Whenever I see any nutrition article like this, I am extremely skeptical. The definition of "ultra-processed" is completely arbitrary as I read it [1]. The control diet is generally worse on non-processing related attributes. The processing angle really only serves to confuse the nutrition debate as the attributes of ultra-processed food (excess sugar, use of partially hydrogenated oils) are already well established health risks. By putting things in the context of the processing, it ignores the possibility of processed foods that avoid these ingredients. By limiting the processing concern to an arbitrary definition of ultra-processing, actual causes might be left uncovered, while non-causes are left in. Whey protein, which I know many very healthy people eat, is considered ultra-processed. Meanwhile, pasta is considered merely processed, while if the pasta is ready to eat, it is ultra-processed. This distinction doesn't seem to be a useful way to make intelligent decisions, and is simply a spurious correlation actually caused by the food ingredients, or just some side effect of people eating less when food isn't ready-made, because they have to do more work to consume it...
Your body doesn't need ultra processed foods. It hasn't evolved to needing them. It has, in fact, evolved to surviving well on food within the horizon.
If you don't drink protein shakes, you will get as big as nature intended for your natural diet and genetics.
Cutting out ultra processed foods because they are not part of our evolutionary diet allows us to omit six or seven figures worth of grant money for science we don't need. Saves time for readers, too.
A thing common in ultra-processed foods is that they are heavily optimized to be palatable while also often losing its satiating effect. Those are things that can be measured only difficultly.
It's not clear that "ultraprocessed" is the issue. The article says "they are usually very high in sugar, salt and fat". Too much salt and sugar are known to be problems. That has nothing to do with processing. Although it does have to do with what will sell.
This is something that often bothers me about the "real food" or similar debate that is largely emotional more than anything else.
What this should all build down to is the nutritional content of the food. Just because I go to a local farmers market and buy the greatest "organic" or "non-gmo" (or insert some other mostly meaningless thing that has been turned into a way to scare consumers to spend more money) and buy the greatest looking apples I can find.
That isn't going to do a damn thing if I turn around and try to replicate the McDonalds (or I guess Popeyes now?) fried apple pie. It is still horrible for me and I highly doubt there is much if any difference in the little bit of vitamins I would get from the apples still in the pie.
Meanwhile I can go for about as processed as you can get, and do Soylent or Huel and have a pretty damn balanced diet if I could somehow sustain myself entirely on that (more of a willpower thing and not an issue with the food itself).
This also ignores the major clasism that has made its way into how people eat and what food they have access to. There is a reason it tends to be urban well off white people going on and on about this stuff.
I cringe anytime I hear the words "real" or "whole" food as if that has any real meaning outside of a marketing term.
If anything this tells me that we need to do better with how we process food, not that processed food itself is the issue.
Well... salt is generally used to preserve texture and flavor. At least that's from my canning background. It's possible to reduce some salt, but really depends.
There's emerging evidence that consuming potassium with salt tends to reduce the negative effects of higher salt intake. Basically, that many of the prior sodium studies ignored the sodium/potassium balance. Of course you could still have too much sodium while staying in balance, but just thought that's worth pointing out. If nothing else, it illustrates how complex it nutrition science can be, and how much we still have to learn (or at least dispel popular half-truths).
That misses his point. You can have too much sugar/salt/fat without eating a single "ultra" processed food. So if the root of the problem is sugar/salt/fat it doesn't simply follow that "ultra" processed food is the problem.
The point here is that they are essentially defining "ultraprocessed" as being full of salt, fat and sugar. I can go buy a frozen pizza at Trader Joe's that contains organic flour, yeast, tomatoes and cheese. Nutritionally identical to what I'd make at home. I can also grind sugar cane and wheat berries and churn butter in my kitchen to make a cake that is just as unhealthy as a Twinkie.
As a layman non-scientist, I wonder why we see so many relatively low-value observational studies in diet/nutrition, often with results that get contradicted or fail to replicate a few years later.
What would prevent us from doing a study like this: take 1000 diverse subjects, assign each of them a lab assistant, and for 2+ years, diligently track everything they eat, their exercise, sleep, etc. You could pay each participant and staff $100k/each, and the cost would be on the order of $400MM.
