middle age even when those meals frequently include a full package of Oreos or bag of Doritos. You might overeat, but that just means your body won't tell you it's hungry again until you actually are, because you only eat when you're hungry enough for a full whole foods meal.
From what I understand fats and proteins in your digestion cause a number of signaling hormones like leptin and probably others to make you feel full. Carbs do not stimulate any of that signaling afaik. A pure carb snack would stimulate zero leptin, for example.
Ignore the trolls that have shown up here on HN. This is a positive and helpful comment. Personal responsibility is the key to ignoring the stuff on the grocery store shelves. Cheers.
I don't really know what is and isn't healthy, but it's worth pointing out that the very same brands and types of fast food available to Americans are also available, and fashionable, in Europe. Ultra processed, high in sugar, carbs, E numbers and whatnot. And people are generally much healthier.
So the processed-ness can only be a part of the picture.
Next paragraph (quick tip) states that it also stimulates glucagon which is an insulin antagonist and keeps it in balance.
My read is that protein and fiber are better for keeping your blood sugar in balance but whole grain can give a safer boost if you’re low. Too much protein can hurt your liver/pancreas, but it’s actually hard for most people to eat “too much” protein as it makes you feel full quickly.
Absolutely. One of my favorite nutrition papers is titled something like "an insulin index of 1000 kJ portions of common foods" -- should be easy to Google, and worth a read.
My mom continues to buy heavily processed food. My dad periodically tries to nag her about eating healthier, but she takes that as a personal attack. She does eat veggies and fruit, but she also likes rice a roni (as do I- it tastes great, but I don’t buy it myself).
If you want to eat healthfully on the go, it generally means that you have to bring food along and ideally cook it, too. It is hard to do.
Is this actually true? Here in Europe where I live or travel you can buy dozens of great fresh salads at every supermarket, they cost reasonably and most folks dont need much bigger lunch.
The bigger issue I see is folks having weak will - why take that salad when next to it is well cooked sausage or pizza slice. When talking about it, few admit they lost the battle of will with themselves, most come up with some made up version of reality where its actually almost ok.
In America, salads are much more difficult to find — let alone good ones. They're also priced accordingly, thanks to the magic of supply and demand.
So, even after an epic lunchtime quest of hunting/gathering, you might end up out 20-30 bucks for a depressing pile of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and shredded cheese. (In America, this is often called a "Caesar salad." Yes, really.)
Even if you do happen to be in the rare neighborhood that has a good salad connection, you're still committing to spending your lunch break furiously chewing raw vegetables in whatever few minutes you have left after running to go get your meal. This is what I did every day for months when I worked in an office, but let's not pretend it's ideal.
The dream would be fresh, cooked vegetables, so that one could get the best bioavailability. [1] But that is largely a fever dream, even in major cities. For example, I can count on 1 hand the number of restaurants I know where I could order a simple plate of steamed/roasted broccoli for less than 20 dollars.
You might be surprised how many Chinese takeout places will happily part with some steamed broccoli and brown rice for a reasonable price. Sure, it's not on the menu, and most of what is may well be covered in sugary sauces, but at least in my experience, they tend to be a pretty reasonable bunch when it comes to just selling what they have for the right price.
Though I'm in the Northeast -- your access to wildly abundant Chinese takeout may vary.
"So, even after an epic lunchtime quest of hunting/gathering, you might end up out 20-30 bucks for a depressing pile of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and shredded cheese."
Depressing indeed! Where I live, it's like €1.50 per ~500g chunk of raw broccoli (just the vegetable, harvested, possibly washed and wrapped in plastic, transported to supermarket). Other vegetables in similar range, and no problem finding stores with a decent selection of veggies & fruit.
Are US farmers somehow unable to grow broccoli <$1.50/lb? Or food stores incapable of selling raw veggies @ reasonable prices?
