Nobody seems to have noticed the "product" next to "yogurt":
>> * Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
If we weren't on HN I'd say that's a subtle engagement hack calculated to generate maximum confusion and irate debate in the comments below. But we're on HN and good faith etc.
So, yes, "yogurt products" are all going to be ultra-processed not least because they will have to destroy the gel matrix of yogurt to incorporate whatever other ingredients they must like fruit juice or sugar, stabilisers, emulsifiers etc. Actually I guess they must include the stabilisers and emulsifiers because they mix in flavours and therefore destroy the yogurt gel matrix, which would otherwise result in an unpleasant gloopy mess.
Speaking of course in all this from the privilege of a summer in Greece where I've start every morning since June with a tub of 150g of fresh (not strained) goat's milk yogurt with the skin on and with a (European) teaspoonfull of honey.
Not healthy, you understand. Not with all the saturated fats and sugars. But, boy, is it palatable.
That's the point. The ultra-processing of shelf-stable unsweetened yogurt food products has nothing to do with engineering it for palatability. And yet they're UPFs, and you could easily ship a highly sweetened dessert yogurt product that would be far less healthy without tripping a UPF standard.
No you couldn't. The reason is you can't just mix stuff like sweeteners into yogurt and ship it or you end up with a gloopy goop as I say above.
The thing that people don't get about yogurt is that it's a gel, and one with a very delicate structure to boot. The moment you so much as stick a spoon into yogurt you disturb the gel matrix and that causes whey to seep out, an effect called "syneresis". If you've ever tried the kind of yogurt I say above that I'm having for breakfast, you'd know that if you eat say half a tub and then leave the rest for a while and come back to it later you find it has turned into a watery mush that's not very appetising at all. A lot of good yogurt goes to waste like that because folks who want to maintain their waistline will eat some and leave the rest "for later", and it's a balancing act for producers to make yogurt tubs small enough that people will want to eat them in one go and large enough that it makes sense to sell them [1].
One traditional way to deal with syneresis is straining which produces what everyone else calls "Greek yogurt" and we, Greeks, call "strained yogurt" or "bag yogurt" (because traditionally it was strained through a linen bag). However, even strained yogurt suffers syneresis as long as it retains any moisture and as a result you still can't ship a tub of "Greek yogurt" with say fruit, or honey, mixed in just like that [2]. That's why you never get delicious FAGE yogurt with fruit already mixed in [3].
You also can't make yogurt with stuff in it from the get go, because yogurt starts as milk, therefore a liquid, and whatever you want to mix in it will sink to the bottom or float to the top before the milk has a chance to set. Some yogurts with fruit jams for example have the jams on the bottom because that way you just pour the milk on top and let it ferment and then you get jam with yogurt on top and you can scoop both in one spoonful. I've also seen home-made yogurts with fruit mixed in that stay at the top. But you can't just mix the jam or the fruit in the milk and expect it will stay mixed in when the milk sets.
In order to sell yogurt with admixtures without it turning into a goopy gloop you have to stabilise its structure, so that's where the admixtures come in that cause sweetened yogurts to become UPFs. In other words, you need stabilizers. Then you probably also need emulsifiers to "correct" the texture. I don't eat that kind of stuff but I'm gonna bet that the sweeteners also end up being industrial-style ones like high fructose corn syrup or maltodextrin and so on, just for reasons of economies of scale and whatnot. So you end up with something that's many times removed from fresh yogurt that you can make in your own kitchen with milk, a thermometer and a bit of yogurt [4] and that counts as a "processed food" in NOVA terms.
So, no, you can't just ship sweetened yogurt without it turning into a UPF. Or, perhaps you can if you're rally crafty about it, but it's not going to be easy, nor cheap, it's going to turn into a chemical monstrosity anyway, and nobody's gonna bother.
Btw none of the above pertains to Skyr or similar products that I don't know anything about. I'm talking about bovine milk yogurt in the style traditionally made in the Eastern med and the Balkans.
