>Unprocessed or minimally processed foods are whole foods in which the vitamins and nutrients are still intact. The food is in its natural (or nearly natural) state. These foods may be minimally altered by removal of inedible parts, drying, crushing, roasting, boiling, freezing, or pasteurization, to make them suitable to store and safe to consume. Unprocessed or minimally processed foods would include carrots, apples, raw chicken, melon, and raw, unsalted nuts.
>Processing changes a food from its natural state. Processed foods are essentially made by adding salt, oil, sugar, or other substances. Examples include canned fish or canned vegetables, fruits in syrup, and freshly made breads. Most processed foods have two or three ingredients.
>Some foods are highly processed or ultra-processed. They most likely have many added ingredients such as sugar, salt, fat, and artificial colors or preservatives. Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats. They may also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers. Examples of these foods are frozen meals, soft drinks, hot dogs and cold cuts, fast food, packaged cookies, cakes, and salty snacks.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/what-are-ultra-processed...
> California roll (加州巻き,カリフォルニアロール, kariforunia rōru) or California maki is an uramaki (inside-out makizushi roll) containing imitation crab (or rarely real crab), avocado, and cucumber. Sometimes crab salad is substituted for the crab stick, and often the outer layer of rice is sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds or roe (such as tobiko from flying fish).
> As one of the most popular styles of sushi in Canada and the United States, the California roll has been influential in sushi's global popularity, and in inspiring sushi chefs around the world to create non-traditional fusion cuisine.[2]
That seems misguided. Sushi is just, very loosely, "thing on vinegared rice". If you put unhealthy thing on rice, it's still an unhealthy thing. May as well say "sandwiches are a healthy food" or "salads are healthy food".
Humans have been curing meat forever. The question is whether "cured meat" is an issue or whether "modern curing of meat" is the problem.
When you ordered a ham from my old local meat market, it was a hunk of freshly butchered pig that was brined, cured and smoked. If it had any sugar, I sure couldn't taste it. You took it home, put it in the oven for a couple hours, and sliced it. It tasted wonderful by itself or with just a bit of fresh horseradish.
That ham is quite a lot different in terms of ingredients from the "sliced ham" you will get from your local grocery deli as a "cold cut".
Further attempts to refine the definition also bumps up against pendants like yourself regardless of what definition they use.
But just like porn, we all know what definitely falls into one category or the other. With foods that straddle definitions, just apply some common sense and moderation. Go ahead and eat your ham. If you share it with family and friends you’re probably ok. If you ate the whole thing yourself in a couple days, maybe that’s bad. Same for everything else. Eat them in appropriate quantities and you’ll be fine.
"Machine Learning Prediction of Food Processing" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.22.21257615v...
"Interestingly, even in presence of detailed ingredient information, the consistency across nutrition specialists in assigning NOVA classes was found to be low [39]"
I don't think bacon consumption has gone down since then.
So now I have stopped eating pastrami, and my reuben sandwiches are ruined, and I'm unhappy about that. They've evolved into an abomination involving chicken tikka and blue cheese, in an attempt to get some kind of taste out.
Nitrites are a bit of an economic factor, due to accelerating the curing process, and also help in mitigating risks around food safety. So they're primarily relevant to entities doing this sort of thing at industrial scale, who are subject to government standards on food safety. Home cooking to the rescue!
...on a related note, I don't really understand why small-scale organic/regional producers of aren't already doing this. At least where I am, in a rural part of Germany, we have farmers markets and other sales outlets that pride themselves on doing pretty much everything in the organic/regional playbook that could possibly set them apart from the mass-market, and who charge very high prices. Surely, they could do me the favour and just skip the nitrites? But, for some reason, they don't.
That's not completely correct if you don't cook the meat quickly afterward.
Apparently the safety issue is mostly botulism. Certain meats (especially sausages) create anaerobic conditions while curing that allows botulism to grow. Nitrites prevent that.
It is possible to cure meats without nitrates (see: Prosciutto di Parma), but it's not a straightforward, blanket thing.
Compare that to millions of cases each year, in the U.S., of foodborne illness, in general.
That's why I'm saying: It's a risk calculation, and government standards on food safety definitely prefer to err on the side of mandating too much processing of food over allowing too much foodborne illness.
Maybe, some of those risk calculations need to be revisited, and there needs to be a societal-level debate about how many cases of tummy-ache we are willing to trade off for how many basis points of cancer risk.
