In case anyone wants a proper definition: ultra-processed food is defined using the Nova classification system [0]. I still find the definition a bit confusing though.
This is the outcome of having researchers dedicating multiple lifetimes towards optimizing food to be as palatable and optimized as possible, such that people are forced to have a self-control battle each meal. Maybe GLP-1 drug proliferation will force companies towards other optimization goals. We ultimately end up paying for the negative externalities of UPF through higher healthcare costs and overall worse long-term quality of life.
It's difficult to change and maintain healthy eating habits when so much of your environment is designed to push you towards foods with questionable health properties. Even if it's technically possible to eat healthy, the cognitive overhead is enough that individualistic solutions are always going to be limited in effectiveness. The ideal is living in an environment where the healthy options are the default choice, so you don't have to waste time, energy, and willpower on maintenance-level tasks. I imagine that a healthier population would also be more productive, for the number-go-up optimizers.
The evidence that UPFs are bad for health is much, much stronger than the evidence for any candidate mechanism. There are lots of candidate mechanisms.
So I don't think anybody knows why they're bad. Surely the UPF classification includes lots of foods that are harmless. We just don't know which ones because we don't understand the mechanism.
Right but this is one of the major challenges with converting this information into actionable nutritional advice.
We have this (reasonably) rigid definition that grants the appearance of specificity. But there are almost surely UPFs that are fine and there are probably non-UPFs that cause the same problems as UPFs. Potato chips are hyper palatable, but are not UPFs.
So what is the benefit of saying "avoid UPFs" over "avoid junk food?" At least saying "avoid junk food" makes the fuzziness apparent. But by focusing on this UPF definition (which is almost surely not the actual thing that is causing negative health outcomes) we end up in weird scenarios where potato chips and bean-to-bar chocolate are fine but wheat bread with preservatives are not even if it turns out that the preservatives aren't the source of any problem.
Actually, according to the Nova Wikipedia page, the packaging of potato chips would push them into UPF. The actual, non-edible bag with the slogans and other soothsayings.
Where do you see that? My understanding is that packaging has to actually be implied by the food. It would be psychotic for potato chips served in a paper bag to be okay and potato chips served in a branded bag to be bad but I've been surprised before.
It is the case that several of the prominent voices against UPFs have said some ridiculous things in this direction. Like that a packaged lasagna that is made entirely from ingredients and processes that a home cook would use to make lasagna is bad because it comes from the same corporations and market forces that also produce the frozen lasagnas that are loaded with stabilizers and added sugar.
There have been several cases of possible or confirmed endocrine disruptors in food packaging, such as phthalates and bisphenol-A. My personal opinion is that those probably will turn out to have been harmless, but concerns over them aren't psychotic.
If there is no understanding of mechanisms, why put such a strong emphasis on the processing, and why organize them?
I, and other people argue that it has nothing to do with the processing and it’s all about the ingredients. So the whole differentiation by “processing” amount is useless. We are talking about ingredients without wanting to say so.
Processing is important. It's well known that that the grinding of flour has significant digestion effects, especially in diabetics. It takes a lot longer to digest a bulgur wheat salad than a slice of bread made with finely ground flour. This time difference makes a massive difference in insulin response.
Ok, maybe you're right, but can you categorize those and show that link?
Yes, the UPF classification used here likely flags some false positives and perhaps misses others, but if the methodology is otherwise sound and the link is there, even if fuzzy, I don't think it's as easy as you claim either. And even if if fuzzy, it's still useful as I would be healthier avoiding UPF (assuming accurate study), even if I would also avoid some perfectly healthy foods.
The addition of ingredients is the processing. The different levels of processing refer to what types and quantities of ingredients are added. It's like complaining that people are labelling food as poisoned when they should really be concerned about whether it contains poison.
Likewise the categorization of processing is useful for exactly the same reason the category of poisoned is useful. I'd rather not consume poisoned food of any variety even if I'm uncertain which poison has been added to it.
Just like other parts of science, that organization can be discussed and tested. It’s the opposite of “we asked the King what foods we can be most proud of”.
Linnaeus did this, and allowed himself to be wrong, and I argue his organization alone was necessary to talk about theory.
Every time i turn on the stove my kitchen catches on fire. I can't point out whats wrong with my stove, so obviously I keep the stove in my kitchen since I can't say it's causing the fire with a specific malfunction.
It reminds me of tobacco again. All these smokers, coughing up lungs, dying of lung/throat cancers, gee I wonder if it’s correlated? I knew when I was a kid and everyone in my family smoked it was unhealthy, it’s just obvious, how it was denied and people believed it for so long baffles me
Does this mean vegetable-based replacements for meats are going to experience reduced demand given they might be worse for health and more expensive than their meat counterparts?
They certainly meet the ultra processed foods criterion.
They might be worse or better for health, but they will probably be cheaper. They do certainly qualify as UPFs, since we don't know which ingredients, if any, are responsible for the health problems.
I don’t get the downvotes, this is a good question. I would prefer that the meat substitute market is allowed unbounded processing; and that the mere addition of nitrates to meat categorizes it into the terminal ultra-processed category.
If it turns out that xanthan gum causes metabolic syndrome, xanthan gum in meat substitutes will probably still cause metabolic syndrome, regardless of what you would prefer to allow.
Nitrates in meat cause stomach cancer (another thing we can't undo by legislative fiat) but probably don't cause the global pandemic of metabolic disease.
My guess is that there is no single mechanism, it's just degrees of freedom + capitalism.
