[david_draco]

The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.

[abdullahkhalids]

> Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition

The United Nations Food and Agriculture authority have designed the NOVA classification of food[1, 2], which includes ultra-processed food as a category.

[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

[WA]

NOVA is criticized to be unscientific: https://afgc.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/UPF-Scientifi...

[parasti]

I read "cancer" in between the lines of that comment. So the characterization of (potentially) that backdrop as "a bit of personal harm" feels wildly overassuming.

[dfxm12]

If one is truly worried about both, they don't have to eat beyond meat though. They can eat rice and beans. Eating rice and beans instead of both conventional and beyond meat is bad for beyond meat, too, I guess.

[baby]

Ultra processed food is food you wouldn't be able to make at home from whole ingredients. It's easy to make bread and pizza.

[gizmo686]

I might be able to figure out how to grind wheat into flour for bread. Maybe I can squint hard enough to consider baking yeast to be a "whole ingredient". But cheese? I assume I can probably figure it out with the internet, but it is not at all obvious what goes into that. And the milk I would use almost certainly went through an industrial sterilization process that I know I am not equipped to so.

[internet_points]

You can make ricotta in <1h with whole milk, vinegar and a bit of salt. And it's good on pizza!

But most "regular" cheeses like Swiss cheese also need rennet, ie. you need to slaughter a calf and scrape its stomach lining. You may want to make sure your downstairs neighbor is OK with the procedure before you start (offer them a veal dinner to make up for the noise?). Other than that, it's basically (unpasteurized) milk, salt and water. And time.

Yeast: take a sourdough baking class. You just need air, water and (organic) flour.

[lopis]

Your ignorance of the process or recipe of a food product doesn't affect the definition of ultra processed food. No amount of knowledge will let you make something like ultra processed foods at home with home equipment simply because it uses industrial processes and ingredients. Naturally there is a spectrum of processed-ness.

[UncleMeat]

And yet, pizza regularly appears on lists of "ultra processed" foods. As do potato chips and ice cream, two foods that are also very easy to make at home from whole ingredients.

There is no consistent definition and people regularly bend over backward to put all "junk food" in this category.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, it's a good example of how useless "ultra processed" is as a heuristic when we can use a slightly better label like "junk food".

So, donuts are fine because they are only a few ingredients that you can make on your stove, and they're bad once a factory makes them? Maybe only because the factory uses "chemicals"?

No, it's the fried calorie-dense food that is easy to overeat while displacing nutrition from better food sources that is the problem.

[voakbasda]

Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value.

Pizza made at home will not use such things. Your local pub that makes their own pizza will not either. Fast food or frozen pizza gets their ingredients from central suppliers in bulk, and they have no choice but to use such things in order for their products to survive the extended storage, processing, transportation, and similar delays that will occur on the way to the consumer.

[hombre_fatal]

It's a very convenient red herring to zoom in on some additives instead of zooming out to evaluate your dietary patterns.

Probably because we can use it to let ourselves off the hook for a bad diet. We can do things like roleplay that it's the seed oil in our Doritos making us fat, and that if it were butter then, idk, it would be a superfood or something?

It's the pepperoni, 15g sodium, 100g saturated fat, and 3000 calories of Costco pizza you just ate that's doing a number on your body, not the guar gum in the dough.

Or, how are you going to pick apart an ingredient list when you just ate a half-dozen home-cooked lard donuts? You're cool with laying down arterial plaque but you draw the line at ascorbic acid in the store-bought cream filling?

The "ulta processed" meme is a huge distraction. It's like listening to a fat guy talk about how he's very particular about the gum he chews because he stays away from "sugar alcohols". Yeah? What about the other 4999 calories of food you ate today?

[Kirby64]

> Everyone here seems to be avoiding the point that ultra processed foods contain ingredients that home bakers would never use: preservatives, anti-caking agents, flavor enhancers, artificial colors and flavors. Ingredients that are not food and add little to no nutritional value.

Precisely what is wrong with flavor enhancers? A common flavor enhancer is MSG, and using that in homemade dishes would not be that unusual. I frequently use it in many home preparations that could use more savory flavor.

Likewise with thickeners or emulsifiers such as cornstarch, xanthum gum, guar gum, etc: these are often used in many preparations at home. Just because something has 'no nutritional value' doesn't mean it doesn't have culinary value. By this same logic, spices have no nutritional value and are just flavors, which clearly doesn't pass the sniff test.

[UncleMeat]

Sometimes. But if you look at papers, media coverage, and policy proposals you'll find that "has preservatives and stuff" is not actually a necessary nor sufficient requirement.

[Karrot_Kream]

This is not true. I frequently use these spooky "ingredients" in home cooking. I use sodium citrate to make cheese sauces that don't coagulate. I use MSG if I need a source of glutamic umami. I've used various gums as thickeners.

These aren't some toxic compounds that machines put in our food. You can just go to a food supply store and grab them. MSG is just available pretty much everywhere.

[pacifika]

You can debate semantics / definitions or make an assessment and get most of the benefit.

[rat9988]

He is saying that the assessment is wrongly done.

[mjevans]

I was extremely dismayed when that supermarket simulator game that got popular on Twitch called 'pizza' something along the line of 'frozen dessert pie'...

At least the way it tends to get made in the US, a sugary pastry that's stuffed full of sugar, carbs, fats and cheese? Ok yeah, my favorite foods are _all_ terrible for me and I can't eat them anymore. This makes me very sad.

[pacifika]

Why not make pizza at home?

[dzhiurgis]

Pizza at home is my pet peeve. Lots of work working the dough, lots of waiting, super messy. Needs expensive oven and tons of electricity. All of this work to get one of the cheapest meal available.

Now compare to a steak - add salt, 5 minutes on pan, rest. Better than $50 steak at most restaurants.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

I get that pizza at home is a whole hobby, yes. And if you don't want to do it, it's all of those things that you say.

1) My pizza oven runs on gas not electricity. Not that this is better environmentally. Some run on wood.

2) I'm getting better results than I can get in a local pizza place. Cheap pizza is not great pizza. Home pizza making has a learning curve, it's more of a niche thing than e.g. cooking a steak or burger.

For grandparent post, Pizza is of course not a "dessert", it's a savoury main course. Full of white flour, cheese fats, and salt. So also not health food.

[timeon]

One does not need to eat these "ultra-processed" foods when reducing meat consumption.

[dokyun]

> The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Yeah, no shit? We're not ants in a colony. I think you're pretty stupid if you're alright with harming yourself while achieving nothing. If you wanna risk your life for a cause then take direct action, eating processed slop and pretending to feel good about it is only gonna make both your world and mine shittier.

[KempyKolibri]

The thing is, we don’t even have good evidence that UPF is necessarily harmful. Whey protein is UPF, but is associated with positive outcomes. Mass produced wholemeal bread is UPF, but is associated with good outcomes.

I’m not convinced that the “UPF” category adds anything useful over “HFSS” at this point. Happy to be pushed off my view, but seen nothing that would do so thus far.