You'd probably put me in that crowd, but I think it is a very valid objection. "ultra-processed" is in my opinion a far too large and diverse group to yield good scientific results. It may be a reasonable starting point for investigations, but you really need to look at specific aspects individually to figure out how this works.

We're not going to convert everyone into only eating fresh and non-processed stuff, so you'll have to find out which specific ways of processing or which additions to processed food are problematic and address those.

One of the laziest rhetorical approaches I see regularly on Hackernews is someone angrily complaining about commenters who aren't there.

If you have an argument, make it. If you see an argument you want to refute, refute it. Complaining about people that aren't even commenting in the thread serves no useful purpose.

you could pre-empt them by defining ultraprocessed food instead of mocking them with the spongebob text if it's so easy to do so. go right ahead.

I’m blissfully unaware of that POV. Links? Are they claiming that boiling noodles is “ultra processing” or something?

You mean, the people who point out that putting a loaf of bread in a plastic bag moves it (under certain rules) into the ultraprocessed category?

How dare they raise issues you don't like!

In July of 2023, I was about 254lbs. I'm a pretty tall dude (about 6'5"), so it's not quite "obese", but it's pretty heavy, and it was only growing.

Amusingly, by accident, I started losing weight a month later, because I bought a kegerator, and I had up to 10 gallons at a time of Diet Coke in the kegs. Suddenly, I almost completely lost my urge to go to Taco Bell for every meal.

I guess it turns out that I wasn't addicted to fast food, I was addicted to "unlimited soda", and Taco Bell is the closest place to my house that had free soda refills. When I made it so that I could get as much cold soda as I wanted directly in my house, I completely lost the urge to go to Taco Bell, and I would eat comparatively-healthier stuff in my house. Within about a month, I had lost about 10lbs, and completely lost my cravings for real sugar.

After that I started more aggressively counting calories and ended up getting to about 191lbs, which is more or less in the "normal" range for someone my height.

I guess I thought that caffeine addiction didn't affect me, somehow, but I'm pretty convinced I was wrong about that. The kegerator more or less worked like a nicotine patch, but nowadays I've transitioned to the caffeine-free versions of soda now.

ETA: Just looked it up, it actually was just barely on the "obese" side.

I think a big part of the problem is that even prepared foods are packed with garbage. There are a lot of Americans who can't/don't cook mainly for time reasons, and instead eat lots of prepared foods, whether that be from restaurants, shops, or grocery stores.

If you are not cooking it from scratch yourself, it is almost guaranteed to be brimming with fat, salt, and sugar. This is true regardless of the source. Whether it be a frozen meal from the grocery store, a sandwich from the local deli, a dish from the bistro, or a quick bite from the coffee shop.

All of it is maximized fat, salt, sugar.

Seriously, I live in a major metro are and if you put a gun to my head and said "You have 20 minutes to pick-up an unmodified meal that is filling, mildly flavored, and healthy", I'd have to eat the bullet.

(And this doesn't even get into all the processed food ingredients)

A useful analogy is the Coca plant. Chewing its leaves will give a mild stimulant and is relatively benign. But if you extract and concentrate the active ingratiate it becomes highly addictive. This is pretty much what we have done with our food.

Just an observation as an American living in Copenhagen, Denmark: The typical diet for my coworkers involves the following attributes compared to the US: 1. Hot/big breakfast is rare. A roll with some butter and cheese + Espresso instead. 2. We have a "canteen" cafeteria and it is all fresh made foods, lots of fish options and of course Rugbrød (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugbr%C3%B8d) a super dense "bread" although IMO it isn't really bread as we understand it. 3. Most folks will pile a ton of food on their plate and lunch is served at 11:30. 4. Very little soda. A six pack of soda will last a week or more in an office of 25 people. 5. Almost no snacks. Our office will maybe have one small bag of nuts available and it can last two weeks before refilling. 6. Very little fast food options. There are a handful of fast food options in town, but they are very much an exception and probably serve more tourists than locals. 7. Dining out is expensive relative to income levels, so it is far less frequent. 8. Yes, portion sizes, again, particularly for drinks. A typical soda pour would be maybe 8-10 ounces in a restaurant.

