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Chomp8645 posted:There is no way I'm going to finish a whole loaf of bread myself before it molds so some slices always get thrown out You know, you could always put half the loaf of bread in your freezer and then microwave / toast it when you want a sandwich.
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Mar 23, 2016 17:28
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Liberal_L33t posted:There may be a grain of truth to this, but you are also discounting the considerable (and, to the working poor and the hectic middle class, extremely unpalatable) time costs of shopping for, buying and preparing 2 or 3 meals consisting entirely of fresh produce every day. I am actually quite sympathetic to the unspoken argument that these peoples' time would be better used watching television, or whatever other sedentary entertainment which the tsk-tsking advocates of "slow food" would sneer at. If, hypothetically speaking, someone obsessively spends 2 hours a day cooking for themselves with fresh, healthy ingredients but takes up smoking cigarettes as a side effect of the increased stress and time pressure, are they actually better off? I'm honestly pretty confident that after some transition costs you and just about anyone would be better off watching less TV and eating more meals they prepared themselves with fresh produce. There's something supremely goony about a post that amounts to "maybe I'm better off eating disgusting cheesy poo poo because it gives me more time to also watch television." You can cook a big big meal and keep it frozen or in your fridge for many days. Food prepared with fresh produce can last a long time if you actually learn how to cook.
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Mar 23, 2016 20:22
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Liberal_L33t posted:Jesus Christ. Did you just use the term "goony" unironically, in a D&D thread? You know what else is "goony"? Posting on these loving forums at all, you holier-than-thou prick. I'm not trying to hurt you're feelings. I use the term "goony" because it bears connotations of being mentally and physically unhealthy, socially isolating and aesthetically depressing. All of those are descriptions I'm comfortable using regarding a post that amounts to "I prefer unhealthy prepackaged foods they let me maximize my TV watching time." Sorry but I'm going to go ahead and say you should buy some rice, some veggies, and some dry pasta, familiarize yourself with the stove and oven, and maybe leave the TV off for the evening and crack open a book when you're all done. I will openly admit to being an "elitist" who thinks human beings are going to be happier when they spend more time being physically active and eating nutritious fresh foods. The kind of lifestyle you're describing is understandable but it's neither desirable nor healthy and the discussion should be about how to help people transition away from it, not some ludicrous false equivalency that claims all lifestyles are equally healthy or equally conducive to human happiness.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:47
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Liberal_L33t posted:I am perfectly aware of how to cook. I grew up with a (mostly) stay-at-home dad who was downright obsessed with gourmet cooking and made drat sure I knew how to do it, to the point that he eventually trained me into doing most of it. Risotto, fried chicken from scratch, casseroles, brussels sprouts in vinaigrette, vegetable stew, shrimp with panko breadcrumbs, spaghetti with homemade cream sauce, home-made pizza (making even the loving dough from scratch), oven baked carrots with herb du provence, and a dozen other frou-frou things he saw watching the cooking channel. I'm not telling you to feel bad about how you live I'm just saying that the life choices you're describing are pretty strongly linked to poorer mental and physical health, which makes me believe that the appropriate response here would be to ask what the constrains are on you having the necessary time and income to live a healthier and more fulfilling lifestyle.
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Mar 23, 2016 23:47
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Liberal_L33t posted:To which I say, thank god I live in a modern society founded on principles of individualism and I don't have to subscribe to your definition of a "fulfilling lifestyle".  If I promise you that the whole foods gestapo is not moments away from smashing down your door and dragging you off to a concentration camp run by Jamie Oliver then will you calm down and get off that ledge? quote:And this does really get to the crux of the food-waste issue, as well. Modern western society puts a high premium on individual choice and a person's right to define their own life. It is my opinion that the best solutions for the health issues (physical health, because I refuse to grant anyone else the right to judge my moral health, which is what people actually mean when they say "mental health") are those which are impersonal, technocratic, and large in scale - like the suggestion to force supermarkets to donate their overstock instead of throwing it in the dumpster. I would actually argue that the more important technocratic solution is better community planning and better working conditions (i.e. more job stability, higher wages, more worker autonomy from management). That having been said, some kind of mandatory home economics / nutritious eating class in High School wouldn't hurt. Discendo Vox posted:Which behaviors? I'm not seeing anything specifically where variance in outcomes wouldn't be explained by separate causes. With the possible exception of salt levels, brand dependent, TV dinners aren't innately unhealthy. Do I really need to explain to you why someone who says that a staple of their diet is a "frozen broccoli with cheese sauce" dish that's loaded with sodium, and who justifies this because it gives them an extra couple hours a day for "sedentary activities" such as TV watching, doesn't sound like they're living the healthiest life? There's nothing wrong with junk food when it's in moderation but when it's a staple of your diet then that's kind of a red flag that you aren't eating very healthy. It also sounds an awful lot like the lifestyle of a solitary 20 or 30 something man with limited social contact, which is also pretty dire. Even if you live alone, I'd suggest that inviting over a friend, romantic partner, family member, etc. and cooking a meal together (or having one person prepare a meal for the other, and perhaps returning the favour at a later date) is a timeless, intimate and deeply satisfying way for two or more people to spend time together.
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Mar 24, 2016 18:57
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Discendo Vox posted:
"Junk food" is absolutely a meaningful description of a lot of fastfood, freshly cooked food does tend to be healthier, and processed food is often higher in unhealthy preservatives and additives. Cooking is valuable because it's a basic life skill and a fairly basic social ritual that can bring people closer together. Cooking some of your own meals also tends to correlate with paying more attention to your diet, which is usually healthier than just microwaving a premade meal and then plopping down in front of the TV. Here's an open letter to the British government published in the Lancet raising the very real concern of poverty leading people to over consume processed foods. Note that the argument here is that wages are too low and food prices are too high, not that there's some kind of basic moral failing among the poor. quote:During the past 5 years, food has been one of the three top factors in price inflation, sufficient to worry even higher-income consumers. In a time of high fuel prices, this inflation has translated into families cutting back on fresh fruit and vegetables and buying cheap, sweet, fatty, salty, or processed foods that need little cooking. A vicious circle is set in motion, with poorer people having worse diets and contributing to the worrying rise in obesity, diabetes, and other dietary-related diseases. So to circle back to the start of this tangent: this kind of behaivour is understandable and totally fine in limited batches, but if it gets to the point where eating prepacakged processed food and engaging in a lot of "sedentary activities" is your lifestyle then you're at much higher risk for a range of mental and physical health problems, and the appropriate public policy response is to try and find ways to help people break that cycle rather than pretending it's a perfectly valid and problematic way to live.
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Mar 25, 2016 19:05
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twodot posted:This is not true. If you think this is true, feel free to give a coherent definition of junk food. Typically "junk food" refers to food that's high in calories and comparatively low in nutritional content. The fact it's a pejorative and colloquial word doesn't mean its either incoherent or useless as a description.
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Mar 25, 2016 19:15
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Discendo Vox posted:unhealthy preservatives and additives What, exactly, do you find confusing?
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Mar 25, 2016 19:19
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twodot posted:Please define "nutritional content" in a way that doesn't include calories and is a thing anyone should care about in a modern context. Or you could just lay your cards on the table and explain what point you're trying to make?
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Mar 25, 2016 20:48
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twodot posted:I thought this was obvious. My point is ""Junk food" is absolutely a meaningful description of a lot of fastfood" is not true. If I can put a multivitamin on top of a junk food, and it stops being a junk food then "junk food" is simply not a meaningful description. You can freak out over the fact that "junk food" is a colloquialism and not a precise scientific term as much you as like, but that's what most fast food and a lot of instant microwavable meals are: junk food. Now aside from your incredible and misplaced pedantry regarding the term "junk food", do you actually disagree with the doctors in the Lancet who are warning about the dangers of eating too much "cheap, sweet, fatty, salty, or processed foods that need little cooking" at the expense of " fresh fruit and vegetables"? doverhog posted:Fresh vegetables or fancy home cooked dinners don't possess magic particles know as "nutrients". Or rather they do, but so does most food. Unless you are talking actual vitamin deficiency, like scurvy or something, the obsession with organic local super health foods we have today is like homeopathy or belief in magic crystals. Fresh food and home cooking isn't automatically more nutritious or healthier, but on average something you prepared with fresh ingredients from a grocery store is likely to be a lot healthier for you than something you popped in the microwave or purchased at a fast food restaurant. And you're the first person to bring up "organic" or "local" in this conversation. We're talking about really basic nutritional stuff that just about any doctor could confirm for you, not hippy dippy crystal healing poo poo.
