Does veganism have an ultra-processing problem?
bbc.com
bbc.com
So the article discusses multiple studies which find increased consumption plant origin ultra-processed foods is associated with an increased risk of disease and mortality. Seperately, another study found vegetarians and vegans eat a higher proportion of ultra-processed foods than the general population.
Does the subset of ultra-processed foods of which vegetarians and vegans eat more significantly overlap with the subset which increases risk of disease and death? We don't know; that's not in the data and the article doesn't discuss any articles linking vegetarian and vegan diets to higher risk of disease and death. What if vegetarians and vegans eat a ton more tofu and soymilk but less potato chips and Oreos?
The article sort of adresses this, but not very directly. Also, vegetarian and vegan diets are more of a footnote in the article; it's more about ultra-proccessed foods in typical diets. And the actual article title better reflects the focus, so I wonder why the post changed it so significantly.
| | Meat-Eaters | Vegetarians | Vegans |
|----------------------------------|---------------|---------------|--------------|
| Salty snacks and crackers (g/d) | 3.69 ± 0.06 | 5.28 ± 0.34 | 10.50 ± 0.48 |
| Sweet and fatty foods 6 (g/d) | 125.00 ± 0.52 | 122.00 ± 2.86 | 73.90 ± 4.00 |
| Sugary drinks (mL/d) | 23.40 ± 0.48 | 27.10 ± 2.65 | 22.40 ± 3.71 |
| Sugar-free drinks (x103 mL/d) | 1.08 ± 4.16 | 1.14 ± 22.70 | 1.05 ± 31.70 |
1. Processing methods whose purpose is to separate components of the food sources. These range from simple processing like peeling and paring vegetables or filleting and boning meat, to processing that requires more complex industrial installations, like for oil extraction or for making meal/flour out of seeds or for dehydrating vegetables.
2. Processing methods that either mix multiple food ingredients or transform them in various ways, e.g. by heating or whipping.
The processing methods from the first class are both necessary and inoffensive when they are implemented carefully, to avoid modifications and contamination in the food components that are separated. For instance, for oil extraction from oily seeds or oily fruits, valid separation methods are cold pressing or extraction with supercritical carbon dioxide.
Such separation methods are necessary because they enable the cooking of food with optimal nutrient composition and because they greatly reduce the costs for the transport and storage of the food ingredients. This is why the most important of them, like seed milling and edible oil extraction, have been used for many millennia.
On the other hand, the processing methods of the second class, when done industrially instead of being done at home, are almost universally harmful and only the food products that use them are rightfully called "ultra-processed foods".
The reason why such processing methods of the second class are almost always harmful when done industrially, is the conflict of interests between the food vendor, who wants to obtain a maximum profit, and the food consumer who wants a healthy food. These goals are not compatible.
For any vegan who is not doing hard physical work, to enable the consumption of 3000 kcal per day or more, some method for the extraction of pure proteins, either done industrially or at home, is absolutely necessary. So, for example, a protein powder is not an "ultra-processed food", unless it is mixed with undesirable additives, like sweeteners, flavors or colorants (which happens far too frequently, so a buyer must be careful to check the composition).
The easiest and the best way to avoid "ultra-processed foods" is to buy raw food ingredients and cook them at home. Using modern techniques, like cooking in a microwave oven or by using other specialized appliances, it has become possible to cook the food in a very small fraction of the time required when cooking using traditional methods.
Until some years ago, I or another family member was cooking the main dishes for an entire week during a weekend day, because that required many hours, so in the other days the food was only reheated. Now, I can afford to cook most or all of the food for a meal only immediately before eating, because that takes only about a half of hour, of which only about a half of the time is active, e.g. used for peeling/paring vegetables or washing dishes, while the rest is spent in waiting for the food to be cooked in an oven, when I can do other things meanwhile.
Original: "What explains increasing anxiety about ultra-processed plant-based foods?"
TFA does not mention "veganism" even once.
Though you're right about the headline, I don't think that your claim is true. Here's the first sentence (or maybe it's the caption of the first picture, or maybe it's the subhed? I can't tell):
> Vegan diets can contain more UPFs on average – but this might not be a problem.
