Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad | Hacker News Reader

Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad

economist.com

220 pointsBrajeshwar428 comments

From the article:

> Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a recent observational study from Harvard University, for example, found that whereas some upfs, such as sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. Dr Astrup warns that the current classification risks “demonising” a lot of healthy food. Insights from Dr Hall’s work could therefore help refine the understanding of upfs, paving the way for more balanced and useful guidelines.

This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless. I look forward to the study noted in the article comparing high-density vs. hyper-palatable. I strongly suspect the study will show its a combinatorial effect... but we'll see.

I agree it leaves a lot to be desired but i wouldn't say it's totally worthless. It's clearly identifying something and even a poorly understood adherence to avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier. Overall though we obviously need to come up with better terms for this

Adherence to avoiding UPFs, by the current Nova classification, would lead to most people having to radically change their diets, assuming you actually follow the Nova classification of UPFs to a tee. And assuming they're already reasonably healthy, there would be no meaningful health benefits I suspect.

That's precisely what the food product industry wants you to believe.

Potentially there could no noticable health improvements but potentially far less health degradation over time when you think about things like risk of type-2 diabetes with high sugar and high-UPF diets.

But it's true that we mustn't focus only on UPFs but it is looking more and more like a significant factor (even if the definitions could be improved).

Again, I’m not saying “all UPFs are safe/healthy”. I’m saying the definition is worthless when you include potato chips and protein bars in the same category.

> avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier

UPFs are defined in a way where you could replace them with essentially identical foods that only count as "processed" by swapping out a couple ingredients with nutritionally identical ingredients (e.g. replace HFCS with sucrose).

The research on UPFs doesn't actually compare ultra-processed food with similar "processed" foods.

So if you replace a pie containing HFCS with a kale salad, yeah it's probably healthier, but there isn't really evidence that replacing an "ultra-processed" pie containing HFCS with a home-made "processed" pie containing sucrose that otherwise has the same nutritional content is healthier (there is some researching showing that fructose can be harmful but the glucose/fructose content of HFCS isn't significantly different from sucrose).

If there is no direct comparison between similar ultraprocessed foods and processed foods, the research doesn't actually show that ultraprocessed foods are bad in a way that homemade processed foods aren't, in which case I'm not sure what the point of defining ultraprocessed foods as a separate category is.

> there is some researching showing that fructose can be harmful but the glucose/fructose content of HFCS isn't significantly different from sucrose

Indeed a lot of people ignore this. Still it is worth pointing out that

a) a higher glucose content due to sucrose based sweetness helps absorbing fructose in a home-made cake.

b) the ultra-processed cake likely got added a fair share of sugar alcohols (keeping it moist) which for a single digit percentage but still significant portion of the population interferes with fructose absorption leading to fermentation in the gut.

c) the longer and cold storage of the industrial cake will lead to an increase of recombined starch which is harder to digest.

(a, b due to fructose transport from gut less efficient than for glucose and the transport part relying on presence of glucose. Some people suffer from fructose mal-absorption where the main transport mechanism is not working and the backup mechanism can be blocked by sugar alcohols)

40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated.

You can't reliably draw any conclusions from them. You have to use common sense and rules of thumb.

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

My favorite plant is wheat, deep friend in peanut oil, covered in corn(syrup).

is the last one even widely accepted anymore

What's not widely accepted?

https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-plat...

That's pretty good. Though it should be balanced with avoiding factory made food.

I personally think non processed meat is good for you, but that's a minor point compared to ultra processed vs not really processed foods.

I once argued with med students that Oreos (which are vegan) are not healthier than a steak.

Absolutely crazy and tbh frightening that anyone (let alone med students!) would think Oreos are healthier than a steak.

The reasoning of course is that processing and sugar content don't matter as much as any level of saturated fat.

The avoidance of factory food is part of the point. GP is invoking Michael Pollan from the Omnivore's Dillema, among others. By 'Food', Pollan specifically means to exclude the sorts of chemical-engineered vague nutrient simacrula you're talking about.

Eating most plant starches would be a terrible diet.

It's saying most of your food should be plants, not that most plants should be your food.

(Michael Pollan) https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/18508-eat-food-not-too-much...

Can you please give your reference for that definitive statement. And what are 'nutritional studies'? Why wouldn't they include the research that led to the list of nutrient recommendations issued by USDA and similar publications in the UK, Norway, France, Australia and many other countries. No conclusions from them? I think there are. There is a truly vast literature on subjects nutritional so it's vital to be very specific.

Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.

The RDA and nutrient recommendations are the bare minimum so you do not die. Vast literature is ad populum fallacy.

Also consider that genetic background matters in nutritional matters and well... The populations under study have changed, and that's assuming you have a fairly similar background to a population and not very mixed.

And we are not even getting into how these things go down in practice, with heavy industry lobbying and what not...

TLDR, you are on your own in terms of optimal nutrition but as another commenter said "eat food, not too much, mostly plants"

They are not, they are recommended averages.

RDA for vitamin C is 60mg, but you can survive without getting sick on 5-15.

Potato potato. Familiarize yourself with their history and then your opinion might differ

40-60% - that's a pretty large p-value and reasonable proxy for thumbs and sense.

But some are better than others. The NIH is currently running a study (N=36, expected to complete in 2025) on ultra-processed foods where the participants are sequested as inpatients at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center's research facility and strictly monitored 24/7. They can't leave without a chaperone that ensures they're not cheating. They've done prior studies such as this one [2] (N=20) in 2019. In these studies, they switch the person's diet halfway through, in order to see if the effect is real. The participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the diets had the same amount of calories total, and the same calorie density. The results are striking; participants eating ultra-processed foods consumed more calories and gained weight while the other group lost weight. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/well/eat/ultraprocessed-f... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/

Even though I'm a scientist and thoroughly trained in statistics, the idea that we can to sequester 36 people and monitor diet 24/7 and made general conclusions doesn't sound completely right to me. Partly in the technical sense and partly in the "why do the folks working on human health get away with sample sizes that would be laughed about in any other field?"

I don't know enough about medical statistics to say, but I often see small sample sizes in studies where the effect size is expected to be high. That may be the case here.

the effect size will not be high

There are too many variables in diet. If they study steak every meal vs rice and beans every meal they can come up with one. However most people are not that one-tracked either way. Sometimes the rich eat rice and beans, sometimes even poor manage to afford steak. For steak, did I mean beef, lamb, goat, pork... - this might or might not matter. There is also chicken, turkey, snake, deer, elk - and dozens more animals people eat which might or might not be healthy. OF each of the above there are different cuts (does it matter?), different fat levels (does it matter?). And that is just meat, how many varieties of beans are there, what about rice? What about all the other things people eat?

Do these other fields also study humans in controlled experiments?

I think it has to do with the sample to staff ratio. It's not enough to observe human subjects. You have to actively prevent them from going off the rails. It doesn't scale well when you increase the sample size. I guess we could replicate a similar experiment n-times and then do a meta study, but it's not ideal either.

How would you tackle the logistics of scaling up the above experiment?

Yes, the most common example would be clinical trials for drugs and other medical treatments- often have thousands of patients (with recruitment being the limiting factor). There are tons of ways that studies can go wrong, for example when patients don't take the treatment and lie (this is common) or have other lifestyle factors that influence the results, which can't be easily smoothed out with slightly larger N.

I don't know how to fix the nutritionist studies- I'm still pretty skeptical that you could ever control enough variables to make any sort of conclusion around things with tiny effect sizes. This isn't like nutritional diseases we've seen in the past, for example if you look at a disease like pellagra (not getting enough niacin), literally tens of thousands of people died over a few years (beri beri, rickets, scurvy are three other examples; these discoveries were tightly coupled to the discovery of essential nutrients, now called vitamins).

From my reading, that's not generally true. It all depends on the methodology. Safety or feasibility studies can use very small sample sizes. I've been reading safety studies on monoclonal antibodies like Cimzia, for example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29030361/ (N=16)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28814432/ (N=17)

https://ard.bmj.com/content/83/Suppl_1/1145.2 (N=21)

Of course, these are not nutritional studies.

You should try reading the FDA approval for the drug; it was already approved before these publications (which aren't so much clinical trials as just medical research). The FDA approval has a whole paragraph about how the effect size was too small to demonstrate statistical significance, and the trials had n=300.

It's also indicated for use in a disease we don't understand, for people who didn't respond to all the previously approved drugs. Not a good example at all.

I'm not comparing these to the FDA approvals process, but to your claim that trials use thousands of patients. These three studies are ascertaining the pregnancy safety of a drug, irrespective of whether we understand the disease or what the response rate is.

Cimzia has been well-studied, and we understand why it works on autoimmune diseases like inflammatory arthritis. It has 6 FDA approvals for different indications, so your description of the drug itself is incorrect.

The sample size doesn't concern me as much as what does that force on their lifestyle and in turn do they apply. They probably are not getting the same exercise as a normal person (which runs the range from "gym rat" who gets too much to "couch potato" who barely walks).

> why do the folks working on human health get away with sample sizes that would be laughed about in any other field?

Because it's really hard and expensive to do such studies with more participants

>The participants were allowed to eat as much as they wanted, but the diets had the same amount of calories total, and the same calorie density. The results are striking; participants eating ultra-processed foods consumed more calories and gained weight while the other group lost weight. [1]

Did they eat the same amount of calories or more calories? People will eat more of tasty food and less of bland food. You could get the inverse result by giving bland ultra-processed food and tasty unprocessed food.

"use common sense" lol - the same common sense that people use when confronted with dyhydrogenoxide? the same common sense that people used if asked about sodium chloride? The same common sense about that tomato, mushroom, seaweed extract called MSG?

> sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.

I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.

Likewise breakfast yogurt could be either yoplait “yogurt” or plain unsweetened actual yogurt, or anything in between.