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Mar 25, 2016 21:22
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twodot posted:Eating too much of anything is by definition bad. "processed foods" is another nonsense category, and I'd wager that "need little cooking" is a category that doesn't have any health impact, particularly in the light that fresh fruit and vegetables don't need any cooking. I'd need a better definition for "cheap", less expensive per pound, per calorie, per what? There's already been a pretty good post about the uncertainty regarding salt. "sweet" also describes fresh fruits so that seems out. I'm not sure what classifies a food as "fatty", classifying all of the fats together seems obviously stupid. So your position is that the doctors who signed on to that open letter I quoted from are incorrect and really just fear mongering. quote:edit: You're asking me why I'm bothering to reply to the posts that you're addressing to me? I'll be perfectly honest, since you just dismissed actual medical opinions out of hand I am also starting to wonder why i'm responding to you.
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Mar 25, 2016 22:02
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twodot posted:I would classify the stuff you quoted as "not even wrong". You just can't make coherent statements about processed foods, because it doesn't have a coherent definition. Obviously, things like "food costs are rising faster than inflation" are reasonable concerns. I wouldn't say they are fear mongering, but charitably they are trying to engage with unsophisticated people by using terminology which doesn't mean anything, but is a proxy for actual categories that people recognize. I don't really have a problem with people using terms like "junk food" to communicate with people that don't have the training to understand why that doesn't make any sense, the problem happens when you claim it's a real category. Processed food does have a definition, it's just a broad one. And if something is "meaningless" then I don't know how it can be a proxy for an actual thing, since that's just another way of saying it actually does have meaning. You're just slinging words around in an attempt to sound authoritative. Also your whole spiel here seems to be in vein since I'm already seemingly using the term "junk food" in exactly the way you say you're fine with. Discendo Vox posted:Yes, actually (most open letters aren't good claim sources, fyi). Doctors aren't nutrition scientists, and the lead author on that one is primarily a political actor. Lumping together "cheap, sweet, fatty, salty, or processed foods" is a pretty good indication that something is wrong with their causal claim structure, as is any attempt to apply the word "fresh" as having nutritional connotations. They're making generalizations that are pretty helpful in the context of someone shopping in a grocery or convenience store. If you go back and read my earlier comments on this subject, my interest here is more political, at least insofar as I think that eating habits have some room for improvement through changed policy. Anyway, if you want to elaborate more specifically on what else you disagree in that letter or it's "chain of reasoning" with then I'd be happy to read what you have to say. OwlFancier posted:The main difference between those two aside from some vitamins is that raw vegetables are not very calorically dense, because humans can't efficiently digest them. So you would have to eat a huge amount of them to get a lot of calories out of them. There are many roads to a healthy diet and plenty of room for indulgences along the way but at bare minimum your regular diet should include things like protein, fiber, vitamins, etc. A reliable way to achieve many of your basic nutritional goals is to eat a lot of whole foods, such as fresh fruit and vegetables. A piece of fruit does typically have a lot of sugar but it is also almost going to be a lot more filling than a bottle of Coke or a chocolate bar so you're a lot less likely to over consume. Fruit Juice, on the other hand, is definitely a sugary indulgence.
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Mar 25, 2016 23:22
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twodot posted:You said junk food is a meaningful description, it is not. In certain audiences, "junk food" may correlate with ideas in their head you want to poke at, but that doesn't make it a coherent category, it just means your audience hasn't thought about the term long enough to realize it doesn't make sense. Clearly my preference is to avoid doing that in the first place, but I don't think someone noting a problem is necessarily fear mongering if they use nonsense terms. I've already pointed out two problems with the definition you gave. You keep trying to say that junk food is meaningless while tacitly accepting that it actually does have a meaning, just one that you feel is overly broad (though you haven't actually said why it's too broad for a conversation about shopping in a grocery store). Also one of the "problems" with my definition that you raised was essentially "if I eat a bag of cheetos but then I follow it with a multivitamin pill then is that still junk food?!" which is such an asinine thought experiment I haven't even wanted to engage with it. So now that you've repeatedly aired your grievances with the term junk food do you have any substantive comments on nutrition? At this point I'm morbidly curious to know what you actually think about the foundations of a healthy diet. OtherworldlyInvader posted:Calories are nutritional content, and arguably the most important. You didn't give a definition, you gave a contradiction. A better definition for junk food would be something like: A meal which is calorie dense, has an unbalanced macro-nutrient profile, lacks sufficient dietary fiber, and provides a poor variety of micro-nutrients. Well you caught me. I'm dyslexic and if you through my posts in any thread you're almost guaranteed to find small and repeated spelling errors or incorrect word usages. I occasionally do some light editing on my own posts to catch these mistakes but life is short and often I simply don't see them until someone else points the error out. In this case I meant to type "nutritious", as in "nutritious content". quote:I'm sure some one can come up with a hundred problems with that definition though, the entire point of the question was that there is no good easy answer. "Junk food" comes from the common understanding of nutrition, and that's a problem because most people's understanding of nutrition is straight up magical thinking. Ok, well let's just go ahead and use the definition of junk food that you yourself just offered, keeping in mind we're talking from the perspective of someone who actually shops in a grocery store. You're telling me that people who think that this kind of food is unhealthy to eat in excess are engaging in "magical thinking"? You're telling me that those doctors writing in the Lancet were full of crap suggesting that it's a problem that food prices are driving the poor to buy less fresh fruit and veggies and to buy more microwave ready meals and more items that are high in salt and fat and sugar? After the tortured arguments about word usage are actually said and done, what substantive comments on nutritious eating are you going to make? asdf32 posted:You may have missed a bunch of threads where a cohort of posters have aggressively argued that terms like 'processed', 'junk' etc are meaningless and that generally conventional wisdom on nutrition is mostly wrong. Fishmech may show up soon. I assume they have some merit although I also assume the tone somewhat overemphasizes the point. The only merit I can see is that they're totally correct that, in the most abstract kind of way, there's no necessary reason why processed food would be less healthy than whole food. It just happens to very often be the case in the context of a modern North American grocery store but it's not some timeless eternal truth of the universe. Is there some kind of alternative framework for nutrition that these people advocate? Do 9 out of 10 Goondoctors recommend the Cheetos + Centrum diet?
