Ultra processed foods

Many studies find a link between processed food and poor health outcomes. But they always seems to manage to avoid the obvious conclusion which seems to be screaming of the pages.

Lets look at processed food. Why would it make the food unhealthy to process it into meatpie or readymade meals, cookies or chips? Is it the machines? Hmm seems unlikely. Metal grinders or ovens or other processing tools would not likely influence the food differently than tools at home in a kitchen. Ok, so what are the other differences? Well, try to look at the ingredients of processed foods. A lot of ingredients with names which mean little to most people are added! Could that be it?

I would volunteer a guess that this would be a likely source. Now processed food is such a wide definition. It covers all sorts of things. There are not many ingredients which are in most or all processed foods though. So that would rule out ingredients which are in some foods but not others. This would take out many things, like product specific spices, specific meats, fish, flour etc.

So what is added to all processed foods and not normally added to home cooking?

Well - vegetable oils like Rapeseed oil, Sunflower oil and Canola oil (Rapeseed oil from Canada). It is hard to find processed foods which don’t contain vegetable oils. Even breads and cookies, chips, crisps, roasted nuts and many snacks contain vegetable oil. Mayonaise can be up to 70%!!!.

Well - for those who like ven diagrams - if you look for common ingredients I don’t think you can find a more likely candidate.

Vegetable oils are also a relatively new ingredient which was added to our food relatively recently. It does raise the question why these studies never look for underlying explanations.

I suspect we will see those studies in coming years!