Arrrgh! Put down the crisps! 'Ultra-processed' foods linked to cancer! A study has suggested a link between diets high in ultra-processed foods and an increased risk of cancer – but academics have warned against over-interpreting the results. The work, published in the BMJ, assessed the diets – as reported through a survey – and cancer risk of a group of almost 105,000 French men and women. It …
If you want to change things then tax processed foods and give subsidies to farmers and others making and selling fresh local produce. It costs LUDICROUSLY more to buy, say, a few veggies than to pick up a huge bag of frozen veg and a whole chicken, or a ready-meal.
But the science behind this is bunk as everything's so broad, and we really shouldn't be reporting it. There are so many assumptions in that paper's opening data collection description that it's unbelievable. Hell, it's all based on a web-survey anyway and "photos of usual food containers" to judge weight/size of the meals!
The science isn't bunk, just a very VERY high-level observation. That should then be repeated focusing on more specific elements eg sugar only, salt, fats, additives etc. Generally speaking, it is extremely difficut to make any sort of diet-related study becaue to get truly scientifically meaningful results you would need to monitor and control exactly what everyone is eating, drinking and smoking, what exercise they do, how much sleep they get etc. Self-reporting can only work to a certain extent but can be flawed because the data itself isn't so reliable.
The ideal study candidates would be long-term prison population - feed one wing with Asda ready-meals and for the other get Jamie Oliver to do a variation on his school-meals program. I propose that this would not fall foul of 'no human experimentation' guidelines as any ready-meal is probably better than whatever slop is served in prison kitchens by the lowest bidder on a tight budget. And finance the whole program by making a nice TV documentary (prison riot optional)
*only partially tongue in cheek*
Have you noticed that Jamie Oliver is gradually turning into Ray Winstone? Seriously, next time he's on TV compare him to a twenty year old photo of Ray. Anyway, this leads to the obvious conclusion that the experiment should take place, not in an adult jail, but in the borstal from "Scum".
Lee D,
fresh veg is always going to cost more. You've got to package it, and it's got a very limited sell-by date - so you get spoilage in transport and then have to chuck some away.
Frozen veg is actually pretty healthy. Modern freezing techniques are pretty good at protecting the vitamins.
And actually ready meals are more expensive than cooking from fresh. An individual cottage pie or lasagne in the supermarket is £3-£4. I can make 4 of those from a £3-£4 pack of minced beef, plus under a quid's worth of onions/spice/pasta/potatoes/tinned tomatoes.
I've heard campaigners talking about "food deserts". Places where there are no general food shops where you can buy fresh, but only convenience stores selling ready-meals. Which then stuffs poor people with the inclination to cook, but not the budget to travel. But with online shopping so common, I can't imagine there's that many places like that in the UK? I believe that's more a US poor inner-city area thing, but could well be wrong.
What you save in money you lose in time, which to many is more precious than the money.
Charles 9,
I've not eaten many ready meals that were even vaguely nice. I've had some pretty decent supermarket pizza though.
But my 4 shepherds pie meal involves chopping some onions for 2 minutes, leaving them to saute in a pan while I watch telly. Then brown the mince, spice, stir, add gravy and generally muck about for ten minutes. Then simmer for half an hour while I do other things and the potatoes boil. So add peeling tatties for 4 minutes. Then mash, and shove in ovenproof dishes, and bung in the freezer when cold.
That's probably 20 minutes work for 4 meals. And I can be pottering in the kitchen - say cooking that day's dinner or washing-up, while all this is going on. And listening to comedy on the radio too. It's not a bad investment of time.
If you're really organised you can be cooking 2 or 3 different meals at once to fill your freezer up with. And your friends will appreciate something you cooked for them far more than any ready meal.
20 minutes is a lot to a person working a crapload just to pay the bills. To them, 5 minutes is a lot, let alone 20, especially when they're running red lights to get to the C-store for that last beer before lockdown because it's the only moment in your day you can buy it, and you need it to get those precious few hours of sleep before the cycle begins all over again. I'm reminded of that lyric, "Stolen moments of your life were all you had to give."
Well, it's got a ton of holes in it, for sure. As others have remarked, deli bakery bread is not ultra-processed (now with more electrolytes!) but packaged bread would be.
