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Is the amount of easy access processed food harming dieters health?
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If easy access to highly processed foods like potato chips and Oeros isn't harmful, why aren't those foods given to the people going hungry?0
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If easy access to highly processed foods like potato chips and Oeros isn't harmful, why aren't those foods given to the people going hungry?
I would think the factors that the humanitarian efforts are using to determine what is provided would be:
Economics + Food Stability + Transportability + Nutritional Profile + Ease of Preparation/Consumption + Satiety
Just because potato chips and oreos are not harmful does not make them a recommended sole component to build an entire diet around - no matter how many times people want to bring up that strawman argument.
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If easy access to highly processed foods like potato chips and Oeros isn't harmful, why aren't those foods given to the people going hungry?
As pictured above, processed food is donated to the poor and hungry. In fact, most food drives ask for "non-perishable" items, which largely means processed.
As far as Oreos and chips, there is a difference between having "easy access" to them, and having them as the only food available. Oreos and chips aren't harmful to me, because I have a choice of what I eat and I choose to eat a wide variety of nutritious food in addition to Oreos and chips. If someone is starving, you want to give them as much nutrition as quickly as possible. It's not that Oreos and chips are "harmful", just not the best choice for people who have no access to any other food. And honestly, they will live longer if they get a box of Oreos and potato chips than if they get nothing and continue to starve.
And again terms are being used too generally. Processed food can include parboiled salted rice, canned beans, frozen veggies with sauce, whole grain bread in a bag, frozen grilled chicken strips, in addition to Oreos and chips. I think easy access to that list of foods would be a godsend to someone in need.0 -
If easy access to highly processed foods like potato chips and Oeros isn't harmful, why aren't those foods given to the people going hungry?
As pictured above, processed food is donated to the poor and hungry. In fact, most food drives ask for "non-perishable" items, which largely means processed.
As far as Oreos and chips, there is a difference between having "easy access" to them, and having them as the only food available. Oreos and chips aren't harmful to me, because I have a choice of what I eat and I choose to eat a wide variety of nutritious food in addition to Oreos and chips. If someone is starving, you want to give them as much nutrition as quickly as possible. It's not that Oreos and chips are "harmful", just not the best choice for people who have no access to any other food. And honestly, they will live longer if they get a box of Oreos and potato chips than if they get nothing and continue to starve.
And again terms are being used too generally. Processed food can include parboiled salted rice, canned beans, frozen veggies with sauce, whole grain bread in a bag, frozen grilled chicken strips, in addition to Oreos and chips. I think easy access to that list of foods would be a godsend to someone in need.
So much all of this.0 -
If easy access to highly processed foods like potato chips and Oeros isn't harmful, why aren't those foods given to the people going hungry?
There's a huge host of reasons why the food that is sent for humanitarian aid is one thing and the food people buy at a grocery store for a snack is another:
http://www.costco.com/329-Total-Servings-of-Parboiled-Long-Grain-White-Rice-Emergency-Food-Storage-with-Gamma-Lid.product.100085077.html
$0.19 cents per serving
http://www.costco.com/Cosmos-Creations-Savory-Puffed-Corn-Variety-Snack-Size-48-Count---1.25-oz-Bags.product.100234554.html
1.25 oz Bags $0.78 per bag
Now maybe you think sending food to people is a means of using them to prove or disprove dietary requirements, but personally I prefer my humanitarian aid to be based on cost effective nutrition.
Your question might as well be, "well if a Ferrari is such a nice, fast car, why isn't what they use for delivering food to the grocery store instead of freight trucks? Won't it get the food there the fastest?"1 -
If easy access to highly processed foods like potato chips and Oeros isn't harmful, why aren't those foods given to the people going hungry?
There's a huge host of reasons why the food that is sent for humanitarian aid is one thing and the food people buy at a grocery store for a snack is another:
http://www.costco.com/329-Total-Servings-of-Parboiled-Long-Grain-White-Rice-Emergency-Food-Storage-with-Gamma-Lid.product.100085077.html
$0.19 cents per serving
http://www.costco.com/Cosmos-Creations-Savory-Puffed-Corn-Variety-Snack-Size-48-Count---1.25-oz-Bags.product.100234554.html
1.25 oz Bags $0.78 per bag
Now maybe you think sending food to people is a means of using them to prove or disprove dietary requirements, but personally I prefer my humanitarian aid to be based on cost effective nutrition.
Your question might as well be, "well if a Ferrari is such a nice, fast car, why isn't what they use for delivering food to the grocery store instead of freight trucks? Won't it get the food there the fastest?"
