|
Helsing posted:Typically "junk food" refers to food that's high in calories and comparatively low in nutritional content. The fact it's a pejorative and colloquial word doesn't mean its either incoherent or useless as a description. Calories are nutritional content, and arguably the most important. You didn't give a definition, you gave a contradiction. A better definition for junk food would be something like: A meal which is calorie dense, has an unbalanced macro-nutrient profile, lacks sufficient dietary fiber, and provides a poor variety of micro-nutrients. I'm sure some one can come up with a hundred problems with that definition though, the entire point of the question was that there is no good easy answer. "Junk food" comes from the common understanding of nutrition, and that's a problem because most people's understanding of nutrition is straight up magical thinking.
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 01:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 11:47 |
|
|
Helsing posted:Typically "junk food" refers to food that's high in calories and comparatively low in nutritional content. The fact it's a pejorative and colloquial word doesn't mean its either incoherent or useless as a description. You may have missed a bunch of threads where a cohort of posters have aggressively argued that terms like 'processed', 'junk' etc are meaningless and that generally conventional wisdom on nutrition is mostly wrong. Fishmech may show up soon. I assume they have some merit although I also assume the tone somewhat overemphasizes the point.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 02:08
|
|
|
DARPA Dad posted:So what exactly makes fresh vegetables more nutritious than frozen ones? Fresh vegetables taste a lot better. And they can be enjoyed raw. Frozen veg are only good cooked up with a strong sauce. Most of them have the texture of mulch.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 02:29
|
|
|
Manic_Misanthrope posted:Not everyone finds cooking relaxing, it's particularly stressful for me. I get paranoid about timing everything and one mistake potentially setting the house on fire like what happened when on my first day at University. Ready meals that can just be put in the microwave is more relaxing than trying to manage 3-4 things at once. If you base everything on how you acted at college your life is going to suck for the foreseeable future.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 03:53
|
|
|
BarbarianElephant posted:Fresh vegetables taste a lot better. And they can be enjoyed raw. Frozen veg are only good cooked up with a strong sauce. Most of them have the texture of mulch. This is just wrong as gently caress. There's a handful of vegetables and a handful of preparation methods where fresh makes a big difference, but for for the most part the cell wall damage from freezing is imperceptible unless you're deliberately trying to preserve crunch.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 07:07
|
|
|
Manic_Misanthrope posted:Not everyone finds cooking relaxing, it's particularly stressful for me. I get paranoid about timing everything and one mistake potentially setting the house on fire like what happened when on my first day at University. Ready meals that can just be put in the microwave is more relaxing than trying to manage 3-4 things at once. If chopping up an onion, putting it+garlic in a pan and then pouring in tomato sauce/beans/spices frightens you, I dunno what to tell you. that's the most blockheaded, simplest meal I can think of, it's delicious, feeds for days over, and can be prepared in less than 20 minutes. There are hundreds of variations of the vague thing I just said that will taste good and be nutritious without any kind of skill or expertise. Cooking does'nt have to be relaxing, it's fundamental.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 07:19
|
|
|
Zesty Mordant posted:If chopping up an onion, putting it+garlic in a pan and then pouring in tomato sauce/beans/spices frightens you, I dunno what to tell you. that's the most blockheaded, simplest meal I can think of, it's delicious, feeds for days over, and can be prepared in less than 20 minutes. There are hundreds of variations of the vague thing I just said that will taste good and be nutritious without any kind of skill or expertise. Cooking does'nt have to be relaxing, it's fundamental. It's not so much that the actions are complicated or anything, I was simply refuting the point of 'what could be more relaxing than cooking?' when I find it stressful from a combination of traumatic memories and general goon 'sperginess regarding trying to time everything exactly, not the ideal thing to do after coming home from work already tired and stressed when there are alternatives readily available.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 11:25
|
|
|
DARPA Dad posted:So what exactly makes fresh vegetables more nutritious than frozen ones? If anything frozen vegetables are more likely to be more nutritious since they're frozen when they're at their peak and not picked early to be easier to ship around the country because fully ripe vegetables can be very squishy, especially when packed on top of each other.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 11:34
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:You may have missed a bunch of threads where a cohort of posters have aggressively argued that terms like 'processed', 'junk' etc are meaningless and that generally conventional wisdom on nutrition is mostly wrong. Fishmech may show up soon. I assume they have some merit although I also assume the tone somewhat overemphasizes the point. The general evolution of all food threads outside of GWS: 1. Someone posts an article. 2. Half a dozen posts discuss said article. 3. One or more goons airs his cooking-related anxiety disorder. 3. Several goons attempt to demonstrate their superiority to the previous goons by claiming to have ones totes made a pork chop. 4. Someone posts something about "junk food", "processed foods", or "food your grandparents would recognize." 4a. This may also take the form of some Luddite reject from the Monsanto thread complaining about GMOs. 5. A multi-page derail of ridiculous pedantry begins. 6. Fishmech arrives; commences fishmeching. 7. :poop emoji:
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 11:52
|
|
|
