ultra-processed food: copied from the ABC

What is ultra-processed food and how do I avoid it?

ABC Health & Wellbeing

By Tegan Taylor

They're cheap to produce, designed to last for a long time without spoiling, convenient and engineered to taste delicious.

But ultra-processed foods are increasingly being recognised as unhealthy — even aside from the high salt, fat and sugar content that most of them usually have.

Last month, researchers showed a cause-and-effect relationship between ultra-processed food And weight gain.

A couple of weeks later, two more studies linked these ffods with disease and death.

But what actually is ultra-processed food? And if you want to cut down on it, what should you be looking for?

What is ultra-processed food?

Ultra-processed food is a category in the NOVA food classification system, which is recognised by global health agencies including the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, and used by many researchers globally.

The system clusters food into four groups based on the amount of processing it has undergone:

1.       Unprocessed and minimally processed foods: Examples include fruit, vegetables, nuts, meat, eggs, milk. Minimal processing may include drying, pasteurisation, cooking or chilling.

2.       Processed culinary ingredients: Examples include oils, butter, sugar and salt. They undergo some processing to make products that can be used in cooking Group 1 foods but they're not meant to be consumed by themselves.

3.       Processed foods: Examples include preserved fruit and vegetables, canned fish, cheese and fresh bread. They're usually made from two or three ingredients.

4.       Ultra-processed foods: These undergo a multitude of processes including many that couldn't be recreated in the home, such as hydrogenation, extrusion, moulding and pre-processing for frying. They contain little, if any, intact Group 1 foods and are industrial formulations that will usually have five or more ingredients, many of which are designed to mimic the qualities of Group 1 foods. Ingredients might include non-sugar sweeteners, hydrolysed proteins, hydrogenated oils and emulsifiers. And they're usually packaged attractively and promoted with intensive marketing.

According to the NOVA system, examples of typical ultra-processed products are:

Sweet or savoury packaged snacks; ice-cream, chocolate, candies (confectionery); mass-produced packaged breads and buns; margarines and spreads; cookies (biscuits), pastries, cakes, and cake mixes; breakfast 'cereals', 'cereal' and 'energy' bars; 'energy' drinks; milk drinks, 'fruit' yoghurts and 'fruit' drinks; cocoa drinks; meat and chicken extracts and 'instant' sauces; infant formulas, follow-on milks, other baby products; 'health' and 'slimming' products such as powdered or 'fortified' meal and dish substitutes; and many ready-to-heat products including pre-prepared pies and pasta and pizza dishes; poultry and fish 'nuggets' and 'sticks', sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products, and powdered and packaged 'instant' soups, noodles and desserts.

More studies are linking ultra-processed foods with disease. Does our focus need to shift?

By having food categories that are globally recognised, researchers can be more precise in measuring the effects of different diets, said Gyorgy Scrinis, a food and nutrition expert from the University of Melbourne.

"We're at the very early stage of knowing exactly what the impacts of the various types of processing techniques and the various ingredients are, but we know this is an area of concern," Dr Scrinis said.

"What this research is telling us is that it's the processing per se, that is part of the problem. It's not just the nutrient profile or the high sugar and salt, for example, or the fats that's necessarily the problem here."

Ultra-processed foods make up a substantial proportion of the Australian diet, he said, probably accounting for close to half of our energy consumption, on average.

How to spot ultra-processed food

While the NOVA system is used by many researchers and international organisations, you're not likely to find it on food packaging in Australia. But if you know what to look for, you can figure out which category a food would fall into.

Reading food labels is the simplest way to spot foods that are ultra-processed — not least because a large proportion of them come in packets.

While not all packaged food is ultra-processed, one of the characteristics of this category of food is that it is designed to have a long shelf life.

Conversely, unprocessed and minimally processed foods often come without any packaging.

On the food label, look at the ingredients list. Would these ingredients be likely to be found in a home kitchen?

"If you see a very long ingredients list with lots of chemical-sounding names, that's probably a good indication it almost definitely is an ultra-processed food."

Ingredients that are generally  only found in ultra-processed foods  include:

·         Some directly extracted from foods, such as casein, lactose, whey, and gluten

·         Some derived from further processing of food constituents, such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils, hydrolysed proteins, soy protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar and high fructose corn syrup

·         Additives such as dyes and other colours, colour stabilisers, flavours, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners

·         Processing aids such as carbonating, firming, bulking and anti-bulking, de-foaming, anti-caking and glazing agents, emulsifiers, sequestrants and humectants

"The message is to begin to be more aware and also wary of, not just high levels of sugar and salt and fats as we're always being told, but to be very picky about how the foods are being processed and broken down," Dr Scrinis said.

"How has it got to you in this form? What's been done to this food and are there some intact ingredients that we can see there?"

With flavour, low-cost and convenience often appearing in the same brightly coloured package, it's no big surprise that ultra-processed foods form such a large part of our diet.

They're also often marketed as health foods, in the form of meal replacements, diet drinks and breakfast cereals.

Dr Scrinis acknowledged many Australians put ultra-processed food into their shopping trollies because they were "cheap and convenient", but hoped the growing body of research would send a message to governments and food manufacturers that change was needed.

"It's not simply a choice that people make. There are structural issues there in terms of people's affordability and availability of these foods," he said.

"So it's not about cutting them out completely, but it's just being aware how much these foods make up to the totality of our diets."