>Even packaged breads, including those high in nutritious whole grains, qualify as ultra-processed in many cases because of the additives and preservatives they contain.
However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.
I'm not sure what the situation in many parts of the US is, but is not freshly baked bread, the kind with unsurprising ingredients and that goes stale when you'd expect it, not an option?
The stuff made to sit on the supermarket's shelf for long times has such an odd consistency and flavor, very spongy and very tangy and sweet, you can't spread anything on it without toasting it first. I wouldn't take it as the standard for bread.
If you want to understand what the average American consumes the answer is whatever is on the shelf of their local Walmart (they sell groceries). The average American may assemble food from time to time but generally does not cook. That said, there are hundreds of millions of people in that country, so this is obviously a generalization, and should be treated as such.
That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into the country and that MIGHT have an impact long term. They have legitimate and affordable fresh bread.
Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day. The closest grocery store to me is 1.5 miles away up an extremely steep hill.
Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US.
You can buy fresh products at a reasonable cost in the USA, just have to make the effort to look.
Talking about processed bread, here is an example from Sam's Club [0] for sourdough boules, at $6 for four (about 1kg total). The ingredient list contains nothing ultra-processed.
Agreed. I just can't eat the bread in stores (for me to too sweet) and I'm a big bread person.
It's remarkable easy to bake your own bread (as many tried in during the pandemic). Yeah, it takes time, but it's a good way to reduce your carbs intake. i.e. if you don't bake it, you can't eat it.
The time ROI of using a bread-making machine and the 3 or so ingredients placed in it could be positive when compared to the trip to the grocery store.
There's bakeries with fresh baked bread all over the place in m y area, but most people would rather just get their bread with the rest of their groceries from the grocery store, where of course they're going to add preservatives. For those that want fresh baked, it's available, just not as convenient.
In many places it’s either not an option or not one that you’re going to find almost anywhere most people shop. As far as I know in my city the only place to find real bread is Whole Foods (where the inventory is limited and inconsistent) or the one independent bakery that happens to sell sliced bread. And it’s a Japanese bakery, so I would guess almost nobody would even think to look there. Almost every other bakery is selling bullshit like cupcakes.
It also costs $5+ a loaf when you can get the cheap stuff for $1-$2, so a lot of people just wouldn’t spend the money anyways because they don’t know or care about the difference.
Supermarket bread is the norm, good bread is the exception. I live in downtown Toronto and I have to go out of my way to find good bread, and unprocessed whole grain bread is particularly difficult to procure.
"that goes stale when you'd expect it". Super dumb question, but would fresh baked bread placed in the freezer last a few weeks ? I don't buy fresh baked out of concern most of it will get thrown away.
There's a national brand that makes fresh artisan style bread and then most even slightly upscale grocers will have a couple types in their inside bakery.
> These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.
Well, that's because they are. The question is why they are unhealthy.
Take an Apple. You eat it, it is healthy.
Slice it. You eat the slices, it's not making much of a difference. You are still eating whole chunks.
Make juice out of it. NOW it is no longer healthy. Not only because you have shredded fibers (so the fructose will absorb faster) but you are probably going to drink many more apples than you otherwise would. And your gut bacteria will be unhealthy. You are probably still fine if you drink a small amount.
Add sugar to it - now it's extremely unhealthy and it's basically a coke but with more nutrients and it's not healthy in any amount.
Or take rice. Cook the rice - fine. Polish the rice before cooking so you have white rice: no longer fine.
Food that's unprocessed, there's very little restrictions. You are going to get full eating them anyway, so it's fine. As you increase the amount of processing, you should eat less and less of them.
> high calorie soda
Note that calories are only relevant to laboratories. Living organisms work very differently. Calories are not fungible. An almond has a similar calorie content as a soda can, but it doesn't matter: we do not absorb all the calories in an almond. It's a similar thing when you eat an avocado: it's very calorie-dense, but a lot of it is in fats that will be absorbed very slowly.
Even simple sugars work very differently from one another. Our cells can readily use glucose(that will require insulin). Our cells, with very few exceptions, cannot use fructose. It goes straight to your liver to be processed by fructokinase. Most of it will actually become triglycerides and you will only burn that when you are burning fat. That process also takes a lot of energy(basically you get into debt to be repaid later). There's also a limited amount your liver can process and that's why people are getting fatty livers even without drinking - from the point of view of your liver, you might as well be drinking.
Is faster absorption really that big of a deal? Highly developed countries like Japan and South Korea that eat a lot of white rice seem considerably healthier than the U.S. as an example.
