Polynesian culture, especially the country of Tonga. In fact:
Cite, International Obesity Task Force. Tonga has very little processed food, but a whole lot of starchy bulk in their diet.
What about smoked salmon? Canned salmon? Pickled sardines? Lutefisk? Fish sausage? Kamaboko?
Tempura? French fries? Potato chips? Cheese puffs? Where do you draw the line?
Carrot soup? Carrot soup in a can? Pickled carrots? Carrot cake? Again, at what point does it become “processed”?
I suppose your list of “unprocessed food” also includes cheese, all “traditional” baked goods but not the recent inventions, kimchi, tofu, thousand-year eggs, natto, etc.?
One thing that is important to note: over time, it doesn’t take a whole lot of extra calories to lead to significant weight gain: eating 100 more calories than you burn a day ends up packing ten pounds a year on your frame. In less than a decade, a skinny latte a day can be the difference between a healthy weight and morbid obesity if you let it just creep up like that.
Americans aren’t obese because we eat like the pathetic fat kid in a teen comedy. We are obese because it only takes over doing it just a little bit day after day, year after year.
Ever hear of Alan Aragon? He’s my favorite nutrition expert. Hopefully the following will give you the excuses to keep eating it you’re looking for.
http://www.flzine.com/alan-aragon-vs-noobette-the-rice-wars/
http://www.alanaragon.com/elements-challenging-the-validity-of-the-glycemic-index.html
This is utterly nonsensical and frankly not the sort of idea that one associates with fact-based and logical explanation.
Though I will admit the term “simplistic” is exactly the right one.
I’m pretty damn sure that someone from any time period past, say, caveman would think a Big Mac is recognizable as food. Or Cheetos, or Velveeta, or whatever.
But your definition is dumb for more reasons than the obvious. For one, it assumes that past people know more about nutrition and health than we do now. That’s just wrong and silly – for example, look at old cigarette ads featuring bicyclists extolling the virtues of smoking as a performance enhancer. Radium tonics? Obviously a good idea.
SCR4 also provides great examples of processed foods that go back thousands of years.
So you either have this naturalistic view, that the only healthy foods are ones that are more or less raw, or you have a view that we need to wait at least a hundred years before we can accept new things as “food”. Both are inane. Steaks don’t look like cows, and cooked steaks don’t look like raw meat. And frankly, MRE’s or some such are much more healthy than a lot of raw foods, like seal blubber.
ETA: Also, do you think ground beef is somehow not healthy compared to other beef? Ground beef is processed – please explain how hamburger is nutritionally much much different (and worse) than beef in primal cuts (including the ancient favorite of nervous tissue.)
Really? Where have you heard that? I eat lots of rice and I’ve never heard it considered an unhealthy thing to eat. It contains very little fat, and I’d consider it a much healthier choice for the carb element of a meal than, say, a big bowl of chips (french fries to you).
White rice has a high glycemic index which means for some people it can cause problems, such as diabetics although not all diabetics find it a problem. For people with a normal, functioning pancreas this should not be a problem at all. It’s also low in fiber and contains fewer vitamins than, say, brown rice.
If you eat it mainly with vegetables, which can supply lots of fiber, too, and with some of the fermented type sauces so common in Asia (such as soy sauce and tamari) which contain B vitamins then the deficiencies of white rice are not significant and it supplies needed calories for those who perform manual labor or who simply have an otherwise low calorie diet (such as vegetarians or those who seldom eat meat).
When, however, you eat rice as a side dish to some typically Western style dinner, such as fried chicken, with minimal vegetables then the lack of fiber can be lamented, and if you add thick, fattening toppings to the rice then it starts to assume the role of empty calories with little other benefit.
Thus, whether or not white rice is “bad” is dependent heavily upon context. As is the usual case when discussing any sort of food, really.
Re the two last posts: the op was asking about a very specific context, not just about white rice but abut it as part of diet overall low in protein and high in that source of simple carbs and coupled with moderate, at best, exercise. He is referencing current thinking that fewer simple carbs and more lean protein is better for long term health than in a diet that consists mostly of simple carbs. And he was appropriately answered that overall BMI will be determined more by total calories relative to total energy out than by macronutrient balance. Still, the macronutrient balance described does have some negative effects. It encourages less muscle mass, more abdominal fat, and and possibly increases the trendency to developing diabetes, which as he notes, is high in that population.
If he is looking for a green light to fill up on rice then I don’t think he’s got it.
One big problem with the OP’s original question is the assumption that carbs are bad. They are not. That’s a myth that gained currency with the popularity of the Atkins Diet.
You need carbs to live. Period. If you don’t get them in your diet, your body will make them out of protein, with the resulting problem that the nitrogen that’s left over has to be gotten rid of by the kidneys. That can and has led to serious health problems in people following the Atkins Diet without a doctor’s supervision and advice.
That said, complex carbs as in rice are better than simple sugars as in Twinkies. And all the fat in the Twinkies doesn’t help, either. You need everything generally recognized as a nutrient (including carbs and fats) in at least a certain minimum amount for best nutrition. But too much of anything is just as bad as too little, just with different diseases as the result.
I seriously doubt 1.5 cups of white rice is at all excessive, nor would be harmful in any way. Just as long as everything else is eaten in moderation too, of course. I don’t eat that much every day, but when I do, that’s about how much I will eat. Yummy, with just a light touch of soy sauce…
Anecdotally I’ll point to what I see with my wife’s family and their Japanese-American ethnic habits. They all eat rice. Tons of rice. I can walk into almost any of her relative’s houses and see a 25 or 50 pound bag of rice. No potatoes, and a loaf of bread will last until it goes stale.
