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Ultra-processed foods should be treated more like cigarettes than food – study
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
418 points (97.5% liked)
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Me, drinking yet another Dr. Pepper Zero: "Uh oh."
There's still the huge problem that nobody knows what an UPF actually is. Name a definition, somebody's traditional home-cooked cuisine does it. Unless home-cooked is your definition, in which case you ascribe too much navigational prowess to food - it has no idea where it's being cooked.
Yeah a food scientist remarked that technically you could call tofu an "ultra processed food"
It really depends on how the tofu was make. There is upf tofu and not upf tofu.
Exactly. It's one of those "I know it when I see it" type of things rather than a solid definition. Like Froot Loops definitely are UPF, but what about a salad in a plastic box? Sure, it's been through a factory where it got chopped, mixed and packaged. That's industrial scale food processing too, right?
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I dont want fast foods, I want a cantina that deals with cooking for me
Taco trucks exist.
Fast food
How the fuck do you expect to get kids to eat salad when the salad dressing is locked behind a counter with the cigarettes?
The problem is that "ultra-processed foods" is too broad to be meaningful. Also the fact that, you know, some amount of personal choice is essential to a free society.
When I was an italian kid, I have never had problems eating salads with no ultra-processed dressing.
No Italian buys salad dressing. Salt pepper herbs olive oil and vinegar.
che processing
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The best example I can think of to represent what the article is taking about is Doritos. I like to think of myself as someone with a decent amount of self-control. But if I ever see a bag of Doritos I can crush a whole value pack in two sittings. That stuff is engineered to be as addictive as possible and it shows. The only reason why I'm not a walking blimp is that I dont buy any because I know what happens when that stuff is in my house.
if I ever see a bag of Doritos I can crush a whole value pack in two sittings
This confirms your decent amount of self-control.
The comedian Louis CK once said: "I don't stop eating when I feel full. I stop eating when I start hating myself."
I guess I have a lower self-hate threshold.
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True, my addiction to Protein shakes will give me lung cancer soon.
Can we use a different label like "addictive foods"? UPF is so incredibly broad and undefined I'd argue bread is an UPF.
Bread literally is a UPF most of the time. Not necessarily the fresh baked bread that you get from a bakery, but the manufactured bread that's slightly less healthy but is much cheaper and more accessible to people in remote or impoverished places.
A lot of ultra-processed foods exist because they're solving specific problems, and you can't just ban them without providing a better solution to those problems.
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