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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the first two comments posted are urging us to forget about this issue.
No, we shouldn’t stop talking about it. Education is good, mm’kay?
Those people have been basically vote-nuked, but you see them every time there’s a topic about vices in particular. Watch what happens when you start talking about how alcohol is objectively poison or that you will be healthier if you don’t smoke weed every day.
They’re not paid shills or propagandists, they’re people with hangups.
People with fucking hangups are going to be the death of every level of progress and better outcomes. From people on the far right who have sexual hangups and can’t be normal about other people having relationships, to people who have been led to believe by their niche subcultures and pandering social habits that their addictions and food issues are somehow their identity and must be preserved.
I will say that the anti-alcohol and anti-UPF people can also be so annoying. Like, alcohol is poison, yes, I was aware of that the first time I got a hangover. But it isn’t gonna stop me from having a couple beers at a party on occasion. And I’m not gonna never eat ice cream again just because it is ultraprocessed. I just think that it should be pointed out that it is possible to say “I know this is bad for me, but I’m going to consume it anyway because I am cognizantly valuing the pleasure it will give me in this moment over the medium-term health consequences I know I will experience later.”
They wouldn’t be so annoying if the world wasn’t designed to be against their views for profit.
I think it’s really fucking annoying how people complain about and perpetuate stereotypes about people who bring up the reality about what healthy stuff is. It confuses some people into not looking deeper. Especially children. Hearing their parents rant about how vegetarians are obnoxious isn’t gonna help the kids eat better. Nor will it encourage kids to listen to people who sound similar to those whom the adults in their lives rant about.
People saying things like “we knew this 30 years ago, so shut up and stop posting about it.” Or “but [the people who talk about this] are so obnoxious” should just move on and stop making broad generalizations about others.
I’ve fallen into this trap too. By making over generalizations based on my misunderstandings of vegetarian and vegan diets.
In some ways, it’s similar to how the news likes to talk about the political jockeying instead of the issues at hand. In this case, a noisy minority likes to talk about how people communicate instead of the facts and ever growing evidence/proof.
The problem is, the vast majority of people who either imbibe or don’t, are not getting online and making advocacy statements or citing some study or personal philosophy or making it an inherent human right to defend the thing they like or don’t like.
What makes this incredibly annoying is when you say the objectively normal and healthy advice online like: “if you’re staying high all day just to function, you probably need to see a doctor or therapist and consider the idea that you may have a psychological addiction.” and you get met with the predictable number of people who are obviously extremely triggered and feel attacked by this statement because they spend all their time on /r/highallday and it’s just a community of losers encouraging each other to not change. (I don’t actually know if that’s a subreddit but I assume so.)
This usually triggers an equal level of rabid response because again, only the people who really care are the ones who are going to bite and start attacking the person’s views.
It makes it very hard to actually spread good advice online, which is a problem because drugs and alcohol harm or kill a lot of people, and I would wager most of those people really thought they had good reasons to do what they were doing.
Agreed
This post is like an iceberg. A handful of comments before you get to the heavily downvoted stuff, then the other 90% come out as replies.
Ok, so what is ultra-processed food and how did they come up with the term?
The term “ultra-processed foods” originated from the Nova food classification system, which defines food in four categories, ranging from least to most processed:
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods like fruit, vegetables, milk, or fish.
- Processed culinary ingredients like salt, sugar, olive oil, and butter.
- Processed foods, such as jam, pickles, or canned fruit.
- Ultra-processed foods, like energy drinks, instant oatmeal, sliced bread, or hot dogs.
Ultra-processed foods have one or more ingredient that wouldn’t be found in a kitchen, like chemical-based preservatives, emulsifiers like hydrogenated oils, sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, and artificial colors and flavors. UPFs undergo processing techniques like pre-frying, molding, extrusion, fractioning, and other chemical alterations that leave the final products bearing almost no resemblance to the original ingredients.
Ultra-processed food and drinks
Ultra-processed foods – which can be foods and drinks – are not really foods but formulations of substances obtained by fractionating foods from the first group. These substances include sugar, oils, and fats for domestic use, protein isolates or concentrates, interesterified oils, hydrogenated fat, modified starches, and various substances for exclusive industrial use.
