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J.K. Lund's avatar

"To make food cheaper and faster to produce, fast food restaurants started using lower-quality ingredients and increasing the portion sizes of their meals. This led to an increase in calories, fat, and sodium content in their menu items, which contributed to the rise in obesity and other diet-related health problems"

One minor nitpick on the above quote is that fat consumption is actually down, carbohydrates and sugar consumption are up. In the misinformed "fat free" craze, many manufactures began offering "low fat" alternatives that loaded up instead on sugars. It's the sugar/carbs and insulin resistance that ensues, that is primarily to blame for obesity and chronic health issues, not fat.

To your general premise though, you are correct. As I wrote: "food processing tends to strip nutrition from food...Bacteria, like any other organism, seek out nutrients. To extend shelf life, food needs to be unattractive to bacteria and insects, thus the nutrition must be removed.

For the same reason, modern food production has thrown our Omega-3/Omega-6 ratio woefully out of balance. Omega-3 fatty acids break down and spoil quickly, so food production and selective breeding began selecting against Omega-3 long before science had even identified its existence. In the meantime, the availability of Omega-6s fatty acids has exploded. We are getting far too little of the former and far too much of the latter."

In short, we are getting more calories and less nutrition, this is the core of the problem.

Source: https://www.lianeon.org/p/the-paradox-of-processed-food

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Atx Dancer's avatar

I love that you pointed out the problem fast food and media. A lot of people understand the importance of organic, unprocessed foods but spend hours on instagram and don’t pay attention to the stress induced unnecessarily by constant Apple News notifications. At least I didn’t until I took stock of my mental health and what was “mental junk food”. The cool thing was I took the same approach to media as I did to my diet. (Elimination diet works for food and media).

1) eliminate all social media and news apps tv movies etc 2) add in sparsely and assess how much it helped or hurt your mental health and assess if there was any benefit. Today I spend less time on social media platforms and when I do there is usually a reason (education, art etc) vs scrolling pointlessly. My mental health has improved tremendously and I’m always looking for ways to improve.

Thank you for writing in detail about this. I read a book called “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman in college and I often find myself wondering what he would write if he were alive today. Postman argued that TV was causing us to be distracted, unproductive and unhealthy. I’m sure he would have agreed with this essay. Would love he know more about how you maintain “social media mental hygiene” lol if that makes sense

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