If you have a relatively unprocessed food, there's definitionally not that much you can do to it.
Market forces dictate that food companies produce the cheapest possible food with the best taste. Evolutionarily, food that tasted good was good for you. Food science has developed, in the service of the market, to make good tasting food, especially food that tastes so good that you get addicted to it, that's made from cheap ingredients. Good for you is neutral unless the customer can detect that the food is not good for them. Generally, cheap ingredients are not as good for you. The ingredients are cheap because they don't taste good, and they don't taste good because they're not very nutritious.
If you give food science and the market some rope, they have a bajillion ways to make cheap things that taste good.
I'd guess it's twofold:
1.) Lack of fiber in the ultra processed foods
2.) shelf-stability additives so the food can sit on shelves for months and not go bad.
Yeah the whole definition is bogus. i.e. "mechanically separated meat" is considered ultraprocessed food? Why? By this logic putting apples into mixer and creating pyre is ultraprocessed food too.
First, I think you're misreading it. The Wikipedia article lists "mechanically separated meat" as one of the ingredients that are used in ultra-processed foods.
The other point is already covered by other replies. "Mechanically separated meat" is not a term for your mother's chicken salad remake of last Sunday's roast chicken.
I'm not sure you are replying knowing what "mechanically separated meat is", as it isn't just cutting / separating pieces of regular meat using machinery. It's the sieving of a ground up bone/flesh mix into a meat paste. The result product is not something you would normally call meat, and called 'white slime' by some.
Seems like a reasonable definition? It's not referring to tissue you put through a grinder yourself.
From wikipedia:
Mechanically separated meat (MSM), mechanically recovered/reclaimed meat (MRM), or mechanically deboned meat (MDM) is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing pureed or ground beef, pork, mutton, turkey or chicken under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. When poultry is used, it is sometimes called white slime as an analog to meat-additive pink slime and to meat extracted by advanced meat recovery systems, both of which are different processes. The process entails pureeing or grinding the carcass left after the manual removal of meat from the bones and then forcing the slurry through a sieve under pressure.
The resulting product is a blend primarily consisting of tissues not generally considered meat, along with a much smaller amount of actual meat (muscle tissue).
Mechanically separated meat is a marketing term. It's neither 100% meat (in fact it contains tons or fat and joints) nor a good quality meat (this one is sold separately). I don't buy any products that list it among its ingredients.
When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?
Does anybody eat mechanically separated meat as-is? I imagine it’s basically only available to end users as a final product like chicken nuggets or hot dogs, mixed with many additives.
It is available as ground meat. You can make meatloaf from it. Or you can buy preformed meatballs which is just ground meat with some shape so you can just drop it into pan and bake in the oven. 40 minutes and done.
Peel some potatoes, cook them and you have a dinner in said 40 minutes.
And I have no idea why this would be classified as ultraprocessed food.
Ground meat is different from mechanically separated meat, which is a paste. At least personally I haven’t seen ground meat for sale in the US that lists MSM as an ingredient, though it may exist.
Mechanically separated meat is different from ground meat, it’s made by pressing unusable scraps through a sieve to remove bits of bone. The end result is a paste.
I don’t think anybody has a concrete answer yet, I’ve seen speculation that the texture of the food may be a component, and the extreme palatability that causes people to eat more than they otherwise would. There are so many potential root causes that it will take time to pinpoint specific ones, but what is becoming clear that eating lots of foods with additives and highly altered basic ingredients (like mechanically separated meat) is not good for you.
I have a hard time understanding how the act of mechanically separating meat from bone and gristle renders it unfit for consumption. Texture certainly matters for taste, but once masticated, all food is roughly the same texture. Digestion is a biochemical process, and if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one.
> if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one
No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad?
To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go.
It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers.
It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback.
The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.
I’ve seen one theory that it might be something to do with not needing as much chewing and how quickly you can eat it. I can’t remember exactly the article I was reading but apparently there is a massive difference (e.g. insulin spike, etc.) eating apple purée of one apple vs. eating an apple.
Needing to chew less processed food may help just by being kind of rate-limiting (slowing down how fast you can get the food in), but also the enzymes in your saliva have time to start working on the food before you swallow it.
If I recall correctly I have also read (perhaps the same article, but maybe somewhere else) that some processes related to digestion might be triggered when you start eating (chewing), so the fact that you can eat so many calories so quickly before those processes get going might make a big difference too.
as I understand, it's also the fiber. The fiber acts as a barrier that slows down the speed at which you absorb the food which leads to a smoother insulin spike (in case of carbs) and a faster feeling of satiation. When you blend the apple all that fiber is broken down do it loses those properties
Nobody knows. This is one of the things that makes efforts to regulate UPFs frustrating.
Some people say that it is lack of fiber. Some people say that it is inflammation caused by preservatives and/or stabilizers. Some people say it is the hyperpaletability, which encourages people to overconsume calories. Some people say it is just the high amounts of sugar and salt. And it is unlikely that all of these things contribute equally such that they should all be regulated the same.
Tangent because I do think you are asking a pretty clear question, but I find it’s much more helpful in these discussions to specify why(mechanical explanation) from why(elaborate on known info) from why(what is the human reason for an action).
Because you really can interpret any of these in a lot of the situations where someone is asking “why”.
it is a food substitute.
food is composed of recognisable ingedients.
what comes from factorys has no connection or relation to that.
the unspoken premise is that pre prepared stuff with a label is somehow part of a continuity.
