As a vegetarian for well over a decade, I've always said the same thing. Meat isn't nearly as egregiously unhealthy as it's panned if at all. Processed foods, excessive simple carbohydrates and sugars are the main evils in the kitchen, but there are a variety of reasons to eat less meat too.
There's nuance in all of this. People sympathetic to American consumption patterns will probably see science and explanations like this as some kind of endorsement of their diet. Nutritional science is still in its infancy and we'll be waffling on the specifics for decades to come, especially if food companies have a vested interest in funding studies.
Another data point. Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake. I think people are too hyper focused on the "super" and "evil" quality of foods and we end up stuck in the margins bike-shedding the minutia.
You're obviously right that processed foods are far worse, but the study the article cites[0] doesn't say what the article says it does, not at all. The article deliberately misconstrues the phrase "weak evidence" to mean that the authors are attacking the past studies, when in fact they're just saying more research needs to be done. Here's the opening paragraph of the Discussion section:
> We evaluated the relationship between unprocessed red meat consumption and six selected disease outcomes following implementation of a meta-analytic approach. We found that unprocessed red meat intake had weak evidence of an association with increased risk of colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes and no evidence of an association with ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke. In other words, given all the data available on red meat intake and risk of a subsequent outcome, we estimate that consuming unprocessed red meat across an average range of exposure levels increases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes at least slightly compared to eating no red meat (by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%, respectively).
> You're obviously right that processed foods are far worse
I see this claim semi frequently online. So I'll just ask.
What is meant by "processed"? What does it mean to be "worse" (Worse than meat? Regular foods?) What is meant by "whole foods"? And finally, what's the evidence for these assertions?
Is black tea a processed food? How about coffee grounds? When does something cross the rubric of processed vs unprocessed?
To me, it's not obvious that "processed is bad" particularly because I don't know what "processed" means.
As a side, how do fortified foods fit in with processed foods? Iodine in salt, for example, has been a huge public health success. Goiters have practically been eliminated as a result.
Every time processed foods come up online someone makes this argument. I will assume you're being genuine but a lot of times it's done in an annoying "gotcha" way and it drives me crazy. Regardless, the NOVA classification system is helpful for talking about this topic: https://regulatory.mxns.com/en/ultra-processed-foods-nova-cl...
When people use the term "processed foods" colloquially they are generally referring to NOVA group 4, ultra-processed foods. It seems that that group is implicated in worse health outcomes and it is also that group that has proliferated the most significantly over the past 40 years in tandem with rising rates of obesity and poor health outcomes.
Wasn't really trying to gotcha. Just trying to get a good understanding on what's actually meant when someone says "processed foods are bad".
The term is quiet loose.
And I'd agree, that category does generally seem to be an issue. Though, I have to wonder if it's more a problem that that category typically has foods with an absurd amount of calories that are easy to consume.
The easiest way to understand unprocessed food is "nothing bad added, nothing good taken away".
For instance, pure peanut butter is unprocessed. While it runs through a mechanism to change it from peanuts to peanut butter, there is no oil added, nor are any of the healthful nutrients of peanut butter extracted. Opposite to this is peanut butter like JIF which is processed - the mix is diluted with sugar and vegetable oil to make the same amount of food for cheaper.
Same with tofu - it starts as soybeans and is ran through a mechanism to turn it into the blocks of tofu we see in stores, but we do not add sugar or oils to change the contents of that block, nor do we remove nutrients from the soybean (this may not be 100% accurate, but generally speaking, nutrients are not removed in this). However, many vegan meat products put a lot of unhealthy additions into the mix, thus making it processed.
the easiest way to understand processed is has it been changed at all since being harvested? peanut butter and tofu are both processed. raw peanuts and legumes are not. cooked legumes are also technically processed. does not mean that it's always bad per se but that is the definition.
I think they go hand in hand to a degree. There aren't many "non-processed" (picked off a tree, animal products, etc.) foods which are as calorie dense as processed foods. Having access to something like twinkies or a powerbar makes it way easier to consume lots of calories.
While you might mean the NOVA classification, the vast majority of people have never heard of that, much less read it. As such the original question still stands because most people have no idea that any definition exists, and in any case if what they mean happens to fit that, well that is just coincidence.
The claim about processed foods has usually become very much accepted because of the failure to correlate any other aspect of food convincingly with the obesity epidemic. That is, there are populations much less obese than others eating all variants of macronutrient distributions (high fat, high carbohydrate, high meat, etc - you can find a low obesity population eating like that somewhere in the world). Processed foods are more or less the only remaining food-based explanation.
This seems a bit like a non-sequitur to my comment.
Even if I accept that "Processed foods are more or less the only remaining food-based explanation." My questions really boil down to "what are processed foods" and "What's the evidence they are bad"?
I was trying to answer the question "why do people think processed foods are bad, and in what way?". My answer was "because processed foods are the only remaining strictly diet-based possibility for a cause of obesity". That is, if we were to ascribe obesity exclusively to a particular diet choice, the only plausible diet choice is "processed foods" - all the others we've tried have clear counter-examples.
Note that I'm not saying we should do this - I believe obesity is much more likely caused by a wide array of lifestyle factors that no study to date accurately controls for (including diet, exercise, stress, environmental factors, mental status, medication etc), not a single dietary style.
Now, "processed foods" is indeed a very vague term, and people tend to include/exclude different foods based on their pet theory of what may lead to the link "observed" in the previous paragraph.
For example, some people strongly believe that glycemic spikes are strongly coupled with diabetes and obesity, and they would include things like fruit juices (as opposed to eating whole fruits) into this category, as well as high glycemic index foods such as bread (in both cases, even home-made ones).
Other people believe that certain additives are likely to have undocumented side-effects, so they will tend to only include foods with synthetic additives, such as preservatives and food colouring, but exclude traditional highly processed foods such as bread or butter as long as they are home-made without additives.
Yet other groups believe the correlation is related to palatability and/or satiety, so they will consider processed foods to be any foods which contain high ratios of palatable substances (like fat, sugar, salt, MSG, other flavour enhancers) to less palatable macro-nutrients. These people would probably include home-made fruit juice or ramen into the processed foods category, but may exclude things like pickles.
This sort of gets to the heart of the problem I have with "processed foods are bad". It doesn't feel meaningful because of how vague it is. If I point at butter and ask "is this processed food" the answer is yes or no depending on the person I'm talking to. That makes it hard to trust the claim "processed food causes obesity". Well, maybe it does? Maybe it doesn't? Pickles don't likely cause obesity (they are very low calorie), so it feels unfair to lump them in the same category as cake, for example.
If it's unreasonable to pin down what is processed, it seems unreasonable to make a claim about the effects of processing.
In a way everything we eat is processed and processing is not necessarily harmful. To take your example of butter, organic butter may be completely different than mass produced butter regarding it's health implications. And this applies to nearly all food. Mass produced tomatoes will be poor in micro-nutrients and contaminated by pesticides. Et cetera.
Our understanding of nutrition and health isn't keeping up in pace with innovations in the food industry. And due to the scale and depth of it I think it's unavoidable that many small bad things will sum up over time leading to health problems without a clear root cause.
Reasons why "processed" food might be bad for health:
- skewed omega-3/omega-6 ratio
- micro-nutrients depletion
Also it's just not economical or environmentally sustainable to feed everyone with "real food". At least not without radical change and trade-offs in other areas.
> Processed meat – meat that has been transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavor or improve preservation
> Red meat – unprocessed mammalian muscle meat such as beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton, horse and goat meat
> Consumption of processed meat was classified as carcinogenic and red meat as probably carcinogenic after the IARC Working Group – comprised of 22 scientists from ten countries – evaluated over 800 studies. Conclusions were primarily based on the evidence for colorectal cancer. Data also showed positive associations between processed meat consumption and stomach cancer, and between red meat consumption and pancreatic and prostate cancer.
When they talk about causing cancer they're talking about two things: the quality of the evidence, and then the strength of the effect.
For processed red meat the evidence is very strong: processed red meat does cause colorectal cancer.
But how much cancer does it cause? It doesn't appear to cause much cancer. If you have a genetic predisposition to colorectal cancer, or if you want to be very cautious, you might want to think about avoiding processed red meat. But otherwise, well, the small increase in risk might be worth it for the benefits you get from eating food you enjoy.
The study includes an appendix with photos of all the meals - it's very interesting!
The evidence suggests that various qualities of ultra-processed foods drive overconsumption. There is also speculation that the calories in ultra-processed foods are more bioavailable than those in less processed foods because ultra-processed foods are easier to digest due to their low fiber content, though I don't have any evidence for than on hand (will update if I find it).
Definitely send more studies if you find them. This one seems to suggest the main problem with ultraprocessed foods is they are easier to over eat (they taste better? Are less filling?) but it doesn't really show that they are necessarily bad.
Seems to jive with how food works for me. I've been counting calories as of late and it's definitely easy to down a bag of doritos or drink a bottle of soda
One thing I found super interesting was that the participants in that study rated both diets equally tasty, which points to some other reason why one diet was easier to overeat than the other! My guess would be that the ultra-processed diet is simultaneously more calorie dense and less satiating. It's true that that's not inherently bad, per se, but if we can prove that those factors cause weight gain and related health issues then I'd be pretty comfortable calling ultra-processed foods bad.
Have you heard of Stephan Guyenet? His book The Hungry Brain is a good read on the neuroscience of obesity. He proposes that eating highly palatable calorie-dense foods changes the brain in various ways that ultimately drive us to consume more of those foods and to have difficulty changing our eating behavior. Unfortunately his suggestion is to eat an intentionally bland diet, which is obviously unappealing, but my anecdotal experience is that highly palatable but less processed foods (e.g. a wheel of brie) are far more satiating than similar but ultra-processed foods (e.g. queso made from velveeta).
I'm not sold on the idea that we need to eat bland foods, or only foods familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, or only plant products...it seems to me that we only need to go back 50 years or so to before the dramatic rise in obesity started, which points toward avoiding ultra-processed foods. I hope we get more studies on this eventually!
In the case of meat I think it's usually referring to added nitrates as a result of processing, which is linked to health problems [0].
> To me, it's not obvious that "processed is bad" particularly because I don't know what "processed" means.
Yeah I think your point is valid - "whole" is a bit like "natural". Too broad and undefined. We're supposed to think one is good and one is bad because marketing of "whole" and "natural" is trying to create that impression. No-one says "chemical" in their marketing, like no-one says "processed". You only advertise as "natural" or "whole".
I agree with the criticism and hate when this term gets used, for the same reason. Most people just use "processed" to mean "bad" without thinking about it.
I think the closest you can get to a "real" definition is food that has added ingredients, usually oils or preservatives, not found in traditional cooking. Usually these are added more for reasons of shelf-life or in order to cram in extra taste, or both.
edit: of course I have to assume something about the structure of the data to say it's very weak evidence. It may be very strong evidence of a very weak effect.
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edit 2: Also, how is this, the last "takeaway," listed in bold, large font directly beneath the headline, some sort of exaggeration or mischaracterization?
> They only found weak evidence that unprocessed red meat consumption is linked to colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease, and no link at all between eating red meat and stroke.
Right, because the results of the previous studies amount to evidence that is too weak to conclude that red meat is inherently unhealthy to consume. I'm not sure how your comment contradicts this.
"Weak evidence" is a term of art, not a pejorative. The original article frames this study as an attack on prior studies and vindication of red meat. My point is that this is extremely dishonest, and the authors of the study do not intend to convey that at all. They instead say that the evidence is there, but it's not yet strong enough for them to recommend any policy actions.
> The available evidence suggests that eating no unprocessed red meat may minimize the risk of disease incidence and mortality compared to consuming any, but there is insufficient evidence to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations. More rigorous, well-powered research is needed to better understand and quantify the relationship between unprocessed red meat intake and chronic disease.
"Processed Foods" is another vague, exaggerated boogeyman though.
For one thing I don't think most people would even agree on what foods count as processed and are bad. Some people are talking about everything except fresh vegetables, some people are talking about specifically industrially-processed food but would say the exact same recipe followed at home (minus a couple of preservatives) is perfectly fine, some people are specifically against fast food but might think canned foods are fine.
Large blood sugar spikes after a meal are what is bad for you, but this a more nuanced equation of things like glycemic load of the food (which is as much a factor of quantity eaten as it is glycemic index), genetics, and level of exercise. It's not as simple as just saying all processed food is always bad, for instance after a hard workout simple carbohydrates are not just ok but actively good for you, and ideally most people should be doing a hard workout multiple times per week. Some other components of processed food like excessive salt can be bad, as is the fact that they often push out more micronutrient-rich foods from your diet.
But it kind of strikes me as the abstinence-only approach to dietary advice. People love the taste of processed foods, I think we'd do better to encourage eating responsibly overall than insisting on avoiding processed foods altogether. And it's possible to be very healthy while eating a significant amount of processed foods.
I disagree on this point all though I think the term is vague.
If I grill a steak and then chop it up into pieces i have "processed" it. This isn't what anyone is talking about when they say processed foods though.
If I chop up several different types of meat, add several different colorants, fillers, perservatives and whatever else, turn it all into a slurry and then reconsistute it into a spam loaf, I think there are a lot of good reasons to believe this is ineherently unhealthy, the most simple being that its really easy to dump in a bunch of sugar and extra fats.
It's meant as a rule of thumb. That level of precision is unnecessary.
Generally speaking, industrially-processed foods are going to be overall less healthy than less-processed alternatives. There are a multitude of reasons this may be so, and between them there's enormous variance in both the size of and our confidence in those effects, not to mention between specific products.
Being overly specific just invites pointless quibbling over those details. Of course, not being specific just started this pointless quibble, so damned if you do damned if you don't.
