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

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).