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Comparing Europe and the US on food choices is probably not the best choice, nutritional choices vary quite a bit in Europe. I live in Spain, and I guess I’m spoiled as I get freshly made “menu” at most local restaurants for a about 15-20$ a day… two plates, drink and espresso for desert. You get to choose the meal, usually about 5 plates for first and second, usually divided into veggies / salads / carbs and followed by a protein second. The fact we walk to the restaurant 15+ mins , eat in about 30 mins, and having light breakfast and dinners helps balance our nutrition. We consumed little if any processed food, with the exception of the sausages, jamón, and salamis which we get at our local butcher, made the night before or the weekend. Since jamón is cured in salt, so no added sugar… again, we might consume this once a week, or less. Southern Europe is very similar in this regards. Our meats, we choose freshly butchered 24h, or some specific pieces might require some aging, but it’s all clearly agreed and ordered days in advanced. The drawback is, you need to plan your meals, food last little, so we usually buy what will be consumed that evening, or afternoon.
Not that this contradicts your very good point at all, but aren't jamons hung for a few months at least?
Lots of comments on how processed foods are bad here. They are bad but it is also the frequency of eating/snacking itself. It is not healthy to constantly stimulate your insulin multiple times a day with high protein/carb foods whether processed or retained in nature's package. That goes for whole foods and processed foods, except processed foods are just a lot worse. Constantly elevated insulin is not how we evolved for millions of years. Insulin resistance can precede T2D by years and years before there is a flag raised by elevated hba1c. You should be able to eat 2 or 1 nutritionally dense whole foods meal(s) per day not crave snacks constantly. Eat until you naturally feel full and do not want to eat anymore. I quit all processed foods and 1 or 2 meals in a 4-6 hour window is normal, I've never felt better. Snack cravings are addictive cravings, not real hunger. Snack cravings can also indicate you are overresponding with insulin and crashing your blood sugar after the spike from snacking. So processed foods are bad but it's how you deliver them to your body constantly is where the damage gets done IMO.
That’s conjecture. We don’t know how much foraging humans snacked from berries, tubers and nuts all day. Prolonged insulin spikes are certainly a problem, as has been shown by research.
Just visit a tribe still living the old ways. We know lots about how people live, and how (incredibly) malnourished they are. Say what you want, but most modern humans are incredibly healthy compared to old humans.
History is not a guide for healthy nutrition.
At least many of the berries and fruit we eat today are not their wild varieties but human cultivars, which usually have both more sugar and less fibre than their wild counterparts.
And didn't they die at 35 on average?
How long were these ancestors of ours living, while eating this idealized diet of which you speak?
While I agree that that evolutionary context is interesting to consider for nutrition, I don't think that it stands on its own as incontrovertible evidence. Evolutionary pressure is for passing on of genes, not necessarily for longevity.
How long were these ancestors of ours living
Threescore years and ten, modulo infant mortality (which was horrific) and various accidents and injuries, easily fatal if the sepsis set in. You can find scholarly treatment by searching for the biblical phrase. That number wasn't put there by accident.
Guess based on anecdotes (primitive tribes etc.) possibly well into their nineties, notably they were physically very strong well past their seventies. One really need not go that far. The 'idealized' diet often shows results in a matter of few weeks.
This is definitely arguable. Dawkins in "The selfish gene" does argue that having grandparents around greatly increases the probability that children live to reproduce, and therefore there is a genetic imperitive for longevity.
I can confirm that a policy of only eating full meals has kept me thin and healthy into middle age even when those meals frequently include a full package of Oreos or bag of Doritos. You might overeat, but that just means your body won't tell you it's hungry again until you actually are, because you only eat when you're hungry enough for a full whole foods meal.
From what I understand fats and proteins in your digestion cause a number of signaling hormones like leptin and probably others to make you feel full. Carbs do not stimulate any of that signaling afaik. A pure carb snack would stimulate zero leptin, for example.
Ignore the trolls that have shown up here on HN. This is a positive and helpful comment. Personal responsibility is the key to ignoring the stuff on the grocery store shelves. Cheers.
I don't really know what is and isn't healthy, but it's worth pointing out that the very same brands and types of fast food available to Americans are also available, and fashionable, in Europe. Ultra processed, high in sugar, carbs, E numbers and whatnot. And people are generally much healthier.
So the processed-ness can only be a part of the picture.
They also walk more due to not being tied to cars quite as badly as Americans are.
Protein high foods stimulate insulin...?
Absolutely. One of my favorite nutrition papers is titled something like "an insulin index of 1000 kJ portions of common foods" -- should be easy to Google, and worth a read.
My mom continues to buy heavily processed food. My dad periodically tries to nag her about eating healthier, but she takes that as a personal attack. She does eat veggies and fruit, but she also likes rice a roni (as do I- it tastes great, but I don’t buy it myself).
If you want to eat healthfully on the go, it generally means that you have to bring food along and ideally cook it, too. It is hard to do.
Is this actually true? Here in Europe where I live or travel you can buy dozens of great fresh salads at every supermarket, they cost reasonably and most folks dont need much bigger lunch.
The bigger issue I see is folks having weak will - why take that salad when next to it is well cooked sausage or pizza slice. When talking about it, few admit they lost the battle of will with themselves, most come up with some made up version of reality where its actually almost ok.
In America, salads are much more difficult to find — let alone good ones. They're also priced accordingly, thanks to the magic of supply and demand.
