>Even packaged breads, including those high in nutritious whole grains, qualify as ultra-processed in many cases because of the additives and preservatives they contain.
However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.
I'm not sure what the situation in many parts of the US is, but is not freshly baked bread, the kind with unsurprising ingredients and that goes stale when you'd expect it, not an option?
The stuff made to sit on the supermarket's shelf for long times has such an odd consistency and flavor, very spongy and very tangy and sweet, you can't spread anything on it without toasting it first. I wouldn't take it as the standard for bread.
If you want to understand what the average American consumes the answer is whatever is on the shelf of their local Walmart (they sell groceries). The average American may assemble food from time to time but generally does not cook. That said, there are hundreds of millions of people in that country, so this is obviously a generalization, and should be treated as such.
That said Lidl is making aggressive inroads into the country and that MIGHT have an impact long term. They have legitimate and affordable fresh bread.
If you want to understand what the average American consumes the answer is whatever is on the shelf of their local Walmart (they sell groceries).
This is the crux of the matter: we can only buy what is on our shelves. If we have to start looking at ingredients lists, I think we've already lost the plot. Why are these questionable things on our shelves in the first place? Likely because they're cheaper to make, or worse, there's some government subsidy involved. And I don't mean "questionable" as in plain junk food, because even then, we have to decipher labeling like chocolate vs "chocolate flavored candy". It can be hard to try to be reasonably healthy once you leave the the edge of the super market.
I think it's a two sided chicken and egg type problem: we can only buy what's on our shelves but - having personally come from a country that's hardly famous for its cuisine - I think American food culture ranges from poor to nonexistent. The bar for agricultural and processed products that the average consumer recognizes as edible food is shockingly low whether we're talking about bread or what passes for tomatoes here. There is plenty of ultraprocessed rye breads in Europe, for example, that are far more nutritious and produced at similar industrial scales because most consumers would recoil at the thought of eating Walmart's value brand of sugar bread.
Here in Southern California there are plenty of food desserts that sit adjacent to immigrant enclaves that provide critical mass for amazing grocery stores with a wide variety of higher quality, cheap produce and a diverse collection of nutritious processed and ultraprocessed food simply because that's the stuff that their communities demand. Replacing such a supermarket with a McDonalds would never work within these communities because most families simply don't consider fast food an alternative to their existing diets. These are huge supermarkets that are often similar in size to Costco or Walmart stores (see Shun Fat, 99 Ranch, Zion Market, etc).
We could do with a little more culinary elitism among consumers in my opinion.
The immigrant melting pot, and the food that results is American food culture, at least when you're outside of homogeneous strip malls that the Midwest is famous for. So in Southern California, there's no shortage of immigrants who started their own restaurant or food truck. Next to the 99 Ranch or H-mart, there's little boutiques of food from back home. And then to top it off, there are fusion places targeting the American palate, which just couldn't exist anywhere else in the world.
If you think American cuisine consists of massive chains; TGI Fridays, Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Hooters, Texas Roadhouse, etc, then no wonder you don't think highly of American cusine. But if you branch out from there, there's a ton of food culture, and Southern California's a great place to experience it.
I don’t believe this is true, it’s a coping mechanism that people use to keep from learning new skills. It’s also a very popular cope to claim “it’s more expensive” to cook at home because you typically have to buy more ingredients than you’d use to make a single serving of some food item.
If people want to stay ignorant and economically and nutritionally disadvantaged it’s not something I pity. I can’t but help feeling disgusted and scornful toward people with these attitudes. Cave people made bread.
I think the problem occurs when you realize its not just bread, it's almost everything at the store. For a working couple with children, they now have to make everything at home, which is not possible if both parents are working.
I totally believe it, but it is just so wild to me that it has gotten to the point where we can somewhat confidently say that most Americans just do not cook at all.
I just don't even understand how that works, even if you have enough income, how do you have enough space to like store all the trash for the week?
Don't you just get tired of restraunt food at some point?
> Today, 82 percent of the meals Americans eat are prepared at home, a much higher percentage than a decade ago, according to research from NPD Group Inc. cited by Bloomberg.
Uncited comments on HN are frequently confidently incorrect, especially when they are descriptions of average American culture
Maybe if you're a highly paid SWE in California with endless takeout options you never cook but that's an absurd proposition for flyover country
It really isn’t BS at all. I’m in Ohio and almost nobody I know under the age of 40 knows how to cook anything that doesn’t come out of a can or a box. “Prepared at home” in many cases is just warming up processed foods or combining a couple processed ingredients.
The vast majority of the people I see actually buying produce at the grocery store are older people and immigrants. Almost everyone else is buying the processed crap in the aisles.
Please, the meals that are so-called "prepared at home" in the statistics are mere assembly of highly processed ready to eat foods. Final assembly is hardly cooking. That said, in general more people are cooking from primary ingredients than in the recent past, I agree.
There are different degrees of food prep. Microwaving frozen chicken nuggets is considered preparing at home but is a far cry from prepare a meal from scratch. There's also a myriad of options in between.
In the US in many places trash disposal is a flat rate included in your utility bill, rolled up into your rent, or you have a common dumpster area you can throw trash into for free. This isn't Switzerland where you have to pay two bucks for a LICENSED small plastic trash bag. Here you can generate as much residential trash as you want for the same price or for free if you drive the trash to the county dump yourself. You have to call the county to schedule a pickup of huge trash like for appliances if your new appliance delivery people won't take your old stuff.
