Comment by bccdee
2 days ago
Yeah, (1) there is no "war on protein," (2) you do not need to eat very much protein unless you are trying to build muscle and you already work out a lot.
The normal recommended daily intake for protein is 0.8 g/kg. 1.2-1.6 is silly; that's a recommendation for athletes.¹
Starches have been a dietary staple in pretty much every society forever. Sugars have not. It's silly that they treat grains as a "sometimes" food.
There's also the weird boogeyman of "processed food." Almost all food is processed to some degree & always has been. We've been cooking, baking, juicing, fermenting, chopping, grinding, mashing, etc. long enough that it influenced the shape of our teeth. Certainly we haven't been making Pizza Pockets that long, but the issue there isn't processing, it's ingredients. And the reason people buy Pizza Pockets isn't that they think they're healthy—it's that Pizza Pockets only need to be microwaved, and cooking a real meal takes time that a lot of people just don't have.
[1]: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/
Starches are basically glucose. They have a massive insulin response -- often even worse than sugar (because you eat starches in a much higher volume since they don't usually taste sweet).
It's very hard to overeat protein naturally. It's very easy to overeat starches and other carbohydrates naturally.
With regard to "processed" food, it's not a great label. I would use this metric: could you conceivably produce this in an average kitchen with the raw materials? If you can, it's probably safe, if you can't, it's probably something you shouldn't eat. For instance, processing often means "partially hydrogenating" a fat, or milling grains into a fine dust and bleaching them. Sometimes chemically produced oils are deodorized, because they would otherwise smell very unpalatable. You generally should not want your food to be bleached or deodorized..
I don't think you do eat starches in a higher volume. The associated fibre and resistant starches lead to many starchy foods being quite satiating—potatoes, oatmeal, and whole grains in particular. Moreover, the relevance of insulin response is unclear; low GI diets have been found to do nothing for obesity.
To reiterate, starches have been a dietary staple in pretty much every society forever, whereas meat has been relatively expensive and rare. The obesity epidemic, which began in the 1970s, did not correspond with the invention of flour or rice.
> I would use this metric: could you conceivably produce this in an average kitchen with the raw materials?
This is completely arbitrary. Why is "milling grains into a fine dust" proscribed, when blending soup in an average kitchen's food processor is fine? We've had mills for millennia and food processors less than a century. Plenty of raw foods smell unpalatable; that doesn't mean the cooked version is secretly smelly or whatever. Besides, what is and isn't a "raw ingredient" is itself arbitrary. I can't make any type of vegetable oil at home, deodorized or otherwise—I don't have an oil press. I can make lard, but that doesn't mean it's better for me.
You're talking about the vibes given by various foods here, rather than their actual health effects.
'Processed' generally means 'chemically modified', a la hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Assuming that "chemical modification" is when you modify something by adding a chemical reagent to it, milk is chemically modified to create cheese curds, sugars are chemically modified to create vinegar and alcohol, and breads & cakes are chemically modified when they rise.
However, this definition of chemical modification doesn't really include hydrogenated vegetable oil. Industrial hydrogenation is done by raising oil to very high temperatures in the presence of a nickel catalyst & then adding hydrogen. We modify it on a chemical level, but primarily by heating it, not by adding reactive substances. And if that counts as chemical modification, then so does cooking!
Anyway, no—people generally used "processed" to describe a particular vibe they get from certain foodstuffs whose production seems too industrialized. There's no rigorous basis for determining what is and isn't "processed" because people use it to describe their feelings about food, not any underlying property of food.
If you search a simple question like "is bread processed," you get a bunch of articles saying "well, since there's no agreed-upon definition for processing and the definitions we do have aren't particularly clear, there's really no answer to the question. But don't worry, because (given the overwhelming vagueness of the category), it's also impossible to say whether processed foods as a category have any health implications, so you shouldn't worry about it."
Generally the definition for ultra-processed foods includes a lot more than that. Some definitions even include "wrapping in plastic".