With so much processed food these days that has been linked to cancer and other general unhealthiness, I wonder if it is more damaging than good. I can find some answers online related to junk food in general, which is that it is better to eat junk food than to eat nothing. But there is nothing specific I can find about processed foods, only that they are thought to cause (possibly fatal) cancer. That would make me think that it would be worse than not eating enough, but I don’t know enough about either to really be sure. I know both are probably pretty okay in the short term, but I’m more curious about long term effects.
Does anyone have any info or thoughts on this? Or any other subreddits that might be good about this topic? Thanks so much!
(if this is the wrong place to post this, im sorry 😢 . not sure what subreddit to post in. I hope this doesn’t come off as a personal situation, i really am just curious)
I’ve had a history of orthorexia/anorexia and remember the dietician telling me if you are hungry but only have a donut to eat, is to eat the donut. It’s still calories and offers some substance.
Normally (I guess I’m still in ‘it’) I would never eat the donut and would rather be super hungry for hours until I could consume a ‘healthy’ food/meal.
Processed foods not gonna kill you unless you eat it all the time. Eating a donut or a burger from McDonald’s every month will do basically nothing bad to your body. Doing it every week? Different story. Every day and you’re in trouble.
Think about it like smoking. Is smoking unwise? Of course. But you’re not going to suffer any poor health from smoking a single cigarette. (THIS IS A LOOSE COMPARISON DO NOT SMOKE) it takes habitual smoking to have a detrimental effect
It depends. I know from experience when I dropped a ton of weight on a big calorie restriction I completely messed up a lot of shit and I know this is TMI, but I’ve been dealing with constipation ever since. Getting to a healthy weight is worth it, though. I think we think of processed food we have to ask, ok, what type of processed food? Are we talking about someone eating spam and then washing it down with some weird drink with gums and dyes in it? Or are we talking about someone eating the occasional chicken nugget and having some oreos but they’re not overeating it. Right now i’m at the weight i want to be and I’ve taken on lifting a ton of weight now and workin’ out as a part of my lifestyle. I could not do the workouts I do and eat at an extreme calorie restriction. Even when I do my cuts I’m restricting at about 200 to 400 calories at most now. i would rather eat processed food, not processed meats containing nitrates or nitrites though, than go back into a extreme deficit.
If you’re at a healthy weight and consuming fewer calories than are necessary to run your body, your body will start to choose systems to downregulate. Often it’ll start with hormones and the reproductive system which you might not notice right away (although for premenopausal women often this will cause dysmenorrhea, aka loss of menstrual periods). Then it progresses to more and more important systems. Eating far below your required energy intake is essentially slow starvation.
That being said, there’s a lot of research linking calorie restriction to longevity. The Okinawan dietary pattern is associated with longevity and they eat on average 11% lower calorie intake than we would normally recommend for a healthy adult.
If we keep the deficit above BMR, and there’s some stored energy to tap (a little fat or even some glycogen) then there’s no problem with it. But if you’re below that then ANY food will be better than none.
Eating below the minimum necessary to keep on a healthy weight, is not recommended. Below that maitenence level then it doesn’t matter if you are eating crap, as long as you are eating something to sustain the body. This is usually somewhere between 1400-2000 calories per day. Without enough calories your body has nothing to work with, and even junk food has some vitamins, and necessary minerals like salt.
Once you are chubby territory, then adding processed food on top of that is not necessary. However think about the diet as a whole… maybe there are some nutrients in the processed food that you didn’t get elsewhere (for example fortified cereals, and nut bars, despite being high in sugar also have a lot of added vitamins).
Moderation of junk food is the best long term approach
Fasting has a ton of benefits so I don’t believe that lower calories will impact health too significantly (when done correctly and safely). It’s definitely more about the quality of food you put in your body. Cancer only thrives in an acidic environment, so eating alkaline foods can help prevent cancer, or so I’ve read