If everyone had backyard chicken operations on that scale, I suspect we'd have a lot more disease problems! Decentralized isn't necessarily better for disease, if the overall scale stays the same.
At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
Any 'fad blitz' you see is just mindless flailing, trying to deal with a category of food we know is unhealthy but are still trying to work out the mechanisms and reasons why (which would enable improved categorizations). It doesn't seem particularly targeted at anything, and most industry players profit from ultra processed foods. I think the interesting edge case is soy milk and similar. Most brands including organic ones count as ultra processed by the nutritionists definition, with vitamins and calcium supplementation. And this very supplementation is how many vegans and vegetarians keep their calcium and B vitamin levels up, even if they don't always realize it.
It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.
But of course there is! That's not the point. You could also probably produce reasonable data indicating that food starting with the letter F results in worse health outcomes. But if you then avoid fenugreek, fava beans and fiddlehead ferns, you're not making up for the fried potatoes, fried cheese and fudge sundaes which really carried the correlation!
We want causal correlations. Someone decided that instead they wanted to divide food into categoried in this specific way, and then rank categories. And I don't think all of them were naive about what they were doing. I've read Merchants of Doubt, I don't give harmful industries the benefit of doubt when it comes to things like this.
It's certainly not the food industry that decided to brand some of its own foods as Ultra-Processd and harmful for health. That kind of categorisation is the work of nutrition researchers of various kinds. The way I understand it the food industry's interests trend the opposite way, trying to convince you that everything they sell you is good for you.
Here, this is a solid intro you can thread out of at your leisure. There's really no controversy around this at a scientific level, only on social media:
That paper unequivocally states in the beginning that the authors aren't trying to contradict that food processing affects health outcomes, they're just dissatisfied with the low quality of the classification system.
So there's no debate that ultra processed foods affect health, there's only debate on whether the category itself is good enough. And if you go deeper into the subject, it becomes pretty obvious that the Nova system is a pretty bad model.
But it's a simple model that can be easily communicated to Doomscroll Sally. The better models we have haven't caught on anywhere near as well.
"The participants in this debate agree that food processing vitally affects human health, and that the extent of food processing significantly affects diet quality and health outcomes. They disagree on the significance of ultra-processing, as defined within the Nova food classification system."
“The NO position argues that the concept of UPF is poorly defined; gives rise to misclassification of foods; is without clear mechanisms of action; and that the observed associations with obesity are likely confounded.“
Is my point. There’s a lot of correlation but whole classification system is poorly designed and mechanisms are not really explained. The whole idea of labelling foods as ultra processed as a proxy for bad seems poorly conceived. If I was to go further I’d say it has a whiff of naturalistic fallacy about it.
Processing itself doesn't make foods more or less healthier. Many highly processed foods are healthier than their unprocessed natural form. Yogurt is healthier than milk while butter isn't.
It why people ultra process foods - to make them more tasty and addictive by processing in more fats, salts and sugars. Take soda for example. They added acidic CO2 bubbles so they can add more sugar .
The problem with the term ultra processed has, it bags in huge amounts of different foods and classifies them all bad.
I notice some have said "hyperpalatable" foods, and that is better, at least it's not such a good stick to use at vegetarian meat alternatives, but it still leaves alcoholic drinks, steaks, traditional smoked food etc. off the hook. They're not usually "boosted" with exotic processing.
But "hyperpalatable" also misleading in that heavy processing of unhealthy food often just makes things a lot more storable but only a little less tasty (e.g. sweet baked goods).
For "ultra-processed", not only is the choice of classes to divide food into suspect, but they're gerrymandering those classes too. Much fried food isn't especially processed. Extract the oil, fry the vegetable in it, basically two steps. Certainly fewer steps than say, rye bread.
From what I've seen, the studies of ultra-processed food find excuses to count many processing steps for obviously unhealthy food, and fewer for benign ones.
Processing food doesn't necessarily make food less healthy, but it does it so often that it should not be considered neutral.
* it frequently removes the fiber and structure, making it faster to eat, and easier to over consume.
* it frequently adds sugar, salt, etc., not just making it easier to over consume, but with a payload that itself does extra damage.
* simply changing the form of food, without changing the contents, itself can have serious nutritional consequences [0].
For my own choices ultra processing is guilty until proven innocent. Believing that implies a radical change to how most people eat.