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Mar 26, 2016 17:15
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twodot posted:If your definition is dumb because you haven't fully thought out the definition, it is still dumb. I have no comments on nutrition, it is a complex science that is still in its infancy, my entire point this whole time has been that you said junk food is a meaningful description, and that's not true. (Tangentially there are some other words you quoted which aren't great, but may have better definitions) Congratulations on one of the spergiest and most pointless tangents I've ever seen in more than 10 years of posting in D&D. Discendo Vox posted:It's because Helsing's use of "junk food" as a proxy is coupled with a variety of other throwaway comments that indicate he's neck deep in the naturalistic fallacy. Or you're just not a very diligent reader and just tend to see what you want to see / expect to see in other peoples posts? quote:It's also generally accurate-though the contents of the multivitamin would be a factor. So apparently goon doctors really do recommend the cheetos and centrum diet. Good to know. quote:Doctors writing in Lancet are routinely full of crap. So, yes, you are engaged in magical thinking because you don't know what any of these things are or what they do. "fresh" has no nutritional connotations. Microwave-ready meals aren't innately nutritionally harmful. Salt intake levels are debated, as I previously discussed. Dietary fat is no longer viewed as a particular concern, since health impacts vary depending on the types of fats involved- the "total fat" label on nutrition labels will probably be removed at some point in the next 5-10 years. The fat type that is a primary source of concern, trans fat, is already heavily excluded from foods in the US, particularly in partially hydrogenated oils, which are being phased out. Saturated fats are common in both "natural" and "processed" foods, and different types have different health impacts that are currently being researched. Sugar is not innately harmful unless we're talking about specific glycemic impact factors. For weight gain, the relevant nutritional measure is calories. I'm just going to refer to my own previous comments rather than repeat myself: Helsing posted:in the most abstract kind of way, there's no necessary reason why processed food would be less healthy than whole food. It just happens to very often be the case in the context of a modern North American grocery store but it's not some timeless eternal truth of the universe. quote:Then don't use the word "processed" when there are more accurate terms to use in terms of the nutritional impact of the foods in question. So, in line with twodot, you're really eager to litigate the precise use of words like "processed food" or "junkfood", despite the fact this is a perfectly acceptable heuristic for using in many grocery store type situations, but when you're actually asked to make any substantive comments on nutrition you suddenly lose all enthusiasm for the conversation. Somewhat ironically, the guide you posted here also exemplifies exactly the dynamics that lead doctors to demonize perfectly health fat content in food for many decades. You see the original government dietary guidelines that came out in the 1970s were written in fairly straight forward common sense language. Responding to the rising incidents on heart disease and related health problems they suggested that people should reduce their consumption of dairy and red meat and eat more plants. That resulted in a poo poo storm of lobbying from the meat and poultry industries which is why revised guidelines came out that stopped talking about food and started talking about things like saturated-fat, cholesterol, etc. "Avoid foods high in x, eat more food that contains y" etc. This was calculated to avoid offending any powerful lobby groups but also made it possible for companies to advertise unhealthy food by bragging that it was "low in x" or "high in y" or whatever. So when the government changed its recommendation from "reduce meat intake" to "avoid meats that are high in saturated-fat" the result was a bonanza for marketing but didn't do much to actually help people eat better. Now here you dumping a bunch of links that I bet you haven't even perused yourself as part of a lame attempt to avoid talking about the actual focus of the conversation, which is healthy eating. So good job demonstrating how nutritionism as an ideology can completely derail any sort of straight forward conversation about healthy eating. If you want to actually reset the conversation now and have a sane, non-pedantic discussion of what a balanced diet would look like (from the perspective of a normal person walking into the average grocery store) then go ahead.
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Mar 26, 2016 19:02
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On the subject of government food guides, maybe you should look at the actual guidelines they give to ordinary consumers. Here's one picked essentially at random. Notice all those horribly unscientific statements like "Eat at least five portions of a variety of fruits and vegetables every day" and "Eat less red and processed meat". Don't they know "processed" doesn't mean anything?!? Aren't they aware that I can skip my fruits and veggies by including some fibre tablets and a multivatmin with my daily Cheetos and Coke binge?! How dare they lie like this by using plain speech and every day common sense to help develop a food guide when they should clearly just have a list of essential macro and micro nutrients and a calorie count. Discendo Vox posted:I've given you three different links to contemporary nutrition standards. "Processed" is not a valid heuristic for the health impact of food, and neither is "junk". The primary cause of negative dietary outcomes is excess calories in comparison with exercise. The breadth of safe and nutritious diets is broader than you are comfortable acknowledging. You've fetishized home cooking and constructed a mental image of others in the thread as incompetent man-children eating Twinkies on the couch. If we're talking about overall health rather than weigh loss then excess calories is not the only important criteria. And you'll have to explain why you think I'm uncomfortable acknowledging the breadth of safe and nutritious diets when my previous comment on the subject was that "There are many roads to a healthy diet and plenty of room for indulgences along the way". I'm getting tired of watching you shadow box with straw man arguments. I think the only thing keeping me involved in the conversation at this point is a morbid curiosity about what your actual beliefs regarding diet are, though I'm starting to suspect you'll never commit to any kind of substantive comment on that front since it would reduce your freedom of action to do what you're really passionate about, which is starting spergy arguments about exactly which words to use when discussing food. Unless you can put some meat on the bones of these arguments I"m going to stop dignifying you with any kind of attention. Let me give you a hint for how that would work: "Processed is not a valid heuristic [for a grocery store shopping trip] because ... x,y,z reasons." quote:Stop using "fresh", "slow", "home-cooked" as proxies for "good". Stop using "fast", "processed", "prepackaged" as proxies for "bad". Stop using the phrase "junk food", it's obfuscatory garbage you're projecting your beliefs onto, a term that provides no information about why the food would be bad. Stop complaining about "additives" and "preservatives" when you don't know what they are. Stop raising salt, sugar or fat when you don't know the details of where they're placed or used. If you want to make nutrition claims, cite to research, not an open letter in Lancet. Above all else, stop saying home cooking is innately healthier than other food sources. That isn't a remotely valid claim. Not only have I not said this but I literally, in my last post, pointed you toward a statement saying the exact opposite of this: that there's nothing innately healthier about home cooking or whole foods. I'm not entirely sure what your goal in this conversation is. Frankly my role here seems superfluous since your responses are so far removed from anything I've actually said. I could speculate that you had some similar argument in the past that you think you won, and you're trying to reproduce your previous success by saying the exact same things over again, without regard for the changed context. What I'm seeing here is an obtuse refusal to actually speak in meaningful or substantive terms about what does or doesn't constitute a healthy diet. I'm just going to reiterate what I suggest that rather than all this empty kvetching you should offer some substantive comments on how you actually view nutrition and what you think the basics of a healthy diet and lifestyle would look like. And just a side note about your specific complaint regarding junk food: you seem to be operating a fundamental misapprehension. Most words in the English language are not fully formed scientific theories that come with their own complete causal theory. Instead individual words are basically just a collection of syllables that pick out or construct some phenomenon. So yeah, noo poo poo that calling something "junk food" doesn't, on its own, provide a comprehensive explanation of why that thing is unhealthy for you. It's already been explained to you that "junk food" is a broad and colloquial term for food that, for a whole variety of different reasons, isn't considered healthy. The term "junk food" itself doesn't do any kind of explanatory work and isn't supposed to. It merely designates a collection of things that are grouped together based on a shared characteristic. In this case that characteristic can, somewhat simplistically but, in this context, usefully, be reduced to: "things that doctors and nutritionists warn against eating large amounts of". Apparently if I were to say "needles are typically painful" then you would object because I didn't include a detailed explanation of the neurology of pain. Because your seeming criteria for a worthwhile word is that it must on its own somehow contain a comprehensive causal theory. I seriously want to save all the comments in this thread in some kind of word file so I can refer back to them in the future as a really clear cut example of nerds willfully misunderstanding how either language or theory are actually supposed to work. Helsing fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Mar 26, 2016 |
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Mar 26, 2016 20:19
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I think the shorter version of the last couple pages of this thread could be: Junk food is fine as long as your overall diet and activity level are kept within a basic balance. Advising people to try and eat whole foods is mostly based on the fact that it's a simple and mostly reliable way to pick good food at a grocery store, not because there's a magical property in fresh food that gets destroyed when that food is processed. There's nothing wrong with processed food per se but in a grocery store processed food often contains higher levels of things like sodium. According to the CDC:  I look forward to this post triggering another Spergling rush, since the Center for Disease Control just dared to advise Americans that avoiding processed food and eating more often at home is a reliable strategy for reducing sodium intake.
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Mar 26, 2016 22:01
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I imagine the kind of "restaurant" described in that guide is most likely to be a Denny's or Olive Garden rather than the kind of place where the chef takes great pride in using their own recipes.