Jarmak posted:This is just wrong as gently caress. I find it *extremely* perceptible. I'm always disappointed when restaurants use frozen veg. So soggy. I grew up eating mostly fresh veg from the garden so frozen veg wasn't part of my day to day experience. I can't get used to it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 13:59
|
|
|
BarbarianElephant posted:I find it *extremely* perceptible. I'm always disappointed when restaurants use frozen veg. So soggy. I grew up eating mostly fresh veg from the garden so frozen veg wasn't part of my day to day experience. I can't get used to it. So did I, it only makes a difference in specific applications that preserve texture (mostly by only lightly cooking the inside, such as with high heat or properly done steaming, and only vegetables that have a robust structure, stuck as broccoli). This isn't an opinion, it's chemistry, I give it about a 100% chance your anti freezing snobbery is actual them not cooking the vegetables right.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 16:12
|
|
|
Rent-A-Cop posted:The general evolution of all food threads outside of GWS: Sorry about your food waste thread, OP. I think an interesting question to weigh, given the direction that goons have been going might be about what the impetus is for reducing food waste. I think that if your goal is to say, divert usable but unsold food to help alleviate hunger, that's a completely different set of goals and values from trying to reduce consumer consumption/waste in general, which I'd assume has an environmental/sustainability bias, with maybe a public health angle. If your goal is ending hunger, I'm not sure what consumer level waste does to help. End-user food waste is not on the whole, perfectly edible, but perhaps suboptomal products like a lot (but not all) of the things grocery stores throw out. Rather, individuals throw out scraps and and spoiled things they didn't finish that aren't particularly useful to anyone. That's maybe a question of education, or technology, or labor/free time, or maybe even industrial design, but generally to me seems like a harder problem to solve that things at the distribution level. Food Justice, as people call it, does raise some uncomfortable questions about the quality and type of foods available to vulnerable and under privileged populations, yes. Personally though, I think that feeding the poor junk food, however you'd define it, is a much healthier outcome that the endemic stress that comes from not knowing where your next meal comes from. I guess it's be obvious where my priorities are.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 16:44
|
|
|
twodot posted:You said junk food is a meaningful description, it is not. In certain audiences, "junk food" may correlate with ideas in their head you want to poke at, but that doesn't make it a coherent category, it just means your audience hasn't thought about the term long enough to realize it doesn't make sense. Clearly my preference is to avoid doing that in the first place, but I don't think someone noting a problem is necessarily fear mongering if they use nonsense terms. I've already pointed out two problems with the definition you gave. You keep trying to say that junk food is meaningless while tacitly accepting that it actually does have a meaning, just one that you feel is overly broad (though you haven't actually said why it's too broad for a conversation about shopping in a grocery store). Also one of the "problems" with my definition that you raised was essentially "if I eat a bag of cheetos but then I follow it with a multivitamin pill then is that still junk food?!" which is such an asinine thought experiment I haven't even wanted to engage with it. So now that you've repeatedly aired your grievances with the term junk food do you have any substantive comments on nutrition? At this point I'm morbidly curious to know what you actually think about the foundations of a healthy diet. OtherworldlyInvader posted:Calories are nutritional content, and arguably the most important. You didn't give a definition, you gave a contradiction. A better definition for junk food would be something like: A meal which is calorie dense, has an unbalanced macro-nutrient profile, lacks sufficient dietary fiber, and provides a poor variety of micro-nutrients. Well you caught me. I'm dyslexic and if you through my posts in any thread you're almost guaranteed to find small and repeated spelling errors or incorrect word usages. I occasionally do some light editing on my own posts to catch these mistakes but life is short and often I simply don't see them until someone else points the error out. In this case I meant to type "nutritious", as in "nutritious content". quote:I'm sure some one can come up with a hundred problems with that definition though, the entire point of the question was that there is no good easy answer. "Junk food" comes from the common understanding of nutrition, and that's a problem because most people's understanding of nutrition is straight up magical thinking. Ok, well let's just go ahead and use the definition of junk food that you yourself just offered, keeping in mind we're talking from the perspective of someone who actually shops in a grocery store. You're telling me that people who think that this kind of food is unhealthy to eat in excess are engaging in "magical thinking"? You're telling me that those doctors writing in the Lancet were full of crap suggesting that it's a problem that food prices are driving the poor to buy less fresh fruit and veggies and to buy more microwave ready meals and more items that are high in salt and fat and sugar? After the tortured arguments about word usage are actually said and done, what substantive comments on nutritious eating are you going to make? asdf32 posted:You may have missed a bunch of threads where a cohort of posters have aggressively argued that terms like 'processed', 'junk' etc are meaningless and that generally conventional wisdom on nutrition is mostly wrong. Fishmech may show up soon. I assume they have some merit although I also assume the tone somewhat overemphasizes the point. The only merit I can see is that they're totally correct that, in the most abstract kind of way, there's no necessary reason why processed food would be less healthy than whole food. It just happens to very often be the case in the context of a modern North American grocery store but it's not some timeless eternal truth of the universe. Is there some kind of alternative framework for nutrition that these people advocate? Do 9 out of 10 Goondoctors recommend the Cheetos + Centrum diet?
