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What are the official definitions of the varying degrees of food processing? When does food become processed and then move into "highly processed" and then on

• stronglikedan 5y ago
  Looks like even the "official" definitions vary. Definitions vary, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture says anything that changes the fundamental nature of an agricultural product – heating, freezing, dicing, juicing – is a processed food. "Those little baby carrots that you get in a supermarket – that's a processed food," said Penny Kris-Etherton, registered dietitian and distinguished professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University's Department of Nutritional Sciences. So are frozen vegetables, or even broccoli that's been cut into florets. Ultra-processed food takes things further. Nutritionists started using the term about 10 years ago, and again, definitions vary. One diet classification system called NOVA sums it up as "snacks, drinks, ready meals and many other products created mostly or entirely from substances extracted from foods or derived from food constituents with little if any intact food." From here: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-processed-food-and-why-it-matters-to-your-health https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-...
  • artful-hacker 5y ago
    Yeah, I feel there is no way we can have a clear definition on it. Even these citations (thank you for extracting them by the way) require more definitions. What exactly is a "intact food"? Does that mean a plant or animal that could exist in nature? Cause thats approximately zero percent of what I buy or eat. It's all subjective, feels very much like a "you know it if you see it" kind of thing.
    • macNchz 5y ago
      It's definitely not always obvious but I think the categories of "minimally processed" / "processed" / "ultra processed" make some intuitive sense: Raw fish filet / Canned Fish / Frozen Fish Fingers Corn on the cob / Frozen Corn / Corn Chips Raw chicken breast / Rotisserie Chicken / Chicken patty Peanuts / Peanut Butter / Peanut M&Ms Milk / Cheese / Powdered cheese sauce mix Brown rice / White rice / Rice Krispies Wheat / Simple bread / Chocolate chip cookies
      • ianai 5y ago
        I think ultra processed includes things like high fructose corn syrup-which basically has nothing else from corn within it. It’s pretty much a naked solution at that point. This is tough. Maybe a good definition could involve how the food hits your blood sugar levels compared to its completely whole equivalent.
      • asiachick 5y ago
        Most of those make no sense to me. Why does chopping up a chicken (a chicken patty) make any difference? Same with fish. If I chop it and roll it in bread crumbs and freeze it it's suddenly "ultra processed"? So if I freeze raw fish is that "ultra processed". If I grind the raw fish with my teeth before swallowing has it suddenly become "ultra processed"? Even corn chips, they're just corn meal, oil, and salt. Unless you mean something like favored Doritos, normal corn chips are aren't remotely "ultra processed". If I was to go by gut feelings on unprocessed to processed on your list, assuming I was making each of them myself, on a scale of 1 to 10 1 Raw fish filet 1 Canned Fish 2 Frozen Fish Fingers 1 Corn on the cob 1 Frozen Corn 2 Corn Chips 1 Raw chicken breast 2 Rotisserie Chicken 1 Chicken patty (it's chopped chicken) 1 Peanuts 2 Peanut Butter 3 Peanut M&Ms 1 Milk 2 Cheese 10 Powdered cheese sauce mix (unless this is easier to make than I understand) 1 Brown rice 2 White rice 3 Rice Krispies 1 Wheat 2 Simple bread 3 Chocolate chip cookies Basically only 1 item on your list would even fit "processed" for me. I think many of those numbers are also misleading. I wouldn't put white rice as 2x processed over brown rice. More like 1.25. Same with cheese, rotisserie chicken
        • macNchz 5y ago