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Mar 26, 2016 22:34
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Well, for the millionth time, this conversation is pitched at the level of someone shopping in a grocery store, not a lab technician determining the exact level at which sodium is directly and verifiable linked to heart problems or whatever. We're talking about general guidelines for your diet, which is why it's useful to use broad terms like "processed foods", "whole foods", etc. This is something that the vast majority of health professionals and nutritionists do. Despite your bizarre attempts to act like an authority on this subject, you're the one making controversial claims. For instance, you previously posted a bunch of links (to pages on dietary supplements rather than healthy eating, which actually says a lot, but never mind that) and those links, in turn, helpfully suggest using this guideline quote:Scientific evidence supporting dietary guidance has grown and evolved over the decades. Previous editions of the Dietary Guidelines relied on the evidence of relationships between individual nutrients, foods, and food groups and health outcomes. Although this evidence base continues to be substantial, foods are not consumed in isolation, but rather in various combinations over time—an “eating pattern.” As previously noted, dietary components of an eating pattern can have interactive, synergistic, and potentially cumulative relationships, such that the eating pattern may be more predictive of overall health status and disease risk than individual foods or nutrients. However, each identified component of an eating pattern does not necessarily have the same independent relationship to health outcomes as the total eating pattern, and each identified component may not equally contribute (or may be a marker for other factors) to the associated health outcome. An evidence base is now available that evaluates overall eating patterns and various health outcomes. quote:Shift food choices to reduce sodium intake:[5] Because sodium is found in so many foods, careful choices are needed in all food groups to reduce intake. Strategies to lower sodium intake include using the Nutrition Facts label to compare sodium content of foods and choosing the product with less sodium and buying low-sodium, reduced sodium, or no-salt-added versions of products when available. Choose fresh, frozen (no sauce or seasoning), or no-salt-added canned vegetables, and fresh poultry, seafood, pork, and lean meat, rather than processed meat and poultry. Additional strategies include eating at home more often; cooking foods from scratch to control the sodium content of dishes; limiting sauces, mixes, and “instant” products, including flavored rice, instant noodles, and ready-made pasta; and flavoring foods with herbs and spices instead of salt. If you go through the rest of that guide it regularly uses terms like "whole fruits", "whole grains", "processed meats", etc. and makes the same common sense warnings about how processed foods tend to be higher in additives such as sodium. Since you currently are currently dismissing the CDC, Healthcare.gov and the warnings of actual doctors in the Lancet, and the healthy eating guide that you yourself just seemingly endorsed, maybe you could provide some sources and evidence for your repeated assertions, because frankly you do not have much credibility left. And while we're quoting ourselves: Helsing posted:I'm getting tired of watching you shadow box with straw man arguments. I think the only thing keeping me involved in the conversation at this point is a morbid curiosity about what your actual beliefs regarding diet are, though I'm starting to suspect you'll never commit to any kind of substantive comment on that front since it would reduce your freedom of action to do what you're really passionate about, which is starting spergy arguments about exactly which words to use when discussing food. So other than repeatedly claiming -- with zero independent evidence -- that you are a more authoritative source than various doctors or health agencies maybe you could actually make a substantive contribution and articulate your views on healthy eating and nutrition. Because so far the one time you actually posted a source for anything a quick perusal suggests it uses many of the words that you are claiming are totally unacceptable to use.
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Mar 26, 2016 23:57
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OtherworldlyInvader posted:I'm not calling you out on a pedantic grammatical error (If there is one there I don't even see it), I'm pointing out that what you said was factually inaccurate, and I'm doing that because I think these inaccuracies are causing you to draw invalid conclusions from them. If I understand the changes you wish you had made to your statement correctly, the statement is still wrong and more importantly it is still wrong for exactly the same reason I already outlined. The reason I intended to write "nutritious" rather than "nutritional" is because, in conventional English, "nutritious" has a slightly different usage than the more technical one that you're deploying here, and is typically defined as: "providing nourishment, especially to a high degree; nourishing; healthful" and in "a good, nutritious meal". Which, in the context of my original statement, was intended to be understood as "food that makes a good tradeoff between calories and micro / macro nutrients". Also you seem to be writing from the perspective that the only reason to monitor your food intake is to lose weight, but that's only one of many reasons to control your eating habits. There are very good health based reasons to want to ensure a proper intake of vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, etc. quote:And yes, people routinely engage in magical thinking when it comes to diet and nutrition. Lets say I have a couple of roasts, a head of lettuce, a few tomatoes, a bag of flour, some cheese and a nicely equipped kitchen. I mix up a batch of dough and bake a loaf of sandwich bread, then put a roast in the oven and run it through a slicer, then slice my tomato, lettuce & cheese and produce a nice roast beef sandwich. Now (using the same proportion of ingredients) I use the same batch of dough and bake some buns, then run the other roast through a meat grinder, cook the ground beef as a patty in a pan on the stove top, and put it all together with the sliced tomato, lettuce & cheese and produce a juicy cheeseburger. Now put the roast beef sandwich and the cheeseburger in front of a statistically significant population of people, and ask each of them which food is healthier than the other. I guarantee you a significant portion of those people will tell you the roast beef sandwich is healthier than the cheeseburger. Magical thinking at work, the same ingredients in the same proportion now have a different nutritional value in the minds of people due to nutritionally inconsequential differences in preparation method. I didn't ask whether people engage in magical thinking regarding food because they obviously do and that's hardly controversial. I asked whether you think it's "magical thinking" that people link the heavy consumption of so called "junk food" with poorer long term health. Now your point about people misunderstand the difference (or rather lack of difference) between a roast beef sandwich and a cheeseburger is well taken but it doesn't actually demonstrate that 'junk food' is a useless category or that heavy consumption of junk food goes against the recommendations of basically every medical expert. quote:Another example of irrational thinking when it comes to diet is the often mentioned "fruits&vegetables". Fruits and vegetables are quite nutritionally different from each other, and there are also very significant differences within each group. Broccoli is not nutritionally equivalent to a potato, and an apple is not nutritionally equivalent to a tomato. Despite this, most people (and even many government nutrition guidelines) treat them as equivalents, which is not conducive to eating a healthy diet. Well, first of all, most food guides will specify that you should eat green and or cruciferous vegetables, and they also tend to emphasize that you should eat a variety of different types of fruit and vegetables. So I don't believe the charge you're making here is fair at all, and if you actually spent a moment looking over those food guides I think you would know that. The health guides I've linked to provide perfectly common sense and more than adequate guidelines for the average shopper attending the average grocery store. Your sandwich vs. burger example is a good one and I know people who have made that kind of fallacious reasoning. Your objection here to the recommendation to consume a lot of fruits and vegetables doesn't even remotely line up with the way anyone I've ever met thinks though, and there's no way to read any food guide I've ever seen and conclude that you can get away with nothing but tomatoes and potatoes. quote:As for the letter to the Lancet, its a letter written to make a rhetorical point, not lay out medially or scientifically sound nutrition facts. Their main point, that rising food costs are causing people to eat less healthy food, may have an element of truth but it also omits a bunch of really important points. That's fine for the letter's intended purpose (a political call to action about an issue), but not fine for a detailed discussion on the topic. About the cheapest meal you can buy is rice and dried beans, which is also a very nutritionally sound basis for a diet. The fact that people are eating lots of take out, chips, and tv dinners instead indicates there are far more factors impacting their decision on what to eat than price alone, because cheaper and healthier options exist which people aren't taking. Additionally, while food prices may have risen over the last few years, they are still generally low by historic rates. "Why are lots of people eating unhealthy diets" is a complex question, and the answer is a hell of a lot more complex than "because food prices went up". All that the reference to the Lancet was meant to establish is what the general medical consensus on food is. It isn't supposed to be the final world on anything, it's supposed to be a jumping off point for a more substantive conversation on nutrition. This is also why I've augmented that letter by referring to and quoting from several different guides put out by the UK and US government on guidelines for healthy eating. If you want to make intelligent and specific criticisms of those guidelines then I will hear you out with an open mind. What I find so remarkable about this thread is that they seem to be reenacting previous arguments they got into with no concern for the actual content of what I'm saying, leading to people repeatedly making counter arguments against the straw man claim that home cooked or fresh meals are inherently healthier, or people freaking out because "junk food" is a colloquialism rather than a technical term.
