4 ms·

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

• 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.
  • symlinkk 5y ago
    If it’s about calories then just say it. “High calorie foods are unhealthy” makes perfect sense. This vague “ultra processed” definition is confusing.
    • jfengel 5y ago
      The problem is that they've been saying "eat less calories" for decades, and it hasn't fixed the problem. Why? Lots of reasons, one if which is that calorie counting is hard. Totting up every calorie you eat is incredibly tedious. "Eat fewer calories" would be less onerous, but only if you're eating regular and consistent meals so that it's easy to identify what "less" means. So they try to give easy-to-follow advice, like "eat fewer foods with a lot of calories". How do you identify those? Well, they're the ones that have been through a lot of industrial processes that take out not-fun stuff (water, fiber) and add in a lot of things that are purified to the calorie-rich parts (sugar, oil, butter). They're looking for another way to say "Don't go to McDonald's and don't eat candy bars or drink soda" for a long time. If those are things that you do, and you stop it, you will almost certainly lose weight. But we can't even get people to do that, even though it's been the same advice for decades. "Ultra processed foods" are convenience foods. If "convenience foods" were to be their next iteration of the advice, I'd be fine with that. It's not about the fundamental nutrition; they've been trying to get people to do the same thing for decades without any headway. It's about communication and persuasion, which are far harder jobs.