One is basically gelatinized sugar and the other is pretty healthy. If one’s classification doesn’t easily distinguish those two, that’s absurd.

one has added sugar and the other not, it’s clear which one is ultra processed

That doesn't make any sense. If I have a bowl of oatmeal, and I sprinkle sugar on top, it does not magically become ultra-processed.

Well if the sugar is ultra-processed, yes it does, doesn't it?

Is the sugar ultra processed?

No, it does not, since ultra-processed, though not a strictly defined term, does not include household ingredients like granulated sugar or brown sugar. If you happen to have a jar of HFCS in your cabinet then that would quality.

it's pretty processed compared to sugarcane at least

So homemade bread is ultraprocessed because the wheat was processed into flour?

From what I understand, technically yes.

I think there’s a lot of work to be done on categorisation but the underlying principle tends to be fairly decent: the more stuff you do to your raw ingredients, the less healthy they become.

No, homemade bread would be NOVA group. 3. The flour itself is group 2 (processed culinary ingredients.) Mixing the group 2 ingredient (flour) with group 1 ingredients (water, yeast, salt) and baking it makes it group 3 (processed food.)

If you added something like Xanthan Gum to your "homemade bread", that would make it group 4 (ultra processed foods.)

Thanks for the correction!

Homemade bread is a processed food, not an ultra processed food.

You can process wheat into flour at home. You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.

>You can process wheat into flour at home. You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.

That statement seemed off, so I poked around a little and, yes you can make granulated sugar from sugar cane at home[0].

[0] https://shuncy.com/article/how-to-make-sugar-from-sugarcane-...

>You cannot process sugar cane into table sugar without an industrial plant.

That's obviously false.

The refined sugar you buy in the store ('table sugar') is clarified with phosphoric acid and bleached using a number of other chemicals. In addition to this, it goes though a number of other industrial processing steps that you would not be able to perform at home. Hence, it is 'highly processed'.

So you can make it at home using scary chemicals that you can easily buy online. You can't just say 'industrial processing' and 'chemicals' and be believed.

Well then it is a worthless term. Both granulated sugar and HFCS are processed foods. Corn syrup is a household ingredient. No idea why you think a bit higher percentage of fructose changes anything.

Corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup are two different ingredients, although they share some words. One is 100% glucose and the other also contains fructose (usually 42% or 55% fructose), produced by chemically altering the corn syrup. We process glucose and sucrose differently and it affects taste, satiation, digestion, and more. I agree that the terminology is useless, by institutional intention.

> chemically altering the corn syrup.

And where does corn syrup come from? From squeezing corn? The sugars in corn don’t start as glucose either (they’re starches).

Besides, at home, bakers easily make “HFCS” themselves by adding any weak acid to table sugar to make invert sugar (an HFCS 50 equivalent).

> We process glucose and sucrose differently

Tell that to some southerners about their sweet tea. This simple distinction isn’t that metabolically interesting for day to day life (or explaining the prevalence of obesity and metabolic syndromes). Concentrations in a serving and mode of delivery are far more important. You can pretty easily get metabolic syndrome from excess glucose as well as sucrose. Altering smell and moisture content are more impactful variables.

Sucrose readily hydrolyzes to glucose and fructose via sucrase in the small intestine, it and HFCS become equals (no, Mexican coke isn’t healthier you dumb hipsters, just eat a piece of fruit already). If it wasn’t you’d get massive diarrhea from eating it. So sucrose vs HFCS isn’t nearly as distinct.

> and it affects taste, satiation, digestion, and more.

The most important distinctions go beyond the relative concentrations of the simple sugars. A fresh fruit doesn’t have the same insulin spiking and metabolic syndrome inducing potential as plain Karo syrup or a (Mexican) Coke, even though its relative percentage of fructose is higher or similar.

It does make sense if we're talking about yogurt. The sugary yogurts sold at super markets etc don't have sugar sprinkled on top, but mixed in. Normally, you can't do that.

If you make yogurt the standard way [1] and try to add sugar to it while it's still a fluid, it will all sink to the bottom and then you'll just have some yogurt with a layer of sugar on the bottom. If you add it when it's not a fluid anymore, then you'll have a layer at the top. If you try to mix it up in between you'll break it up [2] and end up with mush; with sugar mixed in.

The only way I can think of to add sugar to yogurt and ensure it is evenly mixed throughout its mass is to use some additive, probably some kind of stabiliser. I suspect that's what makes this kind of yogurt qualify for the ultra-processed category.

Check the ingredients on your favourite yogurt. They should say: milk, yogurt culture. End of transmission. If there's anything else in it, then I would say there's a good claim it's been over-processed.

____________

[1] Bring milk to boil or use UHT. Let cool to 45° C (113° F). Add lactic ferments (Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus - readiest source: yogurt). Keep warm. Do not disturb. Wait. Enjoy. Scales up to industrial level (and is dirt cheap to boot).

[2] That's called syneresis - that's when you put a spoon in and then find a little puddle of milky fluid in its wake a few hours later. You've broken apart the jell'0 like structure of the yogurt's curd, i.e. the coagulated milk solids, and caused the milk fluids to leak out.

There are many brands of yogurt with "fruit on the bottom" or otherwise unmixed that use plain sugar. Not every store-bought product is the worst possible version of a store-bought product. There's a huge variation.

>> Not every store-bought product is the worst possible version of a store-bought product.

I agree with that for the general case but my intuition is that if someone's selling you something ready-made and pre-packaged, that you can easily make yourself (yogurt with fruit mixed in), then that's because they want to charge you extra and force you into a choice -of ingredients- you possibly wouldn't make.

For example, the yogurts with fruit I've had in the UK were just not very good yogurts, and the fruit were just not very good fruit. The yogurts were the thin and tasteless stuff that seems to be typical of anywhere outside the Balkans (I'm Greek) and the fruit were basically preserve, with added sugar. Why do you need added sugar with fruit? Because the fruit is under-ripe and probably too sour to eat in the first place.

You have to think of the economics a bit. Yogurt is cheap to make and most people won't pay a premium for it. Also it's sour and many people (again, outside the Balkans) don't like that. So companies will add sweeteners and sweet admixtures, like jam, honey or fruit to make it more palatable. And of course to make that financially viable they have to drop the quality of the ingredients. And that's where the additives come in: they improve packaging, transport and distribution, even as they degrade taste and nutrition.

I think you're ignoring the hundreds of higher-end brands that are trying to appeal to people like us. Some are still shit, some are, by all possible accounts, actually amazing.

>The only way I can think of to add sugar to yogurt and ensure it is evenly mixed throughout its mass is to use some additive, probably some kind of stabiliser. I suspect that's what makes this kind of yogurt qualify for the ultra-processed category.

What?? I can't be the only one that gets plain greek yogurt and adds a tablespoon of honey or agave syrup and mixing it evenly before adding some granola + fruit. It's not that hard, and it's definitely not ultra-processed.

Honey and agave syrup have oligosaccharides that act as stabilizers. Fructans in agave, specifically.

As does molasses like when making refined sugar. Most unrefined sources of sugar naturally contain chemicals that act as stabilizers because it’s a side effect of many polysaccharides.

Also "Greek yogurt" is normally strained so it's already stabilised and is less subject to syneresis.

Note that even with the stabilising effect of straining and honey, real Greek yogurt (the stuff without additives) is never sold with admixtures. Once you mix stuff in you really are changing the consistency of the product and therefore its storage and transportation profile.

There's a scene in Silicon Valley [1] where Elrich Bachman is complaining that people keep taking his narrow spoons that he needs to mix in the jam in the little tub attached to his "Fa-Yeeh yogurt" (spelled "Fage". Surprisingly he pronounces it right! I'm Greek).

Bachman is talking about this product, Fage's split-cup Total yogurts:

https://gr.fage/total-2-split-cup

The reason there's a little tub and you have to tip it in and mix it up after you buy it is exactly because once you've disturbed the yogurt by mixing things in it, you don't have yogurt anymore but a gloopy goo with the consistency of thick cream and that just doesn't travel very well, especially if you want to be exporting your yogurt from Greece (where Fage has its plants) to the US (where Bachman complains about his spoons).

Also that gooey gloop is not what yogurt is supposed to be like. But I suppose that's just a matter of habit.

_______________________

[1] https://youtu.be/ZR_taax1TUc?si=1TQM0vPrJY-9184l

Right, but honey and agave syrup can also act as mild adhesives. I'm not sure anyone would consider them an adhesive any more than they would a stabilizer.

Wut? The point wasn't that honey and agave are adhesives, it was that they don't need stabilizers when mixed with yogurt _because they already contain stabilizers_. Emphasis on the "already contain" and "stabilizer" parts.

People do use honey and agave as stabilizers in salad dressings, so obviously people consider them to be stabilizers </dumb semantic argument>

> If you try to mix it up in between you'll break it up [2] and end up with mush; with sugar mixed in.

Are you sure? Won't the sugar just dissolve into the water that is part of the yogurt? Or if a granule texture remained, just mix in sugar syrup?

I've definitely mixed honey into yogurt and put it in the fridge and it was fine the next day, no separation or anything. Why do you think you'd need a stabilizer?

Honey contains oligosaccharides that act as stabilizers.

>> Are you sure? Won't the sugar just dissolve into the water that is part of the yogurt? Or if a granule texture remained, just mix in sugar syrup?

Nope. The fluid you're trying to mix the syrup in is milk, already a stable emulsion of proteins, sugars and water. Try mixing sugar (well, corn) syrup in that and see how long it stays mixed in. Once you stop mixing and the mixture comes to rest, the syrup starts sinking to the bottom. Better drink fast, and it sure sets faster than it takes for yogurt to set.