Danes do drink a lot of beer though and they start early. There's no "drinking age" and teens can buy beer/wine at 16 and booze at 18.

    > Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? 

Too much sugar. Too carb heavy.

Not enough fiber (fruits, veg).

Fats demonized for a long spell.

No time for preparing whole foods in daily lives.

No easy access to cheap, prepared whole foods.

Edit: car-focused culture and zoning laws/planning that result in more sedentary day-to-day lifestyle that magnifies the effect of the poor diet.

For me, the biggest mystery is this: If obesity is caused by poor diet, why doesn't dieting work long-term?

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/when-dieting-doesnt-work...

> 121 eligible trials with 21 942 patients were included and reported on 14 named diets and three control diets ... At 12 months the effects on weight reduction and improvements in cardiovascular risk factors largely disappear.

One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility of contaminants like machine grease, spray lubricants, and dust getting into food. When the process for making food is automated, it seems much more likely to me that some of the moving parts in the process end up getting coated with small amounts of machine grease or lubricants. Maybe a moving machine part was sticking, so a technician used some spray lubricant on it, some of which found its way to the conveyor belt that was transporting the food to the next stage of the process. Maybe a metal part that is used in the process was coated in some kind of oil to protect it during storage. Someone may install it without cleaning it off with a solvent. Maybe something is being stored in an open-air vat, and work is being done nearby that generates dust. The more processed a food is, the more opportunities there are for contaminants to find their way into the food.

I think of these things because I worked in a kitchen that made dough, and our dough mixer always needed to be lubricated. I once found grease that had dripped from above into the mixing bowl. Luckily I am someone who takes such things seriously, but there are a lot of careless people out there. Even if you wipe off grease, an invisible trace amount will remain on the surface unless you clean it with a solvent. I also worked in a warehouse that stored machine parts used in food packaging equipment. There was drywall work being done at the time and the whole place was coated in gypsum dust. I remember handling "food grade" lubricant and looking up its safety data sheet (SDS) out of curiosity, and my takeaway from reading it was that it's still probably not something you would want to eat.

Imo, its mostly cultural which turns physiological. Every home cook I know has difficultly even putting on weight. The home cooks also enjoy the taste of vegetables and find the amount of sugar in store bought/fast food desserts nauseating. But I also know people who were fed pre-made food all their life and would literally throw up if fed broccoli. This problem needs to be addressed at home and from a young age, which is.. hard.

We don't have self-control. Nobody cooks. And if they do it's microwaved or frozen garbage.

We eat out too much. To the point where we overpay to have shoddy delivery services bring us fast food.

The portions are too big. 1,500 calorie burgers, 2,000 calorie appetizers (the thing you eat before you eat your meal), 1,600 calorie 'salads'. Let's not forget the copious amounts of soda. When's the last time you at a single slice of pizza?

Plus ubiquitous snacks like chips or cookies that are precisely engineered to get to eat as many as you can.

The truth about a good diet is not reducible to a simple rule of thumb; like life itself, it's more nuanced than that.

Thank you, New Yorker, for letting me read the article without a subscription.

I weigh myself every morning and have a chart of my weight going back 10 years. The chart plot looks like a roller coaster. Last March I hit 228, so started counting calories, limited myself to 1500/day, and hit 187 by August. Then I ate whatever I wanted and climbed back up to 232 at the end of 2024. So I'm counting calories again, feel comfortable at 1000/day of meat and potatoes, and have dropped 11 pounds the first 7 days of this year.

I'm a formerly obese person who has kept the weight off for 20 years. It is a mindset, though not in the way they claim.

It's not about shaming yourself or having tremendous restraint. Dieting is like "not thinking about elephants" in that you'll obsess over it if you try not to.

What has helped is understanding true hunger and the sensation nutrients have. Sugar can feel as strong as a narcotic in certain conditions. If you are eating 20g of sugar you should have a strong sensation. if you aren't, the calibration is off.

Junk food (including restaurant cuisine) plays a part in disrupting that calibration. It's like listening to a deafening rock concert every day and then trying to distinguish a whisper. But junk food isn't poisonous. I eat "junky" food daily like chocolate truffles, marshmallows, butter, ice cream, bacon fat, donuts, brownies, chocolate cake, McDonalds. The difference is that a mouthful has an immediate sensation.

