A useless adage. What we consider food is 100% culturally determined. Other cultures eat things that I do not recognize as food at all, and I’m sure the reverse is true as well. I suspect there’s no shortage of kids that recognize McNuggets as food but not a piece of chicken still on the bone.
Also useless. I have in my cupboard some xanthan gum, which is a perfectly safe fermentation product used by all kinds of people. My mother, let alone grandmother, wouldn’t recognize it as a food, since it’s only somewhat recently that it’s been easy to get as a consumer (as opposed to an industrial user). But it’s as innocuous as corn starch.
I think what I am looking for is exactly why it is bad for you. I do eat what is on that list quite often. I realize to much salt and empty calories is bad, but preservatives? I don’t buy the argument that everything needs to be as close to nature as possible to be good for you.
As far as I’ve gathered “processed” means it’s been ground up and mixed with other substances to add taste/preserve. But is it the fact that it has been ground up that is bad, or is it the substances that have been added? Could you just add another mix of substances and have it be healthy?
I suppose something like this is a good example of processed foods:
The advent of reasonable quality pre-made meals doesn’t fully rebut the question of ultra-processed.
My take on ultra-processed is the class of foods where there are ingredients that would not normally form part of a traditional recipe for the food that are present with no other purpose than to make things easier/cheaper for the vendor.
So why worry?
I’m sure original sin comes into it somewhere.
But there are a few well understood bad actors. Probably the first on the list are trans-fats. They are substituted in for more traditional fats because they don’t stale and add rancid flavours to the goods. But why is this bad. Mostly bad luck IMHO. One might argue that it is in part because we didn’t evolve with lots of trans-fats in our diet, so the balance of chemical pathways is not jigged up to handle much of them. Trans-fats compete with our metabolisation of LDL cholesterol, and also trigger inappropriate down regulation of HDL. So a double whammy bad actor fat. But all there is one silly difference in the bonds down the lipid chain. It isn’t as if trans-fats are inherently evil.
Another complaint about processed foods is glycemic index. Macerating up stuff makes it adsorb faster. Just the milling of oats for instant porridge versus traditional whole rolled oats bumps up their glycemic index. So any food with highly milled carbs is going to get a stern talking about. White bread versus wholemeal, whole grains in general versus smooth yummy treats. This is something where the idea of “processing” gets some traction.
Sugar of course is right out on its own as the work of Beelzebub. HFCS is a curious one because fructose is metabolised differently to other sugars in humans, and can increase likelihood of developing metabolic syndrome. Again, more by bad luck that some inherently evil characteristic. But its ubiquity in some countries (such as the USA) as a cheap sweetener makes for yet another target for constituents in cheap and nasty processed foods.
Loading in cheap flavour enhancers, where salt is the easiest, but MSG and others of its brethren gets you another target. Salt is fine in moderation, but we have get another cheap enhancer for cheap foods that has health implications when consumed to excess.
I would mostly consider the rage against ultra-processed foods as, at least in part, more a complaint about cheap foods that are manufactured with an eye firmly on the cost of production, storage and transport, and little to no concern over the implications of some of the ingredient choices. It seems to be more bad luck than inherent evil that these choices can turn out to have poor health implications. So, perhaps original sin is in there somewhere after all.
Realistically, the “Mac’N’Cheez” list of ingredients is going to be pretty close to the total list of all the ingredients in your store-bought butter, cheese, and pasta. Even if you make your own pasta for example, the flower is going to be bleached and enriched [Niacin (a B Vitamin),Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Enzymes, Folic Acid (a B Vitamin)], and may contain some preservatives or anti-clumping agents. Then you add the salt, yeast/baking soda/baking powder, maybe egg. Then there’s the butter and cheese which are also salted, pasteurized, cultured with enzymes, fermented, etc. Simply combining all those things in one package makes them look a lot scarier than they really are.
The nitrates (or maybe nitrites) are actually really good for you – they massively reduce the risk of botulism, previously known as “sausage poisoning”. Sausages, while delicious, are probably in the same category as ice cream – enjoy in moderation.
I have been trying to “eat stuff that I can tell what plant or animal died to give me this meal” for years, so I was really interested in the data on “ultraprocessed food”, until I looked at the underlying list of foods, and how they classified them. They basically ranked stuff within broad categories. So there were whole categories that are probably not great for you, but some of the brands were ranked reasonably well. And then I looked at milk, and they knocked milk way down on the list if it included vitamin D (an artificial additive). I am extremely dubious that adding a little vitamin D to milk significantly changes how safe/unsafe it is to drink.
I’m sure there is some signal in there, but I think there’s an awful lot of noise, too.
I don’t think that what was meant was “recognized as food” in the sense that some cultures consider insects to be food and others do not. My understanding is that by “recognizable food” he meant eat corn, (even off the cob) rather than Doritos or even corn muffins.
