[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.