I don’t really know much about this topic but I always assumed additives were a much greater problem than white rice, white bread, etc.
I think the major problem is that no one can define what "processed" means in any consistent or objective sense. It's just a retcon'd category of things people already think of as unhealthy.
Flour, water, salt, yeast. Take those and make bread. You have "processed" food. Now, take flour, water, salt, yeast, flour conditioners, sugars, added nutrients, etc. and make bread. You have "ultra-processed" foods.
Processed can be fine as long as you use healthy ingredients. Ultra-processed is never fine.
Then again, the advice really just cashes out into buying whole foods like produce, beans, frozen bags of veggies, etc.
Better food items will get caught in the crossfire of someone naively avoiding the worse "processed foods", but maybe that's still a net win.
Even your fancy nuts example, if one of the main problems with ultra-processed foods is that they are hyperpalatable, then I see good reason to avoid fancy nuts (nuts with an oil + salt coating) and eating raw nuts instead. It's easy enough to overeat raw nuts!
If you like eating nuts, I suggest buying them with the shells. Pecans, pistachios, walnuts, heck even peanuts. You can still roast them so they taste better, but the shell slows you down a lot. Get a small bowl and when the bowl is full of shells, you stop eating them.
> However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
How so? I eat organic veggies, organic meat, nothing with added sugars, from time to time I drink a glass of organic wine. It's absolutely not difficult to avoid anything "ultra-processed" (I dislike this term which is ehnancing something not strictly defined) or even store-bought "processed".
In fact, the only, in any way, "processed" food I eat are things I make myself: veggies baked with turkey, chicken and beef, blended, portioned and frozen. No preservatives other than fat and reasonably small amounts of salt (and with sodium, I also ingest potassium). Eating healthy is fairly easy (although more expensive) and avoiding shitty food is really not hard to achieve.
That's commendable. It's "simple" as in not complicated and easy to understand. It's "difficult" as in it requires an incredible amount of discipline, and potentially time, compared to the alternative.
I think you just need to avoid taking an all-or-nothing attitude here. Knowing that ultra-processed foods are bad is valuable, even if you can't totally eliminate them from your diet. I do agree it's an overbroad category with stuff that ranges from abysmally terrible to stuff that's just kinda bad, but it has the upside of relatively low complexity (if you had ten different categories of processed food, most people would probably just give up on understanding the concept in general).
I eat mostly fish/veggies/fruit/rice, but sometimes I have pasta (and worse, sometimes I have cookies). In general, I've worked to shift my diet to unprocessed (or processed but not ultra) foods over time. Being cognizant of it is helpful at restaurants, too - I love all kinds of food, so more often than not, going with the least processed option is a helpful decider among menu items.
Careful of your rice intake. Lots of rice has arsenic, cadmium, and lead. It is part of growth and nothing to do with processing or packaging. There are even warnings from the FDA not to feed babies baby food that contains rice products.
It is interesting that "ultraprocessed" foods have all these effects but I think it seems necessary to try and tease out what about them is causing the effect because it seems like we're including wildly disparate foods, some of them not so different from something someone could plausibly make at home.
You're going to struggle to give up anything your gut bacteria is tuned to being normal, so there is an effort associated with changing your diet - but once you have been on a new diet for a few weeks, assuming it is balanced enough to be sustainable, it becomes easy.
You also have to want to do it; it's far easier to eat whatever is convenient than to put effort into finding ingredients and cooking them. The problem is that what is convenient is _not_ good for you long term, at least in the US (and at least several other western countries). A good diet is fundamental to good health (both physical and mental) - you'd think this would be axiomatic, but there are plenty of people who don't care enough for whatever reason.
> I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
You can, you've just prioritized taste/convenience over your health. Going into a supermarket and looking at what people put into their carts pretty much confirms this.
> a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed
Maybe read the labels? Also buying the cheapest thing there (w/o reading the labels) is also not a good idea.
If you're buying nuts and it has nut-x, plus a whole bunch of salt, a whole bunch of sugar, plus a whole bunch of chemicals that one glosses over, then there's a big chance that it's ultra-processed and/or something you shouldn't eat/buy.
Buying nuts in bulk is probably the best. Adding you're own spices/favors will make it super apparent on what you're consuming.
Food companies are trying to maximize profits, shelf life by adding crap to make the cheapest product. It's been obvious for a very long time.
Just an aside: countertop bread machines are amazing these days. You can control the ingredients (i.e. eliminate preservatives) and have wildly inexpensive, fresh bread since you can buy breadflour in bulk (e.g. 50-lb bags).
