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Processed Foods Article
whlinder
Member Posts: 4,986 
Still reading (it's long) but found interesting so far, and logical of course. "Eat Food" is typically how I try to approach eating.
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I remember being like 12 or 13 and a Bruegers Bagels shop opened up. My dad was eating like 9 of them a day because they were supposedly non fat and then being shocked he put on some pounds. Big food really fucked up peoples brains on fat being what to avoid and instead people loaded up on sugar.
At the end of the day though, ingredients are just ingredients with certain energy values.
If you eat too much "whole" food, you're still gonna be fat.
My man Dr. Peter Attia talks a lot of about this research- i.e., "processed" food tends to be more energy dense and it's a quicker way to shovel in the calories.
"Hall ended up refuting his own hypothesis. When participants were on the ultra-processed diet, they ate five hundred calories more per day and put on an average of two pounds. They ate meals faster; their bodies secreted more insulin; their blood contained more glucose. When participants were on the minimally processed diet, they lost about two pounds. Researchers observed a rise in levels of an appetite-suppressing hormone and a decline in one that makes us feel hungry.
It wasn’t clear why ultra-processed diets led people to eat more or what exactly these foods did to their bodies. Still, a few factors stood out. The first was energy density—calories per gram of food. Dehydration, which increases shelf life and lowers transport costs, makes many ultra-processed foods (chips, jerky, pork rinds) energy-dense. The second, hyper-palatability, was a focus of one of Hall’s collaborators, Tera Fazzino. Evolution trained us to like sweet, salty, and rich foods because, on the most basic level, they help us survive. Hyper-palatable foods—combinations of fat and sugar, or fat and salt, or salt and carbs—cater to these tastes but are rare in nature. A grape is high in sugar but low in fat, and I can stop eating after one. A slice of cheesecake is high in sugar and fat. I must eat it all."
Respectfully, this line of thought is completely misguided.
Yes, I know in chemistry a calorie is a unit of measure for energy.
But if this remained true, as it relates to the human consumption of food, how come one feels like a goddamn sloth after a double bacon cheeseburger, large fry and large strawberry shake? We both know you aren’t jumping on a row Peter puffer after consuming that and busting out thousands of meters. Just aren’t.
It’s a lot more difficult to over-eat whole food. You suggest a similar bloated outcome which is simply not the case. Whole foods — organic, non-gmo — aren’t inundated with artificial chemicals. Some of which are designed to be addictive appetite enhancers that keep one eating and eating. This alone explains the lower obesity rate on the right-side of the tracks in white Wakanda.
Back to the issue of energy in and of food. The chemistry definition is too myopic. I think of energy as defined in the book Power vs Force by David Hawkins. The energy available in any whole food often exceeds the ascribed, wrote caloric value. Any food chock full of chemical processing does the opposite in practice.
Sometimes, I don't know what we're arguing about, big dog.
I copypasta'd from the OP article noting the UK study - which I was previously aware of via Attia's pod - about it being far easier to overconsume energy via "processed" vs "whole" foods. My earlier comment about getting fat from whole foods is simply an observation that any food consumed in excess will still add body weight. It's just harder to eat 1000 cals of broccoli vs 1000 cals of Big Mac and side of fries to use an extreme example.
Humans are evolved over hundred of thousands of years to crave fat and sugar, because for most of our existence those fuels were hard to come by.
And, no, we didn't eat McDonald's before row peter puffer training. We also didn't eat "healthy" organic, grass fed ribeyes and 2 eggs over easy as a pre workout meal either (although that would have been good recovery food).