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Mar 27, 2016 02:02
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Income and weight are related, but the relationship is a complicated one.Pew Research posted:Obesity varies considerably depending on gender, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic factors. In 2010, CDC researchers (using data from 2005-08) found that among black and Mexican-American men, obesity increased with income: 44.5% and 40.8% of those men are obese, respectively, at the highest income level, compared with 28.5% and 29.9% at the lowest level. Beyond that, though, the researchers found little correlation between obesity prevalence among men and either income or education.
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Mar 28, 2016 05:54
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Zodium posted:helsing you are my favoritest D&D poster and I got no dog in this race until somebody trips the stats alarm, but you are way out of your field and way out of your league on this issue. and uncharacteristically oblivious to that fact. Well, first of all thanks for the compliment. One of the reasons I like posting here is because I can test out arguments and have people tell me what an idiot I am from a position of relative anonymity, which is quite freeing in a way. At times aggressively arguing a point is the best way to get a reality check on whether you're right or whether you're just saying things that, if you weren't an anonymous person on the internet, would mark you out as some kind of doofus. I'd rather have my bozo erruptions on the internet, so here we are. But that having been said, it's far from clear to me that that's what is happening here. So if you can actually help explicate what you think I've gotten wrong here I'd appreciate it. So far though I don't think I've staked out any unreasonable positions. I also don't think I'm relying so much on any individual paper as I am relying on the broad scientific consensus about health -- or maybe, more accurately, the way that this scientific consensus is presented to the public. That's obviously not a guarantee that I'm right but I think it at least puts the burden of proof on you, Discendo Vox, etc. to explain your own positions and to articulate an alternative position. Here's a proposed definition for 'junk food' ripped straight from wikipedia. I don't see what's wrong with it as a starting point for discussing nutrition but I'm genuinely curious to hear your objections: Obviously you couldn't use this definition to formulate an actual policy response. But if we're discussing how to maintain a healthy diet then the advice "limit your intake of junk food", using this definition of junk food, then I don't see why that's bad or remotely controversial advice to give. If anything the real objection here would seem to be that the term junk food is so tautological that you might as well just say "avoid unhealthy foods". But again, "avoid eating unhealthy food" isn't bad advice, it's just advice that needs to be complemented by more specific instructions or nutritional guidelines. I also do not understand why people are so upset at the idea that someone might recommend that a grocery shopper "eat a variety of fresh foods and vegetables (in particular green cruciferous vegetables), try to make at least half the grains you consume whole grains, and try to limit your intake of processed meats" is such terrible advice? Even the guidelines posted by Discendo Vox linked to a food eating guide with exactly that advice. What, specifically, is wrong with it?
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Mar 28, 2016 19:31
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The vagueness of the "junk food" category is a reason not to use it for formulating government policy, not a reason not to use it in casual conversation when you're talking about nutrition. And the health related reason for being cautious about processed foods, which has been explained to the point of tedium by now, is that processed foods are vastly more likely to contain high levels of sugar, sodium, trans-fats, etc. Why are you even bothering to post in this thread if you're not going to try and reply to the actual arguments being made there? You haven't even tried to refute that argument. If you want to dispute that processed food items in the grocery store are the main source of sugar, unhealthy fats, sodium, etc. then go ahead and actually make that argument instead of just repeating the completely irrelevant fact that processed food isn't inherently less healthy just by virtue of having been processed. And maybe you can at least explain why so many doctors and nutritionists are using "processed food" or "processed meats" as a heuristic for evaluating health if, as you claim, it's so utterly worthless a category that only a charlatan would apparently try to use it. twodot posted:How did you end up in a place where you thought saying "avoid eating unhealthy food" is a good idea? Because every single actual food guide then gives some actual examples of junk food. So yes, I would say that warning consumers against "eating unhealthy foods, such as the following" is a good starting point. quote:I'd wager your average shopper isn't capable of evaluating that ratio anyways. It's not that this is bad advice necessarily, people following this advice will probably end up ok, it's just advice that displays a fundamental ignorance about what words mean. This is almost as dumb as the argument that that advising people to eat fresh vegetables might be interpreted as saying that they can exclusively eat potato and remain healthy. By the time someone has gotten to the point of actually following a food guide I am pretty sure that they can take the additional step of distinguishing between steel cut oats and wonder bread. I would also like to know why you, some random internet poster on the Something Awful forums who hasn't presented any obvious qualifications, are so comfortable declaring that food guides put together by actual health organizations and medical professionals are displaying "a fundamental ignorance about what words mean". Like, you're not just saying "oh this is a bit simplistic" you're actually apparently claiming that these food guides must have been prepared by people who are vastly less qualified than you are. That's a pretty serious claim that might require some actual positive proof.
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Mar 28, 2016 21:36
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You're not in an argument not with me but with what appears to be the received nutritional wisdom of almost the entire medical establishment. I've presented multiple different nutritional guidelines that use the term processed food. Your quarrel is now with a large number of doctors and health professionals. Go quote from their studies and then critique them and explain why your own perspective is superior. I'm not someone who thinks that a layperson should never argue with an expert, because even experts can be wrong. But when the expert consensus is against you it becomes your job to explain why you know better than them, and until you put at least a tiny bit of effort into doing that I'm going to start treating you like some crank who claims that the scientific consensus on global warming is totally wrong because you say it is for reasons you don't feel like revealing.
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Mar 28, 2016 22:05
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twodot posted:Ok from your guide: Do you have any familiarity with these debates at all? The definition of "Processed food" isn't exactly obscure and the fact you're acting like it's some kind of ambiguous or airy word is making me suspect that you don't have even a passing familiarity with basic nutritional guidelines. You also don't appear to know what a "contradiction" actually is (you're accusing him of being redundant, not contradictory, but that's a whole other issue). I'm starting to think you probably never even thought about any of these issues prior to starting that pedantic little derail about junk food, and now you're flailing around for someway to make your original argument tenable by trying to play word games. You don't appear to have anything of interest to say about the actual science of nutrition and frankly even your language games are subpar. Zodium posted:your positions aren't unreasonable as such, but they aren't sound (or useful) either, and I think that's the critique that's being levied. your mistake, and I'm really just speculating here, is that you seem to think the science itself is reasonably solid, so it's probably okay to abstract away a bit with terms like "junk food." Well, first of all, I really admire your willingness to stake out a position that amounts to: "we're stuck in a veil of radical ignorance and can't really make any strong or binding statement about nutrition". I'll point out that nobody else has been honest enough to say anything like that. Instead twodot and Discendo Vox are implicitly presenting themselves as higher authorities than actual medical professionals and I find that quite silly. If they were simply saying "you know the science of nutrition is in it's infancy and we just can't know much about healthy eating" then I'd have more respect for them, even if I didn't entirely agree. What I find ridiculous is that they're doing this very typical form of nerd-arguing where you take on an authoritative tone and hope the other person will be intimidated enough to stop arguing, even though there's very little substantive argument to support any of your points. I think you can levy some intelligent criticisms against nutrition science. Just look at the changing opinions on the value of fibre or the recent reversal on dietary cholesterol or certain forms of dietary fat. These all give us reasons to be cautious. However, the fact we should be cautious is not an excuse to ignore the available data. And one thing that the data seems to repeatedly reveal, and which I don't think any serious experts dispute, is that you should be very diligent about what kind of additives are contained in the processed food that you purchase. If the processed food in question is just a bag of chopped and frozen veggies for a stir fry or pasteurized milk then you're fine but if you're buying canned food or microwavable meals or various types of meat then you should really pay attention to what is on the label. In other words: because of everything we know about how food companies make and sell food, anything processed should make you stop for a moment and examine the label. This is totally reasonable and sound advice. I feel like the more one actually looks at the specific and detailed advice on offer, the harder it is to object. Are you really going to dispute that 11 grain bread is overall healthier than wonder bread? Do you really think it's bad advice to eat a lot of fresh fruit and green vegetables, when this food is known to be both satiating and filled with micro-nutrients? I guess we could start to really get into the nettles of studies suggesting a link between the consumption of processed meats and heart disease. Here's a woman who specializes in epidemiology at Harvard discussing a meta-study that showed a strong link between eating "processed meats" (her words) and heart attacks, strokes and diabetes. They found a huge difference between consuming processed and unprocessed red meats when it came to your risk from those health problems.