Making your own bread will have it qualify as non-ultra-processed. Now that might seem extreme for most folks or too cumbersome but today to avoid ultra-processed food or generally unhealthy food is pretty hard. And most people won't put in the effort no matter how well labeled it is.
To me it is more counterproductive not to label it as such, regardless that it may be highly nutritional, due to the fact that people like me who are not able to eat processed food and information like this is a literal life saver.
it seems like a lot of your problem here is being caught off guard that pre-sliced bread, which has been modified so that it does not go stale as it otherwise would, is a processed food. try buying bread from a bakery that goes stale. after recalibrating that expectation maybe this will make more sense overall?
Even though this is a review, it still suffers from the fact that diet studies are not controlled, randomized, or blind.
My mother has early onset dementia. Her habits were very healthy for 30+ years (quit drinking, quit smoking, daily exercise, lifetime healthy BMI, moderate diet) and otherwise physically she is in extremely good shape for her age. But one of the early, subtle signs of her cognitive decline was a reluctance to cook real meals. She now has progressed to a state where she can still use a smartphone or laptop for basic tasks, but isn't able to cook any sort of complex recipe from scratch, even one she previously did from memory. Seems pretty obvious to me that it's just as likely that cognitive decline causes an inability in older adults to plan and cook healthy meals, not the other way around.
Higher chance of dementia might be caused by the genome or the lack of mental exercise, so it's not just food or unhealthy habits, rather an amalgamation of various factors.
Dementia is still not yet understood well enough to identify a single causal factor, even with correlated variables. Personally my money is on HSV (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234998/). We don't have a genetic predisposition / family history of early onset dementia.
In her case, retirement and being unmarried/socially isolated during COVID lockdowns obviously contributed to a more rapid progression in decline. But you would never say that social isolation causes Alzheimer's. There are many other people with active social lives and happy marriages who get early dementia. The same is almost certainly true with diet.
Until we're allowed to muzzle humans or lock study subjects in a room for 5 years straight and carefully monitor/manage everything someone eats, it will always be hard to study something like this.
Oof, what exactly is "ultra processed food", because as far as I can tell it's "whatever seems bad".
How much "processing" a potato chip gets (slice, fry, salt) is a whole lot different than one of the meat substitute burgers.
It seems like anything done on an industrial scale is evil and anything done in your kitchen is fine, despite the two being very similar in many cases.
Either there's a problem with specific ingredients or people are just getting very poor nutrition by eating diets very heavy in fortified grain based foods and the "daily value" suggestions for micronutrients aren't being appropriately satisfied by the vitamin powder they put in these foods or the list of requirements is missing many things.
Studies like this aren't so helpful because they don't actually point to anything specific. We need to find actual mechanisms not vague hints at what might be wrong.
Well, they point out that "ultra processed" is a euphemism for hyperpalatable foods that are low in nutrients and high in calories.
I don't think we need to parcel out the exact moment in processing where something becomes "ultra processed" since it's just a euphemism. It's like overly scrutinizing an analogy for contradiction instead of considering the point it's trying to make.
An obvious mechanism would be nutrient displacement as people fill up on calories without nutrients.
If you look at the nutrients that are good for our brain like foods that promote BDNF, those are the foods these people aren't eating. Look up any of the mechanisms where diet can improve cognitive function, cardiovascular health, brain health, and then consider that someone who displaces these foods with hyperpalatable trash will not get these benefits.
“Processed food” is like many other such words, like “chemicals”, which strictly can mean anything, but is only used when you want to imply badness. And any advice like “Avoid processed food” or “Avoid chemicals” sound like they mean something, but actually don’t.
The article says that more research is needed in that regard:
> For example, you could eat a burger and fries from a fast food chain, which would be high in fat, sugar and salt as well as being ultra-processed. You could make that same meal at home, which could also be high in fat, sugar and salt but would not be ultra-processed. More research is needed to determine whether one is worse than the other.
Lard is very much food, it has been a staple of many cultures diets for a long, long time. People here in Central Europe spread it on top of sourdough bread and top with sliced leeks.
I'm with you on refined sugar, though, which is what I think you probably meant by raw sugar.
Not only are raw sugar and lard considered food, but they're better for you than refined sugar and refined plant oils. Of course, as with everything, the poison is in the dose.
Don't forget to look at what the potato chip is fried in. How was that oil processed? What preservatives were added to it to make it shelf stable? How much more are you getting than you would in something freshly made?
> How much "processing" a potato chip gets (slice, fry, salt)...
