The complete lack of rigor and the use of shock-headlines around "ultra-processed" foods drives me nuts. It conveys very little useful information.
Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn't make the thing bad for you.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that constantly horking down Mountain Dew, Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos isn't good for you. We all know this, we don't need a headline for it.
Give me some useful information. What are reasonable thresholds for these junk foods? How about for specific ingredients?
Ranting and raving out of the way, do yourself a favor and skip to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization classification document [1] linked in the article. It actually answers some of the questions I posed.
> Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn't make the thing bad for you.
I have to admit though, I'm not aware of any food that would be considered "ultra-processed" yet known to be good for people.
I assume when people talk about “ultra-processed” they’re talking about foods which 90% would agree are bad for you: foods with a lot of added sugar or oil, or almost everything else taken out. e.g. candy, fried foods, chips, pizza on white bread, fruit juice.
Is pasta ultra-processed? What about salami? Mashed potatoes? Cheese? Honestly, no. Actually, high-calorie foods like cheese or wheat pasta are very nutritious. Of course a diet consisting of pasta, salami, and cheese with a side of mashed potatoes is probably bad. But it’s better than the above.
I wonder whether kids are really getting fat off of even hot dogs, mac and cheese, steak and cheese subs, and corn. Or if it’s the added sugar and refined carbs - candy, soda, white bread, “snacks”. People say that kids’ diet in the 60s was the former, and they were fine.
Honestly “ultra-processed” can be misleading because it isn’t the processing which is bad, it’s the amount of fat and carbs vs. protein, fiber, water, and other nutrients. Maybe we could call it “junk” food but that’s even more ambiguous.
"Ultra-processed" is a pretty meaningless standard. Pasta and Cheerios are very processed but part of the process is being fortified with loads of micronutrients. Cheerios are better for you than something like white rice which is almost pure starch. And high-fructose corn syrup has the same nutritional value as raw honey despite being processed. There's no substitute for just reading labels.
totally agree. i think there is no baseline at all for “healthy food.” it means different things to different people. even high calorie foods can be healthy for some groups.
i think this argument about processed foods tries to simplify it too much when there’s really a lot of different factors. high in calories? no vitamins? known carcinogens? individual allergies or trouble digesting? this one size fits all approach to labeling food good and bad ignores the details.
and the real issue is education: do you know what you’re eating? and how much? and what your body needs? i’d rather see answers there than “big soda bad” and “chips bad”
> Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn't make the thing bad for you.
Is someone suggesting to get 70% of calorie intake from pharmaceuticals though ?
So at first glance it seems like there's no way this is actually possible. There are 21 meals a week, plus enough snacking that we could probably just think of it as 28 meals a week. Kids just eat constantly, it's bonkers. Anyway, with 28 meals a week, you'd need about 20 of them to be ultra-processed in order to meet this. That's a lot!
Except that it's actually really not. If we take my 5 year old son as a normal kid, a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then whatever random food they feed him for school lunch and we're already 2/3rds of the way to the goal. He snacks on fruit and stuff, but also on pretzel sticks and honey roasted peanuts and all sorts of other kind of junky things.
I make dinner from scratch very nearly every night, and my kid still falls into this 70% bucket! And so I really don't have a good idea about how to change that. Maybe make our own bread and have them have toast for breakfast every day? That's going to get old quick.
This is perhaps a good indicator that “processed versus unprocessed” isn’t a great signal for whether a particular fooditem should be part of one’s diet.
Using your cereal example: I grew up eating grape nuts[1], which are probably in the ultraprocessed category. But it’s just barley flour and I ate it like most people eat muesli (with fresh fruit) — what should that count as?
Good healthy food costs more money. We've done a great job about putting the most amount of calories and flavor into cheaper than dirt forms. I think a breakfast of oats and lunch of a tuna sandwich would work. Most lunch meats are probably considered Ultra-Processed.
I think the only ways out of this are as you said fixing everything yourself. Most things you can eat raw that isn't packaged would probably be safe. Then cooking your own meats.
But pasta is considered Ultra-Processed, packaged bread is ultra-processed. I thought those were some of the most basic foods with the smallest number of ingredients. Maybe home made versions as you suggested are not considered Ultra-Processed.
Another angle is that junk tends to be more caloric, so even if kids actually did eat their fruits and veggies, even say with 21 of those meals, they'd still only make up a comparatively small portion of all the calories in their diets. But given that they're full of other nutrients (and esp. fiber) I don't think that's so bad.
Breakfast is definitely a good place to start. We eat eggs for breakfast nearly every day in my home. It’s not as simple as cereal but scrambling a batch of eggs is not too bad.
