Do you happen to have any recommended pointers for research on health impacts of processed food? It’s pretty easy to turn up a few recent meta reviews, which seems like a decent place to start, but I’d be interested if there were any other sources, particularly influential individual experiments, etc. (It seems like there’s a whole lot of observational studies, but many fewer RCTs, for reasons that I guess are pretty understandable.) It seems like some important work here might never use the word “processing”.
UPP is terribly written and I imagine mostly useful for its bibliography (I skimmed it in an hour or so). Metabolical is better (although far too difficult a read to be a successful popsci book), although it isn’t specifically focused on processing techniques (it in particular discusses stripping out fibre, adding sugars, reducing water, as some major processing techniques with big issues). You might find something helpful looking in the refs section of either book.
Also as a brief pointer at another cool thing in Metabolical, Lustig claims that exercise is useful for weight loss mostly because of its beneficial impact on cell repair/metabolic system repair (something specific about mitochondria?) and not for the calorie deficit it may or may not create.
I consider Lustig’s science to be quite thorough, I like him a lot. The main point against him is that he personally doesn’t look very metabolically healthy, which I would expect of someone who had spent his life investigating and theorising about what influences metabolic health.
Do you happen to have any recommended pointers for research on health impacts of processed food? It’s pretty easy to turn up a few recent meta reviews, which seems like a decent place to start, but I’d be interested if there were any other sources, particularly influential individual experiments, etc. (It seems like there’s a whole lot of observational studies, but many fewer RCTs, for reasons that I guess are pretty understandable.) It seems like some important work here might never use the word “processing”.
I don’t remember individual studies but two books that might be helpful:
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken
Metabolical by Robert Lustig
UPP is terribly written and I imagine mostly useful for its bibliography (I skimmed it in an hour or so). Metabolical is better (although far too difficult a read to be a successful popsci book), although it isn’t specifically focused on processing techniques (it in particular discusses stripping out fibre, adding sugars, reducing water, as some major processing techniques with big issues). You might find something helpful looking in the refs section of either book.
Also as a brief pointer at another cool thing in Metabolical, Lustig claims that exercise is useful for weight loss mostly because of its beneficial impact on cell repair/metabolic system repair (something specific about mitochondria?) and not for the calorie deficit it may or may not create.
I consider Lustig’s science to be quite thorough, I like him a lot. The main point against him is that he personally doesn’t look very metabolically healthy, which I would expect of someone who had spent his life investigating and theorising about what influences metabolic health.