And we will promptly ignore those warnings, because freedom. 'MURICA!
Some examples of ultra-processed foods are:
Chicken nuggets; Fast foods, including Pizza; Frozen meals; Deli rotisserie chicken; Mashed potatoe flakes; Hot dogs; Lunchables; Packaged soups; Packaged cookies; Jarred sauces; Potato chips; Crackers like Pringles and Cheez-Its; Soft drinks and Energy Drinks; Sweetened breakfast cereals and Flavored granola bars
Pretty much anything that isn’t in the meat, produce and milk areas. If it’s premade from a big corp, it’s bad for you.
Edit: Also, this…
A small but landmark randomized controlled study in 2019, led by the National Institutes of Health’s nutrition expert, Kevin Hall, found that when inpatient trial participants received diets with ultra-processed foods, they ate roughly 500 extra calories a day compared to a control group of inpatient participants who were served a diet that was matched in macronutrients but did not include ultra-processed foods.
including Pizza; Frozen meals
I have to wonder why that is or if it applies to everything in this category, because some frozen food is literally just normal food, only frozen. I recently bought and ate two cheap frozen pizzas and took a look through their ingredients to see what kind of crap I’m ingesting. One of the pizzas contained the same ingredients that a homemade pizza of a similar type would have, with only one exception, which was a tiny bit of citric acid. Harmless. The other contained added modified starch in the tomato sauce, and surprisingly a bit of dextrose in the dough and on the pieces of chicken meat. That is not great, but since it was listed in the last place and ingredients have to be sorted by the amount present in a descending order, I know that there was less dextrose than salt in the dough, which means the amount was quite small. Still, no preservatives, colorants or flavor enhancers.
There is one difference - making a homemade pizza takes me about an hour because there’s a lot of prep involved, whereas this is done in 15 minutes, so I eat it more often. But I have no need to restrict caloric intake, so that’s not an issue for me either unless there is some other way in which this is unhealthy.
Highly processed on its own doesn’t mean much without taking into account processing method and ingredients used to process them.
These processing methods used may include extrusion, moulding, chemical modifications and hydrogenation (turning liquid unsaturated fats into a more solid form).
In the case of frozen pizzas, the ingredients do not say much, but they are in fact considered a group 3 ultra processed food because of how they were made and the fact that manufacturers don’t need to state the processes foods undergo on the label… just that they are bread, cheese and sauce.
Why is the onus always on the consumer? Regulators, mount up.
Minimal change in relation to the damage ulta-processed foods are causing our population but at least its a step in the right direction. As someone who suffers from a Crohns (likely induced by a combination of processed food and over stress/work) I’m very happy we’re finally taking a look at the food industry with more scepticism. I’ve done work inside food processing plants and it amazes me how they can justify manipulating our basic foods to ensure they are addictive and profitable at any cost.
Change does not happen overnight and hopefully this push to reevaluate our food practises will actually make it through the next election.
One day, I hope to be able to eat a food cooked by someone else without experiencing debilitating pain afterwards.
They need to do what Europe did to cigarette packs
Food doesn’t have ingredients it is an ingredient.
