What the body really needs is not processed foods, which are loaded with salt, sugar, and fat [0, 1]. Processed foods are what the world's largest food corporations need you to buy in order to generate profits that feed their businesses.
What the body needs is fresh foods - fruits, vegetables, grains, pulses, nuts and meat.
[0] https://www.penguin.com.au/books/salt-sugar-fat-978144813387...
I kinda believe it but it’s real “chemicals!!” sort of generality. I can imagine a granola bar being less bad than like… my grandma’s paté
Look down the aisles of a store. If it's in a box, or a bag, it's probably based on processed carbs.
Disclosure: Biased diabetic who has struggled with management, and now "strictly" (with the best of intentions) limits processed carbs. Bread of any kind, especially. Toss the hamburger bun, for example. And it's worked, with help from meds.
https://www.lhsfna.org/index.cfm/lifelines/may-2019/the-many...
It's not that it's "processed" necessarily. Your grandmother processes fresh pumpkin to turn it into pumpkin soup, and that's still healthy, nutritious, and delicious.
The problem with food from Cargill. Nestle, Pepsico, Kraft, Unilever, Kellog, General Mills and the like is the added sugar, added fat, and added salt in every can, box, jar, bottle and packet they sell in supermarkets.
Read the labels. They'll tell you how much sugar, fat and salt is in every 100g of product.
If its more than 2g of sugar per 100g, you're being manipulated to crave and buy more.
Check the ketchup and the breakfast cereal labels. Compare the sugar in those to the sugar in Coke. What do you find?
How much sugar is listed in the label for your granola bar?
Take sausages. These have been around for ages but are, technically, processed. Are these now bad? They seem to pass the lindy test.
One obvious difference is time and fineness. The machine will grind it significant smaller than your teethes. And processed meat from machines has far longer time to sit and change.
Some other reasons are that processed food is usually not just the meat itself. but a mass that is mixed and enriched with several other elements. And in the money-driven food-industry they are usually not the most healthy things.
From what I gather you shouldn't consider that as a strict rule. It's more a rule of tendencies. Less processed food tends to have more fiber, less sugar, less calorie density. There are exceptions, and obviously it's sometimes debatable what counts as "more processed".
But despite these inaccuracies, it's probably a good simple guidance in a field where there's a lot of uncertainty.
Not all fats are equal. For example, high-fat foods like nuts, butter, avocados, cold-pressed olive oil etc do not occupy the same space as highly processed fats (e.g. trans fat/hydrogenated fat).
Salt remains divisive among health researchers after many years of public campaigns warning the public to limit salt intake. But is it less harfmul than previously thought?
The Guardian: Salt not as damaging to health as previously thought, says study (2018):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/09/salt-not-as-...
In any case, while human bodies are amazing in the way they can strive on different diets, we know that the traditional Intuit diet (~50% fat, 30% protein, 20% carbs) leads to significantly increased cardiovascular risk:
"However, actual evidence has shown that Inuit have a similar prevalence of coronary artery disease as non-Inuit populations and they have excessive mortality due to cerebrovascular strokes, with twice the risk to that of the North American population.[27][28] Indeed, the cardiovascular risk of this diet is so severe that the addition of a more standard American diet has reduced the incidence of mortality in the Inuit population.[29]"
But protein is the macro nutritient which is least likely to get you fat, too much fat, you will gain fat if you don't work out and are in a calorie surplus, same for carbs. Too much protein is hard to achieve consistently and will give you flatulence, but not much else.
Too many scenarios and factors to sum up all in a one size fits all statement.
If someone is trying to lose weight, protein intake should be bit higher, to preserve the muscle tissue.
> A 2014 analysis of 36 papers found that protein supplements have no impact on lean mass and muscle strength during the first few weeks of resistance training in untrained individuals.
Seems like any difference you would see with a couple few weeks of training would be a rounding error? In my experience, any noticeable differences in muscle mass require months of training.
If someone gains 2kilos of pure muscle(not fat and water) in a year , it's a lot. That is like 175grams a month, so yeah, these studies are done by people who shouldn't have any business doing such studies.