, pared= to cut/divided
You’re welcome to do your own years of research to learn more (everything, cooking, freezing, drying, blending, adding acids affects amino acids and certainly bacteria in the food) but until then stick with what the studies prove
The UPF definition includes a ton of very distinct things. It is unlikely that emulsifiers, preservatives, food dyes, added sugar, and removed fiber all produce the same health responses. Science showing correlations between UPF consumption and health outcomes also don't tend to show a dose response, which is odd. We'd expect lots of UPF consumption to be very bad and for some UPF consumption to be kind of bad, but we don't tend to see this in the data.
Nutritional research is also enormously difficult to perform. Any sort of controlled study is necessarily over short periods of time. Long term studies come with all of the messy confounds that make it remarkably difficult to determine causation.
I don't have free access to the paper and dose response findings are not present in the summary. Can you reference the dose response findings for me?
Existing published research has not consistently found a dose response.
The authors are also not just saying "hey here is some science." They are advocating for policies that say that plain potato chips can be in schools but sour cream and onion potato chips cannot.
I guess a reasonable person can question the science, when ordinary words are used wildly inappropriately. E.g. 'ultra-processed' to mean things that are far from that.
If 'the science' is so conclusive, then maybe a single link to a single study would be an appropriate response.
Think of eating an apple vs drinking apple juice. The amount of entire apples you can drink is immense compared to eating the apple whole. So the mechanical process does affect how we consume the food.
If you are asking the question whether UPF is bad, surely you got to control for the amount. Of course you can say that people tend to eat too much of UPF simply because it is easier to prepare and eat, but that doesn't mean it's the processing that is bad for you. It's still just the amount.
But that's part of it. There's a part to do with the nutrient quality, which can also be talked about, but also a part that has to do with how UPF are consumed. The act of processing the food a certain way makes you eat more of it without realising it. Same with fat and sugar, eating a stick of butter on its own is hard, same with pure sugar, mix them up and it's delicious and addictive which leads to health problems.
So rather than apple juice, consider watermelon juice. The nutrition and fiber are unchanged, the volume is close to 1:1. But you can drink more than you can eat.
My question might he stupid: is cottage cheese (kirkland) ultra processed food? I cook most of my stuff, but I use egg whites and cottage cheese from Kirkland for the high amount of proteins
I always assumed ultra-processed means that the food is loaded with preservatives like phosphates or BHT. I guess that's part of it, but maybe the efficiency of digestion should be considered. I remember Ben Krasnow (Applied Science) measured the calories in poop, humans are not very efficient at extracting all calories leading to very likely large efficiency variance between foods. But extending this further, the calories lost during preparation should be accounted for...
So how about: calories * digestion-efficiency - calories you personally need to expend to prepare or acquire it. The higher this number, the more processed is the food. So cane sugar is very bad, unless you personally harvested it.
Bad news for highly paid programmers.. basically all food should be considered ultra-processed since no physical labor was needed to acquire it.
A better example is astronauts. Their diet (on the job) is 100% ultra-processed food. They perform highly and have limited access to normal physical activity. But they’re hard to study because radiation and gravity differ so much that categorization of food might not be influential at all.
Discussion about this tends to get hung up on the relative harm of a particular food, let’s say a donut. But the article is really about a diet that is dominated by food like donuts.
>Evidence reviewed by 43 of the world’s leading experts suggests that diets high in UPF are linked to overeating, poor nutritional quality and higher exposure to harmful chemicals and additives.
>This category is made up of products that have been industrially manufactured, often using artificial flavours, emulsifiers and colouring. They include soft drinks and packaged snacks, and tend to be extremely palatable and high in calories but low in nutrients.
>They are also designed and marketed to displace fresh food and traditional meals, while maximising corporate profits, Monteiro said.
An issue is that a meal of donuts and doritos is equally as ultraprocessed as a diet of bleached pasta and jarred tomato sauce with some preservatives.
I don't have access to the paper, but it'd be interesting to see from the food surveys if the UPF domination is coming from stuff we'd traditionally call "junk food" or from foods that are similar to whole foods made from scratch but with some preservatives added.
That's not just the main point. The article references three papers, two of which are making policy arguments about UPFs. If we are going to propose interventions then it is rather important to understand these details.
I have always found it so weird to go to a supermarket when you have a (somewhat) "clean" diet. I go from veggies and fruits to meat and dairy and then I'm out again. 95% of the shelves I don't even look at.
Also, the definition of (ultra) processed food isn't so hard: just buy original food, not extrapolations of that. Buy veggies and potatoes, not chips. Buy meat, not sausages or burgers. Buy an apple and yoghurt, not the yoghurt you can buy off the shelf. Just basic ingredients.
The UPF category isn't helpful to the person at the grocery store trying to decide what's to buy because it significantly overlaps with very healthy foods.
Loose terms like junk food and whole foods are more helpful because they don't come with the patina of scientific rigor, you can use personal judgement about what fits in those categories.
Also from this wiki page[0], identifying UPF (paraphrased by me):
Long ingredient list: Foods that contain many ingredients, especially those that could not be found in a kitchen, are likely to be ultra-processed.
Claims on the packaging: Ultra-processed foods often come in packaging with nutrition claims like "low-fat," "sugar-free," or "fortified with vitamins."
Weird choice of the image by TheGuardian: there's some obviously highly processed foods such as doughnuts and candy, but you also have french fries, popcorn and even some nuts there. The text itself doesn't elaborate on this much either.
What is it exactly that I am supposed to avoid?