Added colors, flavors, emulsifiers, thickeners, and other additives that give the formulations sensory properties similar to those found in foods from the first group are added into ultra-processed foods. They also serve to disguise undesired characteristics of the final product. Despite the claims commonly seen on the packaging of ultra-processed products, unprocessed foods are just a small percentage of their composition or are simply absent, as in the case of “strawberry flavored” or “grape flavored” products.
…
Ultra-processed foods include soft drinks, dairy drinks, fruit nectar, powdered mixes for making fruit-flavored drinks, ‘packaged snacks’, sweets and chocolates, cereal bars, ice cream, packaged bread and other bakery products, margarine and other butter substitutes, biscuits, cakes and cake mixes, morning cereals, pies, pasta dishes and pre-prepared pizzas, chicken and fish nuggets, sausages, hamburgers and other reconstituted meat products, instant noodles, powdered mixtures for preparing soups or desserts and many other products.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
Our food in the us is straight poison.
“America Bad” 🙄
Junk food is available in literally every country in the world, which is why every country in the world has seen a rise in obesity since its introduction. The US has problems with various aspects of it’s food system, yes. We have problems with a lot of things. But god, it is so tiring to see Americans here endlessly complain like little babies about how terrible their lives are in their terrible, no good, very bad, dystopian country.
America really is bad. Look at how it ranks globally for any aspect of the well-being of its citizens. Education, mortality rates, access to healthcare, consumer protections, and… food and drug regulation. The only thing that America excels at is business first at the cost of the well-being of its citizens.
According to this metric, the US is 16th in education. 16th out of 200 ain’t bad in my book.
This notes that US life expectancy is 55th in the world, at 79.3 years. We beat out Poland and China and about 150 other nations on the list.
The only thing that America excels at
Who said we need to excel at anything? Does America have to be number one in order for all its citizens to not want to off themselves? All I’m saying is that if you asked an average person in the Congo if they wanted to trade citizenships with an American, they would probably be quite happy to.
Based on what?
Processed foods cause cancer. You go to any supermarket in the us and thats the main thing being sold. Our “bread” has so much sugar and other garbage in im not even sure how it can be called bread. Coke for example has Cain sugar in it everywhere else in the world in except the us. This is just crap off the top of my head. The list goes on and on and on.
I’ve been all over the world and the products you describe are available front-and-center in every supermarket. Even in places with French influence where bread is regulated there is still bread with sugar in it that’s widely available. In the US you can buy basic bread anywhere that sells bread. HFCS and sucrose (which you refer to as “Cain” sugar) are functionally the same when it comes to blood glucose, insulin, triglycerides, and satiety, and obesity / metabolic syndrome track with total sugar consumption and not the type of sugar consumed (that’s actually just marketing).
I’ve been all over the world and the products you describe are available front-and-center in every supermarket.
Have you seen Cheetohs in Europe?
Yes they have different flavors too, like paprika.
I remember seeing raw stuff in shops when I visited USA… no one is shoving the processed shit down your throat. But then I also remember no one was taking the time to cook in our local office over there.
Saying people don’t cook in America is absurd.
Saying that our food in America is straight poison is absurd.
Because drinking Coke in other countries is so healthy? If you’re being healthy you just don’t drink sugary sodas. The difference between cane sugar and HFCS is irrelevant.
I just checked my very American white sandwich bread, and it has 2% dv of sugar. That’s “so much sugar”? I could eat five entire loaves of it and still be under the daily recommended amount of sugar. But you think that two measly slices in a sandwich is giving me cancer?
This has very little to do with the US. You think they don’t have bread and sausages in Germany? Because that’s all ultra-processed.
Just say you don’t like America and leave it at that. This is the internet. You don’t have to justify your opinion with bullshit.
I don’t like America but want more sugar in my bread. What do?
Buy a bread machine. Used is a good option since a lot of people buy them then don’t actually use them.
Brioche
…the study this whole post is about?..
…which does not conclude that American food is poison?..
Critics argue UPF is an ill-defined category and existing health policies, such as those aimed at reducing sugar and salt consumption, are sufficient to deal with the threat.
