Obesity

[annedonnelly]

edit - looking upthread and seeing your "like" you were probably agreeing with me

Entirely

 

[Low Gear Guy]

Processed food is likely to be easier to digest as it usually contains white pasta and rice rather than wholemeal. This is what the customer has come to expect.

 

[Blue Hills]

If they are anything like my daughter No 3, throwing it away, when the Best Before date is reached, and, it has not been eaten.

I despair

If she lives close by can you salvage it?
Ditto any wine you have marked dates on.

 

[Blue Hills]

Also, millions of years of evolution have made sure that we don't waste calories. If it goes down your throat, you're burning it.

Have I misunderstood something or do you need to rephrase/clarify that?
Looking around there seem to me to be a fair number of folk who need help with their burning.

Serious work with a blowtorch to burn off the fat/accumulated and stored calories.

 

[neil_merseyside]

obviously we do. We have a whole raft of controls, testing is a tiny part of that.

So how did the Horse meat get used then, can't be much checking at all - or is it a case of closing the stable door after the horse had been eaten.

 

[battered]

Have I misunderstood something or do you need to rephrase/clarify that?
Looking around there seem to me to be a fair number of folk who need help with their burning.

Serious work with a blowtorch to burn off the fat/accumulated and stored calories.

By burn I mean get into your bloodstream. If you then elect to turn it back into a stored fat, then that's another process. The point is that the calories that go down your throat either end up in your bloodstream or, bluntly put, falling out of your bottom. Your body is going to minimise the ones that fall out unabsobed.

 

[Blue Hills]

By burn I mean get into your bloodstream. If you then elect to turn it back into a stored fat, then that's another process. The point is that the calories that go down your throat either end up in your bloodstream or, bluntly put, falling out of your bottom. Your body is going to minimise the ones that fall out unabsobed.

still don't understand.
seems clear to me that many folk eat too much, eat too much junk, don't exercise much, the excess calories far from being burned (by what?) just sit there on their bodies, in many cases leading to an early death.
I don't understand this "elect to" either.

 

[BoldonLad]

If she lives close by can you salvage it?
Ditto any wine you have marked dates on.

There is never any wine going.

I did get a pack of beer last time I called round

If we salvaged the food, it would lead to ill-feeling, ie, it would be obvious we disapprove, of her wastefulness. Sometimes, for family harmony, it is wise to keep your mouth shut, or, as I often advise (outspoken) daughter 4, "best to engage brain, before opening mouth".

 

[Reynard]

Yes, and it's about satiety and eating more, not ease of digestion. In a mixed diet, eating comparable meals, you can't make one easier to digest than another. Chew, sure. Digest, no. Now you can if you wish compare wheat grains to bread and get that result, but nobody suggests that a sack of wheat is a meal, or that it's comparable with bread.

By the same token a steak is probably easier to digest it it's turned into a hamburger, but then it's not a steak any more. I maintain, and I know, that minced beef turned into a spag bol by me is no harder to digest than a minced beef of identical meat composition turned into a burger, or a factory s pa gb bol. Which is where I came in.

Ease of cramming it down your throat is not to be confused with digestion. Nor is the amount that you eat before you've had enough.

Also, millions of years of evolution have made sure that we don't waste calories. If it goes down your throat, you're burning it. Steak and the same steak, minced, have identical calories. Think about it, is a successful alpha predator that goes and hunts to live going to let a calorie go to wast e?

From purely a chemical composition POV, yes, I will agree with you. I've done enough combustion / energy tests in a lab in my time. But that's incredibly idealized and not true-to-life.

The process of preparing, cooking, eating, digesting etc throws in a lot more variables, and hence it's not quite as simple as you make it out to be.

And comparing a burger to a spag bol is not a fair test either, as the other ingredients (beef aside) are totally different. It's apples and pears here, I'm afraid.

And in any case, you'd be working with slightly different cuts of meat as well. You can get away with a leaner meat in spag bol than you would in a burger, because the cooking methods themselves are different. You are grilling or frying a burger at a fairly high temperature, and so you need a fattier mince to keep the meat moist. The ragu for a spag bol is braised in liquid.

 

[battered]

From purely a chemical composition POV, yes, I will agree with you. I've done enough combustion / energy tests in a lab in my time. But that's incredibly idealized and not true-to-life.

The process of preparing, cooking, eating, digesting etc throws in a lot more variables, and hence it's not quite as simple as you make it out to be.

And comparing a burger to a spag bol is not a fair test either, as the other ingredients (beef aside) are totally different. It's apples and pears here, I'm afraid.

And in any case, you'd be working with slightly different cuts of meat as well. You can get away with a leaner meat in spag bol than you would in a burger, because the cooking methods themselves are different. You are grilling or frying a burger at a fairly high temperature, and so you need a fattier mince to keep the meat moist. The ragu for a spag bol is braised in liquid.

You're talking about different composition again. If the meat has a different fat level, it's different. If not, not. Yes, a spag bol has tomatoes etc, doesn't matter. It's additive. I'm answering your point that identical components that are industrial ly processed are somehow nutritional ly different from the same identical components made into a meal by you or me. They aren't.

