This surprises me. A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy, and I would have assumed are heavy contributors to poor health.
Apparently "basically candy" is not the same thing as candy. That is a great find, lets us eat basically candy without the health consequences.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...
But it's true that we mustn't focus only on UPFs but it is looking more and more like a significant factor (even if the definitions could be improved).
UPFs are defined in a way where you could replace them with essentially identical foods that only count as "processed" by swapping out a couple ingredients with nutritionally identical ingredients (e.g. replace HFCS with sucrose).
The research on UPFs doesn't actually compare ultra-processed food with similar "processed" foods.
So if you replace a pie containing HFCS with a kale salad, yeah it's probably healthier, but there isn't really evidence that replacing an "ultra-processed" pie containing HFCS with a home-made "processed" pie containing sucrose that otherwise has the same nutritional content is healthier (there is some researching showing that fructose can be harmful but the glucose/fructose content of HFCS isn't significantly different from sucrose).
If there is no direct comparison between similar ultraprocessed foods and processed foods, the research doesn't actually show that ultraprocessed foods are bad in a way that homemade processed foods aren't, in which case I'm not sure what the point of defining ultraprocessed foods as a separate category is.
Indeed a lot of people ignore this. Still it is worth pointing out that
a) a higher glucose content due to sucrose based sweetness helps absorbing fructose in a home-made cake.
b) the ultra-processed cake likely got added a fair share of sugar alcohols (keeping it moist) which for a single digit percentage but still significant portion of the population interferes with fructose absorption leading to fermentation in the gut.
c) the longer and cold storage of the industrial cake will lead to an increase of recombined starch which is harder to digest.
(a, b due to fructose transport from gut less efficient than for glucose and the transport part relying on presence of glucose. Some people suffer from fructose mal-absorption where the main transport mechanism is not working and the backup mechanism can be blocked by sugar alcohols)
I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.
One is basically gelatinized sugar and the other is pretty healthy. If one’s classification doesn’t easily distinguish those two, that’s absurd.
If you make yogurt the standard way [1] and try to add sugar to it while it's still a fluid, it will all sink to the bottom and then you'll just have some yogurt with a layer of sugar on the bottom. If you add it when it's not a fluid anymore, then you'll have a layer at the top. If you try to mix it up in between you'll break it up [2] and end up with mush; with sugar mixed in.
The only way I can think of to add sugar to yogurt and ensure it is evenly mixed throughout its mass is to use some additive, probably some kind of stabiliser. I suspect that's what makes this kind of yogurt qualify for the ultra-processed category.
Check the ingredients on your favourite yogurt. They should say: milk, yogurt culture. End of transmission. If there's anything else in it, then I would say there's a good claim it's been over-processed.
____________
[1] Bring milk to boil or use UHT. Let cool to 45° C (113° F). Add lactic ferments (Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus - readiest source: yogurt). Keep warm. Do not disturb. Wait. Enjoy. Scales up to industrial level (and is dirt cheap to boot).
[2] That's called syneresis - that's when you put a spoon in and then find a little puddle of milky fluid in its wake a few hours later. You've broken apart the jell'0 like structure of the yogurt's curd, i.e. the coagulated milk solids, and caused the milk fluids to leak out.
I agree with that for the general case but my intuition is that if someone's selling you something ready-made and pre-packaged, that you can easily make yourself (yogurt with fruit mixed in), then that's because they want to charge you extra and force you into a choice -of ingredients- you possibly wouldn't make.
For example, the yogurts with fruit I've had in the UK were just not very good yogurts, and the fruit were just not very good fruit. The yogurts were the thin and tasteless stuff that seems to be typical of anywhere outside the Balkans (I'm Greek) and the fruit were basically preserve, with added sugar. Why do you need added sugar with fruit? Because the fruit is under-ripe and probably too sour to eat in the first place.
You have to think of the economics a bit. Yogurt is cheap to make and most people won't pay a premium for it. Also it's sour and many people (again, outside the Balkans) don't like that. So companies will add sweeteners and sweet admixtures, like jam, honey or fruit to make it more palatable. And of course to make that financially viable they have to drop the quality of the ingredients. And that's where the additives come in: they improve packaging, transport and distribution, even as they degrade taste and nutrition.