I really agree with the critics here. Just saying things are bad because they’re unnatural is silly. It reminds me of the anti-GMO craze: pretty much all of our foods have been genetically modified by thousands of years of agricultural science, so it’s silly to just outright reject things that were only modified recently with modern technology.
It’s reasonable to reject foods high in sugar or other things that we know are bad for you, which a lot of these UPF’s happen to be. Similarly, it’s reasonable to object to GMO’s with regards to the business models of corporations like Monsanto (now Bayer). But let’s not confate our modern solutions with the problems that happen to exist alongside them.
It’s not just because they’re unnatural. Did you read the article or look up any definitions of what ultra processed foods are? It’s very easily accessible information.
Ultra-processed foods are basically confections of group 2 ingredients (substances extracted from whole foods), typically combined with sophisticated use of additives, to make them edible, palatable, and habit-forming. They have no real resemblance to group 1 foods (minimally processed foods) ,although they may be shaped, labelled and marketed so as to seem wholesome and ‘fresh’. -Monteiro 2009
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). -NOVA
These foods have essentially no nutrients but still force your body to be hungry all the time. It’s a truly evil combination and isn’t an accident or coincidence.
Read it? I literally quoted the article in my comment.
SOME of those industrially manufactured additives are harmful, but not all of them. There is insufficient evidence to say that industrial manufacturing and processing is inherently unhealthy.
If I search on DuckDuckGo for a comparison, the first result I find is this scientific paper which concluded:
These findings indicate that homemade foods do not necessarily offer superior nutritional quality or lower levels of harmful compounds compared to industrial products. The classification of food products quality based on processing or industrial ingredients alone is not a reliable indicator of their healthiness.
Yeah this study is evaluating the making of similar foods at home yourself.
Making cereal bars or fish sticks yourself is not meaningfully more healthy than eating processed cereal bars or fish sticks. Cool. Also sidestepping the issue entirely.
Food deserts + working + poverty = UPF diet
Diets we already know are disproportionately calorie dense for the nutrients.
If you make imitation McDonald’s at home you’ll get McDonald’s results
Slight tangent, but I saw (I think it was a Dylan Johnson video) that a literature review suggested that caloric density was the best predictor of long term weight loss. These ultra processed foods being so convenient and calorie dense is a recipe for long term weight gain, which itself is another risk factor for health problems.
There is a difference between knowing an exact reason why something is happening, and making a policy recommendation. If we notice that UPFs are bad for your health, but don’t know why, the answer as a responsible scientist isn’t to say “well, we haven’t figured it out yet, so keep eating as much as you want!”
Except we do know why, and it was included in the quote I gave from the original article. It’s not a mystery that loading up foods with sugar, fat, and salt is bad for you. And we can pick at nits about the differences between high-fructose corn syrup being worse for you than unprocessed molasses but at the end of the day both are bad.
A lot of UPF’s lack nutritional content, but at the same time a lot of UPF’s are fortified to have better nutritional content than their unprocessed counterparts. This article reeks of the “crunchy” trend towards naturalism, the same kind of mentality behind the anti-vaccine movement and alternate medicines. Just labelling chemicals as “bad” because they’re difficult to pronounce without taking a more nuanced investigation into which chemicals are good or bad, and for whom.
I’m cooked.
Grow your own food in your back yard. Share it with your neighbors. Break your dependence on Babylon systems. You can grow 100# of potatoes in 4 square feet with the right techniques there is literally no good excuse not to garden.
growing that amount of food requires tons of free time. people don’t have it.
not everyone can be a homesteader. it’s also extremely difficult unless the weather and soil is excellent quality. most people don’t live in areas where that is the case. hence why our agriculture is apart from our population centers.
Also requires yard with soil. Not everyone has these, especially those who would benefit most if they had the time and means to grow food.
Gardening takes very little time. But you can’t blow it off when it needs care.
No! Literally no excuse!
Excuse #1: I don’t want to.
Unless…
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Someone already cared a whole awful lot. Lots of people, actually. They invented large scale mechanized agriculture, so now I can pop the top on a can of beans that cost a dollar, instead of spending the majority of my money on food because of the cost of human labor involved in its production.
Sure thing, ill go to the backyard of our fourth floor apartment. So much room out there to grow.
