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So at first glance it seems like there's no way this is actually possible. There are 21 meals a week, plus enough snacking that we could probably just think of

So at first glance it seems like there's no way this is actually possible. There are 21 meals a week, plus enough snacking that we could probably just think of it as 28 meals a week. Kids just eat constantly, it's bonkers. Anyway, with 28 meals a week, you'd need about 20 of them to be ultra-processed in order to meet this. That's a lot! Except that it's actually really not. If we take my 5 year old son as a normal kid, a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then whatever random food they feed him for school lunch and we're already 2/3rds of the way to the goal. He snacks on fruit and stuff, but also on pretzel sticks and honey roasted peanuts and all sorts of other kind of junky things. I make dinner from scratch very nearly every night, and my kid still falls into this 70% bucket! And so I really don't have a good idea about how to change that. Maybe make our own bread and have them have toast for breakfast every day? That's going to get old quick.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
Another angle is that junk tends to be more caloric, so even if kids actually did eat their fruits and veggies, even say with 21 of those meals, they'd still only make up a comparatively small portion of all the calories in their diets. But given that they're full of other nutrients (and esp. fiber) I don't think that's so bad.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  yeah a bag of cheezits is ~200 calories. An orange is ~50 calories. So if you ate one of each youd have 80% of calories from ultraprocessed food.
- taylodl 5y ago
  My wife likes to joke no one ever got fat eating carrots and celery. The calorie dense foods kids enjoy tend to have a lot of refined sugar. Heck, that goes for most adults too. I can eat a bag of carrots and a bag of potato chips and I'll have gotten more than 70% of my calories from the chips.
throwaway1777 5y ago
Breakfast is definitely a good place to start. We eat eggs for breakfast nearly every day in my home. It’s not as simple as cereal but scrambling a batch of eggs is not too bad.
- xenonite 5y ago
  Not surprisingly the taste of eggs depends on the chickens' meal. For example, the protein demand is often fulfilled by fish powder or soy flour.
causi 5y ago
Pack him a lunch instead of letting him eat cafeteria food. A ham sandwich is a lot healthier than a slice of school pizza.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  I'd be surprised if commercially made ham didn't fall into the ultraprocessed category! Saying this as someone who's curing his first ham in the fridge rn :-)
- sjwalter 5y ago
  I run a chicken farm so I'm biased but for my family I grow out a bunch of birds to be bigger than typical (9-10lbs). Roast one of these and it sits in the fridge providing sandwich meat for a week, plus the occasional plate of hot sauce and cold meat. Super delicious and healthful.
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    My parents did this for most of my childhood. They weren't farmers, so the meat came from the supermarket – but larger cuts of meat (or whole chickens) are much cheaper than buying jointed, pre-cut or cooked meat anyway.
- fancifalmanima 5y ago
  The bread (made from processed wheat, probably bleached flour, and containing bread conditioners, preservatives) would almost surely fall into the ultra processed category, unless homemade from minimally processed whole wheat flour. The ham and cheese could as well, unless they were made with fairly traditional processes (and probably more expensive than what the typical person is buying at walmart, target, etc). They'd all probably be considered processed foods, at minimum.
woodruffw 5y ago
This is perhaps a good indicator that “processed versus unprocessed” isn’t a great signal for whether a particular fooditem should be part of one’s diet. Using your cereal example: I grew up eating grape nuts[1], which are probably in the ultraprocessed category. But it’s just barley flour and I ate it like most people eat muesli (with fresh fruit) — what should that count as? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-Nuts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-Nuts
- fanf2 5y ago
  Grape nuts count as "processed" because of the added salt and vitamins
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    Right, which begs the question: if processing includes ostensibly beneficial (or at least neutral) processing as well, how important is the 70% in TFA? My intuition is that it’s still pretty important (since most people are probably eating Frosted Flakes, not grape nuts, for breakfast), but that we need a better way to talk about healthy eating habits and proportions than “most of our foodstuffs are processed.”
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      "Processed" and "ultra-processed" are two different things: the latter goes beyond the former. Grape Nuts might could as processed, and Frosted Flakes as ultra-processed.
sosuke 5y ago
Good healthy food costs more money. We've done a great job about putting the most amount of calories and flavor into cheaper than dirt forms. I think a breakfast of oats and lunch of a tuna sandwich would work. Most lunch meats are probably considered Ultra-Processed. I think the only ways out of this are as you said fixing everything yourself. Most things you can eat raw that isn't packaged would probably be safe. Then cooking your own meats. But pasta is considered Ultra-Processed, packaged bread is ultra-processed. I thought those were some of the most basic foods with the smallest number of ingredients. Maybe home made versions as you suggested are not considered Ultra-Processed.
- ogwh 5y ago
  They're made with ingredients that are processed. The flour that goes into the bread and pasta has been stripped of all fibre and micro nutrients, then some vitamins might be added back if you're lucky. The bread is full of refined sugar. You need to look at the ingredients recursively. If you eat wholegrain everything you're half way there. Same applies to rice etc. The reason they remove the good stuff is so it doesn't spoil, if you remove the nutrients it's less appetising to microbes and pests.
- sosuke 5y ago
  Answering my own question: Industrial breads made only from wheat flour, water, salt and yeast are processed foods, while those whose lists of ingredients also include emulsifiers or colours are ultra-processed. Plain steel-cut oats, plain corn flakes and shredded wheat are minimally processed foods, while the same foods are processed when they also contain sugar, and ultra-processed if they also contain flavours or colours. From http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf
- ev1 5y ago
  They are small (flour, yeast, salt, etc) number of ingredients if you shop for bread at specialty, expensive, organic shops or make it yourself. At the supermarkets 99% of the US uses, even the high end bread is 15-25 ingredients at eyeball. The ingredient list for one of the most expensive packaged whole wheat bread that would show up at a regular non-Whole Foods-style place: Whole Wheat Flour , Water , Sugar , Wheat Gluten , Yeast , Wheat Bran , Salt , Soybean Oil , Raisin Juice Concentrate , Enrichment ( Calcium Sulfate , Vitamin E Acetate , Vitamin A Palmitate , Vitamin D3 ) , Calcium Propionate ( Preservative ) , Datem , Grain Vinegar , Monoglycerides , Soy Lecithin , Citric Acid , Potassium Iodate .
alex504 5y ago
Dont feed him processed food for breakfast and pack him lunch.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  This is one of those things that’s easy to say but way harder for parents to actually do. You’re suggesting someone make time to prepare not one, but two homemade meals as they’re trying to get their kid (and probably themselves) out the door in the morning.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Kids learn quickly which foods have the most sugar and get stuck on them. I tried to prevent ours from ever tasting junk until they had broader palettes, but the moment grandparents have the kids alone or SO has a bad day... it's over.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    Overnight oats take seconds to prepare.
    - handrous 5y ago
      ??? How? I'm looking at a good 15 minutes, almost all hands-on time, from the moment I decide to go make overnight oats, using either of what I'm pretty sure are normal methods (crock pot, boil-briefly-and-leave-covered stovetop). That's assuming I don't discover that something I need is dirty. I'm not saying that's a ton of time, but seconds? Quick oat packets (awful stuff, full of sugar unless you get really expensive ones, cutting it 50/50 with rolled or plain quick oats helps a little and also makes up for the fact that one packet isn't, realistically, an entire serving) aren't even seconds. Talking maybe 2-3 minutes hands-on to lay out a bowl for each kid, rip and pour the packets, set the electric kettle going, then pour some on each when it boils (microwaving it with cool water is even slower once you're past a single serving—kettle saves time)
      - 5y ago
sparrc 5y ago
Does cereal count as "ultra-processed"? Things like Cheerios don't seem much more processed than bread from what I can tell. Also honey-roasted peanuts? My understanding of ultra-processed would be things more like candy, cheetos, pringles, oreos, soda, etc.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Check the nutrition facts on honey roasted peanuts. I was shocked at how many carbs a serving includes. Now I just eat dry roasted peanuts, and not too many since they too have plenty of carbs. It's hard to find a simple rule that isn't subverted. Though simpler more primitive diets (mostly low carb vegetables and high protein foods) seem best all around. It's sad to see folks think they've leveled up enough to 'cheat' after loading up on yams ("veg!"), carrots ("veg"), and beans ("protein!").
  - asdff 5y ago
    What is wrong with carbs? If I don't have carbs while working all day I get tired. That stuff is brain fuel.
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Carbs themselves are fine. It's the quantities, especially those in the form of sugars, that are excessive. All that said you can live without carbs and just digest fats instead. Hence the whole ketosis and low-sugar diets.
- deep-root 5y ago
  Check out the ingredients of Cheerios, which says a bit about the process of making them and the attempt to restore some nutrition: https://www.wdbqschools.org/Downloads/Cereal-Cheerios.pdf https://www.wdbqschools.org/Downloads/Cereal-Cheerios.pdf Probably Wonder Bread would look similar, but homemade bread quite different. All are processed foods of some level due to flour.
  - 5y ago
bell-cot 5y ago
A bread machine can make the "make our own bread...toast" less laborious. (Recipes printed in bread machines' instruction booklets tend toward the less-healthy, but with some experimenting...) Commercial breakfast cereals vary, though the least-healthy are probably the most tuned to appeal to kids. Home-cooked cereal can be far better. And easy to mix nuts, frozen berries, etc. into. If a bit of dressing up (squirt of mustard, bit of mayo, etc.) makes hard-boiled eggs acceptable to him, those can be made once a week and kept in the fridge. An old friend perfected a fairly-healthy, filling stew recipe (some meat, mostly veggies, etc.) that he could make up in large batches and keep in the fridge. As a teenager, his son consumed an enormous quantity of that over time.
taylodl 5y ago
Try to minimize the amount of refined sugar and white flour in your diet. That'll get you below the 70%. As you're probably suspecting, it isn't easy! Refined sugar is in almost everything you buy at the grocery store, save for fresh produce and meat. White flour is present in many breads - even whole wheat bread! Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used. And breakfast cereal? Yeah, that's going to be hard to replace, especially for a five year old! Oatmeal is a good alternative but unless you're buying a box of old-fashioned oats and making it yourself you're likely to be buying a lot of refined sugar. Those healthy granola bars? Lots of refined sugar. Trail mix, especially the ones with the M&M's? Ungodly amounts of refined sugar. To be honest I'm kinda surprised that it's only 70% of calories coming from refined foods.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used. Part of the reason is that it's really hard—way more work, way more time—to get a fluffy sandwich loaf out of just whole wheat flour. Or anything that's not kinda dense and focaccia-looking, really.
  - taylodl 5y ago
    You're not wrong! When I make home made bread I don't use only whole wheat flour - it's really difficult to work with and hard to get a good loaf, and I've been making bread on a regular basis for over 30 years! The 'whole wheat white' flours (fine ground 100% whole wheat flour) coming out are really good and allows for an excellent loaf.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Sometimes I eat shredded wheat and bananas, yogurt and fruit, or shredded wheat + yogurt + fruit. That takes 0 effort and can be packed for breakfast or lunch. Also carrots and hummus, dry roasted nuts, cheese and wheat thins, PB and apple slices, are all good snacks for a kid.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago

