In his [2023] interview with [Lex] Fridman, Mr. Kennedy said he ate his first meal around noon and tried not to eat after 6 or 7 p.m.... It is nearly impossible to avoid processed food, a category that is most broadly defined as any food altered from its original state, including chopped vegetables.
Including chewing!
Some of his podcast interviews suggest that he is using “processed” as shorthand for “ultra-processed,” a term that more narrowly refers to industrially made foods containing hard-to-pronounce additives and ingredients....
Oh, well, then... never mind.
He explained how he would approach nutrition if he were to run the government: “My inclination is to give people good information and at the same time maximize freedom,” he said. “I wouldn’t tell people what to eat and what not to eat.”
About an hour into the interview, Mr. Kennedy vented a little bit, with the palpable frustration of a septuagenarian who can no longer afford the reckless consumption of his youth. “I don’t like eating healthy food,” he said. “If you don’t have a live-in cook,” he added, trailing off for a moment. “Why does the stuff that tastes the best, why is it so bad? Why are Twinkies so bad for you? How did evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald’s French fries and Big Macs, when they are so bad for you?”...
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93 comments:
“Why does the stuff that tastes the best, why is it so bad? Why are Twinkies so bad for you? How did evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald’s French fries and Big Macs, when they are so bad for you?”
Who can answer that? anyone? Because I got nothing.
It's just mankind's urge to dominate and tame his environment. Maybe he should call it 'Palette Change' and declare it an existential crisis, that science will dedicate itself to solving.
my comments are vanishing again. It's a festivus miracle.
"Hard to pronounce" and "bad for you" mean pretty much the same thing, don't they?
.... and who says he's 'reformed'? You can still get them, and if you want to feel virtuous, visit the Hostess website and then hit 'Reject All' when it asks you about their cookies.
He uses "processed" when he means "ultra processed"? This is pretty nit-picky. I think this is an acceptable use if you are not needing to be research paper-specific. If I tell you I'm avoiding processed foods, you know I'm talking about the prepackaged convenience foods, not cut up vegetables.
Some of his podcast interviews suggest that he is using “processed” as shorthand for “ultra-processed,”
So does everybody else. Who uses "processed" to mean cut vegetables?
Sfogliatelle is bad for you? How about gnocchi?
Watching the corporat media try to define away eating normal food means this confirmation hearing is going to be lit.
Bobby should place plates of Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes all along the confirmation dais, just for fun, just to see who caves first.
I sure wish this guy would focus more on heart disease, the nation's leading killer of people.
Attacking obesity is probably the best way to do that and one of the most effective ways of tackling obesity is to tax it out of existence.
Tax PEOPLE who are obese more money. Then watch as they lose weight. Obesity is a CHOICE and we should not, as taxpayers, be forced to pay for the insane medical costs of people who CHOOSE to be fat.
If all you eat are Big Macs and french fries, it can be bad for you. Especially if you lead a sedentary life. My favorite adage is: Eat healthy, exercise, die anyway. I'm speaking of extremes on both sides of the argument.
Many years ago I discarded the very notion of "good/bad" or "healthy/unhealthy" foods. It's all just food. You'll die just as readily eating only carrots as Twinkies.
I subscribe to there being healthy/unhealthy diets.
I had a colleague who had a lot of serious food allergies. He was traveling once and was roaming a grocery store looking for something he could eat and apparently not coming up with much. He asked an employee, "Do you have anything in this store that's not processed?" The employee looked shocked and said, "Oh, no sir. All of our food is fully processed!"
He apparently just said that he wants the government to force soda makers to use cane sugar (which is 45% fructose) instead of corn syrup (which is 55% fructose). In other words, he wants to drive up the price to make a minimal change with no identified benefit just to satisfy a new-age vibe. If you liked losing your incandescent light bulbs, you're going to love RFKJr. And this is only the beginning of the quackery.
"Bobby should place plates of Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes all along the confirmation dais, just for fun, just to see who caves first."
