Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Ultra-processed food exposure and adverse health outcomes: umbrella review [pdf]

bmj.com

19 pointsfulafel9 comments

NOVA's "ultra-processed" definition is hopelessly broad, ranging from fruit yogurts to liquor to chocolate to the actual packaged food products you're probably thinking of when you hear that term.

This is useless if you care about what specifically is harmful - probably salt, sugar, saturated fat, all the bad things we knew about long before "ultra-processed" became a buzzword.

Liquor is indeed ultra-processed and is the most harmful substance humans routinely ingest leading to ~180,000 premature deaths per year in the United States alone. I would argue that distillation is the ne plus ultra of ultraprocessing.

Sweetened fruit yogurts are also not good for you, stacking fructose on top of lactose for a sugar left-right combo that people aren't expecting. My favorite is when somebody shovels honey-sweetened granola into a tub of HFCS-sweetened strawberry-vanilla yogurt and chomps down on it mumbling "mmm healthy".

edit: used to say "one of the most harmful"

I think the point of GP is that the definition is wildly overbroad. What is actually the cause of the unhealthiness? You can't just lump EVERYTHING into ultra-processed or it becomes noise. Liquor and a chocolate bar are clearly not the same level of unhealthy.

I disagree that the definition is over broad.

The definition is very well written and easy to understand.

The NOVA Food Classification System Simplified:

Category 1: Foods that look like what was pulled out of the ground, off the plant, or off the bone.

Category 2: Category 1 items that have been squeezed, evaporated, boiled, or shaken

Category 3: Things that are made up of things from categories 1 and 2

Category 4: Everything else (this is the ultra-processed category)

Regions where residents who are socioeconomically similar to the US but mainly eat categories 1, 2, and 3 are (was going to say tend to be but it is an absolute) healthier.

Regions where residents eat high proportions of category 4 substances (the US and a growing number of other nations) are obese and sick.

The NOVA Food Classification System https://ecuphysicians.ecu.edu/wp-content/pv-uploads/sites/78...

I’ve read the classifications, and the problem is that almost any prepared food would automatically make it category 4.

Can we agree that a chocolate bar and a Twinkie are wildly different levels of healthiness? It isn’t the category 4 definition that’s the issue. It’s the stuff in certain items within that category that is the issue, and identifying them is what matters.

>Can we agree that a chocolate bar and a Twinkie are wildly different levels of healthiness?

No. Sugar is sugar is sugar. Sugar is bad for humans. A twinkie excreted out of a factory is just as bad as artisanal small-batch free-range fair-trade chocolate that comes out of a Swiss boutique. It doesn't matter that the chocolate has more vitamin-D because of the sugar.

Category 4, which does indeed include nearly all prepared food, should be avoided to the greatest extent possible.

Then we're at an impasse because that sort of black-and-white position is clearly untenable and leads to ridiculous policy decisions that are unhelpful to society.

Chocolate bars or cocoa in general are shown to have anti-oxidant properties. If I get something with lots of cocoa %, it likely has substantially less sugar than a Twinkie, notwithstanding the difference in hyper-palatability between a Twinkie and a chocolate bar.

Sugar is just sugar. It's not evil outright. It's certainly not bad for humans in any amount.

HTML version from same site: https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2023-077310

Funny enough I recently came across this video [1] about ultra-processed foods maybe being labeled "predigested". It sort of got me thinking but makes an interesting point that if you take a basic ingredient like a potato and break it down into a starch slurry it does sound like it has been pre-digested.

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz2WR6tVg5E&t=308s

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