Ultra-processed food linked to 32 different health problems including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and early death
by Mihaithepulla
Ultra-processed food linked to 32 different health problems including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and early death
by Mihaithepulla
24 comments
The problem is the definition of “ultra processed” is pretty much “not straight from the farm”, making it functionally useless for real life
Have a read of Ultra Processed People by Dr Chris Van Tulleken, it’s eye opening. The issue of course is ultra processed food is convenient and poor people tend to work long hours, so cooking meals from scratch is hard to be motivated into doing.
Life pro tip: buy an extra freezer (only costs around £90 to run for a year) for storing batch homecooked meals you can just heat up in the microwave. Basically like ready meals but actually healthy.
Having an extra freezer makes it a lot easier to have a constant supply of frozen dishes like lasagne, risotto, curry – all freshly prepared and cooked but then frozen. And while cooking I listen to podcasts so it all feels productive.
Avoid processed foods like the plague. And don’t fall for any of the marketing BS where some of them pretend to be healthy, they never are.
Today I learned rich people don’t eat bread biscuits cake & cereal. What a load of shit this article is.
Is breakfast cereal really an ultra-processed food??? I thougt most cereals were fortified with viatimins. Another question I have is, is there a clear definition of ultra-processed??? The article mentions ultra-processed foods contain colours, emulsifiers, flavours and other additives but doesn’t almost everything bare fresh produce contain some of that??? And under that definition free from foods like gluten free bread is an ultra processed food.
Reading the article and the Guardian article, but not the full study, the issue highlighted is:
‘“We have good understanding of the mechanisms by which these foods drive harm,” he added. “In part it is because of their poor nutritional profile – they are often high in saturated fat, salt and free sugar.
But the way they are processed is also important – they’re engineered and marketed in ways which drive excess consumption – for example they are typically soft and energy dense and aggressively marketed usually to disadvantaged communities.”’
So is the issue that UPF are typically unhealthy and lead to unhealthy habits, rather than the processing itself being an issue? For example, if I eat UPFs but track my calories/macros, provided my macros are being hit that is no more or less dangerous than hitting those same macros eating non-UPF foods? I can’t see anything to suggest that (for example), 500 calories, 20g of fibre and 30g of carbs from UPF is any different to my health than the same breakdown in non-UPF.
UPF is just the latest diet woo woo that grafters can jump on to milk the gullible.
UPF is ill defined and rather meaningless, studies like this conflate high fat/salt/sugar diets with industrial processing as the driver of health issues. There is nothing to indicate that the processing (or indeed colouring/preserving etc) has anything to do with the bad nutritional outcomes of eating crap food.
UPF is a poor substitute for classifying food by its fat/salt/sugar content. If you moderate your intake of that, it won’t make any difference whether your food is highly processed and comes in a packet or you grew the sugar cane yourself.
What IS worthy of discussion is consumer awareness of just how nutritionally poor some UK grocery staples actually are.
Consider checking out your local grocers, butchers, and bakers. Cost of living increases have made them quite competitive on price before we even get into quality. If you’re buying the £1.40 bread check your bakers isn’t the same or less. Don’t get me started on the chicken breasts once you cook the injected water out. Fruit and veg are a little more but last long enough for you to actually eat them with less to cut off and throw away. Treat yourself to some actual food.
That double spam and egg butty I’ve just had was fit though.
For Millennials and the generations below, it’s pretty doom and gloom: processed food causing illnesses, forever chemicals in the body, micro plastics in the body, mens sperm count halved by 50% in the last thirty years, child and teen cancer rates increasing by 24% in thirty years and this is all before getting to personal money situations and what state the planet is in.
Which is why the poor die at younger ages. They are the ones that mostly live off these diets. Proper good food often costs a lot more money.
Honestly am not super into Ultra processed food but enough of my stuff is processed for the convenience of it and I’m guessing if low blood pressure didn’t run through my family I’d probably be dead by now of something lmao 🤣
This includes the oils we are told are good for us: Sunflower, Canola, Soybean, Rapeseed etc etc are so industrially produced that our bodies react in violent ways such as skin disorders, breathing issues (myself in this category), bowel and degestinal tracts irritations, it goes on. Seed oils are sold to us that any other fats are going to killl us. Lard, tallow, butter and non-seed oils are way better for us and have far more flavour.
It’s literally correlation between being fat and having a poor diet
I try to eat healthy, but have supermarket bread every day and cereal most days(weetabix) thought I was being healthy.
This seems incredibly hand-wavey since “ultra processed” is actually a very broad category of foods and the sheer breadth of the research aims must make it very hard to control for other factors.
Questions need to be answered like: which ultra processed foods are linked to which health conditions and why? Do the compounds that cause these issues only exist in ultra processed foods or is it actually important to be cautious of certain processed or unprocessed foods which contain similar compounds as well? If somebody naively swaps out their sausages for “unprocessed” red meat (which also has known health issues associated with it), are they actually improving their health?
But importantly, are we potentially throwing out the baby with the bathwater by painting in such broad strokes around ultra processed foods?
Ate frewt ate vejtabals luv Maggie nudels luv this pain down me left side.
Like plastics, fossil fuels, tobacco and the likes, blame the consumer,, who consumes from the options certified by the government, who have taken brown envelopes from lobbyists on behalf of the 1% of mega rich part of society.
When you have an industry that knows by putting sugar and fat in food you will return for more , it kinda makes sense from a business perspective to keep doing it…the same for fast food…they ain’t selling healthy calories, they just want you to come back.
Not seeing much here about fast food. IE fried chicken, pizza, burgers etc.
Younger gens are eating a ton of this stuff on top of all the UPF’s they eat at home. If not chicken nuggets from the freezer its chicken nuggets delivered by ROO. I see the fast food outlets full of kids after school, they then go home to similar food served for tea.
I guess these kids are gonna be living short lives.
is bacon ultra processed food?
cause i need to buy cancer insurance if it is.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Sick of this fear mongering. Eat what you can just to get through the day. Saying this as someone with ARFID – it fucking sucks. We’ll all die anyways and by the looks of things, who’s even want to live til their 80s? Fuck that. Let them eat ultra processed foods!!
I mean how is this even something that needs pointing out? Processed food is literally one of the biggest killers out there, without any doubt.
What a shock, got called a conspiracy theorist in the past for saying upf is poison .