You got a balcony? Get a fuckin’ pot and grow tomatoes in it. They basically grow themselves. You don’t have to be 100% self sufficient by next Thursday but you sure could be a little less reliant, even if that just means growing 6 tomatoes.
Yeah sorry. The spiders own that balcony. Its not for hunan use.
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There are absolutely millions in poverty in developed countries like the US who do not have any ability to buy fresh food.
Being able to eat healthily is a privilege in 2025, which is fucking disgusting, but absolutely true.
There are towns in America where the only place for a hundred miles they can buy food is a dollar store. These shops don’t typically stock anything fresh or particularly healthy.
The people there will be too poor to live anywhere else and might be working multiple jobs (as is typical in American poverty) so will not have time/energy to attempt to grow anything themselves
We are lucky that we can eat healthily, but don’t let yourself think that’s a choice everyone gets
Rural dwelling pedant here: Dollar General is not a dollar store. Dollar Tree is, but Dollar General is a garbage store with regular-ass prices. They only stock shit and the prices are often higher than regular grocery stores.
It’s the only food store my town has and it sucks so bad. At least Dollar Stores are affordable.
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What do you mean there are no such things as farmer’s markets?
What do you mean there are no such things as other grocery chains that isn’t Wal-Mart, Kroger .etc?
Exactly that, it’s all in the article.
The only shop is a dollar store.
All these things you expect are absolutely not a given everywhere.
Besides, why the fuck would anyone want to live in the smack of no where?
Predominantly because they don’t have the wealth or income necessary to live anywhere else in most cases. Y’know because of the poverty…?
It’s about access. You can still have stores around and still be in a food desert. I did research on this while in grad school. You’re discounting indigent populations ability to navigate to stores with fresh food. Imagine you’re a single mom with 2 kids. How easy is it for you to get to the Walmart that is 4 miles away by bus?
Do you expect people to have availability to go to the farmers market on Saturday morning? They would have to make a coordinated effort to travel with a kid, or find coverage so they could go to the farmers market. Do you think all small towns have easily accessible farmers markets that are priced in a way that the less fortunate can afford the produce?
Beyond that, folks tend to gravitate towards easily accessible or ready made food (e.g., microwaveable). You’re also assuming that everyone has familiarity with those ingredients and has bandwidth/willing to learn to cook. While most people do learn at some point, it can still be a barrier.
When you say “why would someone want to live in the middle of nowhere,” some people don’t have a choice and have geographic/work/family/community ties in small towns that lack resources.
Your response is flippant and disregards the reality of the situation.
What world do you live in where farmers markets are affordable? It’s just an outdoor Whole Foods.
Why do I feel like people bring these posts up so they can feel better about themselves by downvoting anyone who disagrees? Hm…
I guess because you lack empathy and refuse to acknowledge that reality is probably more nuanced than your singular lived experience?
Who is actually trying to make themselves feel better here: the person who’s posturing as simply better than others because you don’t struggle with your weight? Or the people down voting you because they recognize there are a myriad of other factors that might cause a person to struggle with eating healthy including:<br> -food deserts<br> -physical or mental disabilities<br> -lack of time (some people are legit out there working 2 or 3 jobs)<br> -inadequate cooking spaces (especially cheap apartments in big cities)
I wake up every day between 4 and 5 am. Get myself (ready for work) and my kids (ready for school) by 6:30 am. Drop the kiddos off at school, wife off at work, and I’m usually back home by 7:30. Then I walk my dog until 8 am, and finally I have an hour to myself before I start work at 9–usually spent cleaning. I work until 5 pm, then go pick up the kids and wife to be back home by 6 pm. We have two hours now as a family, before the kids bedtime at 8 pm. Cooking is an option if you want to hog up most of the two hours with cooking, eating, and cleaning. Otherwise, we can eat fast food during the drive and maybe watch a movie together when we get home. Beside that, I walk the dog again at about 8:30 pm and I’m in bed by 9 pm. The wife and I might stay up until nearly 10 pm if we’re watching a show.
There’s not a lot of time to do much besides fast food.
You can eat McDonalds responsibly if you don’t eat too much. If you feel like you are still hungry get a burger and a salad instead of two burgers. Or stuff like that.
