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  #1   ^
Old Wed, Jan-03-24, 11:16
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default Why You Can’t Stop Eating Ultra-Processed Foods

Thought I'd share Dr Rangan Chatterjee's latest podcast:

Quote:
Why You Can’t Stop Eating Ultra-Processed Foods: Dr Chris Van Tulleken

by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee / January 3, 2024

Why do we all eat stuff that isn’t food and why can’t we stop? In this episode, Dr Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People explains all. As well as being one of the UK’s leading science broadcasters, Chris is a practising infectious diseases doctor in the NHS. He gained his medical degree at Oxford University and his PhD in molecular virology from University College London, where he is an associate professor. He works closely with the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and his research looks at how corporations affect human health.

In this episode, Chris explores what may be the biggest public-health crisis of our time: ultra-processed food, or UPF, for short. Many people these days, certainly most regular listeners to this podcast, will be aware of UPFs. But there’s still a lot of confusion around what they really are. For Chris, it’s simple: if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen, it’s a UPF. If it makes a health claim on the packet? Ironically, it’s even more likely!

A UPF is any food that’s processed industrially and created for big-business profit, rather than to provide nutrients. And here in the UK, UPF makes up 60 percent of the average diet. The trouble is, says Chris, UPFs have been shown to be the leading cause of early death in the world, ahead of tobacco. Even if you remain at what is considered a healthy weight, consuming UPFs still leaves you vulnerable to things like Type 2 Diabetes, heart disease, dementia, anxiety, depression, inflammatory bowel disease, cancer and eating disorders.

In this conversation, Chris provides a clear definition of the difference between processing and ultra-processing, and explains how our toxic food environment is designed to be addictive. We also discuss a whole range of different topics such as the need to see obesity as a condition and not an identity and the seemingly revolutionary idea that re-prioritising food shopping and cooking as a vital, enjoyable part of our day, could be a first step towards the societal change that’s urgently needed.

This podcast episode is not about shame or blame – it’s about education and empowerment. Chris is a brilliant communicator who insists the prevalence and appeal of UPFs is not our fault. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with him – I hope you enjoy listening.

https://drchatterjee.com/why-you-ca...s-van-tulleken/

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  #2   ^
Old Thu, Jan-04-24, 07:50
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JEY100 JEY100 is offline
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Many thanks for sharing this podcast! Two choices for my morning walk…2:32 hours of two truly engaging health communicators…or 3:29 hours of two well-known scientists who are now becoming a bit stale for me…. Dr Huberman and Dr Robert Lustig on How Sugar and Processed Foods Impact your Health, Episode 155.

Dr Van Tullkin and Dr Chatterjee definitely won! The Coco-Pops analysis was fun and I have much more to go Scary review of the ingredients in UPF, even though I have seen his television special with his twin brother, this podcast is good for anyone worried about their "addiction" to sugar, AS, diet soda, packaged foods, etc.
I will eventually listen to both, but Huberman Lab keeps dropping down my list. So many podcasts, so little time.

Last edited by JEY100 : Thu, Jan-04-24 at 10:20.
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  #3   ^
Old Mon, Jan-08-24, 05:01
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JEY100 JEY100 is offline
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Plan: P:E/DDF
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A YouTube video from Diary of a CEO. It is 3 months old, but first I ran across it. 1 hr, 40 minute, has time stamps.

The Junk Food Doctor. Dr Chris Van Tulleken, Ultra Processed People.
https://youtu.be/dzUDhstqXbg?si=sPQntZjtp2DCXflD

Last edited by JEY100 : Mon, Jan-08-24 at 07:45.
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  #4   ^
Old Tue, Jan-09-24, 03:56
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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We preferably stream movies and series, and have a DVD collection of favorites. So I haven't watched TV in years. Until my five months of bedrest, which got me into Youtube.

I plan my own Youtube channel, but I'm well enough to at least I have a TikTok now, under WayofCats THIS is something I can do in my phone, and people are responding.

But it paved the way to watching Youtube -- and being exposed to commercials again. I was blown away by the reaction channels to My 600 Pound Life. And seeing how things got out of control.

It's ALL the processed food! Over and over, you can see how using food like a drug makes it behave like one.
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  #5   ^
Old Tue, Jan-09-24, 10:32
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Ms Arielle Ms Arielle is offline
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Devouring UPF is a real struggle. It hits the brain sweet spot. And the tongue. I stopped buying chips some 20 plus years ago after reading DANDR.

However, other avenues are available and need management: sugar and flour and a kitchen.

To avoid real sugar, the Swerve brown sugar is a lifesaver. Its an occasional treat when baking a batch of cookies is threatening my dietary goals.

Dorito Nachos are a special draw. A taste sensation. Maybe once every 5 years . Eat the whole bag. Enjoying every bite. Never sharing.

