* Avoid processed anything. Most especially soft/fizzy drinks, baked goods, candy, fruit drinks, jams, jellies, syrups, most processed cereals.
* Eat fresh vegetables, some fruit, legumes. Whole grains for breakfast (rolled or steel-cut oats). Meat, eggs, and dairy if they're in your diet.
* Check breads and other products for added sugar, in all forms: sugar, molasses (often added to "rye" breads as colouring), caramel colour or flavour, honey, rice syrup, agave nectar (nearly pure fructose), corn syrup, HFCS, concentrated apple juice, etc., etc.
Generally, Michael Pollan's guidance in The Omnivor's Dilemma is good: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Many strength training books have good guidance on nutrition (contrast with cardiovascular fitness, though there are exceptions). I'll recommend The New Rules of Lifting for Women (Schuler, Cosgrove, & Forsythe) specifically as it includes a large section on nutrition and meal planning. The fitness advice is also generally applicable to men, though there is a companion title on that topic specifically -- its nutritional advice is similar though briefer.
What does it precisely mean for a food to be "processed"? "Processed" in general just means "went through some kind of process", which covers pretty much anything (if a local farmer collects their apples in a bin and moves them across the field that's a process) but in relation to food it has a negative connotation, so it must be specific processes the food was involved in that are unwanted? What about these processes inherently make the food more sugary or otherwise unhealthy?
I'm not sure it is a science problem, i.e., processing food makes it unhealthy. I think it is more an economics problem; food processors don't have the incentives to care about the long-term health of the food consumers.
Food processors have incentives to improve their logistics (e.g., increase shelf life) and to make the food taste better (or even, hopefully, addictive). Some brands try to make their products appear to be healthy, but consumers generally have little information about what is going into processed food, so appearance might not mean much.
Of course, even unprocessed food like fruits and vegetables has been heavily engineered by breeding, especially in the last century---and again, not to make it healthier.
I think commonly, processed doesn't mean so much "flour you didnt grind at home", but more "these meats have been ground and mixed with spices and cured" or "they made the speghetti sauce at the factory" or "artificial flavorings and lots of added sugar!".
Not all processing is bad, per se: Factories can make red sauce pretty darn healthy if they want. But what usually happens is that the sauces are filled with a good deal of fat, salt, and sugar along with other things you'd never actually put in food at home (not all of which are bad, but some are misleading - food coloring, for example). They do this because... well, they researched this and found there are 'bonus taste points' if they have the right combination of flavors and feels.
And there is a lot of politics and lobbying to keep the labels more confusing and to use special ingredient names so people don't really know what is in it. Sometimes even when you are trying to avoid something, it is really difficult to figure it all out.
And really, what would probably be needed is some sort of push for healthier processed foods without the weird ingredients. Some things will probably always be bad in excess - cured meats, for example, but we can do better with the others.
Moving apples around is not really processing them because they are still the same. A better example of processing is when you homogenize or pasteurize milk, or mill and separate wheat into flour and bran. Of course you don't see anyone demonizing these processes because we've been doing them for a pretty long time. It's good to bet on traditional foods because the cultures that came up with them must have survived on them somehow. However, newer processes could modify foods into more dangerous forms. Partial hydrogenation, for example, turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Also, modern processing often comes with new additives that wouldn't occur in traditional diets.
A reputable nutritional guide (and I've listed several, though there are many others) will be far more reliable and complete than me. Please refer to them.
If you care to share your findings, report them back to the discussion.
Vinegar + sweetener is the or a fundamental flavor in a number of things, including barbecue sauce, ketchup, coleslaw dressing, several salad dressings, some pasta sauce and chili-type sauces, cocktail sauce, some pickles, and so on.
By that I do not mean "those evil bastards are sticking sugar everywhere", I mean that this is a standard culinary technique. It may be overused and we may consume too much of it, but it is an old technique. It is also one of the answers to the question "how can so much sugar be everywhere but not everything tastes sweet?" Vinegar is one of the bigger answers to that question. (Even ignoring the fact that we can end up very adjusted to the sugar flavor, it is still amazing to me that some things can literally be half sugar by mass and not taste sweet.)
I also mention it because if you want to cut sugar out of your life, this is definitely one of the easiest places to miss a significant quantity. It's pretty easy to make yourself a great salad and accidentally slather it in vinegared sugar.
Yes, but the "traditional" sweetener in Italian pasta sauce is usually carrot, not processed white sugar. At least that's how I've always made pasta sauce.
If you look around, there's sauce on shelves now without lots of added sugar. It's been gradual over many years, but I'm starting to find more choices of various foods that have a shorter ingredients list, less salt, less sugar, etc.
Not OP, but:
* Avoid processed anything. Most especially soft/fizzy drinks, baked goods, candy, fruit drinks, jams, jellies, syrups, most processed cereals.
* Eat fresh vegetables, some fruit, legumes. Whole grains for breakfast (rolled or steel-cut oats). Meat, eggs, and dairy if they're in your diet.
* Check breads and other products for added sugar, in all forms: sugar, molasses (often added to "rye" breads as colouring), caramel colour or flavour, honey, rice syrup, agave nectar (nearly pure fructose), corn syrup, HFCS, concentrated apple juice, etc., etc.