Maybe its just me, or maybe I've spent too much time working in kitchens, but there is an overriding sameness to restaurant food even if you are considering the full spectrum of McDonald's to fancy steakhouse takeout. Something about the necessary restrictions and specificity in cooking commercially in big kitchens creates certain tendencies around flavors and salt and such that I just personally need a break from if I find myself eating out a lot. But I guess that is extremely subjective.
In the big chains it's overwhelming consolidation and cost cutting that completely eliminated flavor. Sugar and heat compensate for the lack of flavor. Finally, overweight and obese people perceive the things they eat differently than if their BMI was normal (personal experience going from obese class 1 to normal). If the majority of your clientele are obese or overweight, you will update the menu to appease their palate. Forty-one percent of U.S. adults, on average over the past five years, from 2017 to 2021, have characterized themselves as overweight or obese.
> you can generate as much residential trash as you want for the same price or for free if you drive the trash to the county dump yourself.
They charge a fee if you do that in my county, and the "flat rate" is dependent on the size of your bin, as a proxy for how much trash you generate. If you have more trash than fits in your bin you have to buy stickers for the extra bags to pay for them to be picked up.
It's highly dependent on where you live. Some cities/suburbs find it easier to financially manage flat rate payments instead of usage-based. Many would argue this is counterproductive and they are probably overcharging some citizens, but the upside in logistical billing makes it worth it (for now).
Garland TX, a suburb of Dallas, has a flat rate per bin, with free curbside large item/landscaping waste twice a month. Throw your old washing machine on the curb and move on with your life!
My mother in law, lives about 50 miles outside the DFW Metroplex and pays a flat rate based on the average of her trash usage. She rolls 2 bins up to the curb once a week. She can put more out and they will take it, but if she consistently puts out more trash, they will bill her extra when it comes time to renew every year. The guys on the trash truck keep a rolling tally of your "usage" and then the office works out who needs to pay more if the customer skews towards more usage than they signed up for.
I live in Europe now and moved here last year. I pay $12 PER PICKUP for residential trash here in the Netherlands. The catch? They pickup that bin ONCE every TWO MONTHS. If I want to throw more stuff away, I need to somehow transport all my trash to the local dump, pay a fee, and unload and sort it all myself.
On a more positive note though, recycling plastic is free. Some of my neighbors generate an entire large bag of plastic every day. My wife and I fill up one bag a week. Our "normal trash" bin is usually half full when it's time for pickup.
Pricing for waste is largely dependent on the municipality as well here in the Netherlands.
I have live in 5 different states, 3 had "free" municipal trash, 2 had cheap flat rate trash. Currently, I am in Omaha and if your weekly trash fits in the generous 100 gallon or so bin it is flat rate. If you need a second bin you pay extra for just that bin.
My household typically throws away 3 or 4 ten gallons bags per week leaving the bin maybe a quarter full. The neighbors across the street are constantly having food delivered and routinely fill two bins.
You also get "more" because fresh bread tends to be thick slices. Even at home, it's difficult to slice a fresh loaf thin enough to stretch as far as sandwich bread.
Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day. The closest grocery store to me is 1.5 miles away up an extremely steep hill.
Shit, fresh vegetables can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US.
heh... we have over fresh bakery shops IN EVERY STREET so you are no more than 10 house lengths away from one. It has no yeast, around 3% is salt but is made fresh and goes bad in hours so it is consumed HOT. I wonder if stuff like our centuries old tech can be replicated in more "modern" nations?
In the US you can literally purchase a bread machine for $60 and as long as you have the ingredients on hand, you can have a hot loaf of bread any time you have 5 minutes to measure and add the ingredients.
Add the ingredients in the evening and enjoy fresh bread in the morning.
The problem in the US is housing density and dependence on cars. In the average US city a street may have an order of magnitude fewer people than a moderately dense city.
Zoning laws generally exclude businesses from opening in residential neighborhoods. So no neighborhood bakery, butcher, produce, pub, etc within walking distances. Change the zoning laws, change the car dependencies.
This is also a major shift in culture and is likely to have unexpected side effects. Maybe those side effects are good, or bad, I don't know but zoning is a big deal and complex to the point of having emergent properties that should be considered.
Why not have a "shopping area" in every locality, say in every block of houses? That way you would be employing people and people would just "walk" to get everything.
Hyper-Local stores would only keep most essential in demand products while you'd have to go out and buy from big stores something niche.
There's a reason bakeries are so prevalent in many areas. That "squish it" part is a lot of work, and you have to wait long enough that it's not available for breakfast. Making it yourself counts as hard to obtain every day.
I bake my own bread. It's very little work. The problem is the time commitment.
You need to be there for a large part of the process. The first mixing and kneading takes the longest, maybe 5 minutes. After that every 20 minutes you need to come and fold for a minute 3 times. After that, let it rest for 8-16h (depending on dough temperature, amount of yeast, environment temperature). Then you do another 2 minutes of work. Half an hour later preheat the oven. Half an hour later put it in.
Doing this over night you save a lot of time. I.e. you can start at 8pm and finish by 8am-9am if you wake up at 6am. But a lot of people can't stay home that long in the morning.
So it's very little work in essence, but it's spread over a whole day. Perfect if you work remotely. Takes less time than most coffee breaks. But you need to be home.
