I typically consume my greens with ground flax seeds in a smoothie.
I feel very confident that adding refined oil to vegetables shouldn't be considered healthy, in the sense that the opportunity cost of 1 Tablespoon of olive oil is 120 calories, which is over a pound of spinach for example. Certainly it's difficult to eat that much spinach and it's probably unwise, but I just say that to illustrate that you can get a lot more nutrition from 120 calories than the oil will be adding, even if it makes the greens more bioavailable.
That said "healthy" is a complicated concept. If adding some oil to greens helps something eat greens they otherwise wouldn't eat for example, that's great.
I am perhaps not speaking as precisely as I should be. I appreciate your comments.
I believe it's correct to say that if you consider all of the food/energy we consumed in the past 50+ million years, it's virtually all plants.
The past 2-2.5 million years had us introducing more animal products to greater or lesser extents. Some were able to subsist on mostly animal products. Some consumed them very rarely.
In that sense it is a relatively recent introduction. My main point is that given our evolutionary history, the idea that plants would be healthier for us than animal products when we have both in abundance, and the idea that plants are more suitable to maintaining health long past reproductive age, aren't immediately/obviously unreasonable ideas.
I would consider adding salt to something to be making that thing less healthy. If adding salt is essential to making something edible, I think it would be healthier to opt for something that doesn't require added salt. That's speaking generally though, someone might not be getting enough sodium, but typically there is adequate sodium in a diet of whole foods.
We often combine foods to make nutrients more accessible, like adding oil to greens with fat-soluble vitamins.
I would disagree that adding refined oil to greens would be healthy overall.
Not sure how much oil we're talking, but a tablespoon of oil has more calories than an entire pound of greens. Even if the oil increases the availability of vitamins, I am very sceptical that it would be healthier than greens or other whole plants with an equivalent caloric content to the added oil. I believe it's also the case that fats from whole foods can offer similar bioavailability effects.
At the same time, as far as I'm aware some kinds of vinegar might sometimes be a healthy addition to a meal, despite it's processing being undoubtedly contrary to the general guidelines I'm defending, so even if I don't agree about the oil I think the point still stands.
I do think you're offering some valid points that confound my idea of simple guidelines somewhat, but I still don't think they're very significant exceptions to my main point.
Appreciate the dialogue:)
I think we're pretty confident that refined oils are unhealthy (especially in larger quantities) , I believe there's just controversy about the magnitude of explanatory power given to seed oils.
There's some simple processes that make it easier/possible to digest whole foods that would otherwise be difficult/impossible to healthily digest, but I don't really think there's meaningful confusion as to whether that's being referred to by the term processed foods.
Could you offer some examples of healthy foods /better for us foods that are processed such that there would be meaningful confusion surrounding the idea of it being healthy to avoid processed foods, according to how that term is typically used?
I can think of some, but definitely not anything of enough consequence to help me to understand why people here seem so critical of the concept of reducing processed foods as a health guideline.
I had just searched on google about ways to make olives edible and got some mixed results. The point I was trying to make was that the way that olives are typically processed to make them edible results in a product that isn't particularly healthy at least relatively speaking, due to having isolated chemical(s) added to it in its processing.
The main thing I'm trying to say is that eating an isolated component of something we're best adapted to eat, and/or adding isolated/refined components to that food, will generally make that food less healthy than it would be were we eating all of the components of the food rather than isolated parts.
I think that process, and more complex variations of that process, are essentially what's being referred to when referring to the process behind processed foods. I think it's a generally reasonable term with a solid basis.
I don't know enough to dispute the ratios of animal products eaten by people in the paleolithic era, but it's still certainly true that throughout our evolutionary history plants made up the vast majority of our diets. The introduction of animal products representing a significant part of our diet is relatively recent thing.
The fact that fairly recently in our evolutionary history humans adapted to be able to exploit the energy and nutrition content of animal products well enough to get past reproductive age, is by no means overwhelming evidence that saturated fats "can't possibly be bad for you".
Although the connection between higher fat diets and negative health outcomes is then another inferential step that hasn't been strongly supported
How would you define strongly supported?
We don't have differential analysis of the resulting health
There is archeological evidence of Arctic people's subsisting on meat showing atherosclerosis.
A cooked food could technically be called a processed food but I don't think that adds much meaningful confusion. I would say the same about soaking something in water.
Olives can be made edible by soaking them in water. If they're made edible by soaking in a salty brine (an isolated component that can be found in whole foods in more suitable quantities) then they're generally less healthy.
Local populations might adapt by finding things that can be heavily processed into edible foods which can allow them to survive, but these foods aren't necessarily ones which would be considered healthy in a wider context.
It seems pretty straightforward to me but maybe I'm missing something in what you're saying or thinking about it differently.
Our bodies evolved to digest and utilize foods consisting of certain combinations/ratios of component parts.
Processed food typically refers to food that has been changed to have certain parts taken out of it, and/or isolated parts of other foods added to it (or more complex versions of that). Digesting sugar has very different impacts depending on what it's digested alongside with. Generally the more processed something is, the more it differs from the way that our bodies are optimized for.
To me "generally avoid processed foods" would be kinda like saying "generally avoid breathing in gasses/particulates that are different from typical earth atmosphere near sea level".
It makes sense to generally avoid inputs to our machinery to the extent that those inputs differ from those which our machinery is optimized to receive, unless we have specific good reasons.
Why should that not be the default, why should the default be requiring specific good reasons to filter out inputs to our machinery that our machinery wasn't optimized for?
I would consider most bread sold in stores to be processed or ultra processed and I think that's a pretty standard view but it's true there might be some confusion.
I would consider all of those to be processed and unhealthy and I think thats a pretty standard view, but fair enough if there's some confusion around those things.
I guess my view is that it's mostly not hogwash?
The least healthy things are clearly and broadly much more processed than the healthiest things.