          I think the main thing is that as you go up in the amount of processing, nutrients/fiber are removed (even just by canning) and other things are added (salt, sugar, oil etc), which has an impact if most of what you eat comes from the more processed categories. In the fish fingers and chicken patty examples, they may by definition just be ground up meat with breadcrumbs on it, but the actual store bought versions are often full of other stuff: High Liner Fisher Boy Fish Sticks >MINCED FISH BLEND (COD, POLLOCK, HADDOCK, SOLE, WHITING), WATER, WHEAT FLOUR, VEGETABLE OIL (CANOLA OIL, COTTONSEED OIL, AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL), SOY FLOUR, ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (FLOUR, NIACIN, FERROUS SULFATE, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), MODIFIED CORN STARCH, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: SUGAR, NATURAL FLAVORS, SALT, SPICES, DEXTROSE, ONION POWDER, LEAVENING (SODIUM ALUMINUM PHOSPHATE, SODIUM BICARBONATE), TITANIUM DIOXIDE, HYDROLYZED CORN PROTEIN, BUTTER FLAVOR (MALTODEXTRIN, ENZYME MODIFIED BUTTER, FLAVOR), YEAST, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE (TO RETAIN MOISTURE). CONTAINS: FISH (COD, POLLOCK, HADDOCK, SOLE, WHITING), WHEAT, SOY, MILK Walmart brand Chicken Patties >BONELESS SKINLESS CHICKEN BREAST WITH RIB MEAT, WATER SALT, TURBINADO SUGAR, DRIED GARLIC, ONION POWDER, SEA SALT, NATURAL FLAVORING. BREADED WITH: WHEAT FLOUR, WATER, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF THE FOLLOWING: CORN STARCH, EXTRACTIVES OF PAPRIKA, LEAVENING (CREAM OF TARTAR, SODIUM BICARBONATE), NATURAL FLAVORING, SALT, SOYBEAN OIL, SPICE, SUGAR, YEAST, YEAST EXTRACT, YELLOW CORN FLOUR. BREADING SET IN VEGETABLE OIL. I'm not necessarily making specific judgements about any individual ingredients here, but I think that this is what these studies are getting at. Perhaps corn chips were not the best example, but a tour through the chips aisle at the supermarket will offer a grand selection of extremely salty, oily stuff that's, I think, fairly clearly very far from its original raw ingredients of corn or potatoes in terms of nutrition.
    • akiselev 5y ago
      How "intact" a food is basically how much of the original nutrition remains after processing. Hand milling whole grain into flour is a form of processing, for example, that leaves the food almost completely intact because it gets rid of the inedible chaff without destroying much of the bran, germ, and endosperm. Industrially processed all purpose flour, on the other hand, goes through a more destructive process that destroys more of those layers and more of the nutritional value (due to chemicals used, more heat and force generated from machinery, etc). Processing flour into bread, leaves even less of it intact because the yeast and heat irreversibly change the chemistry of the bread, but if the flour is made from intact grains it will be significantly more nutritious, despite roughly the same amount of processing. "intact" food is important because of bioavailability of nutrients as well as metabolic responses like insulin. You can't add fiber or vitamins back into fruit juice with the same effect as eating whole fruit, for example. Edit: Even fully synthesized food that counts as "super duper ultra processed" can be more nutritious than unprocessed food, but as a general rule outside of medicine it isn't.
    • xeromal 5y ago
      Yeah, my first thought was ground beef which to me still feels like minimally processed. Sure, it's high in fat but eaten correctly is a solid food choice in many dishes.
  • asiachick 5y ago
    So olive oil is a processed food (pressing is the same a juicing). Bread is a processed food. Most salads with diced tomatoes and onions are processed food. Like most similar classifications (eg. organic) it's mostly nonsense.
  • smnrchrds 5y ago
    > freezing, dicing, juicing I know it's not the correct interpretation in reality, but it's fun thinking that by this definition, all beef is processed unless you buy the whole live cow.
• yoz-y 5y ago
  The experiment itself only seems to consider imbalanced macros and additional sugar inside water. I too wish to know what exactly is meant by the term “processed” and whether, say, an industrial sausage is any worse than “all natural” shake having exactly the same macros (- preservatives)
• hombre_fatal 5y ago
  Ready-to-eat foods high in fat and refined sugars doesn’t seem as nebulous as this sort of cookie cutter HN comment seems to assert though.
• okareaman 5y ago
  I had the same question: food we eat every day that has been significantly changed from its original state, with salt, sugar, fat, additives, preservatives and/or artificial colours added. https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-processed-food https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-process... It's not clear to me what attribute of UPF is bad. I know sugar is not good. But fat? Additives, preservatives and/or artificial colors?
