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Ultra processed foods unhealthy even if plant-based
(amp.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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I'll never get behind that term ultraprocessed. It typically means that a lot of ingredients were combined with specific physical and chemical reactions to create something new.
But think about what happens inside a chicken. You put in corn, soy, insects, water, give it air to breathe. Then it will first use its beak to physically break everything into smaller pieces. Then, it will use highly complex chemistry, enzymes etc. to first digest and then - again using highly complex processing - rearrange all these aminoacids, fat etc. into meat, eggs etc.
And the chicken isn't even the first step of the chain. The worm, the soy and the corn already did plenty of crazy processing before that.
It's not processing or chemistry in general that decides about healthy or unhealthy. There's specific stuff that makes food healthy or unhealthy.
In processed meat you find a lot of added nitrates which can turn into nitrosamines which are known to be cancerous. In vegan substitues it's as far as I know mostly sugar and fat that make them unhealthy.
Btw. also because because something is 'natural' doesn't mean it's healthy by default. There are countless poisonous plants and animals that can easily kill you if you eat them just once. And also 100% natural food can be dangerous if consumed in high amounts, e.g. brazil nuts (radio active!), red meat, salt, ...
Exactly, they never quite explain what “processing” is, or why it’s bad. Just makes me think of people that say “chemicals” as if they are automatically a bad thing. It’s like, dude… water is a chemical!
Damn, you went and used the hard “R” and everything… not cool man.
Yea but it is in general a important insight that a vegan patty is usually much better for the environment, but not necessarily for your body. This being said there are different vegan meat replacements, but a lot of the stuff you get in a normal supermarket is not necessarily healthy, since there is a lot of „eatable glue“ in this stuff.
Completely agree. This needs to be better communicated. Vegan junk food is not meant to be healthy, it's meant to be ethical.
This whole subject is a misunderstanding.
PS: I would go further and suggest that vegans stop insisting that a vegan diet is more healthy in itself. In the absolute, it clearly is not. Perhaps vegans are generally healthier eaters than non-vegans, but that's because they pay more attention to food in general, not because they are vegan. In other words, the healthiness argument is a conflation of cause and correlation. I don't think that this disingenuity helps anyone in the end.
A vegan diet is definetely not healthy by definition but for many specific products I would still argue that the vegan version is indeed healthier. And especially for junk food. If you take sausages for example, then both versions - let's say pork and soy/wheat - contain plenty of fat and salt. But meat products have...
Animal based food on the other hand has better protein quality. E.g. eggs or meat contain a way better composition of amino acids than soy, wheat, peas etc. alone. This negative aspect of a vegan diet can be compensated by combining various different sources of protein (e.g. a mix potatoes, spinach, beans, peas and soy in one meal rather than just soy).
This obviously can be done but it requires some knowledge, practice and more time if you want to prepare everything yourself. Using pre-processed food can make things way easier, more convenient and not necessarily unhealthy. If you can buy a healthy vegan something that tastes good, has similar nutrients like an egg and doesn't take hours to prepare that'll make the transition for people a lot easier. If you give them complex recipes and long tables instead of what should be combined with what, it will scare off many folks.
Therefore, if we want more people to go vegan in a we shouldn't object pre-processed food in general. We should rather praise manufacturers that manage to produce healthy substitutes. Without adding loads of sugar, cheap fats etc. There's nothing wrong with large-scale food processing in general.
Agreed on all that. Interesting points about sausages. My simplistic assumption has been that animal-based junk food is probably nutritionally superior to plant-based junk food not because of its protein but rather because of the sheer variety of molecules that animals contain by virtue of being higher up the trophic pyramid. I still think that's generally true but thanks for pointing out those qualifiers.
To be clear, ethically vegan food is superior across the board.
Yeah I fucking hate it. There's got to be something going on because the results are real but I don't see why taking say a corn kernel apart and then reconstuting it could transform it into something unhealthy.
It has to be about some sort of chemical change, additive, contaminate, or removal (perhaps structural, fibre structure?) which is inducing these harms. Or at least some cluster of them.
Identifying that is the key, for now weird foods you can't make in a kitchen should probably be tentatively minimised in your diet but it's not because of the number of manufacturing steps per se but because something that links oreos, burger rings, and meat pies is waiting to be found.
You're all overthinking it.
When they say "ultra processed foods" they usually mean that all the healthy (yucky) parts were removed.
White bread is "unhealthy" compared to whole because they've taken out the parts that are nutritional and provide fiber. Corn syrup is less healthy than corn because they've taken out the fiber and nutrients and boiled it to make a syrup.
You could put kale in a food processor and call it processed, but that isn't what they mean.
No I've actually read the studies of the scientist that started all this. She groups stuff by the number of processing steps and ingredients, making no effort (due to difficulty, I have no reason to believe she's a hack) to identify the specific reasons.
Her research groups foods which are essentially deconstituted, separated, and reconstituted in the same category as sauces made from 5 base veggies and 40 stabilisers, texture modifiers, flavour additives, and preservatives.
Aw damn, there goes my plant based alternative to vaping.