Fear and Pleasure in Beef and Ultra-Processed Foods
For reasons that escape us, it has become fashionable to preach that food is medicine. So food marketers are looking for snippets of research they can use to persuade people to buy their latest formulations of food-like and ultra-processed products, Standing in unflinching opposition are food policy advocates who (though they favor the food-is-medicine catchphrase) tell us those ultra-processed foods will kill us. So we should favor whole and minimally processed foods. Unless the whole food is beef – which will kill both us and the planet. Then we are faced with a dilemma of what to fear more, beef or ultra-processed foods marketed as meat alternatives.
Pleasure is not really part of this equation. Yet humans seem drawn to find pleasure in their food.
Healthy Eating with Food We Like
It turns out that finding pleasure in the food we eat is likely an important part of healthy patterns for eating. In fact, a new controlled study suggests that eating a little beef can give people more pleasure and prompt them to moderate their consumption of carbs and sugar.
Morgan Braden, Jess Gwin, and Heather Leidy compared the effects of consuming two diets with similar caloric and protein content. One included two servings per day of fresh, lean beef. The other diet was entirely from plants. On the seventh day of these tightly controlled diets, people had the option of consuming additional foods rich in carbs and fats.
The two diets were equally satisfying. But these subjects liked the diet that included beef better and on the ad libitum day, they chose to consume less sugar and carbs. Could it be that eating food we like is important?
Soy, Beef, and Skeletal Muscle
In another controlled study, David Church and colleagues tested the effects of ground beef patties versus a soy-based, ultra-processed alternative on skeletal muscle protein synthesis. The comparisons were between three options: a 4-ounce beef patty, a 4-ounce soy patty, and an 8-ounce soy patty. Cutting straight to the results, they found that four ounces of beef stimulated more muscle formation than the same amount of a soy patty. With a double serving of soy patty, the effects on muscle synthesis were similar.
It’s Complicated
So should we fear eating beef more than we fear the ultra-processed foods that some advocates insist are making us sick? The truth is that food and dietary patterns are complicated. The research on ultra-processed foods is incomplete. In the International Journal of Epidemiology, Lauren O’Connor, Kirsten Herrick, and Keren Papier caution us:
“Decades of research have helped refine public health recommendations and dietary guidelines. To achieve a similar understanding of the impact of UPFs on health, and potentially inform well-established dietary recommendations, more robust research is needed to clarify what features of foods (e.g. processing, additives, formulation) constitute the label ‘ultra-processed’ and to address several outstanding challenges.”
Before we preach fear and loathing of a wide range of foods, we would do well to heed these words.
Click here for the Braden study and here for the Church study. For the O’Connor commentary, click here.
Actual Veggies, photograph by Ted Kyle / ConscienHealth
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September 14, 2024
