UPFs should also be heavily taxed due to impact on health and mortality, says scientist who coined term
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are displacing healthy diets “all over the world” despite growing evidence of the risks they pose and should be sold with tobacco-style warnings, according to the nutritional scientist who first coined the term.
Prof Carlos Monteiro of the University of São Paulo will highlight the increasing danger UPFs present to children and adults at the International Congress on Obesity this week.
“UPFs are increasing their share in and domination of global diets, despite the risk they represent to health in terms of increasing the risk of multiple chronic diseases,” Monteiro told the Guardian ahead of the conference in São Paulo.
Will that achieve anything?
People know the effects, people see the effects, people don’t care.
Just seems like a silly outdated idea. Isn’t it well established that the best way to stop people from buying stuff like this is plain white packaging and advertising restrictions?
Do they?
I don’t even know what an “ultra processed food” •IS•.
How is it different than the “processed cheese product” that passes for most individually wrapped “American cheese” cheese slices? Or is that ultra processed?
Are Doritos ultra processed or just the regular kind of processed?
Which kind of ground beef qualifies for “ultra”? Only the pink slime or anything that’s been chemically treated?
I’m not being a pedantic contrary asshat, I legitimately do not know what qualifies something to be in this category and why it’s worse than normal processing.
Bpa from plastic tubing used in the processing of Annie’s organic leeched into the food. Is that considered contamination or a side effect of processing?
My dude, if you don’t know that Doritos are ultra processed food, this is living proof that the government needs to step in and provide warnings to people…
They’re processed, yes. The corn is milled, pressed into triangles, coated with preservative-heavy flavor powder and cooked in one order or another, possibly repeatedly.
What makes it ULTRA processed?
Frickin… most raw potatoes are “processed” because they’re typically not covered in topsoil when they get put in 5lb plastic bags.
A grass-fed organic, antibiotic free, roaming free-range massaged poterhouse steak is “processed” because it’s not still attached to the cow.
I’m trying to understand the definition, here. Almost everything is processed to some degree or another.
Is white flour ultra processed because they bleach and de-hull the wheat berries? Or only when it’s made into cake flour? Or do both of those count as “processed” and only “cake MIX” counts as “ultra processed”?
Am I making sense?
Ultra-processed food - Wikipedia
Linking a whole article to answer the question, is a hilarious way to prove his point that most people don’t know what an UPF is.
Hilarious? Folks don’t usually downvote things that make them laugh. It was my belief that putting a link up as a follow up to his question was helpful.
Laughing at not with. Hence the downvotes
Did you have a point relevant to UPF? The fact that my post above had maybe 9 upvotes and 12 downvotes does show that some folks found it helpful. In the early days of the publicly-available internet, folks tried to help each other. Now the world is on the edge of WWIII and folks are beating folks down where they think they can. I kinda miss the old internet. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ignoring your crazy old man rambling, people likely downvoted a link to Wikipedia because it’s low effort. If you’d taken a little time to give a short summary and included your link as a source, you would likely have received better reception.
No one wants to say, “I don’t understand this very well”, only to be told to go read about it. They want human conversation and explanation.
Holy cow, thank you!
I think it would help. Often times all the items on the shelf look the same with the exception of price.
You add a warning label on one item and the item next to it is $2 more and doesn’t have the warning, I am likely to buy the more expensive item.
Maybe. Maybe not.
But if we’re putting warnings on things and trying to influence behaviour around tobacco and alcohol consumption (don’t get me started on drugs) then we might as well do it with foods that can cause serious health problems and are arguably addictive.