I can easily find fresh broccoli for around $1.50/lb at several grocery stores near me here in the US. There's loads of stores with a variety of vegetables that are decently cheap and are also eligible under my state's food stamp/child food supplement programs for low income people.
Looking at price indexes from the US Fed it might just be cheap for me here. The average seems close to $2/lb.
I am hungry fairly quickly after eating that salad and have trouble to focus then. I can go by them, if the team I work for does not care about my output. But if I actually need to produce, I need different lunch.
Healthy and "have as little calories as possible just above the eating disorder line" are two different things.
You can supplement given salad, literally any salad, with something chunkier but still reasonably healthy that will keep you satiated for long. Can be anything from whole bread, chunk of some quality cheese, boil few eggs at home and just bring them, slices of good quality ham/sausages etc.
If you have some big blood glucose swings (which end up in cravings for example), I would recommend tackling that as underlying issue, great improvements of quality of your life lie there. You can train your body to almost any regime including healthier ones, the only requirement is a bit of discipline in the beginning.
I can also eat a bacon and spoon of sugar with it. Or steak. That is not the point.
And no, I can't train my body to almost any regime. My body needs nutrients and calories. When food does not have it, it is not healthy food.
My point was, people do not eat just salad as their only food, because despite having Fibre and vitamins, it does not contain what your body needs. And that "any calories baad" thinking is an eating disorder.
Idk about Europe, but the US has a lot of so called "food deserts" where fresh food is miles away (like 20miles /32 km or more). These areas aren't just rural but often in poorer areas of Major cities and population centers. Plus, premade salad that isn't just lettuce can be relativily expensive.
I also live in Europe and also in my experience healthy salads are often an available choice. However, "salads" are often tricky, because the calorie count can go up very fast (eggs, cheese, side bread, crumbles, etc.), while thinking of eating "only a salad"
Eh, when you say a salad in Europe, there's a 90-95% chance that its only dressing is olive oil (and not much of it, just for the texture) and not heavy stuff like ranch or french dressing.
Sure, but the rest of the stuff (in what I consider salad base - tomatoes, cucumbers, maybe peppers?) is really small so it doesn't matter. A greek salad has cheese, yeah, that's a high calorie input but you don't eat much of it
"Processing" is way too general. It includes boiling, frying, stirring, cutting, freezing, drying, soaking etc. Most food requires some sort of processing to be edible.
I never saw the point of reducing all this into a single thing and declare that too much of is it bad.
That's why I'm glad to see "hyper-palatable" gaining currency. "Ultra-processed" has always been a too-ambiguous term that fails to convey what's actually problematic about some foods. It's used to scare instead of inform. Find ten articles about "ultra-processed" food and nine of them will be pure clickbait - the junk food of nutrition advice. "Hyper-palatable" is far from perfect, but at least it's a little bit less ambiguous and scare-inducing.
P.S. In many ways "junk food" is still better than either, despite the pejorative tone.
There is a spectrum of processing, from minimal chopping or boiling that you might do at home, to more involved processes that significantly transform the food, which changes how your body processes it.
Meal replacement shakes like Huel would be considered “ultra processed” because they contain various industrially produced ingredients (artificial sweeteners, gums, extracts etc).
The evidence seems to suggest that less processed are healthier, particularly when it comes to these ultra-processed items, not just boiling/frying/cutting etc.
Personally I see these meal shakes being marketed as healthy/for athletes and think of how everyone 50 years ago though margarine was so much healthier than butter.
Fair point about the gums. But my Huel Unflavoured and Unsweetened powder does not have any artificial sweetener in it. It’s not very palatable on its own, but half a banana and a little peanut butter and it’s great.
I don’t pretend huel is perfect, but it’s definitely a meal. I feel good after eating it. Also, I alway have time at work to eat it, even if it’s only 7 minutes (which is quite often), and time to make it in the morning.
For me, huel is definitely better than the meals it replaced, and the other things that I could make/consume with the time and budget available.
My point is that you should worry about specific ingredients, and specific types of processing. What do you think is bad here?