There is a compromise that you can do if you are short for time. Buy a bread maker with a timer. You add the ingredients before going to bed and it will bake overnight and will be ready in time for breakfast. It is not the same thing as hand made sourdough but it is a good compromise.
Yes, I recommend this, too, if you're in some American bread desert and short on time.
If you have time on the weekends only you can do amazing bread and freeze it. I prepped it on Friday or Saturday evenings, baked it the next morning. Cut and froze it and had enough for the week. That's how I survived in Canada.
I have a mixer. I made pizza dough the other day in about 10 minutes. It takes a while to stretch into pizza and add toppings but, if you're just making bread, that'd be ready to bake by morning. Are you actually trying to argue that bread, ine if the simplest things to make and the bedrock of civilization for thousands of years, is too difficult to make?
But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.
Or is this just that you don't think I should use the word "hard" to mean "pain in the ass"? It comes out of your money/time budget either way.
There's a bit of a conflict between your post and it's grandparent.
> Freshly baked bread can be hard to obtain in many parts of the US. For me if I wanted fresh baked bread every day and not make it myself, I'd be looking at like 40-60 minutes of extra time per day if I drive there every day.
and
> But there are so many super-local bakers around the world. Single neighborhoods are willing to pay full-time wages to a baker just so they don't have to make their own bread. Explain why they do that if daily bread-making isn't a pain in the ass.
Which I have two thoughts on, first, I'm pretty sure most people are buying bread at the grocery store. So, the availability of fresh bread (which is also frequently available in the grocery store bakery) has more to do with lack of demand than it does with lack of availability. It seems like the convenience of pre-sliced bread that doesn't go bad in a couple days is just vastly preferred over fresh bread.
As for the local bakeries, I'd argue that those bakeries exist because they bake a variety of bread (and cakes) that are more involved than simple bread. I'd be shocked if the majority of the money they make wasn't from specialty items with wide margins.
The top level point I'm trying to get across has to do with the article and top level comment though, fresh bread is available to anybody with an extra few minutes every couple days. And, frankly, if you're doing any amount of cooking during the day, you can do it at the same time. There's usually some down time in a recipe that you could sneak in throwing a few ingredients into a mixer. Or put it together while watching whatever netflix show you're watching or podcast you're listening to.
Bread was certainly much more work but a stand mixer is not that expensive, especially compared to the amount of time it will save you if you cook semi-frequently (and even better if you make the bread you eat frequently). There are a plethora of modern conveniences that make bread so much easier to make than it used to be (and it was already pretty easy...).
> Which I have two thoughts on, first, I'm pretty sure most people are buying bread at the grocery store. So, the availability of fresh bread (which is also frequently available in the grocery store bakery) has more to do with lack of demand than it does with lack of availability. It seems like the convenience of pre-sliced bread that doesn't go bad in a couple days is just vastly preferred over fresh bread.
No my point is that going to the grocery store daily or near daily for fresh bread adds like an hour of time to my day, because there's no very close grocery store. Not even talking about a dedicated bakery
Right, where my wife grew up she could just walk out the front door and go like a block or two, and there'd be fresh everything - produce, baked goods, whatever. That doesn't exist for a lot of people in the US.
I do sympathise: not only is kneading by hand something I can absolutely believe people can't be bothered with after a long day at work, but also I can't even remember when I last tried even though I have access to an electric mixer.
That said, a DIY/health POV, what's given here (no yeast) can be relatively quick.
I can only recommend flour, water, salt, yeast by Ken Forkish if you want to get amazing results.
However there is some amount of time commitment that I think might be hard if you don't have the luxury of working from home or being/having a stay at home partner.
The second best thing might be using a bread baking machine, that takes most of the work from you. It doesn't taste as good, but it's similarly healthy I'd guess.
That’s a myth: leavened bread doesn’t need much more than that recipe. “No knead bread” was a craze 20 years ago in some circles when people (re)learned that all it takes is a bit of time to rise.
Bread takes hours to make and lasts for one day.
So unless you wanna wake up at 3 am (or have a dedicated stay-at-home person making bread every day) it's not really a realistic option for many people.
This entire subthread is proof why we need n-gate to come back- and also a living example of why they were likely overloaded with content, and burned out
You can buy fresh products at a reasonable cost in the USA, just have to make the effort to look.
Talking about processed bread, here is an example from Sam's Club [0] for sourdough boules, at $6 for four (about 1kg total). The ingredient list contains nothing ultra-processed.
What's a reasonable cost depends on your means. And I can get an (ultra processed) 800g sliced wholemeal loaf for less than 2 USD. There are other cheaper ones too.
Agreed. I just can't eat the bread in stores (for me to too sweet) and I'm a big bread person.
It's remarkable easy to bake your own bread (as many tried in during the pandemic). Yeah, it takes time, but it's a good way to reduce your carbs intake. i.e. if you don't bake it, you can't eat it.
Counterpoint to the carb reduction is fresh baked bread is so delicious and scaling bread recipes is easy so you end up eating twice as much bread compared to store bought.
Yeah, my wife bakes bread and it's usually just her and I. Can't leave that bread overnight, so I end up eating half a loaf of bread instead of the two slices of store bought bread that I usually have each day.
The time ROI of using a bread-making machine and the 3 or so ingredients placed in it could be positive when compared to the trip to the grocery store.
