It is 5:50 am on a Saturday and I’m already awake. Due to routinely waking up at 5:30ish on the weekdays, my body can’t help but think I want to rise up at this time every day, and so it makes sure I do. I slowly leave the room to avoid waking up my wife, close the door then start my morning routine: go to the toilet, open the whole house, drink a small glass of milk with whey protein and creatine.

As I start shaking the milk to make it homogeneous, a thought comes into my head: why am I still drinking this everyday? After all it seems like its benefits are mostly a “maybe” for both whey and creatine, nonetheless it seems to have just become an easy habit as it provides an easy option of nutrition to start the day. In this case I continued having it because I was ultimately curious to taste the “Brazilian Peanut Candy” flavor and intrigued with the fact that it was the only one who didn’t seem to be as ultra-processed food (UPF) like the others¹. It actually tasted good, so I thought that maybe I should write about all this and here we are².

If you were remotely close to me in October 2024 you knew I was tremendously shaken up by Chris Van Tulleken’s book Ultra-Processed People. It’s not like it was the first time I was ever hearing about the concept of UPFs, however it served to increase my appetite³ for understanding food even more and it has led me to make some amazing discoveries over the past 6 months or so, which I anecdotally share with you this fine morning.

The Ugly: Whey Protein 🥛

See, every time I had to buy a refill for my supplement, I would try and pick a different flavor, to test which one was more appealing. I always knew these were artificial, after all the concept of the whole product was to be a “concentrated/isolated protein powder”, so if it has a taste, it had to contain something else. In January 2025 I decided to try a different brand and when browsing I noticed it had ultra high resolution pictures of the product package on its webpage, which allowed me to read the ingredient list:

Whey Protein Concentrate, Flavor, Xanthan Gum, Sucralose

That was for the Vanilla offering, but when I picked others, I saw it didn’t change at all, regardless if it was White Chocolate, Banana or Strawberry⁴. Bar from the “White Chocolate”, the others feel like natural flavors and one might expect them to have more natural ingredients⁵ when compared to things like “Brazilian Peanut Candy”, but they do not. Turns out that the latter also contained “Crushed Peanuts and Cocoa Powder” and this was an interesting enough discovery to fuel my questionable habit for a few more months⁶. Therefore Whey Protein is “The Ugly”, because it still is an UPF, but it tries to not be as much in some cases.

The Bad: Bread 🥖

Over time I grew the habit of reading the ingredient list of the products I bought at the local bakery. Sure they didn’t seem very trustworthy, after all it’s hard to believe that an appetizing chocolate panettone would only use 4 ingredients⁷. Still, knowing they were all prepared and baked there and not in an industrial warehouse made me a bit calmer that they wouldn’t be an UPF, as this typically requires very controlled and meticulous industrial processes.

Yet those days were coming to an end, since I’d be moving away from that apartment into another which was in a distant enough neighborhood that would prevent my almost daily visits to the bakery. Being at the new place, I had to start buying bread from a local supermarket instead and, though I was skeptical at first, it didn’t take long for me to find both very inviting and dreadful options. Who would have thought a simple orange cake or a brioche-like sweet bread would have over 20 ingredients in the list, including soy lecithin, whereas the financier would have only 5 or 6? I was appalled, the bread became “The Bad”.

The Good: Potato Chips 🍠

There is no shortage of options when you want to buy potato chips these days and there we were at the supermarket again looking for a big one to buy and serve as a light snack for our upcoming barbecue. I was visibly grumpy, knowing this is like in the top 5 most remembered UPFs or bad foods. Out of habit, I read the ingredient list of the one my wife picked:

Potato, Salt, Oil ⁸

Wait, just those 3? Sure they still aren’t super healthy since they have a lot of salt and fat, but not finding any weirdly named ingredient was a pleasant and unexpected surprise to which I would happily swipe my card to pay 😂. Against all odds, the potato chips became “The Good”.

Takeaways

I didn’t write this to have takeaways really, I just wanted to share interesting cases where I was surprised by the item being either more ultra-processed than I expected, less or just, different? Hence the word play with the title.

It’s an interesting exercise to read the ingredient list⁹ because sometimes you have several similar products in front of you, looking the same and you know they even taste the same, but one is “simpler” and potentially healthier. After a while you will have built a list of brands you trust and shopping becomes easier and not a reading session 🤣.

Let me know if you have a trusted list or if you ever find a product that was a lot more or less UPF than you expected!