Are we counting flour as ultra-processed now? Are we going to have a discussion on the ultra-processed diet of the medieval peasant?
Medieval flour would have had the entire grain -- the bran, germ and endosperm -- ground into the resulting product. The product would be high in fibre and nutrients, and with a ratio of good fats as well.
Modern flour separates out just the starch endosperm and discards the rest, then refining it to an ultra digestible product.
Nutritionally the former is healthy. The latter is not great, especially for people with a caloric surplus and a sedentary lifestyle, where it's just a massive glucose blast as that flour is 75% almost immediately turned into blood glucose.
Putting it into bread products with flavor enhancing additives and shelf life enhancing preservatives like you see in the hamburger buns at the store would make it ultra processed.
> Are we going to have a discussion on the ultra-processed diet of the medieval peasant?
Are you intentionally missing the point? A medieval peasant processing whole wheat into flour and then making a recipe out of it without added sugar and preservatives is a lot less processed than modern white flour production that goes into hyper-palatable foods on the shelf.
The average pizza that kids or adults consume is not from fresh, hand-made flour like a medieval peasant. It’s from the industrial process and it generally has flavor enhancing additives (sugar). We’re talking Domino’s pizza for most people, not an artisanal handmade pizza with freshly ground flour.
Just had to jump in on this. We have gotten way too accustomed to calling out sugar as a particular villain in stories like this, and it misses the forest for the trees. It makes it easy to think that removing sugar suddenly makes a product healthy. In the same way that we as a society went through that very foolish period where we thought "low fat" made a product healthy.
An average pizza dough for a large pizza has about 270g of 00 white flour. 75% of that flour is glucose chained into starches, or about 202g of glucose.
The same pizza dough will have around 1.5 tsp of sugar, or about 6g of sucrose. About 3g of that is glucose.
So in that pizza dough people will often shriek and point at the 3g of glucose courtesy of the sugar, blind to the fact that the flour added an enormous 202g of glucose. Glucose that will end up as blood glucose extremely rapidly (the body close to instantly cracks starches of refined flours into individual glucose molecules).
I've harped on here about this a lot, but sugar is simply not the big problem people think it is, at least relative to many diets where it is absolutely dwarfed by the glucose contribution of simple carbs. And to be extra clear, such a meal is perfectly fine if you're highly active and follow it up by a game of soccer or a hike or some other venture that uses that glucose to feed muscles. But for the average person it's followed by doing nothing, and their already insulin resistant body goes through trials to deal with the flood.
And overloading your liver with fructose is linked to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, visceral fat and inflammation - just like drinking alcohol