Eating 'sweet and salty' foods... The impact of ultra-processed foods on health

These days, looking at our country's eating habits, it seems that eating simply and conveniently has become a daily routine.

Actually, even in our family, there are many days when we just have a simple hamburger for a meal.

By the way... Have you heard of processed foods and ultra-processed foods among these types of foods?

Among the things that distinguish these processed foods, they can be divided into processed foods and ultra-processed foods.

Cheese, juice, canned foods, and ham are commonly classified as processed foods, while French fries, cookies, and pies are considered ultra-processed foods.

Are you having trouble understanding what the difference is?

 

Processed foods can largely retain their original identity and ingredients as long as they do not contain excessive added sugar, salt, or oil.

On the other hand, ultra-processed foods go through multiple stages of processing and contain many more additives, making ingredient labels quite long and complex. Ingredients such as fruit juice concentrates not typically used in cooking, high-fructose corn syrup, whey protein, as well as preservatives, starches, colorings, and flavorings may be added.

 

What does this mean??

We try to eat healthily and live healthily every day.

There is nothing more important than the diet there.

Whether I eat three meals a day or two, I wonder how I am eating.

I realized how much processed food I am still consuming.

 

 

How was your diet today?

 

 

SBS Premium article by Nam Joo-hyun, SBS Reporter

https://naver.me/5JpDgzfn

 

 

 

What did you have for dinner yesterday evening? Some people might have had a company dinner at a restaurant in front of the office, while others cooked and ate at home. There are students who simply had a meal with convenience store lunchboxes or hamburgers and studied, and families who easily prepared and ate meals with meal kits purchased online and delivered.

Which of these was the healthiest meal? Most people would choose a home-cooked meal, but that's not always the case. The key to a healthy meal is 'what you eat,' not 'where you eat it,' as the world has become that way.

Shall I give an extremely extreme but easy-to-compare example? If you grilled ham at home and ate it with white rice, fried frozen foods as side dishes, and accompanied it with cola? If after the meal, you had a very sweet apple pie for dessert? If at a company dinner, you didn't drink alcohol, but instead ate pork boiled with wraps generously, and then had fruit for dessert? In that case, the company dinner menu might actually be a healthier meal.

Do you have a sense of where the difference between the two menus comes from? It is the difference in how much the natural state of the food has been 'processed' and how many complex steps were involved in cooking.

The problem is that the foods we eat daily are not as clearly comparable as in the two cases above, and there are parts we misunderstand. In a world where a significant portion of the dining table inside and outside the home is made up of processed foods, we can't simply avoid processed foods altogether. Therefore, it's worth considering which ones we should eat less of.

 

Difference between processed foods and ultra-processed foods

 

Processed foods have become an inseparable part of our lives. According to the <2021 Basic Analysis Report on Consumer Attitudes Toward Processed Foods> published by the Korea Rural Economic Institute, as of 2021, 1.5% of people purchase processed foods daily, 23.7% buy them 2-3 times a week, and 43.2% purchase them once a week. This means that about 7 out of 10 people buy processed foods at least once a week.

But if you think about it, the term "processed foods," which was quite commonly used about 20 or 30 years ago, is not used much these days. This is partly because alternative terms such as instant, retort foods, junk food, and convenience foods have become more common, and as I mentioned earlier, our eating habits have changed so much that it is now difficult to find foods on the table that are not processed foods, compared to the past.

 

 

The impact of highly processed foods on health

 

Pre-processed foods are increasingly being linked to the risk of overeating and obesity, as well as damaging eating habits and appetite, and increasing the risk of various diseases, but the causal relationship has not yet been clearly established. There are also significant criticisms of the NOVA classification system. Some argue that it is too inaccurate and incomplete, and there are criticisms that it fosters an illusion about home-cooked meals.

 

 

 

SBS Premium article by Nam Joo-hyun, SBS Reporter

https://naver.me/5JpDgzfn