Generally, Michael Pollan's guidance in The Omnivor's Dilemma is good: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Many strength training books have good guidance on nutrition (contrast with cardiovascular fitness, though there are exceptions). I'll recommend The New Rules of Lifting for Women (Schuler, Cosgrove, & Forsythe) specifically as it includes a large section on nutrition and meal planning. The fitness advice is also generally applicable to men, though there is a companion title on that topic specifically -- its nutritional advice is similar though briefer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12481699
What does it precisely mean for a food to be "processed"? "Processed" in general just means "went through some kind of process", which covers pretty much anything (if a local farmer collects their apples in a bin and moves them across the field that's a process) but in relation to food it has a negative connotation, so it must be specific processes the food was involved in that are unwanted? What about these processes inherently make the food more sugary or otherwise unhealthy?
I'm not sure it is a science problem, i.e., processing food makes it unhealthy. I think it is more an economics problem; food processors don't have the incentives to care about the long-term health of the food consumers.
Food processors have incentives to improve their logistics (e.g., increase shelf life) and to make the food taste better (or even, hopefully, addictive). Some brands try to make their products appear to be healthy, but consumers generally have little information about what is going into processed food, so appearance might not mean much.
Of course, even unprocessed food like fruits and vegetables has been heavily engineered by breeding, especially in the last century---and again, not to make it healthier.
I think commonly, processed doesn't mean so much "flour you didnt grind at home", but more "these meats have been ground and mixed with spices and cured" or "they made the speghetti sauce at the factory" or "artificial flavorings and lots of added sugar!".
Not all processing is bad, per se: Factories can make red sauce pretty darn healthy if they want. But what usually happens is that the sauces are filled with a good deal of fat, salt, and sugar along with other things you'd never actually put in food at home (not all of which are bad, but some are misleading - food coloring, for example). They do this because... well, they researched this and found there are 'bonus taste points' if they have the right combination of flavors and feels.
And there is a lot of politics and lobbying to keep the labels more confusing and to use special ingredient names so people don't really know what is in it. Sometimes even when you are trying to avoid something, it is really difficult to figure it all out.
And really, what would probably be needed is some sort of push for healthier processed foods without the weird ingredients. Some things will probably always be bad in excess - cured meats, for example, but we can do better with the others.
Moving apples around is not really processing them because they are still the same. A better example of processing is when you homogenize or pasteurize milk, or mill and separate wheat into flour and bran. Of course you don't see anyone demonizing these processes because we've been doing them for a pretty long time. It's good to bet on traditional foods because the cultures that came up with them must have survived on them somehow. However, newer processes could modify foods into more dangerous forms. Partial hydrogenation, for example, turned out to be a pretty bad idea. Also, modern processing often comes with new additives that wouldn't occur in traditional diets.
1 reply →
"Processing" is a continuum, not a binary. I'll let you work it out from there.
What do you think about white rice? Google lists white rice (1 cup, cooked) at 0.1g. Conversely, brown rice shows 0.7g for the same portion.
Are these simple sugars? Is this bad for me?
A reputable nutritional guide (and I've listed several, though there are many others) will be far more reliable and complete than me. Please refer to them.
If you care to share your findings, report them back to the discussion.
1 reply →
I'm not the OP but I'd guess it's mostly vegetables, nuts/non meat proteins, and/or meat. Maybe some of the less processed grains like flax or quinoa.
Amen to that--what is 8g of sugar doing in a serving of /pasta sauce/?
Sugar is a pretty common ingredient in red pasta sauce recipes. It cuts the acidity of the tomato
Vinegar + sweetener is the or a fundamental flavor in a number of things, including barbecue sauce, ketchup, coleslaw dressing, several salad dressings, some pasta sauce and chili-type sauces, cocktail sauce, some pickles, and so on.
By that I do not mean "those evil bastards are sticking sugar everywhere", I mean that this is a standard culinary technique. It may be overused and we may consume too much of it, but it is an old technique. It is also one of the answers to the question "how can so much sugar be everywhere but not everything tastes sweet?" Vinegar is one of the bigger answers to that question. (Even ignoring the fact that we can end up very adjusted to the sugar flavor, it is still amazing to me that some things can literally be half sugar by mass and not taste sweet.)
I also mention it because if you want to cut sugar out of your life, this is definitely one of the easiest places to miss a significant quantity. It's pretty easy to make yourself a great salad and accidentally slather it in vinegared sugar.
1 reply →
Yes, but the "traditional" sweetener in Italian pasta sauce is usually carrot, not processed white sugar. At least that's how I've always made pasta sauce.
And makes up about 25% of ketchup...
If you look around, there's sauce on shelves now without lots of added sugar. It's been gradual over many years, but I'm starting to find more choices of various foods that have a shorter ingredients list, less salt, less sugar, etc.
The easiest way to eat healthy is to only buy things in the supermarket that have one ingredient.
Pretty soon you'll notice you're only buying fruit, vegetables, pasta, rice, beans & non-processed meat.
Disclaimer: of course you could buy pure sugar or pure lard - so don't do that :)
Do yourself the favor, buy the lard and leave the pasta for the people who believe the broken gov't recommendations.
Also, cheese and butter and possibly milk.