May not be epistemologically perfect given that people change their behavior when observed, but still superior to plenty of the stuff getting published now, and likely the knowledge gained for humankind would be worth many billions.
> As a layman non-scientist, I wonder why we see so many relatively low-value observational studies in diet/nutrition, often with results that get contradicted or fail to replicate a few years later.
On my peak fitness enthusiasm I kept a rigorous food diary for some time and it was such a pain in the ass that I don't believe for a second that food diaries coming from people who are not 100% committed and interested in keeping one are accurate at all. People would often forget to log small snacks they have, or estimate portion sizes completely wrong, or neglect logging sauces, oils, condiments, etc.
What you describe is still an observational study, just a very expensive one now. It's still quite possible you'd fail to measure something important you hadn't thought of.
Better to spend some of that budget instead on a randomised controlled trial but there are likely issues with getting people to follow their prescribed diets to the letter
Really? I would think weight loss, inflammation, and psychological health measures would at least be affected on a timescale of a couple years, if not risks for things like cancer and heart disease.
There are a wide variety of heavily promoted dietary identities - from vegan to carnivore - but I'm convinced that in terms of one's health, eliminating these processed food items from one's diet is the one that has the most long-term benefits. The only downside is that relying only on 'real food' ingredients requires a fair amount of cooking, but the effort is well worth the payback.
There's no snappy one-word term for this dietary choice, maybe someone could come up with one.
> There are a wide variety of heavily promoted dietary identities - from vegan to carnivore - but I'm convinced that in terms of one's health, eliminating these processed food items from one's diet is the one that has the most long-term benefits.
What has you convinced?
I wouldn't be surprised, but I'm curious if you're relying on anything more than intuition. I don't think intuition is worthless, for whatever it's worth. Seems like a pretty common-sense idea that non-fresh foods could have adverse effects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a major factor in increased rates of cancer, which is surely a combination of many mild factors that accumulate over a long period of time.
Incidentally, I think this is also why many extreme diets seem to have some evidence in favor of their health benefits. From where I'm standing, it seems like veganism/paleo/etc start being linked to various problems right around the time the agro industry starts cranking out specialized (read: highly-processed) products.
> "Ultraprocessed foods are defined as "industrial formulations of food substances (oils, fats, sugars, starch, and protein isolates) that contain little or no whole foods and typically include flavorings, colorings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives," according to the study.
But if I have a package that says it is whole grain or whatever, how do I know if it is or isn't ultraprocessed or just, you know, regular processed?
Indeed. I hate the term "ultraprocessed" so much, because I have no idea what to look for if I try to avoid it.
If I chop my potatoes before boiling them, is that processing? If not, which steps in cooking count as "processing"? And how many of those steps need to be included for the food to be "ultraprocessed"? How can I avoid accidentally "ultraprocessing" my food when I cook it at home?
The definition I heard (apparently by the Brazilian woman that did the first research) was "any ingredient that wouldn't be found in a regular kitchen". Not meaning things like rutabagas or mangosteen, but rather things like xantham gum, soy lecithin, and things with organic chemical names. So by definition you cannot ultra-process your food in your home kitchen.
I think the name is lousy, but I think the reason is that things like xantham gum and soy lecithin are there to provide texture. For example, low-fat yogurt has some of these in it because if you take the fat out, it doesn't have the same texture (probably isn't even solid), so you need to do some processing to get it to the same place. See [1] for a summary.
There's a podcast on the BBC where a doctor tries to get his twin doctor brother of ultra-processed food. Unfortunately, most of the episodes involve emotional issues, but they do have a few minutes of interviews with major researchers. [3] is sort of a summary.
Why are you seeking absolute definitions where none exist? If you have to ask, its probably bad for you. Edges of the grocery store, avoid the aisles, ingredients-not-meals, things not in packaging.... Rules of thumbs abound. Next, a bit of ultra processed stuff is obviously not going to kill you. Some soy sauce, or the ocassional frozen pizza is obviously OK. And its obvious that your example is needlessly contrived. No, its not processing.