Check out the ingredients on any chocolate milk. There's always a stabiliser, usually a caragenaan. That's to keep the corn syrup and chocolate powder from separating from the milk. Back Home in the Old Country (when I was a kid in Greece) the stores sold a chocolate milk which was just milk with cocoa and some sugar. When you bought it from the store you could see that the milk and solids had separated, and there was a darker layer at the bottom, where all the chocolate and sugar had set. So you had to shake it well before drinking. Nobody makes that anymore, now all the chocolate milks have a stabiliser, so you don't need to expend your precious energy shaking the bottle. All those wasted calories. We don't want that. I guess.

For similar reasons, when you mix honey in your tea you need to keep a spoon in to stir it often, or it all goes to the bottom.

>> I've definitely mixed honey into yogurt and put it in the fridge and it was fine the next day, no separation or anything. Why do you think you'd need a stabilizer?

Because I know yogurt. I basically eat yogurt every day. I even make it myself some times (see my recipe above). Are you sure your yogurt did not have stabilisiers in it?

Thanks for the info! Fascinating. It's the explanations like these that keep me on HN.

This is an incredibly bizarre comment - I buy unsweetened yogurt and sometimes mix honey in before I eat it.

My comment is about adding sugar to yogurt during production. Please read more carefully (e.g. the part of the comment that explains how it's made and why sugar can't be added at that moment).

Oats also don't grow as individual flakes, they are processed too. Separating and concentrating a single ingredient is "processing" it. If you want the healthiest oats, you probably need to grow them yourself and eat them directly off the stalk. I'm joking, of course - sort of.

There is a difference between processing an oat and the derivative ‘ingredients’ that are used to simulate the mouth feel of ‘ice cream’ - which includes a type of mold.

I agree the distinction is murky and can be easy to mock but at the end of the day something associated with these foods is making societies deeply sick and that should encourage us all to care about a solution. Even if you take a libertarian approach to diet, the economic cost of caring for a society with rampant obesity and diabetes impacts us all

> I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health.

You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout.

Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've gone much too far in demonizing it.

Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it.

Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.

Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.

> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.

Emphasis on refined sugar.

Most food products, even meat in trace amounts, has some level of some form of sugar in it.

Added sugars are not needed in mass amounts for sure.

While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it.

Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.

That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.

> That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic

there is no way to separate the discussion, doing so it’s just to avoid solving the issue that is to regulate refined sugar

Refined sugar is extremely concentrated compared to the natural sources. You need like 50 kilos of sugar cane to produce one kilo of refined sugar, and through multiple steps of heavy industrial processes.

You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

> You could make a case for honey, but, like all other natural sources, it contains other ingredients that somehow limits ingestion or metabolization.

In the natural environment, said other ingredients would be the angry swarm of bees?

Sugar is literally evaporated sugar cane juice. You need a lot of cane to make a little sugar because water is heavy. "refinining" is just separating out the molasses to make it white and so the molasses can be sold separately. You only need "heavy industrial processes" to make it profitably at scale.

> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.

Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.

> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful.

The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol,

Alcohol is a literal poison that you should not consume at all. Sugar is a basic dietary requirement. Of course, all nutrients should be consumed in moderation, but that's not unique to sugar in any way.

> Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.

The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.

> The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate

Again, the body does not :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet

Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?

Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.

> Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?

You mean, is there any evidence aside from every person who manages their diabetes through diet alone? Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?

> It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.

You seem to be confusing the ketogenic diet with starving. That's not how it works. If you deplete your fat body's stores and get hungry, you simply eat some fat and then your body will burn it for fuel. If you decide to eat much more fat than your body needs, your body will store the fat as fat. But it won't do it quite as readily as with sugar/carbs, and you won't get food cravings mere hours after eating.

> Or the various pre-industrial human cultures who ate virtually nothing but fish and small game because their climate was notoriously resistant to agriculture and fruit trees?

We have longer life span. We are healthier then them. And we have also bigger muscles for those fitness oriented.

That article starts with

> The ketogenic diet is a high-fat, adequate-protein, low-carbohydrate dietary therapy

Keto diet is low-carbs - not completely carbs free.

To split hairs, "low carb" means different things to different groups of people. Lifelong adherents of the keto diet put the limit at around 20g of carbs per day. But you can find research studies and the like where they take a normal Western diet (75-90% carbs) and reduce it to say, 60% carbs and then refer to THAT as "low carb."

It's not splitting hairs. Unless you are extremely physically active, even ~100g of carbs a day will inhibit ketosis where the liver converts fats into ketones for powering your brain and body. This is easily seen by using ketone strips to detect ketones in urine.

>The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.

Only in so much as that it will built glucose out of other things you eat if you don't eat carbs separately. Your body runs on glucose which is a carbohydrate.

> Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.

How do you go from "Sugar should be consumed in moderation" to "Sugar should be ripped out of all foods and the body doesn't need carbohydrates"?

Why jump from a reasonable and sound observation to some ridiculous extreme nobody asked for?

I interpret it to mean that we shouldn't be adding sugar to any of our foods. The natural sugar in the foods we eat is plenty.

I wouldn't even go that far. A slice of birthday cake won't kill someone. Added sugars have their place, but we shouldn't be adding them where they aren't needed and we should consume them in moderation. It's wild how much random stuff has added sugar. I've even seen deli meat with added sugar. Who is asking for corn syrup to be pumped into their roasted turkey?

In side by side taste tests more people like the version with added sugar. That’s why they add it; it sells.

Actually carbs are necessary and carbs are sugars. In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long. Personally I am not sure I am buying the narrative about fructose - but it is plausible that it might be bad - but glucose you'll have in your blood even if you don't eat any sugar - because your own body produces it if you don't get it from the food directly.

I wonder why nobody has started sweetening stuff with glucose as a 'healthy sweetener'. It is maybe 3 times more expensive than normal sugar - but I guess this is mostly because it is not a common product - cane sugar in Poland is of the same price - and the impact on the price of the end product would be marginal.

> In the past people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.

What is “long?” There are people living years on no carbs at all.

Who is living years without any carbs?

The Inuit, for starters. Oh, and me.

So far as I can tell, Inuit get about 15–20% of their calories from carbohydrates, because of all the glycogen from the raw meat they consume.

But I am only looking at summaries outside a bunch of paywalls, so I can't confirm the quotes on the wikipedia page.

People on zero carb and carnivore diets.

There are no essential carbohydrates. Essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids, yes. Essential carbohydrates, no.

> Actually carbs are necessary

This is NOT true. Carbs are ONE form of energy that the body can use for fuel. Fat is the other one.

> people with diabetes tried to live on a completely carb free diet - but you cannot do that for long.

I guess you're saying I don't exist?

For about 10 years, I haven't eaten carbs beyond the VERY rare cookie or two every other month and the insignificant trace amounts in above-ground leafy vegetables and the like. I'm not alone, there are lots of us who eat this way. Whole online communities, full of people who each have their own reasons. I did it for general health and fitness reasons, others do it to reverse their type 2 diabetes.

In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.

The planet used to be dotted with cultures that eat animals and fish primarily or exclusively for hundreds to thousands of years. The Inuit, Mongolian nomads, tribes in the Amazon, etc. They mostly don't exist anymore. (But not because of their diet.)

It's not a big group, but there ARE modern people who live on a carnivore diet for years on end and don't appear to suffer any notable long-term effects. Generally these are either extreme keto/paleo adherents, bodybuilders, or those who are trying to manage a medical condition.

> In the 1960s, a man named Angus Barbieri fasted for over a year under medical supervision and suffered no ill effects afterward. Unless you want to believe the whole thing is a hoax and he was secretly snarfing donuts on the sly, he is proof that humans don't NEED carbs.

Read a little about this on Wikipedia, that's insane! I'm still being stubborn and halfway refusing to believe there were no bad side effects, though lol

> Angus Barbieri

So far as I can tell, he consumed yeast extract, which all my suppliers of assure me does in fact contain carbohydrates.

But perhaps Barbieri ate a special kind that didn't?

have you ever actually tried to read about indian diet on Amazon? ... it's not because they hunt(ed) fish and capybaras that you can make such a claim, go figure

i also tried to find a link for a paper here but it's been a long time but basically the population we have the smallest register of disease is an indian tribe around the coast of South America that mostly has a super high carbohydrate consumption compared to the rest of the world (will edit and comment if i find it)

edit: yeah, doubt i'll find but another counterpoint, go look at the rate of disease of Eskimos... they eat meat only!

OK - I stand corrected on the point of consuming carbs.

But our body produces glucose anyway - so consuming or not does not change much. Brain needs glucose.

> Brain needs glucose.

That is actually incorrect, just a common misconception. You might want to read up on ketogenic diets, and specifically the state of ketosis itself.

If you have an ultra-low carb diet (<30 g/day) with only moderate protein consumption (<30% of daily required calories), then the body can’t produce enough glucose to power the brain. Instead, it starts to convert fats to ketones in the liver, and the brain actually runs fine on ketones as well. Alternatively, if you’re not underweight, you can fast for 24 hours with a moderate activity level, and should enter ketosis regardless of diet (as you start converting stored body fat into ketones to power the brain).

Interestingly, you then notice that the “low blood sugar” mental haze disappears as your brain switches over to ketones, and you kinda avoid the rollercoaster between mental highs and lows throughout the day that you usually get with a carb-based diet – instead, mental energy is kinda just at a constant “medium” throughout the day. It’s also easy to measure more objectively, if you pick up a glucose monitoring device + “keto sticks” from a pharmacy.

I saw this randomly the other day - what do you make of it?

https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2020/10/excessive-ketone-me...

If you don't eat sugar directly your body will produce it. And unless you plan on eating no fruits or vegetables I can't imagine a diet devoid of all sugar.

Maybe you can't imagine it, but lots of people do it all the same.

What you are referring to would be something akin to a hyper-strict keto diet, which I think nearly all medical professionals would consider ill-advised if not outright dangerous.