What?? I can't be the only one that gets plain greek yogurt and adds a tablespoon of honey or agave syrup and mixing it evenly before adding some granola + fruit. It's not that hard, and it's definitely not ultra-processed.
As does molasses like when making refined sugar. Most unrefined sources of sugar naturally contain chemicals that act as stabilizers because it’s a side effect of many polysaccharides.
Note that even with the stabilising effect of straining and honey, real Greek yogurt (the stuff without additives) is never sold with admixtures. Once you mix stuff in you really are changing the consistency of the product and therefore its storage and transportation profile.
There's a scene in Silicon Valley [1] where Elrich Bachman is complaining that people keep taking his narrow spoons that he needs to mix in the jam in the little tub attached to his "Fa-Yeeh yogurt" (spelled "Fage". Surprisingly he pronounces it right! I'm Greek).
Bachman is talking about this product, Fage's split-cup Total yogurts:
https://gr.fage/total-2-split-cup
The reason there's a little tub and you have to tip it in and mix it up after you buy it is exactly because once you've disturbed the yogurt by mixing things in it, you don't have yogurt anymore but a gloopy goo with the consistency of thick cream and that just doesn't travel very well, especially if you want to be exporting your yogurt from Greece (where Fage has its plants) to the US (where Bachman complains about his spoons).
Also that gooey gloop is not what yogurt is supposed to be like. But I suppose that's just a matter of habit.
_______________________
People use honey and agave in salad dressings for their stabilizing effect by the way, so they’re also used as stabilizers if you want to be that obtuse about it.
People do use honey and agave as stabilizers in salad dressings, so obviously people consider them to be stabilizers </dumb semantic argument>
Are you sure? Won't the sugar just dissolve into the water that is part of the yogurt? Or if a granule texture remained, just mix in sugar syrup?
I've definitely mixed honey into yogurt and put it in the fridge and it was fine the next day, no separation or anything. Why do you think you'd need a stabilizer?
Nope. The fluid you're trying to mix the syrup in is milk, already a stable emulsion of proteins, sugars and water. Try mixing sugar (well, corn) syrup in that and see how long it stays mixed in. Once you stop mixing and the mixture comes to rest, the syrup starts sinking to the bottom. Better drink fast, and it sure sets faster than it takes for yogurt to set.
Check out the ingredients on any chocolate milk. There's always a stabiliser, usually a caragenaan. That's to keep the corn syrup and chocolate powder from separating from the milk. Back Home in the Old Country (when I was a kid in Greece) the stores sold a chocolate milk which was just milk with cocoa and some sugar. When you bought it from the store you could see that the milk and solids had separated, and there was a darker layer at the bottom, where all the chocolate and sugar had set. So you had to shake it well before drinking. Nobody makes that anymore, now all the chocolate milks have a stabiliser, so you don't need to expend your precious energy shaking the bottle. All those wasted calories. We don't want that. I guess.
For similar reasons, when you mix honey in your tea you need to keep a spoon in to stir it often, or it all goes to the bottom.
>> I've definitely mixed honey into yogurt and put it in the fridge and it was fine the next day, no separation or anything. Why do you think you'd need a stabilizer?
Because I know yogurt. I basically eat yogurt every day. I even make it myself some times (see my recipe above). Are you sure your yogurt did not have stabilisiers in it?
I think there’s a lot of work to be done on categorisation but the underlying principle tends to be fairly decent: the more stuff you do to your raw ingredients, the less healthy they become.
If you added something like Xanthan Gum to your "homemade bread", that would make it group 4 (ultra processed foods.)
Homemade bread is a processed food, not an ultra processed food.
That's obviously false.
That statement seemed off, so I poked around a little and, yes you can make granulated sugar from sugar cane at home[0].
[0] https://shuncy.com/article/how-to-make-sugar-from-sugarcane-...
And where does corn syrup come from? From squeezing corn? The sugars in corn don’t start as glucose either (they’re starches).