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Mar 28, 2016 23:27
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Gahmah posted:You're arguments sound similar to "why don't poors just get better jobs" Helsing. What similarities do you see exactly? In the mid to long term I think the best way to improve health outcomes would be higher wages, shorter working hours and communities that aren't oriented around car ownership. In the short term I think some kind of mandatory home economics class in high school probably wouldn't be the worst thing but I tend to view health problems as being more of a byproduct of economic forces rather than individual ignorance.
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Mar 28, 2016 23:35
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Zodium posted:praise from caesar. I would be very happy to read such a criticism so if anyone wants to post one from a decent source that'd be great. For one thing it would demonstrate that there's an actual controversy here. I mean, actually read through twodots posts in this thread again and tell me you can do it without reflexively rolling your eyes a bunch of times. The guy has zero interest in nutrition but feels that he's qualified to evaluate how doctors are using words like "processed" because he "knows English". Whether or not processed is a decent term to use the idea that somebody who doesn't even pretend to have any interest in the substantive underlying debate wants to come in and police the use of language is beyond silly. You can't judge how an expert uses a term without at least making some effort to understand the field in which the expert operates. Experts aren't beyond reproach, but if you are going to reproach them then I think you need to at least do a bit of homework first. quote:this is a very dangerous rabbit hole that I absolutely will not follow you down, and really handwaves away the criticism against you in some sense. making inferences based on invalid or incomplete data is, in my mind, certainly worse than making decisions based on no data at all. (i can't remember how controversial this is to non-statisticians, but take my word or don't, I guess.) of course, you're not really looking at the data in the sense of the actual empirical observations here, anyway. you're looking at very vague, very weak inferences about individual behavior, based on extrapolations from the nutrition or mean outcome data. that's a different beast. Honestly the use of the term "junk food" just seems to come down to personal taste. At this point I don't think anyone really disputes that in basic way most people understand what the term "junk food" refers to. How comfortable you are using a casual term like that in a discussion on health just seems to irreducibly come back to your feelings about using language. I think it's a perfectly comprehensible and useful word. I feel like some of the objections to it are almost like if somebody were to challenge you on the use of the term "global warming" by pointing out that in some places the globe is actually getting colder. That having been said, I also don't see any way for one side or the other to reach any kind of closure on this argument, and I don't really think it's a significant enough debate to keep it alive any longer. The place I will draw a line is on this more basic issue of nutritional guidelines. Nutritional science has room for improvement but the way some of ya'll are writing it's almost as though you think that we aren't in a position to make any statements beyond "count your calories". I think that's insane. Scientific research over the last couple decades has improved our knowledge of nutrition and while there is definitely a crisis right now in scientific testing where individual studies can't be reproduced, but there are some observations that have been overwhelmingly confirmed again and again. No one really disputes the importance of getting certain micro-nutrients in adequate supplies (hell, people understood that lack of vitamins lead to scurvy long before we actually knew what vitamins were). The scientific consensus on the importance of omega 3s or the danger of trans-fats is pretty well established at this point. This idea that nutrition science is so under developed that we just can't say anything about it other than "count your calories" is ridiculous. Counting calories isn't even very good advice outside of a narrow and specific focus on weight: if you were trying to plan what you're gonna feed your kid over the next week and you just completely ignored any scientific advice on nutrition other than "count the calories", then you're being outright negligent. quote:we could start to really get into the nettles of studies suggesting this and that, but it would be a technical quagmire that most posters aren't competent to engage in, and we'd just end up at radical ignorance anyway. except we'd actually get bored long before that, because you'd never run out of studies, obviously. why don't you pick the single best set of publications or other support you can find to support the terms you're using, and then dvox/twodot can pick it apart, and then we can get this over with? I personally think you have to do a lot better than "it was used in a peer reviewed paper, ergo, qed," though. So far as I can tell basically everyone discussing public health and giving any kind of advice of guidance to consumers uses the term "processed foods" for the reasons that Vital Signs and asdf laid out perfectly adequately the other day.[/url] Processed foods is a simple but useful way to indicate any kind of food that has been altered from its original natural state. Because of the way that the modern food industry works it's important to give extra scrutiny to processed foods, and as a general rule of thumb. Eating fresh fruits and vegetables is thus one of the most reliable but simple ways to 1) efficiently receive important micro and macro nutrients that your body requires and to 2) do so in a calorie efficient manner and 3) avoid excess amounts of several unhealthy additive that are commonly found in many of the most popular processed food items sold at grocery stores. The amount of pedantic objections and complaining that this incredibly basic and common sense advice, supported by a huge amount of medical science and advocated for by top doctors at the world's most respect health organizations such as Harvard, is simply insane. Obdicut posted:Helsing, Zodium is telling you why you're deeply wrong nicely, others are doing it more harshly. Whichever way it's presented to you, it's still wrong. You say that the only thing that matters is calories and then immediately contradict yourself by drawing a link between fructose and diabetes. Maybe that should be a hint that calories aren't the only thing to pay attention to when evaluating food. Sugar, salt, fat, fibre, protein, vitamins, not to mention the glycemic index, are also relevant. To use an extreme example: you are already perfectly aware that somebody who stayed within their weight maintaining calorie count for each day but got these calories exclusively from Coca Cola would be a loving health disaster. Or to use a historical example: tell those generations of sailors whose bodies were literally falling apart from scurvy that vitamins are irrelevant as long as they count their calories. quote:Individual-level behavior policing looks like the low-hanging fruit of public health but it's actually really, really hard to address in many areas, especially those areas most associated with class, stress, and pleasure. If you want to go after that low-hanging fruit, it is dumb as a box of rocks to go after 'nutrition' when we don't have solid science. What you should do is promote activity, exercise, walking places, because that both has extremely solid science backing it up, and small gains and improvements still have a massive effect. If you do want to go after food, then there is one meaningful metric: calorie content, and pretty much only two ways to get people to reduce that: portion size reduction and frequency of eating reduction, both of which are mostly cultural values and not individual, anyway. Ok, so what I'm getting here is that you haven't paid attention to the debate so far. You're coming in to sternly lecture without having done enough homework to understand what is actually being argued about, and I guess you've missed the posts that emphasize that this is a social health issue and not a matter of individual behaviour.
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Mar 29, 2016 18:51
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I'm not suggesting vitamin deficiency is a realistic threat for people living in North America, just that following this whole "only calories matter" thing to its logical conclusion would be devastating for health. A healthy diet necessitates more than just keeping your calories at maintenance level.
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Mar 29, 2016 19:06
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twodot posted:If you think this is a good definition for processed, please explain to me what you think an unprocessed meat is. (edit: Also please note this definition contradicts the definition your guide provided) There's no contradiction, I've explained my definitions at some length, "scrutinize all food" is indeed one of the implications of the warning against processed food (though again, the purpose is to provide consumers with a heuristic for doing their shopping) and I'm not going to waste any more time debating someone who thinks that being an English speaker is somehow an excuse to make sweeping judgement on debates (judgement massively contradicted by top experts in the field) without having any knowledge whatsoever of what is actually being discussed.
