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Comment by onychomys | Hacker News Reader

So at first glance it seems like there's no way this is actually possible. There are 21 meals a week, plus enough snacking that we could probably just think of it as 28 meals a week. Kids just eat constantly, it's bonkers. Anyway, with 28 meals a week, you'd need about 20 of them to be ultra-processed in order to meet this. That's a lot!

Except that it's actually really not. If we take my 5 year old son as a normal kid, a bowl of cereal for breakfast and then whatever random food they feed him for school lunch and we're already 2/3rds of the way to the goal. He snacks on fruit and stuff, but also on pretzel sticks and honey roasted peanuts and all sorts of other kind of junky things.

I make dinner from scratch very nearly every night, and my kid still falls into this 70% bucket! And so I really don't have a good idea about how to change that. Maybe make our own bread and have them have toast for breakfast every day? That's going to get old quick.

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This is perhaps a good indicator that “processed versus unprocessed” isn’t a great signal for whether a particular fooditem should be part of one’s diet.

Using your cereal example: I grew up eating grape nuts[1], which are probably in the ultraprocessed category. But it’s just barley flour and I ate it like most people eat muesli (with fresh fruit) — what should that count as?

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grape-Nuts

Grape nuts count as "processed" because of the added salt and vitamins

Right, which begs the question: if processing includes ostensibly beneficial (or at least neutral) processing as well, how important is the 70% in TFA? My intuition is that it’s still pretty important (since most people are probably eating Frosted Flakes, not grape nuts, for breakfast), but that we need a better way to talk about healthy eating habits and proportions than “most of our foodstuffs are processed.”

"Processed" and "ultra-processed" are two different things: the latter goes beyond the former.

Grape Nuts might could as processed, and Frosted Flakes as ultra-processed.

Good healthy food costs more money. We've done a great job about putting the most amount of calories and flavor into cheaper than dirt forms. I think a breakfast of oats and lunch of a tuna sandwich would work. Most lunch meats are probably considered Ultra-Processed.

I think the only ways out of this are as you said fixing everything yourself. Most things you can eat raw that isn't packaged would probably be safe. Then cooking your own meats.

But pasta is considered Ultra-Processed, packaged bread is ultra-processed. I thought those were some of the most basic foods with the smallest number of ingredients. Maybe home made versions as you suggested are not considered Ultra-Processed.

They're made with ingredients that are processed. The flour that goes into the bread and pasta has been stripped of all fibre and micro nutrients, then some vitamins might be added back if you're lucky.

The bread is full of refined sugar.

You need to look at the ingredients recursively. If you eat wholegrain everything you're half way there.

Same applies to rice etc.

The reason they remove the good stuff is so it doesn't spoil, if you remove the nutrients it's less appetising to microbes and pests.

Answering my own question:

  Industrial breads made only from wheat flour, water, salt and yeast are processed foods, while those whose lists of ingredients also include emulsifiers or colours are ultra-processed. Plain steel-cut oats, plain corn flakes and shredded wheat are minimally processed foods, while the same foods are processed when they also contain sugar, and ultra-processed if they also contain flavours or colours.

From http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf

They are small (flour, yeast, salt, etc) number of ingredients if you shop for bread at specialty, expensive, organic shops or make it yourself.

At the supermarkets 99% of the US uses, even the high end bread is 15-25 ingredients at eyeball. The ingredient list for one of the most expensive packaged whole wheat bread that would show up at a regular non-Whole Foods-style place: Whole Wheat Flour , Water , Sugar , Wheat Gluten , Yeast , Wheat Bran , Salt , Soybean Oil , Raisin Juice Concentrate , Enrichment ( Calcium Sulfate , Vitamin E Acetate , Vitamin A Palmitate , Vitamin D3 ) , Calcium Propionate ( Preservative ) , Datem , Grain Vinegar , Monoglycerides , Soy Lecithin , Citric Acid , Potassium Iodate .

This is one of the more expensive brands: https://www.kroger.com/p/nature-s-own-100-whole-wheat-sliced...

Whole Wheat Flour, Water, Yeast, Brown Sugar, Wheat Gluten, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Salt, Monoglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid, Soybean Oil, Vinegar, Cultured Wheat Flour, Monocalcium Phosphate, Soy Lecithin

But Kroger's own bargain brand does indeed contain more ingredients: https://www.kroger.com/p/kroger-wheat-bread/0001111008450

Another angle is that junk tends to be more caloric, so even if kids actually did eat their fruits and veggies, even say with 21 of those meals, they'd still only make up a comparatively small portion of all the calories in their diets. But given that they're full of other nutrients (and esp. fiber) I don't think that's so bad.

yeah a bag of cheezits is ~200 calories. An orange is ~50 calories.

So if you ate one of each youd have 80% of calories from ultraprocessed food.

