How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/...e-android-share |
Somehow I'd missed the memo that the whole story about the identification of ultraprocessed foods being a problem began in the 90's in Brazil.
I also questioned the definition at the time of what constitutes an ultraprocessed food, especially since they began with this: Quote:
This points up a lot of the faults we've seen in the definition of UPFs: They see buying sugar, and cooking oils to cook at home as no problem. But somehow if you buy food that use those ingredients, it's a problem. Sausages - meat stuffed into a casing, smoked and/or preserved with salt is ultraprocessed, despite being a process that has existed for thousands of years. Their classification of what constitutes unprocessed and minimally processed, processed culinary ingredients, processed, and ultraprocessed are also a problem - if you bake a loaf of bread at home using processed ingredients, that's no problem. If you buy that loaf of bread ready made, it's a problem. By that logic, if you make candy bars and potato chips in big batches at home from ingredients in those first 3 categories - no problem. If you eat a store bought candy bar or single serving bag of potato chips, that's a problem. There's also this little gem: Quote:
I see little difference between most breakfast cereals and twinkies: both have lots of sugar and starch. For that matter, not much difference in the nutrition in flavored yogurts and whole grain bread either. They're both not much more than carbs. The worst part of this is that the US can't figure out what to do about UPFs. |
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There ISN'T. You are utterly correct. That is what they are working so hard to hide with this blizzard of maybethismaybethatwhocantell. |
I sat here mostly looking like this while reading this article:
:help: :q: :nono: :confused: :daze: :bash: Quote:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpe3pppw1z7o.amp Obviously it's not enough to notice that since UPFs have become the norm for most people's diets that obesity levels have skyrocketed, and record numbers of children whose diet consists mostly of UPFs are becoming obese. It's also not enough to notice that increased use of UPFs are associated with increased levels of diabetes. The part about the fish fingers really made me want to :bash: Yes, it uses up bits of leftover fish, and it's something some kids will eat that has some nutritional value from the little bit of fish in it. But those fish fingers (if they're anything at all like the fish sticks in the US) are mostly made from stuff to hold the bits of fish together inside the fish finger, with a thick layer of coating and breading so that the kids will eat it. Assuming they don't just eat the crispy breading and leave the fish. And then there was this bit: Quote:
Because sugar, salt and fat content are apparently the only things that matter in determining if a food is good or bad? :bash: So it doesn't matter at all whether or not it contains any vital nutrients (minerals, vitamins, essential amino acids, essential fatty acids), as long as it doesn't have too much sugar salt and fat? :bash: |
Heard a short on YT from a trusted low carb source. Stunning the amount of ultra processed food in the daily diet. About 50%.
-------- More reasons to NOT eat ultra processed foods. A long list of cancers that increases .... https://youtube.com/shorts/t7FlOlsL...pxW-ham2M7slJjm |
I couldn't understand why they were concentrating so much on the "processing" part of it - it's the garbage they add (and the nutrients they remove) in creating UPFs so that it lasts on the shelf for months or years that's the real problem.
Combine that with the sugar/salt/seed oil ratio that makes it incredibly addictive, and you have practically entire populations filling up on this nutritionally bankrupt junk. The traffic light isn't going to tell them much about what's actually IN the food they're buying - you can have a highly nutritious roasted chicken labeled with all red lights simply because of the nutrients inherent in roasted chicken, and a nutritionally bankrupt candy bar made sufficiently low enough in all the "bad" things to meet the standard for green lights. |
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Because this system is not meant to inform. It is designed to confuse. Then they can point to the bits of truth in their argument, like the bits of fish in fish fingers, and claim they are explaining and we are the ones who are confused. |
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I think that Monteiro did the whole issue a disservice when he terms nutritionally deficient grocery products "ultra processed foods", especially since his concern was that people were buying less sugar, flour, and oil so they were doing less home cooking - those 3 ingredients are already highly processed. So the very terminology he chose to describe junk food has confused the issue, and given the junk food apologists all the ammunition they need to make it sound like their products are just as nutritionally sound as unadulterated meat, fish, eggs, veggies, and fruit. We've mentioned repeatedly that it makes no sense if we can make a batch of cookies from the same ingredients used for store-bought cookies - but the home-baked cookies are not considered ultra-processed, while the store bought cookies are considered to be ultra-processed. Now the whole issue is conflated around whether factory processing is really that much worse than home processing. Quote:
The problem is that the article goes way too far in trying to label something like fish fingers as a healthy food. And then there was this: Quote:
Not that I consider tofu to be truly healthy, but as a processed food, it doesn't come anywhere near to the amount of processing required to produce chocolate bars. The history of food processing is a big part of the confusion that the term Ultra-Processed Food provokes: Sausages have been a diet staple in many parts of the world for thousands of years, but now since they're mostly factory produced, suddenly they're a modern ultra-processed food to be avoided. (At least part of this is due to the fat and sodium content, but the very fact it's made from meat is considered to a mark against it now too) Tofu (bean curd) has been a staple in far Eastern diets for thousands of years, but unless you make it at home, it's considered to be a UPF. (but apparently it gets a pass to be considered a healthy UPF, since it's vegan) The only significant differences between the sausages and tofu of today and the ones that were produced thousands of years ago is that now they're usually made in factories, packaged in plastic, and with a brand name label (complete with nutrition) attached to the packages. |
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Apparently it's even higher than that: Quote:
https://apnews.com/article/ultrapro...1e6cc727e55dfea All hail the US dietary guidelines... because that has served us soo well over the last 40+ years in controlling weight and improving health, right? Not to mention that food labels don't even mention the vast majority of essential micronutrients, but they're really big on making sure you know how much sodium, fat, and sugar is in the food. |
Here's some Little Debbie Devil Squares:
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And here's what I had for dinner: Salmon, asparagus, butter, herbs, salt. There really isn't any confusion. It's about what we regard as food. Grains are ground up seeds and that is the base of our pyramid. But for someone like me, sensitive to plant content, basing my diet on ground up seeds is going to have a poor effect. Modern machine ground seeds are capable of high concentrations, like seed oils. So we have plant concentrates infiltrating everything people eat, and then the unrecognizable ingredients. They have preservative in their oils, and then the 2% is often, as Carianna has pointed out, highly concentrated artificial ingredients. We can start to see how snack cakes have become nothing but processed, it is 100% processed, and so, has great impact as a percentage of calories. I use whey protein in smoothies, but otherwise cannot think of much other non-plant concentrates. Maybe bouillon cubes? Which no one eats, and now I can't even contemplate :) Jerky and dried strawberries reconstitute. And none of this is concentrated, only dehydrated. This is all about selling profitable plants to the public, while seeds and beans are among the most toxic substances on earth. Concentrating them into oil and as a protein food ingredient they can add to snack food, all while skipping the detox stage of past generations -- soak those beans! All a giant experiment on the global public. What we should be eating the most of as the base of our healthy pyramid, animal protein and fat, is what we are being scared away from. As a result, it's only officially that UPF is confusing. It's the ULTRA part. I can guarantee you, from back in my cake baking days, there is no recipe in that snack cake list. That list, to resemble actual cake, has been made worse by scientists and all their filler and binder stuff. When I cut all that out of my smoothies, I really got on the road to health. More protein was important, but so was the package it came in. |
Your dinner sounds delicious, BTW!