> Group 1 - Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat, milk, etc.)
Group 2 - Foods processed in the kitchen with the aim of extending their shelf life. In practice, these are ingredients to be used in the kitchen such as fats, aromatic herbs, etc. to be kept in jars or in the refrigerator to be able to use them later.
Group 3 - Processed foods. These are the foods obtained by combining foods of groups 1 and 2 to obtain the many food products for domestic use (bread, jams, etc.) made up of a few ingredients
Group 4 - Ultra-processed foods. They are the ones that use many ingredients including food additives that improve palatability, processed raw materials (hydrogenated fats, modified starches, etc.) and ingredients that are rarely used in home cooking such as soy protein or mechanically separated meat. These foods are mainly of industrial origin and are characterized by a good pleasantness and the fact that they can be stored for a long time.
Nobody really knows for certain what things do to the body even in isolation. For one example, see Yellow #5 [1]. It's associated with all sorts of nasty stuff, but actually proving a causal relationship is not really possible. So some countries ban it, some require special scary labeling for products with it, and in other countries it's A-OK.
And processed foods aren't in isolation. You're mixing up all sorts of stuff which can viably result in chemical and other changes which will vary by product, producer, and even time. Trying to pin all of that down is not really possible.
I'm specifically not making that claim. (I also don't disagree with that claim) I'm making the claim that those activities are indicative of a constellation of activities that as a whole are categorically unhealthy.
Because doing that is an invite to the field of weak/conflicting evidence because food science just don't have this level of granularity yet. Though I believe to be undeniably that the replacement of ultra-processed cheap foods with real food is beneficial. I'm too lazy to research it for the sake of an argument but I can support it at least on a personal/anecdotal level. It's not scientific but as a rule of thumb if you don't know how it was made better to not eat it.
Which particular part of this process is unhealthy, though? And how unhealthy is it?
If the problem is the food coloring, then we need to go out and say so. If the problem is the high fat content, we shouldn't pretend that home cooking with lots of oils (which oils?) isn't any healthier than processed food. Is the spoon of sugar I add to my home-made stir-fry sauce the problem, or is it the fact that I am frying it, or the fact that I serve it next to a plate full of rice?
Certainly more specificity would be useful and I hope we get there someday. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the imperfect information we have in the meantime.
In this case, the link between processed foods (Nova groups 3 and especially 4) seems strong enough to warrant minimizing them in my diet even though the evidence for the specific ingredients or mechanisms is weaker.
Avoiding processed foods is more about avoiding the unknown than avoiding something specific. I would say more analogous to rolling your own tobacco vs buying a pre-packaged cigarette. At least you know what's in there for the most part.
> I think we'd do better to encourage eating responsibly overall than insisting on avoiding processed foods altogether. And it's possible to be very healthy while eating a significant amount of processed foods
Interesting. I am curious what your definition of "responsible eating" is?
To a very good approximation, it is simply not eating too many total calories. If you want to go one extra step, then also not eating too much sugar.
Some people might find that they have a hard time not over-eating with processed foods, and maybe for them their preferred diet is just to avoid all processed foods. But it's useful to treat that as a means to an end, rather than saying that avoiding processed foods always needs to be the end goal.
After living in England for a while, this year we finally moved to the US. Although I have never been too athletic, I've put on 5-7 KG since we moved, and I can't shed them off. We are mostly eating the same as before, and in fact I'm more active than I was over there.
There isn't much point to this comment other than the flabbergasting anecdote of how eating roughly the same diet in different countries can have markedly different effect in your health.
Look carefully at the ingredients list on any packaged foods you're buying. Many things contain sugar in the US when the equivalent product in Europe does not. A particularly insidious example is pre-made broth/stock: nearly every single product on the shelves at my local grocery store contains unnecessary sugar. Same goes for canned beans and salad dressings. Doing your due diligence when buying packaged foods is an unfortunate necessity if you live in the US and want to stay healthy. God, I miss grocery shopping in France!!
Diet can have different effect across different states in the US too. California doesn't (seem to) use the same types of lard and oils that you'd find in Georgia, judging by cholesterol issues that self-resolved without change in diet or exercise.
I agree with you “Processed foods, excessive simple carbohydrates and sugars are the main evils in the kitchen, but there are a variety of reasons to eat less meat too.”
I like to eat red meat two or three times a month: tasty and I think some red meat is healthy for me.
I avoid any packaged food except I am too lazy to always make homemade bread. +1 for shopping for fresh vegetables, fruits, berries, whole grains, beans,…
Really, the main center parts of grocery stores where everything is in plastic or boxes really needs to be avoided.
As a substitute for packaged deserts, making a pancake and berries is pretty good.
The main reason people eat so unhealthily in the US is the price gouging in the vegetable aisle.
My wife came home with a small bag of brussel sprouts and some "gourmet" Baklava that weighed a bit less, but not much. Virtually the same price.
It is very common for (cardboard tasting) tomatoes, which come from a high-production plant, to cost as much or even more than meat, that comes from a plant-consuming animal and then butchered and constantly refrigerated. the vegetable/meat price ratio in the US means vegetables are comparatively 3-5x+ more expensive than any of the many other places I have lived. They are more like 10x less expensive than meat in in some places I have lived. The same goes for nuts to carbs, etc. And you will feel it immediately in lack of energy and hunger if you don't have protein and the sufficient number of daily calories, while lack of vegetables mainly leads to a more subtle lack of general health.
If you were to consider that in ye olden days the majority of things in the vegetable aisle would have been simply unavailable out of season, does it seem a bit less like price gouging? Transport is likely the most significant cost.
I suppose our food production has generally centralized over time to the regions that can grow these vegetables all year, and almost no vegetables are grown locally. So we end up paying the transportation costs, even during the four weeks in the fall when we could be overwhelmed by cheap locally-grown vegetables.
My ability to get broccoli in November in North Dakota is quite remarkable?
That's an interesting point. I live in Southern California, in Los Angeles. I'm maybe a 50 minute drive from Oxnard where a large portion of our vegetables are grown. (If I recall, more vegetables in the US come from Ventura County than any other place in the world.) They don't have to be shipped very far and a lot more stuff is in season here than in other parts of the country. Just checking the things the person above mentioned on my local Ralph's (Kroger's), I see the cheapest ground beef = $5.99/lb. and brussels sprouts are $2.99/lb. for loose sprouts. That seems like a high price ratio to me, but I certainly don't know all of the logistics.
My ability to get broccoli in November in North Dakota is quite remarkable?
Oh, it is remarkable, but this is an honest question, do you really care?
I mean, I could get fresh tomatoes year round, but they're garbage outside of summer. When we buy things in season, they tend to be cheaper and taste better. Right now in my area, apples are plentiful and cheap! I really wish my supermarket would do some curation of products and only put the best stuff out for sale. I honestly don't care that I wouldn't be able to buy any (expensive, bland) fresh tomatoes right now. That's why we have cans...
I can go to Whole Foods and pay $10 for a bag of mini-cucumbers. Or I can go to Aldi and pay $3 for the same product picked from the same field and delivered regionally on the same train.
The answer people have to that is “I’m too busy and don’t have time to do that”. Grocery stores collect a lot of market intelligence and price to the audience. That’s why a tomato with a wholesale price of $0.50 costs more than a nice steak. Or why they sell pre-chopped carrots and onions to helpless people with money but without skill for $15/lb.
people eat unhealthily because they are lazy and fat/sugar are addictive.
In season fruits and vegetables are inexpensive. You can easily find vegetables that are under $2/pound. Eating half a pound of vegetables a day (most people dont) is a dollar a day.
carrots are typically $1/pound, green peppers $2/pound, cabbage .67/pound, peas .35/pound, green beans $2/pound, broccoli 2/pound
beef is expensive, but chicken and sometimes pork are less expensive.
What people do is irrelevant, because they don't eat enough, and that is my complaint. My family is recommended to eat about 10-12 cups of vegetables (not fruits and vegetables) per day as per [1]. There is always significant waste with vegetables as well, unless we want to act like buying fresh vegetables and preparing them is a luxury reserved for the rich. That is far more than half a pound per person. We shop at 5-7 different stores every week (thanks to our location we can do this), to find the best values on various items. We don't do farmers markets, whole foods, or anything that is not very average and typical. Our evening salad, which is not fancy but not meager, covers about half this requirement, and costs us about $15. If somebody wants to claim salad is a luxury and people should just eat cabbage, I hope you learn to have a more dignified worldview. Also, I have not seen such low prices around here for quite some time, outside of limited sales that you cannot rely on for more than a portion of your purchases.
I don't know if price gouging is the right phrase in this context. Products with processed stuff, including sugar & cheese, can be cheaper because it tends to be subsidized. I don't think supermarkets are gouging any more on veggies than anything else.
The government really could focus on subsidizing healthier food options and stop subsidizing taco bell's crunch wrap things, pizza hut's stuffed crust pizza or various colas.
Personally speaking, the main setback of fresh fruits and vegetables isn't the taste or the inconvenience of cooking with them, it's the spoilage. They go bad so quickly that it's a chore to keep them around and make sure they get used in time.
Going against what was just said, but there's no shame in buying frozen vegetables, especially peas and corn. They're quite nutritious and easy to store.
Fresh vegetables can stay good too if you buy the right kinds. I've found that asian leafy green vegetables like yu choy or gai lan keep a lot better. The leaves may turn a little yellow but they don't end up a slimy mess in a day. Cabbage is the western equivalent that keeps forever.
Frozen vegetables have been a lifesaver for me. I’m not up on the latest research, but I remember reading at one point that frozen veggies actually retained more of their nutrients than fresh because they are often frozen immediately after being harvested.
That is a problem specific to North American/car-centric/suburban cultures, where people buy groceries once or twice a month.
In places where the grocery shops are within walking distance and more integrated with your life, you just make groceries more frequently. Consequently, the food you buy is always fresher.
A lot of this can be solved by cooking your extras into something that freezes well using one of the basic techniques. Soups, stews, casseroles etc. can use up almost any random vegetables you have lying around, no formal recipe required, just keeping around a few basics like oil, butter, flour for thickening/dumplings, and your favorite spices.
I recently had a pile of potatoes sitting around for reasons unclear, now I've got several portions of an amazing potato chowder sitting in the freezer, ready to nuke in minutes when I want them. I had a spare onion and carrot lying around so those went in too, worked out great, no planning or recipe required aside from keeping basic cooking staples on hand.
Alternatively most raw vegetables (and fruits!) can be pickled. While you do have to get the proportions roughly correct, making refrigerator pickles is as simple as throwing extra sliced veggies into a jar with water, vinegar and salt (herbs and spices optional to your preference). The acidity keeps them from going bad.
Fruits can be turned into freezer preserves almost as easily. Almost any combination you have lying around can be mashed and cooked down on the stove as much or as little as you want with some sugar, pectin is optional. They'll last for months in the freezer, weeks in the fridge.
People think I'm a cooking genius when they see all this random stuff in my fridge but it's all so easy, the truth is I just don't like waste.
Frozen vegetables are good. Some canned vegetables retain their flavor and nutrition as well. Some canned veggies are just a hot mess (I am looking at you, canned asparagus). Canned beets are fine. Canned corn is fine in most recipes.
The beauty of canned goods is that you don't expend energy to store them.
The beauty of frozen veggies (and some frozen fruits, blueberries for example) is that they keep and work well for small quantities. I ate a lot of frozen veggies when I was single.
The problem with frozen vegetables is that they very easily loose texture. If you fry them they will in practice boil instead of being fried. The only thing that works in my experience is to throw them in boiling water and then just let the water boil again and finished. Or use them directly in a stew or soup or something like that.
Depends. Apples, carrots, citrus last a surprisingly long time in the fridge. Tomatoes prefer room temp. Extra bread always skips the fridge, right to the freezer. Freeze things rapidly, thaw them slowly. Plenty of tricks.
Cabbage, for instance, keeps longer than lettuce. Pluots keep, too, much better than peaches. Oranges, tangerines, and grapes keep well. Carrots keep pretty much forever.
I live on my own; I find it hard to use up veggies before they go off. It was easier when I was in a couple. (It's hard, or at least embarrassing, to buy two carrots and one large spud).
I went through this for years and was always felt so discouraged and guilty. I didn't have the repertoire or financial pressure to use the "leftovers". It changed completely for me when I decided to stop buying cuts like packaged chicken breasts and started buying whole chickens and making stocks and sauces. Now when I look in the fridge at the end of the week and see old, sad vegetables I get excited because I'm going to turn them into delicious stock. I feel so much better because my food waste has reduced by an order of magnitude, the food is tastier, the house smells great, and cooking this way is compatible with local, sustainable agriculture (I'm looking for a poultry operation in my area). But I have to acknowledge, it's a lot easier because I work from home.
> I avoid any packaged food except I am too lazy to always make homemade bread.
Ha, so do I, except if you started forcing me to give in to certain things bread would be one of the last I'd be willing to give up. (Unless I was allowed 'packaged' bread from an actual baker I suppose.)
Pre-sliced supermarket bread has to be me the most miserable yet widespread thing in existence, can't stand the stuff any more.
I don't know how prices translate, but where I live in the US you usually get corn in the husk for $1 each. I prefer it in the husk because cooking with it on makes it taste better.
Here in Iowa we only buy corn in season. Picked the same day, on the husk for $6/dozen. I won't even touch the packaged stuff you sometimes see off season, and given how rarely I see if I don't think many others will either. In season the farmer delivers half her corn to the grocery store and sells the other half from the back of her (happens to be a girl where I live, other places it was a man) truck on the side of the road.
Until this year I believed that if I would attempt to make bread at home every day I would waste too much time, because I was making bread in a traditional way.
