Not exclusively, of course, but the degree of processing of food greatly influences our body’s insulin response, which can over time have huge impacts on health (leading to fatty liver disease / metabolic syndrome / obesity / diabetes). This is why, for instance, fruit juice is so much worse for us than the whole fruit — most of the fiber is removed which would otherwise slow down digestion and temper insulin response. For more info I’d highly recommend Jason Fung’s Obesity Code book — he’s a nephrologist specializing in diabetes treatment.
Some kinds of processing increase insulin impact, others don't. If your goal is controlling sugars, a diet premised solely on minimizing processing isn't a great strategy; "processing" isn't the high-order bit of that problem.
Theoretically, you are right, of course. In practice though, to apply this, you would need to know how the processing exactly works, and how the body responds to that processing. Given that you can not really determine this easily, it is in practice just simpler to stick to unprocessed foods as much as possible, and just apply the sugar limit to those.
I don't think this makes a lot of sense. Cheese is cooked, fermented, emulsified, and aged. It has a lower glycemic impact than milk, its primary unprocessed input.
Mostly, I think the "processed" vs. "unprocessed" debate is an appeal to tradition, not science; if it's a kind of processing we were doing 200 years ago, it's OK; otherwise, it's unhealthful.
I would say that Cheese, at least its classic variants, fall exactly under the category where you have fairly good knowledge of the nature of its processing and its effects on the body. I'd say your example supports my argument.
But as humans we can't read every study for every ingredient. We have to use heuristics to guesstimate a healthy diet. Reducing (not eliminating) processed foods is a decent one. Same goes for including protein, increasing fiber (so whole wheat instead of the cake americans call "bread"), including veggies.
For some reason there is no reply button on the other replies.
Maybe the evidence for meat doesn't generalise, but the idea that fresh vegetables would retain some sort-lived structures that start to break down once processed seems plausible. I was just pointing out that GPs claim could do with some backup.
Your references seem to back me up, and not the person I was replying to? Eg:
"There is evidence showing an association with certain types of food processing and poor health outcomes (especially highly- or ultra-processed foods). This association applies mainly to ultra-processed foods that contain added sugars, excess sodium, and unhealthful fats."
From the second one. Maybe you confused my position?
That's mostly related to the curing salts and their reaction with heme iron. Curing salts are not used when processing vegetables; heme iron is not added either (I hope), so this should not apply in this case.
What makes you think so? Do you have any examples of particularly healthful highly processed foodstuff in mind? Or is this more some "there are no slow programming languages, only slow implementations" type of argument about the absence of strict logical necessity?
Healthy food is basically a lemon market, so what would a plausible mechanism to economically incentivize high processing for healthfulness look like?
Conversely there is a clear economic incentive to highly process food in order to decrease unit cost at fixed palatability. By increasing yield (pink slime) or shelf-life (trans-fats) or taste and looks (flavor enhancer etc).
None of these are necessarily bad in all cases, and in some cases might even correspond to increases in healthfulness (e.g. by killing harmful micro-organisms).
But on average, in the absence of some additional economic incentive to keep or increase healthfulness, I'd expect optimization for these criteria to decrease it.
For example, a lot of nutrients have short shelf-lives, so if there is an incentive to increase shelf-life but not an equal incentive to preserve nutritiousness (and I don't think there is), you'd expect healthfulness to go down, no?
Saying there's necessarily a causal relationship is probably not well supported, but there's absolutely a correlation, and as a rule of thumb, if you choose whole foods over processed foods it will tend to net out as more healthy.
Nutrition pretty much by definition requires a lot of simplification to allow people to make quick decisions on food choices, and so broad rules that are mostly right are pretty useful (and pretty much the basis of how most diets work).
I agree in so far that I believe that the observation of "more processing > less health" is not caused directly by the amount of processing, but by the way those highly processed products are designed to match as many "appetites" as possible. I use the term "appetites" in the sense of a low intensity craving, the feedback signal the body sends to fill some nutrient deficit. But our taste buds can't really identify most of the nutrients in question, we just have is a set of complicated heuristics taking an educated guess. And many of those highly processed foods, in their quest to maximise desire, will fool those heuristics, matching the "appetite" without fulfilling the deficit. Perhaps not by deliberate design, but by market selection.
On one hand, the faux meats sound quite risky, but in the other hand they are under extreme scrutiny like no highly processed food before them, so they might not actually be bad at all.
Tell me that raw, uncooked wheat is just as healthy as processed and cooked wheat. I'll wait.
Cooking makes some things edible that weren't before. Just because it doesn't work on an apple in the way you are imagining doesn't mean much.
I'll also note that many folks think of baked apples as sugar-laden desserts and fresh apples as eaten plain. Nevermind that folks add apples to savory rice dishes and nevermind that folks dip fresh apples in caramel sauce. You need more than the descriptions of "baked" and "raw" to denote health.
Depends on fruit/vegetable. Some have nutrients that are easily destroyed by heat, but some have nutrients that are easier absorbed after light heating, or problematic compounds removed during cooking.
You mentioned a ton of things that change (which, sure, they do, after all it would be weird if, after processing when things taste differently, nothing would have changed), you did not make the causal link to things changing in a way that is detrimental to health.
Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad.
Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vitamins) is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
> is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter.
It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.
Cooking meat allows your digestive system to ingest more proteins, for example.
This is why fire was such an unprecedented step in our evolution.
For example:
Raw egg: 3g of protein at most.
Cooked egg: 6g of protein.
Not just heating, even simple cutting/mincing of the food promotes oxidation that can significantly influence the composition of food.
On the other hand some processing like canning of fresh food can actually help preserve the good stuff compared to whole food that's refrigerated or otherwise stored over longer periods of time. Processing also can increase the bio-availability of many ingredients, which can sometimes be a good thing, or in case of sugars not so good.
Eating heated food is a staple of human diets for hundreds of thousands of years - ever since fire was invented. I wouldn't worry about that part so much.
Unless you're on a paleo diet, heating to cook is considered minimally processed. So that's more evidence that looking for "processing" isn't a good metric.
Processing changes so many things in both good and bad ways that you can't use its presence to determine much of anything.