Most of the list of ingredients in the Little Debbie cakes are added nutrients to help make up for what's been removed in the flour refining process. Ironic that in order to create wheat based UPFs that can be preserved long enough to reach store shelves, and for home storage, all these nutrients are removed or destroyed in the process of milling, refining, and bleaching: Manganese, Zinc, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Niacin, Vitamin B6, copper, folate, selenium, potassium, pantothenic acid, thiamine, calcium, riboflavin, vitamin A and vitamin E. The "enriching" process only adds 5 nutrients: Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid. (I've read in the past that there are actually more nutrients in the original wheat berries than in the list above - something like 23? 27? And that the nutrients added to enrich the nutrient deficient refined wheat flour are in smaller amounts than in the original grain - I don't recall what book I read that in 40-some years ago, and don't have the patience to dig through google's mess to find out right now. The point is that for all of whole wheat's deficiencies as far as nutrition is concerned, it's still better for you than the refined stuff.) If we break it down to it's most basic parts, it's wheat starch, water, sugars, seed oils, and some cocoa. Everything is chosen to make it a product that meets minimum gov't requirements, and to preserve it. Other items on the list of ingredients in the Little Debbie cakes are flavor enhancers, other versions of starch and sugar, or preservatives to keep the finished product from getting moldy or stale tasting too quickly. Quote:
Nutritionally though? A perfect example of empty calories. And yet I can assure you that the nutrition label has parts that make make it sound far less nutritionally deficient than it really is. |
I have a teen that eats out most meals, because of long hours at work.
I do pester him as mom's perogative and duty. Difficult to find a restaurant at 10 am for lunch. But the crew seeks out options close to job sites. Even if a language barrier results in pointing at items in a display. This crew seems to make an effort to avoid McD style crap. And everyone is paid a substantial wage allowing any food they want. Most long days, crew catches dinner out. When son gets home, it's a shower and bed. Skipping dinner at home. PS. Work starts at 6 am. -------- Eating good food requires wanting better food, finding it, and ability to pay for it. Ultra processed is too easy to get, too yummy to not want it and pegged as cheap when it's not. God burger is about $5-7/ lb but how much are a bag of chips per pound????? |
The controversy is really heating up:
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Part of the problem here is that the ultraprocessed foods the dietician chose were foods that were... pretty much normal foods that you could make at home - foods that have been made at home in various countries for hundreds (or even thousands) of years.
The other part of the problem is that they're painting all processed foods with the same brush. Aside from some extra sodium, the canned beans and canned soup are not really all that much different from the versions you'd prepare at home (meaning processed to make them edible). They are not comparable in any way to a diet of nutritionally vacant Oreos and Twinkies. The Trader Joe's ready to eat Tamales would essentially at least be nutritionally comparable to what you'd make at home. Hall chooses frozen microwavable dinners that he feels meets his nutritional goals as closely as possible. Yes, a frozen dinner is obviously an ultra processed food - but a frozen meal that's made from actual food (meat, vegetables, and yes even some grains if you can tolerate them) is not in any way nutritionally comparable to a bowl of Lucky Charms or a candy bar. Again, this goes back to the definition of what actually constitutes UPFs. IMO, NOVA should have never described UPFs as factory processed, packaged in plastic and some of the other arbitrary descriptors that have nothing at all to do with their nutritional value. Even some of the ingredients not normally found in home-made foods (preservatives, salt) were used in processed foods with no ill effects for most people for many decades before they were suddenly labeled as indicators of UPFs to be avoided. Problematic UPFs have two factors inducing you to eat more: the addiction angle, and also the nutrient deficiency so that your body is screaming for those nutrients wherever it can get them - if the bowl of Froot Loops you had for breakfast has a maximum of 10% of some essential nutrients, and your body/brain connection recognizes Froot Loops as a source of those nutrients that it so desperately needs, then you're going to want 9 more bowls of it to get adequate amounts of those nutrients. Personally, I think the whole terminology for UPF should be thrown out - it's more a matter of what's addictive, while also being very deficient nutritionally, rather than the processing itself. |
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And since when is this "food"? |
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