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 17:15
|
|
|
Helsing posted:You keep trying to say that junk food is meaningless while tacitly accepting that it actually does have a meaning, just one that you feel is overly broad (though you haven't actually said why it's too broad for a conversation about shopping in a grocery store). Also one of the "problems" with my definition that you raised was essentially "if I eat a bag of cheetos but then I follow it with a multivitamin pill then is that still junk food?!" which is such an asinine thought experiment I haven't even wanted to engage with it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
Arguably, there are no junk foods, only junk diets, and foods which are bad if they comprise a large part of your diet. We need to address why people have bad diets, instead of attacking individual foods.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 18:23
|
|
|
twodot posted:If your definition is dumb because you haven't fully thought out the definition, it is still dumb. I have no comments on nutrition, it is a complex science that is still in its infancy, my entire point this whole time has been that you said junk food is a meaningful description, and that's not true. (Tangentially there are some other words you quoted which aren't great, but may have better definitions) You realize that not every word in the English language is an exact scientific qualification process right? That people can disagree what qualifies and what doesn't? Because this sounds goony as all gently caress.  "Eating a lot of junk food is bad for your health" "False! there's you have no exacting technical definition for the category 'junk food', this cheeto dust is fulfilling my daily dairy requirement!"
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 18:31
|
|
|
Jarmak posted:You realize that not every word in the English language is an exact scientific qualification process right? That people can disagree what qualifies and what doesn't? Because this sounds goony as all gently caress. It's because Helsing's use of "junk food" as a proxy is coupled with a variety of other throwaway comments that indicate he's neck deep in the naturalistic fallacy. Helsing posted:You keep trying to say that junk food is meaningless while tacitly accepting that it actually does have a meaning, just one that you feel is overly broad (though you haven't actually said why it's too broad for a conversation about shopping in a grocery store). Also one of the "problems" with my definition that you raised was essentially "if I eat a bag of cheetos but then I follow it with a multivitamin pill then is that still junk food?!" which is such an asinine thought experiment I haven't even wanted to engage with it. It's also generally accurate-though the contents of the multivitamin would be a factor. Helsing posted:Ok, well let's just go ahead and use the definition of junk food that you yourself just offered, keeping in mind we're talking from the perspective of someone who actually shops in a grocery store. You're telling me that people who think that this kind of food is unhealthy to eat in excess are engaging in "magical thinking"? You're telling me that those doctors writing in the Lancet were full of crap suggesting that it's a problem that food prices are driving the poor to buy less fresh fruit and veggies and to buy more microwave ready meals and more items that are high in salt and fat and sugar? After the tortured arguments about word usage are actually said and done, what substantive comments on nutritious eating are you going to make? Doctors writing in Lancet are routinely full of crap. So, yes, you are engaged in magical thinking because you don't know what any of these things are or what they do. "fresh" has no nutritional connotations. Microwave-ready meals aren't innately nutritionally harmful. Salt intake levels are debated, as I previously discussed. Dietary fat is no longer viewed as a particular concern, since health impacts vary depending on the types of fats involved- the "total fat" label on nutrition labels will probably be removed at some point in the next 5-10 years. The fat type that is a primary source of concern, trans fat, is already heavily excluded from foods in the US, particularly in partially hydrogenated oils, which are being phased out. Saturated fats are common in both "natural" and "processed" foods, and different types have different health impacts that are currently being researched. Sugar is not innately harmful unless we're talking about specific glycemic impact factors. For weight gain, the relevant nutritional measure is calories. Helsing posted:The only merit I can see is that they're totally correct that, in the most abstract kind of way, there's no necessary reason why processed food would be less healthy than whole food. It just happens to very often be the case in the context of a modern North American grocery store but it's not some timeless eternal truth of the universe. Then don't use the word "processed" when there are more accurate terms to use in terms of the nutritional impact of the foods in question. Helsing posted:Is there some kind of alternative framework for nutrition that these people advocate? Do 9 out of 10 Goondoctors recommend the Cheetos + Centrum diet? https://fnic.nal.usda.gov/dietary-guidance/dietary-reference-intakes/dri-nutrient-reports http://www.nap.edu/search/?term=dri Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Mar 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 18:39
|
|
|
Jarmak posted:You realize that not every word in the English language is an exact scientific qualification process right? That people can disagree what qualifies and what doesn't? Because this sounds goony as all gently caress.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 19:01
|
|
|