Rice is the only carb they eat, sometimes with a little dried seaweed (nori) for flavor. Maybe sometimes they’ll cook up some Japanese noodles. They don’t eat junk food like cookies or candy. Their idea of binging out is tofu with soy sauce.
White rice may be carbs, but there are a lot of worse carbs that they simply don’t eat.
Cite please. If anything, the actual data from the past 50 years has shown the exact opposite trend.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/fats-full-story/index.html
Okay, let’s look at potato chips as an example. Potato chips are typically fried in so-called “vegetable oil.” How is this vegetable oil produced?
Heavy machinery is required to do the mechanical cleaning, grinding, crushing, dehulling, milling, high-temperature heating, and high-pressure screw pressing. Then there’s the solvent extraction (typically done with a volatile hydrocarbon such as hexane), solvent stripping, refining, deodorizing, degumming, and packaging.
If that doesn’t sound like it’s being “processed”, I don’t know what does. And that’s all for just one ingredient.
Of course there are degrees of processing, I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. Most of your examples would be considered “minimally processed” foods.
:rolleyes:
I explained above that a good rule-of-thumb for identifying a “processed” food would be to ask someone from a century ago if they could recognize it as being food, and you think you’ve somehow proven me wrong by discussing ground beef and cooking?
I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure cooking was around in the year 1910 AD, as was meat-grinding.
Cite please. Where is the evidence to suggest that seal blubber is unhealthy?
So then, in 40 years, Velveeta will no longer be a processed food? Why are you setting 1910 as some magic date? Your definition is simply untenable and illogical.
As a “rule-of-thumb”, it’s even more worthless than an actual definition. Why are foods like Alfredo sauce better than, say, a Powerbar or an MRE (which are decently balanced and healthy)? Why is a “processed” (or by your definition "invented less than 100 years ago) food better than a nutritionally less balanced food that is more recent? Like I said, it’s a pseudoscientific scare word that is virtually meaningless. You’ve advanced this position that processed = bad and that processed means “invented after 1910” without giving us any reason why all food science progress apparently ceased in 1910.
And why 100 years? Nixtamalized corn is definitely processed, and is much better for you than non-processed maize. Why is that process ok, and why are current processes bad? Like I said, your position makes no logical sense.
The problem is that you just cited vegetable oil–something that’s been a food for quite a long time. The process for making it is now different, but oils in general will be recognized.
And the rest of the ingredients in potato chips (potatoes and salt) are definitely seen as food. Yet that won’t stop these people from thinking that they don’t look life food as they no longer look like actual pieces of potatoes.
As for the Atkins diet–people seem to forget that it is a corrective diet. The point is that you’ve consumed so many calories in your life that you need to be burning off the fuel from your fat cells. And his method of doing so is to eat small amounts of protein, and large amounts of fat, so that only fat is being metabolized. After you’ve hit your goal weight, he does suggest you stay with lower carbs than you used to, but that’s because refined carbs are so prevalent in our diets that it doesn’t hurt to be wary of them.
As far as the hijack regarding the harms of “processed foods” - well yeah, that term, and the also becoming popular Michael Pollan one, “Real Food”, suffer from some fuzziness, but be real. Do we really need to state it out longhand each time? - “many of today’s factory produced foodstuffs are processed with additives that are harmful to our health, including but not restricted to trans-fats, nitrates, a variety of preservatives, and a host of other chemical additives not usually found in unprocessed foodstuffs to any appreciable degree that have effects that may include acting as endocrine disruptors. This modern industrially factory processed food also tends to be higher in simple carbohydrates.” Really, you can’t let people get away with saying “processed food” or “real foods” as shorthand? I’m not saying I completely buy it, but I know what people mean when they say it.
Yes. And you need to have at least some idea of what kind of additives you think are harmful. Most people who go on about processed food are afraid of “chemicals”, which is uninformed. Many of the stabilizers and preservatives used today have been around for a lot longer than 100 years, they just have names that sound scary. Even worse are people who complain about adding chemicals like riboflavin (used as a dye) and I’ve even seen a few who were afraid of ascorbic acid.
Like I said above, foods that are calorically dense taste good, and thus we eat more. Economics dictates that people who make food are more likely to make tasty food than bland food. Blaming obesity on “processing” (usually scary chemicals) or, even more hilariously, some sort of mechanical process like pressing is just silly. I guarantee you eating 5000 calories a day of raw veggies and grass fed organic beef is going to make you just as fat as 5000 calories a day of processed food.
Sorry but I disagree. You can make the point that not everything that can be called “processing” is unhealthy or even a recent creation, but for the general public the simple guideline that Pollan promulgates that you are better off eating things that your great grandmother would’ve recognized as food and limiting your exposure to those things that she wouldn’t, is more likely to help people make healthier rather than unhealthier choices, and possibly better for the world as a whole as well. Most of the public doesn’t have the information or the training to know or understand which foods have trans fats and which have monosaturated ones or if they should eat foods with omega 6’s or 9’s and how much omega 3’s … , which foods have nitrates and what the current data is on their relative risks, and so on, and neither are they reasonably expected to. Choosing what to eat isn’t going to an exercise in academic analysis for most eaters. They need a shorthand, a simple guidelne. It is a fuzzy shorthand, yes, and some “processed foods” are very healthy, and some things that great grandma ate would be horrible for my health (schmaltz!?!) - but eating less of the highly industrially processed “foods”, relatively more of what fits his definition of “real food”, not too much of it, mostly plants - is defensible advice - and a debate about its wisdom in general (or lack thereof) can be had without resorting to naming every single potential additive one by one. (I’d still argue for making sure that the simple carbs are kept down and that there are adequate and decent quality protein sources, be they vegetable or animal in origin.)