I don't know much about enriching ingredients in the US, but where it's done, it's to prevent diseases you can get from missing them, or which can cause other health problems. Folic acid, which is in your list, is well known as a recommended supplement for pregnant women, since it dramatically reduces incidence of spina bifida in newborns. Niacin is better known as vitamin B, and it's a similar story.
How do we determine which specific ingredients to worry about? I can’t keep up with all of the various additives in highly processed products–it’s simpler to reduce the number of ultra processed products I buy.
In this case the enriched flour in the commercial bread presumably isn’t concerning, but I would prefer bread without added sugar and all of the various preservatives and emulsifiers.
Well, hopefully we can keep up with the help of some uncorrupted public health experts who can read the studies, commission studies and meta-studies etc.
It helps that other countries have them too. It's hard to corrupt the entire world. I wouldn't worry (yet) about individual studies claiming some possible interaction, especially if they bunch up manky things (say, aim to study all emulsifiers at once, or all processing at once).
I would worry if, say, an additive was banned in many countries. And there's much that we know is bad, which is permitted for cultural reasons, and which therefore many people assume can't be that bad (smoked food in particular).
Bread will rise just fine without sugar! There are plenty of commercial loaves sold with no sugar, and I’ve been making bread for like 15 years and have only ever used sugar to make something like brioche.
Um. I’ve ground wheat with rocks and cooked it over a fire. I can promise you it won’t rise. Your super-processed flour that you buy in the store has all the magic in it to work though.
Ever made wheat milk? It tastes sweet because wheat naturally contains water soluble sugars. They are more than enough to make the bread rise. The problem with your medieval bakery experience probably rested with too coarse grinding, too little hydrolize, not enough yeast and probably a combination of them.
I think the distinction between "processed food" and "ready food" is important here. Not all processed foods are bad - I am not paid to say this, but after doing a lot of preliminary research into Huel some 3 years ago, I've lived off it for weeks at a time when time-constrained or lazy. I usually feel better overall for it (fuller, prolonged energy), which for me, meant less snacking.
On account of the higher carbs, I can't speak so much to their "instant meals", but the powders are a pretty even split of carbs/fats/protein, with the black powder being primarily protein for a slightly higher cost.
We can't live on raw food. I read a catalog from an "alternative" magazine once, which listed an enormous number of diets and self-help therapies. All raw diet was one of the extremely few (even) they warned against.
It's damn near impossible to not harm your health with an all raw diet.
"Processing" is not the issue. Food seeing the inside of a factory is not what will make you sick. It's what gets put in it. It's the sugar.
I'm pretty sure at this point that the word "processed food" was also a stroke of marketing genius by the shit suggary food lobby. Avoids putting front and center what is it that makes the food bad (it's the sugar), and replace it with a generic scary-sounding word that can be applied to everything, so it diffuses responsibility and hides the actual problem ("See, this shit food uses unprocessed brown cane sugar as its addiction additive. Healthy!")
Well it's not just the sugars. Processed food gets a lot of preservatives (some natural, some made in a lab) which make the food last longer and "look better". In Bulgaria (I think this is an EU directive though) you can see the preservatives on the nutrition info and they all have an ID (E###). Typically the more Es that something has, the more processed it has been and is seen as less healthy.
That's not entirely true. Processed food requires less energy to digest and absorb. Nutritionally it can be exactly the same food but the net calorie intake will be higher for food that has been processed.
We should eat food that our pre-industrial ancestors would recognize.
>That's not entirely true. Processed food requires less energy to digest and absorb. Nutritionally it can be exactly the same food but the net calorie intake will be higher for food that has been processed.
What does this actually amount to though? You might be right in principle but if it's like 50 calories per day then it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
In some aspects the problem is food processing. A lot of magnesium gets lost when food is processed and prepared. As a result of that magnesium insufficiency and deficiency seem to be rather prevalent.
If the problem was as simple as that, it wouldn't be a problem.
