Dana Bash on CNN calling the BS out

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[+] 101 points 3 months ago (57 children)
  • [–] 87 points 3 months ago* (9 children)

    The rest of the shit he says is just weird

    The rest of the shit he says is actively dangerous to your health and mental wellbeing.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    There's gotta be a word for when people say baseline obvious shit like eat healthy and exercise before going off the deep end with pseudoscience bullshit. It's like they go, "I'm normal, but also [thing a nornal person wouldn't say.]"

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  • [–] 41 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Motte and bailey. Make wild claim, retreat to safe claim when challenged, go back to wild claim.

    Jordan Peterson is the master of it.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    That's how religion works. "Be nice to each other! Otherwise the guy who is his own dad but also a ghost and still only one person will be mad at you!"

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  • [–] 35 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    you should eat non processed foods

    in heads of these morons, this equals to unpasteurized milk :D

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    and you should eat non processed foods.

    Pasteurization is a process.

    That alone has prevented countless deaths.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Yeah I always felt that "Proccessed" foods have a bad reputation for no good reason. The fact that something might have enough sugar, salt and so on to kill a cow is what makes it unhealthy not the fact that it was "processed".

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  • [–] 37 points 3 months ago (39 children)

    you should eat non processed foods

    It's kinda true... But less than you'd think. I get that it can be a convenient shorthand, but even the scientific field of nutrition can't agree on a good definition of processed foods, let alone ultra processed foods. As soon as you break it down to "you should eat a lot of vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, and not too much sugar, meat, salt, or saturated fats" you actually remove any predictive power that the "ultra processed" label has, so we can understand this concept much better in terms of the basic nutritional guidelines which have changed very little over the last 50 years except for some better understanding of the role of unsaturated fats. Meanwhile, on the contrary, totally unprocessed raw milk, minimally processed beef fat etc., which are favourites of the MAHA crowd, are extremely unhealthy. So even there his advice is quite dangerous if you actually look in to it.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago* (7 children)

    "Processed foods" has the same energy to me as when people say food is bad because it has "chemicals" in it.

    When following a recipe I start with ingredients and I end up with a prepared meal that I processed. We need to identify and specify the processes that causes problems in food instead of giving that food a label that could be applied to any meal you create.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    Preservatives and high sodium is probably the better term(s), because that's what people usually mean when they say processed foods. Like have a butcher cut instead of Oscar Maier salami slice

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  • I feel the same way when someone says a certain food is 'organic'... well, yeah, pretty much everything we eat is organic. Even the main ingredient in Roundup is organic.

    I get the need to be able to market 'clean' food in a way to differentiate it from everything else, but using a term that is scientifically incorrect is poor marketing.

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  • [–] -4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    You're being overly literal. That you made it yourself with real ingredients is a good rule of thumb for not ultra-processed. You're unlikely to have partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids or high fructose corn syrup lying around, and you won't test your recipe repeatedly until humans want more of it than any of the competing products on the supermarket shelves.

    Yeah, everything's a chemical, but that's not what people mean when they say there's chemicals in the food. They mean there are edible non-food ingredients whose only purpose is to cheaply make it last longer on the shelf or be more moreish or reduce costs.

    There's a significant correlation between proportion of ultra-processed foods in diet and all-causes mortality. Don't pretend there isn't.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    No, sweetie, they're not being "overly literal", they're just telling the truth.

    We don't even have a consistent definition of what "ultra-processed" should mean.

    People using words like chemicals wrong is a problem with them.

    Correlation doesn't imply causation, and we still need to agree on a definition for "ultra-processed" to conduct any meaningful science.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago

    It's also very difficult statistically to remove the co-morbidity factors:

    populations that eat more "processed" foods !especially in the US! are poor, in toxic environs, stressed, over-policed, incarcerated, discriminated, unstable housing healthcare employment, using "coping" mechanisms, in a food desert, multigenerational defecit of various "health skills", no "free" time for cooking and exercise, etc etc etc

    If they had healthcare, housing and union jobs ... stats wouldn't be near so bad for them

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Tangent.

    This is why I hate when people feel they have to call themselves 'Socialists' in political arguments. Instead of dealing with the actual issues, you end up talking about what Trotsky had for lunch at the Fist International.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    That sandwich was a sign of problems to come dammit!

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)

    You see? According to the Third Volume of the Soviet Approved autobiography of Rosa Luxembourg it wasn't a sandwich at all, but a knish!