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Mar 29, 2016 20:21
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twodot posted:I don't understand how you can conclude I'm making a sweeping judgement. I'm specifically saying certain words aren't useful. Your definition of "processed" is so overly broad that you're just suggesting people think more about their food. That's not bad advice, but it's just as effective as your earlier advice that people eat less unhealthy food. Your insistence on using underspecified terminology is leading you to uninteresting conclusions. You've acknowledged that humans can do a thing that leads to creating food you think is bad, why aren't you talking about that thing rather than using a term that covers that thing and also safely produced milk? Because, for most consumers, the vast majority of their intake of sugar, trans-fats, sodium, etc. comes from processed foods which is why nutritional guides almost universally use 'processed food' as a category for pedagogical purposes (even though they also immediately qualify this advice by explaining situations where processing doesn't matter, such as buying chopped and frozen vegetables or pasteurized milk). It gives people a framework for understanding healthy eating and then after they've spent more time learning on their own they can move beyond that simple heuristic and develop a more sophisticated view of nutrition. Like with most educational programs you start with a simplified but helpful guide to action and then build upon it, gradually adding additional nuance and context as appropriate. I'm really not going to waste any more time with this. You're claiming that because you speak English you're perfectly qualified to attack the language used by an expert in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. It's a testament to my own idiocy and stubbornness that I've indulged your ridiculousness for this long.
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Mar 29, 2016 20:46
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I feel like I'm debating a martian who has never actually eaten human food or been in a grocery store. You do understand part of why doctors recommend fresh fruits and vegetables is because in addition to having a good calorie to nutrition trade off, they also promote a sense of satiety? Whereas sugar is the opposite: many food items with added sugar will actually make you hungrier despite being full of calories. Also I can't even begin to comprehend the level of idiocy that claims only calories matter. The logical conclusion of that position is that you could eat or not eat literally anything you wanted and as long as you watched your calories it wouldn't matter whether you were getting protein, fibre, vitamins, etc. Is that seriously the position you are defending? Obdicut posted:Again, there isn't any good research about high sodium intake that's population-applicable. Likewise, 'sugar' isn't a problem. Trans-fats are the only thing you listed there that are definitively bad. Those nutritional guides are of very, very dubious efficacy. The video you cited has the key word 'may' in it. The video showed a strong association between eating large amounts of processed meats and the risk of diabetes or heart disease. There's no ambiguity there. The exact relationship of the association is where the "may" comes up, there's no question that an association exists. More importantly, the video is exhibit A in the massive pile of evidence showing that people who actually know what they are talking about regularly use the term "processed" when advising consumers about food and nutrition, which was the original point of contention in this debate.
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Mar 29, 2016 22:27
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Obdicut posted:'sugar' isn't a problem. Obdicut posted:Sugar is bad because it is calorific and digests super quickly
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Mar 29, 2016 22:41
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Obdicut posted:And yet, if you eat the same amount of non sugar calories, you will be just about as likely to develop type 2. If a diabetic follows your mystical beliefs in fresh food and eats a ton of nuts, or a bunch of boiled potatoes, or anything else calorie dense they will have the same outcomes. So in addition to reversing your position on sugar you're now rehashing stuff that was already addressed, in tedious detail, pages ago. PT6A posted:The bad diet is the problem, not any individual component thereof. So far as I can tell this has been universally and explicitly agreed on by everyone posting here for the entire discussion.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:38
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PT6A posted:If no food can in and of itself be bad for you (and excepting trans fats and literal poison, this is the case), then how can you call something "junk food?" That's what people are arguing with you about. This has been explained in tedious detail. You can read my post history in this thread and decide for yourself if you agree with the arguments but unless you want to quote something I've said and offer some novel critique that hasn't been made yet I do not think there's much profit in going through this yet again.
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Mar 29, 2016 23:50
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Obdicut posted:I didn't reverse my opinion though. Eating straight sugar is bad for diabetics since it spikes their blood sugar. Eating white bread or a bunch of fruit is bad for the same reason. I can't tell if you are pretending not to understand this or really don't. And the rehashing is stuff that you are still wrong about, so it's probably going to keep happening. The point, which you seem to simultaneously grasp and yet not grasp, is that food is more than just an empty and neutral vessel for a certain number of calories. Depending on how it's prepared and what's in it the human body responds differently, and these different responses are very relevant to a discussion about diet and health. This is one of the reasons why doctors tend to recommend that a large part of our daily food intake come from plants. Because they tend to not only have high nutritional value but also because they promote a feeling satiation. The chips and cola you drink, by contrast, don't make you feel full and you're a lot more likely to eat more of it. DARPA Dad posted:Why do you keep saying "fresh" fruits and vegetables? What's wrong with frozen varieties or canned tomatoes from a respected brand? You type that exact phrase so often I'm surprised it hasn't overtaken your auto complete. Usually there's no meaningful difference between, say, a bag of frozen fruit vs. a piece of fresh fruit. Sometimes canned foods can have additives like sodium for preservation.
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Mar 30, 2016 17:41
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Obdicut posted:Not really, though. Calories in and out are by far the biggest nutritional deal as long as you're not deficient in any vitamins, and very few people eating a modern diet are. For diabetes, for heart conditions, etc. by far the main driver is obesity and for obesity by far the main driver is calorie count rather than calorie makeup. That's not actually true though, or if it is then it contradicts the studies I've heard about. Huge numbers of Americans are thought to be deficient in vitamin D, people don't generally consume enough fibre, etc. Where exactly are you getting this idea that only calorie counting matters? quote:I don't know why you keep referencing doctors. Do you think doctors are an authority on nutrition for some reason? Anyway: Yes, compared to chips, vegetables produce satiety. So does crappy 'hungry man' processed food. And 'plants' is a silly thing to say: wheat is a plant and eating bread does not produce satiety. I think you mean 'vegetables'. A lot of the problem with what you say is you seem completely careless about your terminology and get irritated with other people for not continually discerning what you really mean rather than what you actually said. Because doctors can also be researchers and I'm not just referring to some family doctor but rather the general consensus among a large number of health agencies and practitioners. I'm curious about where your ideas and thoughts are coming from? Also in light of my numerous previous comments on the importance of including whole foods in your diet it's hilariously dorky and pedantic that you're now complaining that my comment on plants could be interpreted as meaning "it's fine if you just eat bread." Is it hard for you to understand that each post I make builds on my previous posts rather than negating them? quote:And usually when you prepare fresh vegetables, you use salt. Harping on 'fresh' the way that you were is a distraction, and really makes this more of a cultural issue than an actual nutrition issue. This is yet another thing that was discussed upthread which you either missed or forgot. The vast majority of the salt in American diets comes from processed foods or dining at restaurants, less than 10% is typically added during home cooked meals. wateroverfire posted:I didn't think any topic could provoke more spergposting than Uber, but apparantly nutrition is that special unicorn. Yeah, sorry bout your thread.
