Why should food processing matter for our health? “Processed food” is a blurry term and for years, the food industry has exploited these blurred lines as a way to defend its additive-laden products. Unless you grow, forage or catch all your own food, almost everything you consume has been processed to some extent. A pint of milk is pasteurized, a pea may be frozen. Cooking is a process. Fermentation is a process. Artisanal, organic kimchi is a processed food, and so is the finest French goat’s cheese. No big deal.
But UPFs (ultra processed foods) are different. They are processed in ways that go far beyond cooking or fermentation, and they may also come plastered with health claims. Even a sugary multi-coloured breakfast cereal may state that it is “a good source of fibre” and “made with whole grains”. Bettina Elias Siegel, says that in the US, people tend to categorize food in a binary way. There is “junk food” and then there is everything else. For Siegel, “ultra-processed” is a helpful tool for showing new parents that “there’s a huge difference between a cooked carrot and a bag of industrially produced, carrot-flavoured veggie puffs” aimed at toddlers, even if those veggie puffs are cynically marketed as “natural”.
Are four basic kinds of food (called Nova), graded by the degree to which they are processed :
➜ group 1 – is called “least processed”, and includes anything from a bunch of parsley to a carrot, from a steak to a raisin.
➜ group 2 - is called “processed culinary ingredients”. These include butter and salt, sugar and lard, oil and flour – all used in small quantities with group 1 foods to make them more delicious: a pat of butter melting on broccoli, a sprinkling of salt on a piece of fish, a spoonful of sugar in a fruit salad.
➜ group 3 - is called “processed foods”. This category consists of foods that have been preserved, pickled, fermented or salted. Examples would be canned tomatoes and pulses, pickles, traditionally made bread (such as sourdough), smoked fish and cured meats.
➜ group 4 - foods tend to consist largely of the sugars, oils and starches from group 2, but instead of being used sparingly to make fresh food more delicious, these ingredients are now transformed through colours, emulsifiers, flavourings and other additives to become more palatable. Are liable to “replace freshly made regular meals and dishes, with snacking any time, anywhere”.
A website called Open Food Facts, run by mostly French volunteers, has started the herculean labour of creating an open database of packaged foods around the world and listing where they fit into kinds of food.
As I ate my Pringles and my white bread, I felt like a failure for not being able to stop. I had no idea that there would one day be a technical explanation for why I found them so hard to resist. The word is “ultra-processed” and it refers to foods that tend to be low in essential nutrients, high in sugar, oil and salt and liable to be overconsumed. But I’ve started to feel a creeping unease that our ardent affection for these foods has been mostly manufactured by the food corporations who profit from selling them.
We still don’t really know what it is about ultra-processed food that generates weight gain. The rate of chewing may be a factor. In Hall’s study, during the weeks on the ultra-processed diet people ate their meals faster, maybe because the foods tended to be softer and easier to chew. On the unprocessed diet, a hormone called PYY, which reduces appetite, was elevated, suggesting that homemade food keeps us fuller for longer. The effect of additives such as artificial sweeteners on the gut microbiome is another theory.
Even if scientists do succeed in pinning down the mechanism or mechanisms by which ultra-processed foods make us gain weight, it’s not clear what policy-makers should do about UPFs, except for giving people the support and resources they need to cook more fresh meals at home.
src - https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-processed-food-took-over-your-shopping-basket-brazil-carlos-monteiro
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