Just seeing a lot of articles about ultra processed foods lately and wondering.
In: 16
Basically, everything you every do from a food, from picking it, washing it, cooking it, etc.. is processing that food.
So think of processing as a scale like:
Washing and eating raw
Cooking single ingredient food
Cooking and combining food
Cooking, combining and seasoning
Cooking, combining, seasoning and adding artificial ingredients.
Ultra processed is basically the higher end of processing, which includes mixing ingredients that aren’t found in nature, which some of them are just toxic to the body, and the most important is creating “ultra palatable” food combinations. Basically scientists work endlessly to find exactly what combination makes people want to eat as much of that food as possible. The problem is that the mix together is incredibly toxic to the body in large quantities, including being carcinogenic (inducing cancer), destroying your arteries, etc..
In addition, they are usually highly calorie dense.
It isn’t so much as a single oreo will be harmful to you, but constantly and daily eating ultra-processed foods is linked to the vast majority of health problems facing the modern world.
The main determinant for the “ultra-processed” label is the ingredient list and just how far from the original plant or animal the food is when being eaten. While there’s lots of nuance, if the ingredient list is long and filled with difficult to pronounce words and things that aren’t easily recognizable as food, you’re almost certainly dealing with an ultra-processed food. Same with appearance – take an apple for example. An apple is unprocessed. Press a bunch of apples in a juicing press and the result is apple juice, which is minimally processed. Add some cane sugar and it’s a bit more processed, but still more or less minimally processed. Add in NutraSweet, red and yellow food dyes, artificial flavors, preservatives, etc. and now you’re closer and closer to ultra-processed. Take the apple juice out completely but add carbonated water and a bunch of amino acids and stimulants and you’ve got an ultra-processed energy drink.
As you get further and further away from unprocessed, the food tends to lose nutrients, especially micro-nutrients. A fresh apple contains all the nutrients you’d expect to find in an apple. Apple juice with nothing added has had all the fiber removed. Plus the caloric content is now concentrated and while an apple contains about 90 calories, a cup of unsweetened apple juice contains about 115 calories, and it’s far easier to drink two cups of apple juice than it is to eat two apples, so you can easily get far more calories drinking juice than eating the whole fruit. Add sugar and the calorie count goes way up. Add artificial sweeteners and now you’re ingesting artificial ingredients – doesn’t mean they’re bad for you, but some are worse than others.
Essentially, as you move further and further down the processing road, you end up with generally more caloric and less nutritious foods, and you eventually get to the ones that have no nutritional benefit but plenty of calories and/or other downsides (like an energy drink).
Basically, there is a scale of processing – pretty much all foods are processed in some way – with basic processing being things like peeling or cooking, medium processing being things like making milk into cheese or curing meats, and ultra-processing being industrially produced things using complicated process based on already processed ingredients, often resulting in major changes to the shape and texture of foods.
You can have minimally processed food – like a green salad: the food is raw, and the only processing has been peeling of things like carrots, shelling of beans and washing. Other examples are fresh uncured and uncooked meat (e.g. a steak or a chicken breast) or fish (e.g. a salmon fillet)
Processed ingredients might be things like flour – where the wheat has been ground. This type of processing is not something which you could do in, for example, your regular kitchen. Other processed ingredients might be things like raisins (grapes processed by drying and with preservatives), fruit juices (processed by juicing), vegetable oils.
Then you get things like processed foods, which have more complicated processing are made with processed ingredients – things like bacon or ham (curing, with the use of preservatives like nitrites), sourdough bread, unprocessed cheese, natural unsweetened yoghurt, canned vegetables or beans (e.g. canned sweetcorn), canned fruit or canned or smoked fish (e.g. canned tuna, smoked salmon),
Finally, you have ultra-processed foods – things which may contain artificial ingredients, or ingredients which have been chemically altered, or may have been formulated to be “ultra-palatable” (super delicious) by mixing lots of completely different ingredients together. The food may be processed into different shapes (by mashing, and then reshaping), or cooked by techniques like deep-frying which adds tons of fat.
Ultra-processed foods are things like ready-made snacks (potato chips, pringles), candies (including chocolate), cookies, cakes and pastries, white bread (including supermarket bread, hot dog buns, burger buns, etc), ice cream, chocolate, canned or carbonated soft drinks( e.g. cola, lemonade, energy drinks), instant foods (ramen, instant soups, drink concentrates/squash/cordial), packaged deserts (fruit yoghurt, ready-made deserts), sweetened milk drinks (chocolate milk), chemically modified foods (margarine and spreads), ready-meals (e.g. supermarket lasagna, meatballs, etc.), pasta and pizza, burgers, hot-dogs, sausages, frankfurter, chicken nuggets, fish fingers, breakfast cereals, processed cheese (e.g. burger cheese)
“Ultra processed” is a label from the [NOVA classification system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food), which is used by many organizations including the WHO (but *not* US government agencies).
