My wife, Malathi, enjoys cooking fresh vegetables, fish and meat. Rather than buying a ready-to-eat meal from a store and just heating it up in minutes, she prefers to stand in the kitchen for an hour or more, cooking a meal that is usually quite healthy. And sometimes tasty too!
Actually, her meals are very often tasty, with only a few exceptions, which I won’t detail here, suffice to say that I am lobbying the Trump Administration to put a 500 percent tariff on imports of okra (lady’s fingers).
Malathi works hard to keep her family healthy through her cooking, just as many other women (and some men) do. But store-bought processed foods are becoming a larger part of diets around the world, especially among women with busy lives and men with busy wives. Just buy a frozen dinner, pop it in the microwave and you have a tasty meal that won’t kill you — not right away, anyway.
It eventually might, though. A new global study shows just how much harm we might be causing by eating ultra-processed foods (UPFs).
The study, which analyzed data from eight countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, United Kingdom, and United States), found that a 10 percent increase in the calories you get from UPFs gives you a 3 percent higher risk of dying prematurely — between the ages of 30 and 69. (Once you hit 70, you can only die maturely.)
The study, which appears in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, describes UPFs as ready-to-eat-or-heat industrial formulations that are made with ingredients extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories, with little or no whole foods in their composition. You won’t find the words “industrial formulation” on any food package though, because no one in their right mind would eat an “industrial formulation” that Beyoncé has not endorsed.
A high consumption of UPFs has been associated with 32 diseases, including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes, some types of cancer, and depression. But aside from that, they’re perfectly okay.
Study co-author Carlos Augusto Monteiro, emeritus professor at Brazil’s University of São Paulo, coined the term “ultra-processed” in 2009 when he developed the Nova classification, which assigns foods to one of four groups based on processing.
Group 1 consists of unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, grains, legumes, fresh meat, eggs, milk and crushed spices. If you get all your calories from this group, you might live to be 200.
Group 2 consists of processed culinary ingredients, such as olive oil and other oils produced through crushing seeds, nuts, or fruits; salt, sugar, vinegar, honey, butter, and other substances used to season and cook. If you get all your calories from this group, you might be an ant.
Group 3 consists of processed foods, which are made by adding Group 2 to Group 1. These include cheese, canned vegetables, salted nuts, fruits in syrup and canned fish. Even bread, cakes and snacks can fall into this group, as long as they’re made predominantly from Group 1 foods with Group 2 ingredients.
Group 4 consists of the foods we should all try to avoid: ultra-processed foods (UPFs). To identify a UPF, just look at the list of ingredients and if you have no idea what some of them are, you are probably holding a UPF. Drop it immediately and run!
UPFs might have varieties of sugar such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose. They might have modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils. Interesterified fats are a type of fat used in food processing to replace trans fats (which the Trump Administration does not recognize).
UPFs might also have protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and “mechanically separated meat.”
Anytime you see the words “mechanically separated” on a food package, the best thing you can do is mechanically separate yourself from the food. Drop it and run!