Besides, at home, bakers easily make “HFCS” themselves by adding weak acid to table sugar to make invert sugar (an HFCS 50 equivalent).
> We process glucose and sucrose differently
Tell that to some southerners about their sweet tea. This simple distinction isn’t that metabolically interesting for day to day life (or explaining the prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndromes). Concentrations in a serving and mode of delivery are far more important. You can pretty easily get metabolic syndrome from excess glucose as well as sucrose. Altering smell and moisture content are more impactful variables.
Sucrose readily hydrolyzes to glucose and fructose via sucrase in the small intestine, it and HFCS become equals (no, Mexican coke isn’t healthier you dumb hipsters, just eat a piece of fruit already). If it wasn’t you’d get massive diarrhea from eating it. So sucrose vs HFCS isn’t nearly as distinct.
> and it affects taste, satiation, digestion, and more.
The most important distinctions go beyond the relative concentrations of the simple sugars. A fresh fruit doesn’t have the same insulin spiking and metabolic syndrome inducing potential as plain Karo syrup or a (Mexican) Coke, even though its relative percentage of fructose is higher or similar.
I agree the distinction is murky and can be easy to mock but at the end of the day something associated with these foods is making societies deeply sick and that should encourage us all to care about a solution. Even if you take a libertarian approach to diet, the economic cost of caring for a society with rampant obesity and diabetes impacts us all
You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout.
Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've gone much too far in demonizing it.
Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
Emphasis on refined sugar.
Most food products, even meat in trace amounts, has some level of some form of sugar in it.
Added sugars are not needed in mass amounts for sure.
Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.
That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.
there is no way to separate the discussion, doing so it’s just to avoid solving the issue that is to regulate refined sugar
You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.
In the natural environment, said other ingredients would be the angry swarm of bees?
Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful.
The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol,
Alcohol is a literal poison that you should not consume at all. Sugar is a basic dietary requirement. Of course, all nutrients should be consumed in moderation, but that's not unique to sugar in any way.
How do you go from "Sugar should be consumed in moderation" to "Sugar should be ripped out of all foods and the body doesn't need carbohydrates"?
Why jump from a reasonable and sound observation to some ridiculous extreme nobody asked for?
The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.
> The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
Again, the body does not :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet
Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.
You mean, is there any evidence aside from every person who manages their diabetes through diet alone? Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?
> It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.
You seem to be confusing the ketogenic diet with starving. That's not how it works. If you deplete your fat body's stores and get hungry, you simply eat some fat and then your body will burn it for fuel. If you decide to eat much more fat than your body needs, your body will store the fat as fat. But it won't do it quite as readily as with sugar/carbs, and you won't get food cravings mere hours after eating.
We have longer life span. We are healthier then them. And we have also bigger muscles for those fitness oriented.
> The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate dietary therapy
Keto diet is low-carbs - not completely carbs free.
Only in so much as that it will built glucose out of other things you eat if you don't eat carbs separately. Your body runs on glucose which is a carbohydrate.
I wonder why nobody has started sweetening stuff with glucose as a 'healthy sweetener'. It is maybe 3 times more expensive than normal sugar - but I guess this is mostly because it is not a common product - cane sugar in Poland is of the same price - and the impact on the price of the end product would be marginal.
This is NOT true. Carbs are ONE form of energy that the body can use for fuel. Fat is the other one.
> people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.
I guess you're saying I don't exist?
For about 10 years, I haven't eaten carbs beyond the VERY rare cookie or two every other month and the insignificant trace amounts in above-ground leafy vegetables and the like. I'm not alone, there are lots of us who eat this way. Whole online communities, full of people who each have their own reasons. I did it for general health and fitness reasons, others do it to reverse their type 2 diabetes.
In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.
The planet used to be dotted with cultures that eat animals and fish primarily or exclusively for hundreds to thousands of years. The Inuit, Mongolian nomads, tribes in the Amazon, etc. They mostly don't exist anymore. (But not because of their diet.)