There may be additional steps when a factory makes potato chips. [1]
1 When the potatoes arrive at the plant, they are examined and tasted for quality. A half dozen or so buckets are randomly filled. Some are punched with holes in their cores so that they can be tracked through the cooking process. The potatoes are examined for green edges and blemishes. The pile of defective potatoes is weighed; if the weight exceeds a company's preset allowance, the entire truckload can be rejected.
2 The potatoes move along a conveyer belt to the various stages of manufacturing. The conveyer belts are powered by gentle vibrations to keep breakage to a minimum.
3 The potatoes are loaded into a vertical helical screw conveyer which allows stones to fall to the bottom and pushes the potatoes up to a conveyer belt to the automatic peeling machine. After they have been peeled, the potatoes are washed with cold water.
4 The potatoes pass through a revolving impaler/presser that cuts them into paper-thin slices, between 0.066-0.072 in (1.7-1.85 mm) in thickness. Straight blades produce regular chips while rippled blades produce ridged potato chips.
5 The slices fall into a second cold-water wash that removes the starch released when the potatoes are cut. Some manufacturers, who market their chips as natural, do not wash the starch off the potatoes.
6 If the potatoes need to be chemically treated to enhance their color, it is done at this stage. The potato slices are immersed in a solution that has been adjusted for pH, hardness, and mineral content.
7 The slices pass under air jets that remove excess water as they flow into 40-75 ft (12.2-23 m) troughs filled with oil. The oil temperature is kept at 350-375°F (176.6-190.5°C). Paddles gently push the slices along. As the slices tumble, salt is sprinkled from receptacles positioned above the trough at the rate of about 1.75 lb (0.79 kg) of salt to each 100 lb (45.4 kg) of chips.
8 Potato chips that are to be flavored pass through a drum filled with the desired powdered seasonings.
9 At the end of the trough, a wire mesh belt pulls out the hot chips. As the chips move along the mesh conveyer belt, excess oil is drained off and the chips begin to cool. They then move under an optical sorter that picks out any burnt slices and removes them with puffs of air.
10 The chips are conveyed to a packaging machine with a scale. As the pre-set weight of chips is measured, a metal detector checks the chips once more for any foreign matter such as metal pieces that could have come with the potatoes or been picked up in the frying process.
11 The bags flow down from a roll. A central processing unit (CPU) code on the bag tells the machine how many chips should be released into the bag. As the bag forms, (heat seals the top of the filled bag and seals the bottom of the next bag simultaneously) gates open and allow the proper amount of chips to fall into the bag.
12 The filling process must be accomplished without letting an overabundance of air into the bag, while also preventing the chips from breaking. Many manufacturers use nitrogen to fill the space in the bags. The sealed bags are conveyed to a collator and hand-packed into cartons.
13 Some companies pack potato chips in I O cans of various sizes. The chips flow down a chute into the cans. Workers weigh each can, make any necessary adjustments, and attach a top to the can.
However, a factory made Veggie Burger seems to have fewer processing steps than that potato chip. [1]
1 Grains and vegetables are loaded into separate machines for thorough cleansing to remove dirt, bacteria created by spoilage, chemical residue, and any other foreign materials that may exist. Some factories have conveyer belts that move the food products under high-pressure sprayers. Others use hollow drums that tumble the food while water is sprayed on it.
2 The base grain, whether it be whole wheat, rice, or beans, is cooked in large vats of water until softened. The resulting puree is strained, separating the product from excess water, and any remaining foreign matter.
3 The vegetables are diced into tiny pieces. In some factories, this is done by a machine that is calibrated to slice the vegetables into uniform sizes. Other, smaller companies, still do this by hand.
4 Pre-measured amounts of the grain puree and the diced vegetables are combined into an industrial mixing bowl that blends the ingredients thoroughly.
5 The mixture is then loaded into an automatic patty-making machine, or press. The press is a cylindrical device with several stacks of round molds topped by a plunger. When the plunger is depressed, the ground mixture is formed into patties.
6 The patties are loaded onto perforated baking trays, then placed in an oven for about an hour and a half at a preset temperature.
Patties are quick-frozen
7 The trays are loaded into a freezing chamber in which the temperature is below the freezing point of 32° F (0° C). The goal is to freeze the patties in 30 minutes or less. Because vegetables contain a jelly-like protoplasm, the speedy processes promotes the formation of ice crystals through the tissues. When the patties are cooked, the water is reabsorbed as the ice crystals melt.
8 The patties are conveyed to a vacuum-packing machine which envelopes the patties in pre-measured plastic sleeves, drawing out the excess air and sealing each end. Then, they are loaded into pre-printed cardboard packages, usually four patties to a package. The frozen varieties are kept in temperature-controlled refrigerated compartments before and during shipment.