There is a lot of stuff I can't eat because the amount of added sugar is disgusting.

Yeah, but even a cup of celery contains a gram of sugar. Eating "no" sugar is preposterous. You could never eat any fruits or vegetables! But lots of people avoid excess sugar, me included.

> Eating "no" sugar is preposterous.

This is relatively easy for anyone on a carnivore diet.

It's actually not hard to eat a diet that doesn't have a lot of fructose. More difficult to avoid heavily processed carbohydrates that are absorbed too quickly.

Almost correct, except sugar consumption has been declining for decades. The peak was prior to 2000 IIRC

Yeah there used to be a children’s breakfast cereal called Super Sugar Crisp and the cartoon character promoting it in commercials was named Sugar Bear. Foods in the ‘70s and ‘80s were loaded with sugar.

Pretty sure this still exists and in the US it is called "Golden Crisp". I personally always loved it :)

That is just eating disorder kind of thinking. Stop spreading it. You can eat sugar, it wont harm you. Pretty much anything harms you in super large quantities.

Sacharids are good for you in general, just like faits, protein and everything else.

Strong agree. The Nova classification is extremist and heavily useless. Yes if you come up with two classifications and one includes McDonalds burgers and the other doesn't you'll be able to show a health effect. Doesn't mean your categorisation is useful.

Do you really think it's not useful at all to know you can protect your health proactively with one classification system of UPFs, that is deemed a bit extreme?

Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, they're just not known to be healthy within one of many frameworks.

Instead of tearing down what we know works because it doesn't include the foods you deem healthy, why not advocate for more research into the foods in question specifically?

The history of nutritional advice studies is extremely noisy and full of questionable, later reversed discoveries that have been p-hacked into existence. I think people are right to be very, very wary of rejecting the null hypothesis about anything without extremely solid clear evidence.

I don't disagree at all, but is there anything ambiguous about the health benefits of avoiding UPFs as defined by the Nova classification system? It seems the criticism I was responding to was more about the classification system being too strict, rather than lacking clear evidence of health benefits.

Nova does not make any judgment on the healthiness of foods, to my knowledge. The problem is that people take the extremely broad classification of UPFs by Nova, infer health detriments, and then cast judgment on the overly broad UPF classification as if everything in that category is equally as bad.

Here's a reminder of the Nova UPF classification:

> Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.

A few items that stick out like a sore thumb to me regarding healthiness:

* How could sophisicated packaging, usually with synthetic materials impact health?

* How does making something highly profitably necessarily impact health?

* Nova's definition of something with 'no culinary use' is extremely biased in my view. How do specific sugars (each with specific properties that are useful) have no culinary use? How are protein mixes not culinarily useful?

* Nova's definition of 'cosmetic function' is also just.. stupid in my view. Flavors are cosmetic? Emulsifiers are cosmetic? By this definition, adding MSG to a food makes it UPF.

While I can't speak to all of your questions / criticisms, food packaging is responsible for releasing a wide range of chemicals that are either known or suspected to be harmful to some (men, pregnant women, etc) or all humans, including BPA, phthalates, xenoestrogens, per- and poly-fluorinated substances, and microplastics. I'm sure there are many others, those are just the ones that come to top of mind for me.

The poor categorization may be a purposeful obfuscation. If you have bad labels it becomes easy to have poor studies that are easily criticized, and entire movements or research fields for food safety can be dismissed. Instead of labels we need transparency on every last ingredient and process applied.

> Instead of labels we need transparency on every last ingredient and process applied.

Why not both? Let's list every ingredient on the label along with info on the processes involved.

I need something so that when I go get some food I know if it is good or bad for me. Bad is a range, somethings are bad enough to never eat, some are fine as a treat. Some are good in specific circumstance but bad in others. Somehow I want to cut through all that to know how to eat.

> others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.

This surprises me. A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy, and I would have assumed are heavy contributors to poor health.

> A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy

Apparently "basically candy" is not the same thing as candy. That is a great find, lets us eat basically candy without the health consequences.

I don't see where your assumption is being challenged. "Breakfast cereals" is a very loose category. I would not conclude that Froot Loops lower risks of cardiovascular disease just because Ezekiel's Gravel Bits have been shown to do the same.

Wait until you learn about The Ice Cream Paradox:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/ice-cre...

Brit here: the idea that "ultra-processed foods" are really bad for you is definitely something that's entered the general consciousness here, but I don't think I know anybody who has any kind of meaningful answer to what "ultra-processed foods" actually are.

If it couldn't be made outside a factory, it's ultra processed.

At what point does a bakery become a factory?

I personally would avoid pretty much everything that comes out of a bakery.

Ok, so when does a butcher shop become a factory?

When does a fruit farm become a factory?

Is candied bacon an ultra-processed food?

And even then, things made in a bakery can be made at home so I don't get how your above standard still makes any sense. Is homemade bread with flour milled at home ultra-processed as well? Candied bacon can be made outside of a factory as well. If so, it's not really a "was it made in a factory" argument now was it?

Ah yes, the ol' I can't tell a fruit farm from a factory shtick

Uninformed Average Joe here and I'm with GP. If bakeries are out of the question then I'd be questioning fruit and meat shops as well

Bakeries load their goods with sugar.

Typically you don't mix sugar with meat. Though I think that practice is unfortunately becoming more frequent.

> Typically you don't mix sugar with meat.

You're joking right? There's tons of meat dishes with fruit sauces in them dating back thousands of years. It's almost Thanksgiving, think adding cranberries to turkey is really just a product of 1950's marketing?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fesenj%C4%81n

http://historicalrecipes.blogspot.com/2017/02/patina-de-pers...

Ah yes, the old completely ignore the question shtick.

And yeah, most fruit around me went through various inspection, sorting, washing, labeling, packaging, and potentially even cold storage places that are in big buildings with loads of trucks moving pallets of materials around with loads of automated machines. All things that seem very "factory". What is the final delineation where it goes from some guy in his backyard to a factory operation?

And I still ask, is candied bacon still a processed food if I slaughter my own pig and press my own sugar cane? What if I buy a pig belly and cure it myself? What if I get it pre-cured? At what point is my own kitchen a factory? I guess it's the point I get an oven because then I've got the equipment necessary for it to be a bakery and we all know bakeries are off limits too!

This guidance you're giving me isn't making much sense.

My guidance was: "If it couldn't be made outside a factory, it's ultra processed."

An apple can be made outside a factory. A steak can be made outside a factory. That doesn't mean there aren't factory farms.

Sugar cannot be made outside a factory. If you press and boil your own sugar cane, you won't get refined white sugar.

The candied bacon you buy at the store could not be made at home. The sulfates and industrial products alone would be impossible to make.

If you made your own, that'd be way healthier.

> Sugar cannot be made outside a factory

We've been making refined sugar as an ingredient in foods for over a thousand years. Hard to say it can't be made outside of a factory when they were making it in 350 AD. Even the white refined variety, it's just been clarified and filtered. Anything they're doing in the factory to clarify it can be done in a kitchen. Which then continues to make me question at what point is a kitchen a factory? You've still never actually answered that question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_sugar

> industrial products

Can you actually define this term? Is dihydrogen monoxide an industrial product? Sodium bicarbonate? Sodium chloride? Trimethylxanthine?

And finally, candied bacon is really not an ultra-processed food? I truly don't understand what the definition of "ultra-processed" is if something which is cured in various salts, fried, and glazed with a refined sugar is considered a healthy, non-ultra-processed food. So long as I use the right sources of nitrates and refine the sugar myself. As long as it's not in a building technically considered a factory by cynicalpeace, its A-OK!

"Which then continues to make me question at what point is a kitchen a factory? You've still never actually answered that question."

This is like asking when some grains of sand become a heap of sand. There's not some number of grains when it becomes a heap, but heaps of sand obviously do exist and 2 grains of sand is not a heap of sand.

Arguing about definitions is always boring.

If your food is getting produced at a Costco type bakery, yeah that's worse than abuela grinding the corn herself. You get enough abuelas together and it starts to look like the bakery from Costco.

Less "hands" in your food is directionally better.

Also, I know very well how sugar is made. My wife is Colombian and grew up on a sugar cane farm. They have a panela cabin which is industrial under some definition of the word. Eating panela is way worse than just chewing the stalk, or adding some cane juice to a dish at home. The labor to create panela in any useable quantity requires large and/or expensive tools. Even more so for white sugar. Even more so for Coca-Cola.

> And finally, candied bacon is really not an ultra-processed food? I truly don't understand what the definition of "ultra-processed" is if something which is cured in various salts, fried, and glazed with a refined sugar is considered a healthy, non-ultra-processed food. So long as I use the right sources of nitrates and refine the sugar myself. As long as it's not in a building technically considered a factory by cynicalpeace, its A-OK!

This is just ad-hominem and doesn't take anything I said at face value. Disingenuous and against HN guidelines. I didn't say candied bacon isn't ultra-processed. I said if you actually made it from scratch on your own, it'd be better than store bought.

You can make bread at home.

with ultra processed flour and pressed seed oils :)

What separates "ultra processed" from regular flour? Isn't "regular" flower "ultra processed"?

Also, I'm not sure what bread you make at home but when I do make bread at home its pretty much just flour, water, yeast, salt, and maybe a touch of honey. Maybe sometimes some extra herbs or other stuff, but not usually any oil.

Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.

But yes, I'd rather have a classification that clearly separates Coke and Cheez Doodles from actual foods. There are some multi-billion dollar lobbies to prevent that happening, though.

> Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.

I eat a lot of (plain) yogurt. But my kids often eat sweetened yogurt, which I've suspected is not-at-all-healthy. So I went to check the ingredients of several sweetened brands. I could be wrong but I don't see any of those you're concerned about explicitly mentioned. I do see "fructose" which seems like it could be just about as bad as HFCS? Or maybe the terms you use are generic and there's some specific ingredients that qualify? Or did I just get lucky with these examples I picked?