There's bakeries with fresh baked bread all over the place in m y area, but most people would rather just get their bread with the rest of their groceries from the grocery store, where of course they're going to add preservatives. For those that want fresh baked, it's available, just not as convenient.
In many places it’s either not an option or not one that you’re going to find almost anywhere most people shop. As far as I know in my city the only place to find real bread is Whole Foods (where the inventory is limited and inconsistent) or the one independent bakery that happens to sell sliced bread. And it’s a Japanese bakery, so I would guess almost nobody would even think to look there. Almost every other bakery is selling bullshit like cupcakes.
It also costs $5+ a loaf when you can get the cheap stuff for $1-$2, so a lot of people just wouldn’t spend the money anyways because they don’t know or care about the difference.
Supermarket bread is the norm, good bread is the exception. I live in downtown Toronto and I have to go out of my way to find good bread, and unprocessed whole grain bread is particularly difficult to procure.
"that goes stale when you'd expect it". Super dumb question, but would fresh baked bread placed in the freezer last a few weeks ? I don't buy fresh baked out of concern most of it will get thrown away.
Yes. My family bakes our own bread, and we freeze it all the time. Also, rolls seem to take less skill and attention than loaves, and are super convenient to freeze.
I only eat homemade bread. I slice unused bread and put in the freezer after a day or two. Thaw it out with a toaster. It will easily keep a few weeks.
There's a national brand that makes fresh artisan style bread and then most even slightly upscale grocers will have a couple types in their inside bakery.
> These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.
Well, that's because they are. The question is why they are unhealthy.
Take an Apple. You eat it, it is healthy.
Slice it. You eat the slices, it's not making much of a difference. You are still eating whole chunks.
Make juice out of it. NOW it is no longer healthy. Not only because you have shredded fibers (so the fructose will absorb faster) but you are probably going to drink many more apples than you otherwise would. And your gut bacteria will be unhealthy. You are probably still fine if you drink a small amount.
Add sugar to it - now it's extremely unhealthy and it's basically a coke but with more nutrients and it's not healthy in any amount.
Or take rice. Cook the rice - fine. Polish the rice before cooking so you have white rice: no longer fine.
Food that's unprocessed, there's very little restrictions. You are going to get full eating them anyway, so it's fine. As you increase the amount of processing, you should eat less and less of them.
> high calorie soda
Note that calories are only relevant to laboratories. Living organisms work very differently. Calories are not fungible. An almond has a similar calorie content as a soda can, but it doesn't matter: we do not absorb all the calories in an almond. It's a similar thing when you eat an avocado: it's very calorie-dense, but a lot of it is in fats that will be absorbed very slowly.
Even simple sugars work very differently from one another. Our cells can readily use glucose(that will require insulin). Our cells, with very few exceptions, cannot use fructose. It goes straight to your liver to be processed by fructokinase. Most of it will actually become triglycerides and you will only burn that when you are burning fat. That process also takes a lot of energy(basically you get into debt to be repaid later). There's also a limited amount your liver can process and that's why people are getting fatty livers even without drinking - from the point of view of your liver, you might as well be drinking.
Is faster absorption really that big of a deal? Highly developed countries like Japan and South Korea that eat a lot of white rice seem considerably healthier than the U.S. as an example.
I don’t really know much about this topic but I always assumed additives were a much greater problem than white rice, white bread, etc.
I think the major problem is that no one can define what "processed" means in any consistent or objective sense. It's just a retcon'd category of things people already think of as unhealthy.
Flour, water, salt, yeast. Take those and make bread. You have "processed" food. Now, take flour, water, salt, yeast, flour conditioners, sugars, added nutrients, etc. and make bread. You have "ultra-processed" foods.
Processed can be fine as long as you use healthy ingredients. Ultra-processed is never fine.
"NOVA classification system" by Monteiro et al's description of ultra-processed food is more or less exactly what I've described:
> A singular feature of NOVA is its identification of ultra-processed food and drink products. These are not modified foods, but formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes (hence ‘ultra-processed’). All together, they are energy-dense, high in unhealthy types of fat, refined starches, free sugars and salt, and poor sources of protein, dietary fibre and micronutrients. Ultra-processed products are made to be hyper-palatable and attractive, with long shelf-life, and able to be consumed anywhere, any time.
Previously we would just call this "junk food" rather than make some insinuation about "processing," which is still undefined and without meaning.
Then again, the advice really just cashes out into buying whole foods like produce, beans, frozen bags of veggies, etc.
Better food items will get caught in the crossfire of someone naively avoiding the worse "processed foods", but maybe that's still a net win.
Even your fancy nuts example, if one of the main problems with ultra-processed foods is that they are hyperpalatable, then I see good reason to avoid fancy nuts (nuts with an oil + salt coating) and eating raw nuts instead. It's easy enough to overeat raw nuts!
If you like eating nuts, I suggest buying them with the shells. Pecans, pistachios, walnuts, heck even peanuts. You can still roast them so they taste better, but the shell slows you down a lot. Get a small bowl and when the bowl is full of shells, you stop eating them.
> However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
How so? I eat organic veggies, organic meat, nothing with added sugars, from time to time I drink a glass of organic wine. It's absolutely not difficult to avoid anything "ultra-processed" (I dislike this term which is ehnancing something not strictly defined) or even store-bought "processed".