I like the whole food based diet; essentially buying fresh items simple ingredients. Stick to the meat and produce isles, maybe go to the butchers or bakery for local meat and bread, and a greengrocers for local veg. Make things like sauces from scratch. I enjoy cooking which helps. I believe that no matter what Scientists decide are good/bad for that particular year I'm going to be okay because it's simple, fresh, and rarely processed.
A lack of knowledge about cooking is imo the single biggest cause of health issues in the United States. People generally know that real food is healthier, but it’s not convenient and they don’t know how to cook so it’s really not even an option most of the time.
Knowing how to cook doesn't solve the underlying problem driving someone to use food as a drug.
I had laid many pots of Boeuf Bourguinon on my family's dinner table before I started shoving Big Macs into my face every night when I hit rock bottom.
This article is somewhat pointless. It cites two studies, one which found correlations between ultra-processed food and cognitive decline, and one which found that it does not. It concludes that more research is needed.
For anyone that's been confused by all the disjoint and contradictory nutritional information that's bombarding us these days, I'd recommend two books:
They are both new books, by two different authors, they both rally against processed food (and talk at length about what processed food IS) and, crucially, they are adamantly against dietary sugar.
The tone of both of them was a bit off-putting to me at first: they try to spend time convincing you that the food we have today is terrible and, if you are already convinced of that like I was, it's a bit grating. But keep going, there's good nuggets all over.
Personally, my rule is no liquid calories (nut beverages, milk, fruit juices, sugar with my coffee, etc.) unless I am on a weight gain diet, then smoothies with whole fruits are ok.
There's lots of additives in processed food, because the food processing machines require them. I guess a lot of food processing innovation is about finding new additives that makes the food sludge go through the machines a bit faster, or makes the machines clog less or require less cleaning and downtime. The food itself doesn't require those additives, and probably makes it worse in many ways.
There might be a way to prepare food without additives at scale. Basically, prepare food traditionally like a human cook but use robotics. Pick and place in parallel instead of pushing food through pipes. Not sure if viable, but I'd be more willing to eat such food even if it'd be more expensive.
I follow a yeast-free diet to control an auto-immune disease called Hidradenitis suppurativa. Some doctors produced a study a while back where they found anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae autoantibodies in HS patients. When patients followed a yeast and wheat-free diet they would see 100% remission of symptoms. The hardest part of following this diet is avoiding yeast as it is a major flavor component in almost all "ultra-processed foods", especially the "healthy" ones. Vegan and plant-based foods add yeast proudly. The problem is that our bodies have an innate immune system that is coded to recognize and fight fungi. Our DNA even codes for pattern recognizers that specifically target saccharomyces cerevisiae, also known as bread/baker's yeast. It's alarming to me that scientists know with certainty that yeast is innately inflammatory, and that inflammation is the majorcause of chronic disease, but have not put it together that maybe yeast should be avoided as a food additive.
Not exactly the same, but my dad has (diagnosed) celiac disease and, being stubborn, refused to adhere to the diet. He had early onset vascular dementia within a couple of years (no history of this in the family). Eating wheat when you have celiac disease is similarly inflammatory, it seems, and can cause all sorts of seemingly unrelated problems.
For me, the diet puts HS completely into remission. I've been on the yeast and wheat-free diet for about six years. While the diet is hard to follow, I never have any boils, sinus tracts or any skin inflammation. Also happily (and anecdotally) I no longer experience headaches or migraines of any kind.
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However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.
The stuff made to sit on the supermarket's shelf for long times has such an odd consistency and flavor, very spongy and very tangy and sweet, you can't spread anything on it without toasting it first. I wouldn't take it as the standard for bread.
That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into the country and that MIGHT have an impact long term. They have legitimate and affordable fresh bread.
https://www.walmart.com/tp/bread
This is Walmart's store brand (as cheap as possible): https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Wheat-Sandwich-Bread-...
Ingredients: Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Whole Wheat Flour, Sugar, Yeast, Contains 2% or less of the following: Soybean Oil, Wheat Bran, Salt, Vital Wheat Gluten, Molasses, Calcium Propionate (Preservative) Vinegar, Dough Conditioners (Monoglycerides, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Ascorbic Acid, Calcium Sulfate, Enzymes), Potassium Iodate, Monocalcium Phosphate
Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
We've got ~20 million people who don't live near a grocery store with fresh food at all.
Talking about processed bread, here is an example from Sam's Club [0] for sourdough boules, at $6 for four (about 1kg total). The ingredient list contains nothing ultra-processed.