 

[Reynard]

You're talking about different composition again. If the meat has a different fat level, it's different. If not, not. Yes, a spag bol has tomatoes etc, doesn't matter. It's additive. I'm answering your point that identical components that are industrial ly processed are somehow nutritional ly different from the same identical components made into a meal by you or me. They aren't.

Yes they can be. And quite often it's purely down to the scale of the equipment. Something mixed in vast quantities in an industrial sized drum will have much shorter strands of fibre than the same thing made by me in my kitchen.

In a lab test, the *calories* in whatever it is will be the same - I'm not disputing that. But the more long strands of fibre there is in something, the harder it is for the body to extract those calories. And the harder your body has to work to *access* the calories, the fewer are actually available for your body to turn into fuel.

Unless you know something about the laws of conservation of energy that I don't...

 

[battered]

still don't understand.
seems clear to me that many folk eat too much, eat too much junk, don't exercise much, the excess calories far from being burned (by what?) just sit there on their bodies, in many cases leading to an early death.
I don't understand this "elect to" either.

OK. You and I need to eat 2500 calories a day, give or take. This is converted, with pretty decent efficiency, into proteins (amino acids, pedant alert), carbs and fats (FFAs and glycerol, pedant alert) and these leave the gut and go into the bloodstream. The body then *elects* what to do with them. If you eat only 2500 cals, there's no spare and the components are reassembled into body parts, repairs, or burnt for energy. The energy is used to keep us warm or move about. The proportion of components used for repair or burnt for energy varies. If there are a lot of repairs or muscle building to do, all the protein gets used for rebuilding new body protein. The body monitors the supply of amino acids, carbs, fats etc and elects to use them as building blocks of living things o r use them for energy. That's the simple case where the food supply is adequate but not excessive.
if times are good and calories exceed 2500, the body will generally store spare energy in the form of fatty tissue. If times are hard, this tissue is taken apart and used for repairs, energy, etc. The balance of days of plenty versus hard times dictates whether an individual tends to gain or lose weight.
very simplistic, but these are the basic facts.

 

[battered]

Yes they can be. And quite often it's purely down to the scale of the equipment. Something mixed in vast quantities in an industrial sized drum will have much shorter strands of fibre than the same thing made by me in my kitchen.

No it won't. If I turn wheat grains into flour in a hand mill at home, and sieve it to the same sieve size, as Smith's Flour Mills of Worksop with their massive millstones, it will be the same flour. The fibre particles will be the same.

The same goes for other food materials. If I make significant changes to the composition (eg size distribution) of a food, I will change its behaviour in the finished food. So if I had a crap mill and only took my hand made flour down to half grains of wheat, you would have a point. But I don't, my hand powered flour mill works if I put enough work in to mill it down to flour, and if I didn't mill it down to flour it wouldn't work for bread. I'd know if one of my processes were significantly different because that ingredient would then behave differently in the final recipe. Meat mincing, likewise. I can do it a kilo at a time, or a tonne. If one has a different size distribution, let's say if I had a bowl chopper that turned it into a comminute rather than a mince, then it will be obvious, because it won't work in mince recipes.

The point is that meat mincing, flour milling and the like are not different when they are done in a factory, other than the scale of the whole thing. The unit operation remains the same, just like crude oil distilled in a laboratory will generate identical petrol to that distilled in a massive oil refinery still, because the unit operation is the same.

Unless you know something about the laws of conservation of energy that I don't...

No, same laws of conservation. Different understanding of the principles of unit operations, maybe.

 

[KnittyNorah]

Like the person above, you're not comparing like with like. Of course if you change the formulation the food changes, of course it has a different nutritional content. However this discussion started as "the nutrients in highly processed food are more available to the body than home cooked food, because of the processing", which is not true.
You're saying "I use nicer ingredients at home than the manufacturers", which is probably the case if you shop carefully, certainly for the cheaper end of the manufactured foods market. It's not for the premium end though, and I know, because I make the stuff. I see the beef that goes into a pie. What checks do you make on the raw material that your butcher uses in his mince?

Since being a young adult, I have tried to only eat meat from animals I have personally met and which I, or someone I know and trust, has either done the deed or accompanied them to the abbatoir; for many years, therefore, I have been effectively vegetarian and sometimes even vegan when eating away from home. Currently my preferred practice is not possible and it is doubtful that it will become so in the near future, either, so I am now largely vegetarian, occasionally pescatarian.
My mother, however, taught me to use a recognisable cut of meat, preferably from a carcase I had seen for myself, and make my own mince with a Spong hand-powered mincer, which I still have somewhere in a box. This has come in very useful at times in my life when I was presented with a part of a dead animal and expected to make a 'British' style dish with the creature allocated to me ...

ETA it is impossible to replicate some industrially-prepared food in the home kitchen anyway, as even some of the ingredients are not ones available to the normal home cook, so there is no ability to make a direct comparison anyway.

 

[battered]

This has come in very useful at times in my life when I was presented with a part of a dead animal and expected to make a 'British' style dish with the creature allocated to me ...

This sort of thing goes down very well in France. I do like a nice rabbit, so too do the French. I also like cooking, but the French can't quite grasp the idea on an English person who can cook. An English *man* who can cook, well that's just infaisable.