My wife likes to joke no one ever got fat eating carrots and celery. The calorie dense foods kids enjoy tend to have a lot of refined sugar. Heck, that goes for most adults too. I can eat a bag of carrots and a bag of potato chips and I'll have gotten more than 70% of my calories from the chips.

Breakfast is definitely a good place to start. We eat eggs for breakfast nearly every day in my home. It’s not as simple as cereal but scrambling a batch of eggs is not too bad.

Not surprisingly the taste of eggs depends on the chickens' meal. For example, the protein demand is often fulfilled by fish powder or soy flour.

Try to minimize the amount of refined sugar and white flour in your diet. That'll get you below the 70%. As you're probably suspecting, it isn't easy! Refined sugar is in almost everything you buy at the grocery store, save for fresh produce and meat. White flour is present in many breads - even whole wheat bread! Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used. And breakfast cereal? Yeah, that's going to be hard to replace, especially for a five year old! Oatmeal is a good alternative but unless you're buying a box of old-fashioned oats and making it yourself you're likely to be buying a lot of refined sugar. Those healthy granola bars? Lots of refined sugar. Trail mix, especially the ones with the M&M's? Ungodly amounts of refined sugar.

To be honest I'm kinda surprised that it's only 70% of calories coming from refined foods.

> Yes - whole wheat bread oftentimes means there's whole wheat flour used in making the bread, it doesn't mean only whole wheat flour was used.

Part of the reason is that it's really hard—way more work, way more time—to get a fluffy sandwich loaf out of just whole wheat flour. Or anything that's not kinda dense and focaccia-looking, really.

You're not wrong! When I make home made bread I don't use only whole wheat flour - it's really difficult to work with and hard to get a good loaf, and I've been making bread on a regular basis for over 30 years! The 'whole wheat white' flours (fine ground 100% whole wheat flour) coming out are really good and allows for an excellent loaf.

A bread machine can make the "make our own bread...toast" less laborious. (Recipes printed in bread machines' instruction booklets tend toward the less-healthy, but with some experimenting...)

Commercial breakfast cereals vary, though the least-healthy are probably the most tuned to appeal to kids. Home-cooked cereal can be far better. And easy to mix nuts, frozen berries, etc. into.

If a bit of dressing up (squirt of mustard, bit of mayo, etc.) makes hard-boiled eggs acceptable to him, those can be made once a week and kept in the fridge.

An old friend perfected a fairly-healthy, filling stew recipe (some meat, mostly veggies, etc.) that he could make up in large batches and keep in the fridge. As a teenager, his son consumed an enormous quantity of that over time.

Dont feed him processed food for breakfast and pack him lunch.

This is one of those things that’s easy to say but way harder for parents to actually do. You’re suggesting someone make time to prepare not one, but two homemade meals as they’re trying to get their kid (and probably themselves) out the door in the morning.

Kids learn quickly which foods have the most sugar and get stuck on them. I tried to prevent ours from ever tasting junk until they had broader palettes, but the moment grandparents have the kids alone or SO has a bad day... it's over.

Overnight oats take seconds to prepare.

??? How? I'm looking at a good 15 minutes, almost all hands-on time, from the moment I decide to go make overnight oats, using either of what I'm pretty sure are normal methods (crock pot, boil-briefly-and-leave-covered stovetop). That's assuming I don't discover that something I need is dirty.

I'm not saying that's a ton of time, but seconds?

Quick oat packets (awful stuff, full of sugar unless you get really expensive ones, cutting it 50/50 with rolled or plain quick oats helps a little and also makes up for the fact that one packet isn't, realistically, an entire serving) aren't even seconds. Talking maybe 2-3 minutes hands-on to lay out a bowl for each kid, rip and pour the packets, set the electric kettle going, then pour some on each when it boils (microwaving it with cool water is even slower once you're past a single serving—kettle saves time)

> from the moment I decide to go make overnight oats, using either of what I'm pretty sure are normal methods (crock pot, boil-briefly-and-leave-covered stovetop).

This sounds like it's conflating porridge with overnight oats. All you have to do to prep overnight oats is soak them in liquid (and maybe rinse off excess starch). I throw the lot in the fridge at night with chia seeds, consume it in the morning with berries and yogurt.

With the finely rolled oats which seem to be the most common ones available in Denmark, I'm even lazier:

1. Put about 1-2dL of finely rolled oats into a fairly wide bowl

2. Dribble over "enough" cold water

3. Add yoghurt, berries, chopped fruit, coconut flakes or whatever

I guess my mistake is that I use steel-cut oats when I do overnight oats. AFAIK without boiling they'll still be pretty tough in the morning (else why do so many recipes call for boiling or long-term heating in the crock pot?)

Ah, yes. They have to be rolled oats for a soak to be sufficient. Soaking steel cut might reduce the necessary boiling time but they still have to simmer quite awhile.