Examples:

Yoplait GoGurt Protein Berry Yogurt Tubes contains: Grade A Reduced Fat Milk, Ultrafiltered Skim Milk, Sugar, Contains 1% or Less of: Kosher Gelatin, Modified Food Starch, Fruit and Vegetable Juice (for Color), Tricalcium Phosphate, Potassium Sorbate Added to Maintain Freshness, Natural Flavor, Carrageenan, Yogurt Cultures (L. Bulgaricus, S. Thermophilus), Vitamin A Acetate, Vitamin D3.

Danimals Smoothie Strawberry Explosion And Mixed Berry Dairy contains: Cultured Grade A Low Fat Milk, Water, Cane Sugar, Modified Food Starch, Contains Less Than 1% Of Milk Minerals, Natural Flavors, Fruit & Vegetable Juice (For Color), Lemon Juice Concentrate, Vitamin D3, Active Yogurt Cultures S. Thermophilus & L. Bulgaricus.

"Natural Flavor" is an ultra-processed ingredient.

Contains added sugar.

Added fructose seems bad for you. Specifically, a high ratio of fructose:glucose (which doesn't occur in nature) does something weird to your metabolism. Your gut uses some hack like detecting only glucose to trigger intermediate steps in the metabolism of both, and consumption of high fructose:glucose foods causes weight gain.

More: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4145298/

High fructose:glucose ratios definitely exist in nature.

Agave syrup is 4:1. Apples and pears are around 2:1.

Moreover, high fructose corn syrup is a bit of a misnomer. Most HFCS used in food are 42% fructose, 58% glucose. The ones used in soda are typically 55:45.

That makes even the latter's ratio lower than say, watermelon, papaya, pears, apples, mango, blackberries, etc.

I agree. Classification of UPFs seems more to be a "religious purity" discussion than actuall classification of good/bad

Univariable classifications are usually not helpful, and this seems to just confirm it. In the same way "sugar free" or "fat free" make little sense

It's like the 'screen time' of the food industry.

> breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease

Breakfast cereals? That sugary stuff? Someone else said 40-60% of nutritional studies are not replicable. Sounds more like the whole field is BS.

Scream naturalistic fallacy all you like but I would absolutely avoid all chemical additives and go natural all the way. If humans haven't been eating it for thousands of years, I would absolutely avoid it.

Yep. It’s hard to trust anything, especially because in the US things that aren’t banned are allowed by default. Companies add new substances to products constantly, often just minor variations of something that was banned.

This is the best advice. Also proportion should match historical proportion, ie. very little sugar most of the time.

not all cereals have added sugar, I dont buy 40% added sugar, but rather 0% and 14% added sugar cereals

What we need first is transparency. Complete information about every ingredient, its supplier, where it was grown, what process it went through, etc. then we can perform research without confusing and conflicting results. Unfortunately I’ve seen people fight state or local level labeling laws by falling for corporate propaganda, particularly from companies in the GMO industry.

One hundred percent agree. Companies should be obligated to provide comprehensive information on the ingredients they use in producing the food they sell us. It seems so basic, but even small steps in that direction are always met with maximum industry resistance.

I think adding labels to the product is only useful to a certain extent. There's a few things that stand out, like if a product has 70% DV sodium that's usually a bad sign, or "cheese product" tells you that it's not real cheese (for better or worse). But stopping to look at the ingredient list of every product you buy is time consuming.

This is where online food databases might work better. Scan the UPC/EAN with an app and the app can tell you which ingredients are generally safe, which ones to avoid. The recommendations could be personalized to your dietary needs or allow ratings from different organizations that might have varying criteria for what they consider OK vs bad.

Such apps exist but usually requires someone (volunteer crowdsourcing or paid) to input products into the system so it may not be complete or fully up to date. And as you suggested, supplier information and more detail on the processing isn't available. Having an international, public database of that information (with an API for app makers) could help make nutrition label apps -- or maybe even built into Google Lens -- much more accessible to the general public.

It's not hard to intuit, but yes it can be less useful owing to ambiguity and confusion. It would be less difficult to settle on a definition that does not lean so hard on "processing" and actually conveys what is problematic.

For example, "shelf-stable packaged foods with a large flour component, wherein the flour component is stripped of all fiber, with added fat, salt, and sometimes sugar". You can also include candy, soft-drinks and juice.

That doesn't tell you something is "ultra-processed", but it identifies more meaningful factors. These are typically non-satiating snack foods, very low in protein and fiber, but very savory with added salt and fat. The combination of refined flour, salt and fat seems to be of particular note (and sugar regardless).

> This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless.

It's quite funny that even 15 years after labeling UPF as such there's still a struggle to "officially" mark it as unhealthy and I don't understand why it should be challenged. I would think that most children growing up are being told that candy, fries and Gatorade aren't healthy foods. Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.

As mentioned in the article there are statistics that under the UPF classifications people are way more unhealthy both physically and even mentally. Shouldn't that be enough? Now a new study is needed to benchmark UPF that is low in fat, sugar and salt. Basically against a product class that hardly exists. I mean nobody eats like that. Most people put extra salt on their food, the Mediterranean diet somewhat the gold standard in good yet healthy food contains tons of fat and various cuisines from the region have rather sugary desserts.

I'd be fine classifying UPF as unhealthy and calling it a day. If food businesses want to explore "healthy" UPFs they should probably do so and take the burden to re-classify it as healthy. This seems like a quite Kafka-esque endeavor.

> Most people I know consider E-numbers as dodgy ingredients.

(From a quick 30 second search) E300 is Vitamin C, E101 is Vitamin B2

And yes - I'm aware that vitamins that are naturally present are probably better than "fortifying" food - but still.

I've never seen Vitamin C listed as E300 on a label. So while you are correct, the heuristic (avoid E-numbers) works in practice.

Yeah, anything good wont be listed as an E number, you use the name people recognize.

OK but then why would a manufacturer ever use a E number - considering the stigma attached? Only when the other name "sounds worse"?

Is there a legal threshold where you have to use the E number?

Limited space on the label maybe :D Some of the real names of the E's are very long.

Indeed, they’ll use E numbers to shorten the chemistry catalogue part of the list. Note the law requires sorting ingredients by weight, so these additives end up clumped together. You’ll end up with half a line instead of half a page.

The best exception is high quality protein powder. Additional protein consumption is extremely healthy for you, short and long term. But it's technically an ultra-processed food.

It's probably better to each 4-5 chicken breasts per day instead of protein powder. But as far as I know there hasn't been a measured difference.

That's not a clear exception at all.

Within some mental model, isolated protein powder is healthy because we generally treat high protein consumption as low-risk for most people and recognize that protein isolates can be very effective for professional and amateur athletes to consume a lot of while building muscle.

In no way does that imply that these protein isolates are "extremely healthy" for the general public or even for anyone in the long term. There's just not any data to say that specifically (it's too niche to perform those kinds of studies), and far too little reason to make that assumption with confidence.

(And it's almost certainly a terrible idea for most people to eat 4-5 chicken breasts per day -- or a comparable amount of protein isolate powder. Please remember that most people are not living a gym bro lifestyle and shouldn't be following gym bro nutritional advice in the first place.)

Protein isn't bad for you and 4-5 chicken breasts is around 120g a day, a healthy amount for an adult. By way of comparison, indigenous people where I live ate hundreds of grams a day in their traditional diets. I've run into this whole "don't eat too much protein, oh man you will die!" nonsense meme before and I wonder where it came from.

> 4-5 chicken breasts is around 120g a day

Bad math? Per USDA standards, a single boneless skinless chicken breast has ~54 grams of protein; so 4-5 would be ~200-250g of protein.

Because that's grossly outside the norm for the general public, you're not going to find any evidence to support the idea it's a healthy amount for a typical person to consume for a long period of time. And likewise, you'll find little evidence saying what negative consequences it might have, if any.

You're welcome to make whatever assumptions you want to in that case, but there's not a lot of ground for anyone to convince skeptics who disagree with them. It's tenuous assumptions all the way down.

Regardless, in the real world, that also represents 1200-1500 calories of absurdly (mind-numbingly) high-satiety food and quite a lot of slow digestive bulk. Most people simply wouldn't be able to consume that while also eating a varied diet that provides them with adequate long-term nutrition. So it's probably a pretty bad idea for them to dedicate themselves to it, unless -- like some athletes and gym bros -- they have the further discipline to also stuff themselves of all the other stuff they need to eat while also not eating so much that they become overweight. Do you know many people like that? I'm not sure I've met more than a handful in my lifetime.

Whatever the impact of the very high protein consumption itself in some abstract theoretical kind of way, which we're far from having evidence into understanding, it's just terrible advice for the general public because of the secondary effects we might reasonably expect in practice.

It's possible to die of "protein poisoning" but you really have to be in a survival situation with no sources of fat. Hunters and trappers are known to have died this way when only lean meat was available in far northern winters. Maybe this is where the idea came from.

Consuming high amount of animal protein was pointed out by the urologist as one of the things I should evade. Apparently that contributes to development of kidney stones. So there’s at least one way in which it’s bad for you.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-39...

> Moreover, epidemiological studies show that a high intake of animal protein, particularly red meat, which contains high levels of methionine and BCAAs, may be related to the promotion of age-related diseases. Therefore, a low animal protein diet, particularly a diet low in red meat, may provide health benefits.

A high-protein diet can increase calcium and uric acid levels in the urine, raising the risk of urinary stones. I have experienced this, and got the cystoscopy to prove it. It sucked

A fries ultra processed? Potatoes cut into strips, cooked in oil, and salted. Is the deep frying what makes it ultra? Or is a pan fried chicken breast ultra processed since it is cooked in the same oil?

