28 ms·

Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? (2025)

22 points by SamoyedFurFluff 7mo ago

michaelsshaw 7mo ago
https://archive.ph/nLNPp https://archive.ph/nLNPp
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  Oops sorry I just posted it too at the same time. Curiously enough I got a different url.
wolvoleo 7mo ago
https://archive.is/4yObP https://archive.is/4yObP
throwaway5752 7mo ago
It isn't "so deadly", it's just unhealthy, and it's made worse by culture and business encouraging excessive consumption and serving sizes. Ultraprocessed foods aren't great, but it's yet another manufactured crisis to serve as a distraction from the Epstein files scandal and coverup, like the attack Iran will be next Thursday. What a horrible time.
- idontwantthis 7mo ago
  I don’t like the “everything else is a distraction” take. Multiple things can be very bad at once, and our government is capable of multiple conspiracies at once. Not that processed food is a government conspiracy.
  - Tade0 7mo ago
    Also it's not like it's a new topic. Super Size Me came out in 2004.
    - IAmBroom 7mo ago
      The movie made by a serious alcoholic, who omitted the copious amounts of booze he had during the "test period"?
  - throwaway5752 7mo ago
    I think I agree with you in general, just not in this specific case. There is nothing that changed this year with respect to food. And this administration rolled back existing standards to improve school lunch nutrition and their nutrition policy changes have not been science based, so they demonstrably don't care about the issue.
- nradov 7mo ago
  Current US federal government nutrition guidelines call for avoiding highly processed foods. https://realfood.gov/ https://realfood.gov/
  - epistasis 7mo ago
    An important foot note to that is that the current US federal government has politicized science to the point that it cannot be trusted as a source of health or medical information. Professional societies of doctors and scientists are far more reliable. Past governments may have also completely botched the food guidelines, too, but it's never been as clearly botched as it is at the moment.
epistasis 7mo ago
My main problem is defining "ultra-processed," such that I could take action on this in my life. > From this perspective, homemade jam on pain de Gonesse would be fine; Smucker’s on Wonder Bread would not, even if it contained less sugar and fat. “The thesis is that we’ve been focussing too strongly on the individual nutritional components of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting to learn that processing really matters.” So the pain de Gonesse goes through lots of processing to get it's unique attributes, but is not "ultra processed" yet Wonder bread is. Or is it the Smucker's jam that makes it ultraprocessed? Is home made jam ultra-processed? Or this distinction: > “Preparing a day’s worth of ultra-processed meals might take an hour,” he said. “Unprocessed meals could take three or four times as long.” He brought his knife down forcefully, cleaving a carrot in two, and continued: “If I’m swamped, I’d rather make the ultra-processed menu. But if I had to pick one to eat for the rest of my life? Unprocessed, no question.” As somebody who cooks a good chunk of my family's meals, cleaving a carrot in two and taking the example earlier of making a meal of vegetables and grilled chicken is not that time consuming compared to, what exactly? What takes 3-4 hours to prepare here? Vagueness in articles like these reinforce the idea that there's no definiton of "ultra-processed" that a regular person can use, and that it's just based on vibes and vague feelings of "quality" that are at best defined by traditions rather than by choices that are made. Even the start of the article, that the immigrant noticed that American meals had far larger portions, more salt, and more sweetness than French food, does not comport to the definitons used here. Maybe the definition is: the food can go bad in a short amount of time, except for staples like rice or flour. Would that work? I don't know. Can I simply switch to dry kidney beans rather than the canned kidney beans, because the canned kidney beans are "ultra-processed"? I've read sooooo much about ultra-processed food but still don't know how to use it in daily life.
- cmsp12 7mo ago
  anything that was made in a factory is processed. Eat food in its most natural form available
  - tubs 7mo ago
    Raw meat? Wheat grains from the ground? Coconut shells?
HiroProtagonist 7mo ago
I wonder how these macro trends will shake out as more and more Americans start using GLP-1 meds.
heraldgeezer 7mo ago
Don't get too distracted by all this. The number one thing is calories, number 2 is sugar. Cut it out. Cut sugar soda, cut beer, skip 1 meal a day. Now.
- rasz 7mo ago
  insert recent tiktak meme of people putting loaf of bread under faucet watching it fall apart quite quickly while US one acts like plastic sponge
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago
  May I suggest starch also plays a role? Removing starch removes the craving, much like sugar (as in pure sugar). Eating an apple doesn't trigger cravings, eating pasta or pizza does. I am sure it's personal,but the difference is enormous.
  - heraldgeezer 7mo ago
    Interesting, I have not gone that deep. All I know is, calories do not magically teleport inside a body. Just fasting is easier for me. I still eat like crap, just less crap. No sugar drinks of course.
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago
      I tried many times, I usually recover the weight. This time around I have been going months and I don't feel the disappointment that builds up over time due to lack of flavor. I have variety, I think it's key
jovial_cavalier 7mo ago
So the chefs are preparing food that has the same macros as ultraprocessed meals (I assume like tv dinners or something?) Why do they keep referring to the freshly-prepared food as "ultraprocessed"? “Is this processed or unprocessed?” I asked. Kozlosky smiled. “Ultra-processed,” she said. “Lots of participants can’t tell the difference.” If the term has any meaning, you could tell very easily. Go look at a freshly fried tortilla chip, and compare it to a tostito. You know which one is which instinctively. I thought I understood the study but now I'm not sure. I thought the idea was to take the exact same thing you'd get in a tv dinner and make it fresh, so no freeze drying, no preservatives, etc. Then if that food on its own causes the same pattern of health issues, we know it's simply a diet problem. It sounds like they replicated that effect. So they got evidence that ultraprocessing doesn't actually matter all that much?
orev 7mo ago
Too many people jump on the health trend bandwagon to get attention, and all the slight misunderstandings add up to a confusing mess of information. It’s not that difficult: the closer the item is to its natural state, the more healthy it is. Almost all foods need some processing to be made edible (peeling, cooking, etc), but beyond that their health vs processing ratio declines. For example: Rice needs to be cut, threshed, and cleaned. Then you have something that’s baseline edible (brown rice). But then people remove the bran layer to make white rice, which removes health. Then they pre-cook it to make “quick cook” rice, which removes more health. Or they grind it up to make rice flour, which removes more health. Or they ferment it to make saki, which removes more health. At what point does it become ultra processed? It doesn’t really matter. The focus should be on staying as close to the initial edible state as possible.
- danaris 7mo ago
  Your thesis is completely undercut by the rest of your post. Some foods are healthiest to eat with no processing. Other foods require minimal processing to be healthily edible. Still other foods require significant processing to be healthily edible. It's almost like....there's no simple, one-line rule you can apply to food to guarantee that you are always getting the healthiest stuff!! You actually have to apply human thought, judgement, and knowledge of the subject to it!
  - orev 7mo ago
    I don’t see how the thesis is undercut at all. Process the food as much as is needed to make it edible, but not more than that. Of course each food will require different types of processing.
Simulacra 7mo ago
Related: "The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food" https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
(2025) some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623315
RASBR89 7mo ago
Anecdotal but the three times I’ve been in the states recently I come away feeling like trash. When I’m there I crave salads and green food pretty fast. It feels like, as a tourist, unless you’re making food yourself from scratch the ingredients used in most food are not good for you. I don’t feel that way holidaying in other countries..
- fatata123 7mo ago
  [dead]
timfsu 7mo ago
Fascinating article. Also extremely confusing (though probably not unexpected) that an important health researcher is named Nestle.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago
Is cottage cheese ultraprocessed? I eat a lot of real food: my main meal is usually lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, but then I add cottage cheese a tofu that's 100% protein and some egg whites. For dinner I will usually swap out egg whites and tofu for something else, depending on my macros (salmon, rice, occasional red meat). For snacks I eat apple with variations of butters (pure): pistachio, almonds, peanut, cashew, hazelnut. Sometimes I eat frozen blueberries with cottage cheese and a vegan protein poweder. The main thing is I eat basically a whole lettuce heart every meal,along with 2 tomatoes. Fills me up. All of this lands me on very low calories (1200), so I have been losing weight fast without starving. Arguably,my hunger has gone down substantially. Boredom is what usually killed me, but turns out rotating between the various butters allow for enough variation

michaelsshaw 7mo ago

https://archive.ph/nLNPp https://archive.ph/nLNPp

wolvoleo 7mo ago
Oops sorry I just posted it too at the same time. Curiously enough I got a different url.