IDK, those things are pretty disgusting. I have the urge to eat plenty of things I shouldn't, but Twinkies and Ho-Hos and not among them. Give me a slice of homemade pie, instead.
i've read about Some People, that ONLY eat Processed food!
They insist on
* grinding their food into a mushy paste..
* adding some sort of slimy chemical concoction they call "enzymes" that turn ALL the complex carbohydrates into SUGAR..
* THEN they soak their Entire meal in HYDROCHLORIC ACID because They SAY that it "releases the proteins or some such..
* When they are done processing their food.. IT LOOKS LIKE CRAP!!!
AND! sometimes, before all that processing, they will attempt to incinerate their food in fire!
I'm NOT making this up! there are People that REALLY do these crazy things!
Althouse writes, "Including chewing!"
Also including milling grains into flour, plucking a slaughtered chicken, and digging up a turnip. Those brilliant Columbia grads in the NYT newsroom who think themselves so sophisticated and subtle are so ill-educated they never learned to avoid the continuum fallacy. Everyone but a moron knows what a processed food is. There's no need for clarification. Ultra. Here's what fucking ultra: Gen Zs are the least healthy Americans. They're ultra-obese, ultra-confused, and ultra-stupid. Eating better food and getting outdoors (without the goddamned device!!) will go far to reducing your disgusting jiggly-wiggly ass and sorting your disordered perception. Unfortunately, ultra-stupid is probably an unfixable condition.
"Hard to pronounce" and "bad for you" mean pretty much the same thing, don't they?
Like Kamala
I stick to organic twinkies.
Here is a microcosm of the inherent contradictions of Trumpism and his cabinet. RFK Jr wants to heavily regulate medicine, vaccines and food, apparently by gutting the staff of the department? While Vivek Ramaswamy wants the guard rails relaxed from the drug approval process so Big Pharma can thrive.
They see the FDA and Pharmaceutical sector as Schrödinger's sector, both too tightly regulated and stifling big pharma but also too lax, allowing poisonous chemicals to enter into vaccines and food to boost the profits of big business.
This is the problem with Trumps cult-like ability to be vague in what he actually believes, while then drawing so many people in with promises of several conflicting simultaneous utopias.
There will be so many clashing egos and some of the faithful will be let down.
The move that will get the most support might start with airplane seats, and forcing the purchase of an adjacent seat.
I recommend oatmeal with dark brown sugar and heavy whipping cream. Easy and quick to fix in the microwave. Stores well. And ... it's oatmeal ... how bad can that be?
And it supports American Farmers.
Tom T. writes, "He apparently just said that he wants the government to..."
Apparently? Either quote the man directly or STFU. Otherwise it's quackery.
If I wash a carrot after I pull it out of the ground, isn't that processing it?
Coming off 4 years of open borders, lies about open borders, de-fund the police, billions in property damage after the George Floyd-Media driven riots, lies lies and more lies, crime off the charts, and creepy Nazi-like Biden Speeches - your complaints are meaningless.
Just pulling it out of the ground...
Good luck winning Iowa when you decimate corn farmers. There are OTHER WAYS to achieve these goals without putting REPUBLICAN VOTERS out of their homes and small businesses.
"Here is a microcosm of the inherent contradictions of Trumpism and his cabinet. RFK Jr wants to heavily regulate medicine, vaccines and food, apparently by gutting the staff of the department?"
I think that's a misrepresentation of his position. He has made it pretty clear that he wants to give consumers the information, but still let THEM decide whether to eat the food or take the medication.
Carrot interruptus.
I can't eat oatmeal (unfortunately). Too large of a carb load.
While ironically not the most controversial of Trump’s picks, it’s very likely that enough Senate Republicans will vote against him to be cleared. The electoral equations in pharmaceutical hubs like NC and Indiana, and possibilities in NJ makes it way too risky for them to let RFK Jr amok.
In practice very little will change he’s not qualified to make calls that can affect human lives and Trump's advisors know better.