twodot posted:If your definition is dumb because you haven't fully thought out the definition, it is still dumb. I have no comments on nutrition, it is a complex science that is still in its infancy, my entire point this whole time has been that you said junk food is a meaningful description, and that's not true. (Tangentially there are some other words you quoted which aren't great, but may have better definitions) Congratulations on one of the spergiest and most pointless tangents I've ever seen in more than 10 years of posting in D&D. Discendo Vox posted:It's because Helsing's use of "junk food" as a proxy is coupled with a variety of other throwaway comments that indicate he's neck deep in the naturalistic fallacy. Or you're just not a very diligent reader and just tend to see what you want to see / expect to see in other peoples posts? quote:It's also generally accurate-though the contents of the multivitamin would be a factor. So apparently goon doctors really do recommend the cheetos and centrum diet. Good to know. quote:Doctors writing in Lancet are routinely full of crap. So, yes, you are engaged in magical thinking because you don't know what any of these things are or what they do. "fresh" has no nutritional connotations. Microwave-ready meals aren't innately nutritionally harmful. Salt intake levels are debated, as I previously discussed. Dietary fat is no longer viewed as a particular concern, since health impacts vary depending on the types of fats involved- the "total fat" label on nutrition labels will probably be removed at some point in the next 5-10 years. The fat type that is a primary source of concern, trans fat, is already heavily excluded from foods in the US, particularly in partially hydrogenated oils, which are being phased out. Saturated fats are common in both "natural" and "processed" foods, and different types have different health impacts that are currently being researched. Sugar is not innately harmful unless we're talking about specific glycemic impact factors. For weight gain, the relevant nutritional measure is calories. I'm just going to refer to my own previous comments rather than repeat myself: Helsing posted:in the most abstract kind of way, there's no necessary reason why processed food would be less healthy than whole food. It just happens to very often be the case in the context of a modern North American grocery store but it's not some timeless eternal truth of the universe. quote:Then don't use the word "processed" when there are more accurate terms to use in terms of the nutritional impact of the foods in question. So, in line with twodot, you're really eager to litigate the precise use of words like "processed food" or "junkfood", despite the fact this is a perfectly acceptable heuristic for using in many grocery store type situations, but when you're actually asked to make any substantive comments on nutrition you suddenly lose all enthusiasm for the conversation. Somewhat ironically, the guide you posted here also exemplifies exactly the dynamics that lead doctors to demonize perfectly health fat content in food for many decades. You see the original government dietary guidelines that came out in the 1970s were written in fairly straight forward common sense language. Responding to the rising incidents on heart disease and related health problems they suggested that people should reduce their consumption of dairy and red meat and eat more plants. That resulted in a poo poo storm of lobbying from the meat and poultry industries which is why revised guidelines came out that stopped talking about food and started talking about things like saturated-fat, cholesterol, etc. "Avoid foods high in x, eat more food that contains y" etc. This was calculated to avoid offending any powerful lobby groups but also made it possible for companies to advertise unhealthy food by bragging that it was "low in x" or "high in y" or whatever. So when the government changed its recommendation from "reduce meat intake" to "avoid meats that are high in saturated-fat" the result was a bonanza for marketing but didn't do much to actually help people eat better. Now here you dumping a bunch of links that I bet you haven't even perused yourself as part of a lame attempt to avoid talking about the actual focus of the conversation, which is healthy eating. So good job demonstrating how nutritionism as an ideology can completely derail any sort of straight forward conversation about healthy eating. If you want to actually reset the conversation now and have a sane, non-pedantic discussion of what a balanced diet would look like (from the perspective of a normal person walking into the average grocery store) then go ahead.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 19:02
|
|
|
Jarmak posted:So did I, it only makes a difference in specific applications that preserve texture (mostly by only lightly cooking the inside, such as with high heat or properly done steaming, and only vegetables that have a robust structure, stuck as broccoli). I'm not a snob. I didn't say "fresh is better for you than frozen" because I've read plenty that says it is the other way around. But I don't care because it tastes great. And yes, I eat a lot of steamed broccoli but that's not the only thing I eat. Can anyone else here tell the difference between fresh and frozen or am I a freak and never knew it?
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 19:02
|
|
|
BarbarianElephant posted:I'm not a snob. I didn't say "fresh is better for you than frozen" because I've read plenty that says it is the other way around. But I don't care because it tastes great. And yes, I eat a lot of steamed broccoli but that's not the only thing I eat. It depends. I've never tried most frozen veggies, but frozen fruit is absolutely as good as fresh fruit for cooking with (usually better if the fruit isn't in season), and I'm a big fan of using tins or cartons of tomatoes for anything that doesn't absolutely require fresh tomatoes, because the fresh tomatoes you buy at the supermarket are usually really poo poo. For bell peppers, I always use fresh, because I like the taste and texture of eating them raw, but for solely cooked applications, I don't think it would make a big difference.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 19:08
|
|
|
BarbarianElephant posted:I'm not a snob. I didn't say "fresh is better for you than frozen" because I've read plenty that says it is the other way around. But I don't care because it tastes great. And yes, I eat a lot of steamed broccoli but that's not the only thing I eat. You can tell steamed if it's not overcooked (which was my earlier point, I find it just as likely what you're reacting to as frozen is simply overcooked). I jumped on you because you described frozen vegetables as if they were barely palatable trash that had to be hidden under a heavy sauce. The fact is though that the issue with freezing is that the cell walls are damaged/ruptured by the crystallization of water inside of them, cooking causes those walls to become damaged and break down as well, if cooked to the point of softness then the distinction between fresh and frozen is pretty much nothing. In fact freezing fresh vegetables is sometimes desirable because of that, it improves the flavor of a gazpacho for example.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 19:19
