For multiple reasons, one of which is that I don’t like much of what’s for sale, I make most (not all) of my food, starting with fairly basic ingredients. I salt a few things heavily, and many things not at all; and generally use far fewer sugars than are called for in recipes. I do like a few things quite sweet; but only a few.
And most of the stuff for sale as combined ingredients tastes to me like Too Much Salt and/or Too Much Sugar and doesn’t taste like anything else, including whatever’s supposed to be in it. I suspect it’s because the other ingredients are very often flavorless. Confinement-raised chicken is flavorless. A lot of feedlot-raised beef and pork isn’t much better. Vegetables bred and raised solely for most pounds produced per acre are flavorless. Fruits similarly bred and raised and on top of that picked before they’re ripe are flavorless. So they pile on the salt and/or sugar – and people who haven’t had anything with natural flavor to eat, maybe for years, maybe for all their lives, think that’s what food’s supposed to taste like; so the manufacturers pile on yet more salt and/or sugar (when I do find something I like, a lot of the time it soon comes out “new and improved” which means “more like candy”), or if those are out of style MSG, or manufactured synthesized chemicals that don’t otherwise show up anywhere at all.
Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances
extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents
(hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories
You may have mis-read the NOVA reference sheet. The sauce it’s self is the formulation. You can make it by the cup at home, by the gallon in a commercial restaurant, or by the ton in a factory. The majority of the ingredients are extracted from other foods (oil) or are commercially mined substances (salt).
You really don’t need modern technology to create processed foods, and they’re nothing evil. I saw a nature documentary showing some natives in a tropical jungle sitting in the dirt making processed food. It was some sort of fermented delicacy make mainly from a mass of root or bark that a small circle of people chew to a pulp and spit in batches into a big cauldron where it’s mixed with some other ingredients for a few days.
Plenty of foods are much better for us with some processing; cooking being the most beneficial type of processing. Meat and many types of raw vegetables take a lot of chewing and/or gut room to break down. It’s a fallacy to believe that as-you-find-it foods are always better for you than processed.
is referring to something other than bread, since Group 4 also contains
packaged breads, hamburger and hot dog buns
In this classification system, there is no such thing as an “ordinary loaf of bread made with yeast” . It’s either “freshly-made (unpackaged)” and in group 3 or “packaged” and in group 4. And plain * packaged bread is not ever made of flour, water, salt and yeast the way plain freshly baked breads are ( whether homemade or bakery). Packaged breads have preservatives and most have sugar. There’s a reason Pepperidge Farms bread lasts a week but I can’t bake bread for a holiday meal a week in advance.
* By “plain” I mean to exclude breads that have additional ingredients - cheese bread will contain cheese whether it is made at home or in a factory.
Maybe they should have said so in their classification, then.
The entire thing is backwards reasoning. They started with the assumption that pre-packaged stuff is bad, fresh homemade stuff is good, and raw foods are even better, and then tried to work out a classification scheme that fit their preconceptions. The term “ultra-processed” itself is pure propaganda.
What’s a packaged bread, anyway? Does a baguette become worse for you the instant you slide it in a paper wrapping?
I’ve never heard “packaged bread” used in a way that would include freshly baked bread in a paper wrapper - I have always seen it used for the plastic-wrapped , factory-made breads that you find in the supermarket bread aisle with the hot dog and hamburger buns and not for the freshly baked bread you might find in a supermarket or independent bakery
So the bread becomes worse when you use a plastic wrapper instead of paper?
It’s obvious that their starting point was that they see the spongy white breads that are loaded with sugar and preservatives and come wrapped in plastic as bad. And there may or may not be truth to that position. But that kind of intuitive classification isn’t scientifically justifiable, and so they came up with this. Unfortunately, it’s largely nonsense because it’s still just trying to justify their intuitive position.
If they wanted to actually be scientific about it, they could look at the amount of sugar in Wonder bread vs. a typical bakery loaf, determine how that affects the caloric content, glycemic index, and so on, and then show how those things impact human health.
But that’s all hard. They want to use a shortcut of “pre-packaged is bad” and to push a nice catchy propaganda term like “ultra processed”. That’s much easier, and as a side effect makes for nice clickbait titles from the media.
I suppose if there is any scientific merit to any of it, that would lie around the idea that food which is loaded with anti-biological chemicals to make it shelf-stable for a comparatively long timespan will be less good for you than the same ingredients minus those preservatives.
