There have been stories suggesting “ultraprocessed” foods are bad for you. This made me curious about what actually is a ultraprocessed food? How are ultraprocessed foods defined? So I did Googling* and, oddly, the British Heart Foundation has a detailed page on them that links to this document on the “NOVA classification”. The NOVA classification seems to be a standard*. I am no food scientist but this is a weird document.
Ultraprocessed foods are defined on page 33. To my eyes at least there is some weird stuff here, eg
Several industrial processes with no domestic equivalents are used in the manufacture of ultra-processed products, such as extrusion and moulding, and pre-processing for frying.
page 33, Carlos A. Monteiro et al, World Nutrition January-March 2016, 7, 1-3, 28-38
I have a question: How do domestic chefs make jellies without using moulding? Surely you leave them to set in a mould? And a bread tin is also basically a mould …. Also, at least some types of pasta can be made by extrusion, have the (Brazilian, I think) authors informed Italian home cooks that they can’t use extrusion?
The authors also suggest that ultraprocessed foods have “five or more” ingredients. Any curry or similar dish will surely have more than five ingredients, it may have more than five different spices for a start. India recently became the most populous country on the planet, not bad for a country that apparently eats nothing but ultraprocessed foods.
The definition also includes:
Common attributes of ultra-processed products are hyper-palatability, sophisticated and attractive packaging, multi-media and other aggressive
page 33, Carlos A. Monteiro et al, World Nutrition January-March 2016, 7, 1-3, 28-38
This, I think, conflates the food itself, with who makes and markets it. I suspect I would agree with the authors that companies spending large ad budgets selling high-sugar soft drinks to children is bad. But this poor behaviour by large companies does not mean that “ultraprocessed” foods is a well defined useful food category.
Judging from the work of Monteiro et al., the term “ultraprocessed” is either very vague, or if you take the five-plus ingredients literally includes almost every meal we eat, including all what British people would call Indian food, pizzas and huge amounts of Italian food, Cornish pasties, etc etc. A cheese sandwich might just about make under the five-ingredient limit, but only without pickle, and I like pickle.
Maybe we should stick to judging every food by the amount of calories. fat, sugar etc, as well as how tasty it is.
* The Wikipedia page on ultraprossed foods is interesting, it looks like there have been edit battles and the Talk page has some interesting discussion.
Chance & Necessity 