Americans get more than half their calories from ultra-processed foods, CDC report says

I don't think Americans eat healthy, but "ultra processed" not defined by any metric is in favor of the manufacturer. Something can be unprocessed and unhealthy and vice versa. Better regulation would help.

The article claims instant oatmeal is bad because it's sugary, salty, and has other additives then goes on to recommend eating oatmeal and adding sugar yourself. I'm not sure I understand why it's much better for you.

but “ultra processed” not defined by any metric
This is the shit that grinds me. You have the world's information at your finger tips and you're making a wild claim that there isn't a definition for something and basing your argument around that. You have gone this far in your life with the belief that there is no definition "but any metric" for Ultra Process foods?
Don't you think that's a little absurd to think this? I mean, it's literally in the word. Not processed – ultra processed; meaning, roughly, that the food or ingredients in that food are processed again after initial processing.
What I will grant you is that this word is sometimes thrown around inappropriately. You (and us all) have every right to be upset by this confusion and misrepresentation.
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/what-know-about-processed-and-ultra-processed-food
Category 4: Ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations made from food components. They include additives that are rare or nonexistent in culinary use, like emulsifiers, hydrogenated oils, synthetic colors, texture improvers or flavor enhancers. Think chips, soda, instant soup, pastries and mass-produced breads.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/un-decade-of-nutrition-the-nova-food-classification-and-the-trouble-with-ultraprocessing/2A9776922A28F8F757BDA32C3266AC2A
Ultra-processed foods, such as soft drinks, sweet or savoury packaged snacks, reconstituted meat products and pre-prepared frozen dishes, are not modified foods but formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives, with little if any intact Group 1 food.
Ingredients of these formulations usually include those also used in processed foods, such as sugars, oils, fats or salt. But ultra-processed products also include other sources of energy and nutrients not normally used in culinary preparations. Some of these are directly extracted from foods, such as casein, lactose, whey and gluten. Many are derived from further processing of food constituents, such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils, hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, maltodextrin, invert sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.
Additives in ultra-processed foods include some also used in processed foods, such as preservatives, antioxidants and stabilizers. Classes of additives found only in ultra-processed products include those used to imitate or enhance the sensory qualities of foods or to disguise unpalatable aspects of the final product. These additives include dyes and other colours, colour stabilizers; flavours, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners; and processing aids such as carbonating, firming, bulking and anti-bulking, de-foaming, anti-caking and glazing agents, emulsifiers, sequestrants and humectants.
A multitude of sequences of processes is used to combine the usually many ingredients and to create the final product (hence ‘ultra-processed’). The processes include several with no domestic equivalents, such as hydrogenation and hydrolysation, extrusion and moulding, and pre-processing for frying.
The overall purpose of ultra-processing is to create branded, convenient (durable, ready to consume), attractive (hyper-palatable) and highly profitable (low-cost ingredients) food products designed to displace all other food groups. Ultra-processed food products are usually packaged attractively and marketed intensively.
- Imagine doing all that and not reading the article.
- Is it wrong for me to want my own extruder to make puffed starchy treats? I have a hankering for chile lime ginger corn puffs but no one makes them.
  I also want a solar powered freeze drier/sublimator.
- Well said!
Agreed. Early on, the article points to burgers as a main culprit. I just happened to make myself a burger yesterday. Other than coarsely grinding the cut of beef (chuck), what was so ultra processed here? Was the beef so very different than the steak I could have made instead? I would imagine that the authors had envisioned a more heavily processed, meat from a tube sort of burger than mine, but that's the problem with communicating information like this. The imprecision of the language is killing the messaging and undermining the research.
- The bun, any pickle and your sauces and relishes would be the places to look for ultra processed food ingredients.
- The cheese and the bread are almost certainly ultra-processed, as would be the condiments.
- Other than coarsely grinding the cut of beef (chuck), what was so ultra processed here?
  Lol
  Are you really this ignorant of meat production in the United States, or are you just playing dumb?
  There's a world of difference between a ground, pre-made frozen burger patty, ground beef, and even a run of the mill steak in the US.
  Take a look at the fucking package on the product you're buying. Frozen burger patties come with ingredient lists a mile fucking long, and ground beef packages usually come with an origin marker saying how the cattle in the package might have originated from three different continents.
  At one point, I gave enough of a shit about this stuff to bother going to a butcher and getting them to give me a stink eye while they ground up a low quality steak so I could at least be reasonably assured that it came from one cow. Ultimately, I mostly just gave up on beef burgers.
  Nearly every even partially processed product in the United States is like this. For example, pre-cut romaine lettuce is much more likely to make you sick, because it's like sampling lettuce from twenty area factory farms downstream from the meat factory.
Ya, agreed.This is the same thing as "natural" foods. Just doesn't make much sense in any context that matters from a health perspective.
Ideally, the food consists exclusively of the ingredients you intend to consume. "Ultra processed" as I understand it means the ingredients list contains many things that "have" to be there due to the intermediate steps to get it into your mouth (including marketing/presentation).
The most obvious ones are things that make it shelf-stable for months or years, but the less obvious ones are additives that mask flavors that were inadvertently added by the machines responsible for cooking, cutting, and packaging the food. Apparently they figured out decades ago that salt is good at hiding the taste of metal...
So if you instead just buy some oats and sugar and put it together yourself, you circumvent all of that tomfoolery.

