34 Ramadan and Ultra Processed Foods
We talk about why Ramadan travels the calendar and what it is. As well as ultra processed foods and where the science is pointing with it.
Topic
Ramadan
Ultra Processed Foods
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34 Ramadan and Ultra Processed Foods
We talk about why Ramadan travels the calendar and what it is. As well as ultra processed foods and where the science is pointing with it.
Topic
Ramadan
Ultra Processed Foods
Feedback
This episode is brought to you by:
And by our other patrons and those who want no reward.
Contact information, show notes, and links to Social Media and the like can be found at https://htotw.com
The music in this episode is:
Welcome to the Show by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4614-welcome-to-the-show
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
NewsSting by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4124-newssting
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ditty Pong by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4676-ditty-pong
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Disco Sting by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3653-disco-sting
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Sweeter Vermouth by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4450-sweeter-vermouth
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Full shownotes can always be found at https://htotw.com/34
Download episode
- "Humanists Take on the World" episode 34. Ramadan and ultra-processed food.(upbeat music) Welcome to this episode of "Humanists Take on the World." I am Dustin and joining me is Lauren.- Hello.- And with those two topics. Yes, it's two topics. I know the first one's gonna be short. I don't know how long the second one's gonna be yet. But I had thought it'd be funnier to do ultra-processed Ramadan. But search engine optimization is a thing and catchy titles are not well optimized for anything.- I don't think you need to explain. It's okay. It does make it easier to understand what the topics will be about. I do think it is funny that two things about food are to be discussed though.- Yes, so yes, I promised there's gonna be another, was going to be another episode last month. It didn't happen. It was going to be an interview that needed to be rescheduled because I happened to hurt my back. Literally the day that interview was supposed to happen and I did not want to be sitting at my desk. It would have hurt and not been pleasant at all.- Yeah.- So, and that hasn't happened in a long time. So that was quite annoying.- Yeah, it started to bounce back when you were over 30, 35.- Nearly 40.- 40?- Yeah. All right, so Ramadan is, I finally, two day, because we're recording this on Sunday, the 10th. Probably the day before Ramadan. The first I was really aware of Ramadan happening was when a very awkward in-law, at one point, showed up to Thanksgiving dinner, three hours late because he was Muslim and needed to wait until the sun was down. So, he came and met the family during Ramadan, Thanksgiving dinner. And then a couple years ago, I was hearing about Ramadan in the summer and it was like, no, it's around Thanksgiving. Weird. And now it's in March, so I wanted to get to the bottom of it. But before we get to that, we need to talk about what Ramadan even is. It is the Muslim holy month. On the Islamic calendar, it is the ninth month of the year. And it is believed by Muslims to be the month in which the scriptures were written.- Okay.- So, that is the month in which-- What's the significance?- Which Muhammad was, the first parts of the Quran were revealed to Muhammad. It's the month when Abraham did his thing and Moses did his thing, Jesus did his thing, and they believe that that's the month.- Not all the same time though.- No, different years. It's just different days within the month.- Coincidentally, very special month.- Okay.- So, they honor the entire month through fasting, prayer, reflection, and community. It is one of the five pillars of Islam and a month of fasting, of course, would be insane.- Right, no, we can survive that.- There are people who claim they can, whatever.- Super extreme cases, yes, people can.- Not a whole entire population.- No, no. So, they have exceptions on it for those who are acutely or chronically ill, traveling, elderly, breastfeeding, diabetic, pregnant, or menstruating. Also children.- Okay.- So, adult Muslims only, unless any of those other things.- Okay, healthy adult.- Yes, able bodied, yeah.- Got it, okay.- All men, most women who were able bodied, yeah. That fast lasts 29 to 30 days because it starts on the sighting of the crescent moon until the sighting of the next crescent moon.- Okay. So, from my understanding about how the lunar moon, which part of the crescent? Like, how severe of a crescent? Like, if you go from...- New moon.- New moon.- So, the sliver, the very first sliver of a, okay.'Cause I was gonna say, like, you look at a picture of a crescent, that's, I don't know, how many days into the, you know, the month that would be is all the way up to what a half moon, like, how do you measure that? Okay, so basically the day after the new moon.- Most Muslims follow the calculated date.- Okay. Not a, you can't always stick your head out the window and see the moon, so.- Some very conservative Muslims start Ramadan when they can see it with their own eyes.- Okay.