wolvoleo 7mo ago

https://archive.is/4yObP https://archive.is/4yObP

throwaway5752 7mo ago

It isn't "so deadly", it's just unhealthy, and it's made worse by culture and business encouraging excessive consumption and serving sizes. Ultraprocessed foods aren't great, but it's yet another manufactured crisis to serve as a distraction from the Epstein files scandal and coverup, like the attack Iran will be next Thursday. What a horrible time.

idontwantthis 7mo ago
I don’t like the “everything else is a distraction” take. Multiple things can be very bad at once, and our government is capable of multiple conspiracies at once. Not that processed food is a government conspiracy.
- Tade0 7mo ago
  Also it's not like it's a new topic. Super Size Me came out in 2004.
  - IAmBroom 7mo ago
    The movie made by a serious alcoholic, who omitted the copious amounts of booze he had during the "test period"?
- throwaway5752 7mo ago
  I think I agree with you in general, just not in this specific case. There is nothing that changed this year with respect to food. And this administration rolled back existing standards to improve school lunch nutrition and their nutrition policy changes have not been science based, so they demonstrably don't care about the issue.
nradov 7mo ago
Current US federal government nutrition guidelines call for avoiding highly processed foods. https://realfood.gov/ https://realfood.gov/
- epistasis 7mo ago
  An important foot note to that is that the current US federal government has politicized science to the point that it cannot be trusted as a source of health or medical information. Professional societies of doctors and scientists are far more reliable. Past governments may have also completely botched the food guidelines, too, but it's never been as clearly botched as it is at the moment.

epistasis 7mo ago

My main problem is defining "ultra-processed," such that I could take action on this in my life. > From this perspective, homemade jam on pain de Gonesse would be fine; Smucker’s on Wonder Bread would not, even if it contained less sugar and fat. “The thesis is that we’ve been focussing too strongly on the individual nutritional components of food,” Hall told me. “We’re starting to learn that processing really matters.” So the pain de Gonesse goes through lots of processing to get it's unique attributes, but is not "ultra processed" yet Wonder bread is. Or is it the Smucker's jam that makes it ultraprocessed? Is home made jam ultra-processed? Or this distinction: > “Preparing a day’s worth of ultra-processed meals might take an hour,” he said. “Unprocessed meals could take three or four times as long.” He brought his knife down forcefully, cleaving a carrot in two, and continued: “If I’m swamped, I’d rather make the ultra-processed menu. But if I had to pick one to eat for the rest of my life? Unprocessed, no question.” As somebody who cooks a good chunk of my family's meals, cleaving a carrot in two and taking the example earlier of making a meal of vegetables and grilled chicken is not that time consuming compared to, what exactly? What takes 3-4 hours to prepare here? Vagueness in articles like these reinforce the idea that there's no definiton of "ultra-processed" that a regular person can use, and that it's just based on vibes and vague feelings of "quality" that are at best defined by traditions rather than by choices that are made. Even the start of the article, that the immigrant noticed that American meals had far larger portions, more salt, and more sweetness than French food, does not comport to the definitons used here. Maybe the definition is: the food can go bad in a short amount of time, except for staples like rice or flour. Would that work? I don't know. Can I simply switch to dry kidney beans rather than the canned kidney beans, because the canned kidney beans are "ultra-processed"? I've read sooooo much about ultra-processed food but still don't know how to use it in daily life.

cmsp12 7mo ago
anything that was made in a factory is processed. Eat food in its most natural form available
- tubs 7mo ago
  Raw meat? Wheat grains from the ground? Coconut shells?