|
|
|
Helsing posted:If you want to actually reset the conversation now and have a sane, non-pedantic discussion of what a balanced diet would look like (from the perspective of a normal person walking into the average grocery store) then go ahead. I've given you three different links to contemporary nutrition standards. "Processed" is not a valid heuristic for the health impact of food, and neither is "junk". The primary cause of negative dietary outcomes is excess calories in comparison with exercise. The breadth of safe and nutritious diets is broader than you are comfortable acknowledging. You've fetishized home cooking and constructed a mental image of others in the thread as incompetent man-children eating Twinkies on the couch. Stop using "fresh", "slow", "home-cooked" as proxies for "good". Stop using "fast", "processed", "prepackaged" as proxies for "bad". Stop using the phrase "junk food", it's obfuscatory garbage you're projecting your beliefs onto, a term that provides no information about why the food would be bad. Stop complaining about "additives" and "preservatives" when you don't know what they are. Stop raising salt, sugar or fat when you don't know the details of where they're placed or used. If you want to make nutrition claims, cite to research, not an open letter in Lancet. Above all else, stop saying home cooking is innately healthier than other food sources. That isn't a remotely valid claim.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 19:35
|
|
|
On the subject of government food guides, maybe you should look at the actual guidelines they give to ordinary consumers. Here's one picked essentially at random. Notice all those horribly unscientific statements like "Eat at least five portions of a variety of fruits and vegetables every day" and "Eat less red and processed meat". Don't they know "processed" doesn't mean anything?!? Aren't they aware that I can skip my fruits and veggies by including some fibre tablets and a multivatmin with my daily Cheetos and Coke binge?! How dare they lie like this by using plain speech and every day common sense to help develop a food guide when they should clearly just have a list of essential macro and micro nutrients and a calorie count. Discendo Vox posted:I've given you three different links to contemporary nutrition standards. "Processed" is not a valid heuristic for the health impact of food, and neither is "junk". The primary cause of negative dietary outcomes is excess calories in comparison with exercise. The breadth of safe and nutritious diets is broader than you are comfortable acknowledging. You've fetishized home cooking and constructed a mental image of others in the thread as incompetent man-children eating Twinkies on the couch. If we're talking about overall health rather than weigh loss then excess calories is not the only important criteria. And you'll have to explain why you think I'm uncomfortable acknowledging the breadth of safe and nutritious diets when my previous comment on the subject was that "There are many roads to a healthy diet and plenty of room for indulgences along the way". I'm getting tired of watching you shadow box with straw man arguments. I think the only thing keeping me involved in the conversation at this point is a morbid curiosity about what your actual beliefs regarding diet are, though I'm starting to suspect you'll never commit to any kind of substantive comment on that front since it would reduce your freedom of action to do what you're really passionate about, which is starting spergy arguments about exactly which words to use when discussing food. Unless you can put some meat on the bones of these arguments I"m going to stop dignifying you with any kind of attention. Let me give you a hint for how that would work: "Processed is not a valid heuristic [for a grocery store shopping trip] because ... x,y,z reasons." quote:Stop using "fresh", "slow", "home-cooked" as proxies for "good". Stop using "fast", "processed", "prepackaged" as proxies for "bad". Stop using the phrase "junk food", it's obfuscatory garbage you're projecting your beliefs onto, a term that provides no information about why the food would be bad. Stop complaining about "additives" and "preservatives" when you don't know what they are. Stop raising salt, sugar or fat when you don't know the details of where they're placed or used. If you want to make nutrition claims, cite to research, not an open letter in Lancet. Above all else, stop saying home cooking is innately healthier than other food sources. That isn't a remotely valid claim. Not only have I not said this but I literally, in my last post, pointed you toward a statement saying the exact opposite of this: that there's nothing innately healthier about home cooking or whole foods. I'm not entirely sure what your goal in this conversation is. Frankly my role here seems superfluous since your responses are so far removed from anything I've actually said. I could speculate that you had some similar argument in the past that you think you won, and you're trying to reproduce your previous success by saying the exact same things over again, without regard for the changed context. What I'm seeing here is an obtuse refusal to actually speak in meaningful or substantive terms about what does or doesn't constitute a healthy diet. I'm just going to reiterate what I suggest that rather than all this empty kvetching you should offer some substantive comments on how you actually view nutrition and what you think the basics of a healthy diet and lifestyle would look like. And just a side note about your specific complaint regarding junk food: you seem to be operating a fundamental misapprehension. Most words in the English language are not fully formed scientific theories that come with their own complete causal theory. Instead individual words are basically just a collection of syllables that pick out or construct some