Americans may soon get warnings about ultra-processed foods: Report
Americans may soon get warnings about ultra-processed foods: Report
Nutrition experts are reviewing data on ultra-processed foods for 2025 guidance.
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Some examples of ultra-processed foods are:
Chicken nuggets; Fast foods, including Pizza; Frozen meals; Deli rotisserie chicken; Mashed potatoe flakes; Hot dogs; Lunchables; Packaged soups; Packaged cookies; Jarred sauces; Potato chips; Crackers like Pringles and Cheez-Its; Soft drinks and Energy Drinks; Sweetened breakfast cereals and Flavored granola bars
including Pizza; Frozen meals
I have to wonder why that is or if it applies to everything in this category, because some frozen food is literally just normal food, only frozen. I recently bought and ate two cheap frozen pizzas and took a look through their ingredients to see what kind of crap I'm ingesting. One of the pizzas contained the same ingredients that a homemade pizza of a similar type would have, with only one exception, which was a tiny bit of citric acid. Harmless. The other contained added modified starch in the tomato sauce, and surprisingly a bit of dextrose in the dough and on the pieces of chicken meat. That is not great, but since it was listed in the last place and ingredients have to be sorted by the amount present in a descending order, I know that there was less dextrose than salt in the dough, which means the amount was quite small. Still, no preservatives, colorants or flavor enhancers.
There is one difference - making a homemade pizza takes me about an hour because there's a lot of prep involved, whereas this is done in 15 minutes, so I eat it more often. But I have no need to restrict caloric intake, so that's not an issue for me either unless there is some other way in which this is unhealthy.
Highly processed on its own doesn't mean much without taking into account processing method and ingredients used to process them.
These processing methods used may include extrusion, moulding, chemical modifications and hydrogenation (turning liquid unsaturated fats into a more solid form).
In the case of frozen pizzas, the ingredients do not say much, but they are in fact considered a group 3 ultra processed food because of how they were made and the fact that manufacturers don’t need to state the processes foods undergo on the label... just that they are bread, cheese and sauce.
At the same time, we still have quite limited knowledge on what exactly makes ultraprocessed food so harmful. Is it the additives (and which additives exactly), the process (and which process exactly)? Ultraprocessed food is currently treated with a broad stroke, whereas the harm may well come from a very small fraction of additives and/or processes. All of this is very difficult to disentangle because our previous science indicated that the processes/additives now in use were safe.
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Also, almost all sausages and other processed meats are considered ultraprocessed. Let’s not even consider vegan “meats”. For proteins you can essentially only eat chicken and eggs (though these obviously contain harmful antibiotics), and steak ( but red meat cause cancer).
This is why it’s so important to do more research to find out which processes and additives are harmful and which are not, so we can better distinguish between harmful and safe food.
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Deli rotisserie chicken
Ah shit, turns out I actually needed the warning. You'd think it'd be hard for something to be ultra-processed without even being cut up, but apparently not!
Edit: wait a second, does it mean Costco-loss-leader-style whole chickens, sliced glued-and-formed spherical chicken breast lunch meat, or both?
Most likely it fits the definition because it contains MSG or some other additive ( though it’s clearly processed very similar to homemade chicken).