What does "ultra processed" mean? Cheese, bread, olive oil and most vegetables require processing to be made or nutritionally useful. Freeze-dried vegetables are quite processed and quite good for you.
> Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials.
Source: http://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/ca5644en.pdf
I believe this is the widest standard used to define "ultra-processed", though there are more sentences and paragraphs in that doc explaining the definition more thoroughly.
Maybe it's not helpful to paint things with such a broad brush, and we should instead focus on specific substances or practices which might be causing problems?
Plastics commonly leach hormone disruptors to food.
That's a heck of a broad definition!
You know cows didn’t change, we just started separating the milk and reconstructing milk-like products. The classic Simpsons ”Malk” gag is not far off.
I'm sure all brands differ, but the box in my fridge says "Ingredients: Water, Organic Soybeans".
The second prong seems ambiguous to the point of uselessness. "Industrial techniques" are covered by (1); "additives" seemingly impossible to define within this context.
(a) food additive means any substance not normally consumed as a food by itself and not normally used as a typical ingredient of the food, whether or not it has nutritive value, the intentional addition of which to food for a technological (including organoleptic) purpose in the manufacture, processing, preparation, treatment, packing, packaging, transport or holding of such food results, or may be reasonably expected to result, (directly or indirectly) in it or its by-products becoming a component of or otherwise affecting the characteristics of such foods. The term does not include contaminants, or substances added to food for maintaining or improving nutritional qualities, or sodium chloride;
http://www.fao.org/3/Y2770E/y2770e03.htm
The FAO has a standards body that will give you tons of detail to back up their papers.
This is a very important distinction as it changes the glycemic index and will cause blood sugars to rise much faster on consumption than an unground food with its entire fiber content.
The fiber commonly becomes animal feed.
So if you make falafel for example, it's only two steps removed from chickpeas, as it's just mildly grinded and fried. That being said it's an exercise to the reader in determining if each "step" is equally bad. In general steps involving the destruction or heating of the food are worse than the "separation" (e.g. peeling or cutting vs frying or blending).
That's overly simple though, the definition is here: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova (this seems to be a summary of the definition in FAO document linked above).
The other misnomer is labeling chips as "not nutritious." They're loaded in macronutrients. They often don't have many micro nutrients, but most people aren't actually short on those.
The main problem with some of these foods is they're calorically dense, but not filling.
- Cold-pressed, extra virgin olive oil is considered to be the healthiest due to its fat and polyphenol content.
- Traditional cheeses are more nutritious than Kraft singles.
- Whole grain is more nutritious than Wonderbread.
- Freezing, cooking, and the passage of time all destroy vitamins and other micronutrients.
I don't have a scientific definition for you. Just use your common sense to figure out what average people would intuitively call ultra-processed, whatever it means to them. I'm pretty darn sure you would not arrive at the conclusion that ordinary people consider bread and most vegetables "ultra-processed foods".
I am trying to use my common sense here. To create it, you must apply mechanical processing to grind wheat. Chemical processing for the yeast to reacting to the sugars. thermal processing to cook the bread. There is evaporation of the liquid in the bread.
This seems like a lot of processes required to create this.
Otherwise the raw materials are the same:
> Flour, water, yeast, salt, fat, and, where used, minor ingredients common to many bread-making techniques such as Vitamin C, emulsifiers and enzymes are mechanically mixed for about three minutes.
In what way does this represent "processed" food in any material sense?
If anything, this sounds like a perfect example of the kind of fear mongering associated with the "processed food" label...
Edit: I misread, sorry
You've misread the Wikipedia page.
What you're describing is Dauglish's process that preceded CBP. Here's the key bit from the introduction:
> In 1862 a radically new and much cheaper industrial-scale process was developed by John Dauglish, using water with dissolved carbon dioxide instead of yeast, with no need for an eight-hour fermentation. Dauglish's method, used by the Aerated Bread Company that he set up, dominated commercial bread baking for a century until the Chorleywood process was developed.
Notice that last part of the sentence.
CBP, as described in the Wikipedia article, "is achieved through the addition of Vitamin C, fat, yeast, and intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers".
In particular, no CO2 is used with CBP. Bread is proofed by "[placing the dough] in a baking tin and [moving it] to the humidity- and temperature-controlled proofing chamber, where it sits for about 45–50 minutes", with the process aided through the use of dough conditioners like ascorbic acid.
Even traditional bread is certainly highly processed, undergoing mechanical (milling), biochemical (fermentation), and thermal (baking) processing. It doesn't quite meet the definition of ultra-processed though as all these technologies are readily available to unsophisticated producers.
I think ultra-processed is some sort of proxy for hyperpalatable here.
What gave you that idea?
Bleached flour and various additives (such as ascorbic acid) are routinely used in home kitchens:
https://thebreadguide.com/using-ascorbic-acid-when-baking/
What, exactly, do you think goes into making a loaf of mass-produced bread?
If you buy bread made from bleached white flour, sugar (in pretty much any white bread you buy from the supermarket), bread conditioners, preservatives, etc, it's probably considered ultraprocessed. It can also sit in your pantry for weeks.
Ultra-processed bread would probably be made to have a longer shelf life and likely have more additives and preservatives.
How do I do that? Are we averaging the opinions of other people, or taking the opinion of the average person? By what metric?
That depends on what you mean by bread. The sourdough loaf that I make out of flour straight from the grinder is a far cry from cheap white bread.
Again, there's no unambiguous definition here. The UN has drawn one line out of many potentially valid ones. My point here isn't to argue word semantics. I'm just saying look at what the average person would consider "ultra-processed", whatever their definition (or lack thereof) might be.
P.S. I'm not even sure what you consider "ultra-processed bread" is good for people in any case.