The easy answer that encompasses 99% of the target foods is:
Avoid any foods that involve multiple rounds of processing, a term that includes baking, frying, adding preservatives,sugars or oils. Generally, if it has a lot of sugar or oil and has a weirdly long shelf life, be suspicious.
Drift towards: easily washable (smooth/peelable) fruits and vegetables, 100% whole wheat bread products, simple meat products like whole animal parts or deboned animal parts.
Dairy lives in the middle ground. If you have zero lactose problem, most dairy is mostly okay, just watch for sugar levels and recognize that most dairy products are calorie dense. Nuts are in this group too for the same reason but oil instead of sugar.
Bonus points for consuming real pro and pre biotics when you can. In the United States this is pretty limited to live culture yogurts, refrigerated kimchi, and refrigerated sourkraut.
Hang on. Pickling and fermentation are multi-step processes to transform food into their final state. Moreover, pickling is expressly used for preservation and long shelf life. Why are they not considered "ultra-processed" according to this definition? As you point out, they are an integral part of a healthy diet in multiple cultures.
Because the "Ultra-processed" definition is backwards. It's really more "foods that have statistically significant negative effects on health" than a description of why they do so. Because we don't yet know why they do so, and there are probably multiple causes. It seems like modern processing methods create this property, likely in part because the results are hyperpalatable. "Foods that are bad for you are bad for you" is tautological, so the ultra-processed naming is used for the hypothesis that it's something about the processing that makes them bad for you. This hypothesis seems highly likely, but we don't know what propert(y|ies) of the processing cause the harm, so it's a bad name but useful for discussing the hypothesis.
But this definition isn't right. UPFs do have a pretty widely recognized definition (the nova classification) and one of its major criticisms as a useful categorization is that there are plenty of junk foods that aren't UPFs.
> but you also have french fries, popcorn and even some nuts there
For popcorn at least, I'd assume it's the prepackaged microwavable popcorn that gets flagged as UPF, where it's encased in hydrogenated oils, salt, and preservatives. It's hard to think that popcorn you make at home could be considered UPF, considering that it's literally one ingredient with heat applied to it (and oil I guess if you're popping it on the stovetop rather than an air fryer).
imagine just buying normal food that wasnt done on the cheap. nobody could afford to live. even in usa, richest country in the world, people are eating cheap crap, living in wooden houses... of course you can be the richest country in the world if you just lower your living standards perpetually
dafuq is "normal" food? if by normal you mean usual or typical for a supermarket, then that would be mostly highly processed foods full of sugars and fats. Now that I think about it, what one actually wants is the not-normal foods, the raw unprocessed minority
Probably because "ultra-processed" is a bogus definition that doesn't prove what exactly is unsafe or why, which the authors of the study even acknowledge directly in the article:
> Critics argue UPF is an ill-defined category and existing health policies, such as those aimed at reducing sugar and salt consumption, are sufficient to deal with the threat.
> Monteiro and his co-authors acknowledged valid scientific critiques of Nova and UPF – such as lack of long-term clinical and community trials, an emerging understanding of mechanisms, and the existence of subgroups with different nutritional values.
It's not "processing" in itself that is causing problems, there is something specific (possibly a set of common ingredients used in many such foods) that we just haven't identified yet as what the actual harm is, so people lump all processed food into the harmful category and tell people to just stay away from all of it, which is not a realistic solution given current food production practices.
Right but we aren't at the "hey we found this category has some interesting correlations with health outcomes, let's look into this" stage. The authors are advocating for specific policy interventions using the definition of UPF.
In case anyone wants a proper definition: ultra-processed food is defined using the Nova classification system [0]. I still find the definition a bit confusing though.
This is the outcome of having researchers dedicating multiple lifetimes towards optimizing food to be as palatable and optimized as possible, such that people are forced to have a self-control battle each meal. Maybe GLP-1 drug proliferation will force companies towards other optimization goals. We ultimately end up paying for the negative externalities of UPF through higher healthcare costs and overall worse long-term quality of life.
It's difficult to change and maintain healthy eating habits when so much of your environment is designed to push you towards foods with questionable health properties. Even if it's technically possible to eat healthy, the cognitive overhead is enough that individualistic solutions are always going to be limited in effectiveness. The ideal is living in an environment where the healthy options are the default choice, so you don't have to waste time, energy, and willpower on maintenance-level tasks. I imagine that a healthier population would also be more productive, for the number-go-up optimizers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
My problem with it is that it’s a circular definition without a mechanism for why they are bad for health.
Discussions I’ve seen for why they are bad always basically boil down to “it’s the ingredients” without wanting to say this.
The evidence that UPFs are bad for health is much, much stronger than the evidence for any candidate mechanism. There are lots of candidate mechanisms.
So I don't think anybody knows why they're bad. Surely the UPF classification includes lots of foods that are harmless. We just don't know which ones because we don't understand the mechanism.
Right but this is one of the major challenges with converting this information into actionable nutritional advice.
We have this (reasonably) rigid definition that grants the appearance of specificity. But there are almost surely UPFs that are fine and there are probably non-UPFs that cause the same problems as UPFs. Potato chips are hyper palatable, but are not UPFs.
So what is the benefit of saying "avoid UPFs" over "avoid junk food?" At least saying "avoid junk food" makes the fuzziness apparent. But by focusing on this UPF definition (which is almost surely not the actual thing that is causing negative health outcomes) we end up in weird scenarios where potato chips and bean-to-bar chocolate are fine but wheat bread with preservatives are not even if it turns out that the preservatives aren't the source of any problem.
