Food engineering has grown to the point where food is treated as “products”. Taste, feel and looks are highly engineered to optimize our sensations.
Looks: Marketing of food products use wildly unrelated items (glue to mimic cheese, shoe polish to mimic seared meat) to make the food look appetizing. This sets up for completely unrealistic standards.
Taste: Sugar has been pushed in our diet under different names (dextrose, fructose, corn syrup). Salt has been optimized to excite our senses. But the proportion is carefully controlled to ensure we never feel overwhelmed or saturated with a particular taste.
Feel: Food companies hire the best engineers to optimize surface characteristics to ensure their ‘products’ has great sound, great texture and so on. Pringles famously worked on double curvature for specific mechanics.
These food companies have created ‘products’ that are extremely far from nature. They are engineered heavily to maximize profits at the cost of consumers health.
What can you do:
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Read labels: Most countries have food regulatory bodies that require companies to publish their nutrition info. Check the “daily value” information. Check the “serving size”. DO NOT TRUST WHAT IS PRINTED ON THE FRONT. The real info is always in the back in a boring black and white table.
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Spread awareness: Companies are betting on the fact that you are too tired, too occupied or too ignorant to care about all this. I understand you may have bigger problems. But always remember that you may have 1000 worries but when you have a health issue you only have 1 worry.
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Reach out: If you struggle with food addiction and over consumption don’t struggle alone. This battle cannot be won alone. You are fighting against an army. Join local support groups. Help yourselves to gather allies. If you know know someone who is struggling, reach out and help. Any food that you make at home ( no matter what you make) cannot possibly be as unhealthy as ultra processed crap.
most food you cook at home is gonna be processed through heat, chopping, washing and rinsing anyways. you can’t retain a healthy diet if you eliminate processed foods, mostly because a lot of unprocessed ingredients are unsafe to consume
The idea is you process the food yourself via cooking it at home versus the food being processed at a factory and subjected to the engineering described in the original post: addition of preservatives, excess salt and sugar, etc.
what peer reviewed source can you provide that says preservatives are harmful?
“preservatives” are not inherently unhealthy. But some specific ones are, depending on dose, quite bad for you.
Salt is a pretty preservative, as is sugar, citric acid, vinegar, etc. You can eat those in pretty huge (for additives) quantities before you notice anything.
Other stuff, like BHA/E-320 is banned from EU babyfood becuase it’s very low dayly limit (.5mg/kg) is a risk for babies. If you’re the kind of person who snacks on cereal all day, you’re absolutely in the risk group for it. Sodium Nitrate/Nitrite is not dangerous most of the time, but if you’re eating lots of beef jerky, that can absolutely form a cancer risk increase (It’s in IARC group 2A)
Of course, you can construct argument like this for pretty much every substance in food. The main difference is that some are entirely avoidable.
Are you purposefully misunderstanding that comment?
no, I’m just trying to demonstrate how the popsci view of processed foods as bad is unscientific. we’re not cows, we need processed foods to survive and we evolved as a species to live as such
‘Processed food’ usually refers to industrial processes often requiring different ingredients or production stepa compared to homecooked
Eg. Homecooked soup Vs. Instant package soup.
Both are soup, but homecook has usually less salt, less sugar, less preservatives, kcal and shorter cooking times for the ingredients.
That’s why ‘avoid processes food’ is such common advice.
if someone can only afford to survive on instant soup then they have bigger health problems to worry about such as poverty and risk of homelessness. aka social determinants of health. framing it as a diet issue when your diet is shaped by what your class affords you to buy is asinine IMHO
When I was poor poor I would just eat canned veg and apples. I could shit really really fast.
lmao fiber tornado