American is the worst food in the whole world. Its better to go hungry than partaking in the excesses of highly processed american diet. Go to any supermarket and check the ingredients of american food and you will find stuff like malto dextrose, inverse sugar, dyglycerides, corn starch and high fructose syrup. All of these are rubbish ingredients which pollutes your body and makes you addicted.
Stay away from american food for your own health. Buy EU/Canada/India/China/SEA etc but do not touch american products.
Very common in EU processed foods. We produce it ourselves when breaking down starches in the stomach.
Inverted sugar syrup
Is what you get when you take sugar, any acid, add gentle heat, and wait a while, though the industry uses enzymes instead of acid (it’s just easier). Splits up the sucrose into equal parts glucose and fructose which would happen in the stomach, anyway. Equivalent to sugar nutrition-wise, but doesn’t crystallise. In the days of ole, sugar bakers would produce it from sugar and cream of tartar (i.e. acid from grapes). Not to be confused with high-fructose corn syrup which is fructose-heavy and thus loads up your liver more than ordinary sugar.
Mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids
Are part of our fat metabolism, and get produced during ordinary food preparation. Used as emulsifiers.
corn starch
Is… corn starch? Corn is a quite starchy plant. Take a kernel, remove the yellow shell, grind up the rest. Corn starch is to corn flour what white flour is to whole-grain flour.
Not terribly common over here you usually see potato starch but it’s basically the same in function and nutrition.
high fructose syrup
Yeah don’t. We’re not built to sustain high-fructose diets. In nature only fruit have that kind of nutritional makeup and they’re only available during part of the year and precisely at the point where you want to increase your fat storages because it’s summer and you’re eating for winter. All fructose goes directly to fat storage, we can’t use it directly.
Don’t get me wrong I’m highly critical of processed foods but your evil list is quite harmless, it’s within the range of what you can produce in your own kitchen. Stuff legal in the US but not here is stuff like bromated vegetable oil.
I am basing my understanding on the works of Chris Van Tulekken and he had mentioned these to be particularly damaging in the short term as well as long term.
Happy to change my opinion if you can give sources on claims that all of this is natural and there is no harm to our body at all by consuming these.
Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, ‘fruit juice concentrates’, invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and ‘mechanically separated meat’) or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.
Fruit concentrates and inverted sugar have centuries-old culinary tradition, dextrose (i.e. glucose) and fructose are naturally occurring, as said the ratio and amount is the issue not their presence, casein and whey protein are in, well, whey, milk, butter, not a new ingredient, emulsifiers there’s no mayo without it, mayo uses lecithin as emulsifier, that’s why there’s yolk in there, thickener is traditionally starches, particularly roux, the OG gelling agent is gelatin in Europe, Asia also already had stuff like arrowroot. Colours? Red beet, saffron, sepia (cuttlefish ink), it’s not like cooks didn’t care about colour before industrialisation. Don’t ask whether there’s colouring in there, ask what kind of stuff the thing is coloured with. I won’t get started on “flavour enhancers” MF why do you think people put fish sauce, soy sauce, mushrooms, or tomatoes in things. Because MSG, shit’s in there.
All in all, and they say that themselves (“operationally distinguishable” aka “we’re casting a net while wearing a blindfold”) this is a way to classify things as “ultra-processed”, but in itself says nothing about how healthy or unhealthy any of the ingredients are, just that they’re used by Big Munch, and on top of that they’re getting the “no culinary use” thing wrong.
Canada isn’t necessarily great either, and European grocery stores are full of “foods” containing the same cursed ingredients. There’s a big difference in volume of crap though, and alternatives are much more accessible than they are in the US.
American is the worst food in the whole world. Its better to go hungry than partaking in the excesses of highly processed american diet. Go to any supermarket and check the ingredients of american food and you will find stuff like malto dextrose, inverse sugar, dyglycerides, corn starch and high fructose syrup. All of these are rubbish ingredients which pollutes your body and makes you addicted. Stay away from american food for your own health. Buy EU/Canada/India/China/SEA etc but do not touch american products.
Very common in EU processed foods. We produce it ourselves when breaking down starches in the stomach.
Is what you get when you take sugar, any acid, add gentle heat, and wait a while, though the industry uses enzymes instead of acid (it’s just easier). Splits up the sucrose into equal parts glucose and fructose which would happen in the stomach, anyway. Equivalent to sugar nutrition-wise, but doesn’t crystallise. In the days of ole, sugar bakers would produce it from sugar and cream of tartar (i.e. acid from grapes). Not to be confused with high-fructose corn syrup which is fructose-heavy and thus loads up your liver more than ordinary sugar.
Are part of our fat metabolism, and get produced during ordinary food preparation. Used as emulsifiers.
Is… corn starch? Corn is a quite starchy plant. Take a kernel, remove the yellow shell, grind up the rest. Corn starch is to corn flour what white flour is to whole-grain flour.
Not terribly common over here you usually see potato starch but it’s basically the same in function and nutrition.
Yeah don’t. We’re not built to sustain high-fructose diets. In nature only fruit have that kind of nutritional makeup and they’re only available during part of the year and precisely at the point where you want to increase your fat storages because it’s summer and you’re eating for winter. All fructose goes directly to fat storage, we can’t use it directly.
Don’t get me wrong I’m highly critical of processed foods but your evil list is quite harmless, it’s within the range of what you can produce in your own kitchen. Stuff legal in the US but not here is stuff like bromated vegetable oil.
I am basing my understanding on the works of Chris Van Tulekken and he had mentioned these to be particularly damaging in the short term as well as long term. Happy to change my opinion if you can give sources on claims that all of this is natural and there is no harm to our body at all by consuming these.
That’s popsci. If you want to argue specific ingredients please link his sources he used for his list, otherwise:
Also the definition that nutritional scientists use for “ultra-processed food” is… culinarily problematic. Quoth:
Fruit concentrates and inverted sugar have centuries-old culinary tradition, dextrose (i.e. glucose) and fructose are naturally occurring, as said the ratio and amount is the issue not their presence, casein and whey protein are in, well, whey, milk, butter, not a new ingredient, emulsifiers there’s no mayo without it, mayo uses lecithin as emulsifier, that’s why there’s yolk in there, thickener is traditionally starches, particularly roux, the OG gelling agent is gelatin in Europe, Asia also already had stuff like arrowroot. Colours? Red beet, saffron, sepia (cuttlefish ink), it’s not like cooks didn’t care about colour before industrialisation. Don’t ask whether there’s colouring in there, ask what kind of stuff the thing is coloured with. I won’t get started on “flavour enhancers” MF why do you think people put fish sauce, soy sauce, mushrooms, or tomatoes in things. Because MSG, shit’s in there.
All in all, and they say that themselves (“operationally distinguishable” aka “we’re casting a net while wearing a blindfold”) this is a way to classify things as “ultra-processed”, but in itself says nothing about how healthy or unhealthy any of the ingredients are, just that they’re used by Big Munch, and on top of that they’re getting the “no culinary use” thing wrong.
Canada isn’t necessarily great either, and European grocery stores are full of “foods” containing the same cursed ingredients. There’s a big difference in volume of crap though, and alternatives are much more accessible than they are in the US.
Made in Canada stuff are kind of better. Especially the Quebec ones. Agreed on the rest.