[0]: Soudough boules at Sam's Club https://www.samsclub.com/p/members-mark-sourdough-boules-4-c...
It's remarkable easy to bake your own bread (as many tried in during the pandemic). Yeah, it takes time, but it's a good way to reduce your carbs intake. i.e. if you don't bake it, you can't eat it.
It also costs $5+ a loaf when you can get the cheap stuff for $1-$2, so a lot of people just wouldn’t spend the money anyways because they don’t know or care about the difference.
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Well, that's because they are. The question is why they are unhealthy.
Take an Apple. You eat it, it is healthy.
Slice it. You eat the slices, it's not making much of a difference. You are still eating whole chunks.
Make juice out of it. NOW it is no longer healthy. Not only because you have shredded fibers (so the fructose will absorb faster) but you are probably going to drink many more apples than you otherwise would. And your gut bacteria will be unhealthy. You are probably still fine if you drink a small amount.
Add sugar to it - now it's extremely unhealthy and it's basically a coke but with more nutrients and it's not healthy in any amount.
Or take rice. Cook the rice - fine. Polish the rice before cooking so you have white rice: no longer fine.
Food that's unprocessed, there's very little restrictions. You are going to get full eating them anyway, so it's fine. As you increase the amount of processing, you should eat less and less of them.
> high calorie soda
Note that calories are only relevant to laboratories. Living organisms work very differently. Calories are not fungible. An almond has a similar calorie content as a soda can, but it doesn't matter: we do not absorb all the calories in an almond. It's a similar thing when you eat an avocado: it's very calorie-dense, but a lot of it is in fats that will be absorbed very slowly.
Even simple sugars work very differently from one another. Our cells can readily use glucose(that will require insulin). Our cells, with very few exceptions, cannot use fructose. It goes straight to your liver to be processed by fructokinase. Most of it will actually become triglycerides and you will only burn that when you are burning fat. That process also takes a lot of energy(basically you get into debt to be repaid later). There's also a limited amount your liver can process and that's why people are getting fatty livers even without drinking - from the point of view of your liver, you might as well be drinking.
I don’t really know much about this topic but I always assumed additives were a much greater problem than white rice, white bread, etc.
Processed can be fine as long as you use healthy ingredients. Ultra-processed is never fine.
this is 'ultra processed' food that is defined by NOVA classification system.
Better food items will get caught in the crossfire of someone naively avoiding the worse "processed foods", but maybe that's still a net win.
Even your fancy nuts example, if one of the main problems with ultra-processed foods is that they are hyperpalatable, then I see good reason to avoid fancy nuts (nuts with an oil + salt coating) and eating raw nuts instead. It's easy enough to overeat raw nuts!
How so? I eat organic veggies, organic meat, nothing with added sugars, from time to time I drink a glass of organic wine. It's absolutely not difficult to avoid anything "ultra-processed" (I dislike this term which is ehnancing something not strictly defined) or even store-bought "processed".
In fact, the only, in any way, "processed" food I eat are things I make myself: veggies baked with turkey, chicken and beef, blended, portioned and frozen. No preservatives other than fat and reasonably small amounts of salt (and with sodium, I also ingest potassium). Eating healthy is fairly easy (although more expensive) and avoiding shitty food is really not hard to achieve.
I eat mostly fish/veggies/fruit/rice, but sometimes I have pasta (and worse, sometimes I have cookies). In general, I've worked to shift my diet to unprocessed (or processed but not ultra) foods over time. Being cognizant of it is helpful at restaurants, too - I love all kinds of food, so more often than not, going with the least processed option is a helpful decider among menu items.
You also have to want to do it; it's far easier to eat whatever is convenient than to put effort into finding ingredients and cooking them. The problem is that what is convenient is _not_ good for you long term, at least in the US (and at least several other western countries). A good diet is fundamental to good health (both physical and mental) - you'd think this would be axiomatic, but there are plenty of people who don't care enough for whatever reason.
It's not that it's hard to understand, it's just hard to stick to it.
You can, you've just prioritized taste/convenience over your health. Going into a supermarket and looking at what people put into their carts pretty much confirms this.
> a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed
Maybe read the labels? Also buying the cheapest thing there (w/o reading the labels) is also not a good idea.
If you're buying nuts and it has nut-x, plus a whole bunch of salt, a whole bunch of sugar, plus a whole bunch of chemicals that one glosses over, then there's a big chance that it's ultra-processed and/or something you shouldn't eat/buy.
Buying nuts in bulk is probably the best. Adding you're own spices/favors will make it super apparent on what you're consuming.
Food companies are trying to maximize profits, shelf life by adding crap to make the cheapest product. It's been obvious for a very long time.
