It’s Time to End the Tyranny of Ultra-Processed Food
It’s Time to End the Tyranny of Ultra-Processed Food
Industrially processed pizzas, cereals, and convenience foods are responsible for a host of diseases. Policymakers and doctors need to lead the food fight.
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I work in this space (food processing) and deal with this negative public perception all the time. I really think it’s misplaced. The degree to which something is processed is not a good indicator of it’s healthfulness. Tomato paste is a highly processed food, those tomatoes go through the ringer to end up in a little can you can use year round. Those little packs of peeled and sliced apples they sell to put in lunch boxes are a incredibly “processed”; in order to keep them fresh the entire composition of the atmosphere inside those little bags has to be modified, and the bag itself has to be semi-permeable so it can deal with the ethylene gas that the apple slices release.
All that to say that processing makes ultra-unhealthy foods possible, but I don’t think it’s a good metric that we should base policy off of. If we want to regulate the area it should be of the nutritional value of the products. Of course that’s harder to legislate because people get mad when you try to restrict what they can eat, unlike restricting processing which most people don’t know anything about.
Couldn't agree more. The processing is a distraction. Good food can be heavily processed and bad food can lightly processed. The issue is that the processing of food makes some foods easier for overconsumption. That's not an issue than can be legislated at the root cause and anything else will have unintended side effects.
