by adrian_b | 2026-02-20 18:14:07+00:00
The most useful way to define "ultra-processed" is as food that you have not cooked yourself from raw ingredients, like by the time of our grandparents, but you have bought as ready to eat food.

Nowadays most people have given up on cooking, for fear that cooking may require too much time and their work does not allow enough time for this.

This has also happened with me many years ago, and because of that I became obese and I stayed so for many years, despite many failed attempts to lose weight. Eventually I learned to control my weight and I returned to a normal weight after almost a year of losing weight continuously. Had I returned to my previous diet, I would have gained weight again.

Nowadays, I eat only food that I cook myself and there is one obvious difference, which matches what is said in the parent article. With my food, I eat only fixed quantities that I have planned before, once in the morning and once in the evening. After I finish eating, I have no desire to eat more, even if I think that my food is very tasty. Later, I am not hungry again before the next meal.

In the past, when I was eating industrially-produced food, it was very difficult to stop eating soon enough. Moreover, a few hours later I was hungry again. It is certain that nothing has changed with me, but only with my food, because when I eat occasionally other food, again it does not satiate me properly.

When you have to cook for a large family, that is still possible by cooking all or most of the food for an entire week in one weekend day and then reheating the food in a microwave oven in the work days.

When you cook only for yourself, it is possible to cook the food every day just before eating, if you use modern methods instead of traditional methods. I cook all my food in a microwave oven. This requires about a half of hour before a meal, but only at most 10 to 15 minutes are active, e.g. peeling, paring and slicing vegetables, mixing ingredients and washing the vessels used. The rest of the time is passive, waiting for the food to be cooked in the oven and then to cool down, when I can do other activities, e.g. work at a computer.

So even if I have to spend some time with cooking food, that is acceptable and the benefits make it worthwhile. Moreover, food that you cook yourself can be many times cheaper than the alternatives, while also being much healthier.

When talking about "ultra-processing", it is important to differentiate the processing methods that separate the useful components of food from the processing methods that either mix various ingredients and additives or transform the food through various methods, e.g. heating.

Separating the useful nutrients is not bad intrinsically and it is frequently very desirable. For instance, using whey protein concentrate or milk protein concentrate for cooking is much healthier than using any other kind of dairy, because the protein concentrate is the useful part of the milk, while both lactose and milk fat can be harmful in excess. The only danger with separated nutrients is that they facilitate abuses, e.g. the existence of pure sugar makes it easy to add too much sugar in food.

On the other hand, the processing methods that either mix additives in food or transform it, are irreversible, so they are very frequently harmful. Moreover, when you are not the one who mixes the food ingredients, you can never be certain about which is the real content of the food. Therefore this is the kind of "ultra-processing" that should be avoided.