The whole UPF concept is an artificial distinction and very unhelpful

[Interestingnamesuggestion]

I understand that it's healthier to eat foods that are more natural/made with natural ingredients. I have no issue with that.

My issue is that putting so much food that people eat regularly (especially people on lower incomes) into one category and labelling it all as if it were all equally bad just removes all nuance and can make healthy choices feel unachievable to people who have less money or less time to spend in the kitchen.

Literally, cheap sliced wholemeal bread is a UPF in the same category as cheap white sliced bread. Same category as a bag of Quavers or gummy bears.

Wouldn't it be better to have one or two more categories to reflect the benefits of eating food that is higher in fibre (e.g. wholegrains, not that weird stuff they add to "healthy" processed snacks) and lower in fat and sugar? Or food that has some additives but is made with a higher proportion of whole foods?

Thank you I hadn’t seen this before

Have you tried pitta breads? The ingredients for those are often better than the cheap white loaf.

Really confused now by some of these comments. I've already said several times that I don't buy white bread. I've also said I'm not asking for advice about how I can eat more non-UPF foods.

Yes, I often buy pitta breads, as well as cheap wholemeal bread. If that makes you feel any better.

The truth is that the food industry has introduced some food stuff that is genuinely harmful for health. The range of foods that can be bought and the additives put in the food is huge.

Obviously there needs to a workable definition of upf and guidelines. But honestly the OP is coming at it from the wrong end. Recognition about the addictive ness and harm that these foods have on our health is very important.

I am English, but live in another country with a much healthier food culture. I am always slightly horrified when I go back to my family. They eat a huge amount of processed food and really think that it okay. I have many relatives with health issues directly related to the food that they eat.

We have got so used to spending very little time and relatively little money on food. I think it makes people resentful when they are informed that the food that they are eating is basically a bit crap.

We live in a highly artificial and consumption-based world and food is another thing that we need to spend a bit more time thinking about.

I just thought I would share the ingredients list for my standard cheap UPF wholemeal bread as an addendum. Maybe I should have started with this.

Is it the barley malt flour that makes it UPF? Or is it actually not UPF at all and this whole thread was as pointless as unachievable health advice? /s

Please don't tell me it's the vitamins...

Image under review.
List is: wholemeal wheat flour, water, yeast, wheat flour (wheat flour, calcium, folic acid, iron, niacin, thiamin), salt, wheat gluten, fermented wheat flour, barley malt flour, spirit vinegar, flour treatment agent (ascorbic acid).

Yeah literally everything odd-sounding on that list is vitamins. I like that there are vitamins in flour products, so many more people would be deficient otherwise.
I think, like a lot of diet advice, the UPF thing is another overblown fad that will die down.

I have a couple of close relatives that obsessively follow "healthy" fad diets, but lurch from crazy restrictive extremes, that don't seem based on anything logical. Some of their diets have included "no nightshade vegetables", or "no yang food", or "only meat of animals that are vegetarian" or "only food early humans would have eaten". Alongside huge quantities of random things like turmeric powder or orange juice (it varies). Meanwhile they complain intermittently of mysterious rashes or bowel discomfort or even start fainting so they lurch to the next thing. When they're busy distracted by work etc they eat less restrictively and symptoms go away.

Just eat lots of different veg alongside your high fibre staples and meat and cheese, and you will be fine. Some people have a hobby of overthinking their food, leave them to it

It really isn’t an overblown fad. 🤦🏻‍♀️ And it’s not going to die down, the rising numbers of young people getting cancer is alarming and the impact of UPFS on the NHS is huge.

Looking at the ingredients of that loaf of bread you posted, it doesn’t look like an UPF to me. Perhaps the added wheat gluten shouldn’t be there ideally but I’d be happy to buy that.
I think the issue you are having is that for some reason the UPF label is being used too broadly. For example upthread you refer to wheatabix and frosties as being both UPF but wheatabix isn’t one. It’s processed, as the majority of food we eat is, but it’s not Ultra processed. To be ultra processed it needs to contain ingredients we would not recognize in a domestic kitchen. Added vitamins are fine.
TLDR I think you are making good food choices and avoiding UPFs.

It's the wheat gluten, fermented wheat flour and spirit vinegar. The wheat flour contains gluten naturally, why do you need to add more (presumably extracted from wheat flour), fermented wheat flour is what, why is the vinegar needed.? Bread only needs fortified flour, water, yeast and a little salt, I know because I've made loads of it.

While I agree with you I would be alarmed at the foods we've had pushed on us, if I was still raising children. I have been saying for decades that we needed control over the food industry. Older children won't start eating Veg stews, chickea/lentil dishes, mince dishes etc, but if you are a parent, who is short on time and money, then batch cooking using the information available, is something to think about as your child starts to eat.
We have a lot of fairshare/community kitchens in our deprived borough, they have to work hard to get poorer white families to attend.
Iceland cheap wholemeal bread isn't any better than the white. You'd be better making scones with your children and having a scone before bed, instead of toast. We'd come home to soup during the winter, until our parent/carer could make something, after coming home from work. People need to relearn how to cook, cheaply. Our diets were ok in the 70s, using cheaper meats, potatoes, veg, pulses etc. We can't carry on telling people what they want to hear. What people want to eat now, was luxury during my childhood and early 20s. Aldi and Lidl make Tesco compete, it starts to become second nature to look at the discounted foods and know how to put a meal together. As well as all three having just processed, rather than UPF fish fingers/sausages etc. 20% allows for the odd cheap pizza.

We aim to eat whole foods and avoid UPFs in our household and probably meet the 80% guide. My partner bakes bread each week which I’m so grateful for as it tastes fabulous.