Try to minimize the amount of refined sugar and white flour in your diet. That'll get you below the 70%. As you're probably suspecting, it isn't easy! Refined sugar is in almost everything you buy at the grocery store, save for fresh produce and meat. White flour is present in many breads - even whole wheat bread! Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used. And breakfast cereal? Yeah, that's going to be hard to replace, especially for a five year old! Oatmeal is a good alternative but unless you're buying a box of old-fashioned oats and making it yourself you're likely to be buying a lot of refined sugar. Those healthy granola bars? Lots of refined sugar. Trail mix, especially the ones with the M&M's? Ungodly amounts of refined sugar.
To be honest I'm kinda surprised that it's only 70% of calories coming from refined foods.
A bread machine can make the "make our own bread...toast" less laborious. (Recipes printed in bread machines' instruction booklets tend toward the less-healthy, but with some experimenting...)
Commercial breakfast cereals vary, though the least-healthy are probably the most tuned to appeal to kids. Home-cooked cereal can be far better. And easy to mix nuts, frozen berries, etc. into.
If a bit of dressing up (squirt of mustard, bit of mayo, etc.) makes hard-boiled eggs acceptable to him, those can be made once a week and kept in the fridge.
An old friend perfected a fairly-healthy, filling stew recipe (some meat, mostly veggies, etc.) that he could make up in large batches and keep in the fridge. As a teenager, his son consumed an enormous quantity of that over time.
Sometimes I eat shredded wheat and bananas, yogurt and fruit, or shredded wheat + yogurt + fruit. That takes 0 effort and can be packed for breakfast or lunch.
Also carrots and hummus, dry roasted nuts, cheese and wheat thins, PB and apple slices, are all good snacks for a kid.
Does cereal count as "ultra-processed"? Things like Cheerios don't seem much more processed than bread from what I can tell. Also honey-roasted peanuts?
My understanding of ultra-processed would be things more like candy, cheetos, pringles, oreos, soda, etc.
I've recently been cutting back on salt, and it's crazy how difficult that is. Even something seemingly benign like a bag of mixed frozen vegetables has so much salt added, a few hundred grams (a reasonable portion) would be almost my entire daily sodium intake. And for all that, it doesn't even taste well seasoned.
Gotta be careful and stick with the frozen vegetables which have nothing added.
"Even something seemingly benign like a bag of mixed frozen vegetables has so much salt added"
Have literally never experienced this except if it's something that's meant to be ready to eat or is a base mix with its own seasoning. Is it a US thing?
As a kid we ate mostly natural food, as my parents had a decent sized farm. We always had salt on the table, and went through a lot of it.
As an adult without a farm, I cannot remember the last time I even touched the salt shaker. I've actually made spaghetti once that was near inedible because the sodium in the sauce, cheeses, and meat made it incredibly salty tasting.
Pizza alone accounts for a large fraction of junk food consumption. I was shocked to learn that more than one in five kids and teens eats pizza on any given day.
Overall, 13% of the U.S. population aged 2 years and over, consumed pizza on any given day. The percentage consuming pizza ranged from approximately 22% among older children (6-11 years) and adolescents (12-19 years) to less than 6% among older adults, 60 years and over
Is there a way to make pizza that wouldn't be considered junk food? Bread, cheese, tomato sauce. I am hoping that the "junk food" of pizza is because of the stuff added for longer shelf lives or added ... something. Frozen pizza should be the same as bread, cheese and tomato sauce. But I'm guessing it isn't the same.
It’s interesting there seems to be a correlation between countries who purchase/consume the least “processed food” and countries who have a cultural reputation for enjoying long meals.
Anecdotal: 5 years ago I went on the Dr. Fuhrman diet (no processed foods). Within 6 weeks I felt better than I had in a decade: everything was better: clearer thinking, inflammation and bodily discomfort gone, longer hikes without getting tired, and better sleep.
I hate to think of the costs to society and personal costs of people not getting healthy food to eat.
> “Consumed in excess, these foods are linked to…”
Won’t most things consumed in excess cause these problems? Is the issue is that it is easier to consume them in excess.
One of the odd things among my son’s kids is that a lot of the kids who seemingly eat the worst seem the most fit and those who eat healthiest seem less fit (skinny unfit not obese unfit).
It's amazing how easy it is to exceed daily recommendations on sugar and salt. You basically have to eat only non-fruity produce and lean meat to get close to what our bodies evolved to thrive on.
As to the not-yet-overweight kids, give it time. Genes are a lottery and the carbs get everyone eventually.
If you're active enough when young, you can be a trash can food-wise and still look fit. But it catches up with you, and those bad habits are tough to break, after the fountain of youth grinds to a halt.