It’s OK to eat McDonalds. The problem is irresponsibly eating McDonalds.
It’s OK to eat McDonalds.
No nutritive content, no fiber. It something you eat, not food.
Yea, not a good food source, but if you use it, you don’t have to get fat.
If you have no time to cook, do mealprep, or if you have the money buy premade meals.
I consider this to be victim blaming. This garbage is designed to be addictive. The mass advertising is akin to cigarette commercials. They’re associating* junk food with various emotion, sexuality (Coca Cola commercials especially), special events, holidays, sports sponsorships, and more. It’s another capitalist evil entirely driven by greed.
So it’s the individuals fault for eating the food shoved in their faces?
If they have easily accessible healthier options, kinda.
The point is that they often do not have those options due to availability, cost, access, etc.
That’s why I said easily accessible.
I think the point is that they also often do.
Is healthy food shoved into people’s faces? You see giant signs on highways for healthy restaurants? Is the cheapest food healthy? Come on…
The cheapest food would be raw ingredients like rice, beans etc. That way you can eat an appropriate amount and not feel hungry. Also let’s not pretend like frozen veggies are more expensive than McDonalds or other restaurants.
Otherwise eating less is always cheaper, you just might feel hungry.
Personal responsibility absolutely plays a role here.
I know you certainly need it to.
I have it. I know when I make poor diet decisions it’s on me, not anyone else.
And if those poor diet choices weren’t around what would you eat? You’re almost there…
I mean, I feel like the argument about food deserts and poverty and such has some validity. But otoh, I have known many overweight people in my life with good jobs and plenty of options and opportunities to buy real food, and they don’t do it. And imma say that’s their fault.
Of course you’ll say that; it fits your narrative. Having money doesn’t negate the accessibility and promotion of ultra processed food. A person can have a good job and make plenty of money, but not have time or effort to cook at home or stick to a specific plan. Some people may have health conditions that make them fat like thyroid issues or hell even depression which circularly makes people less likely to eat healthier. Regardless, UPF is the easiest to acquire, purposefully addictive and super cheap not unlike any other addictive substance.
The real issue is society has created these problems, provided the lucrative solutions and brainwashed people like you into blaming the victims because your experience isn’t like theirs.
My experience is theirs. I grew up in a household that never had any real money issues, and was consistently fed UPFs. Drank probably around 6 sodas per day. Then one day I said “I’m tired of being fat. Why am I fat? Maybe its because I eat so much junk food, since it is well known that junk food makes you fat.” So I stopped eating junk food and now I’m not fat. My parents and other people I knew in my hometown, meanwhile, continued eating junk food, and have continued to gain weight. I will firmly classify this as “their fault”.
Ah right. You were fat now you hate fat people. That makes more sense to why you’re the way you are.
It’s like the two things can be true at once without conflicting – but America would have to be huge at that point, and filled with hundreds of millions of people of vastly different economic standing, but it’s possible. Can you imagine?~
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Yes, people do need to take some personal responsibility, but also corporations engineering products that are unhealthy and addictive and marketers spending billions to convince people its good stuff… is not a great system.
Why does our environment need to be so adversarial?
This is a reasonable question, but also, I don’t feel like my environment is all that adversarial most of the time. The corporations can go ahead and develop their products, and I will continue to not buy them - same as I don’t buy cigarettes. And I can’t remember the last time I say, eg, a Doritos commercial, since I have ad blockers on my browsers and don’t watch cable tv or listen to radio stations almost ever. I would say that the most adversarial aspect of my environment is the fact that I have to drive most places to get anywhere, and when I drive, I drive past Taco Bell. And that’s a whole thing.
So a gun to the head at the McDonald’s counter isn’t realistic, but what is realistic is an empty belly and a choice between unhealthy, cheap food and further hunger. I find it very easy to imagine that scenario, because I’ve been in it. Have you? Or can you imagine how a person could be?
I, personally, have been hungry in the past and eaten at McDonalds. After I did that, my first thought was “I’m an idiot, why did I do that?”
That’s a nice story but it has very little to do with what I was asking. Have you ever faced the hard choice of continued hunger or cheap food? Can you envisage a situation where someone might have to make that choice?
