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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Eat right

Easier said than done, given how everyone and his brother has an opinion on The One True Right Way To Eat, and all these opinions contradict each other.

It's easier than you think. Avoid processed foods and refined sugar and you are 75% of the way there. Yeah, it involves picking up lots of meats, vegetables and grains and cooking them yourself. Sometimes even those are still adulterated, but it's still gonna be better than boxed slop.

Sure, everyone swears by a one true right way to eat that is better than all other ways. But that doesn't mean give up, especially when there are so many pretty obvious, and pretty universally agreed upon things you could do to move the needle in the right direction.

Processed foods are a meme. Washing and cutting up counts as processing for the FDA. It’s a ridiculous standard.

https://yuka.io/en/

This is the app I use, it scans barcodes and tells you how healthy the food is.

We're not cavemen, we have technology.

Well shit, then I guess learned helplessness is the only possible answer. Not using the eyes in your skull to perceive that the veggie tray is categorically different from the canned "Hearty Vegetable Stew" with 30 added grams of sugar, along with more unrecognizable ingredients than not. It's all processed! Nothing to be done about it.

That’s not the point. The point is that ‘processed’ is a bullshit designation that doesn’t mean anything and has no information about the health impact of a foodstuff.

Pop tarts aren’t unhealthy because they’re “processed food”. One could likely have an entirely healthy diet consisting of processed food. The term is irrelevant.

There was a bit I read once, possibly even on Slate Star Codex, that went a bit like this:

Person A: I don't want to eat (food item), it has too many chemicals in it.

Person B: I don't understand what you mean. Everything we eat is composed of chemicals - even water is a chemical!

Commentary from blogger: But, of course, B is being deliberately pedantic, and knows perfectly well that A is objecting to ingredients with complicated names that nobody uses in home cooking and most people don't even know what they are, e.g. sodium benzoate.

It seems like you're being Person B here? Yes, "chemicals" and "processed" are technically overbroad, but they work pretty well for normies to communicate concepts like, "this category of food tends to be low in fiber, high in added sugar and salt, and has good odds of being designed by food scientists to be as tasty and un-satiating as possible so you'll eat more of it per sitting and thus spend more money buying more of it".

B knows what A is gesturing at, but doesn't know what A means because A doesn't either, and that's the point of the objection.

Scott's covered two hypotheses for what the issue with "processed food" is:

  1. it has more degrees of freedom, and food producers' incentives are to trick you into eating 500kg of their food and becoming a balloon so more degrees of freedom for the producers are bad for you,
  2. it's invariably full of vegetable oil, which "normal" food is not.

Yes, many definitions exist which do not correspond one-to-one with a reasonable hypothesis such as these, and to the extent they do not they will be less effective than they could be, but the basic idea of categorising things this way is not insane.

I’d hazard a guess that regardless of definition, processed food will have a strong correlation with unhealthyness.

Listening to the FDA here won't work well. But somehow I doubt that "I look at the food and decide whether it counts as processed" will work well either.

There are dozens of "this is the real diet that works that Big Food doesn't want you to know about" diets which have worked for large numbers of people including smart people. The only thing they seem to have in common is severely restricting refined sugar.

I don't see how you can live well as a normie in a country where the bread is sweetened by default.

Mostly the one weird trick stuff works on two pillars. One, it requires you to pay attention to what you eat. If you’re doing Paleo, you can’t just go buy something that sounds good, you need to read the label and evaluate the ingredients. That alone is a huge help. Second, because the market hasn’t yet caught onto the trend, there aren’t boxed versions of that diet’s foods available. If you were doing Paleo or Keto or Gluten Free when it first became a thing, you had to get the foods and cook them yourself. That eliminates most processed foods from your diet. In early Keto, before the food manufacturers started making hungry man keto foods, you had to get real fresh chicken or steak, real vegetables from the grocery store, and cook them yourself. So you’d end up making marginally better choices even if the new fad diet was based on unicorn farts.

even if the new fad diet was based on unicorn farts

Oh, fasting, I've done that. :-)

I don't see how you can live well as a normie in a country where the bread is sweetened by default.

Buy a bread maker?

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