I don't known that "ultra-processed" is en especially useful label, but I am all for vastly increased food labeling in general. I'm often baffled by people who are opposed to increased mandatory food information (like animal welfare standards, GMO contents, country of origin, to name a few).
Without added sugar or artificial sweeteners, many of these ultra-processed foods are completely unpalatable. You could replace the sugar with fat, which would probably be healthier, but also reduce the shelf life due to rancidity.
The solution is to tax added sugar (including for sub-ingredients) per gram, and a flat tax for any food containing artificial sweeteners. 1c per gram of sugar, or 20% for anything containing artificial sweeteners seems reasonable.
Given mineral soil depletion it's probably a necessity for most people to eat fortified foods.
Sugar and salt as primary flavoring is not the greatest, to be sure, but ultra-processing foods doesn't seem too bad considering that all the human body does is masticate food a bit to mix in some enzymes and dump it in a vat of acid and bacteria, pour in some more enzymes, and then stir it up for a day or so to get the nutrients out. It's not a boutique experience going on down there. The entire point is to reduce complex foods to simple component molecules that can be absorbed.
EDIT: and of course there's complex interactions between some vitamins and minerals that influence absorption that calls for variety in diet throughout the day/week.
[+] [-] dolni|4 years ago|reply
Pharmaceuticals are ultra-processed and completely unnatural, yet many of them are life-saving. Clearly then, mere act of processing something doesn't make the thing bad for you.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody that constantly horking down Mountain Dew, Little Debbie snack cakes, and Doritos isn't good for you. We all know this, we don't need a headline for it.
Give me some useful information. What are reasonable thresholds for these junk foods? How about for specific ingredients?
Ranting and raving out of the way, do yourself a favor and skip to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization classification document [1] linked in the article. It actually answers some of the questions I posed.
[1]: http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf
[+] [-] dataflow|4 years ago|reply
I have to admit though, I'm not aware of any food that would be considered "ultra-processed" yet known to be good for people.
[+] [-] armchairhacker|4 years ago|reply
I wonder whether kids are really getting fat off of even hot dogs, mac and cheese, steak and cheese subs, and corn. Or if it’s the added sugar and refined carbs - candy, soda, white bread, “snacks”. People say that kids’ diet in the 60s was the former, and they were fine.
Honestly “ultra-processed” can be misleading because it isn’t the processing which is bad, it’s the amount of fat and carbs vs. protein, fiber, water, and other nutrients. Maybe we could call it “junk” food but that’s even more ambiguous.
[+] [-] tootie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dig1t|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
[+] [-] cameronh90|4 years ago|reply
It bothers me too, but I think the problem right now is they don't exactly know what part of the "ultra processed" foods is harmful yet.
[+] [-] foolfoolz|4 years ago|reply
i think this argument about processed foods tries to simplify it too much when there’s really a lot of different factors. high in calories? no vitamins? known carcinogens? individual allergies or trouble digesting? this one size fits all approach to labeling food good and bad ignores the details.
and the real issue is education: do you know what you’re eating? and how much? and what your body needs? i’d rather see answers there than “big soda bad” and “chips bad”
[+] [-] sosuke|4 years ago|reply
http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf
[+] [-] slothtrop|4 years ago|reply
> We all know this, we don't need a headline for it.
The headline doesn't communicate that. It communicates that U.S. kids are consuming an abundance of calories from those foods.
> mere act of processing something doesn't make the thing bad for you.
It doesn't communicate that either. That is prior knowledge on your part.
[+] [-] johnchristopher|4 years ago|reply
Is someone suggesting to get 70% of calorie intake from pharmaceuticals though ?
[+] [-] mbrodersen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jareklupinski|4 years ago|reply
Will someone please let me try a minimally-processed doughnut?
[+] [-] onychomys|4 years ago|reply
Except that it's actually really not. If we take my 5 year old son as a normal kid, a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then whatever random food they feed him for school lunch and we're already 2/3rds of the way to the goal. He snacks on fruit and stuff, but also on pretzel sticks and honey roasted peanuts and all sorts of other kind of junky things.
I make dinner from scratch very nearly every night, and my kid still falls into this 70% bucket! And so I really don't have a good idea about how to change that. Maybe make our own bread and have them have toast for breakfast every day? That's going to get old quick.
[+] [-] woodruffw|4 years ago|reply
Using your cereal example: I grew up eating grape nuts[1], which are probably in the ultraprocessed category. But it’s just barley flour and I ate it like most people eat muesli (with fresh fruit) — what should that count as?
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-Nuts
[+] [-] sosuke|4 years ago|reply
I think the only ways out of this are as you said fixing everything yourself. Most things you can eat raw that isn't packaged would probably be safe. Then cooking your own meats.