McDonald's gets a bad rap because of Morgan Spurlock. Dude was a raging alcoholic while filming that movie, and his health problems came largely from potatoes in the form of vodka, not French fries. A McDonald's cheeseburger is actually pretty nutritionally balanced, and eating one with a small fry and iced tea isn't going to be the end of you.
RFK is running into the same problem Orwell encountered when writing The Road to Wigan Pier almost a century ago: the poor will generally prefer to spend their money on tasty food, rather than what the upper classes consider "healthy."
Everything in moderation
I was one of those chidren who were never hungry. My parents forced me to eat, and I grew up quite underweight. At puberty, something changed, and I ate my way into physical normalcy. I believe that my desires to consume particular foods are the unconscious product of instincts I barely understand. I've never been "on a diet".
For the past few days, I've been eating foods with lots of eggs, fresh vegetables and newly baked bread. Next week, it will be something different. Food is pleasure, and it's less pleasure if we obsess about it.
It's trivially easy when you have no job, enormous income somehow without a job, all day to do it, and a live-in cook - as RFK does ... to "eat healthy."
Human GI's are made to digest red meat.
All other foods are less healthy for humans. There is no need for arbitrary cutoffs.
Rich shows everyone he just can't listen to what people say or deal with anything in good faith.
His mental limitations are apparent every time he posts like this.
...processed food, a category that is most broadly defined as any food altered from its original state, including chopped vegetables.
Aggie said...
"Bobby should place plates of Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes all along the confirmation dais, just for fun, just to see who caves first."
Insect Politics
As Narciso said. Everything in moderation. Eating healthy doesn't mean that you can never have something "bad" once in a while. The occasional McDonald's hamburger is not going to kill you. A steady diet of such...probably will.
I cook almost everything from scratch, because I like to cook and want to know exactly what ingredients are going into our food. I try to make balanced meals that are low in carbs and sugar, because husband is type 2 diabetic. That doesn't prevent us from enjoying a dish of ice cream (no sugar added for his)or opening a can of Progresso soup once in a while.
While cooking from scratch is my thing. It can be expensive, especially with the recent inflation in food costs, and many people just don't have the resources, kitchen or tools and have to resort to "fast" food.
Kennedy's idea of reducing the harmful ultra processed ingredients is a good start. Better labeling. More education....what ever happened to Home Economics in schools???
The best weight control program is to be young and energetic. My Fitbit tells me that I burn 2700 calories a day. I can eat 2700 calories for breakfast and do so again in a few hours. It's my body that has trouble processing food, not the processed food.......I was pretty far into my forties before I had to worry about weight. Now every year I have to eat a little less just to stay overweight. There's no getting around it: food is fattening as is middle age and especially old age. On the plus side, as the years go by, you don't diet to look good but to stay healthy. Mortality is a more powerful motivator than vanity.
This man took a dead bear from the side of the road, put it in the back of his car and drove it to Central Park, where he staged a scene to make it look like the bear got hit by the bike. This wasn’t some drunken teenage prank, RFK Jr was 60 years old and stone-cold sober at the time. Now, if that’s not a man you want looking after the health of Americans, I don’t know who is.
I hope Trump is saving something special for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Another supreme talent.
Protein for energy. Animal fat, too, and B12 to remain viable. Plant Lives Matter for vitamins, minerals, and to improve composting. We are not ruminants. Carbohydrates should be few and far between to mitigate inflammatory conditions including damaged linings where accumulation (e.g. cholesterol) can occur on rough edges. Exercise to assist gravity and keep joints limber. Everything in moderation because anything in quantity is either toxic or excess load.
For my sins, I worked for a large food company helping to create nutritional labeling and ingredient declarations in accordance with FDA regulations. But few people know how to read them and what to look out for.
Mexico Coca Cola. *happy sigh*
Rich's primary problem is that he is only here to lie, but he is clearly used to peddling his mendaciousness wares amongst morons, like himself.
