Yeah the whole definition is bogus. i.e. "mechanically separated meat" is considered ultraprocessed food? Why? By this logic putting apples into mixer and creating pyre is ultraprocessed food too.
The other point is already covered by other replies. "Mechanically separated meat" is not a term for your mother's chicken salad remake of last Sunday's roast chicken.
From wikipedia:
Mechanically separated meat (MSM), mechanically recovered/reclaimed meat (MRM), or mechanically deboned meat (MDM) is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing pureed or ground beef, pork, mutton, turkey or chicken under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. When poultry is used, it is sometimes called white slime as an analog to meat-additive pink slime and to meat extracted by advanced meat recovery systems, both of which are different processes. The process entails pureeing or grinding the carcass left after the manual removal of meat from the bones and then forcing the slurry through a sieve under pressure.
The resulting product is a blend primarily consisting of tissues not generally considered meat, along with a much smaller amount of actual meat (muscle tissue).
Ground beef its not the same thing
When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?
Because the fat fraction matters.
Reclaimed chicken has lots of connective tissue and skin, which are fatty and has different makeup than say, the breast.
>When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?
In a stew, one or two chicken carcasses will leach lots of oil and fat into a large stew that fills ten bowls. Specific recipes will also explicitly call for you to remove that fat, and most consumers want soups that are fairly not fatty.
In reclaimed meats, one carcass gets you a couple nuggets. It's up to 30% fat, and unlike say 85% ground beef, will be mixed with thickeners and flour that will soak up that fat during cooking and not let it escape consumption.
Personally, I think mechanically separated meat and other sausage and "use the whole animal" systems are good and delicious. But I'm a fatty. And even I know not to eat baloney every day after one week where I ate a baloney sandwich every day and had rather negative bathroom experiences.
Fat isn't "unhealthy" like the 90s sugar industry wanted you to believe, but it is calorie dense and delicious, which drives you to eat more of it, and means eating the same volume of food will give you more calories.
One pound of skinned chicken breast is like 500 calories. One pound of nuggets is like 1000.
We aren't going to find a set of additives or preservatives or ingredients as the culprit because it's not about the chemistry. It's psychology and biology. The root of the problem is that PepsiCo makes more money if you eat chips and soda every day than if you don't. As long as PepsiCo makes more money from you eating yourself to death, that's going to be the outcome.
Plenty of you get angry about the "military industrial complex" but PepsiCo did significantly more revenue than Raytheon last year: $91 billion, and takes about a 10% profit margin.
The closest you can come in the "ingredient" dimension is things like regulating added sugar and added salt and added colors and added fats, but that's easy to bypass. Your soda wont have added sugar, it will have something like "Apple juice" as an ingredient that is almost itself entirely sugar and water.
As an aggregate, the category of foods appears to be bad for us.
And we aren't sure why yet.
No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad?
To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go.
It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers.
It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback.
The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.
Peel some potatoes, cook them and you have a dinner in said 40 minutes.
And I have no idea why this would be classified as ultraprocessed food.
You’re welcome to do your own years of research to learn more (everything, cooking, freezing, drying, blending, adding acids affects amino acids and certainly bacteria in the food) but until then stick with what the studies prove
If 'the science' is so conclusive, then maybe a single link to a single study would be an appropriate response.
The UPF definition includes a ton of very distinct things. It is unlikely that emulsifiers, preservatives, food dyes, added sugar, and removed fiber all produce the same health responses. Science showing correlations between UPF consumption and health outcomes also don't tend to show a dose response, which is odd. We'd expect lots of UPF consumption to be very bad and for some UPF consumption to be kind of bad, but we don't tend to see this in the data.
Nutritional research is also enormously difficult to perform. Any sort of controlled study is necessarily over short periods of time. Long term studies come with all of the messy confounds that make it remarkably difficult to determine causation.
And I really don’t understand your point at all. All science starts with observing a correlation and deducing a cause years to centuries later.
But you don’t wait for newton to start believing in gravity
Existing published research has not consistently found a dose response.
The authors are also not just saying "hey here is some science." They are advocating for policies that say that plain potato chips can be in schools but sour cream and onion potato chips cannot.
Because you really can interpret any of these in a lot of the situations where someone is asking “why”.
it is a food substitute. food is composed of recognisable ingedients. what comes from factorys has no connection or relation to that. the unspoken premise is that pre prepared stuff with a label is somehow part of a continuity. , pared= to cut/divided
prepared=cut/divided~for you
pre prepared= wtf?
Its pure meat, meat is food. What do you mean?
Needing to chew less processed food may help just by being kind of rate-limiting (slowing down how fast you can get the food in), but also the enzymes in your saliva have time to start working on the food before you swallow it.
If I recall correctly I have also read (perhaps the same article, but maybe somewhere else) that some processes related to digestion might be triggered when you start eating (chewing), so the fact that you can eat so many calories so quickly before those processes get going might make a big difference too.
Some people say that it is lack of fiber. Some people say that it is inflammation caused by preservatives and/or stabilizers. Some people say it is the hyperpaletability, which encourages people to overconsume calories. Some people say it is just the high amounts of sugar and salt. And it is unlikely that all of these things contribute equally such that they should all be regulated the same.
Think of eating an apple vs drinking apple juice. The amount of entire apples you can drink is immense compared to eating the apple whole. So the mechanical process does affect how we consume the food.