Would be happy if all these products were eliminated and never made. But in mean time, manage access to control consumption.
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  #6   ^
Old Tue, Jan-09-24, 11:10
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JEY100 JEY100 is offline
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In the video at minute 25 on Non-Nutritive sweeteners, he calls them "Metabolically Confusing". The UPF manufacturers replaced sugar in their products with cheaper artificial sweeteners, a win for them, cheaper… and increased sales because they stuck a health halo products like Diet Coke. "Four green lights"!.. and even better, people who buy it do not lose weight.
Your Healthy Appetite Signals Have Been Hijacked! Crafty artificial colourings, scents, and flavours [any and all sweeteners] dupe our appetite, tricking it into believing that processed food products are packed with the essential nutrients our bodies crave.
He doesn’t like to make suggestions for how people can overcome food addictions to ultra processed foods, but the WHO recommends an old Allen Carr book about how to stop smoking. How do you change something that you consider yourself addicted to into something you are disgusted by? Read Dr. Van Tulleken's book while eating a packaged product filled with chemicals, or a homemade keto treat with sweeteners.

Last edited by JEY100 : Wed, Jan-10-24 at 03:18.
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  #7   ^
Old Thu, Jan-11-24, 03:36
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JEY100
How do you change something that you consider yourself addicted to into something you are disgusted by? Read Dr. Van Tulleken's book while eating a packaged product filled with chemicals, or a homemade keto treat with sweeteners.


Everyone who really pays attention and eats real food for a while discovers the underlying "dirt" taste of highly processed food. So many junk things have dropped completely off my radar because now I'm fussy. If I indulge, it's from the specialty case, where real bakeries make single serving GF cheesecake, though with sugar.

Developing one's palate this way has been how I walked through breakrooms for years now without a care. Knowing the effect of gluten and lectins and oxalates on my body, foods with these ingredients no longer appeals the way it used to.

I literally cannot eat the cheap sludge which is 99% of what's out there. One of my triumphs is that DH is starting to make these same connections. Quit trying to find a substitute for Grandma's treats on the shelf. Because, unless we make it ourselves, it's a plastic copy, like a wax apple.

No matter how good it looks
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  #8   ^
Old Thu, Jan-11-24, 08:57
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Calianna Calianna is offline
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I'm with you on the break room stuff. I took a snack and my lunch to work with me every single day all those years, because the break room foods were not remotely LC friendly.
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  #9   ^
Old Thu, Jan-11-24, 10:22
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JEY100 JEY100 is offline
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The Utra-Processed Food Industries are not going down without a Fight! How many millions did they spend to defeat the California tax on soda? A drop in the bucket compared to the PR they are lining up now for a nation-wide change!

Is America’s Ultra-Processed Diet That Bad? Big Food Fights Back

Food industry rallies to defend processing; changes could ‘rock the world’ of manufacturers


https://www.wsj.com/business/retail...share_permalink

(You should be able to read this, gifted)

Quote:
Move over GMOs and high-fructose corn syrup. There is a new phrase making the food industry pucker: ultra-processed foods.

A battle is brewing over the latest term for many packaged food products that manufacturers fear could infiltrate U.S. food policy and scare off consumers.

Food-industry groups and makers of goods from ice cream to pasta sauce are stepping up lobbying, pushing back as the U.S. government probes the health effects of heavily processed food. It is a new front in a struggle that could reshape America’s approach to nutrition and threaten profits for companies behind foods throughout much of the supermarket.

Opposition to ultra-processed foods—your frozen pizza, potato chips and other mass-produced goods made with industrial ingredients and additives—is gaining steam worldwide. Scientists are still studying why diets high in ultra-processed foods have been tied to health problems, and any potential U.S. policies could be years away.

The foods are facing rising scrutiny as concerns grow over their outsize role in American diets. They are under review ahead of the next dietary guidelines, the every-five-years advice from regulators on what Americans should eat. Federal researchers are studying the foods, and lawmakers are holding hearings highlighting possible health risks.

Big food companies and their allies are marshaling a defense, with some seeking to forestall recommendations in the coming dietary guidelines. Industry groups and companies such as Unilever and Barilla have touted the benefits of processing to regulators, arguing that it has made food safe, convenient, accessible and affordable.

Greater attention to processing marks a major new challenge for food makers. U.S. dietary advice for decades has focused largely on individual nutrients such as sugar, salt or saturated fat. By contrast, concerns over processing strike at the heart of how most packaged food is produced.


....Continues at link. Though not mentioned by name, and he's not the only one, but Dr Van Tulleken is getting under their skin.
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  #10   ^
Old Fri, Jan-12-24, 07:00
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Bwahahahaha! If they are scared, it's a real risk.
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  #11   ^
Old Fri, Jan-12-24, 10:53
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Calianna Calianna is offline
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I went to the link and failed the quiz at the end asking if each food was unprocessed, minimally processed, processed, or ultra processed.

I got the fish sticks right - those are pretty obviously ultra processed.

However, I said that the chickpeas were minimally processed, and peanut butter was processed, whereas they said the chickpeas were unprocessed, and the peanut butter was minimally processed. Which I suppose they could be considered to be, I just don't consider that to be the case if you're comparing those products to a straight from the field product.