When Carlos Monteiro decided to operationalize UPFs by giving them a definition (laymans terms: UPF is one ingredient you wouldn't find in a traditional kitchen and wrapped in plastic) Kevin Hall from the US had the same reaction as you and decided to make a multi-million dollar experiment to disprove the definition proposed by Dr. Monteiro. Result: People who ate unprocessed lost weight, and the other group gained weight. (Groups were exchanged after 2 weeks and saw similar effects).

A link for other people who are interested in this: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...

People don't understand that basic task like washing is "processing" the food and can be frustrating when talking to them about this subject.

That's not about understanding, that's deliberate obfuscation. If people cannot (or don't want to) distinguish between a faucet and a blender, there is no further discussion to be had.

I don't know if that is true when speaking to the general public about this. They usually think processed food means toxic chemicals were added.

Certain podcasters/influences/etc are absolutely misleading people either for the views or to sell people a "detox" tea they can drop ship from China.

Food that is merely washed might be processed, but is not ultra-processed according to the Nova classification [1]. There's an actual criteria that's being applied in these studies that concern ultra-processed food.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

And have you read their definition?

Yes. The Nova classifications are on the page I linked.

I think there's some fudging of the terms here. When the article is talking about "bread" being healthy- well, there's bread, and then there's bread. Supermarket bread (sliced, packaged) typically lists a couple dozen ingredients. Ordinary bread... you know, bread-bread, like the one some of us bake at home, is made of: flour, water, salt, leavening agent (yeast or sourdough for those as have the patience). Bread-bread is probably healthy especially if you make it with (expensive) wholemeal flours. But supermarket bread? I don't think so.

Same goes for breakfast cereals and breakfast cereals. e.g. there's oatmeal and weetabix that are basically just a bit of fiber, not the healthiest thing you can eat but won't kill you. And then there's ... well my favourite poison is Kellog's Smacks and it's basically just as nourishing as eating cardboard with sugar on top.

There's a cool book I didn't finish White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. It talks about the history of store bought bread supplanting home baked bread, and the marketing wars waged both for and against store bought bread. I'm gonna start it up again and I recommend it.

> But supermarket bread? I don't think so.

Why? The point of the quotation was to question if this was a problem in the quantities listed. I know I’d rather eat whole grain enriched supermarket bread than refined white flour bread from some low protein source wheat.

The whole grain bread is definitely preferable, but it is still very likely to have added oils, gums, and/or preservatives. I think their main point is that supermarket bread is rarely made of just bread. There are exceptions but that requires one to first take the time to identify them and then fork up the extra dough (punintended).

In Australia, our supermarket bread almost always has “vegetable oil” in the ingredients. They can’t even be bothered sticking to one type of vegetable oil or listing which ones they use.

I’ll take the home bread

In NZ pretty much every supermarket bakes their own bread which to me seems same like bakery or home bread.

Because they use the oil for how it changes the texture, not for the taste. So corn oil is just as good as soy oil is just as good as canola... and they're going to use whatever is cheapest.

Yup. This is standard in the US for most product ingredient listings I'd say.

I bake bread at home nearly weekly, it goes stale and crumbly in about 3 days at room temperature and moldy by 7. I bought some pita and didn't use it all up. It was still soft, pliant, mold-free after 2 weeks. I tossed the thing, never going to buy it again.

Why? Are you scared of perfectly good products?

If you added preservatives to your bread it wouldn't stale quickly either. Add a small amount of white vinegar to your bread and it will stale much less quickly.

The question is what kind of preservatives. Formaldehyde is a preservative. Acetic acid is a component of long-ferment lean dough such as sourdough, and an insignificant component of short-ferment (~2 hours) enriched dough, such as sandwich bread. It will not help with enhancement and preservation of texture, in this case the gelatinization of starch in the finished product.

Unless you're suggesting that the pita bread you threw out was preserved with formaldehyde, there isn't much of a question here. Taking issue with bread keeping its freshness is in-and-of itself no bad. If you have issue with a specific preservative, perhaps discuss that specificity.

Let us go back to the beginning. Are you saying home-bake bread which molds in 7 days is comparable to store-bought bread which does not mold in 7 days. OK then, in which we have nothing to argue about. I have no scientific source to cite one is better or worse than the other. By all means, buy and consume bread that does not mold for a long time. That sounds good.

Nova makes this distinction already. “Freshly made” bread is considered category 3 (processed). That said, what distinguishes supermarket bread from freshly made bread?

Literally the only difference is typically some sort of preservatives, some added vitamins, and possibly a dough conditioner.

In general, bread is just not that healthy if you make the fluffy white kind. The preservatives and slicing have little to do with it. If anything, the added vitamins may make it healthier than something you make at home.

The biggest nutritional change in bread in what type of flour is used (and if any other grains/seeds are used). The bran and germ of the wheat berry contain a decent part of it's nutritional value in protein, fat and insoluble fiber. The more refined a flour is the less of those parts it contains. Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins from the endosperm.

What really sets apart the typical white flour seen in most processed products in the US is the bleaching process, which mostly serves to make the flour more visually appealing. It also destroys a large percentage of the micro-nutrients. For many flour products the added vitamins you mention are added back in making the flour "enriched", but really this is just trying to match the nutrient profile of unbleached white flour. It's unlikely the added vitamins you see in the nutrition label alone would make a bagged, commercial pan loaf healthier than even the equivalent you would make at home.

Lack of whatever mythical micro-nutrition you speak of in bleached white flour is not going to meaningfully make any difference in folks dietary outcomes. It's certainly not what is making people fat, or what is making them crave to eat too much bread.

the root cause, at least for bread, is pretty simple; US supermarket bread has a lot more sugar than freshly baked bread, because sugar is a preservative.

You’d be wrong about that, though.

Wonder bread white has 140 calories, 1.5g of fat, 5g of protein, and 29g of carbs for two slices. 5g of claimed added sugar.

In comparison, a recipe I’ve used to make very good white bread (the zojirushi recipe for their bread maker, for reference) has, for an equivalent weight of bread: 137 calories, 2.2g of fat, 3.9g of protein, and 24.8g of carbs. The recipe has roughly 2.5g of “added sugar” per that bread weight.

I wouldn’t consider 4g more of carbs per equivalent weight, or 2.5g more sugar, to be a “lot” more sugar.

I mean, that’s double the added sugar. The US recommends only 50g of added sugar per day. And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread; in the US breakfast mainstay that is peanut butter and jelly, both the peanut butter and jelly also usually have sugar.

> And you’re generally not eating only two slices of bread;

Aren't you? What meal typically has more than 2 slices of bread? A sandwich is two. Breakfast meals where toast is used is typically 2 slices.

And, if we limit ourselves to the 50g of added sugar a day, I'd say 10% of that for a component of one meal is pretty reasonable.

I was regularly eating around 8 to 10 thick slices per day of bread at one point

* 4 for breakfast as toast

* 4 for lunch to make 2 sandwiches (1 sandwich would be too small and I would be hungry all afternoon)

* sometimes another 2 with soup or an evening snack.

I think that speaks more to your diet than anything else. Regardless of the amount of added sugar, that’s an absurd amount of carbs to be getting just from bread and cannot be particularly healthy, no matter the type of bread.

That is a surprising assertion, given that eating the majority of one's calories in the form of bread was the normal human experience for thousands of years - practically since the beginning of agriculture - throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa!

"Give us this day our daily bread", the old prayer goes: because bread was food, and everything else was accompaniment.

What is your point? That doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Thousands of years is literally nothing on an evolutionary scale. Modern humans have existed for at least 100,000 years.

Bread became ubiquitous because it didn’t require hunting or gathering, i.e. it supported ever growing communities of stationary humans. Not because some ancient nutritionist decided it was good for you.

My point? If you think a staple food vast numbers of human beings have relied on for literally all of recorded history (not to mention thousands of years prior) is "not particularly healthy", then perhaps your definition of "healthy" is a little too exalted for everyday use.

Again, “literally all of recorded history” is literally meaningless. I also find it bizarre that you would find something as simple as a well balanced diet (i.e. one humans enjoyed for hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural revolution) as an “exalted” definition of healthy.

Let’s not use thousand year old traditions based on poorly understood nutritional science to guide today’s practices.

If you get the majority of calories from bread then you are, at best, eating far from the optimal amount of protein and lacking some useful nutrition. At worst, you’re eating a poorly balanced diet that will lead to overeating or malnourishment (or both).

You can't really tell how much sugar there is in baked bread simply based on the amount added in a recipe.

Yeast ferment sugar, so depending on how much yeast you have, how active they are and the fermentation time, a small amount of sugar can easily be long gone by the time the bread comes out of the oven.

That goes for both store bought and homemade.

most definitely not. sugar doesn’t even make top-10 list

Not saying it’s the top ten ingredients of supermarket bread but it certainly has more added sugar than homemade bread

Subway "bread" had too much sugar to be classified as a bread in Ireland

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/03/919831116/irish-court-rules-s...

I can't eat supermarket bread for that reason. I didn't grow up in the US and find the bread here too sweet. (i.e. any added sugar)

I bake my own bread (can't remember the last time I bought some) without sugar.

You don't need sugar if you use sourdough starter with an overnight fermentation in the fridge.

> Even unbleached white flour naturally has a decent micro-nutrient profile of vitamins

That doesn't match my experience, at least in the US. Per 1/4 cup:

KA organic unbleached white flour - 0 vitamins or minerals

Arrowhead Mills organic unbleached white flour - 5 mg calcium, 36 mg potassium

Bob's Redmill organic unbleached white flour - 7 mg calcium, 41 mg potassium

Caputo 00 - 9 mg calcium, 0.2 mg iron, 48 mg potassium

These levels aren't remotely close to decent.

Where I live, our supermarkets bake "bread-bread" every morning and once in the afternoon! We also have bakeries here that do the same.