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[1] There's a bit of an exception in ewe's milk yogurt which is much firmer and suffers syneresis more gradually because of the higher protein content of sheep milk. Still, the largest ewe's milk yogurt I used to see was 250g and I don't see them anymore at all though possibly there's other reasons for that. I have never seen ewe's milk yogurt outside of Greece but I believe it's very common throughout the Balkans.
[2] You can strain all the whey out of yogurt. But then you end up with cream cheese, not yogurt.
[3] Btw the scene in Silicon Valley is probably the result of US teaspoons being bigger than European teaspoons. I can totally stick a teaspoon in the little jam tub in Greece.
[4] It takes yogurt to make yogurt. I know. I was endlessly confused about that as a kid.
>> Super clean. No weird chemicals. Worse for you than UPF yogurt.
Ingredients list says it's got 21% sugars. Why is that "worse for you than UPF yogurt"?
I think you have a weird headcanon about what's good and bad for you and that has nothing to do with UPFs. 21g of sugar (of which 11 is honey going by the ingredients list always) is a US teaspoonful and a half. You 're not gonna die younger if that's your daily sugar intake.
Dunno! The thought of sweetened yogurt grosses me out. In fact, all yogurt does, largely because of the name "yo-gurt". I can eat skyr if I mix it into other things or make labneh out of it.
(Following up on your edit)
Because it's more caloric than plain yogurt, for otherwise the same macro profile.
Ewe's milk yogurt is more caloric than plain cow's milk yogurt (because of higher fat content). Does that make ewe's milk yogurt "worse for you than UPF yogurt"?
Put two identically sized servings of yogurt side by side, equal in all aspects except that one is 100kcal and the other, because of added sugar, is 170kcal. The 170kcal serving is less healthful; the other is a UPF.
So, I haven't made any yogurt in a while but from memory it takes about half an hour for milk to set, depending on what milk and what yogurt starter etc. No way you can make an emulsion of e.g. milk, sugar and vanilla that is stable for that long. So either you have to use stabilizers, or you have to accept that your flavourings are not going to be evenly distributed throughout your yogurt.
I can't know the latter since I can't buy that brand in Greece (for rather obvious reasons it's not imported here). If I look at the list of ingredients for e.g. the Vanilla Bean yogurt I see "Pasteurized Whole Milk, Pasteurized Cream..." and that's your stabilizer there.
How much is there? The "Nutrition Facts" label on top lists "Total fat 12g" per serving which is "1 container" of 140 grams. That's ~9% fat, so about 5% more than plain cow's milk (at 4g per 100g). The total fat is more than the fat in ewe's milk (about 6%). I ... guess the extra fat makes the milk and vanilla bean powder emulsion last a bit longer so it gets better mixed in during the fermentation time?
Dunno. The packaging says "Traces of vanilla seeds and marbling on top of the yogurt are the results of a natural infusion process". The other flavours don't have a similar disclaimer but they all have extra fat in the form of pasteurized cream.
So anyway you get both a stabilizer and uneven distribution at least for the vanilla. If you have a strong enough flavour I reckon that's not a problem though.
EDIT: (The fruit-at-the-bottom variants are presumably UPFs).
They don't have to. If you're just mixing some fruit in milk and then fermenting it to make yogurt, that's just processed (going by NOVA AFAIU). But looking at the ingredients list I see e.g. "Corn starch, Natural Flavor, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Pectin" etc. Ew. No, that's a UPF. You don't need to put that stuff in yogurt. Not if the point is to enjoy it.
It's late and I have to go to sleep so answering here.
>> No. Pasteurization isn't a UPF technique. See the problem?
My argument is that the extra fat is used as a stabilizer that wouldn't need to be included if the maker wasn't trying to force their yogurt to hold other stuff in it than milk. The use of a stabilizer makes it a UPF, not the fact that the cream is pasteurised- that makes no difference as you say.
I'm exclusively commenting here about how the label "UPF" is problematic. Pasteurization doesn't make something ultra-processed, despite its stabilizing effect.
Nobody said that pasteurization makes anything ultra-processed.