Would you be able to catch a baseball by calculating the vectors? no, you just look at it and raise your hand.

Something that this genre of article fails to explain or even mention is the vast geographic differences between "the American diet" and other American diets. Health outcomes are quiet varied. Why are people in Minneapolis healthier? Are they immune to Wonder Bread and Gummi Bears? Why are people in Oakland fairly healthy despite the fried chicken wars?

Sugar does not satiate effectively for the calories.

It's too easy to over eat sugar and carbs yet still be hungry, nutritionally deficient.

It's why Ozempic is effective- one feels satiated even if deficient.

Not at all the point, but I love that 3/4 through the article, the author meets with a nutritionist/molecular biologist with the last name Nestle, buys a chocolate cookie to eat in front of them "as a provocation", and Nestle says “Actually, I think it’s probably O.K.”

Yes, "Nestle" != "Nestlé", but reading that she defended the chocolate chip cookie seemed so on the nose.

There's a great quote which I love, and think is relevant: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"

It's from this NYT article and I think it hits the mark: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...

Boredom snacking from starting a new job is killing me. I put 10 pounds on starting a new job, sit at the computer and snack on shit. Crept into "overweight" according to BMR. Hard exercise 3x a week, hard but milder exercise pretty regularly. Its too easy to snack my to 3k calories. I only maybe eat out/order in 3 meals a week.

Snacks and meat have too much calories

Lot’s of people are chosing an healthy diet:

https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/how-the-ketogenic-diet-helped...

Simple: Bad food is subsidized

Can the food industry be sued like they did with big tobacco?

I'd be curious to see if replacing seed oils with olive, peanut or avocado oil as the default would improve health.

India has even higher cases of diabetes and heart disease. I think their diet is quite different than America.

I have family connections into South Korea and this article makes me think of the changes in the Korean diet over the past few decades. When I was first started encountering Korean food over 20 years ago (both in the states and in Korea), everything was either sourced from fresh ingredients, or preserved using some kind of traditional method like pickling, fermenting, or curing. There were very few factory processed ingredients, maybe fish cake, and some condiments. There was a notable absence of sugars and sweetness, even in desserts. I ate more fruit in the first year with my wife than I probably had in the decade prior as it was constantly served as snacks and after meals. I never found Korean portion sizes appreciably smaller than American portions, but I struggled eating through a meal until I fully adapted to mixing banchan in between bites -- which introduced me to the palette cleanser. There were some problems in the diet, mostly lots of instant coffees, tons of alcohol, questionable "medicines", and everybody smoked. But people were generally fit or thin, walked a lot, were tall (a sign of good nutrition), and lived long lives.

In the years since then I was introduced to concepts like the "Bliss Point" [1] and "Taste Satiety" which explained both the taste of Doritos and the use of Kimchi to cleanse the palette so you could eat more.

Over time the Korean diet has changed and I've started to recognize that the food sciences are taking over for the traditional home-made meals and the flavors in Korean food are changing dramatically -- you can feel them targeting the bliss point in flavor. In some ways its getting harder to eat out because it's not hard to cook at home, and make it taste better, and we can keep ingredients fresh. You can still find small restaurants run by old people who make things the home cooked way, but all of the larger restaurants and chains have this new kind of sweetness in the food.

There's a well known TV chef [3] who even advises people on how to make their home cooking taste more like restaurants. The magic ingredient? Add sugar to basically everything. Gone is the delicate sweetness from carrots or pears, now even beef dishes blast you in the face like a candy bar. It used to be unusual to see an obese person at all in Korea (I was usually the largest person anywhere, and I'm not big by American standards). But now it's not at all unusual. Korea is where the mukbang originated [4].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory-specific_satiety

3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paik_Jong-won

4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukbang

Because it creates customers for the Pharmaceutical companies.

> There are a lot of Americans who can't/don't cook mainly for time reasons

In that sense, the 10% of people who aren't that busy, should be cooking.

Very few people are that busy. It's just not a priority.

Americans spend an astonishing 4 hours and 37 minutes looking at our phones every day.