In fact, the only, in any way, "processed" food I eat are things I make myself: veggies baked with turkey, chicken and beef, blended, portioned and frozen. No preservatives other than fat and reasonably small amounts of salt (and with sodium, I also ingest potassium). Eating healthy is fairly easy (although more expensive) and avoiding shitty food is really not hard to achieve.
That's commendable. It's "simple" as in not complicated and easy to understand. It's "difficult" as in it requires an incredible amount of discipline, and potentially time, compared to the alternative.
I believe that time and energy are what many Americans are running in too short of supply on to transition to more wholesome diets. Most have so much on their plates to deal with already that the idea of thinking about additional things they technically don't have to is unappealing, even if it's at the cost of their own health. It's why ultraprocessed foods became so common in the first place.
It's just another microcosm of a culture that's obsessed with productivity and has little resembling proper work-life balance.
>even if it's at the cost of their own health. It's why ultraprocessed foods became so common in the first place.
Agreed.. A thought pattern I've tried to adopt is "Best time to fix your health is today rather than when you've had a heart attack or diagnosed with type-2 diabetes"
Too many people are getting health related diseases (because of diet/exercise)
> It's "difficult" as in it requires an incredible amount of discipline
Maybe at the beginning of this lifestyle it was somewhat difficult and there was some fight inside me (hard not to buy sweets at the store counter etc) but it fairly quickly turned into subconscious, almost mechanical way of doing things.
It's similar to addiction detox: when I ditched smoking (after 20+ years), it was hard at the beginning, there was this feeling of lacking something "important" but it diminished over time. There's no way I'd even consider smoking a cigarette or eating sugary and fatty sweets after few years. I stopped being compatible with those things.
Quitting smoking is something most smokers fail at, so not a great thing to generalize. Also I consider smoking far easier these days as a much smaller number of people do it and there is more social friction.
We are in the 1960s smoking phase of bad diets. It is hard to escape terrible junk foods at just about any place that serves anything edible.
You don‘t have to do that. You can buy cheap meat and cheap vegetables. That way you will still eat much healthier than eating ultra-processed stuff, and probably even save money.
I think you just need to avoid taking an all-or-nothing attitude here. Knowing that ultra-processed foods are bad is valuable, even if you can't totally eliminate them from your diet. I do agree it's an overbroad category with stuff that ranges from abysmally terrible to stuff that's just kinda bad, but it has the upside of relatively low complexity (if you had ten different categories of processed food, most people would probably just give up on understanding the concept in general).
I eat mostly fish/veggies/fruit/rice, but sometimes I have pasta (and worse, sometimes I have cookies). In general, I've worked to shift my diet to unprocessed (or processed but not ultra) foods over time. Being cognizant of it is helpful at restaurants, too - I love all kinds of food, so more often than not, going with the least processed option is a helpful decider among menu items.
Careful of your rice intake. Lots of rice has arsenic, cadmium, and lead. It is part of growth and nothing to do with processing or packaging. There are even warnings from the FDA not to feed babies baby food that contains rice products.
It is interesting that "ultraprocessed" foods have all these effects but I think it seems necessary to try and tease out what about them is causing the effect because it seems like we're including wildly disparate foods, some of them not so different from something someone could plausibly make at home.
You're going to struggle to give up anything your gut bacteria is tuned to being normal, so there is an effort associated with changing your diet - but once you have been on a new diet for a few weeks, assuming it is balanced enough to be sustainable, it becomes easy.
You also have to want to do it; it's far easier to eat whatever is convenient than to put effort into finding ingredients and cooking them. The problem is that what is convenient is _not_ good for you long term, at least in the US (and at least several other western countries). A good diet is fundamental to good health (both physical and mental) - you'd think this would be axiomatic, but there are plenty of people who don't care enough for whatever reason.
> I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
You can, you've just prioritized taste/convenience over your health. Going into a supermarket and looking at what people put into their carts pretty much confirms this.
> a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed
Maybe read the labels? Also buying the cheapest thing there (w/o reading the labels) is also not a good idea.
If you're buying nuts and it has nut-x, plus a whole bunch of salt, a whole bunch of sugar, plus a whole bunch of chemicals that one glosses over, then there's a big chance that it's ultra-processed and/or something you shouldn't eat/buy.
Buying nuts in bulk is probably the best. Adding you're own spices/favors will make it super apparent on what you're consuming.
Food companies are trying to maximize profits, shelf life by adding crap to make the cheapest product. It's been obvious for a very long time.
Just an aside: countertop bread machines are amazing these days. You can control the ingredients (i.e. eliminate preservatives) and have wildly inexpensive, fresh bread since you can buy breadflour in bulk (e.g. 50-lb bags).
I was confused too, but it's going to depend on "How" processed it is. If the flour still has all the bran, germ, and fiber. I would say it's not very processed (Minimally processed). If it's bleached, I would say that treading in Ultra-Processed Foods territory.
Unprocessed or minimally processed foods: Think vegetables, grains, legumes, fruits, nuts, meats, seafood, herbs, spices, garlic, eggs and milk.
Processed foods: When ingredients such as oil, sugar or salt are added to foods and they are packaged, the result is processed foods. Examples are simple bread, cheese, tofu, and canned tuna or beans. These foods have been altered, but not in a way that’s detrimental to health.
Ultra-processed foods: These foods go through multiple processes (extrusion, molding, milling, etc.), contain many added ingredients and are highly manipulated. Examples are soft drinks, chips, chocolate, candy, ice-cream, sweetened breakfast cereals, packaged soups, chicken nuggets, hotdogs, fries and more.
what do you mean by highly processed flour? whole wheat is not treated or anything, just dehusked if i remember and then ground down. is there something else they do to whole wheat flour these days?