phenomenon. So yeah, noo poo poo that calling something "junk food" doesn't, on its own, provide a comprehensive explanation of why that thing is unhealthy for you. It's already been explained to you that "junk food" is a broad and colloquial term for food that, for a whole variety of different reasons, isn't considered healthy. The term "junk food" itself doesn't do any kind of explanatory work and isn't supposed to. It merely designates a collection of things that are grouped together based on a shared characteristic. In this case that characteristic can, somewhat simplistically but, in this context, usefully, be reduced to: "things that doctors and nutritionists warn against eating large amounts of". Apparently if I were to say "needles are typically painful" then you would object because I didn't include a detailed explanation of the neurology of pain. Because your seeming criteria for a worthwhile word is that it must on its own somehow contain a comprehensive causal theory. I seriously want to save all the comments in this thread in some kind of word file so I can refer back to them in the future as a really clear cut example of nerds willfully misunderstanding how either language or theory are actually supposed to work. Helsing fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Mar 26, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 20:19
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I've given you three different links to contemporary nutrition standards. "Processed" is not a valid heuristic for the health impact of food, and neither is "junk". The primary cause of negative dietary outcomes is excess calories in comparison with exercise. The breadth of safe and nutritious diets is broader than you are comfortable acknowledging. You've fetishized home cooking and constructed a mental image of others in the thread as incompetent man-children eating Twinkies on the couch. Brazil has a good fit for that talks ask about processed foods, and that they should be minimised. No, they don't give an airtight definition of processed. It's vague, because when buying stuff is all very areas, and as a health guide is important to give broad advice that is easy to understand. And yes, junk food is a fine term to use when discussing diets, and yes it is bad for you. You say yourself that the science in this field is very young it changes frequently. This doesn't mean we should give the benefit of the doubt to chips and pop and big mac's.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 20:40
|
|
|
Count Roland posted:This doesn't mean we should give the benefit of the doubt to chips and pop and big mac's. Why not? I eat all those things occasionally, and I'm in good health and not overweight. We need to focus on why people are eating those things in such amounts, or with such frequency, that it becomes unhealthy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 21:31
|
|
|
Count Roland posted:Brazil has a good fit for that talks ask about processed foods, and that they should be minimised. You're quite simply wrong on this issue. Eating it all the time ? Yes of course. Once in a while? Not going to have any impact whatsoever. This is the case with all foods and even water, the devil is in the details. Is orange juice junk food? Apple juice? Is the hamburger you made on the grill magically different than the one at BK? 'junk food' doesn't have much meaning if all it translates to is "if you eat this constantly you will probably not be healthy." The same is true of everything. Pop is a perfect example actually, it has almost no difference nutritionally compared with fruit juices yet because of how we use language your average person would have a much different opinion. Both are glasses of sugar water, things like "processing" is utterly irrelevant. The major differences are in the vitamin content, which shocker, is not an issue for people living in western countries. If it does become a problem you take a multivitamin that costs 10 cents a day, oh nooooo! People who know what they are talking about get really spergy about things like 'junk food' because the way people think about nutrition turns out to have little to no basis in the actual science. Look at the "health food" community for extreme examples of this, it gets quite nutty, and it stems from fundamental misunderstandings of nutrition which has their roots in our usage of words like processed or junk food. PT6A posted:Why not? I eat all those things occasionally, and I'm in good health and not overweight. We need to focus on why people are eating those things in such amounts, or with such frequency, that it becomes unhealthy. Fast food is apparently like meth to some posters, not even once.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 21:50
|
|
|
I think the shorter version of the last couple pages of this thread could be: Junk food is fine as long as your overall diet and activity level are kept within a basic balance. Advising people to try and eat whole foods is mostly based on the fact that it's a simple and mostly reliable way to pick good food at a grocery store, not because there's a magical property in fresh food that gets destroyed when that food is processed. There's nothing wrong with processed food per se but in a grocery store processed food often contains higher levels of things like sodium. According to the CDC:  I look forward to this post triggering another Spergling rush, since the Center for Disease Control just dared to advise Americans that avoiding processed food and eating more often at home is a reliable strategy for reducing sodium intake.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 22:01
|
|
|
If you ask a restaurant to not use salt while preparing your meal, the chef should personally come out of the kitchen to throw you out of his establishment.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 22:09
|
|
|
I imagine the kind of "restaurant" described in that guide is most likely to be a Denny's or Olive Garden rather than the kind of place where the chef takes great pride in using their own recipes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 22:34
|
|
|
Cooking food gives you greater control over the sodium content. That doesn't mean that you should never eat a sausage or use a cake mix, or that a sausage is inherently worse than oversalted spaghetti for sodium intake.