Thus, every posting he makes basically lights up with the force of a super-nova of stupidity. But what else can he do? He lacks the skills to move beyond the limits of that paradigm.
LLR-democratical Rich is incapable of properly representing anyone's position. That's his role here, as it was with LLR-demcratical C**** and with LLR-democratical lonejustice.
gilbar said…
“I’ve read about Some People, that ONLY eat Processed food! They insist on … grinding their food into a mushy paste…”
We clearly need more regulation of the mastication of our food!
Is this when Genetically Modified Organisms gets redefined any living thing in which the DNA isn't exactly like what created it?
I get the sense that if Trump supported a Carbon Tax on anything that emitted CO2, that the NYT would finally admit that includes every animal on Earth.
McDonald's fries aren't as good as they used to be.
If you don't like Twinkies and Ho-Hos and do like (or at least tolerate) first-rate Bluegrass music, you need to see and hear the Cluster Pluckers singing their song 'Ding Dong' at Austin City Limits: YouTube link. A sing-along parody of 'The Wreck of the Old 97'.
A lot of Clark W. Griswolds will be looking for work.
The best-tasting carrots are processed with love.
Carbon is in everything
My brother-in-law (a lifelong farmer, and believe me, no liberal) woke up from surgery with his mouth swelling and throat closing. They administered the meds to stop anaphylactic shock in time, but the cause remained a mystery until they discovered he was allergic to the soy in the tubing or whatever they use to get it down your throat for general anesthesia. He'd been getting a lot of sinus problems up to that point and not feeling well, but it turned out he had an allergy to soy that had become life-threatening.
This meant removing anything soy from his diet. Start reading labels, and you'll see how nearly impossible that is. Soybean oil, soy, lecithin, guar gum, monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, vegetable oil blends, tamari, miso, vitamin E, and some natural flavorings are a few of the names it hides behind. Soy is in damn near everything we eat, including stuff you wouldn't imagine! He picked up a Dum-Dum sucker while at the bank, and by the time he was driving down the road, his mouth started to tingle and swell. You guessed it. There's soy in Dum-Dums of all places. He has to keep an Epi-pen with him at all times now.
Even without an allergy, too much soy can mess with hormone levels. And yet, you can barely avoid it. My own family has been trying to cut out some of the high fructose corn syrup and seed oils from our diets to lose a few pounds. That's damned near impossible too. And boy, do you pay more if you want to try to avoid those ingredients!
I'm no fan of RFK Jr. by any means. I think he's a kook on several subjects and definitely has a record of being a morally questionable shitbag - especially to his wives. But if he could do nothing more than help the American public understand what the labels on our food actually mean and raise awareness of what is in the things we eat, it wouldn't be a bad thing. People can decide for themselves what they want to put in their bodies, but at least our choices should be informed. If the Trump administration could do that, we'd be a lot better off healthwise.
hear hear! and *This* alert.
MSG is satanic. It doesn't seem as ubiquitous as it once was but I still check food package labels, and specify 'no msg' at Chinese restaurants.
Soy, per se, doesn't affect me any different than most other people.
Bobby should place plates of Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes all along the confirmation dais, just for fun, just to see who caves first.
What you want to see Jerry Nadler do his Wiley Coyote imitation?
By all means, enable another taxation angle. a.
So making it with cane sugar the way it was made from 1886 until 1985 is a "new age vibe" thing? Fancy that!
3 oz. Ground beef
1 Tbs reduced tomato puree & vinegar + dash salt
1 pinch rehydrated minced onion
1 fresh white bread toasted bun
1 sm. dollop yellow mustard
3 oz. Deep fried Idaho russet potatoes ( fried in lard from beef fat )
Mostly it’s good healthy food. What’s not to love?
What’s not to love?
What civilization sustained itdelf on soy
If you have enough wealth you can hire a professional chef to plan and cook healthy foods for you. That’s what Rush did once he made it big. I’d do the same if I could.
Organic.
You hire a chef to prepare a Diverse diet.
