What makes a food qualify as “ultra-processed” and why are they worse for you?

Question

Just seeing a lot of articles about ultra processed foods lately and wondering.

In: 16

Answer 1

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)