I am currently hungry and am currently choosing not to eat cheap food.
Ok, and do you have the choice? So, you could eat fresh, healthy food today if you choose to? Because if so, then that’s not the choice I’m taking about, is it.
Sure, those are a factor but it isn’t like the food themselves have the same kind of chemicals you’d find in things like drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. Those are two huge differences.
You can completely stop those things. You can’t stop eating.
There’s definitely an element of personal responsibility however it’s not always as simple as that. Ultra-processed foods are cheap, have long shelf lives and can be quick and easy to prepare. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to go on a diet to avoid UPF as much as possible, but it’s way more expensive, takes a lot more effort to cook everything from scratch, and generally doesn’t last long at home. For a lot people, they don’t have the luxury or time to manage such a diet.
Some people are more susceptible to addiction than others. For some, having a pack of biscuits or doughnuts in the house would be torture and would have to eat the lot if they’re there, where as for others they wouldn’t even think about it at all and probably forget they exist. Of course, people need to take that responsibility and not buy them, but you can say that about any addict.
if you’ve ever tried to go on a diet to avoid UPF as much as possible
I have to say, this idea that it is so much harder and more expensive to cook real food is pretty bullshit.
As an example, I had a friend in college who had a recipie he ate almost every night for dinner: one can of beans, one can of diced tomatoes. Put in bowl, stir, microwave, eat. He called it… Beans and Tomatos.
Another friend ate (still eats?) the same breakfast for years. His recipie? Oatmeal. Period.
Both these options are easy and quick to make, extremely cheap, and shelf stable. I want to be gracious to people’s individual struggles with things like depression and addiction and whatnot… But seriously, from an objective standpoint, this is not at all difficult.
As an example, I had a friend in college who had a recipie he ate almost every night for dinner: one can of beans, one can of diced tomatoes. Put in bowl, stir, microwave, eat. He called it… Beans and Tomatos.
Yeah that’s not a realistic meal. I’m talking about cooking proper balanced, healthy (although not always!) and tasty meals that are suitable for a family. The prep alone can take just as much time as it can to smash some beige oven food in the oven for 20mins at 180C.
Another friend ate (still eats?) the same breakfast for years. His recipie? Oatmeal. Period.
I do this too. I make it for my kids, throw in some frozen blueberries, sprinkle with chia seeds and add a small dollop of biscoff or golden syrup. Although it’s not that much effort, it’s still quite a bit more than making a bowl of cereal, especially when cleaning the saucepan after as porridge is a bitch to clean once it’s started to cool.
Cost wise it absolutely is more expensive. Every substitute product I get that’s UPF free costs significantly more. I’d say it added about 20% to our weekly grocery costs trying significantly reduce it.
You don’t have to avoid UPF. Just eat less and fill with salad/veggies until you aren’t hungry. As long as you keep the calories in range you’ll be mostly fine. Maybe watch the macros a bit.
Calories are a unit of heat, and absorbing nutrition is a biological process. Unless you’re a bomb calorimeter, they have very little to do with what goes on inside you after you eat. I urge you to reconsider what food you choose to eat.
You should absolutely desist from saying that other people should not avoid UPFs, because that is a harmful statement in the same vein as “you don’t have to stop smoking.”
Have the day you deserve.
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Accessibility to healthy food options is a global problem.
This is way beyond the scope of just Obesity you seemed to be upset about.
Be happy you live somewhere where healthy options are available but please take that stick out of your arse and realise how fortunate you are for it. And don’t start a just move argument because if you are even a little social conscious you understand poor people do not have the luxury to move.
Broo the amount of people pretending that they can’t get rice, beans, frozen veggies and some sauce, but McDonalds is cheaper and available is insane.
“I have no choice, but to buy McDonalds every day” Lmao what? Unless you don’t have a kitchen, that is ridiculous. Even then, don’t they sell salads? Get the burgers for the calories you need and fill with salads until you aren’t hungry anymore.
Edit: For relatively cheap and complete protein source consider Soy-granulate, sometimes called TVP. It also has a long shelf life since its dry.