They leave out too many factors, of course supplements will do nothing for a newcomer.
The only supplements that work you will find on the banned substances lists. The next best thing is a proper diet. I think bodybuilding is a rather dumb sport, but they know how to diet, they have decades of pioneer experience.
It makes the case that roughly 15% of calories is what we should be eating, which is the proportion in the average diet. The basis for this is the protein leverage hypothesis, which states that when protein falls below roughly 15% of our diet, we overeat to compensate. 15% of daily calories corresponds to 1.2g/kg/d, substantially more than the suggested 0.75g/kg/d from the BBC article.
I'm not sure that it's correct to say we eat too much protein for our level of exercise. It seems like it might be more accurate to say we exercise too little for our natural level of protein consumption.
EDIT: Nevermind, found some:
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/8/5/295 [from 2016]
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/35/1/6/469334... [from 1982]
One that says it doesn't differ: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/88/5/1322/4648885 [from 2008]
Another demographic who can benefit from extra protein? The elderly. That’s because as we age, we need more protein to retain muscle mass. But we also tend to eat less protein as we get older because our taste-buds begin to prefer sweet over savoury.
So maybe those bars are intended as whole meal replacement? If so it's not clear on the labels.
Just buy a bag of nuts if you want what bars portray themselves to be, but are not.
That's all I really need to know. Of the big 3 macros, I "trust" carbs the least, then fat, then protein. There's bad carbs - sugars and simple starches, and bad fats - trans fats and long saturated fats, with cholesterol being iffy, but are there "bad proteins" outside of their associated fats?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073510972...
USDA is responsible for pretty much all food and farming oversight, including animal products and fresh vegetables. Just because one of their initiatives produced a misguided food pyramid poster isn't reason to denigrate the entire institution.
I'm sure you enjoy mad cow disease-free beef and salmonella free vegetables and chicken eggs when you go to the supermarket. You can thank USDA for that.
Well, I learned recently I have low B12 levels via a blood test. B12 is found in meats, fish, and dairy. We'll see if supplementation reduces my carnivore desires.
Just a single data point but it seemed salient for the discussion.
According to some studies I should be fat or my muscles would grow as if I Was eating half the protein which is not the case.
This article is a convoluted joke, just like the rest of the nutritional science field. In few other fields can you find so many contradictory theories. Mainly due to the poor research methodologies.
Instead, most knowledge in nutrition comes either from extremely small clinical studies (often less than 50 people), often with co-morbidities such as obesity or diabetes or endocrine diseases; or from professional atheltics. Or, from huge national-level statistics that rely on interviews for self-reported diet information, and are thus forced to mix diet, diet perception, excersise levels, lifestyle (stress, sleep) and environmental factors in one big mess, out of which come recommendations like the mediteranean diet, instead of siesta or 5-7 weeks of vacation per year or year-round sun.
> In the early 20th Century, Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent a collective five years eating just meat. This meant that his diet consisted of around 80% fat and 20% protein. Twenty years later, he did the same as part of a year-long experiment at the New York City’s Bellevue Hospital in 1928.
> Stefansson wanted to disprove those who argued that humans cannot survive if they only eat meat. But unfortunately for him, in both settings he very quickly became ill when he was eating lean meats without any fat. He developed "protein poisoning”, nicknamed “rabbit starvation”. His symptoms disappeared after he lowered his protein intake and he raised his fat intake. In fact, after returning to New York City and to a typical US diet with more normal levels of protein, he reportedly found his health deteriorating and returned to a low-carb, high fat, and high protein diet until his death aged 83.
This doesn't seem like an anecdote about too much protein, it seems like an anecdote about too little fat. Wikipedia's article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning confirms that this is the right interpretation, and mentions (as this article does, later) that there is no point at which you can get poisoned by too much protein consumption, as long as you are also consuming enough fat.
