I am confused by this sort of reasoning. As far as I’m aware, mainstream nutritional science/understanding already points towards avoiding refined oils (and refined sugars).
There’s already explainations for why cutting out refined oil is be beneficial.
There are already reasonable explainations for why all of those diets might be reported to work, at least in the short term.
I would consider most bread sold in stores to be processed or ultra processed and I think that’s a pretty standard view but it’s true there might be some confusion.
Or take traditional soy sauce or cheese or beer or cured meats
I would consider all of those to be processed and unhealthy and I think thats a pretty standard view, but fair enough if there’s some confusion around those things.
So as a natural category “ultra processed” is mostly hogwash.
I guess my view is that it’s mostly not hogwash?
The least healthy things are clearly and broadly much more processed than the healthiest things.
I typically consume my greens with ground flax seeds in a smoothie.
I feel very confident that adding refined oil to vegetables shouldn’t be considered healthy, in the sense that the opportunity cost of 1 Tablespoon of olive oil is 120 calories, which is over a pound of spinach for example. Certainly it’s difficult to eat that much spinach and it’s probably unwise, but I just say that to illustrate that you can get a lot more nutrition from 120 calories than the oil will be adding, even if it makes the greens more bioavailable.
That said “healthy” is a complicated concept. If adding some oil to greens helps something eat greens they otherwise wouldn’t eat for example, that’s great.
I am perhaps not speaking as precisely as I should be. I appreciate your comments.
I believe it’s correct to say that if you consider all of the food/energy we consumed in the past 50+ million years, it’s virtually all plants.
The past 2-2.5 million years had us introducing more animal products to greater or lesser extents. Some were able to subsist on mostly animal products. Some consumed them very rarely.
In that sense it is a relatively recent introduction. My main point is that given our evolutionary history, the idea that plants would be healthier for us than animal products when we have both in abundance, and the idea that plants are more suitable to maintaining health long past reproductive age, aren’t immediately/obviously unreasonable ideas.
I would consider adding salt to something to be making that thing less healthy. If adding salt is essential to making something edible, I think it would be healthier to opt for something that doesn’t require added salt. That’s speaking generally though, someone might not be getting enough sodium, but typically there is adequate sodium in a diet of whole foods.
We often combine foods to make nutrients more accessible, like adding oil to greens with fat-soluble vitamins.
I would disagree that adding refined oil to greens would be healthy overall.
Not sure how much oil we’re talking, but a tablespoon of oil has more calories than an entire pound of greens. Even if the oil increases the availability of vitamins, I am very sceptical that it would be healthier than greens or other whole plants with an equivalent caloric content to the added oil. I believe it’s also the case that fats from whole foods can offer similar bioavailability effects.
At the same time, as far as I’m aware some kinds of vinegar might sometimes be a healthy addition to a meal, despite it’s processing being undoubtedly contrary to the general guidelines I’m defending, so even if I don’t agree about the oil I think the point still stands.
I do think you’re offering some valid points that confound my idea of simple guidelines somewhat, but I still don’t think they’re very significant exceptions to my main point.
Appreciate the dialogue:)
I think we’re pretty confident that refined oils are unhealthy (especially in larger quantities) , I believe there’s just controversy about the magnitude of explanatory power given to seed oils.
There’s some simple processes that make it easier/possible to digest whole foods that would otherwise be difficult/impossible to healthily digest, but I don’t really think there’s meaningful confusion as to whether that’s being referred to by the term processed foods.
Could you offer some examples of healthy foods /better for us foods that are processed such that there would be meaningful confusion surrounding the idea of it being healthy to avoid processed foods, according to how that term is typically used?
I can think of some, but definitely not anything of enough consequence to help me to understand why people here seem so critical of the concept of reducing processed foods as a health guideline.
I had just searched on google about ways to make olives edible and got some mixed results. The point I was trying to make was that the way that olives are typically processed to make them edible results in a product that isn’t particularly healthy at least relatively speaking, due to having isolated chemical(s) added to it in its processing.
The main thing I’m trying to say is that eating an isolated component of something we’re best adapted to eat, and/or adding isolated/refined components to that food, will generally make that food less healthy than it would be were we eating all of the components of the food rather than isolated parts.
I think that process, and more complex variations of that process, are essentially what’s being referred to when referring to the process behind processed foods. I think it’s a generally reasonable term with a solid basis.
I don’t know enough to dispute the ratios of animal products eaten by people in the paleolithic era, but it’s still certainly true that throughout our evolutionary history plants made up the vast majority of our diets. The introduction of animal products representing a significant part of our diet is relatively recent thing.