A toxic emasculated population that will take a knee to the elite. The ancient Greeks emulated the evolution through sodomizing boys and girls in whst is today labeled grooming or transgender conversion therapy.
https://www.necn.com/news/national-international/carrot-e-coli-recall-grimmway-farms/3391745/?f
Extrapolating from my own circumstance, if someone is reading it, they are looking for something particular.
I won't vouch for the accuracy (found on internet), but this purports to be the ingredients to the dreaded and super ultra processed (by the the all-mighty universe)...
Banana
INGREDIENTS: WATER (75%), SUGARS (12%) (GLUCOSE (48%),
FRUCTOSE (40%), SUCROSE (2%), MALTOSE STARCH
(5%), FIBRE E460 (3%), AMINO ACIDS (GLUTAMIC ACID
(19%), ASPARTIC ACID (16%), HISTIDINE (11%), LEUCINE (7%),
LYSINE (5%), PHENYLALANINE (4%), ARGININE (4%), VALINE
(4%), ALANINE (4%), SERINE (4%), GLYCINE (3%), THREONINE
(3%), ISOLEUCINE (3%), PROLINE (3%), TRYPTOPHAN (1%),
CYSTINE (1%), TYROSINE (1%), METHIONINE (1%)), FATTY
ACIDS (1%) (PALMITIC ACID (30%), OMEGA$ FATTY ACID:
LINOLEIC ACID (14%), OMEGA-3 FATTY ACID: LINOLENIC ACID
(8%), OLEIC ACID (7%), PALMITOLEIC ACID (3%), STEARIC ACID
(2%), LAURIC ACID (1%), MYRISTIC ACID (1%), CAPRIC ACID
ASH PHYTOSTEROLS, E515, OXALIC ACID, E300,
E306 (TOCOPHEROL), PHYLLOQUINONE, THIAMIN, COLOURS
(YELLOWORANGE EIOI (RIBOFLAVIN), YELLOW-BROWN E160a),
FLAVOURS (3-METHYLBUT-I-YL ETHANOATE, 2-METHYLBUTYL
ETHANOATE, 2-METHYLPROPAN-I-OL, 3-METHYLBUTYL-IOL, 2-
HYDROXY-3-METHYLETHYL BUTANOATE, 3-METHYLBUTANAL,
ETHYL HEXANOATE, ETHYL BUTANOATE, PENTYL ACETATE),
151 0, NATURAL RIPENING AGENT (ETHENE GAS).
Extremely not picky. The liar media Left is out of ideas, out of substantive criticism. Remember when we asked "After you go full Nazi what else can you say?"
There's our answer: "He leaves out an adjective in an adverbial phrase." Totalitarianism reduced to pedantry.
Twinkies no longer taste the same ever since Hostess was purchased by Bimba. They're not the soft vanilla-tinged sponge cake they used to be.
Good intentions vs reality, I still try to eat healthy. I think most of the people who die prematurely are those that don't even try
I think the "processed food" concern is overplayed, but whatever.
Also, if nobody minds, when the fluoride wars start I'm just gonna sit over here in the corner and watch.
I too suddenly developed a deadly soy allergy at 40. Testing expanded the danger to peanuts and incidentally I found I was allergic to most grasses and trees. A series of shots took care of my environmental allergies but I became a very careful label reader until I could desensitize myself to peanuts and eat them safely. Now I can enjoy soy sauce with my sushi but I do avoid most other forms of soy. Repeated Anafalactic shock episodes briefly left me with temporary PTSD. Some really excellent Allergists had no explanation for why so many foods I'd eaten all my life were suddenly life threatening.
"How did evolution equip us to crave Twinkies and McDonald’s French fries and Big Macs, when they are so bad for you?"
Is this a trick question?
1. Our body needs and craves energy. High carbohydrate foods provide it in an easily convertible form, sugars in particular. Our sense of taste evolved to favor those foods.