It's not a big group, but there ARE modern people who live on a carnivore diet for years on end and don't appear to suffer any notable long-term effects. Generally these are either extreme keto/paleo adherents, bodybuilders, or those who are trying to manage a medical condition.
Read a little about this on Wikipedia, that's insane! I'm still being stubborn and halfway refusing to believe there were no bad side effects, though lol
So far as I can tell, he consumed yeast extract, which all my suppliers of assure me does in fact contain carbohydrates.
But perhaps Barbieri ate a special kind that didn't?
i also tried to find a link for a paper here but it's been a long time but basically the population we have the smallest register of disease is an indian tribe around the coast of South America that mostly has a super high carbohydrate consumption compared to the rest of the world (will edit and comment if i find it)
edit: yeah, doubt i'll find but another counterpoint, go look at the rate of disease of Eskimos... they eat meat only!
But our body produces glucose anyway - so consuming or not does not change much. Brain needs glucose.
That is actually incorrect, just a common misconception. You might want to read up on ketogenic diets, and specifically the state of ketosis itself.
If you have an ultra-low carb diet (<30 g/day) with only moderate protein consumption (<30% of daily required calories), then the body can’t produce enough glucose to power the brain. Instead, it starts to convert fats to ketones in the liver, and the brain actually runs fine on ketones as well. Alternatively, if you’re not underweight, you can fast for 24 hours with a moderate activity level, and should enter ketosis regardless of diet (as you start converting stored body fat into ketones to power the brain).
Interestingly, you then notice that the “low blood sugar” mental haze disappears as your brain switches over to ketones, and you kinda avoid the rollercoaster between mental highs and lows throughout the day that you usually get with a carb-based diet – instead, mental energy is kinda just at a constant “medium” throughout the day. It’s also easy to measure more objectively, if you pick up a glucose monitoring device + “keto sticks” from a pharmacy.
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2020/10/excessive-ketone-me...
What is “long?” There are people living years on no carbs at all.
But I am only looking at summaries outside a bunch of paywalls, so I can't confirm the quotes on the wikipedia page.
This is relatively easy for anyone on a carnivore diet.
Sacharids are good for you in general, just like faits, protein and everything else.
Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, they're just not known to be healthy within one of many frameworks.
Instead of tearing down what we know works because it doesn't include the foods you deem healthy, why not advocate for more research into the foods in question specifically?
Here's a reminder of the Nova UPF classification:
> 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.
A few items that stick out like a sore thumb to me regarding healthiness:
* How could sophisicated packaging, usually with synthetic materials impact health?
* How does making something highly profitably necessarily impact health?
* Nova's definition of something with 'no culinary use' is extremely biased in my view. How do specific sugars (each with specific properties that are useful) have no culinary use? How are protein mixes not culinarily useful?
* Nova's definition of 'cosmetic function' is also just.. stupid in my view. Flavors are cosmetic? Emulsifiers are cosmetic? By this definition, adding MSG to a food makes it UPF.
Why not both? Let's list every ingredient on the label along with info on the processes involved.
You can't reliably draw any conclusions from them. You have to use common sense and rules of thumb.
I personally think non processed meat is good for you, but that's a minor point compared to ultra processed vs not really processed foods.
I once argued with med students that Oreos (which are vegan) are not healthier than a steak.
Absolutely crazy and tbh frightening that anyone (let alone med students!) would think Oreos are healthier than a steak.
The reasoning of course is that processing and sugar content don't matter as much as any level of saturated fat.
https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-plat...
Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.
Also consider that genetic background matters in nutritional matters and well... The populations under study have changed, and that's assuming you have a fairly similar background to a population and not very mixed.
And we are not even getting into how these things go down in practice, with heavy industry lobbying and what not...
TLDR, you are on your own in terms of optimal nutrition but as another commenter said "eat food, not too much, mostly plants"
RDA for vitamin C is 60mg, but you can survive without getting sick on 5-15.
I think it has to do with the sample to staff ratio. It's not enough to observe human subjects. You have to actively prevent them from going off the rails. It doesn't scale well when you increase the sample size. I guess we could replicate a similar experiment n-times and then do a meta study, but it's not ideal either.