|
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 22:43
|
|
|
Helsing posted:I imagine the kind of "restaurant" described in that guide is most likely to be a Denny's or Olive Garden rather than the kind of place where the chef takes great pride in using their own recipes. You probably shouldn't be going to those places in the first place. Not for any kind of health reasons*, just because they serve overpriced poo poo. * Although you could easily argue their insane portions are not conducive to a healthful diet EDIT: I bought a piece of salt cod at the supermarket today. Apparently 1/6th of the package contains 155% of the daily sodium recommendation.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 23:10
|
|
|
The research that was the basis of that set of guidelines are extremely controversial, as I discussed already. Discendo Vox posted:This gets even messier, because the sodium DRI is one of the most contentious metrics in nutrition science. People have been arguing about it for decades. There's basically no question that increased sodium intake past a certain threshold increases likelihood of hypertension (high blood pressure), but what that threshold is, if it varies for different people, why and when it varies, and whether the hypertensive effect causes other negative outcomes, are all basically questions without solid answers. This is made worse because extremely(as in hard to do unintentionally) low sodium diets have clearer and fairly severe negative health effects.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 23:10
|
|
|
Salt is a bad thing to focus on seeing as we haven't really been able to conclusively show that it's bad to over-consume it absent certain health conditions, it's a much healthier way to enhance flavor then adding fat. Some people seem sensitive to it and some people seem like they aren't.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 23:40
|
|
|
Pretty much nothing is bad as long as you don't go nuts with it, and pretty much everything is bad when you overdo it. Fat is loving delicious when used correctly, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you were to eat osso buco with its delicious, perfect marrow every day, it might turn into an issue, but once every month or so is certainly not going to kill you or make you fat.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 23:51
|
|
|
Well, for the millionth time, this conversation is pitched at the level of someone shopping in a grocery store, not a lab technician determining the exact level at which sodium is directly and verifiable linked to heart problems or whatever. We're talking about general guidelines for your diet, which is why it's useful to use broad terms like "processed foods", "whole foods", etc. This is something that the vast majority of health professionals and nutritionists do. Despite your bizarre attempts to act like an authority on this subject, you're the one making controversial claims. For instance, you previously posted a bunch of links (to pages on dietary supplements rather than healthy eating, which actually says a lot, but never mind that) and those links, in turn, helpfully suggest using this guideline quote:Scientific evidence supporting dietary guidance has grown and evolved over the decades. Previous editions of the Dietary Guidelines relied on the evidence of relationships between individual nutrients, foods, and food groups and health outcomes. Although this evidence base continues to be substantial, foods are not consumed in isolation, but rather in various combinations over time—an “eating pattern.” As previously noted, dietary components of an eating pattern can have interactive, synergistic, and potentially cumulative relationships, such that the eating pattern may be more predictive of overall health status and disease risk than individual foods or nutrients. However, each identified component of an eating pattern does not necessarily have the same independent relationship to health outcomes as the total eating pattern, and each identified component may not equally contribute (or may be a marker for other factors) to the associated health outcome. An evidence base is now available that evaluates overall eating patterns and various health outcomes. quote:Shift food choices to reduce sodium intake:[5] Because sodium is found in so many foods, careful choices are needed in all food groups to reduce intake. Strategies to lower sodium intake include using the Nutrition Facts label to compare sodium content of foods and choosing the product with less sodium and buying low-sodium, reduced sodium, or no-salt-added versions of products when available. Choose fresh, frozen (no sauce or seasoning), or no-salt-added canned vegetables, and fresh poultry, seafood, pork, and lean meat, rather than processed meat and poultry. Additional strategies include eating at home more often; cooking foods from scratch to control the sodium content of dishes; limiting sauces, mixes, and “instant” products, including flavored rice, instant noodles, and ready-made pasta; and flavoring foods with herbs and spices instead of salt. If you go through the rest of that guide it regularly uses terms like "whole fruits", "whole grains", "processed meats", etc. and makes the same common sense warnings about how processed foods tend to be higher in additives such as sodium. Since you currently are currently dismissing the CDC, Healthcare.gov and the warnings of actual doctors in the Lancet, and the healthy eating guide that you yourself just seemingly endorsed, maybe you could provide some sources and evidence for your repeated assertions, because frankly you do not have much credibility left. And while we're quoting ourselves: Helsing posted:I'm getting tired of watching you shadow box with straw man arguments. I think the only thing keeping me involved in the conversation at this point is a morbid curiosity about what your actual beliefs regarding diet are, though I'm starting to suspect you'll never commit to any kind of substantive comment on that front since it would reduce your freedom of action to do what you're really passionate about, which is starting spergy arguments about exactly which words to use when discussing food. So other than repeatedly claiming -- with zero independent evidence -- that you are a more authoritative source than various doctors or health agencies maybe you could actually make a substantive contribution and articulate your views on healthy eating and nutrition. Because so far the one time you actually posted a source for anything a quick perusal suggests it uses many of the words that you are claiming are totally unacceptable to use.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 23:57
|
|
|
