High fat and high calorie doesn't seem clear cut and scientific enough.
Definitions vary, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture says anything that changes the fundamental nature of an agricultural product – heating, freezing, dicing, juicing – is a processed food.
"Those little baby carrots that you get in a supermarket – that's a processed food," said Penny Kris-Etherton, registered dietitian and distinguished professor of nutrition at Pennsylvania State University's Department of Nutritional Sciences. So are frozen vegetables, or even broccoli that's been cut into florets.
Ultra-processed food takes things further. Nutritionists started using the term about 10 years ago, and again, definitions vary. One diet classification system called NOVA sums it up as "snacks, drinks, ready meals and many other products created mostly or entirely from substances extracted from foods or derived from food constituents with little if any intact food."
From here: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/01/29/processed-vs-ultra-...
It's all subjective, feels very much like a "you know it if you see it" kind of thing.
Raw fish filet / Canned Fish / Frozen Fish Fingers
Corn on the cob / Frozen Corn / Corn Chips
Raw chicken breast / Rotisserie Chicken / Chicken patty
Peanuts / Peanut Butter / Peanut M&Ms
Milk / Cheese / Powdered cheese sauce mix
Brown rice / White rice / Rice Krispies
Wheat / Simple bread / Chocolate chip cookies
This is tough. Maybe a good definition could involve how the food hits your blood sugar levels compared to its completely whole equivalent.
Even corn chips, they're just corn meal, oil, and salt. Unless you mean something like favored Doritos, normal corn chips are aren't remotely "ultra processed".
If I was to go by gut feelings on unprocessed to processed on your list, assuming I was making each of them myself, on a scale of 1 to 10
1 Raw fish filet
1 Canned Fish
2 Frozen Fish Fingers
1 Corn on the cob
1 Frozen Corn
2 Corn Chips
1 Raw chicken breast
2 Rotisserie Chicken
1 Chicken patty (it's chopped chicken)
1 Peanuts
2 Peanut Butter
3 Peanut M&Ms
1 Milk
2 Cheese
10 Powdered cheese sauce mix (unless this is easier to make than I understand)
1 Brown rice
2 White rice
3 Rice Krispies
1 Wheat
2 Simple bread
3 Chocolate chip cookies
Basically only 1 item on your list would even fit "processed" for me. I think many of those numbers are also misleading. I wouldn't put white rice as 2x processed over brown rice. More like 1.25. Same with cheese, rotisserie chicken
In the fish fingers and chicken patty examples, they may by definition just be ground up meat with breadcrumbs on it, but the actual store bought versions are often full of other stuff:
High Liner Fisher Boy Fish Sticks
>MINCED FISH BLEND (COD, POLLOCK, HADDOCK, SOLE, WHITING), WATER, WHEAT FLOUR, VEGETABLE OIL (CANOLA OIL, COTTONSEED OIL, AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL), SOY FLOUR, ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (FLOUR, NIACIN, FERROUS SULFATE, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), MODIFIED CORN STARCH, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: SUGAR, NATURAL FLAVORS, SALT, SPICES, DEXTROSE, ONION POWDER, LEAVENING (SODIUM ALUMINUM PHOSPHATE, SODIUM BICARBONATE), TITANIUM DIOXIDE, HYDROLYZED CORN PROTEIN, BUTTER FLAVOR (MALTODEXTRIN, ENZYME MODIFIED BUTTER, FLAVOR), YEAST, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE (TO RETAIN MOISTURE). CONTAINS: FISH (COD, POLLOCK, HADDOCK, SOLE, WHITING), WHEAT, SOY, MILK
Walmart brand Chicken Patties
>BONELESS SKINLESS CHICKEN BREAST WITH RIB MEAT, WATER SALT, TURBINADO SUGAR, DRIED GARLIC, ONION POWDER, SEA SALT, NATURAL FLAVORING. BREADED WITH: WHEAT FLOUR, WATER, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF THE FOLLOWING: CORN STARCH, EXTRACTIVES OF PAPRIKA, LEAVENING (CREAM OF TARTAR, SODIUM BICARBONATE), NATURAL FLAVORING, SALT, SOYBEAN OIL, SPICE, SUGAR, YEAST, YEAST EXTRACT, YELLOW CORN FLOUR. BREADING SET IN VEGETABLE OIL.
I'm not necessarily making specific judgements about any individual ingredients here, but I think that this is what these studies are getting at.
Perhaps corn chips were not the best example, but a tour through the chips aisle at the supermarket will offer a grand selection of extremely salty, oily stuff that's, I think, fairly clearly very far from its original raw ingredients of corn or potatoes in terms of nutrition.
"intact" food is important because of bioavailability of nutrients as well as metabolic responses like insulin. You can't add fiber or vitamins back into fruit juice with the same effect as eating whole fruit, for example.
Edit: Even fully synthesized food that counts as "super duper ultra processed" can be more nutritious than unprocessed food, but as a general rule outside of medicine it isn't.