This whole thread reads like pedantry for the sake of it.
2. The longer the list of ingredients, the more likely it is to be "highly" processed
3. The way you avoid 'highly' processed stuff is to avoid processing altogether. Buy corn you have to husk, meat you have to cut, fish you have to filet, wine you have to uncork, bread you have to slice, etc.
> Buy corn you have to husk, meat you have to cut, fish you have to filet, wine you have to uncork, bread you have to slice, etc.
Ok, this is just silly. Cutting your own meat doesn't make it healthier than having a butcher cut it for you. Box wine is no more or less healthy than bottled wine with a cork. Slicing bread yourself doesn't change its health contents.
Its statements like these that make the whole argument seem like nonsense.
The sorry state is that a chain is not stronger than the weakest link. And a food is not healthier than the worst ingredient/compound. A "good" nutrient does not make up for the bad/ultra processed additives.
Stay off the granola bar with high fructose corn syrup.
It is more important to avoid the bad anti-nutrients than to eat a particular food for a certain "miracle" nutrient.
> And a food is not healthier than the worst ingredient/compound. A "good" nutrient does not make up for the bad/ultra processed additives.
This can't be true in an absolute sense. There is no way that adding a single drop of high fructose corn syrup to a meal would completely ruin any health benefits of the rest of the meal. There is also no way that adding a bit of corn syrup to a plate of broccoli would be equally as unhealthy for you as a bowl of lucky charms. Obviously the mix of ingredients matters.
Where do you get the idea that a single bad ingredient ruins the entire food?
> Stay off the granola bar with high fructose corn syrup.
Would a granola bar sweetened with the exact same number of sucrose/fructose molecules from organic coconut sugar (or palm sugar, or date juice, etc) be any more healthy?
I currently do not believe it would be. Sugar is sugar. But I'm not 100% sure.
Ultraprocessed for me means "truly delicious and dopamine-inducing". Not that I don't find other food tasty, but something that feels engineered to please your tongue is usually ultraprocessed.
> "People who consumed more than 20% of daily calories from processed foods had a 28% faster decline in global cognition and a 25% faster decline in executive functioning compared to people who ate less than 20%,"
I wish they just showed a graph of "decline in cognition" vs "percentage of calories from processed foods" instead of making me try to parse the relevant information out of sentences like that. What 10% of my calories come from processed foods? I'm I completely safe or is the effect linear in percentage of calories or what?
This page from the BBC explains the diffrences between unprocessed and minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods.
"Ultra-processed foods usually contain ingredients that you wouldn’t add when cooking homemade food. You may not recognise the names of these ingredients as many will be chemicals, colourings, sweeteners and preservatives."
you could distinguish a loaf of bread, which is processed, from boxed bread products like crackers or cookies (ultraprocessed), but i doubt that distinction matters much for our health, as they'll both likely include said additives in varying amounts. in shopping and food prep, i'd consider them synonyms--as in, things to avoid (but not dogmatically, sometimes you want some potato chips).
processed foods only comes in a box, bag, or can; that is, most of the center aisles in a grocery store. buy mostly fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, and dairy--things found on the outer ring of the store. if you want grains or beans, prefer buying the grains/beans directly, not the boxed form of them.
One of the best thing about the "meal in a box" companies is they remove a lot of the friction from cooking from scratch. I use Blue Apron and love the convenience. They gather ingredients that aren't practical for a single person to normally source/maintain yet I get to have interesting and tasty meals. When it comes to a lot of fresh herbs or specialty items, the cost of meals through them can actually be lower since you have far less waste.
They also help force me out of my comfort zones. There are a lot of recipes that would never try cold out of a cook book, but because they are bundling everything needed the risk/reward tilts more firmly into the "why not try it" column.
Even if every meal was at a premium it's still worth it to me for the connivence.
I've shared free meal codes with friends/family - had a co-worker who's teenage daughter wanted to cook more but was overwhelmed. They tried the service, used it for a year and after she got her skills and confidence up they ended up dropping it, but remade their favorites from the last year and used those for ideas of other recipes to try that they probably otherwise wouldn't have.