    Now we must debate the point, or be accused of revisionism

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    First we must define the limits of various traits to firmly understand exactly what counts as a knish. I will take the anarchic position as I had to look up what a knish is and now I'd like to engage in some conquest for that bread

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The really sad thing is that I've heard worse unironically

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Yeah, unfortunately I've dealt with both the extremes of leftists, and I really don't know who I find more insufferable, the overly academic navel gazers or the "only get intoxicated and smash, no read or unionize" rabblerousers

    Fortunately I've also known plenty of folks who know Proudhon from Trotsky and recognize that the eternal struggle for justice is both intellectual and physical, that we can and should continue striving for a better society and discussing what went wrong and how to improve things as well as trying new things and doing what we can to make the world suck a little less

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    No, this is crap.

    "Scientists can't agree therefore it's not true" has been bogus through smoking and lung cancer, fossil fuels and climate change, and now ultra-processed food (UPF) and all-causes mortality and obesity.

    A good rule of thumb is that if you made it in your home from real ingredients it's probably much healthier than if some company did food science on it until it human testers said "yeah I'd love more of that one". It's not a coincidence, it's not even malice, it's just they're selecting for overeating.

    The malice is when the food industry tries to get you to believe that their products are healthy, that there's nothing to see or be concerned about with UPF, and the malice is also when they're lobbying and suing governments the world over that tell you to avoid UPF.

    Yeah, unpasteurised milk and other crap is bonkers anti-science nonsense, but so is dismissing the correlation between larger quantities of ultra-processed food and all-causes mortality. It's real. Don't spread their lies that it's not.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    A good rule of thumb is that if you made it in your home from real ingredients it's probably much healthier than if some company did food science on it until it human testers said "yeah I'd love more of that one".

    That's right, and exactly what I said. It's a good rule of thumb. It's not, however, a well defined scientific category. The reason the rule of thumb works is that if you cook something yourself from ingredients it's probably got more fiber, more vitamins, less sugar, and less fat, than the commercial alternative. Not because it has fewer processing steps done to it.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It's not the processing, it's the preservatives and other edible non-food junk they put in to make it last longer and keep customers coming back for more and more and more.

    It's called food science, and it works. It works very well indeed. Way too well for our health. You test for moreishness and you manufacture the ones the panel loves and wants more of. Result? Food that people really want more of. Its not magic and it's not deliberately bad, it's just that the inevitable result is the obesity epidemic.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    You know that food science shows that there isn't nearly as much of a problem as you claim, right, sparky?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I don't think you know what food science is.

    Food science is about testing and developing new products. It's not longitudinal or population health and disease studies. It doesn't show anything about the correlation between ultra processed foods and all causes mortality because it simply doesn't study mortality in any way whatsoever.

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  • [+] -9 points 3 months ago* (16 children)

    even science can't agree on a good definition of processed food

    Uh... It's pretty well defined.

    If you alter natural food, it's processed. Dairy products other than raw milk, bread, etc, are processed foods. Unless you're eating raw fruits, veggies, and meat most food is going to be processed in some way.

    Ultra processed foods are foods made with industrial chemical ingredients either extracted from food or synthesized.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    When you actually look in to the details of papers on this topic you'll find that it's actually not defined consistently across the literature.

    Ultra processed foods are foods made with industrial chemical ingredients either extracted from food or synthesized.

    What are industrial chemical ingredients? For example, is sodium hydrogen carbonate one? It's a chemical, produced industrially. Is food made with it in a shop different to food made with baking soda at home? Why?

    When you dig into the reason why any specific "ultra processed" food is bad it boils down to:

    • not enough fiber
    • not enough vitamins and minerals
    • too much salt
    • too much sugar
    • too much animal fat

    And if you control for those things (which we have known for a long time and are standard nutritional guidelines) then the effects of food processing on health outcomes basically disappear.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Here is a good, scientifically informed overview of one popular ultra processed food categorization system and why it excludes good foods and includes poor ones: https://www.eatrightpro.org/news-center/practice-trends/examining-the-nova-food-classification-system-and-healthfulness-of-ultra-processed-foods

    The same kind of thing applies to the other popular systems for defining it. It's just not a good scientific category, we already know about all the components it's a mediocre shorthand for.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    Even the industry funded group the other guy quoted me admitted that the larger scale scientific studies found that

    ultra-processed foods are associated with increased incidences of chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    And you're still ignoring that we don't have a common definition for what constitutes ultra processed, sunshine. Science works on consensus, which you can't have without common definitions. There might be something there, but it's premature to draw any conclusions until we have common terms.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    ultra-processed foods are associated with increased incidences of chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes

    You pretending it isn't real doesn't make it go away. Sorry, you who chooses to ignore science, but your excuses are meaningless and your head is firmly in the corporate sponsored sand.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    You don't understand that bread is literally a processed food

    I literally mentioned bread being a processed food in my comment, "sweaty."

    I also am not saying or even implying it's good or bad. I just stated how the phrases are fucking defined. 🙄

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

    My god, how fucking illiterate are you? You need to go back to primary school and learn how to read and write, for real.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I'm sorry I actually understand this topic, kiddo.

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