- The fast is a sunrise, the sunset fast. So, there is a before dawn breakfast and a after sunset feast.- Pretty handy to have it in the spring and the fall in the winter, then, huh?- Oh yeah, yeah, that's the best. And it is, beyond abstaining from food and drink, they're also expected to abstain from tobacco, sex, and any sinful behavior.- Okay.- So a bunch of--- You'll gambling for you.- And when you consider the smoking rate in the Middle East, that's gonna be a whole bunch of really, really cranky people.- Just as you're supposed to be getting dinner on the table.- The time of year can make it a lot easier when you have short days. If it's in, you know, coinciding around the winter soltsus, it's pretty short, especially if you're up in northern parts of the country. If you are in an area with midnight sun, then depending on which there are not very many Muslims in places with midnight sun, but--- Those rules have to exist.- Greater than zero number, presumably. The general practice is to follow whatever's the closest big city. That does have a discernible day and night, or some more official guidance is follow the mechus schedule.- Okay. That seems like a pretty safe standard. If for some reason you just can't follow the literal.- But if Ramadan's on the summer soltsus, and you're, say, way up in Sweden or Alaska, you have a really, really late dinner, get a little bit of sleep, and then have a really early breakfast, or just do one meal a day while you go through that.- Yeah, it is a fast after all.- Yep.- So yeah, I can see why people might be a bit cranky, but I bet they feel pretty refreshed by the end of it. I've heard good things about, you know, some, you know, fasting, and it's like, I do, I've heard lots of, people totten a couple of weeks of it or something, you just cut down to one meal a day, or something. You feel, you know, then you go right back to it, and you get your energy back up, and your brain fog goes away, and you get back to real life.- And a month of intermittent fasting where you skip lunch.- Honestly, a lot of people could probably pull that off anyway.- Yeah, lots of people do that anyway.- Especially if the American grind, I can't afford to have a lunch break.- So the name of Ramadan, which is really fun to say.- Comes from the Arabic root, R-M-D, because in Semitic languages, the consonants are the only thing that traditionally has been written down. Vals are implied or assumed or come from context.- Don't even get Justin started on that. He will go into Greek Latin history stuff. And it was like, maybe some other podcast.- The word means scorching heat.- Oh.- It started out being in the summer.- The most punishing form of fast.- It started out as a pagan.- Ah, Arab pagan.- I mean, not for sure.- That's a month of fasting, very similar fasting rules that was coincided with markets. Traveling festivals and markets, but just don't eat during the day. Which if it's the hottest time of the year, don't cook when it's hot. That makes sense.- Yeah.- Grill up some meat once the sun goes down. Like, that doesn't sound like a stupid thing.- Well, I mean, we put in that kind of context. Just like, yeah, I guess that makes sense. We do everything we can to avoid turning the oven on in the summer. Like, that's not happening. Because it needs a barbecue's popular.- Now, that is the typical Muslim belief on the origin of it. There are other views on the origin that it was taken from Syriac Christians who were known for very severe lint. And that lint got merged in with Ramadan.- You okay.- Which interestingly this year, lint and Ramadan are overlapping.- They're coinciding. Everybody's happy or miserable.(laughing)- Yeah. So, why does it move around? Like, we have...- Oh, we gotta get into the calendar stuff.- Yes, there's the calendar stuff. Because if you look at holidays that, you know, non-Muslim holidays.- Actually, before we get into the calendar, can you explain what happens at the end of Ramadan?- Oh, yes.- That's kind of an important thing, isn't it?- Yeah, Ramadan ends with the night of destiny.- Whoa, that sounds cool.- It's a sword, "Cotter Night," which is the holiest night of the year. And it is the 23rd night of Ramadan, generally. And then at the very end is Edal Fatir, which is the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Shawal, which is the next lunar month. And it is a massive festival.- I don't know anything about Muslim holidays, but I do know that you can get cards to say happy eat on them. Like, this is a thing. If you're gonna know about any of them, this is the one you need to know about, because it's that big festival at the end of a fasting month. Everybody's eating, drinking, being happy.- And that's when couples can have sex again.- Whoa!- You're a month of...- Oh, baby.- One month later.- Oh, yeah.- So it moves around. Most of us are familiar with other holidays that are on the solar lunar calendars. All the Jewish holidays are on a lunar calendar, but it's a solar lunar calendar. So they shift around within a month. They don't shift around all across the calendar.- Yeah, Easter is always in the spring.- Mm-hmm.- On a cause always in the winter.- What?- Easter, Easter, Passover/Easter, which they're calculated slightly different so they don't always overlap. They're based on the new moon following the spring equinox.- Yeah, so you got that spring equinox just keeping everything in time.