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Mar 30, 2016 18:13
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Obdicut posted:From the way that you actually develop diabetes. Vitamin D is not something you readily get from plants, fiber isn't a nutrient the body uses int he same way as others. Are you saying that nutritional deficiencies are in any way comparable to obesity in terms of health problems in the US? Here's a little canned summary from NPR on the CDC's report and here's a link to to the executive summary. And yes I'm well aware that you don't get vitamin D from plants, whether or not you think I'm totally wrong here you could at least acknowledge that I'm saying a bit more than "eat plants". (Edit: to be clear, read past the headline, which confirms the average American is doing allright, and look at the numbers for certain minority populations, such as African Americans) quote:I work and study at a school of public health and this is an area that I work in. You are falsely representing a consensus. There is huge, huge, huge contention over what recommendations we should make both at a scientific level and a policy level. So, for the benefit of some neutral observer, what evidence can you point to suppoting your arguments? You asked me to cite a study just now and that was fair enough, but where's your source of data here? From the perspective of an outsider all you've done is make a series of raw assertions. Try to imagine this from the perspective of someone who has no knowledge of your qualifications, whatever they may or may not be. Where do they turn to verify some of the things you've claimed? quote:Yeah, it is hard for me to understand why you are so insanely sloppy with your language and do not give a poo poo about communicating well. Saying stuff like 'fresh' and 'plants' and then saying 'Oh that's not what I meant' is dumb. As I said, nobody should have to be able to figure out what you really mean, the onus on you is to actually say what you mean. Instead of whining about it, take the incredibly minimal amount of time and effort to actually speak accurately. I guess we'll have to let anyone else reading this make but their own minds but when I say "you should eat plants", in the context of a conversation where I've repeatedly advocated that people should make whole foods a part of their diet, and your response is "Heh, you mean like bread?" I think that makes you look like an idiot. If someone else has a different take away then so be it but I don't think you scored the brilliant point that you seem to think you did. quote:Yeah, but the amount of salt in a can of tomatoes is tiny, which is part of why lumping all 'processed' food together is dumb. The amount of salt in a can of tomatoes is trivial compared to what you'd use in cooking. Did you just start reading the thread in the last page or two and completely ignore the preceding discussion where it was made clear that the reason one lumps together "processed food" is literally just because consumers should scrutinize the label for ingredients more closely? No one has ever claimed there's anything wrong with processed food. The point is that knowing something has been processed should invite much greater scrutiny about what's been added or done to the food, it doesn't mean you should never eat it. Helsing fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 20:28
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Obdicut posted:So in other words, no, nutritional deficincy in the US is nowhere near, at all, the problem of obesity. Thank you. This is pathetic. Your original claim was that no American is at serious risk of vitamin deficincies. I just showed you a report that indicates that actually some significant minority populations are at risk and your reply was to say "see, I told you obesity was a bigger problem!" Well no poo poo, nobody ever said vitamin deficiency was a worse problem than obesity of all thing. quote:I'm claiming the null hypothesis for most things. For "Calories are what matters for developing diabetes": That's all very interesting but actually what I meant was that I was hoping you could demonstrate that "processed food" is a hugely controversial label rather than a term that practically all health care experts seem to use regularly. Given that even here you're posting a study using the term "processed meats" I feel like you're just demonstrating that actually there's nothing controversial about using that kind of language. quote:I didn't think you meant bread. I was saying that spreading the message 'eat plants' is dumb, and you shouldn't do it, because it's massively inaccurate. Is there some reason you are just refusing the idea that maybe it might be useful to be accurate when you speak? You seem to have almost contempt for the idea that you should bother to use the right words to say stuff. No, I'm advocating this radical idea called "reading things in context". quote:ANd also, this was your first post: What stance do you think I'm taking and why does it make what I said there "nuts"? quote:But they're not going to. We know how human beings are actually going to behave when presented with complex nutritional information. Putting the calorie count on McDonald's menus goddamn backfired--people ordered more high calorie stuff. A lot of prepared food having high sodium levels is worth looking at even without a really significant finding about sodium, but that doesn't mean that prepared foods are bad. This is actually a really great illustration of why nutritional guides use simplified heuristics such as advising people to balance between processed foods and whole foods. While these guides all make clear that processed food isn't inherently bad and that the main thing to do is to check the label for ingredients, they also provide a straight forward and easily actionable plan that, if followed through, will reliably help you ensure you strike a reasonable balance in your diet between caloric intake, satiety, and getting the right mix of micro and macro nutrients. quote:If we want to stop food waste, the absolutely best way to do that is prepared foods, frozen foods, canned foods, etc. Sure, but I never claimed that food waste is reduced by eating more fresh food.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:37
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Obdicut posted:No, it wasn't. Well, unless you're claiming, in a"No-true-scotsman" kind of way, that the millions of people suffering from vitamin deficiencies in America aren't really eating a "modern diet" (talk about a slippery and vague word coming from the prophet of linguistic precision himself!) then I'm not sure how else to interpret what you said there. quote:Processed meats is a meaningful term, barely. Processed foods isn't. And they operationalized it in the study. There have been very good reasons given to you why 'processed' is overly broad, and I don't get why you refuse to acknowledge them. I don't know why processed meat is fine but processed food is somehow bad in your mind, but I'm honestly just glad you're willing to acknowledge that "processed meat" is a useful category for analyzing food health. No one else on your "side" or this debate has actually been willing to acknowledge that up to this point. quote:But anyway, yeah, all those studies were showing that composition of diet does not matter nearly as much as BMI/obesity for diabetes formation. I'm not disputing that. I'm suggesting that you're really overlooking the extent to which different kinds of food lead to different behaviors from the people eating the food, which is highly relevant to this discussion and which has been brought up many times. quote:You've changed your stances back and forth at a whim, abandoning 'fresh', for example, but in general you're advocating people don't eat 'unhealthy' prepacked foods and were offering rice, veggies, and pasta as the better alternative. Veggies are good, but the other two are unhealthy in terms of glycemic index, lack of other meaningful nutrients, and being calorific. I'm sorry, I should have twigged to this earlier. My position has been perfectly clear and hasn't changed. At no point have I said that people shouldn't eat prepackaged meals or processed foods. You're a bad reader and aren't debating in even remotely good faith, leaving me with the unenviable choice of either repeating myself or digging up old quotes from days ago when I addressed exactly the tired and asinine criticisms that twodot and Discendo Vox were making. quote:But what actually happens when you provide people with that guide? What is the actual, real-world result? In my experience people whose health is basically fine rarely pay much attention but many people who are getting older or facing some kind of health situation pay very close attention to these nutritional guides and do seem to get some good use out of them. If you know of any studies on the influence of nutritional guides on behaviour at the population level then that'd be very interesting to read about but I'm not directly familiar with any such research. quote:This was all an intentional derail? Its a conversation that evolved naturally over time. I'm now pretty convinced you only skimmed the early parts of the thread and jumped into the debate without fully understanding who was arguing what.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:00
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Baronjutter posted:Depends if it's processed or not.  Alright, well done. wateroverfire posted:
Well, first of all 1750 calories isn't exactly generous and also the idea that the poor should exist on a diet of nothing but rice and beans is so obviously unacceptable that I'm not sure why you're bothering to bring it up at all. Besides which you're ignoring the time it takes to purchase and prepare, as well as access to transportation to and from the store, and enough leeway to save up money (have $50 or $100 saved up when you're truly poor isn't necessarily a small thing), etc. You start to add that up and it turns into the death of a thousand cuts. There's no one big reason for food security, just a lot of local and proximate ones united by a shared theme of near utter indifference to the plight of the poor by everyone who isn't poor. And yeah, as I think you're alluding to, a lot of poor people experiencing food insecurity on a semi-regular basis are probably suffering from other issues like mental illness and addiction. Or they simply lack any kind of positive examples to emulate because of how insidious inter-generational poverty is.
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Mar 31, 2016 19:10
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Count Roland posted:My guess is there is a lot of this. It's baffling to us because the unstated civic religion of the west is the cult of the rational individual who gets what is coming to them. It's our version of that famous old British hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful: "The rich man in his castle / the poor man at the gate / God made them high and lowly / and ordered their estate". We shouldn't be any more surprised by the persistence of poor eating habits than we should be surprised by the persistence of smoking half a century after it was conclusively demonstrated that smoking destroys your body and greatly raises your chance of a premature and horrific death. I don't agree with a lot of what he says, but there's a conservative leaning philosopher named John Gray who sums up the paradox of the modern world pretty well: Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals, John Gray posted:For the pre-Socratic Greeks, the fact that our lives are framed by limits was what makes us human. Being born a mortal, in a given place and time, strong or weak, swift or slow, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, suffering tragedy or being spared it -- these features of our lives are given to us, they cannot be chosen. If the Greeks could have imagined a life without them, they could not have recognised it as that of a human being. Insofar as human autonomy can be a reality rather than an ideal, it tends to emerge from a highly supportive and structured upbringing and environment in which opportunity is balanced out with an equivalent amount of security. That's not what modern society provides to people who grow up in households or neighborhoods that suffer from food insecurity.
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Mar 31, 2016 22:03
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