So, even after an epic lunchtime quest of hunting/gathering, you might end up out 20-30 bucks for a depressing pile of iceberg lettuce, croutons, and shredded cheese. (In America, this is often called a "Caesar salad." Yes, really.)
Even if you do happen to be in the rare neighborhood that has a good salad connection, you're still committing to spending your lunch break furiously chewing raw vegetables in whatever few minutes you have left after running to go get your meal. This is what I did every day for months when I worked in an office, but let's not pretend it's ideal.
The dream would be fresh, cooked vegetables, so that one could get the best bioavailability. [1] But that is largely a fever dream, even in major cities. For example, I can count on 1 hand the number of restaurants I know where I could order a simple plate of steamed/roasted broccoli for less than 20 dollars.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878450X1...
I am hungry fairly quickly after eating that salad and have trouble to focus then. I can go by them, if the team I work for does not care about my output. But if I actually need to produce, I need different lunch.
Healthy and "have as little calories as possible just above the eating disorder line" are two different things.
Aldi salads.. Cheap and good
Idk about Europe, but the US has a lot of so called "food deserts" where fresh food is miles away (like 20miles /32 km or more). These areas aren't just rural but often in poorer areas of Major cities and population centers. Plus, premade salad that isn't just lettuce can be relativily expensive.
I also live in Europe and also in my experience healthy salads are often an available choice. However, "salads" are often tricky, because the calorie count can go up very fast (eggs, cheese, side bread, crumbles, etc.), while thinking of eating "only a salad"
There's a lot of shaker-meals these days, like Huel, that you can easily bring anywhere and prepare on the spot. Including meal-bars.
You folks must be joking. Clever marketing doesn't make extremely processed food healthy.
They did a lot more than just that: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...
You provide an invaluable service to the public :)
Thanks
Just watch a kid watching YouTube Shorts and TikTok. They're immediately fed with Skittles, Oreo, Mentos, Lays, Coca-Cola, Pepsi marathon of product placement. It's good for your investment portfolios and retirement though.
And you'll need that portfolio yield to afford the insulin.
Caring parents would feed their kids healthy stuff almost exclusively.
And make 'm go out & buy the unhealthy stuff like candy, cookies, sugary soft drinks, chips etc themselves. Using their own pocket money.
Bottom line: both parents & their kids are lazy (or don't care) in various ways.
That is quite impressive because they also had a hand in the creation of 'public relations' i.e mass marketing. A very powerful combination!
Bernaise was credited with "public relations" i think he was just hired to market. Famously his "Torches of Freedom" - which got cigarettes in the hand of women.
Your plate should be full of food from the outside edges of the grocery store. If it’s primarily full of food from the isles then you are eating wrong. There are exceptions (rice, oats etc) that are in the isles.
The article is basis a precis of the book refereed to at the end of the article: "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us" by Michael Moss [1]. It's well worth reading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Sugar_Fat:_How_the_Food_G...
Flavour is a byword for 'driver for compulsive behaviour' here.
Pretty dark stuff.
Have not read the article, but I think "Big Tobacco" is something of a scapegoat for a larger pattern, and basically they were just unlucky enough to produce one of the most harmful products (recognized as such once the health bills started coming due).
(edit - I may add the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.)
read the article. literally the first few paragraphs:
> In the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables.
> The new research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. The Addiction study found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies.
it is difficult to argue that they were simply unfortunate to happen to produce one class of unhealthy products when the same companies proceeded to then move on to an entirely different product class, and somehow also engineer products to also be maximally addictive and, as it turns out, unhealthy.
> (edit - I may add the product probably wouldn't be so harmful if people kept their consumption to under five cigarettes a day.)
Even 1-4 cigarettes per day is very harmful:
> Results: Adjusted relative risk (95% confidence interval) in smokers of 1–4 cigarettes per day, with never smokers as reference, of dying from ischaemic heart disease was 2.74 (2.07 to 3.61) in men and 2.94 (1.75 to 4.95) in women. The corresponding figures for all cancer were 1.08 (0.78 to 1.49) and 1.14 (0.84 to 1.55), for lung cancer 2.79 (0.94 to 8.28) and 5.03 (1.81 to 13.98), and for any cause 1.57 (1.33 to 1.85) and 1.47 (1.19 to 1.82).
> Conclusions: In both sexes, smoking 1–4 cigarettes per day was associated with a significantly higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease and from all causes, and from lung cancer in women. Smoking control policymakers and health educators should emphasise more strongly that light smokers also endanger their health.
https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/14/5/315
Cigarettes also happen to create an addiction, which makes it harder over time to stay below 5 cigarettes per day.
Can you explain the larger pattern you are talking about?
Yes, if you are going to look upwards, why wouldn't you look right to the top at banks and finance? Those who run banking are able to exercise some coordinating control over every industry.
But if you look downwards, bad food and health are choices that people make. Many people want this stuff - individuals are getting what they want.
Yeah?
You can still drink diabetes in a can or choose your liter size from Coca Cola or Pepsi or Faygo within 15 feet of a building entrance in Texas.
No sin taxes either. But yeah, just tobacco companies and their…spin offs?
Many of todays unhealthy foods are actually the fault of generic laziness and over work under paid conditions in the US. But sure, tell me more about how the Washington Post did a great job publishing Bezos’s dick pics in the name of…well, clickbait gonna clickbait
Anecdata: Coke is not hyperpalatable, but Oreos are. IMO.