Incidentally, it stands to reason that the same kinds of things we do to kill off pathogens also kill off a lot of the microorganisms that may be useful to the body. To the extent that we're talking about additives, if we ingest them, then it seems likely that they might also kill off (or inhibit the growth of) useful parts of the microbiome already in the body. Of course, all of this I say in a mode of "cocktail party speculation" rather than peer-reviewed science, but there are just tons of unknown unknowns there, when it comes to the microbiome, and it actually offers one possible action mechanism (surely there are more than one), about how exactly it is that relying mostly on highly processed foods would be unhealthy for you.
Precisely because we have engineered our foods and processes for safety.
None of this is new: "When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch...
"Their earlier ketchups “were medium bodied with average acidity,” Smith writes. In 1906, they replaced this ketchup with a shelf-stable, preservative-free ketchup that had twice as much salt, sugar, and vinegar as other commercial ketchups"
Is a ketchup with extensively boiled tomatoes (which kills quite a bit of their nutritive value), double the salt and double the sugar better than one with small amounts of benzoate?
And this has issues in more than just "highly processed". Listeria is also an issue.
Finding a deli that makes their own meat is practically impossible nowadays.
Unlike say glycemic index: high glycemic index > releases glucose fast > body can't compensate fast enough > bad (diabetes, poor satiety, etc.) right now it's just processed > ???? > bad (in unspecifiable ways, by unspecifiable means).
"Processing" food is literally what people do in their kitchens. But that's presumably not what they mean.
Certain kinds of processing have to be applied to food to make it safe for consumption. But that's presumably not what they mean either.
Certain kinds of processing make the nutritional contents of food more bioavailable. Not what they mean.
Certain kinds of processing are required to preserve food. If humans stopped doing it, their environmental footprint would be orders of magnitude higher than it now is. Presumably, that's not what anyone is suggesting who is opposed to processed foods.
Fermenting is a kind of processing, and fermented foods may be playing a role in a healthy microbiome. ...whoops. Again: Not what they are talking about.
So what exactly are they trying to say? ...surely, picking a word other than "processed" would help in clarifying.
However I would suggest researching about cirrhosis and fatty liver in children. It is a new disease that was unknown up until the 90s and is now common in developed countries. And it has to do with the following: your digestive system has the ability to process nutrients at a certain rate, depending on how hard they are to break down. For example sugar. The cells have a certain rate at which they can metabolize nutrients. The temporary excess is stored in the liver.
Then it becomes not a question of quality rather than quantity. The question then is not "how high is the glycemic index of food X" but "at which rate (i.e. mg of sugar per minute) can this food X be processed by our digestive system, and is this rate too fast for our cells to metabolize, which in turn causes our liver to store the temporary excess?"
Then the boolean variable "is this food X highly processed " becomes a plausible proxy variable, IMO, since refined sugar is something else than whole bread, when we talk about the rate at which nutrients enter the blood stream.
Do I make sense?
To put up a bit of a strawman: By what empirical measure, is an apple different (healthier) than an apple-equivalent of raw glucose/fructose + multi-vitamin + fiber supplement? The latter is obviously more processed, but I literally lack the means[1] to say how, why, and to what degree, one is 'healthier' than the other.
[0]Regardless of name, afaik there is no meaningful way to say e.g. kraft mac and cheese is '80% processed, where as homemade with box pasta, fresh cheddar and bechamel, is 50%, and homemade w/ hand-pulled noodles is 25%.
[1]e.g. a test of 'rate of which simple sugars leach in a ISO standardized simulated stomach'.
(Of course research into better defined categories and the underlying mechanisms of their health impact is also necessary and extremely valuable.)
However, I'm also wondering if we have any processing that makes food less digestible and that decreases it's surface area. If so, it would probably be interesting to compare this kind of processing with the other.
What you call dumbing down is in line with how science works. Rough and inaccurate models first, refined in time or on demand.
Having said that, I think all communication is inescapably slightly manipulative, starting from the mere fact of grabbing the audience's attention. But that doesn't mean we should double down on it.
So, there are tons of people who have rigid schemas, and are actually quite dumb, and watching health food nuts on YouTube is actually a great way to observe them in the wild. If you tell them "don't eat anything that doesn't look the way it looks in nature", they are going to start eating raw soy beans and poison themselves, because "science said so".
I don't think it's doing anyone any good if otherwise reputable news outlets, and actual scientists, throw even more oil into the fire of inaccurate information about nutrition.