Hacker News Reader

> The sliced and bagged bread on the shelves is also more processed than the bread you might make at home or even buy from the bakery section of the grocery store. There's a reason it maintains perceived freshness much longer than bread you might make yourself.

The bakery section bread is sometimes sliced too.

Using slicing and bagging to distinguish ultra-processing is not a good idea, even if it sometimes correlates.

> I don't think their definition is a reason to discard the study. Drop the word "ultra" and it's still true that more than 2/3 of calories being consumed are from processed foods.

Processing can also mean so many different things. Sliced up raw ingredients to make a salad? Now it's processed.

Tthis is a good point. A bag salad is bad for many reasons, but (aside from too much dressing, which you can always do) not nutrionally.

> Would you consider the sliced and bagged bread to be ultra-processed, but not a whole loaf of basically the same thing?

"Ultra" seems subjective, but sliced bread is objectively more processed.

The mistake is assuming that "processed" is necessary a good measure of nutritional merit. A freeze dried turnip is more processed than a piece of raw honeycomb, but I'm pretty sure you'd give yourself diabetes eating honeycomb all day long while binging on turnips should be fine.

> The mistake is assuming that "processed" is necessary a good measure of nutritional merit.

That's what the headline is implying.

But it's also that "ultra" sounds like it means a lot more than "also sliced it."

Either way, if we would all agree that it has nothing to do with nutritional merit, then go ahead and call the sliced bread whatever you want. But I don't think that was the intent of the study!

You're all arguing about elil7's comment, which is false and wrong and not related to this article. There is literally nothing about slicing or bagging in the NOVA classification system. Ingredients are the only discriminating factor.

The definition of "ultra-processed" is in https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

> We found that ultraprocessed foods contain a substantially higher percent of calories from carbohydrates and added sugars, and higher levels of sodium, but also had less fiber and a lower percentage of calories from protein

Considering the vast majority of Americans get enough protein, I'm not sure why this specific observation is considered bad. Calories from carbohydrates (including sugar) aren't intrinsically worse than calories from protein. That's not to say most ultraprocessed foods are healthy, just that the observation doesn't imply they aren't.

For comparison, here's what the CDC has to say about added sugar[1]:

> Added sugars contribute calories to your diet, but no essential nutrients. Eating and drinking too many added sugars makes it difficult to achieve a healthy eating pattern without taking in too many calories.

The important thing is that ultraprocessed foods tend to have less micronutrients and encourage eating too many calories.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/sugar.html

I buy sliced and bagged bread at the grocery store that has exactly the same ingredients as I use to bake bread. I'll admit it actually surprised me that this was possible.

Just checking: you don’t add iron, molasses, inverted syrup, E214, E401, E505 etc when baking at home right? ;-)

Where the processing takes place is really important though, and can completely change the context: sliced & bagged whole-wheat bread made in a factory is not the same thing as a twinkie, but both would be classified as ultra-processed. What about a white baguette from my local bakery that's no more nutrious than a donut? What about a bag of fresh brocolli that's been washed and trimmed? The problem is "ultra-processed" !== bad for you.

What definition would be more useful and strongly correlated with good or bad fx ?

> The problem is "ultra-processed" !== bad for you.

They covered that. It's in the linked article:

> “In additional analyses, we compared the composition of ultraprocessed foods to non-ultra processed foods using data from the 2017-2018 period. We found that ultraprocessed foods contain a substantially higher percent of calories from carbohydrates and added sugars, and higher levels of sodium, but also had less fiber and a lower percentage of calories from protein,” said the study’s first author, Lu Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedman School.

I think too many people are getting hung up on the technicalities of processed versus ultra-processed. The distinction isn't meant to be a perfect ordering of all foods on a scale of unprocessed to ultra-processed. It's a rough spectrum with helpful, though not necessarily 100% perfect, classification guidelines.

Regardless of what you think about their classification techniques, they also showed that the nutritional composition varied significantly with the ultra-processed foods in ways that are known to be unhealthy, so it's not completely useless.