"Ultra-processed food" is a meaningless phrase. The definitions for it are so broad as to cover everything from kimchi to Snickers.

Define the ingredients that are bad ffs. Stop with this ridiculous bs.

I agree with you in general and recognize the validity of your point, but in this particular case we all know they mean a combination of 'meat, brain and bone slurry', 'HFCS-infused everything' and 'chlorine bleached <8% protein wheat flour'.
- we all know they mean
  This is my point. No, "we" don't.
  combination of ‘meat, brain and bone slurry’, ‘HFCS-infused everything’ and ‘chlorine bleached <8% protein wheat flour’.
  Thanks for proving my point. You just described everything from toast to sausages and even laced in some unscientific thoughts on HFCS (hint: it's sugar, sugar is bad but HFCS is no worse than sugar).
  "You know - stuff I hear on Tik Tok is bad for you" is not a scientific conclusion.
- No, the study cited in the article doesn’t share your definition.
You're spreading misinformation/FUD. At a minimum, Ultra Processed Food means it contains ingredients that are added because they "have" to to get it to your mouth, not because anyone wants you to put those ingredients in your body.
I agree that UPF is not rigorously defined yet, but to claim it is "so broad as to cover everything from kimchi to Snickers" is absurd. If it's literally just kimchi, it's not processed. If it's kimchi that has a shelf-stable additive, and a dye to make it look pleasing, and chemicals to hide the taste of the machines that made it, then it's processed.
If your FUD stems from your own ignorance about the subject matter, that's a you problem, quit flaunting it around. If it stems from being a hired shill of General Mills, et al., then I hope you're getting paid well.
- What would make the kimchi 'ultra processed'?
  I agree with the original commenter that these terms are sensationalist bullshit perpetuated by scumbags who don't mind manipulating useful idiots.
  Also, you don't know what FUD is.
- If it stems from being a hired shill of General Mills, et al., then I hope you’re getting paid well.
  OMG. 🤣
I love kimchi, some of my best cubicle-clearing work starts with kimchi.
I have issues with sensitivity to unhealthy foods and even some vegetables set me off. Beans, potatoes, rice, sweet peas, anything spicy like onions, garlic, ginger, or peppers. Honey as well, due to being made up mostly of simple carbohydrates. A box of granola bars would spoil my day, a few slices of pizza would kick up arrhythmia, and a shot of vodka would put me in the hospital.
If it's not a plain fruit, vegetable, nut, or meat like fish or chicken, it's probably bad to at least some degree.
- If it’s not a plain fruit, vegetable, nut, or meat like fish or chicken, it’s probably bad to at least some degree.
  That sounds like stience to me.
If you didn't cook it with your own hands - don't trust it. My mom was an old school Italian who made everything from scratch - including sauces. I was lucky enough to be raised in that environment. Bless that lady - she didn't teach me but I watched. Today I love to cook but it's difficult and yeah expensive... it's not that much more if you do wise things. Today the wife and I will buy 2 whole chickens from Sams club ( 18 to 20 $ ) and carve them up ourselves into 7 or 8 bags of breasts.. wings, etc ( 35 to 45 $ if you buy it individually ) . The remains will be saved for stock or broth and put in bags in the freezer. We've re- taken up pressure canning. Every veg we use, all the trimmings we would have thrown out is saved and used in the stocks. We got some 2.5 foot long pork tenderloins from the same place - like my forearm thick for maybe 22 $ and I cut chops and made packs of 4. I got maybe 24 chops which would have cost well over 100 $ just for the hassle of spending some time in the kitchen with some tunes and a knife. You can stretch a budget quite a ways if you don't rely on purely convenience.

