Processed food is loaded with salt, msg, and high fructose corn syrup because it lights up the dopamine receptors in your brain to make you shovel more crap into your gullet. Those things are also cheaper than real ingredients, like any kind of drug pusher cuts their product with an inert substance (e.g. replacing cocaine with baby powder.) Those cheap adulterants are loaded with calories, which is why a cake you bake yourself (for example) has less calories than a twinkie.
I’m no scientist but I think there are two main reasons:
For most of human history, the goal was to intake more calories due to scarcity, so craving more caloric foods was a beneficial trait from an evolutionary perspective. This is now a maladaptive trait in many first world countries because the goal is often to eat less calories so you lose weight.
Ultra processed foods are made in labs where they can use cool science stuff to make it taste really good, which usually strips the food of nutrients.
When you think of healthy food, you’re thinking of fresh food.
Fresh food generally has more water.
Water can allow bacteria to grow, so when you want a food to last on the store shelf for a long time, you want to get all the water out of it. That food then becomes denser with carbs, fat or protein, whereas some of that volume and weight was water.
Fresh food closer to its original form is usually considered healthier. It contains some ballast that cannot be converted into energy, such as a cellulose skeleton for plants to keep them whole, and also water which all living things need to move stuff around.
Processing takes this food and distills various essences out of it using heat or mechanical separation. For example, you can reduce a fruit mush down on a stove, which causes water to evaporate and the remaining stuff become more concentrated. Then you can strain the seeds or rinds out. Stuff can also be dried with wind to drastically decrease in volume. Parts like starch and oil are useful in recipies, to avoid unwanted effects that you would have adding a whole vegetable instead.
One reason food might be unhealthy is that we can have too much of it because it’s been concentrated down. Sometimes an application of heat for an extended period can change some chemicals for the worse.
I think in at least some measure, it’s because companies underestimate their consumers, or don’t target niches of consumers that care.
Like, a while back I was looking for a high-fiber, low-carb cereal. It’s surprisingly hard to find. Companies assume that I will need a lot of sugar before I can get some bran down my throat. In actuality, I’m not a child, and I really think I could tolerate eating one meal that isn’t dessert.
In some sectors, they have got the message – like, when you buy protein powder, they know that consumers focus on the “macros” – and thus they minimize and maximize to meet that demand. But for many products, they just assume people don’t care, and find the cheapest/easiest way to get good ratings from focus groups is to add sugar (the same flawed process that brought us New Coke).
Maybe more explicit labelling requirements would help?
There are some roundabout explanations going on here, none of which are wrong but it’s important to define what “healthy” means. You can have a food that is full of vitamins and minerals, but also very high in calories. Protein bars are often seen as “healthy”, but they often contain the same amount of calories as a chocolate bar. They do, however, have more nutrients than the equivalent chocolate bar, hence the advice is to treat them as a chocolate bar, but with less “filler”.
Which actually segues into your question. “Healthy” foods, in the sense of fresh food, have a few things going for them, mainly that they are both high in nutrients and they are very filling (due to water content and fibre), so you will eat less of it and still feel full. This is in contrast to a calorie dense food like potato chips, which is not very filling, packed with salt and fats, so you will easily exceed your daily recommended intake while still not feeling full.
A packet of chips may have the same calories as 5 apples, without the nutrient value. Furthermore, the salt content and other flavourings will trigger the chemicals in your brain that make you want to eat more, in turn trigger the need to quench your thirst due to the salt content, which may lead to you grabbing a sugary soda that is devoid of any nutritional value.
In contrast, a single apple can keep you satiated without any downsides.
Healthy foods can be calorie dense, and processed food can be low in calories.
However -processed foods often has added sugar or fat, which is completly fine, and not unhealthy in itself. But those two molecules are calorie dense, compared to other stuff.
Comments
Processed food is loaded with salt, msg, and high fructose corn syrup because it lights up the dopamine receptors in your brain to make you shovel more crap into your gullet. Those things are also cheaper than real ingredients, like any kind of drug pusher cuts their product with an inert substance (e.g. replacing cocaine with baby powder.) Those cheap adulterants are loaded with calories, which is why a cake you bake yourself (for example) has less calories than a twinkie.