Another angle is that junk tends to be more caloric, so even if kids actually did eat their fruits and veggies, even say with 21 of those meals, they'd still only make up a comparatively small portion of all the calories in their diets. But given that they're full of other nutrients (and esp. fiber) I don't think that's so bad.

ffggvv 5y ago
yeah a bag of cheezits is ~200 calories. An orange is ~50 calories. So if you ate one of each youd have 80% of calories from ultraprocessed food.
taylodl 5y ago
My wife likes to joke no one ever got fat eating carrots and celery. The calorie dense foods kids enjoy tend to have a lot of refined sugar. Heck, that goes for most adults too. I can eat a bag of carrots and a bag of potato chips and I'll have gotten more than 70% of my calories from the chips.

throwaway1777 5y ago

Breakfast is definitely a good place to start. We eat eggs for breakfast nearly every day in my home. It’s not as simple as cereal but scrambling a batch of eggs is not too bad.

xenonite 5y ago
Not surprisingly the taste of eggs depends on the chickens' meal. For example, the protein demand is often fulfilled by fish powder or soy flour.

causi 5y ago

Pack him a lunch instead of letting him eat cafeteria food. A ham sandwich is a lot healthier than a slice of school pizza.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
I'd be surprised if commercially made ham didn't fall into the ultraprocessed category! Saying this as someone who's curing his first ham in the fridge rn :-)
sjwalter 5y ago
I run a chicken farm so I'm biased but for my family I grow out a bunch of birds to be bigger than typical (9-10lbs). Roast one of these and it sits in the fridge providing sandwich meat for a week, plus the occasional plate of hot sauce and cold meat. Super delicious and healthful.
- Symbiote 5y ago
  My parents did this for most of my childhood. They weren't farmers, so the meat came from the supermarket – but larger cuts of meat (or whole chickens) are much cheaper than buying jointed, pre-cut or cooked meat anyway.
fancifalmanima 5y ago
The bread (made from processed wheat, probably bleached flour, and containing bread conditioners, preservatives) would almost surely fall into the ultra processed category, unless homemade from minimally processed whole wheat flour. The ham and cheese could as well, unless they were made with fairly traditional processes (and probably more expensive than what the typical person is buying at walmart, target, etc). They'd all probably be considered processed foods, at minimum.

