Coverage of the latest nutrition buzzword is overly broad, arbitrary, and wildly misleading. The problem goes deeper.Over the summer, a story circulated across news outlets claiming that eating plant-based burgers led to heart disease.“New research,” the Washington Post reported in June, “found eating plant-derived foods that are ultra-processed — such as meat substitutes, fruit juices, and pastries — increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.”“Vegan fake meats linked to heart disease, early death,” the New York Post declared.There was just one problem: The narrative was totally fake.The claim emerged from a study on plant-based “ultra-processed” foods by a team of nutrition researchers at the University of São Paulo and Imperial College London. Using data from a sample of 118,397 people in the UK who had reported what they ate over at least two days, the paper found that increased consumption of ultra-processed plant foods was associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease and premature death, while eating non-ultra-processed plants like fruits and vegetables was linked to better health outcomes.
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53 sats \ 1 reply \ @Skipper 20 Dec
The best foods are single-ingredients. That's what i aim with my diet.
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29 sats \ 0 replies \ @freetx 20 Dec
Yes, "caveman diet" is the best. If you could reasonably eaten it 50,000 years ago, its probably fine.
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44 sats \ 3 replies \ @oklar 20 Dec
No one is being lied to. Unless of course you consider the fact that everone is being lied to all the time, constantly.
Being subjected to consumer health advice is like sitting in the middle of a tennis court. You are served a lie from the media who have political leaning in one direction whose political donors represent every kind of industry that includes the largest conglomerates that trade. Then you are served another lie from their opponents through the debunking of studies, which is irrelevant in many ways, is taken out of context and become distorted through media op-eds, and again the debunking of the debunked studies bounces back.
Could we not all agree that the notion of attempting to forcibly throw bunk science down each other's throats is not very convincing nor helpful. Perhaps then we could get back to actually achnowledging the limitations of overly-specialized scientific analysis and instead either make our own minds up with our own objective realities, subjective needs and commonsense.
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30 sats \ 2 replies \ @nout 20 Dec
The article makes a good argument that New York Post and similar outlets lied about this specific study outcomes.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @oklar 22 Dec
Yeah I get that. I think there is merit there, but I think the effect such an article has is to promote the safety and nutritional value of brands that use meat-substitute, plant-based proteins, like beyond-meat (among many others.) It may well be that it is largely harmless. But I think the net effect of a 'double-debunking volley', is that consumers read it, and then ape into diets full of branded cardboard boxed foods, and it obscures the premise of whether or not such a diet is helpful. There's profit and market-share to win back, that's what I read.
I'm not sure that the study which it critisized was particulrly aimed at these products exclusively. More inclusively as ultra-processed foods take many shapes and forms.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 20 Dec
Consider the source: vox is one sided
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60 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 20 Dec
Nutrition science is notoriously low quality.
I largely believe the basic idea about whole foods being healthier than processed, but there's so much selection bias and other stuff that goes completely unaccounted for in these studies.
For instance, many people in poor health switch to a vegan diet after being diagnosed with serious heart conditions. One of the first things new vegans do is substitute a bunch of fake meat because it's familiar. When those people have heart attacks, it has nothing to do with the fake meat. However, I also have no illusions about those products being good for people.
All that said, I think it's fascinating how many of these articles defending the clearly unhealthy Standard American Diet have been coming out since RFK's involvement in the government became an inevitability.
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35 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 20 Dec
If anyone ever mentions anything about nutrition, I'm going to bring up Nina Teicholtz.
Her amazing book The Big Fat Surprise (This book is blowing my mind - The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholtz was what got me interested - first in eating lots more red meat, then going low-carb, and then carnivore.
Although she doesn't explicitly promote the carnivore diet, the evidence that she cites points in that direction.
Also she had an excellent article recently on her substack, about just how bad our nutritional guidelines are, and how the new 2025 version is even worse than the previous versions.
https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/in-the-us-dietary-guidelines-we-cannot
Here's a summary of the key points of the updated guidelines, all of which are terrible nutritionally:
- Reducing red and processed meats;
- Replacing poultry, meat, and eggs with peas, beans, and lentils as sources of protein;
- No limits on ultra-processed foods; and
- Continued caps on saturated fats, to be replaced by vegetable (seed) oils.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @zapsammy 20 Dec
What i see is a Hegelian dialectic applied to food.
problem (thesis) -> reaction (anti-thesis) -> solution (synthesis) that is even more demonic than the original problem.
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @DeltaClimbs 21 Dec
Go simp for fiat vegan seed oil bullshit elsewhere, faggot 🤡🤡🤡
On plus side, StackerNews seems to be breaking out beyond bitcoiners and attracting normies?
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5 sats \ 0 replies \ @kilianbuhn 20 Dec
main takeaway. Good take.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 21 Dec
The best solution is to grow your own food in your own garden and cook it yourself. If you have to buy meat and dairy, go directly to a farmer you trust. Make your own bread and ferment your own stuff. Then you know every ingredient and can even say their names.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @LowK3y19 20 Dec
I got to stop eating all those impossible burgers
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