I truly enjoyed that concise evisceration.0 -
Eviscerate all you need to. Sorry you don't agree that it's a fair question.0
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Eviscerate all you need to. Sorry you don't agree that it's a fair question.
Not concerned about the fairness, just the non sequitor. There are plenty of reasons they don't send snacks to disaster sites (besides bird sanctuaries), none of which have to do with the health effects. It even ignores how much disaster aid food is actually fairly processed to preserve it. Knowing that, the implication id's almost that putting a company logo on a package causes nutrition changes.0 -
This brings to mind the NASA diet offered the thirty three Chilean miners.
http://m.thestar.com/#/article/news/world/2010/10/14/how_the_chilean_miners_stayed_in_shape.html
It is designed for cancer patients and starving people.
http://www.fresenius-kabi.co.uk/4758.htm
Highly processed though. And starvation is hardly a first world problem.0 -
stevencloser wrote: »Christine_72 wrote: »Christine_72 wrote: »It must be different here in in the prison system in Australia. Not too sure abut the mens prison, but the women get fresh cooked meals every night, they can have fresh fruit everyday, cereal or toast for breakfast and a salad or cooked meal for lunch. A lot of them eat healthier in prison, than out.
Much of the European based prison systems (including Australia's) gets its treatment standards from traditions going back to how noble must be treated, even once convicted of a crime. As nobility was resolved, the trend became that prisons rise to that standard, even for commoners.
In the United States, instead of the minimum being raised by the existence of nobility, it was lowered by the long existence of slavery, setting the minimum of dignity ever lower.
Of course, your whole continent is a giant prison colony, so how do you know the prisoners?
Ahhhaaa We're all crims here
But I know this as a husband and wife friends of ours work in the women's prison. They often have their meals there too.
Many penitentiaries are over filled and one of the lowest costs they want to spend on is inmate food consumption. That's why it's about $4 a day for 3 meals for the average penitentiary. What kind of food are they going to get for $4 dollars a day?Christine_72 wrote: »It must be different here in in the prison system in Australia. Not too sure abut the mens prison, but the women get fresh cooked meals every night, they can have fresh fruit everyday, cereal or toast for breakfast and a salad or cooked meal for lunch. A lot of them eat healthier in prison, than out.
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I imagine our massive population difference would enter into the equation too.. You guys probably have more people in prison than we have people in the whole of Australia. Our population is 24 million
About 2.2 million are in prisons according to wikipedia.
Blood el! 33,000 here right now. I thought it would have been a lot more..0 -
Christine_72 wrote: »It must be different here in in the prison system in Australia. Not too sure abut the mens prison, but the women get fresh cooked meals every night, they can have fresh fruit everyday, cereal or toast for breakfast and a salad or cooked meal for lunch. A lot of them eat healthier in prison, than out.
Yeah complete opposite. You wouldn't believe the food in the prison I was working. I was at a high level security men's prison in VA. I'd never ever work in a women's facility. Ever. I've worked with female juvenile offenders. Women are nasty offenders, that is. Not women in general. 0 -
Christine_72 wrote: »It must be different here in in the prison system in Australia. Not too sure abut the mens prison, but the women get fresh cooked meals every night, they can have fresh fruit everyday, cereal or toast for breakfast and a salad or cooked meal for lunch. A lot of them eat healthier in prison, than out.
Yeah complete opposite. You wouldn't believe the food in the prison I was working. I was at a high level security men's prison in VA. I'd never ever work in a women's facility. Ever. I've worked with female juvenile offenders. Women are nasty offenders, that is. Not women in general.
Haha I don't think I could work with a bunch of loud mouth women. I'd end up in prison sitting right next to them lol Men are so much easier to deal with.0 -
Poem On Choices
It is known
Cheap and abundant food
Lowers starvation
And raises obesity
Which is worse?0 -
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs394/en/
The World Health Organization recommends limiting your intake of sugar (what they call free sugars) to no more than 10 percent of your calories, and that includes all sugars that are added to processed foods. They also recommend "avoiding processed foods containing trans fats." One of their objectives is to "reduce incentives for the food industry to continue or increase production of processed foods with saturated fats and free sugars", which pretty much includes almost everything that most doctors and nutritionists would consider to be processed food. Please keep in mind that most saturated fats in processed food are from hydrogenated oil aka trans fat.
In short, processed food is considered a global health hazard, right up there with smoking and drinking.
