Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report.
UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both.
UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits.
There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers’ efforts to optimise the “doses” of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University.
One of the authors, Prof Ashley Gearhardt of the University of Michigan, a clinical psychologist specialising in addiction, said her patients made the same links: “They would say, ‘I feel addicted to this stuff, I crave it – I used to smoke cigarettes [and] now I have the same habit but it’s with soda and doughnuts. I know it’s killing me; I want to quit, but I can’t.’”
There’s still the huge problem that nobody knows what an UPF actually is. Name a definition, somebody’s traditional home-cooked cuisine does it. Unless home-cooked is your definition, in which case you ascribe too much navigational prowess to food - it has no idea where it’s being cooked.
Yeah a food scientist remarked that technically you could call tofu an “ultra processed food”
Well I guess soda is safe to classify then.
Don’t know why traditional home cooked sodas.
Guess Spam too. You can’t really really get that text or taste by making it at home.
Hmmm definitely a lot of candies too.
Concoctions involving naturally occurring carbonated spring water were/are definitely a thing. That’s actually where the commercial idea came from in the first place.
Have been around as long as sugar, which is longer than industrialisation.
Not sure about spam, but isn’t that just canned ham? People definitely do home canning. And, it sounds like Spam is considered a central part of traditional Hawaiian food at this point. Why do you hate Native Hawaiians??? /s
Exactly. It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” type of things rather than a solid definition. Like Froot Loops definitely are UPF, but what about a salad in a plastic box? Sure, it’s been through a factory where it got chopped, mixed and packaged. That’s industrial scale food processing too, right?