Take it with a grain of salt. But, if you'd looked at studies regarding trans fats, a lot of the conclusions may have looked shady 10-20 yrs ago. Still, now that Denmark has been off them for a while, the findings look more solid: http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(15)00328-1/abstract
Ditto nitrites/nitrates in food. 30 yrs ago, a coworker told me that his advisor, he trained as a food manufacturing engineer, told him anyone in the industry already knew they were carcinogens.
For me, this has nothing to do with organic/non-organic, GMO/non-GMO and other scares. Diet matters, a lot, and it is not all pseudo-science by the gullible brigade.
This is only a teaser telling us we should look deeper.
~10% extra cancer risk for ~10% extra processed food is high enough to care, it's not like processed food is really yummy to start with and can't be done without.
'Take it with a grain of salt. But, if you'd looked at studies regarding trans fats, a lot of the conclusions may have looked shady 10-20 yrs ago.'
There's trans fats and then there's trans fats...
As a student back in the early 80's (83-84) I shared a house with a couple of medical students, I used to get it in the neck all the time from them about the 'unhealthy' amount of butter I used, that was until the night they came back in from Uni and binned everything they could find with any mention of hydrogenated vegetable oils in the ingredients, seemingly these fine substances and their negative impact on people's health were the topic of discussion of one of that day's lectures.
So, the medical profession in the UK was aware of the suspect nature of these beasties at least 34 years ago, which leads nicely into
'Ditto nitrites/nitrates in food. 30 yrs ago, a coworker told me that his advisor, he trained as a food manufacturing engineer, told him anyone in the industry already knew they were carcinogens.'
I heard similar back then, and on a related issue, one food engineer I knew back in the 80's refused to eat or drink anything out of a can/tin, this was long before anyone muttered anything publicly about BPA (the 90's, ISTR), and you do have to wonder how long they'd sat on this information, and what else they're sitting on.
Still, all this is the least of my current worries, I've just found out that soil samples taken less than 400ft uphill from my gardens contain levels of Lead, Benzo(a)pyrene, Dibenz(a,h)anthracene and, that old perennial favourite, asbestos which exceed 'Residential End Use Guidelines', oh, what fscking fun...(especially the asbestos..going by their figures, the worst case scenario is that there's potentially 400 metric tonnes of the stuff distributed all over the 6000 m² site..and that's only the bit they've sampled).
These studies raise alarm bells with me.. both the pro and con sides. Who's paying for them? Andy why? Someone sitting around a college campus or research site just doesn't jump up and say "I think I'll research and do a paper on X!". So El Reg didn't do or was unable to do a "money" check on who is paying for what. To me, that's the sad part. Without those bits of data, this is just so much headline grabbing and some smoke and mirrors.
Basically the same the crisis over the MMR vaccine.
However it remains plausible that industrially produced food, much of which is synthetically created, is probably not so good for you in all cases.
We will find out in time, if more targeted studies are done, but I suspect any findings will be far more nuanced that a broad brush factory made stuff is bad for you story.
Marketing departments will seize on whatever fluff is out there to get you to buy their product. A great example is "uncured" bacon, which plays off people's blanket fear of chemical-sounding additives in their food. Supposedly health conscious consumers don't want sodium nitrite added to their bacon, so they'll gladly purchase the "no nitrite added*" kind and think they're avoiding a chemical scourge.
*Except for nitrites naturally occurring in celery powder/juice. And, since celery products naturally vary in nitrite concentration, the manufacturer ends up adding huge amounts of it in case it's an abnormally weak batch, so you're actually likely to consume more nitrite when eating "uncured" bacon than bacon cured with a known concentration of nitrites.
interesting. apparently nitrates/nitrites are healthy enough, but can change into nastier compounds when heated a lot. that's something we already know about meat in general.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/are-nitrates-and-nitrites-harmful#section5
(maybe you Brits were onto something when you boiled everything)
so you might be right. :-( - I was feeling better about celery-added bacon.
'..(maybe you Brits were onto something when you boiled everything)'
Funny you should say that, it was a topic of conversation at work a few weeks back about how the older generations basically boiled the meat for almost every meat dish (only exceptions were the Christmas Turkey and the occasional roast beef), I can remember we only had a 'fry up' once a week (typically Saturday morning).