That’s the big question and one which the study doesn’t really do a good job of answering.
Overall I’m not too impressed by the study, although I’m probably heavily biased (they’ll take away my frozen pizzas when they pry them from my cold cancer ridden hands).
First “Ultra-processed food” includes a wide variety of different things even if the results are real, it is probably one particular aspect of some of the foods that is the problem rather than the fact that they are processed. It would be like running a study that showed that people who engage in activities beginning with the letter “S” have increased rates of lung cancer. This could lead to the media saying that sex is bad for you, when the real problem is the smoking.
The second problem with the study is that it was an uncontrolled observational study, and the extent to which one eats processed food is highly correlated on a huge number of different factors, many of which could affect ones cancer risk. Now they did adjust for a number of the obvious ones, such as income, race, area of the country, certain nutritional parameters, but they can’t probably catch them all. Also the way they corrected for them was as a simple linear model which might miss more subtle effects. Given that the overall finding was rather modest increase in cancer death (note a 6% increase doesn’t mean your cancer risk went from from 8% to 14% it means it went from 8% to 8% x 1.06 = 8.5%) it could easily be from a covariate that was not properly accounted for.
I respectfully suggest you look for information from government authorities (EU, USA and UK, for example) rather than relying on news articles and personal opinion. This is FQ, after all.
Therefore, the NOVA classification can lead to a negative perception by many consumers, because it neglects well-established science concepts from the food science domain. NOVA is based on the erroneous assumption that all commercially manufactured foods have low nutritional value, promote weight gain and chronic diseases to consumers because they contain sugar, salt and additives. It dismisses the proven benefits of diets chosen with the right mix of foods at all levels of processing. Disagreeing with some scientific studies, the NOVA classification suggests with inadequate data, that food prepared from basic ingredients at home has superior nutritional qualities to those produced by processors. Thus, some concepts have emerged in the public health field with special highlights to the term “ultra-processed” foods (UPF).
The linked article isn’t necessarily an example of what I said above about government authorities. I haven’t even read it thoroughly, but it seems to take a more scientific approach. My point is that there’s an awful lot of nonsense online about anything that has to do with food and nutrition.
The cheapness is really the only important point here. HFCS, sucrose, honey, and various other sweeteners all have a roughly 50/50 mix of fructose and glucose. HFCS does not have an unusually high fructose content and thus whatever metabolic problems there may or may not be would be the same with others (HFCS Coke vs. sugar Coke, for example).
The cheapness does mean that it’s easy to sweeten up all kinds of things to bump the flavor. But the same product, with the same calories, just made with sugar or agave nectar or whatever, is not going to be healthier in any way.
Some examples of why highly processed foods can pose a problem is because they change the ratio of various nutrients, fats, sugars, etc. in ways that we were not evolved to eat, thus tricking our metabolism and causing physiological processes to respond in unpredictable ways that may be detrimental to our health.
For example, the glutamate in MSG is normally found primarily in meat. So when you eat Doritos, which are little more than starch, fat, and salt, your brain thinks you’re eating a steak rather than junk food, and it doesn’t put the brakes on your appetite. MSG makes bad foods taste good. Similarly, ignoring the metabolic questions about fructose, when sugar is extracted from crops and used as an ingredient in…well…everything nowadays, we’re getting more sugar than we realize. That also comes without the satiating effect of the fiber in the fruits where fructose is normally found. Fiber slows digestion and the sugar rush compared to something like juice. For instance, one glass of apple juice has the equivalent sugar of as many as 10 apples. Just try eating 10 apples and see how far you get! A glass of juice on the other hand? Yeah.
I’ve known a number of food scientists over the course of my marketing career, and have had it confirmed to me by them that two of the cheapest, most sure-fire ways to improve how most consumers perceive how a processed food tastes, is:
No doubt. Aside from cost, some other advantages of those two are shelf stability and industrial compatibility. Fat is a reliable way to increase taste, too–but it goes rancid, and it’s not always obvious how to add it to a product without fundamentally changing it. But you can always dump in a load of corn syrup and salt.
FYI: I was basing my assessment on a reading of the original study on which the news article was drawn (I agree that science reporting is terrible) and was giving my personal opinion as a statistician in the area of Cancer Research (although I should point out my opinions are me own and do not reflect the views of my employer).
Mr. Legend had to go on a very strict low-sodium diet a few years back, which led me to make all our food at home. This also meant our food had less added sugar than most prepared foods, since most of my home recipes aren’t highly sweetened. Once he was able to cautiously add some prepared foods back in, we discovered that almost all restaurant and packaged foods taste too salty and/or sweet to enjoy. Sometimes I wish the entire country could go on a similar salt/sugar fast just to reset our collective taste buds and let industry bring the sodium and sweetener levels down a bit.