'Then ground down' is a much bigger statement then you may think. If we look at the particle size of flour via historic grinding processes what did it look like? I'm sure they were far less uniform and in general larger than what we have now, which should lead to differences in the glycemic index.
CICO would have you believe there is no difference in 100 calories of coke and 100 calories of raw spinach, but the coke is going to have nearly instant uptake and the spinach will take hours to digest.
Making your own bread will have it qualify as non-ultra-processed. Now that might seem extreme for most folks or too cumbersome but today to avoid ultra-processed food or generally unhealthy food is pretty hard. And most people won't put in the effort no matter how well labeled it is.
To me it is more counterproductive not to label it as such, regardless that it may be highly nutritional, due to the fact that people like me who are not able to eat processed food and information like this is a literal life saver.
it seems like a lot of your problem here is being caught off guard that pre-sliced bread, which has been modified so that it does not go stale as it otherwise would, is a processed food. try buying bread from a bakery that goes stale. after recalibrating that expectation maybe this will make more sense overall?
Even though this is a review, it still suffers from the fact that diet studies are not controlled, randomized, or blind.
My mother has early onset dementia. Her habits were very healthy for 30+ years (quit drinking, quit smoking, daily exercise, lifetime healthy BMI, moderate diet) and otherwise physically she is in extremely good shape for her age. But one of the early, subtle signs of her cognitive decline was a reluctance to cook real meals. She now has progressed to a state where she can still use a smartphone or laptop for basic tasks, but isn't able to cook any sort of complex recipe from scratch, even one she previously did from memory. Seems pretty obvious to me that it's just as likely that cognitive decline causes an inability in older adults to plan and cook healthy meals, not the other way around.
Higher chance of dementia might be caused by the genome or the lack of mental exercise, so it's not just food or unhealthy habits, rather an amalgamation of various factors.
Dementia is still not yet understood well enough to identify a single causal factor, even with correlated variables. Personally my money is on HSV (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234998/). We don't have a genetic predisposition / family history of early onset dementia.
In her case, retirement and being unmarried/socially isolated during COVID lockdowns obviously contributed to a more rapid progression in decline. But you would never say that social isolation causes Alzheimer's. There are many other people with active social lives and happy marriages who get early dementia. The same is almost certainly true with diet.
Until we're allowed to muzzle humans or lock study subjects in a room for 5 years straight and carefully monitor/manage everything someone eats, it will always be hard to study something like this.
Oof, what exactly is "ultra processed food", because as far as I can tell it's "whatever seems bad".
How much "processing" a potato chip gets (slice, fry, salt) is a whole lot different than one of the meat substitute burgers.
It seems like anything done on an industrial scale is evil and anything done in your kitchen is fine, despite the two being very similar in many cases.
Either there's a problem with specific ingredients or people are just getting very poor nutrition by eating diets very heavy in fortified grain based foods and the "daily value" suggestions for micronutrients aren't being appropriately satisfied by the vitamin powder they put in these foods or the list of requirements is missing many things.
Studies like this aren't so helpful because they don't actually point to anything specific. We need to find actual mechanisms not vague hints at what might be wrong.
Well, they point out that "ultra processed" is a euphemism for hyperpalatable foods that are low in nutrients and high in calories.
I don't think we need to parcel out the exact moment in processing where something becomes "ultra processed" since it's just a euphemism. It's like overly scrutinizing an analogy for contradiction instead of considering the point it's trying to make.
An obvious mechanism would be nutrient displacement as people fill up on calories without nutrients.
If you look at the nutrients that are good for our brain like foods that promote BDNF, those are the foods these people aren't eating. Look up any of the mechanisms where diet can improve cognitive function, cardiovascular health, brain health, and then consider that someone who displaces these foods with hyperpalatable trash will not get these benefits.
“Processed food” is like many other such words, like “chemicals”, which strictly can mean anything, but is only used when you want to imply badness. And any advice like “Avoid processed food” or “Avoid chemicals” sound like they mean something, but actually don’t.
The article says that more research is needed in that regard:
> For example, you could eat a burger and fries from a fast food chain, which would be high in fat, sugar and salt as well as being ultra-processed. You could make that same meal at home, which could also be high in fat, sugar and salt but would not be ultra-processed. More research is needed to determine whether one is worse than the other.
Lard is very much food, it has been a staple of many cultures diets for a long, long time. People here in Central Europe spread it on top of sourdough bread and top with sliced leeks.
I'm with you on refined sugar, though, which is what I think you probably meant by raw sugar.
Not only are raw sugar and lard considered food, but they're better for you than refined sugar and refined plant oils. Of course, as with everything, the poison is in the dose.
Don't forget to look at what the potato chip is fried in. How was that oil processed? What preservatives were added to it to make it shelf stable? How much more are you getting than you would in something freshly made?
> How much "processing" a potato chip gets (slice, fry, salt)...
There may be additional steps when a factory makes potato chips. [1]
1 When the potatoes arrive at the plant, they are examined and tasted for quality. A half dozen or so buckets are randomly filled. Some are punched with holes in their cores so that they can be tracked through the cooking process. The potatoes are examined for green edges and blemishes. The pile of defective potatoes is weighed; if the weight exceeds a company's preset allowance, the entire truckload can be rejected.
