It’s immunotherapy that prevents the cancers from deactivating the immune cells that would ordinarily kill the cancer cells. So it’s like a traditional vaccine in that it causes changes to the immune system to better equip it to fight disease, but it’s a pretty new methodology of accomplishing that.
Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.
But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic “forever chemicals”? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.
I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.
And look, I’m a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.
“Very little fiber”, “Frequently have a lot of oil”, and “Relatively high in salt and sugar” aren’t a classification, they’re vibes.
What you’ve listed aren’t classification criteria. These are generally common characteristics within the category, and a basis for investigating what causes ultra processed foods to generally be bad.
I’m in this thread arguing that the scientists have the data to be able to just analyze correlations and trends of those characteristics directly, rather than taking the dubious step of classifying them into the NOVA category to begin with.
It’s not pseudoscience or not science though. The models are the models, and I think they’re bad models, but I don’t think they’re outright unscientific.
So why not focus on the foods containing that stuff, rather than the superficial resemblance of all foods that kinda look like the foods that contain that stuff?
Let’s say you have a problem with potassium bromate, a dough additive linked to cancer that remains legal in U.S. bread but is banned in places like Canada, the UK, the EU.
So let’s have that conversation about bromate! Let’s not lump all industrially produced breads into that category, even in countries where bromate has been banned.
The NOVA classifications are difficult to work with, and I think the trend of certain nutrition scientists (and the media that reports on those scientists’ work) have completely over-weighted the value of the “ultra processed” category.
The typical whole grain, multigrain bread sold at the store qualifies as ultra-processed, in large part because whole grain flour is harder to shape into loaves than white flour, and manufacturers add things like gluten to the dough. Gluten, of course, already “naturally” exists in any wheat bread, so it’s not exactly a harmful ingredient. But that additive tips the loaf of bread into ultra processed (or UPF or NOVA category 4), same as Doritos.
But whole grain bread isn’t as bad for you as Doritos or Coca Cola. So why do these studies treat them as the same? And whole grain factory bread is almost certainly better for you than the local bakery’s white bread (merely processed food or NOVA category 3), made from industrially produced white flour, with the germ and bran removed during milling. Or industrially produced potato chips, which are usually considered simply processed foods in category 3 when not flavored with anything other than salt, which certainly aren’t more nutritious or healthier than that whole wheat bread or pasta.
If specific ingredients are a problem, we should study those ingredients. If specific combinations or characteristics are a problem, we should study those combinations. Don’t throw out the baby (healthy ultra processed foods) with the bathwater (unhealthy ultra processed foods).
And I’m not even going to get into how the system is fundamentally unsuited for evaluating fermented, aged, or pickled foods, especially dairy.
The NOVA classification system is “real” science, but in my opinion the arbitrary and vague definitions make it so that it’s not very good or very robust science.
The infuriating thing is that I believe that nutrition is more than just a linear addition of all the constituent ingredients (kinda the default view of nutrition science up through the 90’s), but addressing the shortcomings of that overly simple model shouldn’t mean making an even more simple model.
NOVA classification is the wrong answer to a legitimate problem.
If you eat nothing but rabbit or other lean protein your body can essentially starve because it’s not getting enough fat and carbohydrates. But eating rabbits in addition to a diet that has fat from other sources makes the entire meal plan balanced enough to where the rabbit is a helpful/important part of the balanced diet.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.
It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.
And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).
Coral can recover after bleaching, so the threshold for bleaching is different from the threshold for dying.
i can say people are fucking animals when it goes to camping
It took me reading the rest of your comment, and a lot of thought, before I realized you were using the word “fucking” as some kind of intensifier instead of as the word for “having sex with.”
You guys are getting diagnosed?!?