How would you tackle the logistics of scaling up the above experiment?
I don't know how to fix the nutritionist studies- I'm still pretty skeptical that you could ever control enough variables to make any sort of conclusion around things with tiny effect sizes. This isn't like nutritional diseases we've seen in the past, for example if you look at a disease like pellagra (not getting enough niacin), literally tens of thousands of people died over a few years (beri beri, rickets, scurvy are three other examples; these discoveries were tightly coupled to the discovery of essential nutrients, now called vitamins).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29030361/ (N=16)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28814432/ (N=17)
https://ard.bmj.com/content/83/Suppl_1/1145.2 (N=21)
Of course, these are not nutritional studies.
It's also indicated for use in a disease we don't understand, for people who didn't respond to all the previously approved drugs. Not a good example at all.
Cimzia has been well-studied, and we understand why it works on autoimmune diseases like inflammatory arthritis. It has 6 FDA approvals for different indications, so your description of the drug itself is incorrect.
Because it's really hard and expensive to do such studies with more participants
Did they eat the same amount of calories or more calories? People will eat more of tasty food and less of bland food. You could get the inverse result by giving bland ultra-processed food and tasty unprocessed food.
When does a fruit farm become a factory?
Is candied bacon an ultra-processed food?
And even then, things made in a bakery can be made at home so I don't get how your above standard still makes any sense. Is homemade bread with flour milled at home ultra-processed as well? Candied bacon can be made outside of a factory as well. If so, it's not really a "was it made in a factory" argument now was it?
And yeah, most fruit around me went through various inspection, sorting, washing, labeling, packaging, and potentially even cold storage places that are in big buildings with loads of trucks moving pallets of materials around with loads of automated machines. All things that seem very "factory". What is the final delineation where it goes from some guy in his backyard to a factory operation?
And I still ask, is candied bacon still a processed food if I slaughter my own pig and press my own sugar cane? What if I buy a pig belly and cure it myself? What if I get it pre-cured? At what point is my own kitchen a factory? I guess it's the point I get an oven because then I've got the equipment necessary for it to be a bakery and we all know bakeries are off limits too!
This guidance you're giving me isn't making much sense.
An apple can be made outside a factory. A steak can be made outside a factory. That doesn't mean there aren't factory farms.
Sugar cannot be made outside a factory. If you press and boil your own sugar cane, you won't get refined white sugar.
The candied bacon you buy at the store could not be made at home. The sulfates and industrial products alone would be impossible to make.
If you made your own, that'd be way healthier.
We've been making refined sugar as an ingredient in foods for over a thousand years. Hard to say it can't be made outside of a factory when they were making it in 350 AD. Even the white refined variety, it's just been clarified and filtered. Anything they're doing in the factory to clarify it can be done in a kitchen. Which then continues to make me question at what point is a kitchen a factory? You've still never actually answered that question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar
> industrial products
Can you actually define this term? Is dihydrogen monoxide an industrial product? Sodium bicarbonate? Sodium chloride? Trimethylxanthine?
And finally, candied bacon is really not an ultra-processed food? I truly don't understand what the definition of "ultra-processed" is if something which is cured in various salts, fried, and glazed with a refined sugar is considered a healthy, non-ultra-processed food. So long as I use the right sources of nitrates and refine the sugar myself. As long as it's not in a building technically considered a factory by cynicalpeace, its A-OK!
This is like asking when some grains of sand become a heap of sand. There's not some number of grains when it becomes a heap, but heaps of sand obviously do exist and 2 grains of sand is not a heap of sand.
Arguing about definitions is always boring.
If your food is getting produced at a Costco type bakery, yeah that's worse than abuela grinding the corn herself. You get enough abuelas together and it starts to look like the bakery from Costco.
Less "hands" in your food is directionally better.
Also, I know very well how sugar is made. My wife is Colombian and grew up on a sugar cane farm. They have a panela cabin which is industrial under some definition of the word. Eating panela is way worse than just chewing the stalk, or adding some cane juice to a dish at home. The labor to create panela in any useable quantity requires large and/or expensive tools. Even more so for white sugar. Even more so for Coca-Cola.