So the point is not that a fresh baguette loses nutritional goodness when slid into a paper bag. It’s that a baguette designed to be made at a factory, slipped into a plastic sleeve, then left on a shelf for 3 weeks, then sold & eaten a few days later will have had a lot of preservative pumped into it to buy that 4 weeks of non-molding and non-staling. preservatives that will be lacking in one made from scratch at home or in a bakery that makes them fresh for consumption today.
The flour, water, sugar, and yeast in that shelf-stable loaf may have started the same as a baked fresh loaf meant to be eaten that same day. But eating that same flour, sugar, and yeast output laced with chemicals that keep/kept mold away for a month means ingesting substances designed to interfere with normal biological functions. If it kills mold that’s trying to get nutrition from the bread, what’s it doing to you trying to get nutrition from the bread?
I don’t know that I exactly agree with the line of reasoning I’ve presented, but there is some element of “common” sense in there.
The processed food products are being optimized for traits other than nutrition & naturalness. The manufacturers know what they are gaining from that trade-off. Do we know what we are losing from the same trade-off as a consequence? I don’t think so. Is there regulation that ensures somebody understands what’s being lost in the trade-off? Not that I know of but I’m admittedly not an expert in the field.
Right–and I’m not disputing the possibility that this is true. I’m not familiar with the evidence here in either direction.
The plastic bag doesn’t do anything to the bread. They are simply using that as a proxy for factory-made bread. It’s wrapped in plastic to prevent it from going stale, which then requires anti-mold agents, and of course the whole thing is expected to be shelf-stable for a while and so demands other preservatives. The fresh bread from the bakery comes in paper because no one expects it to last more than a day, and thus also doesn’t demand any preservatives.
I don’t contest any of this–my complaint is that they are not getting to the (potential) root of the issue by focusing on the packaging or processing. If it’s bad, it’s because of something specific they did, not because of something as poorly defined as “ultra processed”.
Depends upon what you call an “ordinary” loaf. For many people their ordinary bread is what they buy once a week from a supermarket. For others, “ordinary” means the most basic recipe. “Ordinary” isn’t a good term. (Reminds me of the difference between normal and nominal.)
There is a clear difference between these two. It is the additional stuff over a traditional loaf that gets you into group 4. To be more clear, they might have split the ingredients into defining, and additional. To have listed baked goods that didn’t contain any flour or yeast in group 4 would have been even more silly.
The main health related one in group 4 is the use of hydrogenated vegetable fat. Even here it isn’t clear enough. Emulsifiers is a scare word. I’m surprised nobody has put two and two together making -5, to link guar gum with fracking, and thus taint it as the work of Satan.
The whole idea of ultra-processed is poorly done. Clearly there is a lot of scare terminology at work, and an undercurrent of “natural good, industrial bad” at play. But there is value is calling out bad fats and overloading with sugar.
What one can say with some justification, is there there is some correlation between foods that have been made on an industrial scale with an eye to cost and logistics, and foods that contain less than happy ingredients. A correlation with stuff in plastic bags too. I would say that that link is less clear than it was. I do notice that long life breads - which are those containing hydrogenated fats and anti-staling agents - do tend to come in impermeable plastic bags, clearly to keep them from drying out, whereas the higher quality breads tend to come in either paper or perforated plastic. So there are some additional dynamics here.
Those tend to be packaged after baking at the store, so they need to cool and dissipate some moisture. A few weeks ago I caught a batch of baguettes that had come right out of the oven and were still warm on the display rack. There was a little bit of condensation on the plastic sleeves even with the tops wide open. If they were sealed up tight that might trap too much moisture and you’d lose the crispiness of the crust. At lower-end grocery stores they seem to package those in plain plastic sleeves with twist ties, not much different than the commodity stuff, and they’re also more evenly soft.
Also, “baked fresh in-store” is one of those sly marketing terms. Yes it’s technically true, but the dough is still pre-made in a factory and sent frozen to the grocery store for thawing and baking. Subway does this same thing. Most “fresh” meat and seafood was frozen and thawed too. I’d say this is better than making the entire loaf offsite and shipping it into the store (that’s what the bread aisle is for), but it’s not like the bakery section is mixing and kneading dough in the back. The “bake it yourself” loafs are, as far as I know, the same thawed out dough they’re putting in their ovens.
There was something of a scandal here over that. Partially created loaves were carted from the other side of the planet to be baking in well known chain supermarket ovens. OTOH, we have a number of quite genuine in-store and speciality bakeries that very clearly do bake every night. One can see the huge mixing engines and the entire production chain all on display. My usual supermarket does a very good line of in-store baked goods. You can see the bakers slaving away in the bakery area behind the counter. But I don’t frequent any of the major supermarket chains.