4 ms·

The concept of ultra-processed food is nonsense. https://thecritic.co.uk/whos-afraid-of-upfs-part-1/ https://thecritic.co.uk/whos-afraid-of-upfs-part-1/

droopyEyelids 3y ago
My buddy and I recently went down a rabbit hole researching this after "processed foods" started to be the topic everyone was talking about. It really is nonsense when people try to define it scientifically. This is the closest to anything we found that makes sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing#Processing_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing#Processing_lev... but it's kind of separate from the popular idea of processed foods Here's a Nature article discussing the problems: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1
- hrnnnnnn 3y ago
  My working definition, taken from Michael Greger, is "nothing bad added, nothing good taken away".
  - vel0city 3y ago
    So then freshly picked vegetables steamed is ultra-processed, as some of the nutrients got washed away in the steam (good taken away). Cooking a freshly caught fish in a pan or on a grill is ultra-processed because its potentially charring meat proteins which is potentially cancerous (something bad added). I dunno about you, but this definition doesn't seem to work for me.
    - darkclouds 3y ago
      Alot of the fruit and veg that is sold in supermarkets today is not the same stuff from the 70's. Orange juice has gotten sweeter, even shop bought blackberries are noticeably worse than wild blackberries so I just dont buy the fruit and veg now. Naturally ripened bananas taste so much better than the artificially ripened bananas and you can taste the gas used to ripen the bananas even though they claim you shouldn't be able to. Carrots today are horse stock carrots, big, bland and no taste. Spuds, you cant get a decent baker with a decent skin on it any more, come back Spud U like, all is forgiven. The mince meat from supermarkets is just gristle that leaves feeling worse for wear. Yoghurts, massed produced sludge, designed to forced through pipework for automated containerisation. Successive Govts have allowed this to occur in the UK and then they wonder why the NHS cant cope. Thing is, for most people they havent noticed this decline in quality food so they think you are nutter when you complain about the decline, which probably explains the rise of the influencer. Cheap crap food masks the costs to your health.
      - ungruntled 3y ago
        Having lived in a few countries globally, I’ve had the chance to observe the decline in food in multiple regions. Some local industries decline at different rates likely due to locals not tolerating it. Bread and milk are good indicators in my opinion. Whole milk fat content is lower in US vs Europe, and in the middle east, milk fat is replaced with coconut fat or others non bovine sources.
        vel0city 3y ago
        The standard "whole milk" in the US and EU are both 3.5% milkfat. If your whole milk is less than 3.5% in the US, report them to the USDA.
    - hrnnnnnn 3y ago
      The parent comment mentioned "processed foods", and that's what I was attempting to define, not "ultra processed", which doesn't really seem to mean anything coherent. I think you're right about steaming though, if you're going for maximum nutrition you're better off eating some vegetables raw.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  The ones I hate the most are "organic" and "bio" foods. The sweet talking marketeers (professional liars) have won. It's likely just my biases but I've noticed that the vast majority of people using these nonsense terms are, hmmm, let's just call them high calorie humans. They really want to believe
  - orwin 3y ago
    I mean, I've spent time in west Virginia, the people I met at Huntington's organic farmers market (and Fayetteville) were significantly more normal-sized than most Americans I met, even those I met in Cali, so I don't know if it's true.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    Organic actually has a legal definition, at least in the USA. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/subchapter-M/part-205?toc=1 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su... Of course the lists of regulated chemicals and all the weird stuff it covers are don't correspond to what anyone imagines "organic" means, but it is not marketing puffery.
- orwin 3y ago
  (I up voted you because it was good information that do not deserve to be greyed, I really like the study, but I disagree) The ultra-processed food are not nonsense, only hard to define depending on your culture. One example my sister used is bread. If your bread contain flour water and salt, it's processed food but not ultra-processed. Everyone agree. Even if you use multiple different flour and nuts, still the same. After that, you can add oil on the bread before cooking it (not mixed with the bread,just on top, to change the crust formation). It is possible to consider it ultra-processed now (people rarely do, even in France). Now come the question of sugar (there is a salt question too but I don't know enough to talk about it). Sugar help conserving the bread. In France, some people (including me) consider that any amount of sugar in bread makes it ultra-processed. Some consider that it only is if the bread cannot be just called bread, but that depends on your culture. Some 'bread' in the US would be called 'brioche' here by almost everyone. But for the majority of stuff, it's easier : if it's a pre-prepared meal with conservatives, it's ultra-processed. Which does not mean it's bad, though. Generally it is, but not always. Nutri-score (at least the last iteration, the previous one was flawed against fat in general and insaturated fat in particular) is imho a better way to look at food.
jjoonathan 3y ago
Yeah, it's useful to observe the correlation -- processed foods tend to be optimized for junk-food traits -- but going to war on this basis is insane. You'll just wind up discarding a bunch of genuine culinary advances while kicking open the door for fraudulent health foods, of which there are already too many. I was roundly mocked for predicting that sugar would rebrand as "natural" with marketing that heavily exploited "natural=healthy", but now that I have been proven right I just want to see the madness stop here.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

