FWIW I’m pretty confident this is me too; you can ask me about it any time you like—I would love to figure out/replicate what I think I have going here, to find out if it’s teachable/shareable
(There’s -one- area of life where I’m less confident I have full access, so it isn’t fair to say I feel 100% this way—but 94-98%)
The ideas in this post remind me both of David Schnarch’s book Brain Talk (and in particular the concept of mind mapping which is central to the book) and also Leverage’s Self-Alignment System, which includes a step almost identical to your ‘hypothesise without checking’ step as a way to address situations where you get hijacked while trying to introspect.
Also I think cultures in which honesty/vulnerability is valorised and privacy/saving face is denigrated limit people’s options for responding to hostile telepaths more than cultures in which privacy is seen as something everyone deserves and should be allowed. (I think; it’s possible there are ways hostile telepaths could take advantage of privacy-protecting cultures that I can’t think of right now),
I call a water fountain a bubbler and I’m from Australia
1I suspect the word 'pre-prepared' is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here--when I see that item on the list I think things like pre-fried chicken, frozen burger patties, veggie pakora, veggies in a sauce for a stir-fry, stuff like that (like you'd find in a ready-made frozen meal). Not like, frozen peas.
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.
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.
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
My values/morality are too complicated and contextual for me to be able to describe/list them easily, but if I’m not true to them, I feel some sort of phenomenological consequence—an emotional reaction (grief, anger etc), or a distinct lack of clarity (cognitive fuzziness, a drained feeling, fatigue); there are probably other signs too but those are obvious ones.