HiroProtagonist 7mo ago

I wonder how these macro trends will shake out as more and more Americans start using GLP-1 meds.

heraldgeezer 7mo ago

Don't get too distracted by all this. The number one thing is calories, number 2 is sugar. Cut it out. Cut sugar soda, cut beer, skip 1 meal a day. Now.

rasz 7mo ago
insert recent tiktak meme of people putting loaf of bread under faucet watching it fall apart quite quickly while US one acts like plastic sponge
Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago
May I suggest starch also plays a role? Removing starch removes the craving, much like sugar (as in pure sugar). Eating an apple doesn't trigger cravings, eating pasta or pizza does. I am sure it's personal,but the difference is enormous.
- heraldgeezer 7mo ago
  Interesting, I have not gone that deep. All I know is, calories do not magically teleport inside a body. Just fasting is easier for me. I still eat like crap, just less crap. No sugar drinks of course.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago
    I tried many times, I usually recover the weight. This time around I have been going months and I don't feel the disappointment that builds up over time due to lack of flavor. I have variety, I think it's key

jovial_cavalier 7mo ago

So the chefs are preparing food that has the same macros as ultraprocessed meals (I assume like tv dinners or something?) Why do they keep referring to the freshly-prepared food as "ultraprocessed"? “Is this processed or unprocessed?” I asked. Kozlosky smiled. “Ultra-processed,” she said. “Lots of participants can’t tell the difference.” If the term has any meaning, you could tell very easily. Go look at a freshly fried tortilla chip, and compare it to a tostito. You know which one is which instinctively. I thought I understood the study but now I'm not sure. I thought the idea was to take the exact same thing you'd get in a tv dinner and make it fresh, so no freeze drying, no preservatives, etc. Then if that food on its own causes the same pattern of health issues, we know it's simply a diet problem. It sounds like they replicated that effect. So they got evidence that ultraprocessing doesn't actually matter all that much?

orev 7mo ago

Too many people jump on the health trend bandwagon to get attention, and all the slight misunderstandings add up to a confusing mess of information. It’s not that difficult: the closer the item is to its natural state, the more healthy it is. Almost all foods need some processing to be made edible (peeling, cooking, etc), but beyond that their health vs processing ratio declines. For example: Rice needs to be cut, threshed, and cleaned. Then you have something that’s baseline edible (brown rice). But then people remove the bran layer to make white rice, which removes health. Then they pre-cook it to make “quick cook” rice, which removes more health. Or they grind it up to make rice flour, which removes more health. Or they ferment it to make saki, which removes more health. At what point does it become ultra processed? It doesn’t really matter. The focus should be on staying as close to the initial edible state as possible.

danaris 7mo ago
Your thesis is completely undercut by the rest of your post. Some foods are healthiest to eat with no processing. Other foods require minimal processing to be healthily edible. Still other foods require significant processing to be healthily edible. It's almost like....there's no simple, one-line rule you can apply to food to guarantee that you are always getting the healthiest stuff!! You actually have to apply human thought, judgement, and knowledge of the subject to it!
- orev 7mo ago
  I don’t see how the thesis is undercut at all. Process the food as much as is needed to make it edible, but not more than that. Of course each food will require different types of processing.

Simulacra 7mo ago

Related: "The Extraordinary Science of Junk Food" https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

(2025) some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42623315

RASBR89 7mo ago

Anecdotal but the three times I’ve been in the states recently I come away feeling like trash. When I’m there I crave salads and green food pretty fast. It feels like, as a tourist, unless you’re making food yourself from scratch the ingredients used in most food are not good for you. I don’t feel that way holidaying in other countries..

fatata123 7mo ago
[dead]

timfsu 7mo ago

Fascinating article. Also extremely confusing (though probably not unexpected) that an important health researcher is named Nestle.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago

Is cottage cheese ultraprocessed? I eat a lot of real food: my main meal is usually lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, but then I add cottage cheese a tofu that's 100% protein and some egg whites. For dinner I will usually swap out egg whites and tofu for something else, depending on my macros (salmon, rice, occasional red meat). For snacks I eat apple with variations of butters (pure): pistachio, almonds, peanut, cashew, hazelnut. Sometimes I eat frozen blueberries with cottage cheese and a vegan protein poweder. The main thing is I eat basically a whole lettuce heart every meal,along with 2 tomatoes. Fills me up. All of this lands me on very low calories (1200), so I have been losing weight fast without starving. Arguably,my hunger has gone down substantially. Boredom is what usually killed me, but turns out rotating between the various butters allow for enough variation