There's a lot of shaker-meals these days, like Huel, that you can easily bring anywhere and prepare on the spot. Including meal-bars.
I never saw the point of reducing all this into a single thing and declare that too much of is it bad.
Meal replacement shakes like Huel would be considered “ultra processed” because they contain various industrially produced ingredients (artificial sweeteners, gums, extracts etc).
The evidence seems to suggest that less processed are healthier, particularly when it comes to these ultra-processed items, not just boiling/frying/cutting etc.
Personally I see these meal shakes being marketed as healthy/for athletes and think of how everyone 50 years ago though margarine was so much healthier than butter.
I don't know much about enriching ingredients in the US, but where it's done, it's to prevent diseases you can get from missing them, or which can cause other health problems. Folic acid, which is in your list, is well known as a recommended supplement for pregnant women, since it dramatically reduces incidence of spina bifida in newborns. Niacin is better known as vitamin B, and it's a similar story.
In this case the enriched flour in the commercial bread presumably isn’t concerning, but I would prefer bread without added sugar and all of the various preservatives and emulsifiers.
Research is ongoing but shows some potential impact re emulsifiers and their impact on the gut: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9331555/
And some indication that one of the preservatives can have behavioral effects in kids: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12173999/
https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/45587/how-did-pe...
It helps that other countries have them too. It's hard to corrupt the entire world. I wouldn't worry (yet) about individual studies claiming some possible interaction, especially if they bunch up manky things (say, aim to study all emulsifiers at once, or all processing at once).
I would worry if, say, an additive was banned in many countries. And there's much that we know is bad, which is permitted for cultural reasons, and which therefore many people assume can't be that bad (smoked food in particular).
I don’t pretend huel is perfect, but it’s definitely a meal. I feel good after eating it. Also, I alway have time at work to eat it, even if it’s only 7 minutes (which is quite often), and time to make it in the morning.
For me, huel is definitely better than the meals it replaced, and the other things that I could make/consume with the time and budget available.
P.S. In many ways "junk food" is still better than either, despite the pejorative tone.
Huel (standard) is grinded seeds, oats, tapioca, brown rice, pea protein, flaxseed, coconut, sunflower, and kombucha to be specific
It's not more processed than any other "healthy" food.
Where do we suppose the fiber goes to?
Not an expert.
On account of the higher carbs, I can't speak so much to their "instant meals", but the powders are a pretty even split of carbs/fats/protein, with the black powder being primarily protein for a slightly higher cost.
Processed foods are great and small amounts at infrequent times. But we tend to see them as a fast easy way to fill a hole.
It's damn near impossible to not harm your health with an all raw diet.
Cooking is not that hard, even if it is just for you on your lonesome.
Really, if you can't be bothered to cook, that should be the time you start scrubbing potatoes and putting together a wholesome and satisfying meal, to actually enjoy it and be incentivised to cook some more.
This makes no sense. We already established that the person doesn't like cooking and your solution is to... cool anyways? Has it occurred to you that some people simply don't like cooking and/or doesn't place high value on food?
I'm pretty sure at this point that the word "processed food" was also a stroke of marketing genius by the shit suggary food lobby. Avoids putting front and center what is it that makes the food bad (it's the sugar), and replace it with a generic scary-sounding word that can be applied to everything, so it diffuses responsibility and hides the actual problem ("See, this shit food uses unprocessed brown cane sugar as its addiction additive. Healthy!")
For example, E164 is saffron, E290 is carbon dioxide, E901 is beeswax, E913 is lanolin.
Loads of others are also extracts of natural products.
Any reason to think they're bad aside from a vague sense of "ewww chemicals"?
We should eat food that our pre-industrial ancestors would recognize.
That's also just a heuristic. To take the most basic example, ice is more processed than water but requires more energy to digest and absorb.
depends on weather outside.
What does this actually amount to though? You might be right in principle but if it's like 50 calories per day then it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
A do-everything multivitamin-and-mineral pill is pennies per day[0], so we could very easily just require them to be added — and in some cases we already have: UK cereals, back when I was there, often advertised "fortified with 7…" (or was it 8?) "…vitamins and minerals".
I got the impression it was a legal requirement they'd tried to pretend was a special feature.
[0] https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/285513527
Basically all body needs in terms of nutrition are taken care of, including high fiber and protein, in a vegan way, quite cheaply (5-6€ per day). 900kcal in total, nearly zero effort/time spent.
Then I can freely do „whatever“ for dinner that I enjoy. Nutrition basically solved.
Or like cheap greenhouse veggies, it’s mostly water with only a fraction of the nutritional profile the food used to have in the past.
I like to have some standardization on the baseline input without much thinking - but everyone is different here I guess!
There is no way that you would say you are eating Huel.
I don't want no dick in my food, thank you very much.