To me it is more counterproductive not to label it as such, regardless that it may be highly nutritional, due to the fact that people like me who are not able to eat processed food and information like this is a literal life saver.
Other than that I agree with your critique. It's as unhelpful as a typical California proposition 65 warning.
Can you explain a bit why? Isn't what you eat your choice? What's the problem, exactly, I really don't understand why you have nearly zero chance.
Dead Comment
My mother has early onset dementia. Her habits were very healthy for 30+ years (quit drinking, quit smoking, daily exercise, lifetime healthy BMI, moderate diet) and otherwise physically she is in extremely good shape for her age. But one of the early, subtle signs of her cognitive decline was a reluctance to cook real meals. She now has progressed to a state where she can still use a smartphone or laptop for basic tasks, but isn't able to cook any sort of complex recipe from scratch, even one she previously did from memory. Seems pretty obvious to me that it's just as likely that cognitive decline causes an inability in older adults to plan and cook healthy meals, not the other way around.
In her case, retirement and being unmarried/socially isolated during COVID lockdowns obviously contributed to a more rapid progression in decline. But you would never say that social isolation causes Alzheimer's. There are many other people with active social lives and happy marriages who get early dementia. The same is almost certainly true with diet.
How much "processing" a potato chip gets (slice, fry, salt) is a whole lot different than one of the meat substitute burgers.
It seems like anything done on an industrial scale is evil and anything done in your kitchen is fine, despite the two being very similar in many cases.
Either there's a problem with specific ingredients or people are just getting very poor nutrition by eating diets very heavy in fortified grain based foods and the "daily value" suggestions for micronutrients aren't being appropriately satisfied by the vitamin powder they put in these foods or the list of requirements is missing many things.
Studies like this aren't so helpful because they don't actually point to anything specific. We need to find actual mechanisms not vague hints at what might be wrong.
I don't think we need to parcel out the exact moment in processing where something becomes "ultra processed" since it's just a euphemism. It's like overly scrutinizing an analogy for contradiction instead of considering the point it's trying to make.
An obvious mechanism would be nutrient displacement as people fill up on calories without nutrients.
If you look at the nutrients that are good for our brain like foods that promote BDNF, those are the foods these people aren't eating. Look up any of the mechanisms where diet can improve cognitive function, cardiovascular health, brain health, and then consider that someone who displaces these foods with hyperpalatable trash will not get these benefits.
What exactly does this mean? The potential energy in food measured by calories is in its macronutrients. No macronutrients, no calories.
Is it some kind of reference to micronutrients, phytochemicals, and the like which are reduced by processing activities like blanching?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstr...
Of course, the scourge of paywalls prevents me from actually checking what definition the paper used.
> For example, you could eat a burger and fries from a fast food chain, which would be high in fat, sugar and salt as well as being ultra-processed. You could make that same meal at home, which could also be high in fat, sugar and salt but would not be ultra-processed. More research is needed to determine whether one is worse than the other.
source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S247529912...
Go to the supermarket and only buy things with one ingredient, cook and eat those things.
What qualifies? Vegetables, fruit, rice, beans, meat, etc.
ONE ingredient only.
(Technically raw sugar or lard qualify to be on my list, but I think most people who passed high school know those aren't food)
EDIT: well, yes raw sugar and lard are food, what I meant was you shouldn't be eating either in large quantities.
I'm with you on refined sugar, though, which is what I think you probably meant by raw sugar.
There may be additional steps when a factory makes potato chips. [1]
1 When the potatoes arrive at the plant, they are examined and tasted for quality. A half dozen or so buckets are randomly filled. Some are punched with holes in their cores so that they can be tracked through the cooking process. The potatoes are examined for green edges and blemishes. The pile of defective potatoes is weighed; if the weight exceeds a company's preset allowance, the entire truckload can be rejected.
2 The potatoes move along a conveyer belt to the various stages of manufacturing. The conveyer belts are powered by gentle vibrations to keep breakage to a minimum.
3 The potatoes are loaded into a vertical helical screw conveyer which allows stones to fall to the bottom and pushes the potatoes up to a conveyer belt to the automatic peeling machine. After they have been peeled, the potatoes are washed with cold water.
4 The potatoes pass through a revolving impaler/presser that cuts them into paper-thin slices, between 0.066-0.072 in (1.7-1.85 mm) in thickness. Straight blades produce regular chips while rippled blades produce ridged potato chips.
5 The slices fall into a second cold-water wash that removes the starch released when the potatoes are cut. Some manufacturers, who market their chips as natural, do not wash the starch off the potatoes.
