Ultra Processed Food (UPF) is yet another thing that we need to avoid in order to eat a healthy diet. We already know that we should avoid foods that are high in saturated fat, salt and sugar. And we already know that we shouldn’t exceed a limit of 2000 calories a day for women, and 2500 calories a day for men. Yet, taking these steps is still not enough to ensure that we are eating a healthy diet.
What is Ultra Processed Food (UPF)?
Ultra Processed Food (UPF) is a highly processed food or beverage that has been manufactured using a variety of industrial techniques to transform food and food products into a substance that is designed to be convenient, shelf-stable, and highly palatable.
To put it another way, Ultra Processed Food is a substance that contains ingredients you wouldn’t normally find in a kitchen. If you were baking a loaf of bread at home for example, you would use salt and flour – extremely common ingredients you likely already have in your cupboard. If you picked up a popular loaf of bread from a supermarket however, like Hovis Soft White Medium Bread, you will find that it contains these ingredients as well as Preservative: E282, Emulsifiers: E472e, E471, and E481. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t have jars of those on hand in my kitchen.
What are the most common types of Ultra Processed Food (UPF)?
The most common types of Ultra Processed Food (UPF) includes; soft drinks such as sodas and energy drinks; packaged snacks such as potato chips, candy, and cookies; fast foods such as burgers, fries and chicken nuggets; packaged desserts such as cakes, pies and pastries; and sweetened breakfast cereals
Other common foods in a supermarket, that you wouldn’t immediately expected to be Ultra Processed Foods are often Ultra Processed Foods.
For example sausages, containing (Tetrasodium Diphosphate, Disodium Diphosphate, Ultra Processed Food. Yeast (because perhaps you want to bake your own UPF free bread), containing Ascorbic Acid, Alpha-Amylase, Ultra Processed Food. Cream of chicken soup, containing Polyphosphates and Sodium Phosphates, Ultra Processed Food.
This means that much of a typical supermarket would be out of bounds for a customer intent on avoiding the purchase of Ultra Processed Food.
Why is Ultra Processed Food (UPF) everywhere?
It seems that Ultra Processed Food is almost everywhere you look. But why is this? One major reason is that Ultra Processed Food can be extremely lucrative for food and drink companies. This is because Ultra Processed Food products can be less expensive to produce due to cheaper and lower quality ingredients.
For example, if you were making mayonnaise at home with a traditional recipe, you would normally add at least a couple of egg yolks. However, walk into a supermarket and pick up a bottle of mayonnaise made by a big brand, such as Hellmann’s Light Mayonnaise Squeezy 580ml, you will find that only 1.5% of the mayonnaise has egg yolk, and a dizzying number of Ultra Processed ingredients, such as cream powder, citrus fibre, guar gum, and xanthan gum have been added to lower costs and to improve the texture of the product.
Why Should I worry about Ultra Processed Food (UPF)?
Unfortunately, Ultra Processed Food has been linked with a worrying number of health conditions, such as obesity, heart disease, type two diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, heart attacks and strokes. In order to protect the health of yourself and your family, it is important to monitor and limit your intake of Ultra Processed Foods.
Summary
In summary, although Ultra Processed Food is not new, we now live in a world where it is everywhere. Ultra Processed Food allows major food companies to generate huge profits while putting the health of people and their families at risk.
To learn more, I recommend reading the book Ultra Processed People by Dr Chris Van Tulleken, who discusses Ultra Processed Food, and its implications, at length. Open Food Facts is a really helpful resource you can also use to check the ingredients in a product. It also displays which Nova group a product falls into as well as other details including a product’s Nutri-score and its Eco-score, which is handy if you want to check a product’s impact on the environment.