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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?

> What's the minimally processed food that bread is made of?

Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.

Is flour considered food at all? It sounds more like an ingredient than a food.

> sounds more like an ingredient than a food

Nova doesn’t distinguish between ingredients and food [1]. (It needs to be able to do this. UPFs are defined, in part, by almost lacking low-Nova inputs.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

You can eat it and survive.

Cooking it first is a big improvement, but the same is true of carrots, IMO.

Bread is a bit of an exception here, as it undergoes extensive mechanical (milling), biochemical (fermentation) and thermal (baking) processing. Yet it does not count as ultra-processed.

Bread is made from dough, which is mainly made from flour (the "minimally processed" food), which is made from grains (the unprocessed food)

It definitely stood out as a bit of a confounding example. That combined with the emotive language used in the classification names makes me a bit wary of this way of classifying food.

AFAIK, whole-wheat flour is considered minimally processed. Of course bread is not equal, so it was more about home-made/sourdough types, not high-processed, shelf-stable ones.

Flour is processed from grains

Flour, presumably.

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