However, after some experimentation, I have discovered that it is possible to make bread in a simplified way, which does not need more than 10 minutes of effective work for one bread made of 500 g of wheat floor (including washing the vessels etc.).
I bake the bread in a microwave oven, in a lid-covered glass vessel. The right baking time must be determined by experiments, in my oven it is 13 minutes @ 1000 W for the dough made of 500 g of floor.
The advantage of the microwave oven is a short baking time and perfect reproducibility. After kneading the dough in a glass bowl for a few minutes, I can put it in the oven and go to do other activities. Now I make at home one bread every day after I wake up, for breakfast.
When baked at microwaves, you can use a leavening agent for a more conventional bread, but even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste.
Previously I was tempted from time to time to buy some commercial bread or cakes, but now I no longer care about them, I like more my own bread.
There is not much of a recipe, because the point is to be simple enough to be easy to make in less than a quarter of hour, every morning.
The simplest bread can be made with nothing else than wheat floor and water, by using the same method as described by Cato the Elder, 2200 years ago (except for using microwaves instead of fire).
With the wheat floor that I use (12.1% proteins), I add water that is 75% of the floor mass, e.g. 375 g water for 500 g floor.
The dough is kneaded for a few minutes, until it becomes homogeneous and elastic.
After kneading, it is possible to bake it immediately. However, in most days I prefer to make a bread with high protein content, in order to not exceed the daily intake of energy that would make me gain weight. For this option, the dough must be left to rest for 30 minutes, to become cohesive, than it can be washed for a few minutes, to remove a large part of the starch, enriching thus the dough in gluten, i.e. protein.
I bake the dough in a glass vessel covered by a lid, 13 minutes @ 1000 W in a microwave oven. The exact time will depend on the oven, so it must be determined by experiments. When the baking time is too long, the bread will harden.
Pure bread must be eaten immediately after cooling. Unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has poor shelf life.
Starting from the simplest bread, there are many options. One is to add a leavening agent, for a softer bread. Now, I prefer the unleavened bread, because when baked in a microwave oven it still grows, maybe 30% of what it might grow with an leavening agent, but it remains more chewy than standard bread. Unless you have untreated teeth problems, this is a good thing, because it causes much more satiety than soft bread in the same quantity. Chewing also keeps your teeth or your dental implants healthy, by stressing the bones.
Some people like to add salt to the bread, so that is another option (when that is done, one should take care that the recommended daily intake of salt is 4 to 5 g, so less salt should be added to other food). Various spices or seeds can also be added before baking.
Another option is to make it sweet, by adding sugar or raisins. Instead of mixing the sugar uniformly in the dough, I prefer to deposit the sugar on the flat dough, before baking, and then roll the dough and bend the resulting cylinder into a torus when transferring into the baking vessel. This method allows the use of less sugar, while still producing an intense enough sweet sensation, due to the alternation of sweetened and unsweetened layers in the baked bread. In this way, I use 50 g sugar for dough made of 500 g floor, but that should be adjusted depending on the individual taste. On the sugar, before rolling, I deposit e.g. cocoa powder (e.g. 5 g for 50 g sugar), vanilla essence, ground cinnamon, ground cloves etc. The advantage of this kind of simplified cake vs. traditional cakes or commercial cakes, besides the very short time for preparation, which allows doing this before breakfast, every day, is that the chewy bread, optionally with high-protein content, can cause satiety after ingesting a much smaller amount than would be needed when eating traditional cakes.
I just wish there was a way to buy meat from animals that hadn’t been systematically tortured for their short life until they were drowned in co2 for easy butchering… the only reason why I try to use as much vegetarian replacement products is because I have moral qualms eating meat from sentient creatures that have been so brutally abused…
And even diary is hard to consume after seeing cows from a bio farm getting herded for milking. They’re in serious pain while getting continuously impregnated to maximise milk production… it’s really hard to stomach for me as I’m not morally opposed to milk/meat consumption… but the way these creatures are treated really make it hard.
I think there are some operations that are trying to do this well. Granted, I'm probably pretty susceptible to their marketing efforts, but I find White Oak Pastures Farm in GA a really exciting example of an establishment that is pushing back against industrial farming practices.
https://whiteoakpastures.com/
There are lots of great ranchers and butchers out there who raise their livestock humanely. You’ll probably want a big deep freezer but search for a “half beef” or “whole cow” sales and you’ll likely find a ranch near you that can give you ethical meat, and probably at a better price since you’re buying in bulk. (Many ranches will do smaller steak/burger sales too)
The cool thing is that a lot of these operations partner with butchers who can cut to order, so you get exactly the thickness of steaks you like, certain roasts, Korean-style ribs if you want them, soup bones, shanks, etc. all exactly how you like them.
I don't think it's possible to buy any kind of food that has been treated in a way you can feel morally comfortable with at the majority of traditional grocery stores. Whether it's chocolate being created from cocoa beans farmed with slave labor in other countries, apples getting picked by undocumented workers making less than minimum wage on farms, or frozen foods getting packaged at factories with questionable working conditions. Unless you straight up build your own garden and farm off the grid and do everything yourself your only option is to either feel morally queezy 24/7 or live your best life and maybe donate a couple hundred each month to organizations like The Humane Society that work to improve conditions for you.
I think you hit it on the head with "the majority of traditional grocery stores." For me those just aren't the place to shop for animal products like meat and dairy. Hit the specialty places for that, pay the premium, and eat less of it. Maybe this one study debunks all the rest of the data out there about red meat, maybe not, but it's a healthy lifestyle that works for me; I only pay to eat meat once or twice a month as a result.
There's one other source of good meat: hunting. I suck at that but I have friends and associates who hunt and they are often trying to get rid of extra meat. Always happy to help with that :)
Shop from local farms, if that's an option for you. All suffering won't be eliminated, of course, but if you want to consume animal products, it's way better IMO to support local farmers who are invested in ethical animal treatment and sustainable practices.
There untortured grass-fed meat delivery companies out there for example, ButcherBox. Their site is glitchy, but the products are good, I've had them for a while, and now trying some other ones. There are many choices with good delivery now.
> I just wish there was a way to buy meat from animals that hadn’t been systematically tortured for their short life
A good portion of the meat I consume comes off my own land, mostly as venison although a little bit of turkey too. It tastes better than farmed meat, it's cheaper, it helps keep the animals from overpopulating, and the animal didn't live a miserable life of torture before it was harvested.
But I get that not everybody lives in an area where that is practical.
You can buy direct from farmer who treats the animals well, either individually or with a group of friends and family. You just have to have the freezer space.
Exactly. And animals that are treated well start out at 3x the price, and when the tortured animal meat prices are already breaking the bank for most people.
Do you have a 4H program in your area? Those animals are treated like pets. I buy a quarter cow once a year. Higher quality and cheaper than the Grocer.
Well, CO2 asphyxiation is so far the most humane approach to butchering.
I remember a YouTube of a journalist looking for the most humane technique to administer capital punishment and it turned out that during co2 asphyxia the victim goes light-headed, even laughingly before passing out and away without even realizing. When told about this, Death Sentence advocates were disappointed that the victims wouldn't suffer while the sentence was carried out. (surprising eh!)
CO2 asphyxiation is not kind. The effect of elevated CO2 blood levels is to make you panic that you are suffocating; you struggle for breath. Nitrogen gas is much kinder; you don't know that you are suffocating, you just pass out. (So be extra-vigilant around tanks of N2).
Sorry to burst your bubble but "uncured" bacon is a sham
They add celery powder instead of nitrates, so they can claim "nitrate free". However, the celery powder just decomposes into nitrates, achieving the same effect
Isn't that just sliced pork belly? Also, personally, I think if you cook it like bacon its not good, just grey and not flavorful, I just eat traditional bacon infrequently.
There has to be somewhere in the spectrum a company that processes food and it ends up being superior. In fact, I bet it's more prevalent than you expect.
I did a few searches. Turns out there are benefits to food processing. Inactivation of toxins seems like a big plus to me. Improved nutrition, seems good.
Yes, many processed foods are of nutritionally poor value, but please don't label all processed food as being bad.
Depends on the food - something like acorns, for example, they are inedible for humans in their whole form, but hulling, grinding the nuts, and rinsing them of tannins makes a tasty nutritious flour.
The word “processed” is kind of a lazy heuristic - butchering, cooking, hulling, mixing, those are all ways of processing that are healthy and effective.
Creating something like a Twinkie is a whole different ballgame and looks more like a triumph of chemical engineering and material science than anything related to baking or cooking.
My personal favorite oversimplification is you shouldn't eat what the average person would try and stop a zookeeper from feeding to a monkey.
Some bread made from acorn flower, cooked butchered meat or hulled rice would be fine, but giving them a Twinkie or Mountain Dew seems like the kind of thing that might lose them their job.
The problem is that I've read "If you give a mouse a cookie" to my daughter so many times that I would naturally assume that giving a twinkie to a monkey would result in a bedtime-story length chain of humorous events.
Why unfortunate? Plant-based meat substitutes are exactly as unhealthy as one would assume from them being ultra-processed. They are made to taste good in the same way (adding lots of fats, sugars, salt, etc.).
Perhaps there are ultra-processed foods that are not unhealthy, but that does not include "Impossible Meat".
It is unfortunate because we cannot in good conscience ask people to switch from barely-processed meat to ultra-processed meat substitutes, despite the meat industry's heavy contribution to looming climate disaster.
Many of us have switched to things other than meat, but that choice seems beyond most people.
Another alternative is what is called "lab-grown meat", which is not a meat substitute, per se, but is actual meat that might be a lot less harmful to produce. Where it sits on the "processed" spectrum is hard to assess. Obviously it is, in one sense, 100% processed, but details matter.
I'd say many of these terms are way too vaguely defined and used. What exactly counts as "packaged" food? What's "processed" food?
If I process cabbage into Sauerkraut or Kimchi, does that count as bad, because it's "processed"? What if it's processed by some company? What if they process it differently?
Case in point, Sauerkraut. If I make that at home, the bacteria stay alive the whole time. They still multiply in my fridge right now and keep the Sauerkraut OK to eat if a bit mushy after being left in there for too long coz I don't eat it often enough. If I buy Sauerkraut in a glass it's dead. Sure, they also used bacteria to actually make the Sauerkraut. And then they killed off all of the good bacteria by pasteurization to be able to stick it on a shelf w/ a long best before date and to guarantee the texture and color. Not to mention the extra "ingredients" they put in there.
Generally when people talk about the negatives of processed food, they mean either:
1. Something that was originally nutritious, but had some part removed due to processing. Sometimes they attempt to add vitamins back into it, like enriched flour, but the issue is that we don’t know what else might be missing, or how changing the structure affects the body (faster absorbing carbs for example)
2. Foods that are sanitized heavily. Obviously it’s in the name of safety, but there could be benefits to eating a little dirt sometimes (ie there’s tons of vitamin B12 in dirt, but who knows what else we could be missing)
3. Foods that have lots of artificial or derived chemicals. Many are probably fine but it’s hard to know how certain things affect our gut microbiome.
There’s so much we still don’t understand about our bodies, especially our gut and it’s bacteria. That’s why nutrition science changes constantly. “Fat is bad, no wait it’s good” etc.
It’s not entirely scientific, but I strongly recommend reading In Defense Of Food. It’s thought-provoking and hits heavily on the many inconsistencies in our primitive understanding of nutrition. The author also calls out interesting points about “whole unprocessed foods” and why nutrition science is hard (eg too many variables)
No, if you process something minimally like Kimchi it is not bad. In fact fermented foods are generally seen as good for you. Yogurt, cheese as well.
So Kimchi is considered minimally processed. Flour has various processing levels to make bread. Enriched white is strictly worse than others.
Cookies with hydrogenated palm oil would be bad. Any oils beyond cold pressed extra virgin olive oil are supposedly bad.
Now the preservatives in store bought kimchi could theoretically be a bigger issue.. I don't know how many folks have studied them. I imagine they just pass through us but probably influence the microbiome etc...
> I'd say many of these terms are way too vaguely defined and used. What exactly counts as "packaged" food? What's "processed" food?
Do you think this is some sort of a smart or incisive observation?
I am sorry if I come off as rude, but I have grown weary of people making such asinine comments, quibbling about terms and their definitions, when they clearly know what the parent comment is talking about.
It does come off as rude, yes. We see right here in all the threads the difference in opinion of what constitutes "processed" or "packaged". A lot of misunderstandings in the world stem from people using the same terms to mean slightly different things. So in fact I think it's very important to state this explicitly. It helps in business communication as well, when you're the third party and see that two people are saying the same thing with different words or using the same word to mean different things and they just keep arguing.
This is just a excuse to be intellectually lazy. You just offload the definition to "you just know" and make it impossible to refute since it targets arbitrary definition.
And there's a case in point right in one the answers to my reply:
So Kimchi is considered minimally processed
Minimally processed vs. processed. What does this actually mean to everyone? Who draws the line where?
As with the Sauerkraut example, home made Kimchi is minimally processed I would agree. Commercial Kimchi, like commercial Sauerkraut I would probably count as just "processed", not good for you. But agileAlligator may not see even commercial Kimchi/Sauerkraut as processed and he draws the line at "processed cheese", so that weird vegetable oil with "natural" color in it.
agileAlligator says
Asking what the definition of processed food is, is talking past the point.
and I bet my other two questions above he'd see the same way. But he's not seeing that I'm not asking a direct question. I am not expecting any answers to those questions. I'm not asking for an actual definition. I'm "asking" so that people may ponder these and think back to previous conversations or look at some of the back and forth in these threads and recognize that people are talking past each other.
This is a great point. "Processed food" is an incredibly broad category that is being somewhat demonized at the moment (not saying any comments here do this).
I don't think (and am guessing most would agree) canned tomatoes are particularly harmful food, nor are frozen blueberries or fish, nor are dried raisins when I'm putting them in oats.
