“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Pretty much from there, I guess…
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At least when you see it in the health stores its usually processed into powders and pills. As opposed to eaten raw.
I am also extremely skeptical of any vegetable or herb being touted to boost male sex drive. Sounds like advertising to desperate rubes.
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Balderdash. The real problem is possessed veggies. Seriously, you don’t want that.
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Just make a salad!
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All I know is if I ever end up in a Mad Max Fury Road situation, I will try to set myself up as the Distiller/Pickling King.
Alcohol, vinegar and brine are all wildly useful in a nascent industrial society.
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When people are afraid to learn it’s easy to take advantage of them and unfortunately anything related to sexuality and fertility is somewhat taboo.
So much abuse happens at this intersection but most of it is petty financial abuse so it just kind of grinds on.
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Well, bread isn’t really very healthy, especially when it’s industrially produced bread that has texturizing and shelf stabilizing ingredients added.
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While “ultra-processed” does sound like something a food guru snake oil salesman came up with, I’m still struggling with “processed.” What does that even mean? Does canning, milling, or even cooking make something “processed”? If so, must we eat nothing but raw vegetables in order to be healthy? Or is it just a stand-in, like organic used to be, for “business bad”?
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The problem is some “food gurus” have decided that bread, any and all bread, is evil. I have been baking, mostly bread, for decades, and my friends tell me it is great bread, and to bring more when I come overs. Most parties I’m invited to I’ll bring (well labeled for ingredients) bread sticks, rolls, pull-aparts, or whatever else seems appropriate, and it will all be long gone before the party is over. But since the “gluten belly” and “bread is evil” memes have taken hold, I keep hearing “oh, you brought bread again. I can’t eat that.” They’re not allergic, or have celeriac disease (I have two friends with celeriac, and bring something else when I know they’ll be there), and mysteriously all the bread is soon long gone despite their cries of “it’s poison!,” but it’s as if they’re trying to shame me into not bringing it.
The staff of life. Wheat, salt, water, and that’s it, unless I’m doing something fancy. I use a starter culture bred from . . . water and wheat, nothing else. I grind my own flour (hard white winter wheat in the Wondermill for the win), bolt it, and bake it into bread. We humans evolved around this stuff, wheat, and have been baking it for as long as we’ve had agriculture, at least, and eating it when it was available since we were squeaky things that ran around on four legs.
Mind you, I watched some of these same people greedily wolf down a mass-produced bag of “seven grain whole meal bread” which was half chemicals and contained both wheat flour and sawdust in the listed ingredients, so I’m not exactly feeling too guilty about bringing something that, just a few hours ago, was a bunch of seeds, some groundwater, and a bit of salt.
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Right? The anti-bread fad has gotten way out of hand. I mean for most people, aren’t wheat and other grains used to make bread good for a body, if not consumed in excess?
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The other day I read that whole-wheat bread is, technically, “ultraprocessed” but to go ahead & eat it anyway (which, I did)
(Or… what @Purplecat et al already wrote)
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The definition of “ultraprocessed” seems to vary by ingredient, making it all a bit wobbly. (And not all ultraprocessed foods are the same in terms of potential health impacts either, to make things more complicated.) There’s not a single process we can point to and say, “don’t do that.”
My response to this is to increasingly just make everything myself from scratch. I know what sort of processing the food is undergoing that way, and can minimalize it.
It’s a lot bigger than that - it’s about treating foods in ways that remove nutrients, fiber, etc. (i.e. the reasons why you’d eat the food in the first place) and increase fillers and sugar/salt/fat (though I think that’s more a side effect, to some degree, of the processing). Also, certain ingredients used in highly processed foods (various food stabilizers, preservatives) seem to have negative health impacts.
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That was never my understanding of organic. If I’m buying it, there’s a business involved.
It just meant no chemicals added etc. Not even more nutritious. And I appreciate not having the additional chemicals.
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There are these ads for “Balance of Nature” supplements where they brag about how they process vegetables down into their little caplets, like you’re getting a healthy full day’s veges in one tiny pill. I guess the FDA banned them for a time because of false advertising and/or unsupported claims.
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Balance of Nature is a scam with connections to Mormons and Scientology, believe it or not.
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Evolution is an ongoing process-the people who couldn’t digest wheat/gltuen tended to die young. Same with lactose tolerance, and resistance to the diseases of crowded populations. 10-12,000 years is enough time for natural selection to have an effect.
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Easy now. 66% of the world are lactose intolerant as adults. Us northern Europeans (and the Masai and a bit of northern India) are the mutants, and while eating ice cream without becoming a weapon of mass destruction is a pretty lame superpower, I guess I’ll take it.
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I was just referring to the propensity for lactose tolerance as an example of continuing evolutionary processes, not trying to say it was a dominant trend.
Agreed with everything above about how misleading and woo-filled a lot of supposed definitions of “ultraprocessed” can get. I happily admit the intended category is itself fuzzy and any attempt at a short, principle definition is going to make what most reasonable people would consider errors. Still, I recently read a list of minimally processed or unprocessed foods that included raw chicken. This was right after pointing out that processing to make things safe to eat is fine! Sorry, no, no matter what definition you’re using, raw chicken can’t be there because it is not yet processed enough to be a food.
Edit to add: anyone who has ever been asked to nail down a definition of a category word knows how frustrating it can get. Fun fact, a judge in Indiana recently settled a case by ruling that burritos and tacos are legally considered sandwiches.
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