It seems I didn't know what steel-cut oats were. I've looked it up, we apparently call that coarse oatmeal in Britain, and it's not stocked by the largest supermarkets — only health food shops.

Coarse/thick-rolled oats should be fine soaked overnight, or fine/thin-rolled oats for the soak-in-one-minute-in-the-morning way. Both grades are easily available in the UK. I would tend to use the thin ones for breakfast, and the coarse ones for making things like flapjack (similar to a granola bar).

My approach to cooking steel-cut oats overnight which takes about one minute in the evening and one minute in the morning:

1. Put oats and water in rice cooker shortly before going to bed. Turn on rice cooker. 2. Remove perfectly cooked oats in the morning and add desired seasonings.

Since I don't have a dishwasher, washing the bowl I ate out of is the most time-consuming step other than actually eating, and when I need to eat breakfast immediately in the morning to leave ASAP I can be sitting down eating under 5 minutes after my alarm goes off.

For stuff like breakfast it just takes some practice getting the timing right for multitasking. Making eggs and toast is like a full sixty seconds of actual hands on time. You just space it out between heating the pan, cracking the egg and later flipping it onto a plate, and waiting for the toast, and you can totally get other things done in those gaps. Stuff like lunches you can prep in advance, there are tons of recipes these days for quick easy bulk cheap good food.

Pack him a lunch instead of letting him eat cafeteria food. A ham sandwich is a lot healthier than a slice of school pizza.

I'd be surprised if commercially made ham didn't fall into the ultraprocessed category!

Saying this as someone who's curing his first ham in the fridge rn :-)

I run a chicken farm so I'm biased but for my family I grow out a bunch of birds to be bigger than typical (9-10lbs). Roast one of these and it sits in the fridge providing sandwich meat for a week, plus the occasional plate of hot sauce and cold meat. Super delicious and healthful.

My parents did this for most of my childhood. They weren't farmers, so the meat came from the supermarket – but larger cuts of meat (or whole chickens) are much cheaper than buying jointed, pre-cut or cooked meat anyway.

The bread (made from processed wheat, probably bleached flour, and containing bread conditioners, preservatives) would almost surely fall into the ultra processed category, unless homemade from minimally processed whole wheat flour. The ham and cheese could as well, unless they were made with fairly traditional processes (and probably more expensive than what the typical person is buying at walmart, target, etc). They'd all probably be considered processed foods, at minimum.

Sometimes I eat shredded wheat and bananas, yogurt and fruit, or shredded wheat + yogurt + fruit. That takes 0 effort and can be packed for breakfast or lunch.

Also carrots and hummus, dry roasted nuts, cheese and wheat thins, PB and apple slices, are all good snacks for a kid.

Does cereal count as "ultra-processed"? Things like Cheerios don't seem much more processed than bread from what I can tell. Also honey-roasted peanuts?

My understanding of ultra-processed would be things more like candy, cheetos, pringles, oreos, soda, etc.

Check the nutrition facts on honey roasted peanuts. I was shocked at how many carbs a serving includes. Now I just eat dry roasted peanuts, and not too many since they too have plenty of carbs.

It's hard to find a simple rule that isn't subverted. Though simpler more primitive diets (mostly low carb vegetables and high protein foods) seem best all around.

It's sad to see folks think they've leveled up enough to 'cheat' after loading up on yams ("veg!"), carrots ("veg"), and beans ("protein!").

What is wrong with carbs? If I don't have carbs while working all day I get tired. That stuff is brain fuel.

Carbs themselves are fine. It's the quantities, especially those in the form of sugars, that are excessive.

All that said you can live without carbs and just digest fats instead. Hence the whole ketosis and low-sugar diets.

Check out the ingredients of Cheerios, which says a bit about the process of making them and the attempt to restore some nutrition: https://www.wdbqschools.org/Downloads/Cereal-Cheerios.pdf

Probably Wonder Bread would look similar, but homemade bread quite different. All are processed foods of some level due to flour.

We've been deliberately fortifying foods since the 1930s to try to reduce incidence of diseases caused by lack of some vitamin or other micronutrient, which has seemed to be effective. You're required to add it for some products, although I believe quite a bit is still voluntary.

Depends on what you mean by "cereal". Oats that you mix with nuts and fresh berries? No, unlike all those sugar-infested abominations of a breakfast food packaged in colourful boxes.

Nuts and cereals like shredded wheat aren’t ultra-processed. But check the labels, a lot of nuts and cereal have added sugar and even oil.

Cheerios seem surprisingly healthy (the first ingredient is whole grain oats and only 1g of added sugar). Even special K has 4g of added sugar per serving. I would consider sugar-coated cereal like raisin bran or special K with yogurt chunks ultra-processed.

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