Obesity and diabetes are western societies biggest health issues and the best research we have is a small n for a 4 week trial. Clearly there’s regulatory capture at play here.

Once we better understand what is driving the poor health outcomes we can work back and better classify problem foods and ingredients. Right now it’s all a bit unknown and doesn’t seem to have the right resourcing. There’s research that shows that UPFs are so simple that the body gets all the bad stuff in all its unfettered glory. Compare that to a date fruit, very high in sugar, but packed with fiber, the body metabolizes the date much more slowly, no sugar spike and gets some nutrition

Why on earth do they include the word "ultra" when the definition is "literally any amount of any additive"?

Because the whole premise is being bike-shedded out of existence.

On paper, fruity pebbles and Cheerios are pretty similar. But the dyes, sugar, etc make it a very different product. Sorta how we pump sugar into yogurt, spray it on as a frosting and peddle it like it’s actual, healthy yogurt.

A great way to undermine the argument is to make the terminology and classification impossible.

Living in the US, my takeaway is this:

Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor.

But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they would stop making them. But their snack cakes are designed to make you want to eat the whole package and sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix, making the consumer's choice almost a moot point since consumers tend to trade their own best interests for convenience and "saving" money.

And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.

But I do hate it. I have to put a stupid amount of effort into eating healthy because I don't have room for a garden and healthier alternatives are often more expensive. I can see why most people just reach for the snack cakes and call it done.

In retrospect, I realize the food industry probably took a page out of the cigarette industry's playbook. Or was it the other way around?

There is a clear link between the two industries: https://neurosciencenews.com/hyperpalatable-foods-big-tobacc...

This game theory problem, where consumers are buying unhealthier options because they're cheaper, and companies are producing unhealthier options because they're more profitable, is exactly what regulation is for. I don't understand why we've all collectively forgotten why regulation exists and become so cynical that it can actually work! Actually I do understand: it's industry interests spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intentional misinformation and government capture for a half century.

A reasonable counter-argument is "but the science is extremely muddy here, so effective regulation is especially difficult", which is unfortunately true, but I'd point out that the science is extremely muddy largely because of industry efforts to intentionally poison our understanding of nutrition.

It's even (often) in company's selfish interest to have regulation so that they aren't forced into a race to the bottom.

Yes and: "regulations" is just a scary words for "rules".

Yes and: Policy proceeds rule making. Rules try to encode incentives and disincentives to achieve those policies. For better or worse.

Yes and: Surplus, and therefore overuse of, unhealthy foodstuffs (eg HFCS) is the result of pro Big Ag policies. Which are often in opposition to public health interests. So we (taxpayers) are paying to create lifestyle diseases at the same time we're paying to mitigate those same diseases.

I know you know all this. I hate to go meta on the UPF debate; but there really is an easily identified root cause.

The very first priority to mitigating lifestyle diseases should be:

Stop making it worse.

/rant

this is why I'm always very astonished when European regulation is frowned upon by reflex

It's not in the food industry's interest to harm us beyond pursing profit margin, but it is in the health and pharmaceutical industry's interest to harm us — treatable chronic disease is recurring revenue. The more chronic disease, the more revenue. Pharma companies are making fistfuls of money from GLP1 agonists.

This incentive to harm is translated into the food system when captured groups like the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association help write dietary guidelines (for school systems for example) that look good optically but actually create disease and future recurring revenue for the health industrial complex. Groups like the ADA and AHA are also captured by major funding from the food industry, so that cheap high margin food products fit into their dietary guidelines.

The incentives are synergistic and exactly aligned to push food products with a veneer of health that cause long term disease.

I think you're wrong about the food industry not slowly harming people, for two reasons.

1) For "unhealthy" food (i.e. not something that's acutely poisonous) the link between ingestion and harm is in the long-term; it would be very difficult to blame harm on a particular group of foods, let alone a specific product. Maybe in a couple of decades there will be hand-wringing and governmental investigations, but in the short term, there's no negative incentive for food companies.

2) Most executives are directly incentivised to think in the short term - this bonus cycle, this year's results, the two-three years until LTIs vest, or a next promotion or change of job. Short of something catastrophic, there will almost never be a comeback for those individuals, meaning they have all of the positive incentives to chase profit, and it's very unlikely that they'll ever personally experience anything negative from their decisions.

---

Also, I don't really want to engage with quasi-conspiracy theories, but if you think that pharma companies have a hand in influencing dietary advice to be unhealthy so they can sell more drugs, IME you're vastly overestimating the competence of the pharma industry.

The word "captured" was very apt, as food companies make donations to the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association in return for their stamps of approval. This is not a conspiracy theory, but has been documented:

ADA takes money to promote Splenda: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/ex-director-accuses...

AHA takes money to promote foods like ham which raise heart disease risk: https://huffpost.com/entry/health-news_b_4398304

AHA advisory cherry picks trials to reference, on the back of funding from Procter & Gamble (Crisco) and Bayer (soybean oil): https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-saturated-...

> sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix

Sorry for sniping, but the alternative is to not buy a snack. You don't have to eat snacks.

> And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.

It's not this simple.

Marketing isn't just about making an existing product attractive to consumers - it's also about creating new products and even new product categories, and then creating a desire amongst consumers leading to purchases.

Where do you think all of the ultra-processed food has come from in the past decade? It didn't always exist...

A side effect of maximizing profit is harming our health. Doesn't really matter to me whether it's malicious intent or in the pursuit of shareholder value.

Looking at the amount of processed food available in Japan, it is hard to think it is just the processed food that is to blame.

I think it is a cheap observation, such that I expect people to push back on me, but it is hard to ignore portion sizes. Will try and take a dive on some of the data around that. But a personal level, it is hard to grapple with the fact that I just got less food per place that I went.

And it is frustrating, as getting the food, I would want a large burger/sandwhich/whatever. But waiting a small amount of time after a small snack/meal works.

There have been experiments that control for portion size, processed food still spikes glucose more, etc.

Isn't that some of what this article was challenging?

I don't believe so, I felt it was we know it does just not why yet.

I mean, that is the headline. The thrust of the article was that a lot of the common things people offer for why don't have any real evidence. All we seem to have is that people eat more calories when doing processed foods.

Specifically, the RCT showing that people eating ultra processed foods eat an average of 500 more calories per day is what I was looking at. Seems to basically align far more heavily with it being the volume of food than it is other qualities. Though, my memory was stronger in what that paragraph claimed.

I honestly think stress and work obsession along with sedentary lifestyles has a lot more to do with anything health related than ultra processed foods.

Very true, someone that has time to make a meal from scratch is clearly not stressed, has money and time. Maybe not all, but from a category view, there are so many factors on those two different worlds that affect health, that focusing on just food is crazy.

Plenty of stressed and work obsessed people in Japan too, and yet the obesity rate is tiny.

What’s special about Japan in this context?

They do have a particularly high life expectancy.

https://data.who.int/countries/392

And don't have the obesity problem we have

This is a lagging indicator though, right? I wonder how the diets of Japanese people ~50 years ago compare to the Americans of today.

Good health outcomes compared to other first world countries?

Japan isn't special IMHO, but overweight rate is on the low side.

Now, trying to understand why is can of worm (social pressure and bullying probably plays a role for instance, which have other adverse effects possibly worse than just being overweight)

I went to Japan recently and one of the most striking things to me was how easy it was to walk to places. Their infrastructure astounded me because it was set up with people in mind and not car companies.

I wouldn’t be surprised if keeping moving contributed more to not dying than diet specifics.

My understanding (albeit only gathered from blogs/YouTube videos/Google Maps) is that the biggest difference is parking. On-street parking is mostly not allowed, free parking at businesses is mostly limited to car-centric ones like mechanics and dealerships, and you can't register a car without proving that you have a place to park it. Tens of millions of Japanese people living in less-dense areas have no problem with that, but in Tokyo it's prohibitively expensive for the average person due to land cost. This means that even in suburban areas, roads are narrower and everything is closer together.

When I worked in Japan for a year and lived in the company subsidized dormitory, a coworker half-joked that it cost more to house his car in a payed parking spot than it did to house himself in the dorm.

When my grandfather passed away the deed for his Manhattan parking spot was far more valueable than the five bedroom home I grew up in.

I think this can be seen in cities with walking-to-work culture (often metro/underground).

Although I've wondered if cause is enforced exercise or just selection (people that move to a large city to work have a demographic).

Possibly nothing. Was just recently able to observe it directly.

Much lower rate of obesity. Like 5% instead of 40% (US).

In the US, portion size, calorie density, frequency of eating high calorie foods are contributing to people getting a lot fatter a lot faster than before. We now have instant gratification in food delivery services. Get anything you want without leaving home.

In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.

It is amazing to see how much more obese people have gotten in the last decade, and the % of fat people has gone up a lot, too.

Restaurants of all types serve massive portions, and people eat it without thinking or realizing they are eating a day's worth of calories in one meal, and I haven't touched on the amount of fat, sugar, and sodium they are packing away.

The fact that people today have shorter lifespans than their parents should be sounding alarms everywhere, but there is nothing but silence.

> In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.

The UK had a reality TV show called Secret Eaters where they signed up people to be monitored 24/7 by cameras and private investigators which tracked every single thing they put in their mouth and counted up the calories.

It was really informative to see how some people eat and it is not pretty. Even the people who didn't regularly eat fast food or go out to chip shops ate way more than is healthy with fatty sausages, fried things, and little fruit or vegetables, all in huge portions.

I'd love to see that happen with people that are keeping a food diary and see how much they're being honest with themselves.

Though their behavior would probably change if they knew they were being recorded.

Sedentary lifestyles are a huge factor too.

