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Ultra-processed food increases risk of early death, international study finds (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

114 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Consuming large amounts of ultra-processed food (UPF) increases the risk of an early death, according to a international study that has reignited calls for a crackdown on UPF.

Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%, according to research in countries including the US and England.

UPF is so damaging to health that it is implicated in as many as one in seven of all premature deaths that occur in some countries, according to a paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

They are associated with 124,107 early deaths in the US a year and 17,781 deaths every year in England, the review of dietary and mortality data from eight countries found.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Gotta up my junk food consumption then

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago

It is my life's dream to die clutching my heart as I'm giving a presentation in front of hundreds of people.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

What is considered an ultra-processed food? Like... Cheese is processed (all cheese; it isn't just found, it's made by processing milk). Is it ultra processed? What about a hot dog?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

It seems cheese just missed the mark for ultra status according to this specification I found on webMD.

a quick summarisation is that there are 4 groups:

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (berries, nuts etc).
Processed culinary ingredients (oils, butter, sugars etc).
Processed foods (cheese, bread. Stuff with 2+ ingredients).
Ultra-processed food and drink products (preservatives, additives, all the bad -ives).

So I'm guessing a hot dog would be ultra processed due to preservatives and additives often found in the 'meat'.

That was an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Feels as though what is considered ultra-processed by the experts, is what us laymen tend to refer to as processed foods. I suppose technically their terminology is correct (the best kind of correct ofc), but it just feels like an exaggeration due to everyday usage of the term being what it is.

Edit: formatting.

[+] [email protected] -8 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

How is milk processed? It's pasteurized, which means it's heated to kill bacteria. Nothing is added to the milk ... so no, it is NOT considered a 'pprocessed' food.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I'm not sure about milk, but high temp heating is not something that occurs naturally. I am pretty sure heating kills both good and bad stuff so it chemically alters milks, even if minimally. If it is altered chemically or it's nutrient profile changes or it goes through a process that doesn't occur regularly, naturally in nature, I consider it processed.

Some form of processing is necessary to prevent disease, i am not against processed stuff to prevent disease.

Eating raw wheat seed, our body can't absorb anything, eating powered wheat we still can't absorb much nutrient. The moment we add water and heat and make bread, we break the cell walls, and now we can absorb most of the nutrients. It also raising the glycemic index of wheat.

I don't consider fermented (decomposition) stuff like yogurt as processed since it can occur naturally, I just see it as a different food, like a seed is a food that can naturally become a plant that is also a food.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 hours ago

Firstly, pasteurisation is most definitely a process.

Secondly, it's very unlikely you are buying milk which has only been pasteurised, it has very likely at least also been homogenised, after being mixed from various different sources in order to produce a mill standardised fat & milk solids. The vast majority of the time rather than just being blended, it has been centrifugally separated into fractions that are then recombined in order to create a standard product.

None of this is really bad, btw, but it is 100% processing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Look up how to make cheese.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 18 hours ago

It is highly processed.

It is grass that has gone through a cow.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I feel like we’ve known this for a very long time

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

We've known about climate change for a long time too. "We" not all of us.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

True

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

The long game suicide, baby.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The NOVA classifications are difficult to work with, and I think the trend of certain nutrition scientists (and the media that reports on those scientists' work) have completely over-weighted the value of the "ultra processed" category.

The typical whole grain, multigrain bread sold at the store qualifies as ultra-processed, in large part because whole grain flour is harder to shape into loaves than white flour, and manufacturers add things like gluten to the dough. Gluten, of course, already "naturally" exists in any wheat bread, so it's not exactly a harmful ingredient. But that additive tips the loaf of bread into ultra processed (or UPF or NOVA category 4), same as Doritos.

But whole grain bread isn't as bad for you as Doritos or Coca Cola. So why do these studies treat them as the same? And whole grain factory bread is almost certainly better for you than the local bakery's white bread (merely processed food or NOVA category 3), made from industrially produced white flour, with the germ and bran removed during milling. Or industrially produced potato chips, which are usually considered simply processed foods in category 3 when not flavored with anything other than salt, which certainly aren't more nutritious or healthier than that whole wheat bread or pasta.

If specific ingredients are a problem, we should study those ingredients. If specific combinations or characteristics are a problem, we should study those combinations. Don't throw out the baby (healthy ultra processed foods) with the bathwater (unhealthy ultra processed foods).

And I'm not even going to get into how the system is fundamentally unsuited for evaluating fermented, aged, or pickled foods, especially dairy.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Some bread is treated with stuff one would ordinarily not want to eat.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

So why not focus on the foods containing that stuff, rather than the superficial resemblance of all foods that kinda look like the foods that contain that stuff?

Let's say you have a problem with potassium bromate, a dough additive linked to cancer that remains legal in U.S. bread but is banned in places like Canada, the UK, the EU.

So let's have that conversation about bromate! Let's not lump all industrially produced breads into that category, even in countries where bromate has been banned.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 day ago

Another cancerous item is sodium benzoate. I use it to make photos. It reacts with UV light in gelatin to cause the gelatin to harden up. That same effect is what give you cancer. Its the free radicals generated during UV exposure.