- And of course, virtually the entire world is on the Gregorian calendar, which is a purely solar calendar that the days don't shift seasons or within a season.- Okay, yes, the seasons do shift a little bit'cause the winter solstice, for example, is usually December 21.- Right.- Sometimes it's December 20, 22. Not huge variations, but little bits of variation. Nothing's perfect. But the Arabs followed the pretty standard solar lunar practice where you'd have a filler month, every so often. Somebody would declare it and then you'd have extra days. So the Romans did that before the Julian calendar, February was the filler month.- It was a whole month.- I'd love to have a year without February. That would be nice.- There was, and there's, the Jewish calendar has a short little month that gets added in every so often. It's an extra week or two.- Okay. - Just to bring it in line. The main idea being you want the lunar calendar to still be, like you want the same first new moon of the spring, to be the first new moon of the spring. You don't want it to become the first new moon of the summer, or the last new moon of, yeah.- All right.- So that all worked fine. And Ramadan or whatever version of it there was in pre-Islamic Arabia, it was always in the summer.- Okay.- Until the 10th year of the Paj, the 10th year after Muhammad marched from Medina to Mecca, he decreed, or he claimed that God told him that the year is 12 months, and messing with that is not okay.- Okay. No extra months for you.- Which of course, Muhammad then interpreted, the year is 12 months on a lunar calendar. Not, you need to follow the Roman calendar,'cause it's better. If you want a good 12 month calendar, that's one of the best ways to do it.- Not perfect, but.- Talking to calendar nerds about the perfect calendar, is hilarious, by the way. But it ends up resulting in a calendar that is 354 or 355 days long. It's off by more than 10 days.- Yeah.- Every year.- Sound, I mean, it sounds like, oh, okay, this doesn't sound like that much, but we have a holiday. It's good, it jumps around. It jumps around a lot. So every, especially when you're on the outskirts of the year, all kind of aware of it, you forget that something exists, but you see it on the calendar every once in a while, you're like, wait, wasn't that in, like you? You're like, wasn't that in Thanksgiving or was that like a Christmas or something? It can really jump around every couple of years if you don't pay attention to it.- Yeah. Moving forward, a holiday advancing 10 to 11 to 12 days a year. That's one month every three years. Earlier.- I think it's kind of cool to have a holiday that moves around. It's like, hey, it gets to see all the seasons. It's not stuck in just the same season, like all the other poor holidays. Easter is so fed up with rabbits and tulips. It wants to go check out, see what the snow is like. Now, just ram it on. Oh, man, so, okay, bring up Easter with that. It, Easter had shifted quite a lot, which is why we got the groin calendar. The Julian calendar was imprecise just enough that Easter had moved late enough that it was not after the first area. It wasn't associated with the first new moon anymore. So, they deleted days out of the calendar and they added days to the calendar, changed the rules on leap years. And that was when they added the except for years divisible by 100 unless divisible by 400.- Yeah, it's a lot of fudging numbers. I love it.- If you're paying attention to it every year, this is the beginning of a month and leading up to your major holiday, you're gonna be able to remember in your miles. Oh, yeah, this is gonna be about 10 to 12 days later earlier than last year. But when you don't pay attention, may I say, wait, what month is it?(laughs)- At least those of us who don't pay attention kind of flabbergasted and I hope adorably confused and not insulting.- Yeah. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the next topic.(upbeat rock music) All right, so, ultra-process foods. This is one that I saw.- Hold on, give it a second. We just triggered like 60% of the reviewers, okay? So let's give them a second to calm down. All right, now we can go in. All right, so ultra-process foods. This is one I saw a ton of articles on right around the New Year's. So basically from Christmas to the end of the first week of January, okay? I saw articles all throughout my RSS feeds about ultra-process foods and predictions that concern about ultra-process foods was gonna be the big new food trend and that changes in product labeling was gonna be coming and I've been wanting to talk about it since then, but having the motivation and creative energy to do it has been a limiting factor for me as of late. And today, it finally all came together. So, yay.- So now we're gonna judge everything you eat.- No. So, I was one of those people who was adamantly confused and dismissive and...- I'm that adamantly confused. Can you get more bullheaded than that? Adamantly confused. I'm gonna stay so confused.- Anytime, anybody, and we had some friends who were very anti-processed food, I...- Straight up contrarian. You were just like trying to shut the conversation down'cause you're like, I don't like these terms. You don't make sense.- Well, for one, I couldn't define it in my head and nobody could give me a good definition. So...- You know it when you see it is not a great way to describe something.