It's a spectrum. With my kids, dried mangoes make me slightly guilty because I know they are pretty high in sugar, albeit natural sugar. Most people would be more wary of frozen chicken nuggets. Some more specificity around what makes processed foods harmful, from the science and science comms communities, would be helpful.
Popular wisdom is hopelessly confused on what "processed" means. Cheese, yogurt, tofu, nixtamal are all subjected to intensive processes using industrial chemicals which radically alter their flavor and texture. But it feels almost trolly to suggest that they're processed foods in the same way that a Twinkie is. Certainly it seems ridiculous to suggest they're less processed than frozen french fries - but they are! Many brands of fries are just potato, oil, salt, coloring, with the only processing steps being cutting, frying, freezing.
I think most people understand it to mean something more like "stuffed full of oil or sugar".
When you see “natural”, “processed” or “toxin” in reference to a food, health or cosmetic product, pretend the word isn’t there. At best, it means nothing, at worst it is a manipulation designed to part your money from you or a fake cure.
More like a complex concept who can't be reduced to white and black. Sausages are processed, but there's a big difference between chorizo and Oscar Mayer. Powdered milk is processed, but yogurt and cheeses are too. Even cooking is significant processing that actually makes food safer and more nutritious.
a company that processes food and it ends up being superior
To be glib, any process that makes normally undigestible things edible to humans would qualify for that. Cooked rice is superior to raw rice, fermented cabbage is superior to raw cabbage, and glazed onions are superior to raw onions.
That's usually not the type of processing people refer to when they use the term "processed foods". It usually refers to a type of processing where the original ingredients are no longer individually recognizable, and where the end result contains much more additives (sugar, salt, fats) than were in the original product(s).
My rule of thumb is to think about the processes and whether I could do them in my kitchen or not. Things like 'boil' or 'grate' are recognizable processes that I don't worry about. Thinks like 'hydrogenated' are indicators that some serious modification of the underlying ingredients has taken place.
The term 'hyper-processed' is used to refer to foods that bare very little resemblance to recognizable ingredients straight from the farm.
> Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake.
If you highly diversify your diet, if any one thing is 'bad' for you, you are by your actions, reducing your exposure to it.
As far as processed foods, there are different forms of 'processing'. For example, canned vegetables are pretty minimally processed. Cured sausages are more highly processed, and nacho cheese doritos are really highly processed.
Unfortunately food is religion to many folks. They will die defending their precious food choices.
The problem with articles like this is that it’s designed to be an echo chamber of denialism.
The key to being healthy is good diet. Good diet means good ingredients. Most animals are treated like crap and fed crap too—save for a few small-scale producers.
If you want to eat meat do yourself (and everyone having to hear these discussions) a favor: visit a high quality Kobe cattle ranch and see how they treat the animals.
Then visit a large-scale farm (tip: you might need top-secret clearance) which provides the majority of beef products to the USA.
There is research to support it. It makes sense as well. If your human diet affects your health/nutrition/body composition, animal diet should affect their health/nutrition/body composition.
Not the person you replied to, but I think "animal's diet affects their nutrition" is pretty obvious. For instance, the "omega 3" eggs you see at the supermarket are produced by feeding the chicken a high omega 3 diet. That itself isn't really interesting. The real question is whether going through all that trouble is worth it. In other words, is it better/more cost effective to buy the higher quality animal products at the supermarket (eg. omega 3 eggs) or buy the regular stuff and pop a multivitamin? For omega 3 eggs at least, the answer is the latter. I'd be interested in seeing how it works out for beef.
There are some measurable differences in certain vitamins, fat content,and amino acid profiles, but I do not believe the differences have a causal link to overall human health i.e. longer lifespan, improved health markers, etc. At least nothing significant in the literature.
> Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible ...
Fully agree with your take except for "eat [...] as often as possible" part. For instance, intermittent fasting is effective exactly because of not eating often.
I understood the comment to mean, “when given the choice between minimally processed whole foods and highly processed packaged foods, pick the former as often as possible,” not “eat frequently.”
I don't think "often" means "as much as you can during the day", I think it means to try to have that kind of food at each meal/snack as often as you can.
> Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake.
I think this is really the most important thing anyone can do. Not directed at you at all or at anything you said, but I dislike the term "vegetarian" in general. It suggests a binary diet: either you eat meat, or you don't. Someone who never eats meat and someone who eats meat once a month have essentially the same diet. It makes little sense to distinguish one as vegetarian and one as not. The pervasive idea that you could eat no meat for years and that somehow taking a bit of meat makes you "not vegetarian" anymore is kind of ridiculous. I won't get into it but the concept of "sobriety" often falls into the same trap.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with choosing to not eat any meat products (or not drink any alcohol), it's got nothing to do with the choices people make for themselves, simply how we discuss it.
I think the terms "vegetarian" and "vegan" are only useful as descriptors of food: whether it contains meat or any animal products at all. But categorizing people as "vegetarian" or "vegan" is absurd and counter-productive.
Veganism is a moral philosophy, so it really _only_ makes sense to use that term when referring to people. "Vegan" food is short-hand for "plant-based" food. Food does not subscribe to moral ideals, only people do. It's unfortunate that the difference between those terms has been so muddied with time, but it's an important distinction.
I'm unsure by your wording, but I am a vegetarian in case that's what you mean by "either" - over a decade and still ongoing. Not very important, but I just wanted to clarify.
Your breakfast sounds tasty. I don't blame you for having it often. :+1:
Environmental impact of meat production is one major one, but it depends on what meat we're talking about. Beef and similar are absolutely terrible from an environmental perspective. It takes significantly more water and space to produce comparable quantities of beef to other meat sources, or plants. Chicken and Turkey are usually better on that score.
It's also helpful to note that slaughterhouses have broad, measured psychological impacts on the community. They are often pushed to butcher at unsafe speeds and the killing of animals for an entire work day has a negative impact on the mental health of the workers. The installation of a new slaughterhouse has been associated with increased crime, domestic violence, and drug abuse in the community, and isn't replicated in new factories for manufacturing, lumber processing, paper mills or other similarly sized factories.
Killing for a Living: Psychological and Physiological Effects of Alienation of Food Production on Slaughterhouse Workers - https://core.ac.uk/outputs/54847380
Additionally, Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle, which is largely attributed with launching public pressure to create federal reforms for more sanitary meat packing, originally created this to highlight how it fucked up the workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
That's true on the current margin in the US but only on the current margin. Creating one more pound of beef than we currently do does require a lot of farmed soy and other crops and ends up very inefficient. But there's also a lot of grazing land in the US that can't be used for intensive agriculture and provides a lot environmentally "free" (minus methane emissions) meat. From an environmental standpoint we want to halve or so the amount of beef we consume, not eliminate it entirely.
And other countries than the US are operating on differnet margins.
Maybe so, but if we only focus on "efficiency" we're going to end up living in dystopian nightmare, a very efficient one. Specifically regarding food, eating is not something purely functional for humans who are not seeking maximal efficiency but also enjoyment.
In Western countries population is already naturally dropping. What's needed first and foremost is a culture shift so that we stop seeing that as a negative. In any case, we have no choice because population cannot keep growing indefinitely in a finite space (which is what would lead to an actual dystopian outcome and we are getting there just looking at the state of the environment).
The very fact that you replied what you replied just now after I mentioned population levels shows how the public has been conditioned.
Compare: "In Western countries vegetarianism is already naturally rising" ... "What's needed first and foremost is a culture shift so that we stop seeing meat as a necessity" ... "We have no choice because livestock supply can't keep growing in a finite space" ... "The very fact that you commented as soon as you saw an anti-meat sentiment shows how the public has been conditioned" etc.
Environmental impact (both carbon and water), animal cruelty/welfare in factory farms, high cost of more sustainable/lower cruelty options, general distaste for most of it
Not all countries have standards for handling meat. Have you ever been to a developing nation? I spent 4 years living and traveling all over Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos by motorbike.
"Street food" sounds awesome until you realize that you have no idea where the meat you're eating came from, how it was raised, handled, prepared. It is cheap for a reason. It could have easily been the stuff you saw by the side of the road sitting out in the sun with flies all over it. Ever been to a wet market?
I was once in a super remote town in northern Vietnam staying at a small hotel. They were having a festival of some sort and someone had left a 300+ lbs pig in the parking lot sitting there in the sun. Alive, barely. It was so abused, it could barely lift its head. That was going to be the delight of the festival.
How do you even know the meat is the meat they say it is? I've seen my share of dog/cat restaurants. Other than those being generally more expensive... who knows... maybe they ran out of pig that day (swine flu was in full effect when I was there).
Certainly, veggies also have their share of issues... sprayed with who knows what sorts of chemicals smuggled in from China... grown next to polluted rivers... in polluted air.
According to the National Council for Animal Protection, over 99% of beef farmed for meat comes from cows that live in horrific factory farm environments.
Does the remaining 1% matter all that much in the conversation?
Would you expect the National Council for Animal Protection to give you an unbiased figure?
I struggle with the concept of feedlot farming being morally acceptable at all. However, I've been on a number of beef farms in the UK and it's just not representative of how British beef is raised.
Is that representative, there are areas in California where grazing was eliminated and they are not overrun with other grazing animals and beautiful meadows and creeks have begun to recover.
> only relevant if you grain feed, instead of allowing animals to graze on grass.
What's the percentage of grass fed vs grain? From a shallow search it seems like it's low single digits yet I see this argument come up a lot. Do you have different numbers perhaps?
It really depends on what you want to maximize in your life, health and environment. Not everyone will agree, but here are some things to chew on.
* Animal products require an inordinate amount of water to produce compared to plant-based products.
* Animal breeding and grazing at scale creates a bunch of environmental issues.
- Methane production
- Dust bowl effect due to over-grazing
- Manure runoff and associated effects
- Crazy abuse and proliferation of antibiotics and the resulting antibiotic resistant bacteria
* Ocean dredging for seafood is horribly destructive to marine environments.
* Fish, due to other human-origin environmental issues, are loaded with methyl-mercury and arsenic. This trend is only getting worse.
* Animals have brains and the associated emotion, pain and fear responses to trauma.
* Outside of chickens, most animals we like to eat are higher order mammals that are arguably more susceptible to the kinds of pain and distress we feel ourselves.
* Animal rights standards for slaughterhouses, especially in the US, are abysmal.
* Food and food handling standards for meat, especially in the US, are abysmal.
* Meat production creates a lot of secondary waste products that wouldn't be market competitive if they weren't subsidized by super-high meat production. Used as fillers in all kinds of things from pet food to cosmetics.
- eg. Animal tallow, gelatin, organ meat, animal bone-meal
- some of these are inherently useful, but as meat consumption rises to meet demand, so do these byproducts' supply and they show up all over as they now compete with vegetable based options.
* Risks of parasites, improper cooking, spoilage, etc.
* Nutritional benefits exist, but there are nutritional issues with red meat, organ meat and associated fats as well.
* A lot of food "certifications" are industry-managed and opaque to consumers, pushing a lot of negative externalities under the rug and making these things worse, not better.
- "Grass-fed" is a "best-effort" thing and most companies that claim this are still only seasonally feeding their animals grass while also supplementing with diets molasses.
- Free-range, prairie raised, farm-fresh, cage-free... What this means depends largely on who you ask.
- etc. etc.
There are more bullets I'm sure too, I'll stop listing though. Hope this helps.
Just given the above, animal foods aren't required for adequate human sustenance and yet there are a lot of issues with them.
There are of course nutritional benefits to consuming meat and negative externalities from modern agricultural practices, but I think animal production has high costs for its benefits.
It doesn't have to be an all or nothing either. Everyone reducing their meat consumption by a little has an outsized impact compared to some zealots doing so. No one benefits if we treat this as some kind of morality food fight or religious crusade.
Environmental impact has been mentioned a few times but personally (!) I have reduced (not yet eliminated) my meat consumption mostly due to the fact that my short term unnecessary enjoyment is not justified in the face of the insane cruelty connected to mass animal farming. There is plenty of well-established documentation about this industry you can find online and subjectively I find it psychopathic.
I personally cannot consume meat from mass production anymore with a good conscience after hearing pigs scream in pain as their cage entered into the CO2 cloud used to kill them. The CO2 forms acid when coming into contact with their eyes, nose, lungs and mouths. You can kinda get a tiny hint of that feeling when you drink too much carbonated soda and burp up CO2 throw your nose by accident.
I hope it doesn't sound patronizing but that's MY reason to avoid meat, even more so than the terrible environmental impact. If you have ever spent time with pigs on a farm, they are eerily similar to dogs in some ways, so intelligent and funny. We would never subject dogs to the crazy amount of torture and violence just to eat them for 5 minutes out of no necessity at all and I believe it takes cognitive dissonance and plain ignorance to then just torture pigs for years and then kill them. Most of them never get to see the sun or run across a field of grass in the spring. Just death, disease, oozing wounds and death by acid-suffocation.
It's not really about health. In this day and age you can be healthy with or without consuming animal products.
It's really about cruelty towards sentient beings and is the biosphere destruction really worth having a strip of bacon or a steak?
Are culinary pleasures more important than not inflicting all this cruelty and damage?
Pigs pass the mirror test and can be compared to small 2-3 year children when it comes to intelligence.
Cows are such gentle and curious animals.
And yet we treat animals as inanimate objects.
As Carl Sagan said 'They are too much like us'
If we ever achieve a Star Trek like society - those future humans will look back at this time the same way we look back at the times when slavery was fully accepted by society.
I’ve found a simple rule of thumb that works for me:
Nature has a way of limiting how much of a certain substance you can consume. By simply eating less processed foods, you’re eating more in line with what the human body expects historically.