I know it's not the correct interpretation in reality, but it's fun thinking that by this definition, all beef is processed unless you buy the whole live cow.
food we eat every day that has been significantly changed from its original state, with salt, sugar, fat, additives, preservatives and/or artificial colours added.
https://www.heartandstroke.ca/articles/what-is-ultra-process...
It's not clear to me what attribute of UPF is bad. I know sugar is not good. But fat? Additives, preservatives and/or artificial colors?
Fats in ultra-processed tend to be low quality industrial seed oils, like soybean, sunflower, etc.
Additives/preservatives/artificial colors can be of dubious safety as the standards for “safe to eat” are very lax.
These foods tend to be very calorie-dense, which encourages you to eat too much of them. They provide those calories without a lot of other things (fiber, calcium, and possibly other unknown micronutrients). There's some suggestion that their high concentrations also throw off the complex balance of gut flora, but that's harder to pin down.
The additives, preservatives, colors, etc. are probably safe in and of themselves. They've generally passed at least some basic level of safety testing (including being fed in megadoses to rats). They tend to be added to convenience foods to make them even more appealing and available. So they're correlated with negative health outcomes, but without being the cause of it.
It's still possible that there's something wrong with the additives themselves, but if you avoid them by eating less-processed products, you'll likely do better regardless of the additive safety. Generally, that means doing more cooking yourself, or at least selecting menu items that more closely resemble home cooking.
Why? Lots of reasons, one if which is that calorie counting is hard. Totting up every calorie you eat is incredibly tedious. "Eat fewer calories" would be less onerous, but only if you're eating regular and consistent meals so that it's easy to identify what "less" means.
So they try to give easy-to-follow advice, like "eat fewer foods with a lot of calories". How do you identify those? Well, they're the ones that have been through a lot of industrial processes that take out not-fun stuff (water, fiber) and add in a lot of things that are purified to the calorie-rich parts (sugar, oil, butter).
They're looking for another way to say "Don't go to McDonald's and don't eat candy bars or drink soda" for a long time. If those are things that you do, and you stop it, you will almost certainly lose weight. But we can't even get people to do that, even though it's been the same advice for decades.
"Ultra processed foods" are convenience foods. If "convenience foods" were to be their next iteration of the advice, I'd be fine with that. It's not about the fundamental nutrition; they've been trying to get people to do the same thing for decades without any headway. It's about communication and persuasion, which are far harder jobs.
what does 1 calorie of ice cream looks like?
What about 1 calorie of broccoli?
1 calorie of steak?
The solution is to switch to a macro focused diet, which still uses calories under the hood.
With Macros you'll get a target of x g fats / y g protein / z g carbs which makes it much easier for a person to learn and reason about the food they are eating by sight and weight.
The second factor is, our much more sedentary lifestyle means that often a 2000 calorie diet is 200-400 calories off or a lot of people.
Cut the obvious junk. Cook more for yourself, with more focus on vegetables. Don't worry about trying to limit yourself; just aim for sensible foods. Try that alone for a few months, and see if your weight stabilizes and declines a little, which it should.
If that works, you can start substituting more processed stuff, as a treat or convenience. There you can look at calories or macros to help: "Ok, I was going to eat dinner, which is ordinarily around 800-1000 calories. This frozen pizza is... holy crap!" Have it anyway; you just know what it means now.
Overall, what I recommend is not to go on a restrictive diet, but to start eating for the weight you wish to be, and plan to remain there forever. (If you're a lot overweight, you may need to do that in stages.) A lot of people want to diet and then switch to a maintenance phase. I think it's better to go directly to maintenance, and let that asymptotically lower your weight. You suffer less and thus bounce back less.
But that's just my $.02. This is all brain stuff; whatever persuades you to eat right and exercise is good.
I.e. nobody knows what “processed” means, they just know it’s bad somehow.
I too wish to know what exactly is meant by the term “processed” and whether, say, an industrial sausage is any worse than “all natural” shake having exactly the same macros (- preservatives)
> The diet chosen here exemplifies the Western UPD with unbalanced levels of micro- and macronutrients
Generally speaking, "unprocessed" foods are raw whole foods. "Processing" means cooking, cutting, adding stuff, etc. (of course none of this is bad in any way). "Highly processed" and "ultra processed" mean there's high calorie density without protein, fiber, micro-nutrients, etc. AKA it's very easy to overeat and throw your nutrient balance off. Of course products like Soylent are technically highly "processed" but that's rarely what these articles mean.
I would like to find the written definition myself.
Say burgers. A home made Burger made of freshly ground meat is a 'processed food.'
A Patty created in a factory out of a slurry of smooshed up animal, parts, binders and preservatives then flash frozen and shipped to various places where it's then thawed and cooked using an industrial grill and assembled by a teenager for minimum wage...that's ultra processed.
Do you have some special definition of that which wouldn't include "everything".
https://www.businessinsider.com/i-went-to-a-mcdonalds-factor...