Wikipedia goes into more detail about the experiment at Bellevue. The two types of diets he was on were a) all meat, with fat and b) all lean meat (analogous to eating solely rabbits, which are naturally lean and have little fat, hence the name). Diet A was fine; diet B was not.
The article's phrasing "a typical US diet with more normal levels of protein" implies that the levels were higher than his previous diet, which caused him problems again. It seems pretty implausible for the standard US diet of the '20s and '30s to be higher-protein than either of these all-meat diets! And the article does mention he returned to a "high protein" diet. It seems like the more reasonable reading is that the important part was that his diet was "low-carb, high fat," which the typical US diet was and is not.
"Most experts agree with Tipton that protein is best consumed in food instead of supplements. But there are some exceptions, such as athletes who find it difficult to hit their daily protein targets, points out Graeme Close, professor of human physiology at Liverpool John Moores University. “I believe most need more than the recommended daily allowance, and there’s good evidence to support this,” he says. In this case, he says, a shake can be useful.
Another demographic who can benefit from extra protein? The elderly. That’s because as we age, we need more protein to retain muscle mass. But we also tend to eat less protein as we get older because our taste-buds begin to prefer sweet over savoury."
In my opinion there is no such thing as too much protein. You should have an estimate of how much calories you burn each day and eat accordingly. Supplements, like shakes, are just easier to consume since they're liquids, and some people have low appetite.
Most people should eat more protein and vegetables, but ditch any refined sugars, oils, processed food, and cook their meals instead of eating garbage snacks.
> Fortunately, it’s difficult to have too much protein. While we do have an upper limit of protein intake, it’s “virtually impossible” to reach, says Tipton.
I don’t use any sports supplements but I do try to prioritize my diet in terms of protein > fat > carbs. It’s tough to find unprocessed protein sources that aren’t at least somewhat healthy. Even red meat provides a great iron source at 1 8 oz filet every week or 2.
Excess protein might be wasteful to the wallet and the environment, but at least it will not get you as fat.
That's why carnivorous have short but large intestines: they digest proteins as quickly as possible before they turn useless.
Maybe a key point is to span a large amount of proteins intake across several hours (as bodybuilders do, if I am not mistaken).
The reason I've always heard about carnivores having shorter digestive tracks is that animal matter is much easier to digest than fiber-and-cellulose-laden plant material. In most organisms (expect humans) digestion takes the most % of energy so shortening the digestive tract if it's not necessary is a no-brainer for evolution.
1000 of each isn’t obviously excessive of any one but without exercise you will get fat.
The problem with making a consumer product that isn't primarily designed to sell is, you tend not to sell very much of it. When it comes to convenience foods - and anything ready-to-eat in a Mylar wrapper is, almost by definition, a convenience food - what most people want to buy is junk food. Not out of some moral failing, I don't think, so much as that, when you're going for convenience foods, you just happen to be working with a part of your brain that's hard-wired to crave junk food. So we tend to go for junk food, and, even when that's not what we think we want, it's ridiculously easy to be taken in by junk food whose Mylar wrapper loudly proclaims that it's actually healthy food.
From there, it's just the law of the jungle. Products that sell better get the shelf space, products that don't sell as well don't. That determines who gets the shelf space, and therefore who gets to survive as a company.
I've also seen this play out at a macro scale in the rise of Whole Foods Market. They devote every bit as much of their shelf space to convenience foods as any other supermarket. Between that and their distressingly ironic name, it's hard for me to feel surprised that I've seen them out-compete a great many beloved stores that were more genuinely focused on selling whole foods over the past quarter century.
Sit anyone down in front of their local pizza joint and tell them to eat a calorically neutral diet without a tracker and see what happens. Compare this to what happens when someone is sat in front of roast chicken and a high fiber vegetable like asparagus/spinach etc.
Odds are you'll get closer to calorie neutrality and balanced macros in the latter scenario than the former.