> And finally, candied bacon is really not an ultra-processed food? I truly don't understand what the definition of "ultra-processed" is if something which is cured in various salts, fried, and glazed with a refined sugar is considered a healthy, non-ultra-processed food. So long as I use the right sources of nitrates and refine the sugar myself. As long as it's not in a building technically considered a factory by cynicalpeace, its A-OK!
This is just ad-hominem and doesn't take anything I said at face value. Disingenuous and against HN guidelines. I didn't say candied bacon isn't ultra-processed. I said if you actually made it from scratch on your own, it'd be better than store bought.
Typically you don't mix sugar with meat. Though I think that practice is unfortunately becoming more frequent.
You're joking right? There's tons of meat dishes with fruit sauces in them dating back thousands of years. It's almost Thanksgiving, think adding cranberries to turkey is really just a product of 1950's marketing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fesenj%C4%81n
http://historicalrecipes.blogspot.com/2017/02/patina-de-pers...
Also, I'm not sure what bread you make at home but when I do make bread at home its pretty much just flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe a touch of honey. Maybe sometimes some extra herbs or other stuff, but not usually any oil.
But yes, I'd rather have a classification that clearly separates Coke and Cheez Doodles from actual foods. There are some multi-billion dollar lobbies to prevent that happening, though.
I eat a lot of (plain) yogurt. But my kids often eat sweetened yogurt, which I've suspected is not-at-all-healthy. So I went to check the ingredients of several sweetened brands. I could be wrong but I don't see any of those you're concerned about explicitly mentioned. I do see "fructose" which seems like it could be just about as bad as HFCS? Or maybe the terms you use are generic and there's some specific ingredients that qualify? Or did I just get lucky with these examples I picked?
Examples:
Yoplait GoGurt Protein Berry Yogurt Tubes contains: Grade A Reduced Fat Milk, Ultrafiltered Skim Milk, Sugar, Contains 1% or Less of: Kosher Gelatin, Modified Food Starch, Fruit and Vegetable Juice (for Color), Tricalcium Phosphate, Potassium Sorbate Added to Maintain Freshness, Natural Flavor, Carrageenan, Yogurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus), Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3.
Danimals Smoothie Strawberry Explosion And Mixed Berry Dairy contains: Cultured Grade A Low Fat Milk, Water, Cane Sugar, Modified Food Starch, Contains Less Than 1% Of Milk Minerals, Natural Flavors, Fruit & Vegetable Juice (For Color), Lemon Juice Concentrate, Vitamin D3, Active Yogurt Cultures S. Thermophilus & L. Bulgaricus.
Agave syrup is 4:1. Apples and pears are around 2:1.
Moreover, high fructose corn syrup is a bit of a misnomer. Most HFCS used in food are 42% fructose, 58% glucose. The ones used in soda are typically 55:45.
That makes even the latter's ratio lower than say, watermelon, papaya, pears, apples, mango, blackberries, etc.
Univariable classifications are usually not helpful, and this seems to just confirm it. In the same way "sugar free" or "fat free" make little sense
Breakfast cereals? That sugary stuff? Someone else said 40-60% of nutritional studies are not replicable. Sounds more like the whole field is BS.
Scream naturalistic fallacy all you like but I would absolutely avoid all chemical additives and go natural all the way. If humans haven't been eating it for thousands of years, I would absolutely avoid it.
This is where online food databases might work better. Scan the UPC/EAN with an app and the app can tell you which ingredients are generally safe, which ones to avoid. The recommendations could be personalized to your dietary needs or allow ratings from different organizations that might have varying criteria for what they consider OK vs bad.
Such apps exist but usually requires someone (volunteer crowdsourcing or paid) to input products into the system so it may not be complete or fully up to date. And as you suggested, supplier information and more detail on the processing isn't available. Having an international, public database of that information (with an API for app makers) could help make nutrition label apps -- or maybe even built into Google Lens -- much more accessible to the general public.