2. Our bodies have evolved to add fat tissue when we have excess caloric energy available. The reasons are obvious.
3. Over a long life this excess tissue will generally shorten a life span.
4. Speaking on behalf of the human race, if I may, after you have passed through your reproductive years your value to the rest of us diminishes tremendously. So, that big belly or big bottom you grew over the years (after you missed out on the famine) that kills you early is just nature's way of saying, "Well, Bye."
Larry Groce - Junk Food Junkie
Mike (MJB Wolf):
I was also surprised to develop allergies late in life, though I was more thirtyish. It's just hay fever / seasonal allergy, but for several years I thought was really unlucky, getting a terrible cold the same time every spring. It didn't occur to me that it would be allergies, since no one in my family had ever had any, and I knew they tend to run in families. I only realized the truth when my older brother complained of his hay fever, and it all made sense, as I realized that it must in fact run in mine. A recessive gene, I assume.
That's easy for you to say.
They seem to be panicking rather much over RFKJr. I wonder why?
I had allergies to the usual suspects (cats, pollens) since I was a kid, and did most of my breathing through my mouth most of the time--my nose was too runny to be a reliable intake--but didn't figure out MSG until I was in my 20s.
(I took weekly allergy shots from about age 12 to my almost 30.)
Once I understood my "Chinese restaurant syndrome" (thanks to a coworker of my wife's with whom we were visiting) a lot of stuff made sense--like the awful headaches I used to get every Sunday afternoon, when we got burgers from a proto-Wendy's (Molly's?) after church . . .
I taught a second grade class how to sort processed and non-processed food. He put the carrot sticks in the processed pile. When questioned he just said, “They’re cut.” I thought he understood the concept well.
"While Vivek Ramaswamy wants the guard rails relaxed from the drug approval process so Big Pharma can thrive."
Nah. The current drug approval process is GOOD for Big Pharma. The effect of heavy regulation is a very expensive process creating a YUUGE barrier to entry for smaller, nimbler competitors. It creates an oligopoly, which is willing to pay the ridiculously excessive cost of ridiculously excessive drug approval processes, because (a) the drug company gets a monopoly and the ability to charge eye watering prices for irs eventually approved drug and (b) new ideas from new competitors are frozen out by the regulatory cost.
To bring down prices you need competition. Competition is frozen if any new drug requires a huge regulatory investment. In the unlikely event that Vivek gets anywhere near hacking down large chunks of the regulatory structure you may be sure that the TV will be awash with ads warning us of the terrifying safety issues - ads funded by Big Pharma.
Latino grocery stores and some local supermarket chains in Latino areas carry Mexican Coca Cola or Pepsi made with cane sugar. Also marketed as kosher for Passover.
Alicia Silverstone hardest hit!
Your body primarily releases 2 neurotransmitters that we know of in response to eating food: dopamine and serotonin.
Dopamine is generally released by reactions in your mouth. Dopamine is the signal for desire and motivation. It is the primary driver of addiction. You can train yourself to like and desire anything that does not cause a repulsive reaction. If something makes you gag you will never really like it.
Things like Coffee you can train yourself to like and eventually desire. You can pretty much do this with any food. This is almost completely driven by culture and personal feelings. These things are entirely under your control.
Serotonin is mostly released by reactions in your gut. These reactions are generally driven by the presence of amino acids. Serotonin generally gives you feelings of contentment and allows you to "settle down." amino acids = protein.
These things are widely known at this point but any attempt to push a high protein no/low carb diet has in the past earned you the position of heretic and the health industry still pushes this crap.
There's a reason why a Cuisinart is called a food processor.
I pay extra for Mexican coke!
(that's a joke, DEA, stay out of my paypal)
"We have a secret formula that we keep in a safe and we fuck with it all the time."
The answer to your question April is quite simple. The things that we crave were scarce in our evolutionary past and are now abundant in our obese present. If you were actually curious you could read the book The hungry brain that explains the primitive biochemistry going haywire in our modern times. But you won't because math is hard, Barbie.
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