[Verse 1] Sugar, sugar, who you talkin' to? Dirty water who be lovin' you? Stroke, no joke, musta hit that salt Don't look at me, 'cause it ain't my fault I know you want it, say you need it And you eat it, 'cause you want it Sugar, sugar, you don't love me Sugar, sugar, you don't need me Now, it be eating me (Eat, eat it up) Got us fightin' diabetes Stress level, sleepless, emotional, mental Drugs in the food I love screwin' up my physical I'll never fall in love again With this hate on my plate and Food and drug administration Is my my hallucination?
[Verse 2] Sugar, sugar, I know you move me I know you wanna drink me You in everything, not just candy Worse than a pow pow, shoot 'em up, kill 'em up movie A riot goin' on in that corner About a word on a bird in that corner Toxic, yeah, they just box it Hard to tell the paranoid "Avoid it like a opioid" How sweet it is They just line up these kids How happy is a meal when dancin' with cancer? With that God bless America FDA romancing A new old kinda ganster get down Pesticide chemical get around Fast food industrial sit down EPA's a gang, throw it up now
Losing weight and losing fat is not always the same, a diet with insufficient protein intake might cause muscle loss and thus, decrease metabolic rate(muscle metabolism rate is less than people think, but over a year, it makes a big difference).
However, i understand that not everyone cares about preserving muscle on a diet, some people just want to be slimmer, fair enough.
There is a reason why olímpica athletes have special diets.
See that voice in the back of your head is a little cognitive dissonance. People’s behavior changes based on their diet, but outside of starvation metabolism doesn’t speed up with extra calories they just result in weight gain.
Look all kinds of stuff happens when you go to extremes. But, the human diet has a lot of flexibility which is why we don’t have the one true diet despite a lot of research. At the middle of the healthy range +/- a few percent doesn’t do anything. That’s why so much nutrition research is inconclusive we can’t optimize for an ideal peak of perfect nutrition because close enough gives identical results.
Which is what I am talking about. Take a perfectly reasonable heathy diet that wouldn’t result in long term weight gain or loss and then toss in 100 calories of protein and you get weight gain the same way adding 100 of any other macronutrients or even an even split of all three. That’s true because a perfectly reasonable diet is far from the limits on how much protein you can digest per day.
Not a great example to make your point because processed meats (specifically, cured meats) are carcinogenic. [0]
> Are these now bad?
Colorectal cancer has always been bad. The difference is that we have more data now.
If you don’t change your assumptions and biases with new data, you will be stuck in the past. Blood letting would have passed the lindy test throughout the 18th century.
[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2015/11/03/repo...
Your linked source claims processed meats can cause a 18% increased incidence of colorectal cancer. The CDC [0] says rates of those cancers are 36.5 per 100,000, or 0.03%. Since some of those people undoubtedly eat processed meat, lets assume the cancer rate is 0.025% for people who don't eat processed meats.
For me, those numbers really dont move the needle - its highly unlikely to get colorectal cancer and abstaining from processed meats doesnt really change the rate much at all. There are probably other good arguments in favor of not eating these foods, but cancer doesnt appear to be one of them.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/colorectal/statistics/index.htm
high salt and/or sugar content foods, whether processed or not, is probably not great for you.
It's just that "processed foods" usually have extra flavourings added (such as salt) to enhance it, for sale purposes.
So instead of targeting processed foods, the targeting for healthy eating should be portion size and amount, followed by freshness.
The vitamins may have leached into the water, but toss that water into a soup and you're good.
I don't think freshness matters much at all. Flour certainly doesn't need to be fresh to make good bread.
People underrate canned veggies in regards to healthy eating. They're really not bad at all from a health perspective, and can often taste very fresh.
Pineapples, pears, peaches are great canned. Artichoke, corn, beans, string beans, spinach, and tomatoes are also good canned products in my experience.
I'm not hating on fresh: big leafy Romaine Lettuce is best fresh, as are onions. But certain foods hold really well in a can, and its extremely convenient to mix-and-match storage strategies. (Ex: Use that Romaine Lettuce for salads this week, and canned corn next week)
Yes, fresh eggs taste better. But fresh flour? Not really. grains, beans, flour, rice... these "preserved" foods can last months or even well into a year or longer.