A do-everything multivitamin-and-mineral pill is pennies per day[0], so we could very easily just require them to be added — and in some cases we already have: UK cereals, back when I was there, often advertised "fortified with 7…" (or was it 8?) "…vitamins and minerals".
I got the impression it was a legal requirement they'd tried to pretend was a special feature.
For me, it solves the "problem" of getting nutrients fast and effortlessly. When I don't feel like cooking, it allows me to get the energy I need, while avoiding fattening or, generally speaking, poorly nutrient food.
Cooking is not that hard, even if it is just for you on your lonesome.
Really, if you can't be bothered to cook, that should be the time you start scrubbing potatoes and putting together a wholesome and satisfying meal, to actually enjoy it and be incentivised to cook some more.
>Really, if you can't be bothered to cook, that should be the time you start scrubbing potatoes and putting together a wholesome and satisfying meal, to actually enjoy it and be incentivised to cook some more.
This makes no sense. We already established that the person doesn't like cooking and your solution is to... cool anyways? Has it occurred to you that some people simply don't like cooking and/or doesn't place high value on food?
+1 for Huel. Using black edition for breakfast, hot&savory for lunch, for many months now.
Basically all body needs in terms of nutrition are taken care of, including high fiber and protein, in a vegan way, quite cheaply (5-6€ per day). 900kcal in total, nearly zero effort/time spent.
Then I can freely do „whatever“ for dinner that I enjoy. Nutrition basically solved.
For a Russian Huel is even more off-putting, "ohuel" (охуел) is a swear word which roughly means "out of his mind", derived from "huy" (хуй), which means "dick".
I don't want no dick in my food, thank you very much.
I think they may be correlating it with the similar sounding word “hurl”. Huel on the other hand is readily available in shops in pre-made form, and I’ve seen it in vending machines in Heathrow.
We do breakfast by mixing frozen fruits and spinach with some extra powders like protein, collagen, Macca and add some vitamins separately. It's fast, it tastes pretty good and you know you get a base amount of essential nutrients every day.
Just watch a kid watching YouTube Shorts and TikTok. They're immediately fed with Skittles, Oreo, Mentos, Lays, Coca-Cola, Pepsi marathon of product placement. It's good for your investment portfolios and retirement though.
Bernaise was credited with "public relations" i think he was just hired to market. Famously his "Torches of Freedom" - which got cigarettes in the hand of women.
Bananas are super weird, basically everything about them.
The origin of the fruit to begin with, and how vulnerable that makes the plants.
The effort put into getting them into every store in every corner of the world.
The money put into marketing.
There are plenty of other kinds of fruit, there's nothing super special about bananas that I'm aware of from a nutrition or taste standpoint.
Your plate should be full of food from the outside edges of the grocery store. If it’s primarily full of food from the isles then you are eating wrong. There are exceptions (rice, oats etc) that are in the isles.
The article is basis a precis of the book refereed to at the end of the article: "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss [1]. It's well worth reading.
Have not read the article, but I think "Big Tobacco" is something of a scapegoat for a larger pattern, and basically they were just unlucky enough to produce one of the most harmful products (recognized as such once the health bills started coming due).
(edit - I may add the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.)
read the article. literally the first few paragraphs:
> In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables.
> The new research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. The Addiction study found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.
it is difficult to argue that they were simply unfortunate to happen to produce one class of unhealthy products when the same companies proceeded to then move on to an entirely different product class, and somehow also engineer products to also be maximally addictive and, as it turns out, unhealthy.
They do very well on the convenience front, which is significant, but seem like the some of the last things you would want if you could have anything magically placed in front of you.
Judging by the contents of the little “USA” shelf at my grocery store in a midsize German city, enough of us are addicted. A large packet of Oreos that I would guess is about $3-4 back in the States is 10 EUR, a box of off-brand Mac & Cheese is 3.50 EUR, and I will confess to buying the latter on an approximately monthly basis, despite being able to make real mac and cheese with cheddar and cream, which actually doesn’t take any more time and only slightly more effort.