It's mostly the sugar that's the killer. Fat isn't necessarily a problem, depending on the specific type. Part of what made the "standard American diet" so deadly is when packaged food manufacturers replaced fat with extra sugar based on junk science that appeared to show a correlation between fat consumption and heart disease.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/price-we-pay-9781635574128/

And even extra salt isn't necessarily a problem for most people with typical genetics, either. The issue with hypertension is more to do with osmolality than absolute quantity. A lot of people have taken the "low sodium" fad a little too far.

https://peterattiamd.com/rickjohnson/

Do you live near a Chipotle? Burrito bowl with brown rice, black beans, and chicken for $8.50.

I really don’t understand this “I don’t have a choice all fast food is bad” some are pretty healthy even if they are less tasty. I think the real discussion is how addictive the trash foods are.

When asked why restaurant food tasted so good, Anthony Bourdain chuckled and quipped that "everything you are served begins and finishes with a stick of butter".

People would gasp if they prepared that food for themselves.

When I finish a steak with 2 tbsp of butter it tastes luxurious, and any respectable steakhouse is finishing a steak with a stick of butter and garnishes it with an ice cream scoop of butter.

Cava is pretty good in NYC and I’ve largely replaced Chipotle with them if I’m craving “bowl of food not made at home”. Would encourage you to try it out.

Thankfully I have a Chipotle 15 minutes away, but most of the other stuff is shit.

>No easy access to cheap, prepared whole foods.

Apples, Bananas, Carrots, Milk.

I imagine there are other foods too. But its weird to see people think they don't exist.

It's the carbs.

>Not enough fiber (fruits, veg).

I'm not sure why people think fiber is great. Yes it pushes things through. Yes there are bacteria that eat it. So does other food.

But it also makes you go poop more often, which is bad for your body.

I mostly eat meats and relatively low fiber food. I don't track it closely, so occasionally I'll eat corn and it passes through.

---

My point:

"Why fiber?" Actually prove that the generic intake of 'fiber' is good. There are so many different types of fiber, the macro size of the fiber matters(ground pinto beans has a different gastro effect than whole), the actual molecules its made of, etc..

You cut out the part that said the diets improved people’s health at 6 mo. But they were hard to maintain for 12 months. I think a lack of consistency is the issue. From your link:

>What if they'd lasted 12 months, or two years, or a lifetime? The benefit would likely have been greater and more long-lasting. The trick is to pick a diet with foods you actually like so that it's not so hard to stick with it.

Meaningful behavioral change is hard, especially in a modern food environment.

Simple, it's called a selection bias. The people able to long-term control what they eat aren't obese, so by running a study on obese people, you're essentially biasing the study towards subjects who have difficulty controlling what they eat. This means most of the subjects will struggle to stick to the diet long term.

You might find this NYT piece on the winners of the Biggest Loser TV show interesting. Basically, "dieting" as a reduction in calories is a lose-lose game because your basal metabolic rate goes down so you have to keep eating less and less to keep it up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weig...

Keeping up the basal metabolic rate is part of the rationale behind intermittent/extended fasting instead of pure calories-in-calories-out weightloss advice.

Because weightless is hard and people fail at dieting.

Long term change in one of the most fundamental aspects of ones life and biology is a massive challenge.

Also, not everything is reversible biologically.

I fixed your question. If obesity is caused by poor [nutrition], why doesn't [weight loss programs] work long-term?

You answered your own question. Weight loss programs do not work long term because only healthy nutrition does. I have been downvoted here before, but I would argue that healthy nutrition is expensive. It is cheaper in terms of time and cost to consume quick meals full of carbs, sugars, chemical additives that wrecks our bodies. It not only takes money but also time to cook meals that are heart healthy, prevent diabetes, and provides healthy fats/proteins/carbs.

Yeah, there is definitely something we are missing. Some of the stuff about portion sizes and processed foods may actually be a symptom rather than a cause. I.E. those foods sell well because something else is wrong. GLP 1 inhibitors are expected to shrink the sales of snack foods and alcohol by at least 5% in the next couple years based on shifting preferences. So the idea that some chemical or pathogen we are exposed to has contributed to it isn't farfetched at all. Especially when we view the spread of obesity across the globe even to countries with very little discretionary income on average.