Actually, according to the Nova Wikipedia page, the packaging of potato chips would push them into UPF. The actual, non-edible bag with the slogans and other soothsayings.
Where do you see that? My understanding is that packaging has to actually be implied by the food. It would be psychotic for potato chips served in a paper bag to be okay and potato chips served in a branded bag to be bad but I've been surprised before.
It is the case that several of the prominent voices against UPFs have said some ridiculous things in this direction. Like that a packaged lasagna that is made entirely from ingredients and processes that a home cook would use to make lasagna is bad because it comes from the same corporations and market forces that also produce the frozen lasagnas that are loaded with stabilizers and added sugar.
There have been several cases of possible or confirmed endocrine disruptors in food packaging, such as phthalates and bisphenol-A. My personal opinion is that those probably will turn out to have been harmless, but concerns over them aren't psychotic.
Reference [10], “sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials“
If there is no understanding of mechanisms, why put such a strong emphasis on the processing, and why organize them?
I, and other people argue that it has nothing to do with the processing and it’s all about the ingredients. So the whole differentiation by “processing” amount is useless. We are talking about ingredients without wanting to say so.
Processing is important. It's well known that that the grinding of flour has significant digestion effects, especially in diabetics. It takes a lot longer to digest a bulgur wheat salad than a slice of bread made with finely ground flour. This time difference makes a massive difference in insulin response.
P.S. That being said, I still hate the term ultra-processed. "Junk food" implies the non-specificity better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45979589
Ok, maybe you're right, but can you categorize those and show that link?
Yes, the UPF classification used here likely flags some false positives and perhaps misses others, but if the methodology is otherwise sound and the link is there, even if fuzzy, I don't think it's as easy as you claim either. And even if if fuzzy, it's still useful as I would be healthier avoiding UPF (assuming accurate study), even if I would also avoid some perfectly healthy foods.
The addition of ingredients is the processing. The different levels of processing refer to what types and quantities of ingredients are added. It's like complaining that people are labelling food as poisoned when they should really be concerned about whether it contains poison.
Likewise the categorization of processing is useful for exactly the same reason the category of poisoned is useful. I'd rather not consume poisoned food of any variety even if I'm uncertain which poison has been added to it.
Just like other parts of science, that organization can be discussed and tested. It’s the opposite of “we asked the King what foods we can be most proud of”.
Linnaeus did this, and allowed himself to be wrong, and I argue his organization alone was necessary to talk about theory.
Every time i turn on the stove my kitchen catches on fire. I can't point out whats wrong with my stove, so obviously I keep the stove in my kitchen since I can't say it's causing the fire with a specific malfunction.
It reminds me of tobacco again. All these smokers, coughing up lungs, dying of lung/throat cancers, gee I wonder if it’s correlated? I knew when I was a kid and everyone in my family smoked it was unhealthy, it’s just obvious, how it was denied and people believed it for so long baffles me
Does this mean vegetable-based replacements for meats are going to experience reduced demand given they might be worse for health and more expensive than their meat counterparts?
They certainly meet the ultra processed foods criterion.
They might be worse or better for health, but they will probably be cheaper. They do certainly qualify as UPFs, since we don't know which ingredients, if any, are responsible for the health problems.
I don’t get the downvotes, this is a good question. I would prefer that the meat substitute market is allowed unbounded processing; and that the mere addition of nitrates to meat categorizes it into the terminal ultra-processed category.
If it turns out that xanthan gum causes metabolic syndrome, xanthan gum in meat substitutes will probably still cause metabolic syndrome, regardless of what you would prefer to allow.
Nitrates in meat cause stomach cancer (another thing we can't undo by legislative fiat) but probably don't cause the global pandemic of metabolic disease.
Those are problems for processed meats but not for butcher cuts of meat.
My guess is that there is no single mechanism, it's just degrees of freedom + capitalism.
If you have a relatively unprocessed food, there's definitionally not that much you can do to it.
Market forces dictate that food companies produce the cheapest possible food with the best taste. Evolutionarily, food that tasted good was good for you. Food science has developed, in the service of the market, to make good tasting food, especially food that tastes so good that you get addicted to it, that's made from cheap ingredients. Good for you is neutral unless the customer can detect that the food is not good for them. Generally, cheap ingredients are not as good for you. The ingredients are cheap because they don't taste good, and they don't taste good because they're not very nutritious.
If you give food science and the market some rope, they have a bajillion ways to make cheap things that taste good.
I'd guess it's twofold: 1.) Lack of fiber in the ultra processed foods 2.) shelf-stability additives so the food can sit on shelves for months and not go bad.
Ultra-processed foods as a category includes lots of foods that have both lots of fiber and few/no stability additives.
No report has ever stated that every single ultra-processed food is bad for you.
They are speaking in generalities, about a general category.
Why would a definition of a food category include a mechanism for why they are bad for health?
Yeah the whole definition is bogus. i.e. "mechanically separated meat" is considered ultraprocessed food? Why? By this logic putting apples into mixer and creating pyre is ultraprocessed food too.
First, I think you're misreading it. The Wikipedia article lists "mechanically separated meat" as one of the ingredients that are used in ultra-processed foods.
The other point is already covered by other replies. "Mechanically separated meat" is not a term for your mother's chicken salad remake of last Sunday's roast chicken.