For example, "shelf-stable packaged foods with a large flour component, wherein the flour component is stripped of all fiber, with added fat, salt, and sometimes sugar". You can also include candy, soft-drinks and juice.
That doesn't tell you something is "ultra-processed", but it identifies more meaningful factors. These are typically non-satiating snack foods, very low in protein and fiber, but very savory with added salt and fat. The combination of refined flour, salt and fat seems to be of particular note (and sugar regardless).
It's quite funny that even 15 years after labeling UPF as such there's still a struggle to "officially" mark it as unhealthy and I don't understand why it should be challenged. I would think that most children growing up are being told that candy, fries and Gatorade aren't healthy foods. Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.
As mentioned in the article there are statistics that under the UPF classifications people are way more unhealthy both physically and even mentally. Shouldn't that be enough? Now a new study is needed to benchmark UPF that is low in fat, sugar and salt. Basically against a product class that hardly exists. I mean nobody eats like that. Most people put extra salt on their food, the Mediterranean diet somewhat the gold standard in good yet healthy food contains tons of fat and various cuisines from the region have rather sugary desserts.
I'd be fine classifying UPF as unhealthy and calling it a day. If food businesses want to explore "healthy" UPFs they should probably do so and take the burden to re-classify it as healthy. This seems like a quite Kafka-esque endeavor.
(From a quick 30 second search) E300 is Vitamin C, E101 is Vitamin B2
And yes - I'm aware that vitamins that are naturally present are probably better than "fortifying" food - but still.
Is there a legal threshold where you have to use the E number?
It's probably better to each 4-5 chicken breasts per day instead of protein powder. But as far as I know there hasn't been a measured difference.
Within some mental model, isolated protein powder is healthy because we generally treat high protein consumption as low-risk for most people and recognize that protein isolates can be very effective for professional and amateur athletes to consume a lot of while building muscle.
In no way does that imply that these protein isolates are "extremely healthy" for the general public or even for anyone in the long term. There's just not any data to say that specifically (it's too niche to perform those kinds of studies), and far too little reason to make that assumption with confidence.
(And it's almost certainly a terrible idea for most people to eat 4-5 chicken breasts per day -- or a comparable amount of protein isolate powder. Please remember that most people are not living a gym bro lifestyle and shouldn't be following gym bro nutritional advice in the first place.)
Bad math? Per USDA standards, a single boneless skinless chicken breast has ~54 grams of protein; so 4-5 would be ~200-250g of protein.
Because that's grossly outside the norm for the general public, you're not going to find any evidence to support the idea it's a healthy amount for a typical person to consume for a long period of time. And likewise, you'll find little evidence saying what negative consequences it might have, if any.
You're welcome to make whatever assumptions you want to in that case, but there's not a lot of ground for anyone to convince skeptics who disagree with them. It's tenuous assumptions all the way down.
Regardless, in the real world, that also represents 1200-1500 calories of absurdly (mind-numbingly) high-satiety food and quite a lot of slow digestive bulk. Most people simply wouldn't be able to consume that while also eating a varied diet that provides them with adequate long-term nutrition. So it's probably a pretty bad idea for them to dedicate themselves to it, unless -- like some athletes and gym bros -- they have the further discipline to also stuff themselves of all the other stuff they need to eat while also not eating so much that they become overweight. Do you know many people like that? I'm not sure I've met more than a handful in my lifetime.
Whatever the impact of the very high protein consumption itself in some abstract theoretical kind of way, which we're far from having evidence into understanding, it's just terrible advice for the general public because of the secondary effects we might reasonably expect in practice.
> Moreover, epidemiological studies show that a high intake of animal protein, particularly red meat, which contains high levels of methionine and BCAAs, may be related to the promotion of age-related diseases. Therefore, a low animal protein diet, particularly a diet low in red meat, may provide health benefits.
Certain podcasters/influences/etc are absolutely misleading people either for the views or to sell people a "detox" tea they can drop ship from China.
Same goes for breakfast cereals and breakfast cereals. e.g. there's oatmeal and weetabix that are basically just a bit of fiber, not the healthiest thing you can eat but won't kill you. And then there's ... well my favourite poison is Kellog's Smacks and it's basically just as nourishing as eating cardboard with sugar on top.
