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How Bad Are Ultraprocessed Foods, Really?
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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"Ultaprocessed" is a stupid classification.
Finnish rye bread is classified as "ultraprocessed" due to its more complex production process but it better for you than white bread.
Lots of soy products count as "ultraprocessed" too.
What people actually mean when discussing "ultraprocessed" foods, are foods designed to taste good without making you feel satisfied. Causing you to eat/buy more of it than you should, more than you would otherwise even desire to.
Yes, when you create a product like that, it often ends up classifying as "ultraprocessed". But not all ultraprocessed food products are a problem, and not all non-processed foods lack the "I wanna eat more" factor that these products go for.
I'd posit that quibbling over food classification plays right into the hands of the people who don't want you to otherwise think too much about what food you buy and eat. The simplicity is likely intentional and so some things are bound to be classified poorly, but that's okay because we can call those out. It still works for the majority of what you'd like to identify.
That makes no sense.
My taking issue with oversimplification, doesn't mean I'm advocating for less thought to be put into the matter.
It means the opposite.
We can do better than simply "how much has this been processed" which is just another word for "preparation".
"Ultraprocessed" makes it seem like the act of preparing the food somehow ruins it, when the real problem is all the other differences between industrially prepared food vs how you'd turn individual "unprocessed" ingredients into a meal, cookies, or whatever else at home.
A bowl of noodles consumed in a restaurant, or prepared by you yourself, would be classified exactly the same as a bowl of sodium-overloaded instant ones, because the classification has literally nothing to do with what the food actually contains, merely how far removed it is from a raw ingredient.
What is the gain that you seek from this fight ?
That people become more informed?
It's better than nothing if people are thinking about whether something they buy is "ultraprocessed".
But even better than that is if people know how to identify food that has been prepared in a way that is sane, or if it has been produced specifically to exploit bad consumer habits.
It's not a fight. My main goal is literally just to put information where people might read it.