Other things we are evidently addicted to, despite objectively superior and far cheaper local equivalents: Pop-Tarts, Swiss Miss hot cocoa, Hershey’s syrup, Cheese Wiz.
> (edit - I may add the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.)
Even 1-4 cigarettes per day is very harmful:
> Results: Adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) in smokers of 1–4 cigarettes per day, with never smokers as reference, of dying from ischaemic heart disease was 2.74 (2.07 to 3.61) in men and 2.94 (1.75 to 4.95) in women. The corresponding figures for all cancer were 1.08 (0.78 to 1.49) and 1.14 (0.84 to 1.55), for lung cancer 2.79 (0.94 to 8.28) and 5.03 (1.81 to 13.98), and for any cause 1.57 (1.33 to 1.85) and 1.47 (1.19 to 1.82).
> Conclusions: In both sexes, smoking 1–4 cigarettes per day was associated with a significantly higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease and from all causes, and from lung cancer in women. Smoking control policymakers and health educators should emphasise more strongly that light smokers also endanger their health.
I agree mostly with your last paragraph. I'm surely not trying to encourage a habit I'm grateful to have been able to give up, but I believe 1-4 would significantly reduce the risk of emphysema - sorry, but I don't have much patience for "abstinence-nazis".
Calling people who are against public poisoning for profit "abstinence-nazis" is a very Big Tobacco PR line.
We're talking about a product that is highly addictive, highly profitable, extremely harmful, and has served no useful purpose beyond making a small number of people extremely rich.
If an individual was responsible for this they'd be jailed, and possibly (in the US) executed.
I really don't, but this is my belief as someone who has extensive experience with cigarette culture and has thought about it. You are free to disregard my opinion based on this fact, but I will still contend that if someone only smoked 1-4 cigarettes a day, then there's a reasonable likelihood (though less than 100%) that they wouldn't have any serious resultant health issues.
(edit - and it's my belief that emphysema/COPD is the most serious risk of chronic smoking, where basically the lungs just wear out.)
> I really don't, but this is my belief as someone who has extensive experience with cigarette culture and has thought about it. You are free to disregard my opinion based on this fact, but I will still contend that if someone only smoked 1-4 cigarettes a day, then there's a reasonable likelihood (though less than 100%) that they wouldn't have any serious resultant health issues.
I guess there is also a chance that if someone smokes 20 a day they won't have any serious resultant health issues, but the study I showed earlier indicates that even 1-4 drastically increases your chance of complications.
> (edit - and it's my belief that emphysema/COPD is the most serious risk of chronic smoking, where basically the lungs just wear out.)
It's possible, but shouldn't you try to find actual evidence for the likelihood of emphysema being much lower with 1-4 cigarettes per day, beyond "cigarette culture" and having "thought about it"?
(edit - but let me amend my original statement and then I'm leaving it at that: "I may add that I would guess the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.")
Yes, if you are going to look upwards, why wouldn't you look right to the top at banks and finance? Those who run banking are able to exercise some coordinating control over every industry.
But if you look downwards, bad food and health are choices that people make. Many people want this stuff - individuals are getting what they want.
No one is saying we shouldn't look into shady nonsense from banks.
However banks aren't directly responsible for encouraging you to consume diabetes can. heart attack crisps or cancer sticks
Hence why we push more for regulation against these industries thar are directly responsible while leaving financial watch dogs to look into banks for now.
You can still drink diabetes in a can or choose your liter size from Coca Cola or Pepsi or Faygo within 15 feet of a building entrance in Texas.
No sin taxes either. But yeah, just tobacco companies and their…spin offs?
Many of todays unhealthy foods are actually the fault of generic laziness and over work under paid conditions in the US. But sure, tell me more about how the Washington Post did a great job publishing Bezos’s dick pics in the name of…well, clickbait gonna clickbait