> to make them more tasty and addictive by processing in more fats, salts and sugars.
This is a very specific definition of "ultraprocessed" that many people don't associate with the term at all. Most people are trying to avoid the strange chemicals and fillers used to market food (like color and shine), to preserve food (so it can last longer on the shelf/warehouse and travel farther), or fill food (to replace expensive fats, starches and sugars with cheap fats, starches and sugars, or even to add indigestible elements for bulk and texture.) We have no idea of a lot of the long-term effects of some of this stuff, and much of it has never been tested for safety, just assumed to be safe.
Other people are trying to tell people to eat healthy food. This is your camp. You don't have to "ultraprocess" things to dump sugar into them. You can just dump sugar into them. I'm a home cook who doesn't really eat much processed food at all, but I certainly eat a lot of fats, salt, and sugar. I can tell you exactly how much. I put it in because I like it. I'm not interested in anybody's suggestion that I cut it other than my doctor. It's a public morals crusade disguised as a health crusade. "Ultraprocessing" often comes in when you dump some strange chemical in to disguise the lack of butter, the lack of a real sugar, or to lower salt content.
But with the other stuff, I hate that it's all lumped together in an "ultraprocessed" category. Each of the types of processing that is done on food is different, each should be justified on its own merits, the process should be public, and things that are notable should be labeled so people who want to avoid them can. Lobbyists fight in order not to label things, and not to have to test things.
I also don't mean to be overcritical about people who want people to eat healthier, but I believe that it undermines the fight to not have unknown dangers in food to turn it into an orthorexia crusade.
It's not at all obvious where to drop the context, though. Maybe it helps to have similar tasks in the context, maybe not. It did really, shockingly well on a historical HTR task I gave it, so I gave it another one, in some ways an easier one... Thought it wouldn't hurt to have text in a similar style in the context. But then it suddenly did very poorly.
Incidentally, one of the reasons I haven't gotten much into subscribing to these services, is that I always feel like they're triaging how many reasoning tokens to give me, or AB testing a different model... I never feel I can trust that I interact with the same model.
The models you interact with through the API (as opposed to chat UIs) are held stable and let you specify reasoning effort, so if you use a client that takes API keys, you might be able to solve both of those problems.
> Incidentally, one of the reasons I haven't gotten much into subscribing to these services, is that I always feel like they're triaging how many reasoning tokens to give me, or AB testing a different model... I never feel I can trust that I interact with the same model.
That's what websites have been doing for ages. Just like you can't step twice in the same river, you can't use the same version of Google Search twice, and never could.
I haven't researched it explicitly, but I do come across "what happens in the wider world" notices in small historical newspapers and sometimes I search to see what it was about. Saw a mention about some general winning an important victory, searched his name, found out he was one of the whites, and the first thing claimed about him was that he only came in "once the war was already lost".
It's a ligature in modern English, but it's a proper letter in Anglo-Saxon.
Ligatures or contextual letter variants (such as s being written with a different symbol when it's at the end of a word) are a sin to encode as characters. They should be part of the presentation layer, not the content layer! And don't even get me started on OCR which thinks such things are good to "preserve".
What I had done sometimes when writing slashed zero by a pencil and needed the disambiguation (which is not that common in my writing but it does happen sometimes that it will be important), is for the slash the other way for zero, to avoid being confused with slashed O or the symbol for empty sets. Atkinson Hyperlegible font (mentioned in another comment) also works that way, too; the slash for zero is the other way than the slashed O in languages that use that.
> A more dignified Secretary of State would have resigned when this news surfaced.
I remain impressed at the number of longstanding Republican politicians that have been willing to sacrifice their dignity and likely their political career on the Trump altar. It is a one-way trip for their credibility, and when Trump is gone what are they going to do?
The only interesting right wing politician to me right now is MTG. And that's an odd position to find myself in. She is a clown, but suddenly she seems much more real for a moment. Like we might have caught a glimpse of the actual person. I am faintly curious how her political career shapes up over the next few years (assuming her resignation does happen and is not the actual end of her ambitions).
Well, you can come up with this position or view on a 5 minute toilet break after reading something that rallied you up. Once you have a voice you can trigger an avalanche with very little it seems.
At least where I live, you can't have chickens in quite the same way our great-grandparents had. You need to comply with veterinary regulation for one, and for good reasons.
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