> Plant-sourced UPF contribution showed a positive association [with CVD risk]
The study is using an existing dataset on food recall. That doesn't necessarily the results are correct or incorrect, but it's lower on the pyramid of science quality. There is nothing else of substance in this BBC article.
Cooking, dehydrating, pickling, milling, crushing, etc. is usually healthy; decomposing foods into simple, commodity ingredients, and then recombining those into new products, maybe not so.
But I've become aware of issues like impoverished soil and the concept of terroir. Many crops are grown outside of their natural habitat, and who knows what's gone on with their soil, water, fertilizer, and general environment.
So I would say that whenever these plants were tested for levels of micronutrients, I am dubious that those assessments hold true throughout space and time, especially for minerals that would necessarily be absorbed, rather than vitamins manufactured through biological processes within the organism itself.
So I guess it's not wrong to fortify and process, if you're going to add something back in that should've been there already.
Whether we evolved to handle this well is under study, but these studies usually have too many confounding variables to make a conclusion.
I was vegetarian for a couple years until meat cravings became so strong I started eating meat again.
84% of vegans and vegetarians return to meat: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/animals-and-us/201...
Many because they crave it.
Several vegan influencers have been caught eating meat and fish secretly. Conversely the same - some carnivore influencers have been caught eating fruit and other plant products.
Only 2% of US-Americans are truly vegan or vegetarian (and even those tend to cheat here and there).
I have no way to verify your statements about cheating, but I personally do not cheat, as I have no need in it, but my advice to everyone who crave meat to stop torturing themselves and it imitations, you'll abandon vegetarian/vegan life anyway.
Vegetarianism is a diet - choices about food for whatever reason. Many of those reasons have plenty of room for imperfection and still hold - the concept of a "cheat day" is common and often even useful for people trying to change their lives through food choices. In almost every case for a diet, craving a treat is normal and healthy and not a personal failure. "Perfect is the enemy of progress".
Veganism, on the other hand, is a moral philosophy specifically about right or wrong AND it isn't internally motivated/facing/impactful. It isn't a diet or guidelines for personal change and a "slip" or "cheat" is very different (craving and then doing something you think is objectively wrong) than occasionally choosing to miss your calorie or macro target.
Of course there are overlaps since choosing to be vegan requires a massive diet change in the US AND because, like vegetarianism, people choose that diet for many reasons, not all of which are the moral philosophy. People use the term "plant based" to describe the diet only (not a good name but it seems to be out there for better or worse) which is on the same footing as any other diet.
As a thought experiment for why the diet vs moral distinction might matter, pick something you're comfortable deciding is morally wrong (lying? Shoplifting? Infidelity? Sexual harassment? Domestic violence? Rape? Murder? Slavery?) and then think about what a "cheat day" for that would be. To me it invalidates the whole idea. As an example, someone cutting down their violent crime to only one "cheat day" a week might objectively be progress but it doesnt earn my respect - the only correct amount of that behavior is zero in my mind and the worse the "indulgence" or "craving" the more clear that is for me when I think about it.
I hope this doesn't put your back up or come off as "holier than thou" - I'm trying to talk about the shape of the difference without taking a side on the specific moral arguments.
For what it's worth this is a common way I see vegans and non-vegans accidentally offended each other and get into a negative spiral so I really appreciate you asking the genuine question.
Nonetheless I now understand the point you’re making about the framing of “cheating.” Thanks for explaining!
Speak for yourself. I might only have them once/month, but I enjoy the flavors of Impossible Foods and Beyond products.
This news flash is news to me. Vegetarian diet (and not much ovo nor lacto) for 25+ years.
I eat fake meat almost every day.
And in the summer, when neighbors cook some unidentified real meat on their grill, and it wafts over, I feel a twinge of carnivore frenzy, ready to fight them for their kill, with my claws and teeth.
(I suspect it was the heme iron in the burger btw)
I'd wager a lot that your craving was due to the psychology of the process you performed, not some actual physiological withdrawal. If you took your time and found other things that were good to eat, rather than 'quitting' your habitual foods, I don't imagine you would have any trouble at all.
My energy level was steadily declining, as you might expect for an iron deficiency. When I gave in and started eating burgers, they were profoundly tasty, and my energy levels recovered.
