Factory Ultra Processed Food
Factory ultra processed food involves highly mechanized processes that are designed to produce food that is cheap, convenient and appealing to the consumer however is often devoid of any nutritional value. To make some products compliant as ‘food’ they are fortified with vitamins and minerals.
By way of an example, lets consider what Google had to say to me when I asked
How are cheese puffs created?
They are manufactured by extruding heated corn dough through a die that forms the particular shape. They may be ball-shaped, curly (“cheese curls”), straight, or irregularly shaped. Puffcorn is a similar food, without cheese flavoring.
What kind of food is this? If I cannot make it in my kitchen, let me check, no, I don’t have the capability in my kitchen right now to extrude heated corn stuff though a ‘die’ under extreme heat and pressure and so as to produce several tons of cheesy puffs. Not many people would have such a beast in their kitchen or anywhere else for that matter, oh and without such I would not be able to make cheese puffs.
So why would I eat it ?
And yet, we all do and have done and many will continue to do so for the forseeable.
The excuses food manufacturers and marketers use to justify the existence of these fake food products is that we have ‘choice’ and that we can ‘choose’ to eat them or not and as ‘part of a balanced diet’ we can eat them in moderation.
And if your on a tight budget and you need to feed your children and have something in the cupboard with the hopes that it will fill their hungry bellies, then these products are easily found at the checkout.
So I yes, made bad food choices in the past but I cannot let the bad guys that make these things off the hook altogether as life is not that simple. People often have to make choices based on what they can afford, rather than what is good for them. This is where commercial food industry fails to have any moral back bone and instead, they are driven by profit, rather than the health of the consumer.
I would also reason that even small amounts of this kind of food in your diet as is sometimes said ‘wont do any harm’, and ‘all things in moderation’ washes all the badness away. But is this the case ? What is the effect of eating even small amounts of ‘non-food’ over many years ? I don’t know but I can guess.
We have in many ‘developed’ countries, a population that is overweight and obese, with a growing number of people suffering from type 2 diabetes and other chronic diseases. We have a population that is eating more and more of these ultra processed foods and we have a population that is getting sicker and sicker.
I would not say that these fake foods are the sole cause of these problems, but I would argue that we need to eat real food if we are to have any chance of reversing these trends.