Why? The point of the quotation was to question if this was a problem in the quantities listed. I know I’d rather eat whole grain enriched supermarket bread than refined white flour bread from some low protein source wheat.
I’ll take the home bread
If you added preservatives to your bread it wouldn't stale quickly either. Add a small amount of white vinegar to your bread and it will stale much less quickly.
Literally the only difference is typically some sort of preservatives, some added vitamins, and possibly a dough conditioner.
In general, bread is just not that healthy if you make the fluffy white kind. The preservatives and slicing have little to do with it. If anything, the added vitamins may make it healthier than something you make at home.
What really sets apart the typical white flour seen in most processed products in the US is the bleaching process, which mostly serves to make the flour more visually appealing. It also destroys a large percentage of the micro-nutrients. For many flour products the added vitamins you mention are added back in making the flour "enriched", but really this is just trying to match the nutrient profile of unbleached white flour. It's unlikely the added vitamins you see in the nutrition label alone would make a bagged, commercial pan loaf healthier than even the equivalent you would make at home.
Wonder bread white has 140 calories, 1.5g of fat, 5g of protein, and 29g of carbs for two slices. 5g of claimed added sugar.
In comparison, a recipe I’ve used to make very good white bread (the zojirushi recipe for their bread maker, for reference) has, for an equivalent weight of bread: 137 calories, 2.2g of fat, 3.9g of protein, and 24.8g of carbs. The recipe has roughly 2.5g of “added sugar” per that bread weight.
I wouldn’t consider 4g more of carbs per equivalent weight, or 2.5g more sugar, to be a “lot” more sugar.
Yeast ferment sugar, so depending on how much yeast you have, how active they are and the fermentation time, a small amount of sugar can easily be long gone by the time the bread comes out of the oven.
Aren't you? What meal typically has more than 2 slices of bread? A sandwich is two. Breakfast meals where toast is used is typically 2 slices.
And, if we limit ourselves to the 50g of added sugar a day, I'd say 10% of that for a component of one meal is pretty reasonable.
* 4 for breakfast as toast
* 4 for lunch to make 2 sandwiches (1 sandwich would be too small and I would be hungry all afternoon)
* sometimes another 2 with soup or an evening snack.
"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.
Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.
If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/03/919831116/irish-court-rules-s...
I bake my own bread (can't remember the last time I bought some) without sugar.
You don't need sugar if you use sourdough starter with an overnight fermentation in the fridge.
That doesn't match my experience, at least in the US. Per 1/4 cup:
KA organic unbleached white flour - 0 vitamins or minerals
Arrowhead Mills organic unbleached white flour - 5 mg calcium, 36 mg potassium
Bob's Redmill organic unbleached white flour - 7 mg calcium, 41 mg potassium
Caputo 00 - 9 mg calcium, 0.2 mg iron, 48 mg potassium
These levels aren't remotely close to decent.
Once we better understand what is driving the poor health outcomes we can work back and better classify problem foods and ingredients. Right now it’s all a bit unknown and doesn’t seem to have the right resourcing. There’s research that shows that UPFs are so simple that the body gets all the bad stuff in all its unfettered glory. Compare that to a date fruit, very high in sugar, but packed with fiber, the body metabolizes the date much more slowly, no sugar spike and gets some nutrition
On paper, fruity pebbles and Cheerios are pretty similar. But the dyes, sugar, etc make it a very different product. Sorta how we pump sugar into yogurt, spray it on as a frosting and peddle it like it’s actual, healthy yogurt.
A great way to undermine the argument is to make the terminology and classification impossible.
> Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a recent observational study from Harvard University, for example, found that whereas some upfs, such as sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. Dr Astrup warns that the current classification risks “demonising” a lot of healthy food. Insights from Dr Hall’s work could therefore help refine the understanding of upfs, paving the way for more balanced and useful guidelines.
This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless. I look forward to the study noted in the article comparing high-density vs. hyper-palatable. I strongly suspect the study will show its a combinatorial effect... but we'll see.