I've had dietary shifts in the past (from one omnivore diet to another) and nothing like this happened.
I'm on board with the ethical aspect of veganism. I'm annoyed by what I perceive as the ideological aspect, which pretends a vegan diet can easily be perfectly nutritious.
[I'm complaining about this because I'm hoping vegans will take a hard look in the mirror, and start taking nutrition seriously, so I won't suffer from an iron deficiency (or whatever it was!) if I try again in the future.]
Eat whatever you like but it's probably good to pause and really consider what you're wanting and why.
Meat is deeply satisfying and has lots of things we need in it. If you're fine with the process of how the meat makes it to your plate then just own that and enjoy it.
This is in party because once you become a heavy user, your body stops producing various chemicals or becomes accustomed to larger amounts to meet its baseline (such as dopamine and other neurotransmitters). When you stop your body slowly start producing those again and has to become accustomed to the new baseline. That craving is exactly your body telling you that you are missing something.
Is there anything that shows vegetarian and vegan dieters increase the production of chemicals associated with what they are refraining from? Most drug addictions deals with chemicals the body can make itself, but it the substances lacking in a vegan diet would seem to be things we cannot produce.
There are large populations that have eaten that way their entire life. I wonder how their body chemistry is different than those that started veganism later in life. They don't have to adjust. If they started eating meat, what changed in iron or protein synthesis do they go through?
But seriously, after 25+ years, though some of the taste of meat dishes would be good, the idea of eating meat is personally unappealing. Plus, I don't know that my system would even be able to process it. So, I'd expect to be grossed out, have GI plumbing and nutrition problems, and maybe frequent food poisoning.
I'm neutral on whether other people should go vegetarian, but personally I feel stuck with it.
Share your own experience and anecdotes - that's great! Once it reaches "you need to do X" it stops being effective at information transfer and becomes overbearing.
It never fails: someone wants a fake turkey, or fake bacon, or fake burgers, or whatever. Unwrap the plastic, heat it up, it sez on the label it's vegan. Also you omnivores are killing the world.
So I now refuse absolutely to cook for vegetarians/vegans. I always did make somebody else buy the fake industrial vegan meat substitutes, and amazingly, I caught friction for that. My wife and I are chemical engineers who have been inside quite a few food processing plants and we refuse to touch the output of those. I will eat potato chips every once in a while but nothing vegan at all. I want my vices honest.
Don't hold back!
The lacking proper definition of ultra-processed foods is just one part of it. How much is "much"? How often is "occasionally"? What is the confidence level and effect size of that advice? What are the alternatives?
Article acknowleges the issue with definition and there a section titled 'Identifying ultra-processed foods'. Why not just run with it .
> In the Nova system, a food product is considered ultra-processed if at least one of its ingredients is a substance that home cooks generally don't use (such as high-fructose corn syrup or hydrolysed protein), or is an additive designed to increase the product's appeal (such as a thickener or emulsifier).
Whether or not home cooks use an ingredient has little to do with the health of that ingredient. And, at least from the abstract of the linked article, the additional details don’t inspire confidence that this is a meaningful category.
“Processed foods” is yet another example of the trend of giving something vague a name, attaching an emotional valence to the name and then using that anti-scientific emotional valence to influence public policy. (See also the politics of nuclear power)
Because it is a waste of time at best, and disinformation at worst.
So anything with a thickener or emulsifier is ultra-processed? So now my potato-soup is ultra-processed because potato-starch acts as both (same with any kind of beans/lentils/starchy things)? What about that sauce where I intentionally add starch or flour? That pasta, where the cooking water emulsifies the sauce? That mayonaise where mustard and egg yolk act as an emulsifier? Risotto, where the rice starch thickens? What about roux? Reductions? Blood? Thickening with paprika powder?
By definition practically everything home-cooked is also ultra-processed. Anything containing any kind of starch is ultra-processed. This is either a completely useless definition, or the actual message is "don't cook food, ever".
More greens and more fibers is a good thing, but also takes more work to cook well. The definition is not useless if you just use it as one part of understanding your ingredients, not the only way.
Hello, are you describing oreos or dried pasta from 1950 here?
