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Ultra processed food is food you wouldn't be able to make at home from whole ingredients. It's easy to make bread and pizza.

by baby 1y ago

gizmo686 1y ago
I might be able to figure out how to grind wheat into flour for bread. Maybe I can squint hard enough to consider baking yeast to be a "whole ingredient". But cheese? I assume I can probably figure it out with the internet, but it is not at all obvious what goes into that. And the milk I would use almost certainly went through an industrial sterilization process that I know I am not equipped to so.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- internet_points 1y ago
  You can make ricotta in <1h with whole milk, vinegar and a bit of salt. And it's good on pizza! But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time. Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.
- lopis 1y ago
  Your ignorance of the process or recipe of a food product doesn't affect the definition of ultra processed food. No amount of knowledge will let you make something like ultra processed foods at home with home equipment simply because it uses industrial processes and ingredients. Naturally there is a spectrum of processed-ness.
UncleMeat 1y ago
And yet, pizza regularly appears on lists of "ultra processed" foods. As do potato chips and ice cream, two foods that are also very easy to make at home from whole ingredients. There is no consistent definition and people regularly bend over backward to put all "junk food" in this category.
- hombre_fatal 1y ago
  Yeah, it's a good example of how useless "ultra processed" is as a heuristic when we can use a slightly better label like "junk food". So, donuts are fine because they are only a few ingredients that you can make on your stove, and they're bad once a factory makes them? Maybe only because the factory uses "chemicals"? No, it's the fried calorie-dense food that is easy to overeat while displacing nutrition from better food sources that is the problem.
  - voakbasda 1y ago
    Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value. Pizza made at home will not use such things. Your local pub that makes their own pizza will not either. Fast food or frozen pizza gets their ingredients from central suppliers in bulk, and they have no choice but to use such things in order for their products to survive the extended storage, processing, transportation, and similar delays that will occur on the way to the consumer.
    - hombre_fatal 1y ago
      It's a very convenient red herring to zoom in on some additives instead of zooming out to evaluate your dietary patterns. Probably because we can use it to let ourselves off the hook for a bad diet. We can do things like roleplay that it's the seed oil in our Doritos making us fat, and that if it were butter then, idk, it would be a superfood or something? It's the pepperoni, 15g sodium, 100g saturated fat, and 3000 calories of Costco pizza you just ate that's doing a number on your body, not the guar gum in the dough. Or, how are you going to pick apart an ingredient list when you just ate a half-dozen home-cooked lard donuts? You're cool with laying down arterial plaque but you draw the line at ascorbic acid in the store-bought cream filling? The "ulta processed" meme is a huge distraction. It's like listening to a fat guy talk about how he's very particular about the gum he chews because he stays away from "sugar alcohols". Yeah? What about the other 4999 calories of food you ate today?

Ultra processed food is food you wouldn't be able to make at home from whole ingredients. It's easy to make bread and pizza.

by baby 1y ago

Ultra processed food is food you wouldn't be able to make at home from whole ingredients. It's easy to make bread and pizza.

gizmo686 1y ago

I might be able to figure out how to grind wheat into flour for bread. Maybe I can squint hard enough to consider baking yeast to be a "whole ingredient". But cheese? I assume I can probably figure it out with the internet, but it is not at all obvious what goes into that. And the milk I would use almost certainly went through an industrial sterilization process that I know I am not equipped to so.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
internet_points 1y ago
You can make ricotta in <1h with whole milk, vinegar and a bit of salt. And it's good on pizza! But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time. Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.
lopis 1y ago
Your ignorance of the process or recipe of a food product doesn't affect the definition of ultra processed food. No amount of knowledge will let you make something like ultra processed foods at home with home equipment simply because it uses industrial processes and ingredients. Naturally there is a spectrum of processed-ness.

UncleMeat 1y ago

And yet, pizza regularly appears on lists of "ultra processed" foods. As do potato chips and ice cream, two foods that are also very easy to make at home from whole ingredients. There is no consistent definition and people regularly bend over backward to put all "junk food" in this category.

hombre_fatal 1y ago
Yeah, it's a good example of how useless "ultra processed" is as a heuristic when we can use a slightly better label like "junk food". So, donuts are fine because they are only a few ingredients that you can make on your stove, and they're bad once a factory makes them? Maybe only because the factory uses "chemicals"? No, it's the fried calorie-dense food that is easy to overeat while displacing nutrition from better food sources that is the problem.
- voakbasda 1y ago
  Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value. Pizza made at home will not use such things. Your local pub that makes their own pizza will not either. Fast food or frozen pizza gets their ingredients from central suppliers in bulk, and they have no choice but to use such things in order for their products to survive the extended storage, processing, transportation, and similar delays that will occur on the way to the consumer.
  - hombre_fatal 1y ago
    It's a very convenient red herring to zoom in on some additives instead of zooming out to evaluate your dietary patterns. Probably because we can use it to let ourselves off the hook for a bad diet. We can do things like roleplay that it's the seed oil in our Doritos making us fat, and that if it were butter then, idk, it would be a superfood or something? It's the pepperoni, 15g sodium, 100g saturated fat, and 3000 calories of Costco pizza you just ate that's doing a number on your body, not the guar gum in the dough. Or, how are you going to pick apart an ingredient list when you just ate a half-dozen home-cooked lard donuts? You're cool with laying down arterial plaque but you draw the line at ascorbic acid in the store-bought cream filling? The "ulta processed" meme is a huge distraction. It's like listening to a fat guy talk about how he's very particular about the gum he chews because he stays away from "sugar alcohols". Yeah? What about the other 4999 calories of food you ate today?