  • lambdaba 5y ago
    There are issues with heat treatment in those foods that create advanced glycation end products. Fats in ultra-processed tend to be low quality industrial seed oils, like soybean, sunflower, etc.
    • symlinkk 5y ago
      And this “low quality seed oil” is bad…why? It seems to me that all of food science besides the basic “calories and macronutrients” that everyone knows is complete pseudoscience bullshit.
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  • ianai 5y ago
    It’s usually got a huge amount of fat or sugar compared to a healthy amount of a whole food. So chips are soaked with fat-on par with nuts. But unlike nuts, chips often come with less protein, no fiber, and fats that have been refined highly. Additives/preservatives/artificial colors can be of dubious safety as the standards for “safe to eat” are very lax.
  • jfengel 5y ago
    It's more about concentration than about special ingredients, and to a lesser extent about missing nutrients. These foods tend to be very calorie-dense, which encourages you to eat too much of them. They provide those calories without a lot of other things (fiber, calcium, and possibly other unknown micronutrients). There's some suggestion that their high concentrations also throw off the complex balance of gut flora, but that's harder to pin down. The additives, preservatives, colors, etc. are probably safe in and of themselves. They've generally passed at least some basic level of safety testing (including being fed in megadoses to rats). They tend to be added to convenience foods to make them even more appealing and available. So they're correlated with negative health outcomes, but without being the cause of it. It's still possible that there's something wrong with the additives themselves, but if you avoid them by eating less-processed products, you'll likely do better regardless of the additive safety. Generally, that means doing more cooking yourself, or at least selecting menu items that more closely resemble home cooking.
• mattmcknight 5y ago
  Exactly. Why isn't the control for this experiment a high sugar diet without the "processing"? It's very unclear what "processing" refers to. What the data suggest is that in combination the elements are bad, but they were unable to isolate which one was the cause and there is nothing to suggest processing was the cause. (For example, the rats eating processed corn oil or processed sucrose did fine.)
• datameta 5y ago
  I presume what sets apart food in its "natural", "prepared" or cooked state is the increased level (though industry regulated) of potential contaminants introduced during separation of protein, fat, and sugar from all the other constituent compounds that may not have caloric value but have nutritional or protective effects. I would like to find the written definition myself.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  In this specific study > The diet chosen here exemplifies the Western UPD with unbalanced levels of micro- and macronutrients Generally speaking, "unprocessed" foods are raw whole foods. "Processing" means cooking, cutting, adding stuff, etc. (of course none of this is bad in any way). "Highly processed" and "ultra processed" mean there's high calorie density without protein, fiber, micro-nutrients, etc. AKA it's very easy to overeat and throw your nutrient balance off. Of course products like Soylent are technically highly "processed" but that's rarely what these articles mean.
• grawprog 5y ago
  I like to go with, if it's something that no longer resembles food that's possible to make with unprocessed ingredients or if more than half the ingredients in a product are chemicals. It's probably ultra processed. Say burgers. A home made Burger made of freshly ground meat is a 'processed food.' A Patty created in a factory out of a slurry of smooshed up animal, parts, binders and preservatives then flash frozen and shipped to various places where it's then thawed and cooked using an industrial grill and assembled by a teenager for minimum wage...that's ultra processed.
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    You're defining 'processed' as 'not unprocessed', there. Obviously a cyclic definition. And how are you defining 'chemical'?
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    > chemicals Do you have some special definition of that which wouldn't include "everything".
    • rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
      Come now: there is energy, and probably dark matter too. And space-time. And black holes. And neutron stars.
      • TchoBeer 5y ago
        Generally don't eat of that though
  • tomjakubowski 5y ago
    In case anyone is wondering how McDonalds beef patties are made, they're minced from large whole cuts of meat and fat. At industrial scale for sure, though not quite so harrowing as parent's description. https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factory-and-saw-how-the-burgers-are-really-made-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...
• teddyh 5y ago
  I think it’s the same as “chemical”. When something’s bad, it’s a chemical. When something’s good, it’s not. I.e. nobody knows what “processed” means, they just know it’s bad somehow.
• 6foot4_82iq 5y ago
  Real meat to plant-based "meat" is one instance.
• forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Have you have seen the food source the way it comes out of the ground or the womb?