Everybody tells you that UPF is bad and you should not eat too much or none at all. I’m on board. But in what timeline do I find the extra prep time to make every family meal and snack from scratch?
The science is telling us it’s bad. But we need affordable solutions at the societal level to give people who want to banish UPF a fighting chance.
Not to mention a lot of UPF is fortified with vitamins a lot of people would not get enough of otherwise.
(Obviously not all UPF is fortified, but every time I see someone cutting it from their diets they just replace it with something like chicken and rice, because, it can honestly be a hassle to find decent fresh produce)
My child and I both have strong food aversions and my wife is vegetarian, I do all the cooking and we eat very little “junk”. But there has been times I couldn’t even find all the ingredients to make salsa without taking a 40 mile one way trip to the “big city”.
What food do you give your family?
I would love to make things like pasta and bread and all manners of cookies and muffins from scratch. I do these things when time permits (never pasta) but to do them all competes with chores, home improvements, showing up for my kid, etc.
I’m sorry. I’m not the most familiar with cooking especially for other people. When I wrote my previous comment I hadn’t read the definition of cat 4 yet. I’d assume it’s a tussle with how food with multiple ingredients (even salads with croutons) ending up in cat 4? I thought those kinds of things would be cat 3.
What is “ultra -processed food?”
Is bacon really considered ultra-processed?
What is “ultra -processed food?”
They need to quantify which aspects are relevant, because “ultra-processed” doesn’t mean much on its own if they aren’t telling me what specifically is bad about it.
Group 4: Ultra-processed foods
The most recent overview of Nova published with Monteiro defines ultra-processed food as follows:
Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and ‘mechanically separated meat’) or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.[10]
Bacon doesn’t really have “multiple” ingredients. I don’t get where it fits into this scale. I didn’t see any references to meat throughout this list.
They found that those who ate the highest amount of ultra-processed food every day had a 58% increased risk of developing dementia and a 46% increased risk for cognitive impairment compared to people who ate the lowest amount of daily ultra-processed food.
That’s a huge effect.
“Conversely, we found lower risks of cognitive impairment and dementia for high vs low consumers of minimally processed foods such as whole grains, fruits and vegetables,”
I’m not surprised of course, but it’s always good to have up to date and more corroborating evidence.
I’ll have to delve more into the studies but I’m curious what the mechanisms they’ve indicated. They point out that bacon was one of the worst offenders, which may track with high nitrates (absent of counteracting antioxidants) and the high saturated fat.
Second to this, I’m curious if it’s not just what you’re eating, but what you’re not eating instead. I suspect we’ll see more cases of malnutrition in the likes of long-term GLP-1 users who while they may eat less like a smoker, they are also not necessarily adding positive nutrients to their diet either.
It can only good happen.
It’s so hard to feel bad for people who still think ut’s okay to eat factory meat day in day out.
That is not an ultra-processed food.
Sausages and things like that definitely fall in the ultraprocessed foods category
No, but it is also bad. Just a different category of food and a different category of bad.
And irrelevant to the current post
It’s as relevant as people decide it is.