A slight asides, Chicken was always boiled, both sides of my family prepared it this way, so you can maybe then image my moment of deep culinary culture shock when as an impressionable young Scot aged 8 I visited the 'States and tasted my first deep fried chicken..and lo! it was tasty...and yea, was I the weird little bugger who used to put bits of chicken (plain and bettered) into the chip pan (Deep fat fryer to all you posh people out there..read the section starting 'THE good folk of the West End of Greenock..') for years after that revelation?, too bloody right I was. Having pegged this as a USian invention, you can imagine my confusion when I discovered that the basic idea of deep frying a chicken seems to have originated in Scotland.
"We will find out in time, if more targeted studies are done, but I suspect any findings will be far more nuanced that a broad brush factory made stuff is bad for you story."
Which is exactly what makes this sort of research dangerous. A large segment of the population seem to get their entire "news feed" by reading Daily Mail-esqe headlines and maybe the first paragraph and rarely get far enough into the story to get past the "click bait". Not helped by self-reinforced outrage with like-minded people on social media "confirming the facts".
This is probably a prime example of the sort of research that should be leading to further research before publishing, not publishing the first vague results showing only correlation and no proof of cause.
So, please help me with the grammar here. The BMJ (and loads of others) say "a myriad of" whereas the book Sapiens (and also loads of other places), just say "myriad". As in "We face myriad choices".
So, journo types, what is it please?
Off topic , however....
What about a seven of nine?
Ah you mean the lady a fellow trek viewer friend refers to as " two of a pair"as he is breast obsessed, and actually watches more than the odd voyager episode. just for this.
I`m reminded of Benny Hill in the Italian Job.
I do agree that Jerry Ryan was splendidly embodied and the outfit showed this, but that`s just nice aesthetically, overall.
"A myriad of" is wrong, it's like saying "a seven of".
No, "a myriad of" is just fine. It uses the word myriad as a noun, meaning "an indefinitely great number".
When used as an adjective, myriad takes on the slightly different meaning "of an indefinitely great number".
Myriad was used as a noun at least 250 years before people started using it as an adjective.
Garner's Modern English Usage states that "myriad is more concise as an adjective...but the mere fact that the adjective is handier than the noun doesn't mean that the latter is substandard...the choice is a question of style, not correctness."
A fascinating reference book, if usage dictionaries are your thing.
I am reminded of a wonderful series on TV, 'Live and Loves of a She-Devil'...some amazing acting (despite Mr Waterman) and there was a scene which predicted this report.
A judge believed that peanut butter made people evil because everyone who was found guilty had eaten peanut butter in the period leading up to their trial. In almost every instance that was because they were on remand and it was served in the prison/remand centre they were held in.
It took me *actually* having to dig down to the "who we are" page before I was able to connect BMJ to British Medical Journal. Keep in mind, am left pondian, and from the *cough* upper 6/10's of the continent, so I am somewhat equipped to make these connections.
That the BMJ has a website that makes it that difficult to connect that particular pair of dots makes me wonder where it is headed.
Now, as for the OMG PROCESSED FUUDZ WILL KILLZ the issue is the hype around anything like this. Mostly I think it comes from some deep seated issue the diagnosticians *and* the publicists have with the current world *period*. I.E. Modern world sucks ass in all sorts of ways, (wars, politics, snowflakes, polarization of the proletariat, 99% vs 1% vs 0.0001%, MS, Oracle, Linux on the Desktop, HP laptops, Lenovo laptops, flavour of the tapwater, colour of the sewage riverwater, sushi rollls, etc etc etc) so if it is relatively modern it must be killing us, lets go back to teh huntard/gathertard cavedweller!
That and the simple fact that if you yell something loud enough, and then point out that the research needs *LOTS* of fine tuning *someone* somewhere will throw lots of money at you to make that tuning in their favour anyhow.
<hmm... I seem to be down a cup of (industrially processed) coffee this morning>
The study clearly shows the French process in an English oven works nearly perfectly every time whereas the English process in a French oven is nearly always a disaster. What it doesn't say is whether the result is due to a deficiency in the process, skill level of the baker, the suitability of the oven, or outright malice because the process was written in the wrong language.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