Food preservation is important, Fortifying foods with vitamins can be awesome. It's good when foods are cheap, food "preparation" and food "processing" are the exact same thing in English. There's always going to be processing. Finding out which processes can cause disease or ill-health is reasonably straightforward, if you want to do it rather than throw around political and marketing rhetoric.
72% less processed!
Things like high oxalate content that, without hydration, can put you at risk of kidney stones.
As a ~vegan I once contracted gout!
What that taught me (via internet knowledge shares, the doctors were completely stumped) was an excess of nutritional yeast.
The daily recommended amount was 3-4 tablespoons per day. I was easily eating 15.
Apparently nutritional yeast has a thing called purines, also found in red meat, and is a cause for gout.
Cut it down to normal consumption levels, and the problem went away.
https://multimedia.efsa.europa.eu/drvs/index.htm
Some of the entries in this public nutrition database have daily maximum values.
That information needs to be more readily available.
When you are unable to rely on old faithfuls, especially meat and dairy, you have to explore other possibilities and really dip into the weird.
One quick and easy trick is to eat “colorful food”.
Eating a meal that has lots of different colors increases your odds of getting a broader variety of nutritional content.
Fasting seems to be good for you, for example, because it stimulates the body to consume malformed proteins. Changing intake up from one day to the next also should help the diversity of the gut biome and the activation of several metabolic pathways without 'overheating' any of them.
> 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.
This definition makes most sense when compared with the definitions of the other three categories [1]. I am pretty sure, that any two people trained on these definitions will only disagree less than 5% of the time.
[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...
Because when you study people who eat a certain thing, they also all tend to eat another thing.
I religiously read nutrition labels and a lot of vegan ultra-processed foods are not particularly healthy, but not necessarily because they are ultra processed but because they mimic non-vegan foods which themselves are unhealthy.
Even if you cook all your meals, it doesn’t mean that you are eating healthy because it still depends on your ingredients.
And as the article hinted to, a lot of people who initially start eating vegan foods tend to buy non-vegan analogues which are not healthy. The better analogues tend to be ultra processed. Are these people at higher risk of certain diseases because they are eating ultra processed foods or because they’ve limited themselves to unhealthy vegan substitutes? Hard to say.
There are dozens of categorizations that are studied in literature. Vegan/Veg/Carnivore is one. Each diet becomes its own category to be studied, such as keto.
Level of processing is another such categorization. It won't give you the final answer on what is good or bad, only a partial answer, that will indeed have to be combined with results of other categorizations to get a final answer.
Please understand that nutritional science is a few decades old at this point. Demanding physics (a 500 year+ academic discipline) level of clarity from a discipline which is many times more complex is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The only thing we are going to get are bad partial answers; just like you point out. Everyone knows they are partial answers, but they are partial answers because of complexity, not because of malice.
I mean we could say that beef is ultra-processed grass. And lettuce, ultra-processed sunlight.
These are the unprocessed and moderately unprocessed foods in the NOVA categorization. Processed foods is something that began to be consumed a few thousand years ago (eg. Tofu is 2k+ years old in China), and ultra-processed foods, as defined above, became largely consumed a few decades ago. So there are very good reasons to define these categories as they are. The lines dividing them are fuzzy but that is how all non-physics sciences work.
> ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value.
Now, if you have a complex system like the human body, it's reasonable to say that the more you drive it outside the domain that it was designed and tested in, the more risk you are taking on the something bad will happen. So a priori you would be mindful of consuming ultra-processed foods. It is a testament to biological evolution that nothing radically bad happens when we consume ultra-processed foods. But it seems very reasonable to investigate such foods more carefully for smaller but long term impacts on health.
> little to do with the nutritional value.
The digestive system doesn't just care about raw nutrition - the number of proteins/fats/carbs - of the incoming food. There are a number of physical and chemical processes occur during digestion, and these processes can be sensitive to what combination of things go in and in what physical form, etc.
And yet the common best-practice nutritional advice is to eat a wide variety of foods. At the same time we know of plenty of natural raw foods, and even some simple cooking processes, that are harmful.
I'd actually advocate for both practices. It's how animals survive best: some members of a species are risk takers and others are cautious, so that one or the other is likely to survive any change in environment.