You don't have to take them every week too - I currently skip around and do it maybe one or two times a month just to supplement my other cooking. The variety is nice. It is a bit of a pain requiring some micromanaging since they are obviously motivated to keep you on the weekly treadmill.
I'd like to hear more about the study design / quality of the science.
How are they correcting for correlation between the ability to afford the more money-expensive or more time-expensive ends of rich people with experts that cook for them, and health nuts (or suffers of seriously annoying allergies) that cook for themselves even though it's more time expensive?
It would help if the exact factors that cause health issues in ultra-processed foods could be identified. "Ultra-processed" is too crude a heuristic. sugar and fat? refined seed oil? calorie density? Food coloring and other toxic ingredients?
Readit News
[1] https://www.fao.org/publications/card/en/c/CA5644EN/
If you don't drink protein shakes, you will get as big as nature intended for your natural diet and genetics.
Cutting out ultra processed foods because they are not part of our evolutionary diet allows us to omit six or seven figures worth of grant money for science we don't need. Saves time for readers, too.
The author has a "natural" bias.
What this should all build down to is the nutritional content of the food. Just because I go to a local farmers market and buy the greatest "organic" or "non-gmo" (or insert some other mostly meaningless thing that has been turned into a way to scare consumers to spend more money) and buy the greatest looking apples I can find.
That isn't going to do a damn thing if I turn around and try to replicate the McDonalds (or I guess Popeyes now?) fried apple pie. It is still horrible for me and I highly doubt there is much if any difference in the little bit of vitamins I would get from the apples still in the pie.
Meanwhile I can go for about as processed as you can get, and do Soylent or Huel and have a pretty damn balanced diet if I could somehow sustain myself entirely on that (more of a willpower thing and not an issue with the food itself).
This also ignores the major clasism that has made its way into how people eat and what food they have access to. There is a reason it tends to be urban well off white people going on and on about this stuff.
I cringe anytime I hear the words "real" or "whole" food as if that has any real meaning outside of a marketing term.
If anything this tells me that we need to do better with how we process food, not that processed food itself is the issue.
There's emerging evidence that consuming potassium with salt tends to reduce the negative effects of higher salt intake. Basically, that many of the prior sodium studies ignored the sodium/potassium balance. Of course you could still have too much sodium while staying in balance, but just thought that's worth pointing out. If nothing else, it illustrates how complex it nutrition science can be, and how much we still have to learn (or at least dispel popular half-truths).
What would prevent us from doing a study like this: take 1000 diverse subjects, assign each of them a lab assistant, and for 2+ years, diligently track everything they eat, their exercise, sleep, etc. You could pay each participant and staff $100k/each, and the cost would be on the order of $400MM.
May not be epistemologically perfect given that people change their behavior when observed, but still superior to plenty of the stuff getting published now, and likely the knowledge gained for humankind would be worth many billions.
On my peak fitness enthusiasm I kept a rigorous food diary for some time and it was such a pain in the ass that I don't believe for a second that food diaries coming from people who are not 100% committed and interested in keeping one are accurate at all. People would often forget to log small snacks they have, or estimate portion sizes completely wrong, or neglect logging sauces, oils, condiments, etc.
Better to spend some of that budget instead on a randomised controlled trial but there are likely issues with getting people to follow their prescribed diets to the letter
It seems too short and unfocused to learn anything meaningful.
There's no snappy one-word term for this dietary choice, maybe someone could come up with one.
What has you convinced?
I wouldn't be surprised, but I'm curious if you're relying on anything more than intuition. I don't think intuition is worthless, for whatever it's worth. Seems like a pretty common-sense idea that non-fresh foods could have adverse effects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a major factor in increased rates of cancer, which is surely a combination of many mild factors that accumulate over a long period of time.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/18508-eat-food-not-too-much...
Relatedly: I'm taking bets regarding lab-grown meat.
> "Ultraprocessed foods are defined as "industrial formulations of food substances (oils, fats, sugars, starch, and protein isolates) that contain little or no whole foods and typically include flavorings, colorings, emulsifiers, and other cosmetic additives," according to the study.