NOVA gives a few labels:
* **Unprocessed food**: straight from nature, no changes. Fruits right off the tree are a good example.
* **Minimally processed food**: simple mechanical changes. Washed eggs, frozen veggies, and pasteurized milk.
* **Processed culinary ingredients**: minimally processed, but something you wouldn’t eat alone. Olive oil and flour.
* **Processed food**: Take the above and add any amount of salt, sugar, or fat. Bread, canned meats, some cheeses.
* **Ultra processed food**: A processed food that also adds artificial colors or flavors. If you use food coloring on your Christmas cookies, they’re ultra processed.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/processed-foods/
These labels are not without criticism. A particular ingredient might fall into different categories depending on how it was sourced. For example, vanillin, the main component of vanilla extract, can be produced “naturally” by a days- or months-long process of treating vanilla beans, or an identical molecule can be synthesized from raw chemicals. From one route, you get a minimally processed culinary ingredient; if you use the latter, your end food would be considered ultra processed. The NOVA system also does not consider the *degree* of the inclusion of such ingredients: you could use minimally processed ingredients up until you throw in a teaspoon of that ultra processed vanillin, and your entire product would be tainted by that inclusion.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924224421004970
My take: processed and ultra-processed are flawed shorthands for actually evaluating what you eat. If you really have no time to think, they might be better than nothing, but if you’re invested enough to be reading the nutrition label in the first place, you can afford to do better than that.
It’s just the new buzzword for junk food. Soft drinks, chips, candy, wonder bread, sugary cereal, etc. They’re really cheap, nutritionally devoid foods which boast an extended shelf life and are made from low quality ingredients, and their consumer appeal is buoyed by sugar, salt, and fat.
Think about it this way: Food companies want to sell you stuff. What makes you want to eat their stuff is whether it is delicious or not. So they opimise their food for deliciousness rather than good-for-you…-ness. In this process, they often find ways to make producing the food cheaper and the result more delicious, but that also means removing a lot of what would make it nutritious. Your average veggies just don’t taste like donuts or burgers. It’s mostly a byproduct of the fact healthy stuff doesn’t sell as well as unhealthy stuff.
– **Little to no proccessing**. I grow some corn. I pick a piece of corn and cook it with the husk on and eat it. This is healthy
– **Lightly processed**. I take that same piece of corn, and husk it, cut the corn off the cob, and can it. Still healthy
– **Highly processed**. I take the same peice of corn, remove it from the cob, dry it, grind it to powder, and mix with sugar, salt, barley extract, and vitamins. I press into flakes and toast it. I now have corn flakes. Less healthy, but it isn’t all that terrible.
– **Ultra processed**. I take that peice of corn, husk, de-cob, dry it, grind it, and mix with some chemical compound to change the properties of the corn. I extrude the corn through a machine that puffs it up. I fry it with industrial seed oils. I coat it in tons of red dies and artificial spices and seasonings. I now have Flaming Hot Cheetos. This is terrible for you.
Just think about the path the ingredients take before they get to you. Most of those ingredients (grain, sugar, etc) were farmed a long time ago. The lowest quality yield from those harvests are what is put into packaged foods. The ingredients are sitting in silos, sometimes for years, and are constantly degrading over time. By the time the food ends up on your plate, not only are there lots of unhealthy, unnatural additives, but everything else has been stored, dried, ground up into powder, etc until most of the beneficial nutrients have been damaged or destroyed.
You have a freshly picked ear of corn – Non processed
You have a bag of whole corn kernals – Minimally processed
You have cornmeal – Mildly processed (Some parts of the corn/nutrients are now gone, and there may be preservatives)
You have corn flour – Moderately processed (More parts of the original corn are gone)
You have corn pops (Cereal) – Heavily processed (Most of the original corn is gone and many other ingredients are added)
You have High Fructose Corn Syrup – Ultra processed (barely anything of the original product exists, and almost pure sugar is missing all the vitamins and other nutrients original corn had)
As a product becomes more processed, they typically remove the less “flavorful” stuff in a food, which is usually the stuff that makes it healthier or less fattening to eat.
Imagine using a processed raw material or ingredient to make a processed food.
Example I can give is chicken meat removed from bone using machines or just offcuts, then added with anti oxidants to avoid colour changes during storage. Then mince the chicken,tumble it in brine. add extenders, fillers and preservatives. Coat it with a processed bread crump also containing 20 ingredients, that bread crump needs some sort of egg free dip to stick to the meat so you add a processed dip, then flash fry it.
And you have a nugget or something.
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