Jarmak posted:Salt is a bad thing to focus on seeing as we haven't really been able to conclusively show that it's bad to over-consume it absent certain health conditions, it's a much healthier way to enhance flavor then adding fat. Excessive salt intake raises your blood pressure. Some people that doesn't do much to (I'm one of them in that my blood pressure tends to be low enough that a doctor said to me "eat more salt.") but people who already have high blood pressure it can gently caress up severely. Coupled with the fact that Americans are likely to also be fat that's two things that increase blood pressure. High blood pressure fucks up your heart. You can't predict it in individuals but over a population? Yeah. High levels of salt is bad. You do, however, need a certain amount of salt to live. The issue is that salt and calories taste really, really good and processed food is often geared toward being as tasty as possible. The issue isn't food processing in and of itself but in an effort to get you to buy X food instead of Y a lot of food companies just focus on making things taste good. Which, of course, means salt and calories. This is why snack foods and junk foods have come under fire; you get bags of food that are primarily made of corn, salt, and not much else. You can't get proper nutrition on that and it just jacks up how many calories our sedentary culture eats. If memory serves your average American is inactive and eats over 3,000 calories a day. Part of the reason is because the food industry has made delicious, calorie-dense, cheap food easily available everywhere, all the time. It's just plain easy to shovel garbage down your throat all day every day without even really realizing it. Snack vending machines are everywhere. Convenience stores have 700 calorie beverages. Starbucks can sell you a cup with 400 calories in it and you may not even think to count it. Meanwhile we associate healthy foods with hipsters, hippies, and even worse bland, awful things that are no fun to eat. Americans are also stressed and overworked. Americans eat for comfort because sometimes that's all you have time for. gently caress, I got up at 6 today to get the kids to school, worked 9 hours, and now I have to cart them around everywhere and I don't have time for anything so McDonald's it is. Christ it's 7:30 and I'm still doing poo poo I just want to watch a TV show but I can't oh hey Starbucks! Mmmm, dis a good latte. God what a day, wait I haven't eaten since lunch but it's 10 p.m. and I don't feel like doing anything so I'll microwave this thing and eat some chips and gently caress God drat it I have to be up at 5 tomorrow. Well hey at least these Hot Pockets taste good. Yum, calories and salt. Wow, I'm still hungry guess I'll eat this bag of chips too. Crap I overslept and can't pack lunch. I'll just grab Subway and get myself some chips while I'm there. Today is going to suck. I'll get myself some Starbucks then when I get home drink like 12 beers. Repeat day in day out for years and you have too many calories going on, not enough getting burned, and piles and piles of salt.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2016 00:49
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:Excessive salt intake raises your blood pressure. Some people that doesn't do much to (I'm one of them in that my blood pressure tends to be low enough that a doctor said to me "eat more salt.") but people who already have high blood pressure it can gently caress up severely. Coupled with the fact that Americans are likely to also be fat that's two things that increase blood pressure. No, this is my point, I don't have time to go study diving right now but the latest research has called this into question as a general rule and suggests that it might be more of a case of just some individuals being sensitive to it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2016 01:21
|
|
|
Helsing posted:Well you caught me. I'm dyslexic and if you through my posts in any thread you're almost guaranteed to find small and repeated spelling errors or incorrect word usages. I occasionally do some light editing on my own posts to catch these mistakes but life is short and often I simply don't see them until someone else points the error out. In this case I meant to type "nutritious", as in "nutritious content". I'm not calling you out on a pedantic grammatical error (If there is one there I don't even see it), I'm pointing out that what you said was factually inaccurate, and I'm doing that because I think these inaccuracies are causing you to draw invalid conclusions from them. If I understand the changes you wish you had made to your statement correctly, the statement is still wrong and more importantly it is still wrong for exactly the same reason I already outlined. You have claimed that certain foods (such as fast food and frozen meals) lack nutrition, and that by basing your diet on these foods you fail to get enough nutrition. This is incorrect. The problem with the foods you have identified is not that they lack nutrition, its the exact opposite. The foods you've identified provide too much nutrition, which makes over-consuming them much easier, which is a major component of obesity (the other major component being level of physical activity). The difference is important. Most "healthy" foods such as non-starchy vegetables actually have very little nutritional content, they're effectively empty filler which provide little more than trace minerals and vitamins which are often easily obtainable elsewhere. And yes, people routinely engage in magical thinking when it comes to diet and nutrition. Lets say I have a couple of roasts, a head of lettuce, a few tomatoes, a bag of flour, some cheese and a nicely equipped kitchen. I mix up a batch of dough and bake a loaf of sandwich bread, then put a roast in the oven and run it through a slicer, then slice my tomato, lettuce & cheese and produce a nice roast beef sandwich. Now (using the same proportion of ingredients) I use the same batch of dough and bake some buns, then run the other roast through a meat grinder, cook the ground beef as a patty in a pan on the stove top, and put it all together with the sliced tomato, lettuce & cheese and produce a juicy cheeseburger. Now put the roast beef sandwich and the cheeseburger in front of a statistically significant population of people, and ask each of them which food is healthier than the other. I guarantee you a significant portion of those people will tell you the roast beef sandwich is healthier than the cheeseburger. Magical thinking at work, the same ingredients in the same proportion now have a different nutritional value in the minds of people due to nutritionally inconsequential differences in preparation method. Another example of irrational thinking when it comes to diet is the often mentioned "fruits&vegetables". Fruits and vegetables are quite nutritionally different from each other, and there are also very significant differences within each group. Broccoli is not nutritionally equivalent to a potato, and an apple is not nutritionally equivalent to a tomato. Despite this, most people (and even many government nutrition guidelines) treat them as equivalents, which is not conducive to eating a healthy diet. As for the letter to the Lancet, its a letter written to make a rhetorical point, not lay out medially or scientifically sound nutrition facts. Their main point, that rising food costs are causing people to eat less healthy food, may have an element of truth but it also omits a bunch of really important points. That's fine for the letter's intended purpose (a political call to action about an issue), but not fine for a detailed discussion on the topic. About the cheapest meal you can buy is rice and dried beans, which is also a very nutritionally sound basis for a diet. The fact that people are eating lots of take out, chips, and tv dinners instead indicates there are far more factors impacting their decision on what to eat than price alone, because cheaper and healthier options exist which people aren't taking. Additionally, while food prices may have risen over the last few years, they are still generally low by historic rates. "Why are lots of people eating unhealthy diets" is a complex question, and the answer is a hell of a lot more complex than "because food prices went up".
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2016 01:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 11:47 |
|
|
PT6A posted:Arguably, there are no junk foods, only junk diets, and foods which are bad if they comprise a large part of your diet. We need to address why people have bad diets, instead of attacking individual foods. Fillers and food engineering would tend to disagree with you PT6A.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2016 01:30
|
|