The fact that fairly recently in our evolutionary history humans adapted to be able to exploit the energy and nutrition content of animal products well enough to get past reproductive age, is by no means overwhelming evidence that saturated fats “can’t possibly be bad for you”.
Although the connection between higher fat diets and negative health outcomes is then another inferential step that hasn’t been strongly supported
How would you define strongly supported?
We don’t have differential analysis of the resulting health
There is archeological evidence of Arctic people’s subsisting on meat showing atherosclerosis.
A cooked food could technically be called a processed food but I don’t think that adds much meaningful confusion. I would say the same about soaking something in water.
Olives can be made edible by soaking them in water. If they’re made edible by soaking in a salty brine (an isolated component that can be found in whole foods in more suitable quantities) then they’re generally less healthy.
Local populations might adapt by finding things that can be heavily processed into edible foods which can allow them to survive, but these foods aren’t necessarily ones which would be considered healthy in a wider context.
It seems pretty straightforward to me but maybe I’m missing something in what you’re saying or thinking about it differently.
Our bodies evolved to digest and utilize foods consisting of certain combinations/ratios of component parts.
Processed food typically refers to food that has been changed to have certain parts taken out of it, and/or isolated parts of other foods added to it (or more complex versions of that). Digesting sugar has very different impacts depending on what it’s digested alongside with. Generally the more processed something is, the more it differs from the way that our bodies are optimized for.
To me “generally avoid processed foods” would be kinda like saying “generally avoid breathing in gasses/particulates that are different from typical earth atmosphere near sea level”.
It makes sense to generally avoid inputs to our machinery to the extent that those inputs differ from those which our machinery is optimized to receive, unless we have specific good reasons.
Why should that not be the default, why should the default be requiring specific good reasons to filter out inputs to our machinery that our machinery wasn’t optimized for?
How can saturated fats, the main ingredients in breast milk and animal products, be bad for humans (an apex predator)? Was eating animals really giving our hunter gatherer ancestors heart attacks left and right?
I think there’s a few issues with this reasoning.
For one thing, evolution wasn’t really optimizing for the health of people around the age where people usually start having heart attacks. There wasn’t a lot of selection pressure to make tradeoffs ensuring the health of people 20+ years after sexual maturity.
Another point is that animal sources of food represented a relatively small percentage of what we ate throughout our evolutionary history. We mostly ate plants, things like fruits and tubers. Of the groups who’s diets consisted of mostly meat, there is evidence of health issues resulting.
The nutritional profile of breast milk is intended for a human who is growing extremely quickly, not for long term consumption by an adult. Very different nutritional needs.
Similarly for seed oils, through them we’re eating such a ridiculous amounts of PUFA; something that would be quite impossible in the ancestral environment. How can our bodies possibly be adapted to cope with that?
I believe mainstream nutrition advises against consuming refined oils, including seed oils . I may be missing a point you’re making.
I’m not sure I understand why the experience you’re describing gives an update towards these seed oil theories when it seems generally consistent with already understood health and nutrition knowledge.
Is it particularly surprising that someone experiences some health problems after switching from a diet low in refined/processed ingredients to one high in those ingredients, while also undergoing the stress of being drafted into the military? (I would be very stressed though I shouldn’t assume)
Standard nutrition might be insufficient to explain the extent and speed at which the health issues occurred, but then likewise the seed oil theories would be insufficient to explain why more drafted soldiers aren’t quickly developing those same health issues.
I am sceptical about the role of alcohol you describe and dynamics around it as a form of lie detector, but I know there’s a range of social dynamics I haven’t necessarily been exposed to in my culture.
I have been in various groups that heavily drink on occasion, but I’ve never seen any evidence of people being viewed as having something to hide were they not to drink.
I think alcohol might make people more honest but I think it’s usually things they already wanted to divulge but for lack of some courage or sense of emotional intimacy that alcohol can provide. It’s hard for me to imagine alcohol playing a similar role as a lie detector for significant factual information people strongly want to hide.
Could you offer any examples of where a real lie detector would be valuable in friendships or potential friendships?
A lot of the things I might want to know seem challenging to address via a lie detector. “Will you do anything violent or steal or intentionally damage my property,” People likely to do those things might honestly intend not to.
I could see it potentially being useful for people having sex more on the casual side.
high-trust friend groups
I’m having a hard time imagining a scenario in which I would find this valuable in my friend groups. If I were ever unsure whether I could trust the word of a friend on an important matter, I’d think that would represent deeper issues than a mere lack of information a scan of their brain could provide. Perhaps I’m nieve or particular in some way in how I filter people.