2 The potatoes move along a conveyer belt to the various stages of manufacturing. The conveyer belts are powered by gentle vibrations to keep breakage to a minimum.
3 The potatoes are loaded into a vertical helical screw conveyer which allows stones to fall to the bottom and pushes the potatoes up to a conveyer belt to the automatic peeling machine. After they have been peeled, the potatoes are washed with cold water.
4 The potatoes pass through a revolving impaler/presser that cuts them into paper-thin slices, between 0.066-0.072 in (1.7-1.85 mm) in thickness. Straight blades produce regular chips while rippled blades produce ridged potato chips.
5 The slices fall into a second cold-water wash that removes the starch released when the potatoes are cut. Some manufacturers, who market their chips as natural, do not wash the starch off the potatoes.
6 If the potatoes need to be chemically treated to enhance their color, it is done at this stage. The potato slices are immersed in a solution that has been adjusted for pH, hardness, and mineral content.
7 The slices pass under air jets that remove excess water as they flow into 40-75 ft (12.2-23 m) troughs filled with oil. The oil temperature is kept at 350-375°F (176.6-190.5°C). Paddles gently push the slices along. As the slices tumble, salt is sprinkled from receptacles positioned above the trough at the rate of about 1.75 lb (0.79 kg) of salt to each 100 lb (45.4 kg) of chips.
8 Potato chips that are to be flavored pass through a drum filled with the desired powdered seasonings.
9 At the end of the trough, a wire mesh belt pulls out the hot chips. As the chips move along the mesh conveyer belt, excess oil is drained off and the chips begin to cool. They then move under an optical sorter that picks out any burnt slices and removes them with puffs of air.
10 The chips are conveyed to a packaging machine with a scale. As the pre-set weight of chips is measured, a metal detector checks the chips once more for any foreign matter such as metal pieces that could have come with the potatoes or been picked up in the frying process.
11 The bags flow down from a roll. A central processing unit (CPU) code on the bag tells the machine how many chips should be released into the bag. As the bag forms, (heat seals the top of the filled bag and seals the bottom of the next bag simultaneously) gates open and allow the proper amount of chips to fall into the bag.
12 The filling process must be accomplished without letting an overabundance of air into the bag, while also preventing the chips from breaking. Many manufacturers use nitrogen to fill the space in the bags. The sealed bags are conveyed to a collator and hand-packed into cartons.
13 Some companies pack potato chips in I O cans of various sizes. The chips flow down a chute into the cans. Workers weigh each can, make any necessary adjustments, and attach a top to the can.
However, a factory made Veggie Burger seems to have fewer processing steps than that potato chip. [1]
1 Grains and vegetables are loaded into separate machines for thorough cleansing to remove dirt, bacteria created by spoilage, chemical residue, and any other foreign materials that may exist. Some factories have conveyer belts that move the food products under high-pressure sprayers. Others use hollow drums that tumble the food while water is sprayed on it.
2 The base grain, whether it be whole wheat, rice, or beans, is cooked in large vats of water until softened. The resulting puree is strained, separating the product from excess water, and any remaining foreign matter.
3 The vegetables are diced into tiny pieces. In some factories, this is done by a machine that is calibrated to slice the vegetables into uniform sizes. Other, smaller companies, still do this by hand.
4 Pre-measured amounts of the grain puree and the diced vegetables are combined into an industrial mixing bowl that blends the ingredients thoroughly.
5 The mixture is then loaded into an automatic patty-making machine, or press. The press is a cylindrical device with several stacks of round molds topped by a plunger. When the plunger is depressed, the ground mixture is formed into patties.
6 The patties are loaded onto perforated baking trays, then placed in an oven for about an hour and a half at a preset temperature.
Patties are quick-frozen
7 The trays are loaded into a freezing chamber in which the temperature is below the freezing point of 32° F (0° C). The goal is to freeze the patties in 30 minutes or less. Because vegetables contain a jelly-like protoplasm, the speedy processes promotes the formation of ice crystals through the tissues. When the patties are cooked, the water is reabsorbed as the ice crystals melt.
8 The patties are conveyed to a vacuum-packing machine which envelopes the patties in pre-measured plastic sleeves, drawing out the excess air and sealing each end. Then, they are loaded into pre-printed cardboard packages, usually four patties to a package. The frozen varieties are kept in temperature-controlled refrigerated compartments before and during shipment.
Seitan for example, is just plant based protein (flour), veggie stock and soya sauce, maybe baking powder and nutritional yeast for extra flavour & structure. 3-5 ingredients, mix & cook for a while, then use in any recipe instead of meat.
Deli meat? Just tofu and plant based protein, spices, cook & let cool down in the fridge.
Cheese? Plant based milk, starch/agar, spices, cook & fridge.
I like the whole food based diet; essentially buying fresh items simple ingredients. Stick to the meat and produce isles, maybe go to the butchers or bakery for local meat and bread, and a greengrocers for local veg. Make things like sauces from scratch. I enjoy cooking which helps. I believe that no matter what Scientists decide are good/bad for that particular year I'm going to be okay because it's simple, fresh, and rarely processed.
A lack of knowledge about cooking is imo the single biggest cause of health issues in the United States. People generally know that real food is healthier, but it’s not convenient and they don’t know how to cook so it’s really not even an option most of the time.