Pasteurised milk is classified as Group 1 (Unprocessed or minimally processed food) in NOVA. Pasteurised cream is the same thing [1].
Pasteurisation doesn't have any stabilising effect.
I argued that the pasteurised cream added to the ingredients of the lafermiere yogurts is a stabiliser. The stabilisation effect comes from the increased viscosity of milk with added fat that helps the emulsion of milk and flavourings keep stable for longer than normal while milk sets during yogurt making.
I did not argue that the stabilisation effect comes from the fact that cream is pasteurised.
I argued that the lafermiere yogurt is a UPF because of the addition of pasteurised cream as a stabiliser.
I did not argue that the lafermiere yogurt is a UPF because of the pasteurisation of the added cream; or the milk itself for that matter.
And now I have to ask: in what sense could anything I said before be taken as a claim that pasteurisation is ultra-processing or that the lafermiere yogurts are UPFs because of pasteurisation?
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[1] If anything it has the opposite in that pasteurised milk tends to produce looser, softer curds than raw milk because it weakens protein bonds and causes calcium to leak out (soorta), hence the addition of calcium chloride to milk when making cheese.
Cream is usually made by centrifuging milk to separate the fat out, which should count as minimal processing and then pasteurisation itself is minimal processing on top. I doubt pasteurised cream counts as a UPF.
To be fair that doesn't really matter in yogurt making because milk is boiled anyway, which denatures milk proteins and we don't care if they leak calcium or not because we're not trying to make curd, as such, but yogurt. Not withstanding the fact that people in the Indian subcontinent call yogurt, "curd". Just a linguistic quirk.
The fact that lafermiere list milk and cream as "pasteurised" in their ingredients is probably something to do with marketing, to make it clear they aren't using raw milk, for whatever reason that might be necessary to clarify.
My fresh Rodopi ewe's milk yogurt lists as ingredient "full organic ewe's milk". They say nothing about pasteurisation and I doubt they even bother to pasteurise it since they're going to blast it with considerably more heat than for pasteurisation anyway. OtoH the difference may not be marketing but the fact that Rodopi get their milk directly from producers while lafermiere buy it second hand from dairy companies that sell it already-pasteurised. I mean the pasteurisation doesn't hurt. It's just unnecessary. So it's a bit weird that they clarify it in the list of ingredients.
You've lost me completely, sorry. I'm backing out now. The only reason we were talking was that you seemed to be asserting that it wasn't possible to do a non-UPF sweetened yogurt product, which, obviously no.
Yes that was my argument and it stands. The Kalona yogurt you showed is not UPF but I think the honey might be only in the bottom. The lafermiere yogurts are UPF.
You're not confused. You're right. That's my point. "UPF" is not a useful health labeling system. Whether or not something qualifies as a UPF doesn't tell you whether it's a healthy choice.
The most unhealthy food choices tend to be UPFs. But that's not a causal relationship.
I think the confusion is that you're loosening up the relation: food can be unhealthy without it being UPF. The relation is an implication, not an equivalence: UPF implies unhealthy. Unhealthy doesn't imply UPF.
So e.g. food with too many calories as in your example can be unhealthy because it can make you fat without it having to be a UPF.
Are you saying that you want a classification that flags up every kind of unhealthy food?
>> * Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
If we weren't on HN I'd say that's a subtle engagement hack calculated to generate maximum confusion and irate debate in the comments below. But we're on HN and good faith etc.
So, yes, "yogurt products" are all going to be ultra-processed not least because they will have to destroy the gel matrix of yogurt to incorporate whatever other ingredients they must like fruit juice or sugar, stabilisers, emulsifiers etc. Actually I guess they must include the stabilisers and emulsifiers because they mix in flavours and therefore destroy the yogurt gel matrix, which would otherwise result in an unpleasant gloopy mess.
Speaking of course in all this from the privilege of a summer in Greece where I've start every morning since June with a tub of 150g of fresh (not strained) goat's milk yogurt with the skin on and with a (European) teaspoonfull of honey.
Not healthy, you understand. Not with all the saturated fats and sugars. But, boy, is it palatable.