- Because depending on how you're looking at it, is a processed food, a thing that is ingredients gone through in major, major industrial chemical processes and then extruded into a package.- Do you have to use the word extrude?- For the most extreme, yes.- Hot dogs.- That's definitely processed. Ground beef goes through processing.- Goes through a grinder, that's a process.- Broccoli goes through processing.- Yeah.- Everything goes through processing of some kind. Now, this is a thing that has been defined and the main person who went through defining it was... Carlos Augusto Montanero. He was a Brazilian researcher looking into initially malnutrition of poor Brazilians.- He used to see some Brazilian representation.- And then he started to see in the '90s, all of a sudden poor people started getting fat and rich people started getting slimmer.- Like full reverse.- It was the opposite of what he'd been observing for the 20 years of his career up to that point. And so he started looking into what the hell is making people fat.- Yeah, 'cause it's not like they were just gaining weight. That wasn't it. It was they went from malnourished to obese, which is like, "How did you do that flipper?"- Now, those two terms are not mutually exclusive.- The truth.- Which was something he was still observing. People who were obese and yet malnourished.- Yeah.- Yeah.- His obvious assumption was... There was a bunch of new products that got released on the market. And a lot of people, especially busy poor people, were eating these new convenience products instead of traditional Brazilian foods, largely beans and rice. So what's going on there? So he did more and more research into it. And in 2009, he published his major scientific paper on classifying the processing of food. This is referred to as the Nova Classification System.- Okay.'Cause it's one nice thing about discussions. You have to have a mutual agreed vocabulary, which is what you were missing before, in which is why anybody talk about processing was frustrating. You're like, "So what is cooking processing? Is picking the bean off the vine process?" It's like, "No, no, there's a definition now."- So group one is unprocessed or minimally processed food. Unprocessed foods include industrial modifications removing unwanted parts, crushing, drying, fractioning, drying, grinding, pasteurizing, non-alcoholic fermentation, freezing, and other preservation techniques that maintain integrity without salt, sugar, oils, fats, or other ingredients added. So if it is a single ingredient, it is group one. Examples of category one would be fresh and frozen fruit.'Cause freezing is a non, not really major modification.- Yeah.- Especially like the flash freezing that they're doing for most veggies.- Frozen broccoli is that is a whole part of a broccoli. It is not the whole plant pulled out of the ground, but it is a part of the, like that plant, that part of the plant is intact.- Brasic as?- Roald oats would be considered group one. It's gone through some processing to remove the outermost shell of the oat and then drying, but it's not getting, not going through all the stuff that instant oatmeal gets where it's pre-cooked and super crushed and all kinds of stuff. Dry beans would count, fresh meat, including ground beef would count.- Okay.- Grinding is, that's not changing what it is. It's what you put in is what comes out. It's just in a slightly different form. That's not major processing.- That's sausages.- No.- Okay.- Sausages are not.- Right, okay, so maybe not, okay. So that's sausage.- Ground pork is group one.- Okay.- Sausage is not.- Okay, because you're adding herbs.- You're adding stuff to it.- Sometimes stuff like sugar, salt.- Yes.- So you're adding extra ingredients, okay.- Yes. Eggs, milk, whether it's raw, pasteurized, 2% whole milk, whatever, that all counts, plain yogurt counts, and natural spices count.- Okay.- Group two is processed culinary ingredients. So these are the seasonings and baking ingredients and the lake that you will commonly find in a kitchen cupboard.- Okay.- Stuff like olive oil, salt, sugar, vinegar, cornstarch, honey, maple syrup, butter, that all counts as--- Oh, funny, 'cause if you look at the kitchen cupboard, the difference between a sugar beet derived bag of granulated sugar and a jar of honey, there is a lot of processing difference between those two things.- Yes. There is quite a bit of processing, but it's what's coming out is, yeah, it's group two.- Okay.- Group three is processed foods, not ultra processed, regular processed.- Okay.- So this includes food that is preserved with a few added ingredients, mostly salt and sugar, pickles, honey, that are to preserve it, and through baking, boiling, canning, bottling, and fermentation, and possibly a few other added things to make them taste better or last longer. So cheese counts in this group. As do canned vegetables, salted nuts, fruits, in syrup, dried or canned fish, breads outside of the US, not US bread.- Okay, okay.- Most pastries, cakes, biscuits, and various snack foods, as long as they come from group one foods with the addition of group two ingredients.- Okay.- So there are breads in the US that would count as group three. The key thing is, all of the ingredients need to be from the processed culinary ingredients, group two, that you would typically find in a home. So if you're baking bread with refined flour and granulated sugar, beet sugar, and baking soda, that's fine for group three. Once you start adding things that aren't typically found in a kitchen, that are only found in industrial processes, you automatically move into group four. And that's when you start seeing the weird chemical names that freak people out.