zlacker

>>atestu+(OP)
Moderately amused at the quote "We are ending the war on protein." In my experience, every single brand in recent years has been coalescing around the idea of making protein bars, drinks, prominently labeling the amount of grams of protein are in items, etc.

I'm not opposed, as protein seems to be a good target to prioritize, but claiming there's a war on protein just seems so out of touch to the point of absurdity. It's practically the only thing that people care about right now.

>>Fumbli+45
Yeah, (1) there is no "war on protein," (2) you do not need to eat very much protein unless you are trying to build muscle and you already work out a lot.

The normal recommended daily intake for protein is 0.8 g/kg. 1.2-1.6 is silly; that's a recommendation for athletes.¹

Starches have been a dietary staple in pretty much every society forever. Sugars have not. It's silly that they treat grains as a "sometimes" food.

There's also the weird boogeyman of "processed food." Almost all food is processed to some degree & always has been. We've been cooking, baking, juicing, fermenting, chopping, grinding, mashing, etc. long enough that it influenced the shape of our teeth. Certainly we haven't been making Pizza Pockets that long, but the issue there isn't processing, it's ingredients. And the reason people buy Pizza Pockets isn't that they think they're healthy—it's that Pizza Pockets only need to be microwaved, and cooking a real meal takes time that a lot of people just don't have.

[1]: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/

>>bccdee+se
'Processed' generally means 'chemically modified', a la hydrogenated vegetable oil.

>>ahazre+Tj
Assuming that "chemical modification" is when you modify something by adding a chemical reagent to it, milk is chemically modified to create cheese curds, sugars are chemically modified to create vinegar and alcohol, and breads & cakes are chemically modified when they rise.

However, this definition of chemical modification doesn't really include hydrogenated vegetable oil. Industrial hydrogenation is done by raising oil to very high temperatures in the presence of a nickel catalyst & then adding hydrogen. We modify it on a chemical level, but primarily by heating it, not by adding reactive substances. And if that counts as chemical modification, then so does cooking!

Anyway, no—people generally used "processed" to describe a particular vibe they get from certain foodstuffs whose production seems too industrialized. There's no rigorous basis for determining what is and isn't "processed" because people use it to describe their feelings about food, not any underlying property of food.

If you search a simple question like "is bread processed," you get a bunch of articles saying "well, since there's no agreed-upon definition for processing and the definitions we do have aren't particularly clear, there's really no answer to the question. But don't worry, because (given the overwhelming vagueness of the category), it's also impossible to say whether processed foods as a category have any health implications, so you shouldn't worry about it."