Saying that though OP your bread looks fine on the face it. My partner uses two thirds white flour in his bread recipe so I reckon your shop bought bread is actually healthier as it is wholemeal and will have a higher fibre content.

Perhaps the trick is to look at all nutritional content on labels and weigh it up. The information about fibre, salt, fat, sugar etc is just as important (if not more important) as whether it’s UPF.

Or perhaps to consider the labels more broadly. If a family’s food shop exists solely of products that are UPF then it’s likely unhealthy. If only a few items in your shopping basket are UPFs you’re doing ok.

This episode of the Maintenance Phase podcast is interesting on the concept of UPFs. Looking at the evidence, the presenters basically conclude that it isn’t particularly scientific, because it’s so subjective what’s included.
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/maintenance-phase/id1535408667?i=1000710989373

I have been told that Weetabix is a UPF because of the barley malt extract, and that all packaged sliced bread is UPF.

Maybe the problem is that either there isn't a clear enough definition, or there isn't an easy way to check.

@Ponoka7 I was wondering why you imply that homemade scones (made with white flour presumably) are automatically healthier than bought bread which is made with majority wholemeal flour?
I suppose you may assume that all home baking is done with wholemeal flour? But even so, the reward for the effort is going to be taste rather than a huge difference in health benefits I think!

I don’t really care. It’s common sense and 80% is good enough for me which covers any grey areas .I just cook from ingredients and look for the least processed for anything else such as stock cubes, cream cheese, mayo etc. It’s not hard or expensive and actually when cooking and eating like this you reach for less processed foods to agonise over.

If you are just looking at societal level trends of disease, then there are a lot of ways our lifestyle and behaviour have changed in the last 50 years. To name a few: greatly reduced physical activity and exposure to the outdoors and sunshine, consequent reduction in social connection. And other changes in diet not just "upfs", including eating food that has come a long way, out of season, and intensive farming that depletes the soil, and many many other changes.

You need to find a direct causative mechanism for adding vitamins or vinegar to food, causing cancer, before you recommend people making broad restrictions to their diet. Otherwise you could blame any random societal-level dietary change. You can't just fall back on "it stands to reason", because you could actually cause harm, as with my two family members described above.

By "you" I mean the influential proponents of this theory, not you personally

Why is the vinegar needed? That's an interesting question but it isn't UPF just because it contains something that you think it doesn't need. Vinegar is a simple basic ingredient, not anything artificial.

If you buy white bread flour for baking bread at home, it typically contains wheat gluten. And most people homemade wholemeal bread recipes contain some white flour as well as wholemeal because it's hard to get a good structure and rise otherwise.

Oh come on you can’t dismiss the entire UPF industry as a bit of added vinegar and vitamins.

No, the UPF theorists are including them, that is my point. By putting everything under the umbrella "UPF" rather than identifying actual ingredients they deem harmful (eg certain pesticides, proven to harm), they are crossing the bridge from having a scientific theory to having a pseudo scientific fad.

It is the direct equivalent of my relative finding tomatoes make her queasy, to confidently stating "all nightshade vegetables are bad for humans" and making broad restrictions to her diet.

The UPF theorists identify that eating too many (say) krispy Kremes or ready meals makes you ill, and absurdly extrapolate that an extremely broad category of foods must be avoided, to include the bread most people eat

Barley Malt extract can be bought in jars to add to your home baking - if you were making a malt loaf for example. It’s a processed food not an UPF.
I agree that something has been warped about the definition of UPF if such items are being placed within that category by some commentators. It is not what the original researchers intended. They were trying to prove that a diet high in UPFs was detrimental to health. They weren’t trying to get consumers to eliminate every last tiny bit of it.

I think we need some common sense ,most that eat low levels of UPF aren’t buying into that. Dismissing the whole sensible priority of eating as little UPF as possible is foolhardy. Hopefully most are learning that they should be avoiding processed meats with nitrates but nitrates can be classed as natural too but yes we do need more regulation, pushing and guidance from the government as regards this.

As an aside I avoid most supermarket bread because of the emulsifiers which many contain and that fact most taste pretty grim. That cuts out the vinegar issue but it’s not my intention.

I don't think your bread is upf. This is upf bread. I think there needs to be better education into how to read labels. The yuka app is good, you can scan barcodes and it highlights upf ingredients.

Warburtons Wholemeal Sliced Medium
Wholemeal Wheat Flour, Water, Yeast, Vegetable Oil (Rapeseed, Sustainable Palm), Salt, Wheat Gluten, Emulsifiers: E472e, E481, E471, Soya Flour, Preservative: Calcium Propionate, Flour Treatment Agent: Ascorbic Acid (vitamin C), This product contains 57% Wholegrains from Wholemeal Flour

Most of the definnitions from credible sources mention high sodium/salt as an indicator of a food being UPF. For instance, from pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/

"ultra-processed foods are typically high-energy-dense products, high in sugar, unhealthy fats and salt, and low in dietary fibre"
/or/

Yale University and Nature (note those both also suggest saturated fats are a problem) Most are characterized by being low in nutritional quality and high in saturated fats, added sugars, and sodium (salt)

...high in salt, sugar and saturated fats.

If you argue salt isn't actually UPF, then you'll have to argue that refined sugar is also not UPF (true that some recipes for supposedly not-UPF are very high in refined and very processed sugars). And we're supposed to believe that high salt & high sugar with unfortified white flour is therefore "healthy" while tiny amounts of emulsifier ruins a cheap supermarket low-salt wholemeal bread loaf and makes that supermarket bread entirely "unhealthy". wtaf

Back to my point about absurd & unworkable definitions of what is or isn't UPF.... I end up ignoring all the antiUPF propaganda becase some people don't treat UPF as a spectrum ,instead get evangelical in their anti-UPF stance, which is silly given there can't be strict boundaries.