CDC director bouta get fired

Nope. They're bucking for a promotion. Ultra-processed foods is something RFK Jr. has been bitching about for a while. He thinks everyone should go back to a more natural diet. Like eating roadkill.
- To be fair, I agree with RFK on this one. If we all started eating natural whole foods, instead of all the fast food and shit we eat, it'd fix a lot of problems.
- Everybody needs a brain worm

What does “ultra processed” mean? I can’t get the article to load.

Part of the problem is simply defining ultra-processed foods.
The new CDC report used the most common definition based on the four-tier Nova system developed by Brazilian researchers that classifies foods according to the amount of processing they undergo. Such foods tend to be “hyperpalatable, energy-dense, low in dietary fiber and contain little or no whole foods, while having high amounts of salt, sweeteners and unhealthy fats,” the CDC report said
- I really appreciate that, thank you!

You know how they feed farm animals low grade corn and grains, junk byproduct of all kind of food processing, just what they need so we can get what we want out of them…everything is optimized for extraction.

They used to need us to work their factories, back when we were a manufacturing economy. They’re not bringing back the manufacturing economy, you gotta be a goddamn moron to believe that.

So if you’re not gonna pay up and eat the cheapest, shittiest food possible, and not harass them about education and healthcare and your fucking “happiness”…what the fuck do they need you around for?

The cheapest crap is fed to animals to extract more profit. The cheapest crap is mixed into manufacturing the food to make it more profitable. The cheapest crap is fed to humans to make them more profitable.
Draft pool for WWIII
- 07

I would say this is almost certainly skewed by income, with the poorest Americans getting almost all of their calories from ultra processed foods, and the share decreasing with income. I would be curious to see that spread because one of the more fucked up things about this is that there are a lot of people who eat this stuff exclusively, and this number kind of hides that.

A tiny bag of chips is over $5 these days, and has less than 200 calories. Potatoes at fancy grocery stores are about $1/pound, and you can get them much cheaper if you go to "poor people" stores.
You can't get a double cheeseburger for $1 anymore.
It used to be true, they got people hooked on junk and fast food in the early 2000s, but those days are gone, people spend WAY TOO MUCH on junk food.
It's absolutely cheaper to buy fresh and eat healthy. It won't feel as good in your brain as good because it won't have all the addictive shit that makes junk food bad, but if you learn to cook it'll taste better.
Even lower income people have time to cook, but people would rather feed another addiction (spend hours on TV and TikTok, but one hour cooking is too much) and ordering delivery. Uber Eats sure doesn't profit off rich people only...
- people would rather feed another addiction (spend hours on TV and TikTok, but one hour cooking is too much)
  I’d argue that people engage in these activities because people are tired from working too hard for too little for too long
Probably also skewed by the fact that ultra processed foods are by default more calorie dense, therefore most of a day's calories might come from that.
- It is, but that doesn't mean that poor people don't still eat more highly processed foods. Not smoking or using drugs is also way cheaper than doing those things, but both are more prevalent among poor people in the US.

It shows in our cognitive abilities.

Hey now. Not all of us are dumb as fuck naturally. We defunded our education system for more than a generation too, we've been working for it.

Walk into a grocery store, 90% of it is ultra processed

Large portions of the United States don’t have access to grocery stores that carry fresh produce

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1411126/episodes/17271368-ultra-processed-foods.mp3

Maintenance Phase is a dope podcast that covers the bullshit of the diet/wellness world. It's appropriately scientifically-skeptical.

This episode adds some much needed context to the idea of "processed-food".

Ultra processed food is way more expensive than real food, so it's a shame if people are using money as an excuse.

Availability may be a larger problem. But with nearly every American (over 90%) living within 15 minutes of a Walmart (at the very least), this seems like an exceedingly rare problem for the majority of people.

I invite you to come shop at my Walmart :) We were one of the first stores in the country to get those little electronic price tags, so you can't say with any certainty what the price of anything is, anymore.
If the vegetables haven't already gone bad on the shelves, they will within a day at your place, and make sure to check the expiration date on every single package you pick up, because they're often past gone. Also, don't trust the frozen foods, they defrost in the trucks and on open pallets in the middle of the aisles.

THE AVERAGE AMERICAN. I don't eat that bullshit :P