Fascinating NYT Mag piece on junk food

Chemical preservatives? Aside from the possible health risks they in themselves provide, they are part and parcel of everything we're talking about on this thread. They help food processors sell large quantities of calories that hook people (as in addicted), as cheaply as possible. In the original link, the Oscar Meyer Lunchables anecdote gave a taste of why things with chemical preservatives are inevitably bad for you. When they tried to create a Lunchables with fresh carrots, they quickly gave up, because the fresh component (i.e. real food) didn't work within the constraints of the processed-food system they operate in. It takes weeks or months of transport and storage before that pseudo-food -- which is really bad for you -- arrives at the grocery store. And it is a product built on taste and shelf life. The chemical preservatives (along with other chemical additives) go hand in hand with them being bad for you.

 

Preservatives in and of themselves are not bad things. People have been pickling, freezing, fermenting, smoking, drying, etc. REAL FOODS for centuries.

But when you see a list of things on a food label that you can't pronounce or that are unfamiliar, it is a very reliable sign that the thing has been highly processed to the point that what is in the package isn't what it purports to be.

Chemical preservatives -- the kinds we see in the types of foods that article was talking about -- are a pretty reliable indicator you are getting things that are not good for you. Industrial processing has filled supermarkets with things that have been processed in ways specifically designed to push the evolutionary buttons that article was talking about (sweetness, fat, salt and engineered to get you to overconsume).

You don't find those things easily in nature, which was our protection from them. But because of the chemicals additives that have become ubiquitous, including those chemical preservatives that allow long supply chain times and shelf lives that go on forever, they are in cans and boxes up and down every aisle of the supermarket. The processing induces people to consume things that were ecologically rare before those chemicals made them cheap. And that is the stuff that is bad for you. The salty, fatty, sugary, processed edible (but not real food) stuff.

You are so much better off finding stuff that will eventually rot. It's your insurance that it is real food. And the most full-proof way to do that is to avoid things with long lists of ingredients, ingredients that are unpronounceable or unfamiliar, things that were made in a plant and things with ingredients that you wouldn't keep in your pantry.

 

Yes, I have a "religious ferver." I guess that style of being dismissive is a bit more mature than sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling.

You are so out of your element on this one. Corn has little nutritional value? It was the staple of the diet of a gazillion native north and south americans for centuries. How did they survive?

This is not about "addictive personalities." There is way more to what processed foods have done to create a more obese world.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-11-11/fatty-foods-addictive-as-cocaine-in-growing-body-of-science.html

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/craving-an-ice-cream-fix/