Thank you. 🐇

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.

Look up how to make cheese.

It is highly processed.

It is grass that has gone through a cow.

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.

True

Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.

But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic “forever chemicals”? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.

I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.

And look, I’m a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.

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.

The difference between doritos and bread is merely the cooking temperature and the flavoring content… One is supposed to be cheesy and salty the other sweet and greasy/moist.

“Real bread” meets that definition of ultra-processed. It’s a bunch of individual constituents (flour, water, yeast, etc.) that are mixed together.

The infuriating thing is that I believe that nutrition is more than just a linear addition of all the constituent ingredients (kinda the default view of nutrition science up through the 90’s), but addressing the shortcomings of that overly simple model shouldn’t mean making an even more simple model.

NOVA classification is the wrong answer to a legitimate problem.

A bread with only flour, water, salt would be a processed food only as flour is processed.

Would be as hard as stone and not bread at all.

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This is the correct answer.

Another way to distinguish the good from the bad: Good bread goes stale in a few days, it also is harder to chew. UPF bread will sit in your breadbin for 7 days without noticeable changes and is fluffy and relatively light.

The reason for the fluffiness and the shelf life is all the chemical additives.

You can see why the corporations love UPF bread - and why (if you didn’t know the health impact) you might want to buy UPF bread on your weekly shop.