Sounds like you don’t understand opportunity cost and don’t value the cost of your own time…
Why do I feel like people bring these posts up so they can feel better about themselves by downvoting anyone who disagrees? Hm…
Because you enjoy vice signaling, apparently?
Carefully buddy, the only thing that obese people love slamming as much as cheeseburgers is the downvote button .
Can we stop bitching about UPF? They are tasty, so you eat a lot of them and get fat. Simple as that.
The definition itself is stupid. Bread is ultra processed. Protein powder is ultra processed. Can we focus on calory-density and taste?
Also as someone with ADHD I regularly forget to eat lunch. If I couldn’t eat 2 pizzas for dinner, I would loose even more weight. This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
That’s the thing. It’s not as simple as that. Same amount of calories is going to hit differently between UPF and low or unprocessed. And what in some places is called bread is in other places legally defined as cake or rubber squeaky toy.
It’s a huge issue to a very select demographic known as “People who are aren’t you.”
The calories hit basically the same. The carbs might be closer to sugar and combined with the missing fiber you’ll get a big insulin spike. Gotta watch out for those to not build resistance.
But there is this obsession with the “chemicals” like the Red dye 40 scare recently. Those are like 0.5% of the problem, but distract from the real problem of too many calories.
The point at which you should care about Red40 is when you’re a professional athlete or bodybuilder on contest prep. No normal human has health issues from these “chemicals” (allergies notwithstanding) anywhere comparable to the issues of too many calories.
Edit: As a German I do agree that American “Bread” should be classified and sold as dishwashing sponges.
Nobody is talking about food dye.
Ultra-processed food, particularly carbohydrates, is digested differently and causes objectively sharper glucose spikes which do harm to your organs and body over time, even if you’re not diabetic. But if you have any chance of developing diabetes, this effect will get much worse.
If eating two pizzas every night helps compensate for your ADHD, that’s fine, but you need to talk to your doctor about what long-term consequences that will have on your body or consider different methods of managing your ADHD if your doctor predictably says that’s a bad idea. You are not trapped in your way of living, you are comfortable in your way of living. And you most definitely should not speak for everyone.
This isn’t propaganda and your eating problems with ADHD are your own. Stop skipping lunch instead of eating 2 pizzas for dinner and blaming UPF articles. Plenty of us have ADHD
Over 70% of America is overweight and UPFs are one of the primary drivers of that
No, that’s the current problem. Growing up my parents believed that a vegetarian diet of 80% vegetables was healthy. While I probably got all the micro nutrients I could not physically fit the needed amount of calories in the form of vegetables into my stomach.
Sounds like you needed more healthy oils in your diet, not UPFs.
The primary driver is eating too much. There are people who are starving but we’re supposed to act like the ones who overindulge are the victims? Get real.
No, it’s scientifically proven that eating too much isn’t necessarily the problem; rather, it’s the quality of the food you consume that determines obesity. If you eat too much unprocessed food, you won’t gain as much weight as you would from eating processed food.
Many Americans visit Europe and are amazed that they can eat a lot without gaining weight.
The human body simply cannot process processed food. It’s simply unnatural.
This is sooo fucking wrong. Portion control in the EU is totally different. CICO is the only way you’re gaining weight period. Eat to many calories you gain weight, doesn’t matter what it is. Is it healthy to eat Twinkies and Doritos for every meal? Hell no, but don’t act like eating upf is the only reason Americans are sitting at 70% obesity rate. Go watch secret eaters on YT for a UK take. Europeans eat a lot less calories than we do. Period.
Can we stop bitching about UPF? They are tasty, so you eat a lot of them and get fat. Simple as that.
That’s literally the issue? They’re engineered that way on purpose so you eat more and more of it in the cheapest way possible. They’re calorie dense but don’t fill you up the same as as non-ultra processed foods.
The definition itself is stupid. Bread is ultra processed. Protein powder is ultra processed.
That’s not the problem with the definition, it’s the problem that most supermarket bread is ultra processed.
It’s driving obesity and causing a whole host of health problems.
Here are some solutions.
If you don’t have a lot of freezer space, go buy one. You can get a model that holds a lot of food and is the same side as a kitchen chair. Costs about the same as a week’s worth of pizzas.