- Yes.- And have been freaking people out forever. The preservatives, the binding agent.- I fructose corn syrup is an automatic group four.- Yeah. Yeah, okay. It's usually industrial and cheap.- Group four also automatically includes anything with hydrogenated oils, modified starches, protein isolates, and yeah, high fructose corn syrup is a biggie. And generally as foods that use extrusion, molding, pre-frying, or other major processes to take food ingredients and turn them into something completely different.- Okay.- Most of what is in the freezer aisle outside of the frozen veggies?- Yes.- You've got, you're, you know, you're pre-pastas and pizzas and all burritos to ketos.- So for example, falls brand, unflavered, or the plain falls brand breakfast sausage that we can get at Winco here. That's coming from, you know, falls brand pork products and twin falls Idaho. That would count as group three because it's a very simple uncooked, they do a pretty simple process. Maple flavored, 'cause it's not flavored with maple syrup.- No.- The maple flavored sausage is automatically group four'cause it's weird stuff creating the flavors.- Okay.- They're not adding flavors, they're creating flavors. That would be another one of the big differences. So that is the Nova classification. Most of the research around ultra-processed food up to this point has been epidemiological studies, which epidemiological studies are ones where you look at very large data models of tens of thousands up to possibly millions of people. When it comes to diet, usually you're looking at food frequency surveys, they get sent out periodically to various groups of people. And data gets cherry picked out of those.- Yeah.- The correct use of an epidemiological paper is to see if there is a hypothesis there. If you see a correlation, 'cause those cannot prove causation, if you see correlation, they're just in precise. It's based on people's self-reporting, which is notoriously atrocious, and there is zero control.- Yeah.- It's the really wide, wide, wide, wide net.- With huge sampling bias as well.- All right, all right.- And since the data can be massaged, it, you can get the same epidemiological data set to say almost whatever you want. What they are really good for is developing a hypothesis. You see something in the data. You try to control for it. You can't control for it. So you then have a hypothesis that needs further research to see if it's actually, if there's actually something there.- Okay.- One of those, good for inspiring good studies. Yes, where the whole point of that study should then be to try to disprove the hypothesis.- Yeah.- The goal of the study should never be to prove the hypothesis, it should be tried to disprove it.'Cause it is way easier to design a study to prove something than it is, and get the result you want, then try to prove it wrong. Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, whose studies obesity and diabetes was skeptical of ultra-process foods being the problem.- Okay.- So he did exactly what you're supposed to do. He designed a study to try to prove it wrong. He got healthy adult volunteers to enroll in a crossover study where they had two weeks on an ultra-process diet, followed by or preceded by two weeks on process and unprocessed foods.- Okay.- These were all controlled. It was a month and total. They were all being provided foods. They were all provided more than twice as much food as they needed to maintain weight. And told to eat until they were full, or until they were done, and naturally wanted to stop. They were also able to control for the general dismissive concern about ultra-process foods, which was that it's the combination of sugar salt and fat that causes people to overeat them.- Okay.- So it must just be that that combination. So what he designed was a trial where the meals that were served had the exact macronutrient combinations. So there was the exact same amount of carbs, protein, fat, the exact same amount of salt, exact same amount of sugar, exact same amount of everything they could possibly get to be the same.- Okay.- And on the ultra-processed weeks, people ate on average 500 calories a day more. And they all gained weight.- Yeah.- On the minimally processed weeks, most of them lost weight.- Even though it was the same foods. Like a hungry man TV dinner of a meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but instead handmade with a meatloaf and mashed potatoes, you would eat, you would finish your hungry man and be like, well, I could go for another.- Yep.- I think we've all been there.- Yeah. And it was, he was shocked. That was not the result he was expecting. He was expecting...- Same.- Exactly the same. He was hoping it was going to be exactly the same.- That was the same than the reactions to the people will be the same. Guess what?- And like I know I, 10 plus years ago, I was, when I was dismissive of any talk of processed foods, my assumption was, calories was the only thing that mattered.- Calories in, calories out.- Yeah.- Oh, we've all heard that mantra before.- Now, at that time, I had successfully lost weight but my weight got too high by cutting down on calories. Those calories were usually in the form of large mocha's at coffee shops and large bottles or convenience store major cups of Mountain Dew.