But pasta is considered Ultra-Processed, packaged bread is ultra-processed. I thought those were some of the most basic foods with the smallest number of ingredients. Maybe home made versions as you suggested are not considered Ultra-Processed.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway1777|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylodl|4 years ago|reply
To be honest I'm kinda surprised that it's only 70% of calories coming from refined foods.
[+] [-] bell-cot|4 years ago|reply
Commercial breakfast cereals vary, though the least-healthy are probably the most tuned to appeal to kids. Home-cooked cereal can be far better. And easy to mix nuts, frozen berries, etc. into.
If a bit of dressing up (squirt of mustard, bit of mayo, etc.) makes hard-boiled eggs acceptable to him, those can be made once a week and kept in the fridge.
An old friend perfected a fairly-healthy, filling stew recipe (some meat, mostly veggies, etc.) that he could make up in large batches and keep in the fridge. As a teenager, his son consumed an enormous quantity of that over time.
[+] [-] alex504|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] armchairhacker|4 years ago|reply
Also carrots and hummus, dry roasted nuts, cheese and wheat thins, PB and apple slices, are all good snacks for a kid.
[+] [-] sparrc|4 years ago|reply
My understanding of ultra-processed would be things more like candy, cheetos, pringles, oreos, soda, etc.
[+] [-] TillE|4 years ago|reply
Gotta be careful and stick with the frozen vegetables which have nothing added.
[+] [-] cameronh90|4 years ago|reply
Have literally never experienced this except if it's something that's meant to be ready to eat or is a base mix with its own seasoning. Is it a US thing?
[+] [-] axaxs|4 years ago|reply
As a kid we ate mostly natural food, as my parents had a decent sized farm. We always had salt on the table, and went through a lot of it.
As an adult without a farm, I cannot remember the last time I even touched the salt shaker. I've actually made spaghetti once that was near inedible because the sodium in the sauce, cheeses, and meat made it incredibly salty tasting.
[+] [-] maxehmookau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sumthinprofound|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|4 years ago|reply
How about fresh vegetables?
[+] [-] nate_meurer|4 years ago|reply
https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/DBrief/11...
Overall, 13% of the U.S. population aged 2 years and over, consumed pizza on any given day. The percentage consuming pizza ranged from approximately 22% among older children (6-11 years) and adolescents (12-19 years) to less than 6% among older adults, 60 years and over
[+] [-] sosuke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baal80spam|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] open-source-ux|4 years ago|reply
Top 3 European countries with the most household purchases of ultra-processed food:
1. UK 50.7%
2. Germany 46.9%
3. Ireland 45.9
Top 3 European countries with least household purchases of ultra-processed food:
1. Portugal 10.2%
2. Italy 13.4%
3. Greece 13.7%
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/02/ultra-proces...
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|4 years ago|reply
Anecdotal: 5 years ago I went on the Dr. Fuhrman diet (no processed foods). Within 6 weeks I felt better than I had in a decade: everything was better: clearer thinking, inflammation and bodily discomfort gone, longer hikes without getting tired, and better sleep.
I hate to think of the costs to society and personal costs of people not getting healthy food to eat.
[+] [-] kenjackson|4 years ago|reply
Won’t most things consumed in excess cause these problems? Is the issue is that it is easier to consume them in excess.
One of the odd things among my son’s kids is that a lot of the kids who seemingly eat the worst seem the most fit and those who eat healthiest seem less fit (skinny unfit not obese unfit).
[+] [-] paulryanrogers|4 years ago|reply
As to the not-yet-overweight kids, give it time. Genes are a lottery and the carbs get everyone eventually.
[+] [-] pengaru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carabiner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doit4thebitties|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quattrofan|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] laydn|4 years ago|reply
Maybe we can also tax "ultra-processed" food at a higher rate.
I just think it is naive to believe that people will make the right decisions for themselves or their loved ones without any "incentives"
[+] [-] standardUser|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NonContro|4 years ago|reply
The solution is to tax added sugar (including for sub-ingredients) per gram, and a flat tax for any food containing artificial sweeteners. 1c per gram of sugar, or 20% for anything containing artificial sweeteners seems reasonable.
[+] [-] benlivengood|4 years ago|reply
Sugar and salt as primary flavoring is not the greatest, to be sure, but ultra-processing foods doesn't seem too bad considering that all the human body does is masticate food a bit to mix in some enzymes and dump it in a vat of acid and bacteria, pour in some more enzymes, and then stir it up for a day or so to get the nutrients out. It's not a boutique experience going on down there. The entire point is to reduce complex foods to simple component molecules that can be absorbed.
EDIT: and of course there's complex interactions between some vitamins and minerals that influence absorption that calls for variety in diet throughout the day/week.