It takes the same amount of time to cook ten portions as it does to cook one. I like to make a huge pot of chili or stew or soup and freeze it in pint size containers. Five minutes to cook in the microwave. A big pan of lasagna will give you a dozen meals. Or you can cook a whole roast chicken on Sunday and eat it all week. Chicken and rice on Sunday, chicken tacos on Monday, green salad with chicken on Tuesday…
This is great advice. Just be careful not to heat it back up in a plastic container. Dump it into glass or ceramic before reheating.
Don’t get me wrong, I do mealprep, just forget or don’t have time for lunch some days. Then I eat “junkfood” because I can’t eat 2000 calories in one go, when I eat rice and lentils.
Not being able to eat 2000 calories in a sitting is a feature, not a flaw of healthy eating. Set a reminder to eat lunch, or just meal prep your snacks.
What a bizarre take
Bread and pizza are not per se ultra processed. They can be depending on how you bought them.
Right like an apple is a plant. Harvesting, washing, slicing, and cooking it into a pie in your own kitchen is technically processing it, but it’s still a whole food as the slices are in their whole unaltered form.
Taking millions of apples, grinding them, emulsifying them and separating them into constituent components, enzymatically pre-digesting them then pressing that concoction into a mould shaped vaguely like apple slices and adding in a barrage of artificial flavors and sweeteners to make it resemble the taste of apple pie? These apples have been ultra processed. It’s done for the sake of corporate profit. Pies made in this fashion make more product per ingredient and are longer lasting on the shelf.
Research is showing foods like this are making us fat not just because they’re tasty and we naturally binge, but because they’re literally interfering with our body’s ability to self regulate hormonally.
The calories from these foods, while not breaking the laws of physics or anything, also come with baggage. The food is already extensively broken down by mechanical and chemical processes; things that our teeth and gut normally have to do. The result if you eat them often is having a bunch of meals that hits your system fast, basically like a runner’s energy gel packet. It’s taken us a long time to discover but research is indicating that this is inherently very bad for us.
This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
That all being said, I agree with you, and I expect all of the nuance around this to get twisted and lost into yet another bead in the endless string of worthless diet fads and hacks that nobody can stick to and do more harm than good. I literally already see “wholesome” aisles popping up in some stores where they use all the same harmful processes to make the food but game their ingredients list to only be things that people can pronounce.
Are you medicated for your ADHD?
I really should get a refill XD
How ironic that you’re defending ultra processed food when you’re benefiting from a medication’s side effect. Aside from that, being skinny isn’t necessarily healthy.
What? I’m trying to gain weight. The meds help me remember to eat.
And stimulants cause weight loss. I’m surprised you didn’t know that…
They raise your heart rate a little bit. But mostly suppress hunger and impulse-eating. For some they can cause weight loss. But they mostly stabilize your diet by making it easier to follow a schedule.
I have been taking them for 2 years and those have been the years I actually gained weight. But I can see how they could make loosing weight easier too.
*calorie
*lose
Also as someone with ADHD
Create and maintain a regular daily routine, with the power of the expectations of others, if necessary.
This propaganda about good and bad foods has kept me underweight for most of my life.
Your failure to appropriately manage your ADHD has kept you underweight. Unless you are literally on death’s door, no one with any sense would tell you the solution to your problem is to eat two pizzas every night.
The definition itself is stupid.
I am still waiting for someone to standardize a definition that passes scientific rigor. The definition right now feels like “You’ll know it when you see it”. We’ve done a lot of stuff to this heavily processed item but it doesn’t count, but then this minimally processed one does… When will the focus shift to the specific processes themselves that are causing issues and not a generic ‘feeling’ that some food or another has reached the point that it is probably not good for you.
Right now these studies are just “Food we personally feel like maybe might be bad for you proven bad” which is usually true but also not really useful. I feel like some day I’ll wake up to an expose on how the whole thing is a large scale ad for the Paleo diet.
Check out the school lunch law that California passed recently, it has a pretty robust definition and even includes a list of exceptions for things that are ultra-processed but are considered worth it
It’s probably going to form the basis of a lot of research and policy going forward
We can use the glycemic index for the insulin spikes and calorie density for how much you can fit. But the taste isn’t really measured I think.