- Oh, yeah, yeah.- What I was also doing each of those times was significantly reducing the amount of sugar I was taking in. So eventually my thinking started to move towards, it's more about the macronutrients. A lot of the scientific dismissal of ultra processed foods being an issue has been around the same assumption. It's about macronutrients. That's the difference. Or the nutrient density is the difference. And now it's like, it's looking more and more like, no, there is an actual difference.- But what is the difference? What's the hypothesis there? If you do this guy controlled for macros, so same amount of salt, fat, sugar, in each meal, but one still stimulated people to eat more food than what was that difference? Was it those preservatives or the extra weird ingredients or is it something social, is it a cultural thing? Like I'm curious, so what the guy, or is it needs further study, which is what it should have said at the end.- Yes, he was not...- Not too eager to comment on that, huh?- His take on it was we need to figure out what the difference is.- 'Cause if we don't, you're gonna end up with a country full of obese, diabetic, sick people, oh wait.- Yeah, we're already there. My assumption on it is that there are two factors at play. One is nutrient density, that whole foods tend to be more nutrient-densed than highly processed foods. Highly processed foods are cheap and convenient and shelf-stable because they're filled with a bunch of basically inert starchy fillers.- Yeah, I mean look at your shredded cheese versus your hunk of cheese. The shredded cheese is covered in the powder.- Yeah.- You don't think, you're not eating enough of that to make a difference, but if that's stuff like that is on everything you eat, then maybe it does make a difference.- So there's, I don't know.- So the nutrient density is, that is one hypothesis, I think is, has some decent weight. That bodies naturally can tell what we're eating and if we need more to be healthy. And if you aren't getting enough nutrients in your food, your body's going to want you to eat more food.- Okay.- So that's one hypothesis that seems reasonable. The other is digestibility.- Yeah, that ultra-process foods that have gone through industrial multiplication.- Yeah, down to atomic levels.- When it's getting broken down to molecules and reconstituted without natural cell walls and that hits our stomach acid and our intestines, more of it's going to get absorbed. Now that part doesn't fit with Kevin Hall's study, which I was in 2019, they did that one. It doesn't fit with that because he found that there was a difference in amount of food consumed. 500 calories more. So it's about 20% more food being consumed by each person. So that's not just a digestibility thing. If they'd been gaining weight on the ultra-processed weeks while eating the same amount of food, that would hold up with that one. I think that could be, that could be also adding to the issue. But I think there's also just ultra-process foods are designed to be delicious.- Yeah.- They're designed to get you to eat more. They're designed to get you to buy more. Engineers are going through a lot of work to make the absolute best possible tasting thing. I do not think that is evil. It is the objective of a company is to make profit. The best way to make profit is to get people hooked on your product.- Yeah. I mean, we live in the shadow of Simplot. They took that and ran with it. Potatoes was the poor person's food.- Yep.- And they managed to engineer it into something that powdered potatoes, like that doesn't make sense when you think about it. But freeze dried, mashed up, throwing a bunch of salt and sugar. You got something that people just, you, all right, yeah, you'll never know there's big ol' glob of it on your plate. And I find that when you make really good foods, like, well, I'm, I think I'm full, but I just, I don't want to stop eating. It's like, sometimes that reward center is going nuts. We have more foods that trigger that reward center. But there's lots of places all over the world that have really delicious food that don't have people who overeat. So, yeah. I don't know.- Yeah.- Coming for me, I'm a fast eater too. So, I eat quickly. I don't know why I always have. So, I'm the first one done at the dinner table, but I'm there sitting there for another 20 minutes while everybody else finishes eating. No. I'll go ahead and take a couple more bites. Get seconds to keep eating. The full signal has it reached my brain yet. If I even have one. So, eating fast is hugely detrimental. Your, leads to overeating. I have not figured out a way to stop that. So, it sounds to me like there is just this massively complicated, vent diagram of things that have all led to this particular health issue. And we've only discovered maybe two of the dozen.- Yeah. Now, when you look at the--- How that affects public policy is a whole nother issue.- And then if you are looking at the macronutrients as well, the amount of processed foods, ultra processed foods that people are eating is enough to skew that heavily as well. Very low protein, very high carb, pretty moderate to medium levels of fat, which high carb high fat, everybody is in agreement is bad.- Yeah.- Like there's nobody who disagrees that that's a bad way to eat.- But it's cheap.