woodruffw 5y ago

This is perhaps a good indicator that “processed versus unprocessed” isn’t a great signal for whether a particular fooditem should be part of one’s diet. Using your cereal example: I grew up eating grape nuts[1], which are probably in the ultraprocessed category. But it’s just barley flour and I ate it like most people eat muesli (with fresh fruit) — what should that count as? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-Nuts https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-Nuts

fanf2 5y ago
Grape nuts count as "processed" because of the added salt and vitamins
- woodruffw 5y ago
  Right, which begs the question: if processing includes ostensibly beneficial (or at least neutral) processing as well, how important is the 70% in TFA? My intuition is that it’s still pretty important (since most people are probably eating Frosted Flakes, not grape nuts, for breakfast), but that we need a better way to talk about healthy eating habits and proportions than “most of our foodstuffs are processed.”
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    "Processed" and "ultra-processed" are two different things: the latter goes beyond the former. Grape Nuts might could as processed, and Frosted Flakes as ultra-processed.

sosuke 5y ago

Good healthy food costs more money. We've done a great job about putting the most amount of calories and flavor into cheaper than dirt forms. I think a breakfast of oats and lunch of a tuna sandwich would work. Most lunch meats are probably considered Ultra-Processed. I think the only ways out of this are as you said fixing everything yourself. Most things you can eat raw that isn't packaged would probably be safe. Then cooking your own meats. But pasta is considered Ultra-Processed, packaged bread is ultra-processed. I thought those were some of the most basic foods with the smallest number of ingredients. Maybe home made versions as you suggested are not considered Ultra-Processed.

ogwh 5y ago
They're made with ingredients that are processed. The flour that goes into the bread and pasta has been stripped of all fibre and micro nutrients, then some vitamins might be added back if you're lucky. The bread is full of refined sugar. You need to look at the ingredients recursively. If you eat wholegrain everything you're half way there. Same applies to rice etc. The reason they remove the good stuff is so it doesn't spoil, if you remove the nutrients it's less appetising to microbes and pests.
sosuke 5y ago
Answering my own question: Industrial breads made only from wheat flour, water, salt and yeast are processed foods, while those whose lists of ingredients also include emulsifiers or colours are ultra-processed. Plain steel-cut oats, plain corn flakes and shredded wheat are minimally processed foods, while the same foods are processed when they also contain sugar, and ultra-processed if they also contain flavours or colours. From http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf
ev1 5y ago
They are small (flour, yeast, salt, etc) number of ingredients if you shop for bread at specialty, expensive, organic shops or make it yourself. At the supermarkets 99% of the US uses, even the high end bread is 15-25 ingredients at eyeball. The ingredient list for one of the most expensive packaged whole wheat bread that would show up at a regular non-Whole Foods-style place: Whole Wheat Flour , Water , Sugar , Wheat Gluten , Yeast , Wheat Bran , Salt , Soybean Oil , Raisin Juice Concentrate , Enrichment ( Calcium Sulfate , Vitamin E Acetate , Vitamin A Palmitate , Vitamin D3 ) , Calcium Propionate ( Preservative ) , Datem , Grain Vinegar , Monoglycerides , Soy Lecithin , Citric Acid , Potassium Iodate .

alex504 5y ago

Dont feed him processed food for breakfast and pack him lunch.