My buddy and I recently went down a rabbit hole researching this after "processed foods" started to be the topic everyone was talking about. It really is nonsense when people try to define it scientifically. This is the closest to anything we found that makes sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing#Processing_levels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_processing#Processing_lev... but it's kind of separate from the popular idea of processed foods Here's a Nature article discussing the problems: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1

hrnnnnnn 3y ago
My working definition, taken from Michael Greger, is "nothing bad added, nothing good taken away".
- vel0city 3y ago
  So then freshly picked vegetables steamed is ultra-processed, as some of the nutrients got washed away in the steam (good taken away). Cooking a freshly caught fish in a pan or on a grill is ultra-processed because its potentially charring meat proteins which is potentially cancerous (something bad added). I dunno about you, but this definition doesn't seem to work for me.
  - darkclouds 3y ago
    Alot of the fruit and veg that is sold in supermarkets today is not the same stuff from the 70's. Orange juice has gotten sweeter, even shop bought blackberries are noticeably worse than wild blackberries so I just dont buy the fruit and veg now. Naturally ripened bananas taste so much better than the artificially ripened bananas and you can taste the gas used to ripen the bananas even though they claim you shouldn't be able to. Carrots today are horse stock carrots, big, bland and no taste. Spuds, you cant get a decent baker with a decent skin on it any more, come back Spud U like, all is forgiven. The mince meat from supermarkets is just gristle that leaves feeling worse for wear. Yoghurts, massed produced sludge, designed to forced through pipework for automated containerisation. Successive Govts have allowed this to occur in the UK and then they wonder why the NHS cant cope. Thing is, for most people they havent noticed this decline in quality food so they think you are nutter when you complain about the decline, which probably explains the rise of the influencer. Cheap crap food masks the costs to your health.
    - ungruntled 3y ago
      Having lived in a few countries globally, I’ve had the chance to observe the decline in food in multiple regions. Some local industries decline at different rates likely due to locals not tolerating it. Bread and milk are good indicators in my opinion. Whole milk fat content is lower in US vs Europe, and in the middle east, milk fat is replaced with coconut fat or others non bovine sources.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        The standard "whole milk" in the US and EU are both 3.5% milkfat. If your whole milk is less than 3.5% in the US, report them to the USDA.
  - hrnnnnnn 3y ago
    The parent comment mentioned "processed foods", and that's what I was attempting to define, not "ultra processed", which doesn't really seem to mean anything coherent. I think you're right about steaming though, if you're going for maximum nutrition you're better off eating some vegetables raw.
beebeepka 3y ago
The ones I hate the most are "organic" and "bio" foods. The sweet talking marketeers (professional liars) have won. It's likely just my biases but I've noticed that the vast majority of people using these nonsense terms are, hmmm, let's just call them high calorie humans. They really want to believe
- orwin 3y ago
  I mean, I've spent time in west Virginia, the people I met at Huntington's organic farmers market (and Fayetteville) were significantly more normal-sized than most Americans I met, even those I met in Cali, so I don't know if it's true.
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  Organic actually has a legal definition, at least in the USA. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/subchapter-M/part-205?toc=1 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su... Of course the lists of regulated chemicals and all the weird stuff it covers are don't correspond to what anyone imagines "organic" means, but it is not marketing puffery.
orwin 3y ago
(I up voted you because it was good information that do not deserve to be greyed, I really like the study, but I disagree) The ultra-processed food are not nonsense, only hard to define depending on your culture. One example my sister used is bread. If your bread contain flour water and salt, it's processed food but not ultra-processed. Everyone agree. Even if you use multiple different flour and nuts, still the same. After that, you can add oil on the bread before cooking it (not mixed with the bread,just on top, to change the crust formation). It is possible to consider it ultra-processed now (people rarely do, even in France). Now come the question of sugar (there is a salt question too but I don't know enough to talk about it). Sugar help conserving the bread. In France, some people (including me) consider that any amount of sugar in bread makes it ultra-processed. Some consider that it only is if the bread cannot be just called bread, but that depends on your culture. Some 'bread' in the US would be called 'brioche' here by almost everyone. But for the majority of stuff, it's easier : if it's a pre-prepared meal with conservatives, it's ultra-processed. Which does not mean it's bad, though. Generally it is, but not always. Nutri-score (at least the last iteration, the previous one was flawed against fat in general and insaturated fat in particular) is imho a better way to look at food.

jjoonathan 3y ago

Yeah, it's useful to observe the correlation -- processed foods tend to be optimized for junk-food traits -- but going to war on this basis is insane. You'll just wind up discarding a bunch of genuine culinary advances while kicking open the door for fraudulent health foods, of which there are already too many. I was roundly mocked for predicting that sugar would rebrand as "natural" with marketing that heavily exploited "natural=healthy", but now that I have been proven right I just want to see the madness stop here.