I was scrolling through the subreddit and read the term “low quality fats”.
What defines a low quality carb, low quality fat, or processed food? Are there such thing as low quality proteins?
Because, from my understanding, everything we eat just gets broken down into monosaccharides anyway for energy. Proteins (regardless of what kind of protein) just become amino acids. Lipids/fats become acetylCoA (if I remember correctly), and carbohydrates are just cleaved into their subunits.
But obviously there are bad/good foods out there. So in addition to my previous question about what makes something high or low quality, I’d also like to know what makes something a good or bad food.
https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova
There are various systems for defining processed foods. Nova is one of them (and commonly used when doing research on processed foods).
I would say that “low quality” foods are generally foods high in calories, high in refined carbs, highly processed (Nova Category 4), and low in various micronutrients and sometimes protein.
Obesity related diseases are the number one cause of death in developed nations (and many developing nations), so excess calories is generally bad. Highly refined carbs are generally not very satiating, so it’s easy to eat a lot of them. And if a food is high in calories and low in other nutrients, you’ll likely hit your calorie quota without getting other necessary micronutrients.
Additionally, highly processed foods have a lot of research suggesting a wide range of negative health outcomes.
So in some sense, yeah, everything gets broken down the same way. But you still need a range of nutrients, and if you’re filling up on just “empty” calories, you’ll either have to overeat to get the nutrients, or you won’t get them. And highly processed foods also independently seem to be bad.
I’d say low quality is processed foods.
Process foods are food products with lots of ingredients such as fillers, stabilizers, thing hard to identify that sound like they came out of a chemistry lab (look up nova food classification for more details).
Low quality protein would be processed protein. Hot pockets, processed beef jerky, Tv dinners, and more. Those all have protein but are highly processed so their calorie to macro ratio aren’t great.
Good food is any food that is minimally processed (whole food)s. Bad foods would be processed food.
Eating any well rounded diet rich in whole foods is going to yield great results towards your health.