elliekelly 5y ago
This is one of those things that’s easy to say but way harder for parents to actually do. You’re suggesting someone make time to prepare not one, but two homemade meals as they’re trying to get their kid (and probably themselves) out the door in the morning.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  Kids learn quickly which foods have the most sugar and get stuck on them. I tried to prevent ours from ever tasting junk until they had broader palettes, but the moment grandparents have the kids alone or SO has a bad day... it's over.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Overnight oats take seconds to prepare.
  - handrous 5y ago
    ??? How? I'm looking at a good 15 minutes, almost all hands-on time, from the moment I decide to go make overnight oats, using either of what I'm pretty sure are normal methods (crock pot, boil-briefly-and-leave-covered stovetop). That's assuming I don't discover that something I need is dirty. I'm not saying that's a ton of time, but seconds? Quick oat packets (awful stuff, full of sugar unless you get really expensive ones, cutting it 50/50 with rolled or plain quick oats helps a little and also makes up for the fact that one packet isn't, realistically, an entire serving) aren't even seconds. Talking maybe 2-3 minutes hands-on to lay out a bowl for each kid, rip and pour the packets, set the electric kettle going, then pour some on each when it boils (microwaving it with cool water is even slower once you're past a single serving—kettle saves time)
    - 5y ago

sparrc 5y ago

Does cereal count as "ultra-processed"? Things like Cheerios don't seem much more processed than bread from what I can tell. Also honey-roasted peanuts? My understanding of ultra-processed would be things more like candy, cheetos, pringles, oreos, soda, etc.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
Check the nutrition facts on honey roasted peanuts. I was shocked at how many carbs a serving includes. Now I just eat dry roasted peanuts, and not too many since they too have plenty of carbs. It's hard to find a simple rule that isn't subverted. Though simpler more primitive diets (mostly low carb vegetables and high protein foods) seem best all around. It's sad to see folks think they've leveled up enough to 'cheat' after loading up on yams ("veg!"), carrots ("veg"), and beans ("protein!").
- asdff 5y ago
  What is wrong with carbs? If I don't have carbs while working all day I get tired. That stuff is brain fuel.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Carbs themselves are fine. It's the quantities, especially those in the form of sugars, that are excessive. All that said you can live without carbs and just digest fats instead. Hence the whole ketosis and low-sugar diets.
deep-root 5y ago
Check out the ingredients of Cheerios, which says a bit about the process of making them and the attempt to restore some nutrition: https://www.wdbqschools.org/Downloads/Cereal-Cheerios.pdf https://www.wdbqschools.org/Downloads/Cereal-Cheerios.pdf Probably Wonder Bread would look similar, but homemade bread quite different. All are processed foods of some level due to flour.
- 5y ago

bell-cot 5y ago

A bread machine can make the "make our own bread...toast" less laborious. (Recipes printed in bread machines' instruction booklets tend toward the less-healthy, but with some experimenting...) Commercial breakfast cereals vary, though the least-healthy are probably the most tuned to appeal to kids. Home-cooked cereal can be far better. And easy to mix nuts, frozen berries, etc. into. If a bit of dressing up (squirt of mustard, bit of mayo, etc.) makes hard-boiled eggs acceptable to him, those can be made once a week and kept in the fridge. An old friend perfected a fairly-healthy, filling stew recipe (some meat, mostly veggies, etc.) that he could make up in large batches and keep in the fridge. As a teenager, his son consumed an enormous quantity of that over time.

taylodl 5y ago

Try to minimize the amount of refined sugar and white flour in your diet. That'll get you below the 70%. As you're probably suspecting, it isn't easy! Refined sugar is in almost everything you buy at the grocery store, save for fresh produce and meat. White flour is present in many breads - even whole wheat bread! Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used. And breakfast cereal? Yeah, that's going to be hard to replace, especially for a five year old! Oatmeal is a good alternative but unless you're buying a box of old-fashioned oats and making it yourself you're likely to be buying a lot of refined sugar. Those healthy granola bars? Lots of refined sugar. Trail mix, especially the ones with the M&M's? Ungodly amounts of refined sugar. To be honest I'm kinda surprised that it's only 70% of calories coming from refined foods.

handrous 5y ago
> Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used. Part of the reason is that it's really hard—way more work, way more time—to get a fluffy sandwich loaf out of just whole wheat flour. Or anything that's not kinda dense and focaccia-looking, really.
- taylodl 5y ago
  You're not wrong! When I make home made bread I don't use only whole wheat flour - it's really difficult to work with and hard to get a good loaf, and I've been making bread on a regular basis for over 30 years! The 'whole wheat white' flours (fine ground 100% whole wheat flour) coming out are really good and allows for an excellent loaf.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Sometimes I eat shredded wheat and bananas, yogurt and fruit, or shredded wheat + yogurt + fruit. That takes 0 effort and can be packed for breakfast or lunch. Also carrots and hummus, dry roasted nuts, cheese and wheat thins, PB and apple slices, are all good snacks for a kid.