In the manufacturing industry we called Frozen and Canned vegetables "Fresher than fresh". Because they are essentially processed within a few hours of the harvest, where are the stuff we usually get at super markets are a few days at the least and up to a few months old at worst.
While there is some processing, they typically aren't removing huge amount of material or being ground up into another form.
On the NOVA scale, these wouldn't be considered ultra-processed. Yogurt would be considered minimally processed and canned vegetables would be considered processed but not ultra processed
I think yogurt is a great example of the problem. In its more natural form it is healthy, particularly as a probiotic with live cultures and enzymes.
But that’s not what the majority of yogurts sold in stores are, they are heated and pasteurized killing live cultures, and then loaded with sugar added. It’s this yogurt product that more closely resembles a desert than a healthy yogurt that is bought/consumed and marketed as a health food.
It’s very similar to the majority of breakfast cereals, probably never as healthy as yogurt to begin with, but a bastardization of the “cereal grains” they are named after.
Yes, but even among those there is some deception.
Take Yoplait, it is made with pasteurized milk, so it doesn’t have the naturally occurring cultures. Like the added sugar they just add cultures/probiotics in, what’s important in this is that there are 1000s of species of probiotics and “added probiotics” is not the same as naturally occurring probiotics, which are generally limited to just a few species. In other words it’s a marketing stunt to market “probiotics” as if it were natural, but to reuse the word it is a bastardization of naturally occurring cultures.
Where are you getting unpasteurized milk that you could make yogurt with it? I don't know anyone who has eaten yogurt made from raw cow's milk and wouldn't know where to get it.
That’s the point, the yogurt purchased in stores is processed to the point it loses the very benefits that make yogurt “healthy.”
To answer your specific question, farmers that have dairy cows. It’s not so common these days, but neither is healthy yogurt. Another example of a probiotic food would be kimchi, which in the US most people probably purchase in stores (pasteurized), but in SKorea many make at home so it’s raw with naturally occurring cultures and enzymes.
Yogurt from “raw milk” doesn’t even make any sense. The pasteurization step during yogurt production isn’t to make the milk safe for consumption. It’s to kill the other bacteria so the one that is deliberately introduced can thrive.
I’ve posted about this before and gotten downvoted, but, yeah, the Nova definitions are problematic. I think the issue is the data clearly shows something or somethings are causing problems, but nobody really knows what the troublesome ingredients are, or if any individual ingredients are problematic at all:
* Is it the emulsifiers? Sounds plausible, but hasn’t been proven
* Is it the high calorie density/ease of chewing? Sounds plausible, but hasn’t been proven.
* Is it <insert pet theory here>? That, too, probably sounds plausible, but hasn’t been proven.
* Is it just the A/B testing? After a few rounds of optimizing for “do people eat more of substance a or substance b”, does it even matter what the ingredients are? Sounds plausible, but hasn’t been proven.
Meanwhile, to pick on one single example, you have jams in the Nova database that are “ultra processed” because they contain ”added” pectin.
The last time I brought this up, someone responded that they made homemade jam without adding any pectin at all, just by cooking the fruit for longer. So, clearly, Big Jam is making Frankenfood Jam by adding artificial pectin to thicken their product.
You’ll never guess how you extract pectin from fruit: apply heat.
While there is some processing, they typically aren't removing huge amount of material or being ground up into another form.