I'm not sure you are replying knowing what "mechanically separated meat is", as it isn't just cutting / separating pieces of regular meat using machinery. It's the sieving of a ground up bone/flesh mix into a meat paste. The result product is not something you would normally call meat, and called 'white slime' by some.
Seems like a reasonable definition? It's not referring to tissue you put through a grinder yourself.
From wikipedia:
Mechanically separated meat (MSM), mechanically recovered/reclaimed meat (MRM), or mechanically deboned meat (MDM) is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing pureed or ground beef, pork, mutton, turkey or chicken under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. When poultry is used, it is sometimes called white slime as an analog to meat-additive pink slime and to meat extracted by advanced meat recovery systems, both of which are different processes. The process entails pureeing or grinding the carcass left after the manual removal of meat from the bones and then forcing the slurry through a sieve under pressure.
The resulting product is a blend primarily consisting of tissues not generally considered meat, along with a much smaller amount of actual meat (muscle tissue).
But what's the issue? I can eat beef and beef tendon separately but if they are blended together it suddenly becomes bad?
Mechanically separated meat is a marketing term. It's neither 100% meat (in fact it contains tons or fat and joints) nor a good quality meat (this one is sold separately). I don't buy any products that list it among its ingredients.
Ground beef its not the same thing
Right but what is wrong with fat and joints?
When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?
Disgusting and disrespectful to the animal.
If we are going to kill an animal to eat it then we should use all of it.
Does anybody eat mechanically separated meat as-is? I imagine it’s basically only available to end users as a final product like chicken nuggets or hot dogs, mixed with many additives.
Those identically shaped chicken, turkey and ham for slicing at the deli are generally mechanically separated.
It is available as ground meat. You can make meatloaf from it. Or you can buy preformed meatballs which is just ground meat with some shape so you can just drop it into pan and bake in the oven. 40 minutes and done.
Peel some potatoes, cook them and you have a dinner in said 40 minutes.
And I have no idea why this would be classified as ultraprocessed food.
Acually, MSM is not found in hamburger, only hot dogs.
Ground meat is different from mechanically separated meat, which is a paste. At least personally I haven’t seen ground meat for sale in the US that lists MSM as an ingredient, though it may exist.
Is such "ground meat" labelled differently from ground or minced meat that is made the traditional way?
In the US at least they are considered different things and must be labelled as such.
You never ate ground meat? It is very common to buy separated processed meat without other ingredients since it is very quick and easy to cook.
Mechanically separated meat is different from ground meat, it’s made by pressing unusable scraps through a sieve to remove bits of bone. The end result is a paste.
Pâté is the commercial offering.
So the additives are unhealthy?
I don’t think anybody has a concrete answer yet, I’ve seen speculation that the texture of the food may be a component, and the extreme palatability that causes people to eat more than they otherwise would. There are so many potential root causes that it will take time to pinpoint specific ones, but what is becoming clear that eating lots of foods with additives and highly altered basic ingredients (like mechanically separated meat) is not good for you.
I have a hard time understanding how the act of mechanically separating meat from bone and gristle renders it unfit for consumption. Texture certainly matters for taste, but once masticated, all food is roughly the same texture. Digestion is a biochemical process, and if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one.
> if the body is experiencing adverse reactions to certain foods, the cause should be a biochemical one
No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad?
To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go.
It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers.
It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback.
The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.
Again, no one is claiming that every component of every ultra-processed food is bad.
As an aggregate, the category of foods appears to be bad for us.
And we aren't sure why yet.
And even if you want to define it as such, why is that bad for health?
I’ve seen one theory that it might be something to do with not needing as much chewing and how quickly you can eat it. I can’t remember exactly the article I was reading but apparently there is a massive difference (e.g. insulin spike, etc.) eating apple purée of one apple vs. eating an apple.
Needing to chew less processed food may help just by being kind of rate-limiting (slowing down how fast you can get the food in), but also the enzymes in your saliva have time to start working on the food before you swallow it.
If I recall correctly I have also read (perhaps the same article, but maybe somewhere else) that some processes related to digestion might be triggered when you start eating (chewing), so the fact that you can eat so many calories so quickly before those processes get going might make a big difference too.
as I understand, it's also the fiber. The fiber acts as a barrier that slows down the speed at which you absorb the food which leads to a smoother insulin spike (in case of carbs) and a faster feeling of satiation. When you blend the apple all that fiber is broken down do it loses those properties
Nobody knows. This is one of the things that makes efforts to regulate UPFs frustrating.
Some people say that it is lack of fiber. Some people say that it is inflammation caused by preservatives and/or stabilizers. Some people say it is the hyperpaletability, which encourages people to overconsume calories. Some people say it is just the high amounts of sugar and salt. And it is unlikely that all of these things contribute equally such that they should all be regulated the same.
Tangent because I do think you are asking a pretty clear question, but I find it’s much more helpful in these discussions to specify why(mechanical explanation) from why(elaborate on known info) from why(what is the human reason for an action).
Because you really can interpret any of these in a lot of the situations where someone is asking “why”.
it's not food,thats why
it is a food substitute. food is composed of recognisable ingedients. what comes from factorys has no connection or relation to that. the unspoken premise is that pre prepared stuff with a label is somehow part of a continuity. , pared= to cut/divided
prepared=cut/divided~for you
pre prepared= wtf?
> it's not food,thats why
Its pure meat, meat is food. What do you mean?
What are you talking about? Why is it not food?
It’s bad for health because the science says so.
You’re welcome to do your own years of research to learn more (everything, cooking, freezing, drying, blending, adding acids affects amino acids and certainly bacteria in the food) but until then stick with what the studies prove
The science is messy.
