The supermarket bread that looks and feels like a squeaky toy. Best to avoid that one.

I remember the first time I visited the States, and bought a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter from the grocery store on my first night to make toast the following morning. Boy, did the unexpected sugar hit at breakfast time wake me up! HFCS really is in everything over there. Not at all surprised that packaged bread is classed as UPF.

Even for bread, is it all bread?

It’s most bread. There will always be a few outliers, but they’re a tiny minority.

Is it added gluten?

Gluten isn’t ‘added’ to bread, it’s a naturally occurring component of grains like wheat, rye and barley. Gluten free bread is made from alternative grains that naturally do not contain gluten (sorghum, rice, buckwheat, etc.). Gluten isn’t unhealthy unless you have Coeliac disease or a gluten sensitivity/intolerance. It won’t factor into UPF status.

Is it a specific preservative?

The ideal bread is preservative free. Mass-produced bread is almost never preservative free, because the time it takes for the bread to be baked, shipped, put on the shelf in a shop, picked up by you and taken home to eat is longer than it takes to go mouldy (particularly if it’s in a plastic bag). Hence, they add a preservative to extend the shelf life.

A bakery is less likely to use preservatives, because they bake fresh daily, based on customer demand. Homemade bread also doesn’t need preservatives for pretty much the same reason.

No need to demonise preservatives, or split hairs over “better” or “worse” ones, but worth being mindful of the amount you consume.

Is it only bread with bleached flour?

Bleached flour improves performance for baking (making lighter, fluffier loaves with more ‘bounce’ and chewiness from the gluten), but also strips out a lot of the minerals that are beneficial for your health. Mass-produced bread tends to use bleached flour, because a white and fluffy loaf is more appealling to consumers than a denser and darker one, and the lighter consistency makes it less filling, leading you to consume more of it, which means more money for them. Given the choice between bleached and unbleached flour, choose the latter if you can.

So, yes, ‘mass-produced and packaged’ does tend to correlate directly with the overall nutritional content.

Costco makes prepared food that is equivalent to what you’d make at home.

I can only speak for myself on this one, but I’ve never seen a pre-prepared meal at Costco that is the equivalent of what I’d make at home. It tends to be carb, fat and animal protein heavy, and very light on veg. My cooking is the opposite (lots of veg, some complex carbs, not too much fat or animal protein).

Just like the preservatives and bleached flour in bread, companies who mass-produce food are looking to use the cheapest ingredients with the longest shelf life to maximise their profits. Makes good business sense for them, but not good health/nutritional sense for consumers.

Ooh, semolina, nice! Love me some Pane Siciliano… Think you just inspired my next loaf 🤭

(Highly recommend breadmaking as a hobby, if the spirit moves you. Very meditative - particularly the kneading - with bonus baked goods when you’re done!)

Focusing on ultra processed foods specifically calls out the obvious problem - we were significantly healthier before these foods were invented, and are less healthy after.

But what confounding variables have also increased during this time? Do we have endocrine disruptors in our drinking water or food packaging or in the foods themselves, from microplastics or whatever? Have we been fertilizing our fields with industrial waste containing toxic “forever chemicals”? Have we become more sedentary at home and at work? I mean, probably yes to all of these.

I do believe that nutrition is more than simple linear addition of the components in a food. But insights can still be derived from analyzing non-linear combinations (like studying the role of fiber or water or even air in foods for the perception of satiety or the speed that subject ingest food), or looking towards specific interactions between certain subsets of the population with specific nutrients. We can still derive information from the ingredients, even if we move past the idea that each ingredient acts on the body completely independently from the other ingredients in that food.

And look, I’m a skeptic of the NOVA system, but actually do appreciate its contribution in increasing awareness of those non-linear combinations. But I see it as, at most, a bridge to better science, not good science in itself.

So why not focus on the foods containing that stuff, rather than the superficial resemblance of all foods that kinda look like the foods that contain that stuff?

Let’s say you have a problem with potassium bromate, a dough additive linked to cancer that remains legal in U.S. bread but is banned in places like Canada, the UK, the EU.

So let’s have that conversation about bromate! Let’s not lump all industrially produced breads into that category, even in countries where bromate has been banned.

Why is your font size smaller than everyone else’s? Very odd.

“Use your best judgement” to read ingredient lables and spend a few hours looking up what you don’t recognize.

You’ll quickly get a grip on what is processed and what is ultra-processed, and why the later is not so great.

Slicing them to vastly multiply their surface area so that more Maillard reaction can occur, and it’s that Maillard reaction that causes the yummy browning, and causes the proteins and starches to change and become potentially harmful/carcinogenic, plus yes the addition of fatty oil that wasn’t present at all.

A lot of us think of “processing” as like, something a food processor does - reducing and changing the form. But it’s also the chemical changes that occur during cooking as a result of the physical processes. When you look at the before/after of a potato and an equal volume of fries, it’s apparent you’ve drastically changed the base food.

I think they might be referencing the pre-packaged-already-popped popcorn or the microwavable version.

I’m rather surprised you are able to pop corn with olive oil. Temp-wise you would hit the smoke point well before the oil was hot enough to pop the kernals, which would be smoky misery in the kitchen.

True

Thank you. 🐇

Firstly, pasteurisation is most definitely a process.

Secondly, it’s very unlikely you are buying milk which has only been pasteurised, it has very likely at least also been homogenised, after being mixed from various different sources in order to produce a mill standardised fat & milk solids. The vast majority of the time rather than just being blended, it has been centrifugally separated into fractions that are then recombined in order to create a standard product.

None of this is really bad, btw, but it is 100% processing.

Look up how to make cheese.

It is highly processed.

It is grass that has gone through a cow.

I’m not sure about milk, but high temp heating is not something that occurs naturally. I am pretty sure heating kills both good and bad stuff so it chemically alters milks, even if minimally. If it is altered chemically or it’s nutrient profile changes or it goes through a process that doesn’t occur regularly, naturally in nature, I consider it processed.

Some form of processing is necessary to prevent disease, i am not against processed stuff to prevent disease.

Eating raw wheat seed, our body can’t absorb anything, eating powered wheat we still can’t absorb much nutrient. The moment we add water and heat and make bread, we break the cell walls, and now we can absorb most of the nutrients. It also raising the glycemic index of wheat.

I don’t consider fermented (decomposition) stuff like yogurt as processed since it can occur naturally, I just see it as a different food, like a seed is a food that can naturally become a plant that is also a food.

Tobacco? Should have gone through, but it didn’t.

Wraps.

Sigh… I get my wholegrain pre-packaged. I guess I’ll die.

So… leading German “Toastbrot” brand, Goldentoast, their “American Sandwich”:

Wheat flour, water, wheat sourdough (wheat flour, water), canola oil, sugar, yeast, salt, acidity regular sodium acetates, fava bean flour. May contain traces of soy, milk, mustard and lupins.

I do wonder why they feel the need to have an acidity regulator, the sourdough those industrial outfits are using is made using pure-bred strains, highly replicable and generally flexible enough to get the exact amount and type of acidity (lactic vs. acetic acid) that you want. Fava bean flour last definitely looks like they did quite some engineering, those are minuscule adjustments to the overall flour mix. Used as a characteristic ingredient you’d use 20% of flourweight of the stuff, thereabouts, and about 5% if you want it for dough properties.

Is it good bread, no, but nutritionally it doesn’t really look worse than any other white bread. Actually American bread would be highly illegal over here.