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.
Freyja
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Just wanted to say thank you for this post! It changed my mind slightly (to considering seed oils potentially nonproblematic in and of themselves, outside their being incorporated into ultra-processed food). I appreciate that because it’s a topic I care a lot about.
Most bread you would buy in the supermarket is ultra-processed (including almost all organic, whole grain etc etc).
Types of bread that are only -processed- (not ultra processed):
- Bakery-made bread, often sourdough, with an ingredients list that looks like (wheat flour, salt, water) perhaps with additions like fruit or seeds. This sort of bread lasts a couple of days at best.
- Bread made from literal whole grains—German fitness bread, pumpernickel, sunflower seed bread. This stuff. It is shelf stable but tastes more like a solid cracker than normal bread.
- Anything you make yourself at home.
That’s it. Anything with preservatives, dough thickeners, soy lecithin etc in its ingredients list is ultra-processed.
There’s a taxonomy now for levels of processing (NOVA groups); most research only finds problems with the highest level of processing (NOVA 4), which includes processing methods you can’t do in an ordinary kitchen, or that were not possible ~100 years ago (extrusion, moulding, preprocessing by frying are some examples given).
https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78/2021/07/NOVA-Classification-Reference-Sheet.pdf
One way it could be ‘the processing, not the ingredients’ is that in many cases the fibre is either removed or deconstructed (making it less useful in slowing down the metabolism of sugars), another is that water is removed (although I’m not sure why that’s bad exactly). This is one of the key arguments endocrinologist Robert Lustig makes against industrially-processed foods, particularly ones with added sugar, bc the fibre cannot help slow down the metabolism of the sugar because it’s broken up or removed.
Lisa doesn’t post much about parenting toddlers; she posts a bit about birth and newborns but the focus of her channel is more on cooking and homemaking and less on parenting IMO. I don’t know enough about the other woman’s channel to evaluate; I’ve only watched a few.
A parent friend recommended the RIE parenting philosophy, and RIE has several demo videos of parents interacting with their kids according to the principles. I’ve watched a few; I think they’re searchable by keyword.
Interviews and kitchen walkthroughs with the head chefs at Michelin-star restaurants; I particularly like one with the head chef at a wild seafood restaurant demonstrating his daily ingredient procurement processes: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUeEVLHfB5-T7E5TPxSphcDweIL5ioLrj
Esther Perel’s podcast called ‘Where Shall We Begin?’ where she does a live couples’ therapy session with a guest couple. It is rare to get access to a recorded therapy session, and she is at least world-renowned as a relationship therapist (although that doesn’t necessarily prove that she’s good at it).
This guy Lance has grown a prolific permaculture food garden in the high deserts of Colorado for the last (iirc) 40 years. It provides almost all his food, including grains and legumes. Here they do a walkthrough of the garden and he discusses how it works: https://youtu.be/i5yUPau-F1c?si=S6lRE4a2Ns9HujGJ
Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.
Her entire YouTube channel demonstrates a tonne of her tacit knowledge with respect to sculpting and SFX in general, but this is one good example of her showing her work on a small sculpture:
Sofia Bue is a professional SFX sculptor; she works at Weta Workshop which is the most well-known special FX company in the world; they were responsible for SFX on Lord of the Rings. She also won the SFX category at the world Bodypainting championships at least once so I think she’s pretty indisputably world-class at it.
Her entire YouTube channel demonstrates a tonne of her tacit knowledge with respect to sculpting and SFX in general, but this is one good example of her showing her work on a small sculpture:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NwYbC5t-9w&pp=ygUJc29maWEgYnVl
A few channels on parenting and homemaking:
Lisa from a YouTube channel called Farmhouse on Boone walks through her house and discusses what items she keeps where and why, and how she avoids clutter. She is a mom of 8 with a successful YouTube channel (successful enough that her husband quit his job and now helps with the channel and homeschooling).
This woman (whose name I don’t know) is a Christian mom who homeschools her 8 children. In this video she walks through a day in the life of her family. I know less about any metrics of success, except that she reports that her family is easy to run and enjoyable for her.
I don’t have one video to recommend for each topic, but YouTube is a great source of videos of giving birth and of related activities like breastfeeding, babywearing, and even holding a baby.
I think simply searching ‘birth video’ or ‘homebirth’, ‘hospital birth’ or something similar gets you enough such videos, and watching a bunch of different women give birth is probably better than watching a single ‘expert’.
I wanted to add a (possible, additional) factor in that I didn’t see included, although I don’t know how you would test it. Guess: because of the size and interconnectedness/maturity of SF’s homeless network, it might be easier to be less isolated/more connected while homeless in SF than in other places. It seems clear that in some parts of SF (I’m thinking of particular streets in SOMA and the Tenderloin, and at Civic Center) the people who live on the streets are connecting with each other and also often enjoying each other’s company. They look like friends. And this may be part of what makes the homeless population more visible in SF than in other places—they’re hanging out together, often talking loudly, and they’re often in the same place all the time, every day. There is a social scene it is possible to be part of, and this might feel better than living alone somewhere much nicer.
(There are still many people who seem both isolated and homeless, too.)
Hi Cathleen. As someone inadvertently but meaningfully once tangled up in this story who you probably don’t know, I have a deep admiration, gratitude and respect for this post and your decision to write it and post it publicly. I read all of it, and might yet read it again. It helped to make sense of the story and the parts relevant to me in a way that is, in real time, updating and improving my understanding of how different people with different personalities can participate in the same situation and come out of it with different struggles and different earned wisdom. Yours is a perspective I’ve been missing, so thank you for having the courage and grace to share it.
Upvoted because Anna articulated a lot of what I wanted to say but didn’t have the energy or clarity to say with such nuance.
Thank you for keeping that promise; I imagine it wasn’t easy to write.
I wouldn’t, but I also wouldn’t consider that to be the case for many of the speculative startups I’ve worked at, in hindsight.
I consider ‘wasting millions of dollars’ to be a shitty thing to do, but also unfortunately common. I think focusing on whether the money was wasted is distracting (and perhaps dismissive) away from the stories being told.
This may be a crux; Walter may just value personal suffering versus use of economic resources differently to me.
I feel like if you read Zoe’s medium post, read the parts where she described enduring cPTSD symptoms like panic attacks, flashbacks and paranoia consistently for two years after leaving Leverage, and then rounded that off to ‘she felt useless and bailed’ then, idk dude, we live in two different worlds.
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.