But if I have a package that says it is whole grain or whatever, how do I know if it is or isn't ultraprocessed or just, you know, regular processed?
If I chop my potatoes before boiling them, is that processing? If not, which steps in cooking count as "processing"? And how many of those steps need to be included for the food to be "ultraprocessed"? How can I avoid accidentally "ultraprocessing" my food when I cook it at home?
I think the name is lousy, but I think the reason is that things like xantham gum and soy lecithin are there to provide texture. For example, low-fat yogurt has some of these in it because if you take the fat out, it doesn't have the same texture (probably isn't even solid), so you need to do some processing to get it to the same place. See [1] for a summary.
There's a podcast on the BBC where a doctor tries to get his twin doctor brother of ultra-processed food. Unfortunately, most of the episodes involve emotional issues, but they do have a few minutes of interviews with major researchers. [3] is sort of a summary.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tcz/episodes/player
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/van_tulleken
This whole thread reads like pedantry for the sake of it.
1. Don't buy meals; buy ingredients.
2. The longer the list of ingredients, the more likely it is to be "highly" processed
3. The way you avoid 'highly' processed stuff is to avoid processing altogether. Buy corn you have to husk, meat you have to cut, fish you have to filet, wine you have to uncork, bread you have to slice, etc.
Ok, this is just silly. Cutting your own meat doesn't make it healthier than having a butcher cut it for you. Box wine is no more or less healthy than bottled wine with a cork. Slicing bread yourself doesn't change its health contents.
Its statements like these that make the whole argument seem like nonsense.
Stay off the granola bar with high fructose corn syrup.
It is more important to avoid the bad anti-nutrients than to eat a particular food for a certain "miracle" nutrient.
This can't be true in an absolute sense. There is no way that adding a single drop of high fructose corn syrup to a meal would completely ruin any health benefits of the rest of the meal. There is also no way that adding a bit of corn syrup to a plate of broccoli would be equally as unhealthy for you as a bowl of lucky charms. Obviously the mix of ingredients matters.
Where do you get the idea that a single bad ingredient ruins the entire food?
Would a granola bar sweetened with the exact same number of sucrose/fructose molecules from organic coconut sugar (or palm sugar, or date juice, etc) be any more healthy?
I currently do not believe it would be. Sugar is sugar. But I'm not 100% sure.
I wish they just showed a graph of "decline in cognition" vs "percentage of calories from processed foods" instead of making me try to parse the relevant information out of sentences like that. What 10% of my calories come from processed foods? I'm I completely safe or is the effect linear in percentage of calories or what?
That describes nearly all modern cultivars of fruits/vegetables.
"Ultra-processed foods usually contain ingredients that you wouldn’t add when cooking homemade food. You may not recognise the names of these ingredients as many will be chemicals, colourings, sweeteners and preservatives."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_...
processed foods only comes in a box, bag, or can; that is, most of the center aisles in a grocery store. buy mostly fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood, and dairy--things found on the outer ring of the store. if you want grains or beans, prefer buying the grains/beans directly, not the boxed form of them.
They also help force me out of my comfort zones. There are a lot of recipes that would never try cold out of a cook book, but because they are bundling everything needed the risk/reward tilts more firmly into the "why not try it" column.
Even if every meal was at a premium it's still worth it to me for the connivence.
I've shared free meal codes with friends/family - had a co-worker who's teenage daughter wanted to cook more but was overwhelmed. They tried the service, used it for a year and after she got her skills and confidence up they ended up dropping it, but remade their favorites from the last year and used those for ideas of other recipes to try that they probably otherwise wouldn't have.
You don't have to take them every week too - I currently skip around and do it maybe one or two times a month just to supplement my other cooking. The variety is nice. It is a bit of a pain requiring some micromanaging since they are obviously motivated to keep you on the weekly treadmill.
How are they correcting for correlation between the ability to afford the more money-expensive or more time-expensive ends of rich people with experts that cook for them, and health nuts (or suffers of seriously annoying allergies) that cook for themselves even though it's more time expensive?