[edited by MFP Moderator]1 -
lisawinning4losing wrote: »http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs394/en/
The World Health Organization recommends limiting your intake of sugar (what they call free sugars) to no more than 10 percent of your calories, and that includes all sugars that are added to processed foods. They also recommend "avoiding processed foods containing trans fats." One of their objectives is to "reduce incentives for the food industry to continue or increase production of processed foods with saturated fats and free sugars", which pretty much includes almost everything that most doctors and nutritionists would consider to be processed food. Please keep in mind that most saturated fats in processed food are from hydrogenated oil aka trans fat.
In short, processed food is considered a global health hazard, right up there with smoking and drinking.
[edited by MFP Moderator]
Added sugar and processed foods aren't the same thing. For that matter "junk food" and processed foods are not the same. (Why is it impossible to address this point? Do people honestly not get that "processed food" is not simply another term for junk food?)
As discussed above (at length), not all processed foods have added sugar or transfats (most don't have transfats these days), and of course one can add sugar to homemade items.
So, again, it makes more sense to focus on the specifics of the nutritional content, and the overall nutritional content of one's diet, than whether a particular food item counts as "processed" (a term people don't seem to use consistently at all).0 -
lisawinning4losing wrote: »http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs394/en/
The World Health Organization recommends limiting your intake of sugar (what they call free sugars) to no more than 10 percent of your calories, and that includes all sugars that are added to processed foods. They also recommend "avoiding processed foods containing trans fats." One of their objectives is to "reduce incentives for the food industry to continue or increase production of processed foods with saturated fats and free sugars", which pretty much includes almost everything that most doctors and nutritionists would consider to be processed food. Please keep in mind that most saturated fats in processed food are from hydrogenated oil aka trans fat.
In short, processed food is considered a global health hazard, right up there with smoking and drinking.
[edited by MFP Moderator]
Processes food is considered a global health hazard? Hyperbole much?0 -
lisawinning4losing wrote: »http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs394/en/
The World Health Organization recommends limiting your intake of sugar (what they call free sugars) to no more than 10 percent of your calories, and that includes all sugars that are added to processed foods. They also recommend "avoiding processed foods containing trans fats." One of their objectives is to "reduce incentives for the food industry to continue or increase production of processed foods with saturated fats and free sugars", which pretty much includes almost everything that most doctors and nutritionists would consider to be processed food. Please keep in mind that most saturated fats in processed food are from hydrogenated oil aka trans fat.
In short, processed food is considered a global health hazard, right up there with smoking and drinking.
[edited by MFP Moderator]
So you don't consider parboiled salted rice, canned beans, frozen veggies with sauce, whole grain bread in a bag, and frozen grilled chicken strips processed? Because I could eat all those things in a day and end up eating no trans fat and my free sugars would for sure be lower than 10% of my calories. And there are plenty of brands of chips that don't contain trans fats (Fritos have no partially hydrogenated oil or added sugar, Lays Potato Chips have no partially hydrogenated oil or added sugar) so I could finish my day with a serving of chips and still be following the WHO's guidelines.
Junk food is not the problem. Eating too much junk food (and really eating too much of any kind of food) is the problem. To me, it's a duh no-brainer that if you eat a balanced diet with a variety foods, eating a bowl of ice cream or a serving of potato chips is NOT a health hazard.
I know a fair number of doctors, registered dietitians, and other sundry "educated" people who do not even remotely consider processed food a "global health hazard". I do know of a lot of bloggers who demonize processed food, so maybe now we need to argue the definition of the term "educated".1 -
lisawinning4losing wrote: »http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs394/en/
The World Health Organization recommends limiting your intake of sugar (what they call free sugars) to no more than 10 percent of your calories, and that includes all sugars that are added to processed foods. They also recommend "avoiding processed foods containing trans fats." One of their objectives is to "reduce incentives for the food industry to continue or increase production of processed foods with saturated fats and free sugars", which pretty much includes almost everything that most doctors and nutritionists would consider to be processed food. Please keep in mind that most saturated fats in processed food are from hydrogenated oil aka trans fat.
In short, processed food is considered a global health hazard, right up there with smoking and drinking.
[edited by MFP Moderator]
Your first paragraph starts out true. I'm not sure about most processed foods saturated fats being trans fats.
Your second paragraph launches into your own supposition about why the first paragraph is true. The WHO has rationals for why they make their recommendations, if you're going to accept their recommendations, don't use it to support your own rationals - you need to accept both. I would really like you to link to where the WHO actually uses anything like the verbiage "global health hazard" to describe processed foods. I'd really like to see that.0
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