Because there’s a measure of how good something tastes. It’s called the calorie.
I’m no scientist but I think there are two main reasons:
For most of human history, the goal was to intake more calories due to scarcity, so craving more caloric foods was a beneficial trait from an evolutionary perspective. This is now a maladaptive trait in many first world countries because the goal is often to eat less calories so you lose weight.
Ultra processed foods are made in labs where they can use cool science stuff to make it taste really good, which usually strips the food of nutrients.
Sugar and oil helps preserve foods, so processed foods have lots of these things to make them last longer on the shelf.
Processed foods tend to have more invisible calories like sugar, butter, oil. This is also why processed foods tend to taste “better”.
Healthy foods lack these invisible calories.
When you think of healthy food, you’re thinking of fresh food.
Fresh food generally has more water.
Water can allow bacteria to grow, so when you want a food to last on the store shelf for a long time, you want to get all the water out of it. That food then becomes denser with carbs, fat or protein, whereas some of that volume and weight was water.
Water has no calories.
Fresh food closer to its original form is usually considered healthier. It contains some ballast that cannot be converted into energy, such as a cellulose skeleton for plants to keep them whole, and also water which all living things need to move stuff around.
Processing takes this food and distills various essences out of it using heat or mechanical separation. For example, you can reduce a fruit mush down on a stove, which causes water to evaporate and the remaining stuff become more concentrated. Then you can strain the seeds or rinds out. Stuff can also be dried with wind to drastically decrease in volume. Parts like starch and oil are useful in recipies, to avoid unwanted effects that you would have adding a whole vegetable instead.
One reason food might be unhealthy is that we can have too much of it because it’s been concentrated down. Sometimes an application of heat for an extended period can change some chemicals for the worse.
Healthier usually is healthier because it has less calories and more vitamins and other stuff.
Processes food contains unhealthy things, or things that become unhealthy really quickly in small amounts like added lots of sugar and salt.
This is not only an unhealthy and cheap way to improve taste but also preserves it.
But sugar and salt become umhealthy really quickly if you only eat a small amount of it.
I think in at least some measure, it’s because companies underestimate their consumers, or don’t target niches of consumers that care.
Like, a while back I was looking for a high-fiber, low-carb cereal. It’s surprisingly hard to find. Companies assume that I will need a lot of sugar before I can get some bran down my throat. In actuality, I’m not a child, and I really think I could tolerate eating one meal that isn’t dessert.
In some sectors, they have got the message – like, when you buy protein powder, they know that consumers focus on the “macros” – and thus they minimize and maximize to meet that demand. But for many products, they just assume people don’t care, and find the cheapest/easiest way to get good ratings from focus groups is to add sugar (the same flawed process that brought us New Coke).
Maybe more explicit labelling requirements would help?
There are some roundabout explanations going on here, none of which are wrong but it’s important to define what “healthy” means. You can have a food that is full of vitamins and minerals, but also very high in calories. Protein bars are often seen as “healthy”, but they often contain the same amount of calories as a chocolate bar. They do, however, have more nutrients than the equivalent chocolate bar, hence the advice is to treat them as a chocolate bar, but with less “filler”.
Which actually segues into your question. “Healthy” foods, in the sense of fresh food, have a few things going for them, mainly that they are both high in nutrients and they are very filling (due to water content and fibre), so you will eat less of it and still feel full. This is in contrast to a calorie dense food like potato chips, which is not very filling, packed with salt and fats, so you will easily exceed your daily recommended intake while still not feeling full.
A packet of chips may have the same calories as 5 apples, without the nutrient value. Furthermore, the salt content and other flavourings will trigger the chemicals in your brain that make you want to eat more, in turn trigger the need to quench your thirst due to the salt content, which may lead to you grabbing a sugary soda that is devoid of any nutritional value.
In contrast, a single apple can keep you satiated without any downsides.
Healthy foods can be calorie dense, and processed food can be low in calories.
However -processed foods often has added sugar or fat, which is completly fine, and not unhealthy in itself. But those two molecules are calorie dense, compared to other stuff.