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Comment by tourmalinetaco | Hacker News Reader

So homemade bread is ultraprocessed because the wheat was processed into flour?

From what I understand, technically yes.

I think there’s a lot of work to be done on categorisation but the underlying principle tends to be fairly decent: the more stuff you do to your raw ingredients, the less healthy they become.

No, homemade bread would be NOVA group. 3. The flour itself is group 2 (processed culinary ingredients.) Mixing the group 2 ingredient (flour) with group 1 ingredients (water, yeast, salt) and baking it makes it group 3 (processed food.)

If you added something like Xanthan Gum to your "homemade bread", that would make it group 4 (ultra processed foods.)

Thanks for the correction!

Homemade bread is a processed food, not an ultra processed food.

You can process wheat into flour at home. You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.

>You can process wheat into flour at home. You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.

That statement seemed off, so I poked around a little and, yes you can make granulated sugar from sugar cane at home[0].

[0] https://shuncy.com/article/how-to-make-sugar-from-sugarcane-...

>You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.

That's obviously false.

The refined sugar you buy in the store ('table sugar') is clarified with phosphoric acid and bleached using a number of other chemicals. In addition to this, it goes though a number of other industrial processing steps that you would not be able to perform at home. Hence, it is 'highly processed'.

So you can make it at home using scary chemicals that you can easily buy online. You can't just say 'industrial processing' and 'chemicals' and be believed.

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