Take oils for example. It requires immense pressure and processing, only available in the Industrial Age, to produce the quantitates of certain oils. We consume way more oil than ever expected. Sugar is in the same boat. Ground wheat is kinda too…
The more processing the worse it is for you, as a general rule of thumb. So yea, eat Whole Foods when you can!
Oil wasn’t as hard to come by as you’d expect. Think of butter, animal fat, olive oil, seed oils, etc. It’s nowhere near as hard to make as you seem to think. The first recorded history of deep frying is from 2500 BCE.
Wheat too was in our diets long ago with the first recorded use in 32,000 BCE. Sugar was 8,000 BCE.
> Nature has a way of limiting how much of a certain substance you can consume.
Is your belief that "Nature" is an actor which can (intentionally or unintentionally) limit human consumption? Or are you saying something more like: "there's a physical limit to how much air a human can breathe in a day"?
Not op - think it’s more along the lines of “humans evolved with nature as a constraint” and industrialization has the ability to remove that constraint.
I think it's a figurative way of saying that our tastes developed in a natural environment where the things we crave (mainly sugar and fat) were limited and packaged in healthier forms (fruits, nuts, meat).
What is "processed foods"? Isn't bread a heavily processed food? Is somehow making it at home magically healthier than it being made in a factory? What about whole wheat bread from a factory vs white bread at home? Which one is healthier?
Or are you trying to say that bread is somehow unhealthy? Even though it is staple eaten by literally everyone across the world in someway, shape or form.
Terms like this destroy the credibility of "food research" and I find it hard to trust any dietary guidance. Specially after the whole fat & sugar debacle
Compare a hand-made loaf of bread to one from the grocery store. Count the number of ingredients. The hand-made loaf is usually made from flour, with water, oil, and leavening. If you buy unprocessed flour that makes 4 or 5 ingredients as a base. A store bought, whole wheat loaf of bread contains roughly 16 ingredients. The home-made loaf doesn't contain preservatives because it won't need to sit on a shelf for a prolonged period. The home-made loaf can use higher quality/purity ingredients than you will find in the grocery store in the USA. White bread is worse.
Not all bread is made the same. Not all bread ingredients are the same. Those individual ingredients can be processed as well. The more processing on the ingredients and end product, the more "processed" a food is. I'm not even touching "highly processed" or "ultra-processed" foods in this short post.
I start to wonder if you can eat with too much variety as well. People tend to eat more when there's more variety (low-carb and potato-only diets work mostly by making you bored of eating).
The slime mold guys are currently testing the hypothesis that the potassium in potatoes is why the potato monodiet works…
The mechanism of diets isn’t understood yet - check out Kevin Hall’s metabolic ward study of low fat high carb vs. high fat low carb for some paradoxical results.
I’d be happy finding a diet that consistently works for people before understanding how.
Kevin Hall also did a fascinating study on ultra-processed vs less processed foods which found that people ate more and gained more weight on ultra-processed foods even when the two diets were identical in macronutrient composition! I would guess that the main reason dramatically different diets show similar levels of effectiveness is that all of them involve drastically limiting intake of ultra-processed foods.
I lately wonder about Japanese or Italian cuisine. Those nations are around the top for longevity of life - at least some specific parts of the population. If the diet has a significant part in this I have a silly theory: they make their food relatively simple and quick, but very tasty. I would even say that Japanese cuisine is for making vegetables delicious for example.
I do recognize I probably don't know nearly enough.
Besides the obvious problem of WHAT should I eat there is the problem of HOW MUCH should I eat. And in general we eat too much volume wise AND at inappropriate times relative to our circadian rhythm. CLOCK genes exist! And eating changes your genetic expression.
And yet, from the position of my armchair and the handful of books on my shelf, history has shown that a monodiet (relative to the modern, diversified western diet, at least) is not only sustainable, but has been the backbone of the human diet for thousands of years.
The partisan tone of this article is very grating and makes it hard to take it seriously. It is full of brash, opinionated statements which are not backed up by the actual study [1] the article is based on.
I have to conclude that it's being upvoted here because people enjoy eating red meat and want to continue to do so, not because it has any particular merit on its own terms.
I agree here. It's hard to read this as "Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of other studies. But you should totally trust this one, because the others are Lazy and Shoddy."
In an area where there are huge amounts of lobbyist dollars arguing in the same direction, I'd love more technical reasons about why every other study is flawed and why this burden-of-proof function is meaningful.
I'm not realistically going to read the 25 page PDF in a field I'm not in.
What if the "extraordinary evidence" that is the foundation of your current dogma is the culmination of several decades of "science" that got corrupted by big money?
Frankly, a LOT of nutritional science is heavily politicized, included the research the contra side of this article. The corn and grain industries have a long storied history of funding studies that support their targets and denigrate the meat industry as well as lobbying for regulations which benefit their industries.
Aren’t cattle the biggest grain consumers, so wouldn’t that be counter productive?
I’ve heard of the ag lobby and the meat and dairy lobbies but never big grain. Of course they exist and do something but going against the meat lobby just seems weird.
To contextualize this given the parent commenter's question:
-- About 50% of US corn production goes toward animal feed (and another 30% goes to ethanol). Slightly out of date source, but recent figures show this has only moved a few percentage points. [1]
-- Over 70% of US soybean production goes toward animal feed. [2]
-- I wasn't able to find something similar about wheat, but I would guess nearly all of it is human consumption.
Given this, it's safe to say that a large portion of these grain subsidies are linked to meat, although to get a better idea of the distribution, we would need to see a further breakdown by category (corn, soybeans, wheat).
I think mahogany’s comment is more important but I just want to add: how many subsidies they get doesn’t relate at all to what research they might fund.
They’re deeply tied to the meat industry so would benefit more from increased consumption.
> I have to conclude that it's being upvoted here because people enjoy eating red meat and want to continue to do so
Similarly, "wine/coffee/beer/marijuana/chocolate/etc is good for you" type studies tend to be upvoted because people like evidence that helps rationalize their habits and vices.
No, that is different. Psychoactives we need to create this illusion of therapeutic use so that we can enjoy ourselves because otherwise the puritans will ban them. For instance, I'm under no illusion that alcohol, weed, LSD, shrooms, or MDMA are good for you in general but I have to promote articles like that because if I don't, puritans in this society will prevent me from enjoying them just like I enjoy jumping off bridges, skydiving, or motorcycling.
This is my life and the only way to live it is to lie to some people in a certain way. So we're going to have this mutually beneficial world where we have to modify the narrative so all parties can get what they want.
Virtue signaling. A loaded term, yes. But it is exactly why these discussions go off the rails. Nutritional 'science' doesn't even really exist, so you can always find something out there that sounds very objective and intelligence which will back up the positions you already hold on faith.
This discussion today is already off to a great start with bro science and bragging about personal choices that are clearly the best, with the occasional 'but I am a little weak, so I don't get it perfect every time' tossed in to make it sound real. Hell, there's even a bit of the smug international 'this is just an America problem' already cropping up. Another day ending in Y on HN.
> Virtue signaling. A loaded term, yes. But it is exactly why these discussions go off the rails. Nutritional 'science' doesn't even really exist, so you can always find something out there that sounds very objective and intelligence which will back up the positions you already hold on faith.
What you're describing is more confirmation bias than virtue signaling. Certainly there's plenty of both here.
FWIW upvotes don't correlate with accurate or impartial content, they correlate with engagement (controversial or entertaining content). Boring accurate science doesn't attract attention.
And specifically engagement with the title, not so much the article. It'd be pretty hard for a link to make it out of new without some early knee-jerk pre-read upvotes, IMO.
Also have to note that there's hundreds (thousands?) of studies that disagree, and you can p-hack anything, so every study should be taken with a grain of salt - especially when it contradicts a consensus.
Yeah, and there's still a big gap between what data tells us and how to create policy. Sometimes waiting for conclusive evidence isn't possible and when you see warning signs you have to make recommendations. Especially considering the potential downside which in this case is really nothing. Eating meat may not be a terrible menace, but eating less meat is hardly a burden on anyone.
The health risks of eating unprocessed red meat may have been overstated, but there is still some evidence that has to be considered. And the article itself says that while the evidence of danger from meat consumption may be a proxy for correlated lifestyle changes so this narrow finding doesn't actually negate policy. Pushing people to eat whole grains, fruits and vegetables still stands as the best option.
Science operates by biasing the null hypothesis. We may like red meat and be partial to it, but the onus is still on people to prove that it's harmful. Now even the correlation for that is falling apart.
The tone is necessary. So much bullshit 'nutrition science', with defective methodologies, has been promoted by mainstream media (along with exaggerated nonsense on the "risks" of eggs, coffee, tea, spinach...) that it's appropriate for people to debunk these claims vigorously. These mainstream outlets shouldn't pretend the nocebo effect doesn't exist, and that their reporting won't harm people's health unnecessarily.
When better science comes around, then we can let the MSM get away with making these claims.
The 'bullshit' was mostly not spread by scientists, but by media. When the findings of scientific studies are twisted and manipulated, and when a study that shows X is treated as if it proved X, and Y, and Z, there's no better word for that than 'bullshit science'. The studies were far too low quality to prove anything, or even show us what's directionally correct.
What better term is there? It wasn't pseudoscience, because the studies were real, and addressed scientific topics. It wasn't scientific fraud, because again the studies were real. But the implications 'derived' from them by motivated media were completely made up. My dictionary calls that 'bullshit'.
It’s an ongoing process but I don’t think anyone can look at this field and see anything other than low quality science with no theoretical model explaining anything and results that often seem like they are driven by conclusions instead of the other way round. Maybe something has changed in the past 10-20 years but certainly the amount of contradictory conclusions in this field is quite high And not like any other more established scientific discipline. To me it’s more in the alchemy phase rather than modern chemistry.
This title seems like clickbait. The linked article seems like mostly blogspam that's talking about a new meta-analysis with some specific claims, but it also sprinkles in a quote from an unrelated professor that makes some stronger claims.
Specifically, the study it leans on most concludes:
> We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke. We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimized at 0 g unprocessed red meat intake per day, the 95% uncertainty interval that incorporated between-study heterogeneity was very wide: from 0–200 g d−1. While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations. More rigorous, well-powered research is needed to better understand and quantify the relationship between consumption of unprocessed red meat and chronic disease. [0]
This conclusion is dramatically different from "not a health risk."
The Nutritional Science field is such an unmitigated disaster of bad science, unethical science, sponsored "science", and contradictory science. The rot starts at the top, with a gate-kept Academy of Nutritionists that is far more concerned about increasing Dietition wages and responsibility at hospitals (for instance, they want dietitians writing "food prescriptions" directly so they can bill insurance) than the quality and origin of the research they approve for their database.
It has been multiyear battles to get their "official scientific consensus) moved off things like "eggs are bad" and now finally "meat is bad". Glad to see there's progress being made. Also glad I got out of that field.
>The rot starts at the top, with a gate-kept Academy of Nutritionists that is far more concerned about increasing Dietition wages
My wife is in the process of transferring her international nutrition degree to the US, and we learned that starting in Jan 2024, nutritionists will now need a Masters degree to be eligible for accreditation.
Talk about pulling up the drawbridge behind you...
There are many, many, more complicated areas of research, including most other areas inside biology. We have millenia of trial-and-error as a starting point for nutrition. The fundamentals haven't changed, although the problems are new and inventive.
I guess I mean an expanded view of nutrition science, where we fully understand the effects of what we eat. This would be beyond engineering.
One thing about engineering is it can succeed or fail fairly quickly, and the results can mostly be replicated. We build a reactor and we soon know whether it works or not. And reactors are something we understand enough that we can design them, and create them.
Meanwhile in nutrition we're making educated guesses and watching what happens over decades. What helps one person kills another. We're using statistics to tease out the truth, to get mere glimpses of the truth. We're on the outside making educated guesses about a system beyond our full comprehension.
A final thought: Which will happen first: commercially viable fusion energy, or the obesity rate in the US falling below 25%? Which would you bet on? (I am considering the challenge of how to improve the diet and nutrition of an entire nation under the umbrella of "nutrition science" here.)
You are conflating the state of the art with how difficult something is.
As other have noted in the comments, research into nutrition is often poorly distributed and implemented. It often over emphasizes child nutrition and neglects adult nutrition. And it is fraught with bad science and agendas.
This says nothing about how complex nutrition is compared to any other field of research.
Did the author even read the abstract let alone the paper?
> We also found that while risk for the six outcomes in our analysis combined was minimized at 0 g unprocessed red meat intake per day, the 95% uncertainty interval that incorporated between-study heterogeneity was very wide: from 0–200 g d−1. While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.
Doesn't sound like it particularly slams years of shoddy research.
> Did the author even read the abstract let alone the paper?
The author has a different purpose in publishing as evidenced in the well crafted headline, as correlated with ratio of commenters here engaging on that headline w/o reading the abstract.
> While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations.
I did a good bit of research and experimentation on diet. Tons of conflicting studies. I just eat things that don't make me feel bad after eating them and hope for the best.
Gosh, for all the bluster in this comment section of supposed technical folks nobody seems to be highlighting what appears to be a very compelling methodological advance in the Burden of Proof methodology [0] used to produce this result.
> "Here, we propose a complementary approach, in which we quantify the mean relationship (the risk function) between risk exposure and a disease or injury outcome, after adjusting for known biases in the existing studies. Unlike existing approaches, our approach does not force log-linearity in risk functions or make additional approximations, such as midpoint approximations for ranges or shared reference group"
Since they don't mention kidneys, I'd like to see someone apply their approach to this study, claiming that red meat increases the risk of end-stage renal disease:
That's a good idea. As I understand it the Burden of Proof method is a meta-analytical method, though, which means it gets applied to a corpus of studies. I'm sure there are more than 1 study that tries to figure out that relationship, though.