If I remember correctly, the book on the subject[1] makes a compelling case for the source of that classification, Monteireo[2], to have pretty solid data on just that
>Subjects were instructed to consume as much or as little as desired. Energy intake was greater during the ultra-processed diet (508 ± 106 kcal/day; p = 0.0001), with increased consumption of carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day; p < 0.0001) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day; p = 0.0004), but not protein (-2 ± 12 kcal/day; p = 0.85).
>Weight changes were highly correlated with energy intake (r = 0.8, p < 0.0001), with participants gaining 0.9 ± 0.3 kg (p = 0.009) during the ultra-processed diet and losing 0.9 ± 0.3 kg (p = 0.007) during the unprocessed diet.
Maybe the issue isn't the 'ultra processing' but protein amount? Less protein = people eat more = weight gain = health issues.
General observation: Discussions about not eating meat in popular and social media seem to forget that 2/3rds other world don't exist. India, te most populous nation consists of 30~40% vegetarians and the rest have a very low animal protein diet compared to western standards. This is the same for much of east and south asia. The diet is heavily plant based, is healthy, nutritious and delicious, and does not contain much processed ingredients. It has been this way for hundreds if not thousands of years. Animal farming culture is very different and less industrialized. Many countries don't have a dairy industry to speak of even though dairy products are consumed. Whether you're a non meatertarien on nutritional or ethical grounds, the east seems to have an answer for you. So you can stop eating meat...or you know eat less of it and still have a good time. I'm not sure why we in the west keep talking as if it's not possible without having some conglomerate reinvent meat for the 11th time.
Ultra processed food eaters have an ultra processed food problem.
I eat a ~vegan diet. (~vegan meaning someone a vegan would refuse to call a vegan, but that anyone else would call a vegan, ie. I eat honey)
I cook all of my food, and it’s all fresh produce, spices, evoo, quinoa, and oats.
Are you on low protein diet ?
My protein comes from beans, quinoa, oats, vegetables, and nutritional yeast.
quinoa - 8g/cup , 8 gm
beans - That is equal to approximately ½ cup per day. Thats about 20g protein
oats - 6 gm protien
So thats about 44g/day.
Are you eating like ~ 3 cups of beans/day ( ~120gm )? That would be around 350gm of carbs which sounds really excessive to me.
All the things in your diet are listed as "examples of not complete proteins" on that page. not quite sure what that means.
Very apropos for an article that discusses ultra-processed foods in the context of a plant-based diet.
As for whey protein isolate, isn't it also considered an ultra-processed substance as well?
1. Soak in water
2. Filter and keep what’s left.
Complete proteins contain all nine essential amino acids in consistent amounts. Most of those are stuff like fish, poultry and dairy, whereas grains or vegetables usually don't contain all the needed amino acids.
So if you're on a veg diet, mixing and matching those protein sources is recommended to get you all the amino acids your body needs.
Also, per serving: lentils (?g), peas (5g), peanut butter (8g), flax meal (3g), hemp hearts (10g); and more I’m sure I’m missing.
That said, I could easily eat 3 cups of beans per day.
As to “complete proteins” mixing quinoa and oats, which each have some of the necessary amino acids, makes their combination a source for complete proteins.
I am without allegiances.
More seriously, if they follow a nearly vegan diet for ethical reasons, except they don't give a shit about bees, it makes sense to describe their choice as approximately vegan, rather than plant based, because it is approximately vegan.
The data suggests that in whatever population the study sampled from all types of food eaters are eating roughly the same amount of ultra-processed food.
That said, I agree with you that the numbers are too high. I eat meat, cook my own food, and I am pretty sure my percentage is less than 10%.
[1] Deleted shoddy analysis in the article.
I'm all for dunking on the vegan lifestyle, but not through pseudoscience.
Monteiro, C., Cannon, G., Lawrence, M., Louzada, M. L., & Machado, P. (2019). FAO. Ultra- processed foods, diet quality, and health using the NOVA classification system.
But to add to that.. ultra processing is not the issue in itself (well not if you use the definition as described in the NOVA system), the issue is certain steps or ingredients used in certain types of ultra processed foods. So blaming "ultra processing" is technically an over generalisation.