Knowing how to cook doesn't solve the underlying problem driving someone to use food as a drug.
I had laid many pots of Boeuf Bourguinon on my family's dinner table before I started shoving Big Macs into my face every night when I hit rock bottom.
Yeah I guess I just did that in the reverse order so my perspective is a bit different lol
I suppose this is something I mainly notice with people < 30. Chipotle is about the healthiest thing they eat & they legitimately have no idea how to cook. I didn’t really begin to learn or do it until I was 27 and pre-diabetic & that started turning things around for me pretty much immediately.
This article is somewhat pointless. It cites two studies, one which found correlations between ultra-processed food and cognitive decline, and one which found that it does not. It concludes that more research is needed.
Notably there is no downvote for submissions, so you can't just downvote the things you think don't belong/are bad. You have to decide whether to ignore it or to flag it in the case that it egregiously doesn't belong or violates the guidelines.
For anyone that's been confused by all the disjoint and contradictory nutritional information that's bombarding us these days, I'd recommend two books:
They are both new books, by two different authors, they both rally against processed food (and talk at length about what processed food IS) and, crucially, they are adamantly against dietary sugar.
The tone of both of them was a bit off-putting to me at first: they try to spend time convincing you that the food we have today is terrible and, if you are already convinced of that like I was, it's a bit grating. But keep going, there's good nuggets all over.
Personally, my rule is no liquid calories (nut beverages, milk, fruit juices, sugar with my coffee, etc.) unless I am on a weight gain diet, then smoothies with whole fruits are ok.
There's lots of additives in processed food, because the food processing machines require them. I guess a lot of food processing innovation is about finding new additives that makes the food sludge go through the machines a bit faster, or makes the machines clog less or require less cleaning and downtime. The food itself doesn't require those additives, and probably makes it worse in many ways.
There might be a way to prepare food without additives at scale. Basically, prepare food traditionally like a human cook but use robotics. Pick and place in parallel instead of pushing food through pipes. Not sure if viable, but I'd be more willing to eat such food even if it'd be more expensive.
I follow a yeast-free diet to control an auto-immune disease called Hidradenitis suppurativa. Some doctors produced a study a while back where they found anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae autoantibodies in HS patients. When patients followed a yeast and wheat-free diet they would see 100% remission of symptoms. The hardest part of following this diet is avoiding yeast as it is a major flavor component in almost all "ultra-processed foods", especially the "healthy" ones. Vegan and plant-based foods add yeast proudly. The problem is that our bodies have an innate immune system that is coded to recognize and fight fungi. Our DNA even codes for pattern recognizers that specifically target saccharomyces cerevisiae, also known as bread/baker's yeast. It's alarming to me that scientists know with certainty that yeast is innately inflammatory, and that inflammation is the majorcause of chronic disease, but have not put it together that maybe yeast should be avoided as a food additive.
Not exactly the same, but my dad has (diagnosed) celiac disease and, being stubborn, refused to adhere to the diet. He had early onset vascular dementia within a couple of years (no history of this in the family). Eating wheat when you have celiac disease is similarly inflammatory, it seems, and can cause all sorts of seemingly unrelated problems.
For me, the diet puts HS completely into remission. I've been on the yeast and wheat-free diet for about six years. While the diet is hard to follow, I never have any boils, sinus tracts or any skin inflammation. Also happily (and anecdotally) I no longer experience headaches or migraines of any kind.
Another way to look at it: You are not likely to find the ingredients that make up most of these foods in your home kitchen.
A general rule of thumb:
The longer the list of ingredients and the more words most people would need to look up, the less likely it is to be good for you.
The shorter the list and the more normal food words on it (potatoes, oil, salt), the more likely it is to be real food and not some over processed food product.
Science has found that we have a slew of beneficial bacteria in our gut. Further, fostering and encouraging particular strains of bacteria have a positive effect on our mood and health. Now, for the leading question; what do preservatives do? How do they affect that bacteria?
There are many other factors that could be relevant here.
As the article says, ultra-processed food tends to be low in nutrients. Given the little we know, that seems as likely a cause as anything else here.
Also, these are not randomized studies, as they also mention. So it is possible that, say, frozen meals are used more by a higher-risk population for other reasons (like cost), and this is just a correlation.
”Lab rats gain more weight from human foods than they do from rat chow with similar nutritional properties because obesity doesn’t come from fat or carbohydrate content, but from contaminants in the food, and human food has more contaminants than the rat chow does, likely from packaging and processing.
Processed foods end up with more contaminants in them — for example, there are 4x more phthalates in Kraft mac and cheese powders than in block cheese, string cheese, and cottage cheese. Another example are these results from the FDA, as reported by the AP. In terms of explaining why the cafeteria diet is so fattening, it’s especially illustrative that grocery store chocolate cake was an extreme outlier, with concentrations of PFPeA more than 100 times higher than chocolate milk.”
Granted, that’s about phthalates, which are widely used as plasticizers, but the same routes apply for PFAS.
However much I'd like to alter my diet to be more healthy, including flavored nuts or bread as ultraprocessed means I have nearly zero chance avoiding a sizable portion of what academic scientists label as ultraprocessed.
These studies and press releases seem counterproductive. If sliced bread or fancy nuts is in the same category as aerosol cheese or high calorie soda, a lot of people are going to struggle to understand what isn't ultraprocessed and give up trying to select better items at the grocery store.