6 If the potatoes need to be chemically treated to enhance their color, it is done at this stage. The potato slices are immersed in a solution that has been adjusted for pH, hardness, and mineral content.
7 The slices pass under air jets that remove excess water as they flow into 40-75 ft (12.2-23 m) troughs filled with oil. The oil temperature is kept at 350-375°F (176.6-190.5°C). Paddles gently push the slices along. As the slices tumble, salt is sprinkled from receptacles positioned above the trough at the rate of about 1.75 lb (0.79 kg) of salt to each 100 lb (45.4 kg) of chips.
8 Potato chips that are to be flavored pass through a drum filled with the desired powdered seasonings.
9 At the end of the trough, a wire mesh belt pulls out the hot chips. As the chips move along the mesh conveyer belt, excess oil is drained off and the chips begin to cool. They then move under an optical sorter that picks out any burnt slices and removes them with puffs of air.
10 The chips are conveyed to a packaging machine with a scale. As the pre-set weight of chips is measured, a metal detector checks the chips once more for any foreign matter such as metal pieces that could have come with the potatoes or been picked up in the frying process.
11 The bags flow down from a roll. A central processing unit (CPU) code on the bag tells the machine how many chips should be released into the bag. As the bag forms, (heat seals the top of the filled bag and seals the bottom of the next bag simultaneously) gates open and allow the proper amount of chips to fall into the bag.
12 The filling process must be accomplished without letting an overabundance of air into the bag, while also preventing the chips from breaking. Many manufacturers use nitrogen to fill the space in the bags. The sealed bags are conveyed to a collator and hand-packed into cartons.
13 Some companies pack potato chips in I O cans of various sizes. The chips flow down a chute into the cans. Workers weigh each can, make any necessary adjustments, and attach a top to the can.
[1] http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/Potato-Chip.html
1 Grains and vegetables are loaded into separate machines for thorough cleansing to remove dirt, bacteria created by spoilage, chemical residue, and any other foreign materials that may exist. Some factories have conveyer belts that move the food products under high-pressure sprayers. Others use hollow drums that tumble the food while water is sprayed on it.
2 The base grain, whether it be whole wheat, rice, or beans, is cooked in large vats of water until softened. The resulting puree is strained, separating the product from excess water, and any remaining foreign matter.
3 The vegetables are diced into tiny pieces. In some factories, this is done by a machine that is calibrated to slice the vegetables into uniform sizes. Other, smaller companies, still do this by hand.
4 Pre-measured amounts of the grain puree and the diced vegetables are combined into an industrial mixing bowl that blends the ingredients thoroughly.
5 The mixture is then loaded into an automatic patty-making machine, or press. The press is a cylindrical device with several stacks of round molds topped by a plunger. When the plunger is depressed, the ground mixture is formed into patties.
6 The patties are loaded onto perforated baking trays, then placed in an oven for about an hour and a half at a preset temperature. Patties are quick-frozen
7 The trays are loaded into a freezing chamber in which the temperature is below the freezing point of 32° F (0° C). The goal is to freeze the patties in 30 minutes or less. Because vegetables contain a jelly-like protoplasm, the speedy processes promotes the formation of ice crystals through the tissues. When the patties are cooked, the water is reabsorbed as the ice crystals melt.
8 The patties are conveyed to a vacuum-packing machine which envelopes the patties in pre-measured plastic sleeves, drawing out the excess air and sealing each end. Then, they are loaded into pre-printed cardboard packages, usually four patties to a package. The frozen varieties are kept in temperature-controlled refrigerated compartments before and during shipment.
[1] http://www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Vegetarian-Burger.html
Dead Comment
Knowing how to cook doesn't solve the underlying problem driving someone to use food as a drug.
I had laid many pots of Boeuf Bourguinon on my family's dinner table before I started shoving Big Macs into my face every night when I hit rock bottom.
(Metabolical - Robert H. Lustig) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53240367-metabolical
(Drop Acid - David Perlmutter) https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57505860
They are both new books, by two different authors, they both rally against processed food (and talk at length about what processed food IS) and, crucially, they are adamantly against dietary sugar.
The tone of both of them was a bit off-putting to me at first: they try to spend time convincing you that the food we have today is terrible and, if you are already convinced of that like I was, it's a bit grating. But keep going, there's good nuggets all over.
I drink water, black coffee, and tea.
There might be a way to prepare food without additives at scale. Basically, prepare food traditionally like a human cook but use robotics. Pick and place in parallel instead of pushing food through pipes. Not sure if viable, but I'd be more willing to eat such food even if it'd be more expensive.