Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.
Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.
UPF is so damaging to health that it is implicated in as many as one in seven of all premature deaths that occur in some countries, according to a paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
They are associated with 124,107 early deaths in the US a year and 17,781 deaths every year in England, the review of dietary and mortality data from eight countries found.
What is considered an ultra-processed food? Like… Cheese is processed (all cheese; it isn’t just found, it’s made by processing milk). Is it ultra processed? What about a hot dog?
It seems cheese just missed the mark for ultra status according to this specification I found on webMD.
a quick summarisation is that there are 4 groups:
So I’m guessing a hot dog would be ultra processed due to preservatives and additives often found in the ‘meat’.
That was an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Feels as though what is considered ultra-processed by the experts, is what us laymen tend to refer to as processed foods. I suppose technically their terminology is correct (the best kind of correct ofc), but it just feels like an exaggeration due to everyday usage of the term being what it is.
Edit: formatting.
How is milk processed? It’s pasteurized, which means it’s heated to kill bacteria. Nothing is added to the milk … so no, it is NOT considered a ‘pprocessed’ food.
I’m not sure about milk, but high temp heating is not something that occurs naturally. I am pretty sure heating kills both good and bad stuff so it chemically alters milks, even if minimally. If it is altered chemically or it’s nutrient profile changes or it goes through a process that doesn’t occur regularly, naturally in nature, I consider it processed.
Some form of processing is necessary to prevent disease, i am not against processed stuff to prevent disease.
Eating raw wheat seed, our body can’t absorb anything, eating powered wheat we still can’t absorb much nutrient. The moment we add water and heat and make bread, we break the cell walls, and now we can absorb most of the nutrients, and also raising the glycemic index of wheat.
I don’t consider fermented stuff like yogurt as processed since it can occur naturally, I just see it as a different food, like a seed is a food that can naturally become a plant that is also a food.
Firstly, pasteurisation is most definitely a process.
Secondly, it’s very unlikely you are buying milk which has only been pasteurised, it has very likely at least also been homogenised, after being mixed from various different sources in order to produce a mill standardised fat & milk solids. The vast majority of the time rather than just being blended, it has been centrifugally separated into fractions that are then recombined in order to create a standard product.
None of this is really bad, btw, but it is 100% processing.
Look up how to make cheese.
It is highly processed.
It is grass that has gone through a cow.