1. MANY studies over many years show red meat consumption is bad
2. This study shows that it's bad, but not a lot
3. This is ONE study we're talking about
4. This study invents a new statistical methodology
Furthermore, the study does not separate growth-hormone-treated and antibiotic-treated meat, which is widely considered to have higher health risks.
Similarly, there's no mention of food-borne illnesses due to microbial contamination, again a higher risk in combined and processed meat (hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage etc.)
> "Approximately 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3000 die each year from foodborne illness. A ten-year study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 46% of these hospitalizations and 43% of the deaths to meat. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the primary federal agency tasked with regulating food, is aware of these statistics, and characterizes them as “largely preventable.” It is becoming clear that modern meat production methods allow pathogens to spread with ease, creating great food safety risks."
If FDA Does Not Regulate Food, Who Will? A Study of Hormones and Antibiotics in Meat Production (2015)
A single animal, raised on crops not contaminated with pesticides and herbicides, nor treated with antibiotics and growth hormones, and butchered in a food-safe manner with due regard for avoiding microbial contamination, is not a health risk.
This rules out, what, >95% of domestic USA meat production, at least?
>Similarly, there's no mention of food-borne illnesses due to microbial contamination, again a higher risk in combined and processed meat (hamburgers, hot dogs, sausage etc.)
Have you read your own data?
>study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 46% of these hospitalizations and 43% of the deaths to meat
The majority of foodborne illnesses do not come from meat. If you are observant, you would notice that a disproportionate amount of things like E.coli outbreaks are associated to salads served in fast foods.
And much of the risk associated with meat comes from a lack of hygiene or under-cooked meat. Chicken is a high risk of E.coli when under-cooked but it's much less dangerous than a damn lettuce when it's well done.
Regardless of ingredients (meat or pure vegetarian) there's also too many illnesses contracted because employees of restaurants are severely lacking in hygiene. Gastroenteritis causing pathogens should have ceased to exist if people were not so disgusting, going to the toilet without washing their hands.
The nice thing about such articles is that you can change the message without being incorrect.
> "Approximately 128,000 Americans are hospitalized and 3000 die each year from foodborne illness. A ten-year study of 4589 foodborne outbreaks attributed 54% of these hospitalizations and 57% of the deaths to vegetables. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the primary federal agency tasked with regulating food, is aware of these statistics, and characterizes them as “largely preventable.” It is becoming clear that modern vegetable production methods allow pathogens to spread with ease, creating great food safety risks."
Even better, you can read the cited study, and look at the footnotes, and read the relevant citation:
> "These percentages do not include illnesses and deaths caused by seafood. See John A. Painter et al., Attribution of Foodborne Illnesses, Hospitalizations, and Deaths to Food Commodities by Using Outbreak Data, United States, 1998-2008"
> "An estimated 26,000 (46%) annual hospitalizations were attributed to land animal commodities, 24,000 (41%) to plant commodities, and 3,000 (6%) to aquatic animal commodities (Table 2). Produce commodities accounted for 38% of hospitalizations and meat-poultry commodities for 22%. Dairy accounted for the most hospitalizations (16%), followed by leafy vegetables (14%), poultry (12%), and vine-stalk vegetables (10%) (Figure 2, panel B). Among the estimated 57,000 hospitalizations, 8% were not attributed to a pathogen, mainly because the dataset did not include data for Toxoplasma spp.
Deaths:
> An estimated 629 (43%) deaths each year were attributed to land animal, 363 (25%) to plant, and 94 (6%) to aquatic commodities (Table 3). Meat-poultry commodities accounted for 29% of deaths and produce 23%. Among the 17 commodities, poultry accounted for the most deaths (19%), followed by dairy (10%), vine-stalk vegetables (7%), fruits-nuts (6%), and leafy vegetables (6%) (Figure 2, panel C). Of the 278 deaths attributed to poultry, most were attributed to Listeria monocytogenes (63%) or Salmonella spp. (26%). Among the 1,451 estimated deaths, 25% were not attributed to a pathogen, mainly because the dataset did not include data for Toxoplasma spp."
The real conclusion here is that the food supply chain in the USA is poorly regulated and presents large health risks to consumers, and as the producers do not have to bear the costs of externalities (air and water pollution, increased disease, etc.) they are under no pressure to improve the situation.
Again, meat, like vegetables, fruits, grains, leafy produce, etc. - when produced under high standards (i.e. no pesticide/herbicide contamination, no hormones and antibiotics, no violations of food safety standards) is quite healthy to consume.
And of the hospitalizations and deaths not from meat, how many are due to animal agriculture? I believe most are due to cattle feces runoff into waterways.
"Unprocessed" seems to be the key word that the headline skips, plus the one specific risk category. So basically the headline is a lie.
But ignoring that, the article is further confirmation that you should eat more vegetables and less processed meat, like your doctors have been telling you. But with some extra attacks on expertise and science, which I'm sure will be helpful in further eroding our civilization.
> "Unprocessed" seems to be the key word that the headline skips
The cancer claims haven't been specifically against things like hot dogs, sausages, pepperoni sticks, etc., but red meat. When the term "red meat" is used, that's implying anything containing red-looking meat from large ruminant animals.
> plus the one specific risk category
That's because that's the only risk category that anyone thought was credible up to this point. There are no risk categories for red meat, besides perhaps that one can overeat protein. That's really hard to do, especially with red meat.
> But ignoring that, the article is further confirmation that you should eat more vegetables and less processed meat,
There is no sound scientific evidence that anyone should eat more vegetables. People are certainly free to eat vegetables, they can be pretty tasty, and some may come with their own individual benefits, but there's nothing inherent to vegetables as a category that means we should simply consume more of them. Vegetables have their own drawbacks and contain various substances that are contraindicated in humans. Vegetables may be better than processed foods on a case by case basis, but not as a group. Humans aren't specialized in consuming them as a primary source of nutrition.
> like your doctors have been telling you
"Your doctors" know f--- all about nutrition. General practitioners are not nutritionists and are not trained in nutrition. Their job is to prescribe pills or send you to a specialist.
Is there any regulated/"official" definition to the word "processed" in this context? I see the word so much in the context of food in general and I've never known exactly what it means.
Buy foods in bulk, not boxed or in plastic. Make food from scratch from whole grains, veggies, peppers, spices. Avoid all of the seed oils.
My Dad is 101 and doing OK, and he has always preferred large salads, small amounts of lean meat. I feel better whenever I hit the Fuhrman Diet for six months.
For frying, I usually use a mixture of olive oil and butter. The oil slows down the process of the butter burning. It's certainly not as good as ghee, but ghee tends to make stuff greasy.
If you put butter into a pan that is too hot and it starts burning, it can be useful to cool things down by adding some oil. But the milk solids will always burn at a given temperature. A mixture of olive oil and butter won't let you cook at a higher temperature than just butter.
I don’t know if peanut oil is considered a seed oil or not, but it has one of the highest smoke points. (I’m aware peanuts aren’t seeds, but not everyone is.)
Coconut oil varies a lot in its smoke point; unrefined its similar to butter but refined can get up past 400 F / 204 C(similar to canola oil).
I do like cooking with it despite the low heat limitation because it's good for things you can cook at lower temps like eggs and if you get good high quality oil then it will be near tasteless. Which means you can actually taste the egg instead of whatever oil / lard you fried them with.
So the stock photo for "processed food" in MSM reports seems to be a picture of a hamburger. As far as I'm aware, the only processed things in a hamburger are the bun and the cheese. Oh - maybe the secret sauce; but I tell them to hold the cheese and sauce.
For me, processed meat means rubbery hotdog sausages; reconstituted chicken meat; doner kebab; TV dinners; fishcakes, and so on. [Edit: ham and bacon, of course, but only a crazy person eats a quarter-pound of bacon.] I imagine some of those are fine, but if you can't see the unprocessed ingredient, then the 'Lemon Market' rule says it's probably not what it's supposed to be.
> Processed meat refers to meat that has been preserved by smoking, curing, salting or adding preservatives. This includes sausages, bacon, ham, salami and pâtés.
> If you currently eat more than 90g (cooked weight) of red or processed meat a day, the Department of Health and Social Care advises that you cut down to 70g.
Scanning the article, I do not see any definition, except that at one place "fresh" is also mentioned.
I assume that "unprocessed" meat refers to meat that is cooked at home, as opposed to buying sausages, ham or any other industrial meat products, which may contain various additives or impurities from techniques like smoking.
This new study still shows an increased probability of cancer when consuming more than 200 g of unprocessed red meat per day, which is indeed more than should normally be eaten.
I have always been skeptical about these claims about the effects of eating meat, because they do not differentiate between the different methods of cooking the meat. I doubt that eating meat that was fried in oil has the same health effects as eating meat that was baked in an oven.
Other than the pedantic both cured and fermented count as chemically preserved in a broad sense, I think the general modern understanding of "processed foods" means that "ultra-processed foods" per the webmd definition https://www.webmd.com/diet/what-are-processed-foods#:~:text=....
e.g. foods that are doped with additives that don't necessarily occur in the food's base state, including dyes, preservatives, added flavors generated in lab environments, etc.
To be fair I'm not advocating either way, since I'm sure I ate some form of ultra-processed food this morning just by having grocery store brand jelly on my toast, but I think the argument is that by mixing these into the diet frequently there are unknown long-term side effects on the human body by eating these in excess.
Yes. It went through process of cooking, which causes that proteins in the meat will fall apart due to heat - denaturation. So it is processed by definition.
Yep. Removing the skin is a process, and the carrot underneath is then exposed to oxidation.
No clue if there is a health effect due to it. Just pointing out what processing means. Though usually processing is totally destroying the physical structure of something and applying heat/freezing/chemical exposure for preservation or transformation.
Maybe "processed foods" is a completely useless term.
I'm pretty sure it's a backformation from "heavily processed foods," which is a useful way to compare foods that have been picked and washed to foods that have been picked and washed and etc, and etc, and etc. Being meaningful makes is less useful for making grand purity pronouncements, though.
All food is processed, all of it is impure, it will make you dirty on the inside, and make you sick. The food that won't make you sick is the food that humans haven't sinned on between God's hand and your mouth.
Slippery, sloped, and in the case of carrots, roasted with olive oil and some kind of herb (dill, rosemary, thyme, or basil. The "or" is important here), perhaps some onion and garlic. Or on top of salad with balsamic vinaigrette.
The other comment on gradients is a good thought too.
Unless you're paying EU100 per litre, your "balsamic vinaigrette" isn't made with proper balsamic vinegar. It's made from regular vinegar mixed with colouring agents, flavouring agents and preservatives.
Proper balsamic vinegar is made using a solera system, and takes a number of years. I doubt any restaurant chef would use real balsamic vinegar to make a "balsamic vinaigrette"; the real thing is for sipping.
I'm not really being fair. It's just that the standards are terribly confusing. There are two main standards; one is ultra-strict, and the other is so relaxed as to be meaningless.
Well, that's how I see it. I didn't mean that the lower-grade stuff is 'knock-off'; I've never so much as seen a bottle of the 'proper' stuff, except in photos. But I'm sure I wouldn't take snifters of normal deli balsamic vinegar.
I don't generally want to eat food that's already been chewed. Arguably things like applesauce have been industrially chewed though.
When you eat food, your body processes it, exposing it to all sorts of nasty physical and chemical processes.
The objection to 'processed foods' is mostly about when the processing significantly changes the content of the food, whether that's from significant additives, or strucural changes like breaking down fiber. If you're ok with eating meat, nobody much cares about processing that removes parts that people don't eat and don't want to see, but if anything much is added, that's flagged (dye, water, preservatives, etc)
We semantically agree. There is a starting point to "processing" and the commentator's question for whether something applied falls into scope. Whether the connotation is agreeable to denotation is sort of a separate discussion, IMO. Separation of degree, not kind.
Yes. Everything that isn't raw is processed. If processed isn't what you mean by "processed," maybe you should say what you mean, e.g., smoking, adding sulfites, nitrates, sodium, and/or sugar.
I don't need to provide a definition for what is a nebulous term like "processed" in order to argue that the one provided in the original comment is both ridiculous and not congruent with what most other people would consider processed.
You only do if you want to make that argument successfully.
>> Everything that isn't raw is processed.
> Likewise, this is a circular definition.
No, it is not. A circular definition is that everything that is processed is processed, the one you're carefully avoiding in favor of argument by calling something ridiculous.
Except that it was clear that I meant "processed" in the way that it is generally used in the context of "processed food" and not in the sense of "having had something done to it".
I'm not in it for the rightness and wrongness and virtue and exercises of justice to the carrots, I'm in it for your request as to whether peeling a carrot counts as processing, which it does, as sometimes the most banal of examples illustrate a tapestry of lived complexity.
No, that's a meaningful definition. When food is transformed through a process, it becomes processed.
The alternative definition seems to be to throw the word around randomly, and to vaguely mention something like a tv dinner from the 50s as a counterexample.
It's annoying. I wish when people were talking about "processed meats" they'd talk about which meats and which processes. They're not fungible. Once you've learned one process, you haven't learned them all. Whether I'm using sodium chloride or sodium citrate makes a difference if we're doing science.
I don't think that's reasonable because there are certain categories of food where cooking makes them healthier/edible. I'm not sure that eating raw eggs is statistically healthier than boiled ones and would be surprised by such a study concluding as such. I would be very concerned about people insisting on eating raw beans? Lentils? Potatoes?