To me the chickpeas are minimally processed (rather than unprocessed) because they grow in a pod on a chickpea plant. Even if you don't consider picking them to be part of processing, shelling them IS a process - one that you would need to do yourself if the food production industry didn't take care of that process. Also, having some experience in the farming industry, if those chick peas were picked in a state where they were either too dry or too moist for ideal storage, they will be put through a moisture adjusting process. It's very rare to harvest any kind of bean or grain at the perfect ideal moisture content, so almost all grains and beans need at least a little moisture adjustment after harvest before long term storage.


I also consider the peanut butter to be processed (rather than minimally processed) IMO - it's not just the fact that the peanut butter only had 2 ingredients (peanuts and salt), it's that the peanuts themselves are encased in a shell when harvested from the dirt, so they need to have as much dirt as possible removed from the shells covered with dirt before the peanuts can be removed from the shells - 2 processes necessary before anything else can be done with those peanuts. While it's possible to make peanut butter from raw peanuts, the color of the peanut butter in that photo makes it pretty obvious they've been roasted, which is also a process. The dark specks in the peanut butter in the photo indicates that they haven't had the skins removed though, so that's at least one processing step that was not used on it. On the other hand, the grinding necessary to produce a smooth peanut butter generates a lot of heat - and the grinding itself is a process, with the heat produced by the grinding process being an incidental process in the production of peanut butter.

Neither the chickpeas nor peanut butter is ultra-processed, because they haven't had a bunch of extraneous additives and additional processing to make sure those additives do a specific job in preserving color, adding to shelf life, or creating unrealistic flavors.

Having said all that, very, VERY few foods are truly unprocessed. Pretty much everything in the grocery store has been processed in some manner - even fresh fruit and veggies have gone through some kind of processing. For instance even an apple harvest be processed in the sense of sizing and grading them to decide which ones will be packed for sale by the pound at your local store, which ones will be sold in bags at your local store, and which ones will go to a cannery to be processed into applesauce, apple butter, or apple pie filling. Truly unprocessed would be picking an apple straight from the tree and eating it raw.

My point is that I think they need to do a much better job of defining the differences between unprocessed foods (which would mostly mean still in the field/garden/orchard/pasture), minimally processed (just enough to make it possible to store, or to make it edible), processed (for instance when making cheddar cheese) and ultra processed (where the sky's the limit as far as additives and processing techniques are concerned).
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  #12   ^
Old Fri, Jan-12-24, 16:27
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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I try to use the word ultra processed. Fast food and convenience food.

Put warning a on my social media about pulling the and truck with port food..
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  #13   ^
Old Sat, Jan-13-24, 19:06
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Bob-a-rama Bob-a-rama is offline
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It's very difficult to avoid UPF.

I can minimize it, but sometimes there is no choice.

And to think 50 years ago, they had to sell cake mixes by ads having the husband say things like, “This cake tastes so great! What did you do?” And the housewife shared her little secret with the TV audience, not her husband — the cake mix.

Before that, people made cakes from scratch, which is a bit more time-consuming. But better. However, repeating the lie that the mix is better sold the mixes.

To find the ingredients to replace many UPFs with real ingredients, is difficult, and probably in many cases impossible.

Of course, that was the era when being a housewife was common. Not so much anymore. My wife has a career, so she doesn't have that kind of time anyway. It also takes two paychecks to make ends meet these days.

We shop the perimeter of our grocery stores, but that represents a tiny fraction of what is in there. And there are things we can't get on the perimeter, and can't make ourselves. We minimize those choices.

Example: If I am going to need food on the run, I might pick up a Quest protein bar. I may have to be on the job site for a long time with no break, so it'll give me enough protein to keep me from getting too hungry.

It's easy, portable (pocketable) and non-perishable.

But I minimize those instances the best I can.
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  #14   ^
Old Wed, Feb-07-24, 14:50
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Demi Demi is offline
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Nina Teicholz's latest blog post on Unsettled Science, click on the link to read in full

Quote:
Junk Food has been Rebranded as “Ultra-processed”

Why that’s a bad idea


https://unsettledscience.substack.c...st_id=141440183

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  #15   ^
Old Wed, Feb-07-24, 17:00
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Calianna Calianna is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Demi
Nina Teicholz's latest blog post on Unsettled Science, click on the link to read in full


This helps explain why I flunked the processing classification quiz at the WSJ link.

She's definitely right that when it comes to UPF, we may "know it when we see it", but the classifications NOVA is coming up with defy the very meaning of ULTRA processing.


Going back to the chickpeas in the WSJ quiz - those are dried chickpeas. You can't eat them like that unless you enjoy having broken teeth. Apparently if you buy them canned (chickpeas, water, salt), then they're processed. If you take home a bag of dried chickpeas, soak them in water and cook them for hours in water with salt - somehow that's still considered to be an unprocessed food, even though it's the exact same ingredients as the canned chickpeas.

If hamburgers are marked guilty of being ultra-processed simply by association with UPFs - then eating a green salad at an Italian restaurant with Tiramisu for dessert makes the green salad ultra processed by association.
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