The UPF definition includes a ton of very distinct things. It is unlikely that emulsifiers, preservatives, food dyes, added sugar, and removed fiber all produce the same health responses. Science showing correlations between UPF consumption and health outcomes also don't tend to show a dose response, which is odd. We'd expect lots of UPF consumption to be very bad and for some UPF consumption to be kind of bad, but we don't tend to see this in the data.
Nutritional research is also enormously difficult to perform. Any sort of controlled study is necessarily over short periods of time. Long term studies come with all of the messy confounds that make it remarkably difficult to determine causation.
The one in the article is dose dependent…
And I really don’t understand your point at all. All science starts with observing a correlation and deducing a cause years to centuries later.
But you don’t wait for newton to start believing in gravity
I don't have free access to the paper and dose response findings are not present in the summary. Can you reference the dose response findings for me?
Existing published research has not consistently found a dose response.
The authors are also not just saying "hey here is some science." They are advocating for policies that say that plain potato chips can be in schools but sour cream and onion potato chips cannot.
I guess a reasonable person can question the science, when ordinary words are used wildly inappropriately. E.g. 'ultra-processed' to mean things that are far from that.
If 'the science' is so conclusive, then maybe a single link to a single study would be an appropriate response.
https://www.google.com/search?q=studies+of+ultra-processed+f...
How about responding to the one in the article…?
Apples are actually a great example.
Think of eating an apple vs drinking apple juice. The amount of entire apples you can drink is immense compared to eating the apple whole. So the mechanical process does affect how we consume the food.
If you are asking the question whether UPF is bad, surely you got to control for the amount. Of course you can say that people tend to eat too much of UPF simply because it is easier to prepare and eat, but that doesn't mean it's the processing that is bad for you. It's still just the amount.
But that's part of it. There's a part to do with the nutrient quality, which can also be talked about, but also a part that has to do with how UPF are consumed. The act of processing the food a certain way makes you eat more of it without realising it. Same with fat and sugar, eating a stick of butter on its own is hard, same with pure sugar, mix them up and it's delicious and addictive which leads to health problems.
So rather than apple juice, consider watermelon juice. The nutrition and fiber are unchanged, the volume is close to 1:1. But you can drink more than you can eat.
My question might he stupid: is cottage cheese (kirkland) ultra processed food? I cook most of my stuff, but I use egg whites and cottage cheese from Kirkland for the high amount of proteins
I always assumed ultra-processed means that the food is loaded with preservatives like phosphates or BHT. I guess that's part of it, but maybe the efficiency of digestion should be considered. I remember Ben Krasnow (Applied Science) measured the calories in poop, humans are not very efficient at extracting all calories leading to very likely large efficiency variance between foods. But extending this further, the calories lost during preparation should be accounted for...
So how about: calories * digestion-efficiency - calories you personally need to expend to prepare or acquire it. The higher this number, the more processed is the food. So cane sugar is very bad, unless you personally harvested it.
Bad news for highly paid programmers.. basically all food should be considered ultra-processed since no physical labor was needed to acquire it.
A better example is astronauts. Their diet (on the job) is 100% ultra-processed food. They perform highly and have limited access to normal physical activity. But they’re hard to study because radiation and gravity differ so much that categorization of food might not be influential at all.
Discussion about this tends to get hung up on the relative harm of a particular food, let’s say a donut. But the article is really about a diet that is dominated by food like donuts.
>Evidence reviewed by 43 of the world’s leading experts suggests that diets high in UPF are linked to overeating, poor nutritional quality and higher exposure to harmful chemicals and additives.
>This category is made up of products that have been industrially manufactured, often using artificial flavours, emulsifiers and colouring. They include soft drinks and packaged snacks, and tend to be extremely palatable and high in calories but low in nutrients.
>They are also designed and marketed to displace fresh food and traditional meals, while maximising corporate profits, Monteiro said.
An issue is that a meal of donuts and doritos is equally as ultraprocessed as a diet of bleached pasta and jarred tomato sauce with some preservatives.
I don't have access to the paper, but it'd be interesting to see from the food surveys if the UPF domination is coming from stuff we'd traditionally call "junk food" or from foods that are similar to whole foods made from scratch but with some preservatives added.
The main point is: the category is correlated with poor health.
That you can narrowly choose items in the category that (you believe) don't correlate with poor health doesn't refute the finding.
IOW: you just made the mistake that the comment you are replying to warns you against.
That's not just the main point. The article references three papers, two of which are making policy arguments about UPFs. If we are going to propose interventions then it is rather important to understand these details.
I have always found it so weird to go to a supermarket when you have a (somewhat) "clean" diet. I go from veggies and fruits to meat and dairy and then I'm out again. 95% of the shelves I don't even look at.
Also, the definition of (ultra) processed food isn't so hard: just buy original food, not extrapolations of that. Buy veggies and potatoes, not chips. Buy meat, not sausages or burgers. Buy an apple and yoghurt, not the yoghurt you can buy off the shelf. Just basic ingredients.
Buy wheat berries, and not whole wheat bread?
The UPF category isn't helpful to the person at the grocery store trying to decide what's to buy because it significantly overlaps with very healthy foods.
Loose terms like junk food and whole foods are more helpful because they don't come with the patina of scientific rigor, you can use personal judgement about what fits in those categories.
What about cocoa powder (which is fermented and dried and separated at least)?
And coffee? Does it matter whether you buy beans and grind them yourself, or offload that grinding to a processor person?