Sure, 'meat' itself is fine, it's the nitrosamine used to cure it, that's the bad part. Anyway, my old boss was a cancer researcher and he always said if you do these three things you have basically done everything to avoid getting cancer:
- excercise a little every day
- don't smoke
- avoid red meat
I think it is still best to err on the side of caution for a number of reasons. One is that not all red meat is equal in quality. For example, beef from cafo's where they heavily does with antibiotics and mostly feed them corn and soy is not the same as grass fed and finished.
But another reason is simply your individual health profile. Most people know that the Inuit and other northern people's have adaptations to allow them to handle much higher levels of meat and fat. Maybe you can't handle as much as other people can.
I only read the abstract but I saw nothing about the risk of obesity and diabetes there, but clearly in rich countries, we eat too much meat.
Lastly there is the environmental reasons. We can't feed everyone the same amount of meat that we in the rich countries eat. So sooner or later we will have to get used to less.
Thing that you thought was bad is good and thing that you thought was good is bad, that's 80% of nutritional click-bait. One note summaries of studies aren't worth reading and shouldn't shape your choices. Whatever rough understanding most people have of healthy vs unhealthy is close enough. We don't need to pretend we're all nutritional scientists attempting olympic athlete level nutritional perfection.
This is because nearly 100% of nutritional education effort is directed at children, which is stupid because children eat what their parents cook. Anyways, that has left a gaping hole for lifestyle blogs to fill with their pseudo-science.
When I was getting my Nutrition degree, I was involved in building a community website to help single fathers learn to cook for their kids. When we applied for the funding, we were one of three applications in the adult education section, versus hundreds in the child education category.
This is a fascinating observation about the funding of nutrition education, thank you for sharing it.
What do you think are the reasons most education efforts are spent on children? It seems to mirror the fact that children spend a significant part of their time on education, while adult education is ad-hoc and self-directed. Are there other factors that you can see from inside the field?
I've been a vegetarian since I visited a slaughterhouse when I was 10 years old. I'll never touch meat again. I believe if more people saw what I did, they would stop too, but perhaps not. I'm an old man now and humanity keeps slipping down in my psyches' personal internal hierarchy of veneration, or to state it plainly, "People suck."
How has that worked out for you, in terms of health? Obviously it is anecdotal, but I'm still curious. I've been plant based for 5 years. Trying to determine if it is a life long thing for me or not.
I'll answer. I have limited myself to vegan food for the last 17 years or so.
Buy good cookbooks. Bring your own food to things. That basically sums up our success sticking with it.
Health-wise, my health markers are extremely good. No B12 or iron deficiency. I attribute a ton of this success to consistent physical activity, though, particularly weight lifting.
Regarding physical activity, it comes easy, I am in way better physical health than the bay majority of my peers, if not for my asthma issues. I associate that, again, not with the diet, but with general physical activity.
Basically, the diet doesn't hurt, and statistically isn't likely to help you. The important part is the ecological cost of a diet full of meat, imo, or if someone eats enormous amounts of meat and ends up with a physical malady from it.
Vegan for nearly 7 years here. Got all my blood work back a couple months ago and I couldn't be healthier! I don't even know much about nutrition tbh. I eat a variety of things, make sure I get B12, and just try to eat green things at every meal. My body is healthy, my conscience is at ease, and I've never enjoyed food more.
The study tries to account for things like publication bias (though seems to not find any evidence for it or do any accounting for it in 5/6 of the comparisons under study). I don't think it's wise to conclude from the fringe cutting through the x-axis that only shoddy research would claim unprocessed red meat has a health risk (which is to say nothing about processed red meat, the subject of most of the headline-grabbing studies about health risks).
> I don't think it's wise to conclude from the fringe cutting through the x-axis that only shoddy research would claim unprocessed red meat has a health risk
You're right, but they don't claim that. The y-axis here is "relative risk." There's no such thing as "no risk" in these studies.
Practically speaking, of course, there is -- most of us live our lives with "low risk" = "no risk," necessarily.
The takeaway from this figure is exactly what's written in the article: "As shown in Fig. 4, the relationship between unprocessed red meat intake and combined-cause incidence and mortality was increasing across the entire exposure domain."
> The takeaway from this figure is exactly what's written in the article: "As shown in Fig. 4 [...]"
That's from the study that I didn't criticize, not the bigthink article that I do criticize. The claims about "shoddy research" and "not a health risk" are from the bigthink article, not the study. If bigthink rewrote the article to focus on the quotation you provided, it would be far more informative.
Edit: And to somewhat address your point about relative risk (RR). If someone told me that an activity had almost no upside health risk, and a wide range of downside health risk, I would not think "no health risk" is an appropriate summary statement. Again, this is a criticism of the bigthink (or really, RealClearScience) article.
From my basic research into saturated fats, they are only really a problem if you are high in cholesterol and need to lower it.
I've checked my cholesterol levels and they are low, despite me being a fan of butter and red meat. If they ever became a problem I would cut out the saturated fats, but there seems to be little point in doing that preemptively.
The cholesterol discussion is highly nuanced. There are alternative theories of the function of lipoproteins in the blood. If you're interested check out Dave Feldman's work around his theory, the Lipid Energy Model. https://cholesterolcode.com/model/
The state of food research science is so ridiculously bad. We got paper after paper, and badly written news article after badly written news article, contradicting each other on everything about fat types, coffee, milk, meat, wine, anything else that's edible or drinkable you name it.
It's as if we know exactly zero information about the relationship between food and health, because for every fact, there'll be another contradictory fact.
I have no trust in food related scientific research. Give us properly conducted experiments with large enough (millions?) sample sizes and all the necessary blinds, publish it, and ensure we can STICK with it, don't leave openings for papers with the opposite opinion to be published, by making your experiment good enough to be indisputable. Thank you.
> Give us properly conducted experiments with large enough (millions?) sample sizes, publish it, and ensure we can STICK with it, don't leave openings for papers with the opposite opinion to be published, by making your experiment good enough to be indisputable.
With all due respect, this comment sounds like you've not really ever considered how this research is actually conducted.
I indeed don't know how research is conducted in this field, and I'm sorry if I made the wrong point due to that. But we're getting papers with opposite opinions now, so something is very wrong with how it's conducted now. Either do it properly, or be honest about the correctness/p-values/... to avoid articles on "red meat is bad", then articles with "red meat is not bad", or "coffee causes cancer", then "coffee has antioxidants and is good against cancer", etc...
Part of your frustration is that you're asking the wrong question. "Is it good or bad?" That is the too simple of a question.
Let me use an example we can all understand on Hacker New: Is React good or bad? Should I start using React? We all know, it depends. Asking whether something is good or bad is not helpful.
The human body is more complicated than even the worst software project. And we're dealing with millions of bodies, all different, not just one. What is healthy for one person will kill another person (allergies, etc). Going back to React, we seem to want the answer to be either "everyone should use React", or "nobody should use React"; we want a clear answer that applies to everyone, but that's impossible.
That's a fair point, and reasonable as someone who's looking for actionable insight. But papers are supposed to contradict each other. This is how scientific knowledge evolves.
I will not claim that nutrition science has achieved methodological purity, because obviously that is far from the truth. But the system doesn't seem to be as broken as folks think.
I think the field just has a long way to go before it settles on methods that are reproducible. Until then, opposing papers are literally the only path we have to get there.
> I will not claim that nutrition science has achieved methodological purity
I'm not in a position to critique the methodology. But the reports that reach the public (and what use are reports that don't reach the public?) keep contradicting one another. If they can't get consistent results, then these reports shouldn't be appearing on the front pages of newspapers; they should stay in the pages of obscure journals.
I pay no attention at all to "nutrition science". I eat a mixed diet, no fruit at all, few green vegetables, a small steak once a week or so, quite a lot of cheese and whole grains. I let my stomach guide me. If I followed dietary guidelines, I'd probably starve. I simply can't swallow food that doesn't appeal to my appetite.
No, it’s totally broken. Typical nutritional studies take a large group of people, ask them what they normally eat, and look for correlation with whatever health problems that have. This can’t possibly work because most people’s diets have been influenced by whatever crap they have read about nutrition over the years.
Or they use animal models, animals whose natural diet looks nothing like a human diet.
The only way to really know how diet affects health is to take a large group of people, assign them different diets, see that they actually follow them, then measure the outcomes. But practically nobody does this because it is really expensive to do.
Like if research was by and large conducted out of any kind of business considerations and agenda. We're getting these contradictory signals for the same reason that it was supposedly debated in the 90s that humans had an impact on the climate or in the 70s that smoking was cancerous.
As a layman, it feels like studies which are not specific to individual genomes (and expressions of those genomes), and don't usually consider differences in areas we seem to be learning more about every hour (e.g. gut biome), are going to be antiquated as we continue to learn more in those types of areas.
Said the other way, getting to the individual level will have a massive impact on how we approach health and medicine.
Am I too optimistic? If and when we can get to this individual level, are we each still a very complex system with too many unknown unknowns - too many interdependencies and unknown relationships between cause and effect (even when they do exist)?
Slams should not be allowed in titles here. It’s abused by journalists or editors who just want to make you feel angry instead of conveying a point. I question info from any publication that uses it
Diet research seems like a wild goose chase and I'm not sure I trust much of it anymore. There are so many variables involved when it comes to human health that I fail to see how you can do any kind of accurate modelling on what is or isn't beneficial when it comes to food unless it has an obviously seismic effect e.g sugar, lack of vitamins and minerals etc. Whatsmore, it's plausible that something that may appear beneficial in the short term may actually be an imbalance that causes a long term response that isn't beneficial. Seemingly every food on the planet has a study showing it causes or cures cancer. Yes I'm being hyperbolic but you get what I'm saying. The whole problem is further compounded by Big $INDUSTRY funding and bribing scientists and whoever else to push $INDUSTRY_PRODUCT such as happened with the sugar lobby until recently.
People desperately want diet to behave like classical physics with an indentikit formula they can just roll out to everyone but it's just not the case. Everyone's body responds to different foods differently and even reacts to those same foods differently over time or in different situations. The only real way to find out is personal experimentation and observation.
I'm always surprised that only we, as in humans species, need studies, books and other things to educate us on what should or should not eat. The processing unit is inside us and yet its feedback is unreliably or, at best, too late to change the course of action. Even when looking at food, my sense doesn't say anything about it suitability to my body and mind. Only rotten or gone bad food are repulsive to the senses.
And we are the most evolved species in this damn mud ball. I'm sick of it. From religions, cultures and science, everybody has something to say about the food we eat. But my body? Nope, almost nothing or too late, and that point you don't even know what caused the damage.
I see a cow and it just eats the grass all day. It is stronger than me. It weigh more than me. It might be less intellectual than me, but it is not less intelligent than me as far as nutrition science.
I don't want to speak like I'm some kind of expert on the state of nutrition research, but I at least follow expert summaries more closely than most people, meaning following science-minded folks in the evidence-based health and fitness communities, not popular science publishing.
My impression is that this is not really a problem with the research itself. There's the well-known problem of science journalists turning every finding into vastly simplified and often flat wrong clickbait. But there is a separate issue with recommendation bodies being very conservative and slow to change a recommendation. In all the time I've been paying attention, which is years now, every published finding about risks from red meat has pretty much exclusively been from processed and charred meats, with the risk clearly coming from nitrates and carbon, not from the meat itself.
I don't personally "like" this finding. I live in Texas, love brisket, got seriously into smoking meats for years in my 30s, but there is no way I can look at all the evidence that's come out and conclude anything other than that eating smoked meat on a regular basis for decades is going to increase risk. But at the same time, I have nothing to make me believe that simply eating red meat at all that has not been smoked or charred and otherwise modified in some way to extend shelf life, is going to increase risk. And the studies themselves never claimed this. It's health agencies and science journalism that chose to make this interpretation without it being justified, whether out of an abundance of caution or just to grab eyeballs.
>And so, the researchers came up with the burden of proof risk function, a novel statistical method to quantitatively “evaluate and summarize evidence of risk across different risk-outcome pairs.”
My stats knowledge is admittedly shallow, but this seemed a bit out of place to me. Is it common to develop novel statistical vehicles for meta-studies like this? My expectation would be that this is a kind of investigation we've been doing for a while, so new models aren't really needed.
I have spoken with one of the leading researchers of cholesterol in the US and he said if you have high cholesterol you should only eat beef once a year due to the inflammatory nature of beef.
I have cut out beef easily. There are a whole host of other reasons to not eat beef or minimize it in your diet. But I'd be curious who funded this research directly or indirectly.
If you want to skip the article and go directly to the conclusions of the research:
> ...given all the data available on red meat intake and risk of a subsequent outcome, we estimate that consuming unprocessed red meat across an average range of exposure levels increases the risk of subsequent colorectal cancer, breast cancer, IHD and type 2 diabetes at least slightly compared to eating no red meat (by at least 6%, 3%, 1% and 1%, respectively). Furthermore, the conservative interpretation of available data is consistent with no association between consuming unprocessed red meat and the risk of subsequent ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke
In other words, very mild risk of _unprocessed_ red meat consumption.
Here's the thing - the culprit isn't the meat itself, it's the saturated fat within the meat. Fatty meats have more saturated fat, and the dose-response of red meat (which is generally higher fat than other meats) means it takes very little to hit general recommendations for saturated fat consumption (less than 10% of total calories).
Also it's hard to decipher what "processing" really is. Ground meat is processed. Bacon is really processed. But you have to cut up meat from an animal to make it packageable - this is all processing. What is "bad" processing of meat? What is "good"? Is there such a thing? Does the moment you cure the meat (i.e. bacon) make it "bad"?
This is how the general public is left with more questions than answers when research like this comes out. But if you stick to the canonical advice of eat lots of plants and a little bit of animal products, you're probably going to be okay. Keep saturated fat and sodium in check. Keep your fiber high. Don't smoke and don't drink to excess. Manage stress. Exercise. All that stuff in aggregate is what matters far more than a grass fed ribeye for dinner tonight.
