Dietary guidelines may soon warn against ultraprocessed foods
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
“Ultra-processed foods typically contain things like artificial sweeteners, synthetic colors, flavors, emulsifiers, and other ingredients that people don’t cook with at home, Nestle said.”
So maybe focus on the harmful ingredients, not the way it is made.
Without a clear and accurate definition of what it means to be 'ultraprocessed' this would just add to the confusion.
> 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. Ingredients include sugar, oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and substances that are sources of energy and nutrients that are of no or rare culinary use such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that prolong product duration, protect original properties or prevent proliferation of microorganisms.
The FAO also recommends that law should mandate that ultraprocessed food be labelled as such.
In the meantime, you can also just search for a particular food item on Openfoodfacts to see its classification. For instance, Nutella [2] is ultraprocessed.
[1] https://www.fao.org/3/ca5644en/CA5644EN.pdf
[2] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3017620422003/nutell...
>The NOVA food classification system with its identification and definition of ultra-processed foods is the one that by far has been most applied in the scientific literature
Seems like the NOVA food classification it's good enough for the actual experts in the field. I suspect _they_ find it quite useful and meaningful.
Of course, I may just be too ignorant of the subject to properly understand, in which case such warning labels should also come with some sort of educational effort.
Personally, I can go around labeling my own food intake, and I estimate that at least 80-90% of my calories are not from ultraprocessed sources.
The problem with the group 4 definition is it is a mix of things that are genuinely harmful, things that are completely irrelevant to the health of a given food item, and broad, vague definitions that could be used to describe almost any prepared food item as “ultra-processed” if one were so inclined.
0 - https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/0096619217939/organi...
Yes, I agree that group 4 is very broad, but I think as an initial attempt its good. Breaking things down into further groups is going to confuse people a lot more, especially because there are no distinct categories here. Too much overlap. Just asking people to eat less of group 4 is a much more reasonable public health objective.
You'll never guess what is extracted from the fruit when you do this.
[1] https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/8850256100106/mitrph...
The irony here is that the more processed pectins can be used to reduce the amount of sugar in homemade jams (while still maintaining a jam-like consistency.)
And while we're at it, mandate that nutrition facts have to be printed for a standardized "amount". I hate comparing the label of one food that has 7g of protein per 123g serving and another that has 9g protein per 144g serving.