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What are Ultra Processed Foods (UPF’s)?
Humans have always processed our foods - we’ve added salt to preserve, ground grains into flour and pressed for oils. We’ve ground coffee, dried tea leaves, put food in bottles, in tins and a lot more. This type of processing is fine as the nutrition remains intact. But now, we’ve gone overboard with the processing and many food manufacturers are ultra-processing food. In the 1990’s in Brazil, Dr Carlos Monteiro and his team established a food classification called NOVA which, for the first time identified Ultra Processed Food (UPF). Basically Dr Monteiro’s team classified UPF’s as 'highly processed food, containing very little, if any food, have over five ingredients including additives and chemicals that you wouldn’t find at home, made very cheaply by food corporations and have a long shelf life.' There’s a lot of definitions around but you get the picture – cheap ingredients, added sugars, salts, saturated fats, thickeners, stabilisers, emulsifiers, preservatives and other synthetic ingredients.
It's not just about the ingredients
It’s important to realise that it’s not only that the ingredients in UPF’s are of poor quality, it’s also how the ‘food’ is made. Food manufacturers don’t have to tell us the processes they use to make their products and neither do they have to tell us why these processes are used. Typically, UPF’s are made by a series of industrial processes that include fractioning (splitting whole foods into substances), chemical modifications and then putting these substances back together using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying, to create a ‘food’. It's obvious these processes maximise the use of cheap ingredients and create hyper-palatable products. But I also wonder how manipulating the original food structure could affect our kids. In some countries this is addressed in thier National Guidelines, but in Australia and many other countries, governments do not address how the types of food processing affects the nature and quality of food.
Why are UPF's really bad for us?
In the last few decades (yes, it takes a long time to get to us), scientists have been doing significant research around the effects of UPF’s, and what they’ve discovered so far is shocking. A growing number of reputable scientists and researchers around the world, are finding the same things – that high consumption of UPF’s can lead to obesity, strokes and heart attacks, type 2 diabetes, depression, high blood pressure, certain types of cancers and the list goes on. A recent publication in The Lancet has found that people born in the 1980s and 1990s (people my daughters’ ages, maybe your age too) have more cancers than any other age group. The medical researchers stated that ‘some dietary patterns (eg, high in saturated fats, refined grains, ultra-processed foods, and sugar ….) ...have been associated with increased risks of some cancers, most consistently for colorectal and breast cancers.’ So far, the research on kids and a high UPF diet shows larger waistlines, diabetes, tooth decay (due to lack of minerals in the body) and overall malnourishment. Can you believe it – our kids are becoming malnourished.​
How much is too much?
We can’t always make everything from scratch and we all love an UPF sometimes. We don’t have guidelines yet about how much is too much so I guess it’s up to you to decide how much UPF you and your kids are eating every day and every week. In the UK and US, 60% of the average diet comes from UPF’s. And Australia is not far behind – around 45% (and climbing) of the average Australian diet is made up of UPF’s. UPF’s are addictive. It’s not easy weaning the kids off UPF’s as our kids are addicted to their artificial and loaded taste. We’re also surrounded by UPF’s, bombarded by them and the marketing to buy them is ridiculous. But there is good food in supermarkets that our kids do love. It’s just about being smart and making the switch. If we can make breakfast, lunch and dinner, with the good stuff, we can change the world.