- It is. And when people are, you know, social economic, if you can't afford either the money or the time to cook, you gotta pick up something on your way home from work that somebody else is cooked, maybe, or has pre-cooked and is frozen in the aisle. That's this whole issue.- So, a lot of these articles I've seen, and the one I've linked to in the show notes is from NPR. I think it's the best coverage I've seen on it. Talk about the what should happen. What should happen now? What are the action items on it? The more research is definitely needed to determine what really is the problem. Like, there are a lot of people who suspect high fructose corn syrup is worse than the same amount of sugar.- Or aspartane sugar. I mean, we've seen those flying around for years.- That's been deep, thoroughly cooked.- Oh, yes.- That one has, but I'm just, okay, sweeteners. Non-chaloric sweeteners. High fructose corn syrup, there's lots of big baddies that people like to attack frequently that the jury's still out on it.- No, this is--- Mom have been straight up debunked, but it's an easy one to keep going back to.- The specific one on, is there actually a difference between high fructose corn syrup and table sugar in how our bodies handle it. There is a reasonable viewpoint that they're the same because they're both sugar.- Thucrose is sucrose in the body, you can't tell.- There's also a reasonable viewpoint that high fructose corn syrup is different because it's not sucrose, it's fructose, which the liver has to work to turn into sucrose. And what does that mean?- Right. If it releases the same amount of sugar into your bloodstream, but slower, does that not spike as much or does it cause way too long of a elevation or what's going on there? There is a lot of talk about what companies should be doing. Either changing the way they make foods or changing how they market foods. I want the science first.- Yeah.- On that, I want the science to figure out what exactly is the problem before companies start producing, figuring out how to make as much money as possible on something they can call process instead of ultra-processed.- My concern lies with policy was that what is the government, the regulation going to be for what companies are allowed to say or not say make or not make? Because obviously when we let them run rampant, with no science to back anybody up, we have a nation that is full of sick people that are just getting sicker. So we can't keep just letting it go.- Yeah.- But you can't just tell people, you can't have like they tried this in New York, try to take away the sodas. Try to take Coca-Cola away from somebody and I swear it will be the spark of the next civil war because socioeconomically speaking, if you don't have good water at home and you've been raised in a neighborhood that Coca-Cola is what you drink and that's what everybody drinks and then the government comes and tells you know you're gonna have to pay extra for that and you happen to be poor and you happen to be black. You're gonna have a problem. Like there's all of these things that go into this.- Just like with cigarettes.- Yeah.- The tobacco companies fought regulation. They did PR campaigns to convince people that their products were healthy when they knew they weren't. They paid doctors to endorse them. They paid medical associations to stay off their back. Big food companies, Kellogg's, Simplott and the Lake. They're doing the same exact thing.- We see it at Kylie's school. The stuff that they let these kids eat at school. The healthy breakfast should I did not consider a chocolate muffin top to be part of that, but those are her grains and everybody knows you need five to six servings of greens. Wow, really? Okay, so okay, well maybe another different day. Maybe that was just a bad day. Well, what about the next day? The next day she had a granola bar with chocolate chips. It's like, okay. So we're okay, but she has some fresh fruit lunch. So I'm seeing patterns here where there's this disconnect between the school has to feed kids, regulate what is regulated. They need their servings of grains. They need their servings of vegetables. And they just, they have to provide them and whoever gives them the food, that's what they serve. So who's giving the school's food to give out to kids? It's gonna be those big companies. Those big companies are more than happy to donate cereal to a poor elementary school. Those kids need to have breakfast.- Well, and.- But my gosh, do they really need Cinnamon Toast Crunch in the morning? Is that for the government?- For them, according to the government.- It absolutely is.- And the government made those rules because that's what business said.- Yeah.- And Dr. Syndalfon.- Yeah, so it's okay. We'll do our best here at home. There is a chance. Kevin Hall, the same researcher.- Not healthy.- A number of the researchers that were talked to by NPR are on the panel that will be starting in 2025 to work on the next version of the U.S. dietary guidelines. They have this in mind.- And we need to make sure that legislatures who come from states that are bought by those bigger food companies. Like Idaho, it doesn't let Simplot root skew those results'cause that's what happened last time.- And when?- For that.- And every time a politician talks about the heartland of America, that's the corn fields that are being, where the products are being ground up to make tons and tons and tons of products.