the thing that every expert screams every time they have a chance—AVOID PROCESSED FOOD.
The USDA defines processing as:
washing, cleaning, milling, cutting, chopping, heating, pasteurizing, blanching, cooking, canning, freezing, drying, dehydrating, mixing, or other procedures that alter the food from its natural state. This may include the addition of other ingredients to the food, such as preservatives, flavors, nutrients and other food additives or substances approved for use in food products, such as salt, sugars and fats.
Basically, don’t do… anything?
I think it’d more accurate to avoid ultra-processed food, and not minimally processed. This new concept was created by researchers from the University of Sao Paulo to really clarify this issue, and it defined roughly as “food containing weird ingredients that you’d never have at home”.
Ultra-processed foods – which can be foods and drinks – are not really foods but formulations of substances obtained by fractionating foods from the first group. These substances include sugar, oils, and fats for domestic use, protein isolates or concentrates, interesterified oils, hydrogenated fat, modified starches, and various substances for exclusive industrial use.
Added colors, flavors, emulsifiers, thickeners, and other additives that give the formulations sensory properties similar to those found in foods from the first group are added into ultra-processed foods. They also serve to disguise undesired characteristics of the final product. Despite the claims commonly seen on the packaging of ultra-processed products, unprocessed foods are just a small percentage of their composition or are simply absent, as in the case of “strawberry flavored” or “grape flavored” products.
The processes and ingredients used to manufacture ultra-processed foods are developed to create highly profitable products (low-cost ingredients, long shelf life, branded products) that can replace all other Nova food groups. Their convenience (imperishable, ready-to-eat), hyper-palatability (extremely tasty and flavorful), promotion by transnational corporations, and aggressive marketing give ultra-processed foods huge market advantages over all other food groups.
Ultra-processed foods include soft drinks, dairy drinks, fruit nectar, powdered mixes for making fruit-flavored drinks, ‘packaged snacks’, sweets and chocolates, cereal bars, ice cream, packaged bread and other bakery products, margarine and other butter substitutes, biscuits, cakes and cake mixes, morning cereals, pies, pasta dishes and pre-prepared pizzas, chicken and fish nuggets, sausages, hamburgers and other reconstituted meat products, instant noodles, powdered mixtures for preparing soups or desserts and many other products.
Yeah, I did some Googling and packaged supermarket bread has all kinds of stuff added to it. (There’s a reason the bagels from the bagel store nearby get moldy and the “Thomas’s Bagels” from the supermarket last forever...)
Most bread you would buy in the supermarket is ultra-processed (including almost all organic, whole grain etc etc).
Types of bread that are only -processed- (not ultra processed): - Bakery-made bread, often sourdough, with an ingredients list that looks like (wheat flour, salt, water) perhaps with additions like fruit or seeds. This sort of bread lasts a couple of days at best. - Bread made from literal whole grains—German fitness bread, pumpernickel, sunflower seed bread. This stuff. It is shelf stable but tastes more like a solid cracker than normal bread. - Anything you make yourself at home.
That’s it. Anything with preservatives, dough thickeners, soy lecithin etc in its ingredients list is ultra-processed.
This sort of bread lasts a couple of days at best.
Unless you freeze it. This is by far the best way of consistently having not-ultra-processed bread that tastes fresh and delicious, without having to eat a whole loaf every day or throwing away most of it.
EDIT: This also works for various sorts of buns, rolls, panettone, etc.
I think it’d more accurate to avoid ultra-processed food, and not minimally processed. This new concept was created by researchers from the University of Sao Paulo to really clarify this issue, and it defined roughly as “food containing weird ingredients that you’d never have at home”.
https://www.fsp.usp.br/nupens/en/food-classification-nova/
Bread is ultra-processed? O_O
I think “packaged bread and other bakery products” this is referring to stuff like Wonder bread, which contains a whole bunch of stuff[1] beyond the proverbial “flour, water, yeast, salt” that goes into homemade or artisanal-bakery bread.
Soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, various preservatives, etc.
Yeah, I did some Googling and packaged supermarket bread has all kinds of stuff added to it. (There’s a reason the bagels from the bagel store nearby get moldy and the “Thomas’s Bagels” from the supermarket last forever...)
Most bread you would buy in the supermarket is ultra-processed (including almost all organic, whole grain etc etc).
Types of bread that are only -processed- (not ultra processed):
- Bakery-made bread, often sourdough, with an ingredients list that looks like (wheat flour, salt, water) perhaps with additions like fruit or seeds. This sort of bread lasts a couple of days at best.
- Bread made from literal whole grains—German fitness bread, pumpernickel, sunflower seed bread. This stuff. It is shelf stable but tastes more like a solid cracker than normal bread.
- Anything you make yourself at home.
That’s it. Anything with preservatives, dough thickeners, soy lecithin etc in its ingredients list is ultra-processed.
Unless you freeze it. This is by far the best way of consistently having not-ultra-processed bread that tastes fresh and delicious, without having to eat a whole loaf every day or throwing away most of it.
EDIT: This also works for various sorts of buns, rolls, panettone, etc.