Do you have examples for how this would aid friendships? Or the other domains you mentioned?
I could see it being very valuable but I also find the idea very frightening, and I am not someone who lies.
And it says something about EITHER the unreliability of intuitions beyond run-of-the-mill situations, or about the insane variance in utility functions across people (and likely time)
I don’t think it’s really all that complicated, I suspect that you haven’t experienced a certain extent of negative valence which would be sufficient to update you towards understanding how bad suffering can get.
It would be like if you’ve never smelled anything worse than a fart, and you’re trying to gauge the mass of value of positive smells against the mass of value of negative smells. If you were trying to estimate what it would be like in a small room full of decaying dead animals and ammonia, or how long you’d willingly stay in that room, your intuitions would completely fail you.
but only minor changes in value toward the tails.
I have experienced qualia that is just slightly net negative, feeling like non-existence would be preferable all else equal. Then I’ve experienced states of qualia that are immensely worse than that. The distance between those two states is certainly far greater than the distance between neutral and extreme pleasure/fulfillment/euphoria etc. Suffering can just keep getting worse and worse far beyond the point at which all you can desire is to cease existing.
I think one reason I don’t like that sort of thing is there’s more ambiguity in “what it took to win the game”
It’s hard to know whether an artificial advantage is proportional to the skill gap. If I win, I won’t know the extent to which I should attribute that win to good play (that I ought to be proud of, and that will impress others), VS attributing the win to a potentially greater than 1/N chance of winning(that I came by artificially).
If the greater skill is the absolute advantage that leads me to a win , I will discount the achievement on account of having an absolute advantage, but I’ll still feel satisfied that I have achieved a relatively higher skill level.
If an improperly calibrated handicap is the absolute advantage that leads me to a win, it’s a win I’d discount on account of there being an absolute advantage, but in this case I’d garner no satisfaction from having an (artificial) absolute advantage.
Morestill the win might feel insulting or condescending if I was given a disproportionately large advantage due to my friends/competitors underestimation of my expected quality of play.
My win will also not necessarily give my competitors an update as to whether they underestimated my expected quality of play.
If the expectation is that I will win 1/N times, they won’t update on my skill level if I win. (Maybe very slightly, and eventually as you play more games)
If I win when the odds are against me, people update significantly on my expected quality of play.
It feels good to know people are updating favourably on my expected quality of play.
Interesting. It is an abstract hypothetical, but I do think it’s useful, and it reveals something about how far apart we are in our intuitions/priors.
I wouldn’t choose to live a year in the worst possible hell for 1000 years in the greatest possible heaven. I don’t think I would even take the deal in exchange for an infinite amount of time in the greatest possible heaven.
I would conclude that the experience of certain kinds of suffering reveals something significant about the nature of consciousness that can’t be easily inferred, if it can be inferred at all.
I’m more confident that I’d spend a year as a bottom-5% happy human in order to get a year in the top-5%
I would guess that the difference between .001 percentile happy and 5th percentile happy is larger than the difference between the 5th percentile and 100th percentile. So in that sense it’s difficult for me to consider that question.
None of these are actual choices, of course. So I’m skeptical of using these guesses for anything important
I think even if they’re abstract semi-coherant questions they’re very revealing, and I think they’re very relevant to prioritization of s-risks, allocating resources, and issues such as animal welfare.
It makes it easier for me to understand how otherwise reasonable seeming people can display a kind of indifference to the state of animal agriculture. If someone isn’t aware of the extent of possible suffering, I can see why they might not view the issue with the same urgency.
Would you spend a year in the worst possible hell in exchange for a year in the greatest possible heaven?
I’m unsure exactly what points you’re making.
I’m saying the idea that it’s healthiest to avoid virtually any refined oil is mainstream nutritional understanding. Do you dispute this? I’m not making a point about which refined oils/fats are better than others. I haven’t seen anything that has convinced me mainstream nutrition is wrong about that, but I don’t think its particularly important when they can all be avoided.
Typical doctors are not particularly reliable nutritional authorities. They have almost no nutrition training.
MacDonalds fries are clearly very unhealthy regardless of what they’re fried in. Do you have evidence that they’re healthier when fried in beef tallow?
Regardless, the point I was making was that the diets the original commenter mentioned all restrict things that mainstream nutrition already suggests cause health problems.
Refined sugar, refined grains, refined fats, and animal products are all things mainstream nutrition suggests cause health problems. All of the diets listed restrict at least one of those things, so it’s not surprising that people would report temporary improvements in health relative to a diet that doesn’t restrict any of them.