The amount of biased interest, lobbying, and funding from the meat lobby / industry is stupendous. With all that as a background, we ought to be skeptical of studies that contradict the evidence of high consumption of meat being correlated highly with (and there's good evidence for causal pathways too of) adverse health outcomes.
He’s an Outspoken Defender of Meat. Industry Funds His Research, Files Show.
My Italian grand-grand parents lived a long life, often filled with hard work for the time they live in. I probably share a lot of their genetical structure. It seems logical to me that I should disregard "good and bad food" clickbait studies and eat and drink the same way they ate.
Am I missing it, or is there no mention of genetics in there? That seems like such a massive oversight that failing to address it makes this meaningless.
It’s like comparing the space/time complexity of different programs without looking at the code - and instead only looking at the language it was written in.
I have had this same thought every time anyone brings up these longevity studies. For the most part the blue zones are isolated locations that would likely have genetically distinct populations. It may be that these groups are genetically predisposed to exceptional longevity or that they're simply especially well adapted to the traditional diet of their location. Either way the findings wouldn't generalize to any useful dietary guidelines unless you're descended from one of those populations. The one exception might be Loma Linda, not very isolated but home to a large population of Seventh Day Adventists who are vegetarian, but I'd be willing to bet that it's still more genetically homogeneous than your average US city.
Red meat is the most efficient way of maintaining iron in the body. That doesn't mean you have to eat red meat all the time, but sufficient for YOUR body to have enough iron. Some people might get away with one iron meal a month, some others might need it 3 times week.
This article has about 10 red flags -- the first one to jump out to me is this:
And so, the researchers came up with the burden of proof risk function, a novel statistical method to quantitatively “evaluate and summarize evidence of risk across different risk-outcome pairs.” Using the function, any researcher can evaluate published data for a certain health risk, then, using the function, compute a single number that translates to a one- through five-star rating system.
A new statistical method?
Outside of that, the entire tenor of the article sounds like it's out of an EA journal. We don't do "studies" -- we do _real_ studies.
That was never a significant concern with regard to the push for lower consumption of meat anyway. If anything the entirety of your diet combined with your physical activity matters, not whether you choose to eat meat at all.
Water consumption, land use, and biodiversity loss are way more important than even our own health care. On top of that, market pressure will always enable abusive treatment and processing of the animal, which is what large-scale animal husbandry inherently is anyway, while climate change and the size of the global population perpetually accelerate the rise of the costs of and competition for our resources.
I have performed over 30 thousand colonoscopies in my career so far. I have never seen a piece of meat in the colon, but see rotting vegetables all the time as humans don't have a ruminant extra stomach like cows to digest vegetables/fiber. Meat gets a bad rap for no good reason. Processed meat is another matter as it is bad for you.
I’ve been listening to a medical history podcast called Sawbones. It’s funny how history rhymes so well. Every generation of health experts have had this sort of smug superiority about how the previous generations were such morons and, finally, they actually understand how things work.
But even today it’s obvious that’s simply untrue. Less fats and proteins, more grains? Way to go, food pyramid.
I’m not equipped to scrutinize this report on red meat. But I do know that they can be very very wrong and to be skeptical of any bold claim in any direction.
The real concern is cured meats. Nitrosamines are terrible for you. Even "no nitrites added" meats will often have celery juice concentrate added, which contains lots of nitrites.
Grain fed meat is totaly different than grass fed meat.
Grain fed animals have very high saturated fat amount compared to grass fed ones.
Grass fed animals and wild boars and wild cattle have much more PUFAs than grain fed ones.
So the quality of meat went down drasticaly in the last 100 years.
Which is ironic since many carnivores are screaming "PUFA bad" in a reductionist fashion and at the same time say you "must eat only grass fed animals" lol.
More and more evidence is mounting that we should be focusing on our gut biome diversity, which is increased when eating a variety of plant-based foods. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33619379/
Statistical models are flimsy and misleading. I think anyone who has worked with them would admit that. Add or remove one parameter and the whole thing can change. Trusting any conclusion based on a statistical model is naive. The fact that scientific research relies on them so heavily is the main reason I don't "trust the science". It's a house built on sand.
It turns out Leafy Greens are the largest health risk for catching bacteria. You can't even wash it out because the bacteria grows into the plant. My wife and I stopped eating any fresh greens lately. Might start again with Kale only because it's a fancier salad green probably sourced in small gardens.
So, please provide a definition of ‘processed’. Like everyone says here, it is really not clear what that is.
It seems ‘an intuition’ to what processed is to most people; some things are obvious ($1 per 12 freezer pack of burgers are not going to be unprocessed), but it gets less obvious fast…
My own definition: If the ingredient list contains something that you are not exactly sure what it is, then it is processed.
Personally I consider a can of skipjack tuna in spring water to be unprocessed, even though it has been canned.
I consider a frozen bag of peeled and cooked shrimp to be unprocessed, even though it has been peeled, cooked, and frozen.
But a frozen bag of peeled garlic shrimp I would consider to be processed, because the ingredient list contains items I don't exactly know what they are.
So that's my definition, it's the ingredient list.
I don't think we need a strict definition. If people really got the message "processed food is bad" and made reasonable choices from that information and their intuition (or a google image search) they would stop eating the worst things, which would help a lot.
yeah, also, it would probably help to think in terms like "raw foods are better" instead of "processed food is bad". When shopping, just try to get as close to raw as you can instead of trying to determine the dividing line between good and bad.
ground mystery meat full of preservatives, coloring, soy protein to mask its own low protein content, and plenty of other shit. fast food slop for bipedal cattle
“There is, however, more evidence for a health risk from eating too few vegetables. That is really the risk of a high-meat diet, those meat calories are displacing vegetable calories.”
Isn't a calorie just a calorie though? Or is this in regards to what comes alongside those calories?
CICO is true at the highest level but not in general. The effect 200g of protein has on your body vs. 200g of carbohydrate (in particular insulin, ghrelin, etc) means not all calories are created equal.
Energy-wise, yes, but the devil is in the details. If I had to infer the meaning here it's that high protein = constipation = not good. Vegetable calories include fiber which is important to insure you're processing things efficiently. Additionally, good vegetables (unfortunately not the ones you can get at the store usually) contain lots of great vitamins and minerals. I would be curious if they mean a typical American chain store vegetable which demonstrably has almost no nutrition compared to it's natural counterpart.
I think it's not so black and white. When you eat meat you essentially eat what the animal ate. Wild elk is going to be a different "red meat" from factory farmed beef that ate only low nutrition corn grown with pesticides
Sure, and a spot of heroin won't hurt you either. No one EVER suggested that eating some meat was harmful. Then Americans and some Brazillians decided they could live on 100% steak. Yeah, no.
So... if i live in a country without a beef tradition, where the beef is imported and -ing expensive and most people have no idea how to cook it... what am I supposed to do now? :)
I don't like the title. It asserts a finding that wasn't actually found.
They determined that the science doesn't really support claims of red meat causing x, y or z health issue. That is not the same as finding that red meat is not a health risk.
The real conclusion: Nutrition science has a long history of poor methodology and cannot state much at all with much statistical confidence.
That conclusion should not shock anyone familiar with how most such studies get done.
Just another example of medical misinformation or disinformation that has been propagated by our media and science community. How many times do we have to fall for the same trick and just fall for what we are told, hook line and sinker?
"Low fat diets are heart-healthy" was false, "high salt causes high blood pressure" was false, and now this "red meat causes cancer" is false. The same goes for "blue light causes sleep disruption" was shoddy science as well, conducted on 8 people with an average difference of 15 mins. Yet Apple and other phone manufacturers modified their settings because of this bad science that made its way through our society.
There was a time when people who disputed low fat diets by pointing to the Mediterrean Diet, and they were considered heretics.
This is why free flow of scientific information is vital to a well functioning society. Without it, we tend to fall into groupthink and we never advance our thinking. MY ENTIRE LIFE, I've been inundated with the idea that red meat caused cancer, especially burnt red meat, and at first I was scared, and then I started eschewing it, and I was right. I'm glad these scientists had the courage to go against the "accepted" view and every scientist should have the freedom to do the same without being castigated. That's one of the biggest problem we have in society today.
in one of lex friedman's more recent podcasts where he had jordan peterson as a guest, they both rave about red meat. peterson allegedly eats a steak for breakfast and for lunch and for dinner and lex is also doing something similar. not sure what to make of that, just came to my mind.
Wheels are coming off the Climate bullshit they keep peddling and this lab grown meat being cancer cells is a fantastic bit of news for me. No way that catches on in the mainstream.
Been on carnivore for 10 days now. Feel like a horse and my lifting energy has increased, my calisthenics have improved. I sleep better and don't feel bloated.
Grains and sugar have been the biggest lie I was ever told.
But here's what I propose to you HN reader: take 30 days. 30 measly days, eat eggs, meat and dairy. No grain, no processed shit. Give it a try and see how you feel. Ignore the rest.
You can get similar results, at least in the short term, with most highly-restrictive diets, provided what's allowed isn't egregiously unhealthy (e.g. "eat only candy") which it almost never is.
I expect the main two mechanisms of action are that these diets tend to reduce total caloric intake (lower variety = lower interest in eating; less opportunistic snacking since what's on offer is often not allowed by the diet; and so on) and drastically reduce how much outright crap adherents eat.
Actually the body switches to using Ketones (Fat) as fuel instead of Glucose/Sugar/Carbohydrates. Its a completely different system OP has switched to now.
10 days to evaluate a diet seem low. Not many people in the history of humanity have had a pure carnivore diet, there's a reason we have evolved longer intestines than carnivores. Another interesting fact is that the inuk people who have mostly a carnivore diet due to inability to farm in the artic, live 15 years shorter than the average person in the developed world. Omnivore is the way to go, not carnivore.
> Give it a try and see how you feel. Ignore the rest.
Remember that how you feel isn't the same thing as your long term health risks. My belief, and that of mainstream science, is that this diet will raise your cholesterol and increase your risk of heart disease. You won't be able to feel your heart health worsening until things are very bad. It might be a trade-off some people want though.
Get your blood work done at regular intervals and confirm that fear. I've seen a lot of people show impressive bloodwork results online. But again, don't believe internet randoms, just talk to a doctor and get your blood drawn. See for yourself.
I had 193 LDL-C, which is about 97th percentile, and I'm fairly lean so I can't look to weightloss as a solution. I was scared when I saw this measurement, and after some research started a mostly plant based diet. I purchased another blood test 10 days later and my LDL-C had fallen 50 points to 143. Both tests were reliable; performed by Quest diagnostics. I hope I will continue to improve. I feel a little shitty though, perhaps I haven't mastered a balanced plant based diet yet. I do eat lean meat two meals a week. I believe a proper plant based diet takes more skill to balance than one that includes meat.
I also believe that what works for one might not work for another. So yes, trying different things and getting measurements is good advice. I'd warn against chiropractors (they call themselves "doctors", but not of medicine) on YouTube telling people that cholesterol doesn't matter; it is a risk factor, but only one of many factors.
The effect of statin drugs on your cholesterol would utterly swamp any putative effects of dietary fat. Also, how is dietary fat bad but the fat synthesized in your body from excess carbs good?
You talk as though it was one study done 60 years ago.
My understanding is that they've done a wide variety of studies continuously over decades.
They observed only, people with higher cholesterol were more likely to die.
They fed various animals high fat diets, the animals died sooner than control groups. The animals who are a lot of fat had higher serum cholesterol.
They tried diet interventions, no medicine, just getting people to eat different, those who ate less saturated fat tended to live longer. Saturated fat is correlated with cholesterol levels, as shown in other observational studies.
They created medicines, did trials, some of the medicines tended to lower cholesterol and extend life, others lowered cholesterol and didn't extend life.
It's complicated, but there's a wide variety of studies that have looked at cholesterol from different angles and taken all together paint a crude but coherent picture.
Today, we know that total cholesterol is quite crude, looking at LDL is better, and there's other blood markers that are even better than LDL.
It's complex and beyond what can be discussed effectively on HN, but there's a lot behind the conventional wisdom on cholesterol. Dismissing it all as "bunk science" is dismissing a strawman.
Furthermore, mainstream recommendations are completely reasonable. Eat a variety of food, avoid processed foods, limit saturated fat but some is ok, only give statins when cholesterol is very high or their risk for heart disease is high. If more people followed the guidelines, the net effect would mostly be people eating more whole fruits and vegetables, hardly the great evil the industry is sometimes accused of.
If you have or had elevated blood sugar, also consider combining that diet with a regimen of metformin. It's cheap, it reduces blood sugar, and it helps with weight loss. It's a prescription drug, but it's long since off patent.
Dr Sean baker has eaten literally nothing but red meat, cooked rare to boot, for more than five years. He has perfect health. He hasn’t developed any of the pathologies that are caused by red meat or saturated animal fat according to the medical establishment. CAC score zero. Zero plaques in a survey of blood vessels in the eye balls. Nothing. The current model is wrong. Why is it so hard for people to wrap their mind around it?
His labs are pretty hard data if you ask me. And there are many people who do it. And the evidence is overwhelming. Look at the cholesterol drugs that enzymatically transform LDL to HDL. They improved peoples cholesterol massively and it had zero impact on cardiac events. Zero.
There's nuance in all of this. People sympathetic to American consumption patterns will probably see science and explanations like this as some kind of endorsement of their diet. Nutritional science is still in its infancy and we'll be waffling on the specifics for decades to come, especially if food companies have a vested interest in funding studies.
Another data point. Just eat minimally processed whole foods as often as possible, diversify your plate and moderate your intake. I think people are too hyper focused on the "super" and "evil" quality of foods and we end up stuck in the margins bike-shedding the minutia.