- The corn isn't inherently unhealthy. Wheat is not inherently unhealthy. So we're working on it. And as long as you become aware of it, and hopefully we can change policy so that it's equitable across the U.S. that everybody can have access to better quality food. I mean, I'm not holding out hope. Not now, I'm just gonna do the best we can because we come from a place of privilege.- Most of--- We can go by fresh produce.- Most of these articles also covered personal responsibility. They've all opened with the stats. The average American adult gets 60% of their daily calories from processor ultra-process foods. The average American child gets 70% of their calories from processor ultra-process food.- Yeah.- There seems to be agreement that it should not be on consumers to make better choices.- I don't think consumers have the ability to.- That it should be on businesses to do better for their customers.- Which they won't, if it's not profitable.- Yeah.- So I get it.- So if we want change, people need to change what they're doing.- Flipping that ratio should be the goal.- And doing was best for you and your family and your body and not necessarily following the rules that we've grown. We were brainwashed into thinking where the rules for everybody because you can't throw a pyramid at a population and say this is good for everybody because it's not. So listen to your old body, figure that out.- Yeah.- So that is that.(upbeat music)- All right, we have feedback. From the website, we actually got the comment this time, or the feedback this time came from comments on the website.- We have one, right?- We have a website.- Yay!- Okay, cool.- We can take comments. We have not gotten comments on there in a long time and then after the last episode, we got two.- Woohoo!- The next day.- Well then, wow.- There we go. Well that is when people are most likely to comment. They hear the episode when it drops. Boom.- So from David. David wrote, "I left Mormonism over four years ago in my late 50s. Your podcast really resonates with me. You don't realize that you grew up in a cult until you leave. I'm definitely T.P. in Myers-Briggs spectrum. And on the in and gram scale, I'm a five with a strong seven, or investigator slash skeptic. I consider myself a secular humanist. Philosophically, I find nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism comforting after deconstructing religion."- I, there is a part of me that cringes, when I hear people use labels like those to describe themselves. To me, it sounds very much like a high schooler, middle schooler. Then I think about when you're leaving a religion like that, socially, you're, I mean, man, I, I, you need those. You need to be able to completely redefine the world around you. And I'm able to pull that cringe back and go,"Good for you." If you find it comforting, then lean into it. Read up more about it, listen more about it. And I think you'll hopefully end up being a much happier person than the long run.'Cause there's a lot of people out there like you as we have found.- And, and I think most, most people who are not believers are existentialists at some level. You have to be to, it's one of the easiest ways to maintain meaning in life.- It's also one of the easiest things to read up on and understand because it has this clearly defined thing that people have been discussing for hundreds of years.- Yeah.- Versus, you know, trying to come up with your own nebulous definition of what it means to exist.- Oh, and from Jay, this is very interesting. Mass description of Judaism reinforces my conviction that there is something fandom like about American liberal Judaism in the best possible way. Just like most fandoms, they take many life lessons from a canon of stories. They have rituals and holidays. They discuss their stories and how they fit into the time. They were written in modern times. They even have Daph Yomi Lake watch cycles. They even choose their friends from their fandom. The only thing they do that a typical religion doesn't is acknowledge their canon of stories as fiction. It's an excellent example of how people can get everything they normally get from religion without having to believe in anything. You can get a great deal of comfort and community from something while also knowing it's fictional. And religiously, you can get a lot from a founding body of myths while knowing it's mythical.- Yeah.- That is, yeah. Liberal, that's a great parallelism, I love that.(laughs)- Liberal Judaism definitely has that a lot of Episcopal churches, the...- Oh, they all do it.- They all do it.- Unitarians, that is their thing.- Yeah.- Completely, that is their thing. So there are lots of religions that still do that. There are the liberal ones. So yeah, those absolutely do exist. But thank you both for writing. You could leave a comment on the website, if you'd like, or use the feedback form while you're there at hdotw.com/contact, you can leave us a voice message. At, no, actually don't leave us a voice message. I will be retiring that. It's not worth paying money for something that's not getting used.- Yeah. (laughs)- So you can use the SpeakPipe button at hdotw.com/speakpipe. You can support the show on a monthly basis with Patreon or just once with PayPal, credit, debit, apple pay, or Google Pay, and you can find the links at hdotw.com/donate. Lauren, thank you for joining me.- Thank you.- And until next time, remember, not all those who wander.(upbeat music)(upbeat music)[MUSIC]