I might be an outlier but I actually don’t read the individual forums. I click on “New Posts” and read the mish-mash of what’s been posted since I last visited. In all the years I’ve read SDMB, this is the first time the forum itself was relevant. Never even occurred to me to check…
The forum itself is also relevant in the Pit, since there are a lot of things that are allowed there but not anywhere else on the board.
You get more calories from cooked grain. Someone must of noticed that if you eat raw grain, you starve to death, but if you cook it first, your many children grow up big and strong and look after you in your old age.
TSD must have covered this sometimes, but I don’t have a link.
You do get some calories from raw grains, and if you eat too much anyway eating raw grain might be a good way of limiting your calorie intake. In a subsistence culture, the difference between having enough to eat and not having enough to eat can be critical.
OK, back on track. I wanted to add this for posterity. This is what the original question must have been referring to. The fact that the bacon industry took a giant hit the month after this news was announced, and the fact that business totally rebounded due to consumer amnesia and a lack of the FDA requiring labelling show how important labels are. Without them… people forget. I will go ahead and presume that’s what the meat industry wanted.
https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/world-health-organization-says-processed-meat-causes-cancer.html
Bacon Causes Cancer: What To Know About New Studies (refers to the links above)
Forgot to add that it would be far clearer to call the meats that have been linked to cancer ‘preserved meats’ not processed. Just as the original question asked, what is it about processing, blending fresh chicken in my blender, that is so bad for us. It’s not the processing, it’s the preserving of the meat. Then we can understand it’s the preserving process that is causing the issue whether it be curing or soaking in nitrates or nitrites, etc…
The link between a heavily processed diet and the western diseases - heart disease, obesity/diabetes & bowel cancer are pretty clear. Sorry, I don’t have any references to hand to back that up, but the reasons for it are clear.
The normal processing of packet foods pander to historical needs & economic expediency.
In the wild, few animals are fat. Historically fat has been valuable & rare. That led Alaskan goldminers to complain of “fat hunger”. Today fat is cheap & plentiful.
Salt adds to taste, but to expel it through the kidneys the entire blood pressure must be raised. If you’re cardio vasc is shot because of all the fat & sugar you eat while sitting down all day, it’s going to kill you.
In the wild sugar is also rare, and is used mainly by fruit trees to attract browsers to spread the seed. Maybe you’ve seen videos of monkeys gorging themselves on ripe fruit. They do so to prepare for the coming lack of food. The fructose is converted straight to fat when possible.
You’re American cattle yard system is pretty much a disgrace. To the point that it is illegal to photograph the cattle knee deep in their own muck. The meat must be sterilised before packing due to the bacterial count.
Processing removes fibre. Fibre feeds the gut microbiome which in turn protect you from the meat eating bacteria you cultivate with each steak.
Combine all that with the profligate use of antibiotics and you can expect very nasty things to happen.
I’m not really the treehugger type. But it turns out the treehuggers were right.
And another thing(s).
It’s well known a low nutrient diet increases life span - puzzling researchers as to why there are so many old crackers remaining from the Depression. The theory is it shifts the metabolism away from replacement and towards repair. There’s now a movement which embraces this. They peel their fruit & veg, then eat the peel & throw away the flesh. The exact of opposite of most processing. Check out Michael Mosely, probably on BBC Horizons.
Deiticians (I know, but wow!) call them ‘empty calories’ (kilojoules, outside of USA & Liberia) for the way they fail to provide all the other stuff you need. Don’t quote me, but I believe USA & Australia lead the way in people both malnourished & obese.
Wheat of course, gets processed to remove the germ & fibre because it dramatically improves shelf life & only treehuggers want the fibre. That’s important when your silo is full.
And of course, there was the time Jamie Oliver took Macs to court because their food wasn’t actually food, and won.
Processing, of course, means whatever you want. I process a mean vindaloo, but I peel nothing & the meat is just a 1/4 of the result, ex rice. And that is the point. You don’t know what the processing has added or subtracted even if you read the (very) fine print. And numbered ingredients. Really? My guess is that your questioneer better hope it’s just butt cancer he’s facing.
runs
Except that never happened. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jamie-oliver-mcdonalds-burgers/
Well known by whom?
A lot of highly processed food has little fiber, but we also have lots of highly processed food that is deliberately high in fiber. As previously mentioned in this thread “processed food” is a bad and meaningless term.
And fiber protecting from “meat eating bacteria” is nonsense. You can’t just go “I don’t have the sources right now”, make up nonsense, and expect it to go unchallenged.
There are possibly issues with eating meat, particularly red meat, grilled meat and cured meat, but it has nothing to do with “meat eating bacteria” that we need protection from.
I suspect that somebody at one of the giant food manufacturing conglomerates came up with the term “processed” to make what they actually do to the food sound much less odious. And they’re probably delighted that people argue over what it really means. Sure, if I slice a chicken breast in half, I’ve processed it. So what? That isn’t what we’re talking about.
Replacing “processed” with “loaded with ridiculous amounts of added fat, sugar, salt, and chemical preservatives,” would probably help cut to the conversational chase more quickly.
Sounds doubtful. The giant food manufacturing conglomerates would rather just use terms like “Chicken nuggets”.
The health discussion is based on what nutritional epidemiologists chose to label as “processed”, and that has little to do with the choices of giant food manufacturing conglomerates.
Because of the other part of the definition: “including ‘substances not commonly used in culinary preparations.’” They don’t want to argue that merely adding one not commonly used substance makes something processed.
I would suspect these are all the type of definitions that are trying to lump things together, and so they need more vaguely described aspects.
If we could limit the definition of “processed” just to this definition, I would suspect the science would get better results. Though personally, I suspect the definition should just involve the use of preservatives and other non-food chemicals that are not as long tested as actual food.
Though I guess maybe combining foods that and food chemicals that aren’t normally combined might be part of the problem, too. And I definitely suspect that just the high caloric intake that processed foods facilitate could be part of the problem, too.