Aren't you breaking your rule in one of your examples? Don't buy yoghurt, buy dairy. Just basic ingredients.
I just found that the bread is also considered ultra processed food (and hence not healthy?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food
This seems shocking a bit. If bread is a UPF, there will be a lot more items we never even think about.
Also from this wiki page[0], identifying UPF (paraphrased by me):
Long ingredient list: Foods that contain many ingredients, especially those that could not be found in a kitchen, are likely to be ultra-processed.
Claims on the packaging: Ultra-processed foods often come in packaging with nutrition claims like "low-fat," "sugar-free," or "fortified with vitamins."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food
Some bread. The stuff you buy from Wonder contains stuff no breadmaking book on Earth lists in their recipes.
Weird choice of the image by TheGuardian: there's some obviously highly processed foods such as doughnuts and candy, but you also have french fries, popcorn and even some nuts there. The text itself doesn't elaborate on this much either. What is it exactly that I am supposed to avoid?
The easy answer that encompasses 99% of the target foods is:
Avoid any foods that involve multiple rounds of processing, a term that includes baking, frying, adding preservatives,sugars or oils. Generally, if it has a lot of sugar or oil and has a weirdly long shelf life, be suspicious.
Drift towards: easily washable (smooth/peelable) fruits and vegetables, 100% whole wheat bread products, simple meat products like whole animal parts or deboned animal parts.
Dairy lives in the middle ground. If you have zero lactose problem, most dairy is mostly okay, just watch for sugar levels and recognize that most dairy products are calorie dense. Nuts are in this group too for the same reason but oil instead of sugar.
Bonus points for consuming real pro and pre biotics when you can. In the United States this is pretty limited to live culture yogurts, refrigerated kimchi, and refrigerated sourkraut.
Hang on. Pickling and fermentation are multi-step processes to transform food into their final state. Moreover, pickling is expressly used for preservation and long shelf life. Why are they not considered "ultra-processed" according to this definition? As you point out, they are an integral part of a healthy diet in multiple cultures.
Because the "Ultra-processed" definition is backwards. It's really more "foods that have statistically significant negative effects on health" than a description of why they do so. Because we don't yet know why they do so, and there are probably multiple causes. It seems like modern processing methods create this property, likely in part because the results are hyperpalatable. "Foods that are bad for you are bad for you" is tautological, so the ultra-processed naming is used for the hypothesis that it's something about the processing that makes them bad for you. This hypothesis seems highly likely, but we don't know what propert(y|ies) of the processing cause the harm, so it's a bad name but useful for discussing the hypothesis.
But this definition isn't right. UPFs do have a pretty widely recognized definition (the nova classification) and one of its major criticisms as a useful categorization is that there are plenty of junk foods that aren't UPFs.
Popcorn is just 1 round of cooking though, you can fry them yourself at home, its less processing than bread.
Then have fun eating your popcorn without sugar or salt :)
What's wrong with baking?
> but you also have french fries, popcorn and even some nuts there
For popcorn at least, I'd assume it's the prepackaged microwavable popcorn that gets flagged as UPF, where it's encased in hydrogenated oils, salt, and preservatives. It's hard to think that popcorn you make at home could be considered UPF, considering that it's literally one ingredient with heat applied to it (and oil I guess if you're popping it on the stovetop rather than an air fryer).
Microwave Popcorn containers are also coated with PFAs.
The necessity for any sophisticated packaging is itself a factor for the terminal Nova classification of ultra-processing.
Yeah ever heard of popcorn lung? Crazy stuff
Is there some clear boundary where a food stops being just processed and starts to be ultraprocessed?
No. Read the wikipedia article on the Nova classification. You can rules-lawyer it for days, or accept that it's a general categorization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
The problem I have with their classification is that people that seem to REALLY care about avoiding ultra processed foods tend to rules-lawyer.
why was this flagged?
imagine just buying normal food that wasnt done on the cheap. nobody could afford to live. even in usa, richest country in the world, people are eating cheap crap, living in wooden houses... of course you can be the richest country in the world if you just lower your living standards perpetually
dafuq is "normal" food? if by normal you mean usual or typical for a supermarket, then that would be mostly highly processed foods full of sugars and fats. Now that I think about it, what one actually wants is the not-normal foods, the raw unprocessed minority
I buy normal food and it’s plenty cheap tbh
Probably because "ultra-processed" is a bogus definition that doesn't prove what exactly is unsafe or why, which the authors of the study even acknowledge directly in the article:
> Critics argue UPF is an ill-defined category and existing health policies, such as those aimed at reducing sugar and salt consumption, are sufficient to deal with the threat.
> Monteiro and his co-authors acknowledged valid scientific critiques of Nova and UPF – such as lack of long-term clinical and community trials, an emerging understanding of mechanisms, and the existence of subgroups with different nutritional values.
It's not "processing" in itself that is causing problems, there is something specific (possibly a set of common ingredients used in many such foods) that we just haven't identified yet as what the actual harm is, so people lump all processed food into the harmful category and tell people to just stay away from all of it, which is not a realistic solution given current food production practices.
Sounds like those people are having an irrational emotional response to a term rather than addressing the presented research in good faith.
Also being a broad or nebulous category doesn’t make it not science… much of what science studies starts broad and nebulous or even theoretical.
Right but we aren't at the "hey we found this category has some interesting correlations with health outcomes, let's look into this" stage. The authors are advocating for specific policy interventions using the definition of UPF.
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