Tagged biology because it’s related to health studies.
I keep seeing that “processed” and “ultraprocessed” foods hurt longevity and cause all sorts of risks. I get what that means in a very general sense – e.g. don’t eat Doritos every day – but this terminology seems really mushy when you push on it, kind of like with “organic” and “genetically-modified.” Please help me understand what the actual guidance is, rather than just panic about how everything is processed.
In: Biology
An apple is an unprocessed food. Well, you should probably wash it to get off any cruft that fall on it while it was being shipped to you, but that’s not much processing.
Applesauce is a processed food. Apples are put into a machine and chopped/mashed/… to make it.
Shelf-stable apple flavored bars are ultra processed. Sure, apples were used in one of the machines, but that’s only a little bit of the bar you’re thinking about eating. It’s mostly refined ingredients/chemicals that give it the exotic properties that the manufacturer wants it to have so you can buy it and it won’t go bad.
Organic is about how the farmers raised the raw ingredient and GMO is about what species of the ingredient they choose to raise.
The most widely reference classification is ‘NOVA’ (see [here](https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78/2021/07/NOVA-Classification-Reference-Sheet.pdf)):
> **Unprocessed** or **Natural foods** are obtained directly from plants or animals and do not undergo any alteration following their removal from nature.
> **Minimally processed** foods are natural foods that have been submitted to cleaning, removal of inedible or unwanted parts, fractioning, grinding, drying, fermentation, pasteurization, cooling, freezing, or other processes that may subtract part of the food, but which do not add oils, fats, sugar, salt or other substances to the original food.
> **Processed** foods are products manufactured by industry with the use of salt, sugar, oil or other substances (Group 2) added to natural or minimally processed foods (Group 1) to preserve or to make them more palatable. They are derived directly from foods and are recognized as versions of the original foods. They are usually consumed as a part of or as a side dish in culinary preparations made using natural or minimally processed foods. Most processed foods have two or three ingredients.
> **Ultra-processed** foods are industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories from food substrates or other organic sources (flavor enhancers, colors, and several food additives used to make the product hyper-palatable). Manufacturing techniques include extrusion, moulding and preprocessing by frying. Beverages may be ultra-processed. Group 1 foods are a small proportion of, or are even absent from, ultra-processed products.
(Group 1 being unprocessed natural foods or minimally processed foods).
Ultra processed could also include the facsimile of real ingredients, some notorious examples being honey (often substituted by corn syrup+Carmel color) maple syrup (same scam) blueberries in waffles/muffins (blueberry flavored gelatin orbees that are dyed blue) and dairy substitutes in whipped cream or cheese flavoring. You’ll also see a notorious proliferation of deceptive terms to sidestep a lack of less processed ingredients. When you think “chocolate chips” you’ll typically envision semisweet morsels made from cocoa and cane sugar. But often this has been replaced by cheaper alternatives – “chocolately bits/coating” on cheap snack products is often a negligible amount of cocoa, palm oil and HFCS.
Another irritating example is peanut butter. “Natural” peanut butter is just ground peanuts, maybe a little bit of salt in there. But heavily processed peanut butter actually takes out the peanut oil (which is valuable and used elsewhere for higher end cooking oil) and replaced with cheaper seed oils that will produce a more uniform texture and might have other favorable properties like shelf life.
Then you have products that use ingredients that would otherwise use foods we’d consider spoiled. Hershey’s chocolate and ranch dressing are both notorious for using milk that would be too rancid tasting to use in other dairy products but it’s functional enough and significantly cheaper than using fresh skin milk or buttermilk.
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