Many elite athletes devour ultraprocessed foods. Elite cyclists have pushed their performance limits by eating as much sugar as their digestive systems can handle. They eat sugar until they puke and it trains their guts to tolerate more sugar in the future.

Sugar and other simple carbs are quick burning fuel. You don't want to be flooding your blood stream with fuel when your body doesn't need it, but when it does, well, it's fuel, it gets into your system fast, and it makes you go.

These people you describe are experiencing very real eating disorders. Even if they aren’t counting calories, they are keenly aware that they’re destroying their body. They aren’t silent, they’re addicted.

Socially acceptable eating disorders are the foundation of multiple hundred billion dollar companies.

Every junk and fast food company in America sells food that does not satisfy you, is unhealthy for you, has a "taste" that is not easy to replicate at home but that has been scientifically curated to prevent you from reaching the satiation point when you are eating them (like Pringles, "Bet you can't eat just one", but it's all of the foods all of the time), has less nutrition year over year despite artificial vitamin supplementation, and is just a hair less expensive than cooking it yourself with better ingredients.

It's not an eating disorder to eat junk food in America.

It's a symptom of a larger society wide dysfunction that any person who lived in a sane world and was suddenly subjected to would consider demonic/evil/abhorrent/terrifying.

Don't blame the victims. Recognize the blight for what it is.

It’s both. I do recognize, and agree with most of what you’re saying. The junk food industrial complex is real.

But people have autonomy and if you took their burgers away tomorrow they’d riot.

> It's not an eating disorder to eat junk food in America.

It absolutely is a disorder to eat to the level you described in your previous comment.

Just because millions of people take part in it, and it’s socially acceptable doesn’t make the way Americans eat not an eating disorder. They’re also aware, not silent, or ignorant. Everyone knows junk food and eating until you want to throw up is bad for you.

And yes I fully understand there are people out there inventing ways to make food even more addictive. Fuck those people. Those are the worst people.

So you're saying ordering any food from a fast food restaurant is an eating disorder?

The average combo meal clocks in at nearly a thousand calories at a minimum at essentially every fast food restaurant in America even if you just drink water with it.

I get where you're coming from, but it is entirely too easy to not see the bigger picture and to blame the victims of the system. The system is fucked, it is fucked on purpose because that is profitable, most people are too stupid too ignorant or at least two uninformed to know about it and even more so do anything about it.

Blaming overweight Americans for their overweightness just lets you personally feel better about yourself while doing nothing to actually identify or solve the problem.

> So you're saying ordering any food from a fast food restaurant is an eating disorder?

No. I explicitly said “ It absolutely is a disorder to eat to the level you described in your previous comment.” Because you previously said,

> … Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week. Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.

What you described here is textbook disordered eating.

> Blaming overweight Americans for their overweightness just lets you personally feel better about yourself while doing nothing to actually identify or solve the problem

> most people are too stupid too ignorant or at least two uninformed to know about it and even more so do anything about it.

And I’m victim blaming?

It’s hilarious and ironic that you both decided to place these two sentences next to one another, and also felt the confidence to attack my character for using the term eating disorder. Take a look in the mirror.

As someone who lives in Japan I can attest that portion sizes are smaller, and seasoning is much less rich and sweet than it is in the USA - this checks out for me.

As someone that often eats one large meal a day, I appreciate large portion sizes ar restaurants. If its the only thing I eat that day, a 3000 calorie meal is what I need.

You cannot imo use Japan as an argument for anything. There are so many unique and localised factors at play in Japan, that it could be something as obscure as incredible self limiting eating due to fear of social stigma.

Japan is a basket case.

Japanese people are much smaller so explains smaller portions.

But I am too surprised how processed (but tasty) their convini food is.

Putting aside the vague hand wavy definition of what "highly processed foods" literally means, my suspicion is that there are two things making processed food worse for you.

I've heard drinking juiced fruits is worse for you than eating the equivalent fruits, as the sugars in the fruit are wrapped in fiber that make the sugars "slow release" into your body, and those are broken down when juiced so the sugars hit you at once. I suspect processed foods "mainline" nutrients in ways that unprocessed foods don't.

Secondly, I think a lot micro-nutrition is ignored when comparing processed food, like the fat, carb, salt, etc is equivalent between potato chips and, say, a baked potato with butter, but there are a lot of small things that our body needs that are not part of that equivalence. At least for me, when I eat potato chips I eat more because they never quite satisfy me. I suspect this is because the micro nutrition is cooked or processed away, so I end up eating more carbs because it's not quite giving me all what I need, just the big macro needs.

I agree. I think there is a third thing: processed foods are more likely to contain additives like colorants, emulsifiers, preservatives and stabilisers that humans have been eating for decades rather than centuries so we don’t have the same body of knowledge about them or their health-related impacts.

And maybe to a lesser extent the plastics in packaging.

Great user name btw

> that humans have been eating for decades rather than centuries

That's false btw. We humans have been eating emulsifiers and preservatives for centuries, even if we only classified them decades ago. Examples:

- Lecithin (E322): naturally found in egg yolk

- Citric acid (E330): naturally found in lemons and oranges

- Agar (E406): found in red seaweed, an edible crop from southeast Asia

- some sulphites (E221, E226) naturally occur in wines. Old wines are actually likely to contain more sulphites than modern ones since we now have a body of knowledge about them and their health-related impacts

The chips not satiating you is more likely to be the effect of the obligatory seed oils in chips; IIRC the linoleic acid that they are high in impedes satiety (and also promotes inflammation).

The lack of fibre also contributes to lack of satiety which is another driving factor that makes people eat more processed food.

The potato chip satiety issue is also investigated in a few studies. Baked potato is some of the most satiating foods. But when you fry it in oil it just does something to your brain that makes you crave for more

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324078#boiled-or-b...

> when I eat potato chips I eat more because they never quite satisfy me.

This is why I have paper bowls. Pour out a portion of chips. Eat that. If you're not satisfied after eat something _else_. This is probably as much about ingredients as it is about packaging and delivery.

100% this. There is a wonderful book called The Dorito Effect that goes into this in more detail.

From reading these comments, i wish nobody was allowed to post on threads like this without posting a pic of their body so we can calibrate their opinions

Smokers are often experts on why cigarettes are bad for you.

I don't meet smokers arguing smoking isn't actually bad though...

I have. You just haven't run into someone delusional enough. It's apparently a lie concocted by white people.

I haven't met one that argued it isn't bad, but many have certainly downplayed it, or they have wildly different standards.

Like...15 years ago, I dated a girl that smoked, but wouldn't eat anything with artificial Blue or Red color because supposedly those cause cancer. I said, "You know those cigarettes cause cancer, right?" and got met with a "yeah whatever".

That relationship didn't last (for many reasons), and I'll never again date a smoker. I always felt we were limited on the things we could do because she HAD to have that cigarette every ~30 minutes.

My mom switched from Diet Coke to full sugar Coke because she heard that Diet Coke causes cancer. All while being a pack a day smoker. It’s crazy out there.

Some smokers will tell you about one guy that drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney and still lived until 100 or something like that.

Agreed. It's clear that most people don't understand basic nutrition, and most people have a very distorted view of what the human body should actually look like. The average American is very overweight. If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

> If you raise your arm above your head in front of the mirror, you should see your ribs, and you should see the clear outline of your latissimus dorsi. If you can't see these two things clearly, you are overweight.

This is kind of an absurd metric. You can be at ~20% BF (which is by any standard a healthy percentage - some studies show best all cause mortality outcomes in men at 22%) and still not have visible ribs or lats with one arm above your head.

Different people carry weight differently as well, no visual test like this is going to be blanket accurate.

That is not health advice, that is "how to be anorectic" advice. If you are at the weight with longest lifespan, you are somewhere at the top of "normal" bmi range and wont see ribs. You wont seen them in the middle of "normal" range and plenty of thin wont see them either.

Otherwise said, for quite a lot of people accomplishing this would mean underweight.

Underweight is less healthy the overweight.

It’s unnecessarily crude heuristic but it’s not totally wrong. It seems like you can see ribs in adult men up to around 25% body fat which is around the end of healthy range.

And what will it tell you? Let's say you have one guy who is morbidly obese, another who is visibly in top shape, a seriously underweight fashion model, and an average guy. Who are you going to trust the most?

The obese guy obviously has some problem with nutrition, but he may also the one who is most interested the subject and the most knowledgeable. Obesity is also a mental disorder and while he may know a lot about nutrition, he has trouble applying this knowledge.

The guy who is in top shape most likely has good nutrition, but he may also simply have good genetics, do a lot of physical activity, and not care much about what he eats.

The fashion model probably knows how to lose weight, which may be as simple as not eating enough. But how much she knows about health is completely unknown.

As for the average guy, that's the most "no idea" you can get.

I think you're misunderstanding why posting the body would be useful. It isn't so we know who to listen to, it's so we know who _not_ to listen to

Here you go: https://imgur.com/M3xoe2c

My opinions:

The amount of "processing" or "chemicals" is a red herring and it really comes down to prepared meals and snacks that have been engineered to make people want to eat more of them. We've gotten so good at this that it seems to override the natural hunger/satiety system which causes people to gain weight.

I eat a mostly vegetarian diet with lots of protein, massive amounts of sugar in the form of fresh fruit, and lots of whole grains.

A quick mention of your staple vegetarian protein sources ? :)

Cottage cheese, tofu, edamame, greek yogurt, seitan, whey isolate.

To circle back to your first assertion: tofu is also one of the most "processed" foods you can find. You go from beans to milk to cheese to solid cake, that's more processing for a single ingredient than you need to get from e.g. wheat to naan bread.

The whey isolate is also a super processed food product. I think the key is to ask "why was this processed?" Whey isolate is processed to make it easier to get quick digesting protein, Doritos are processed to make them more addictive, more shelf stable, and cheaper to produce; only one of these products will contribute to a tendency to overeat.

Do you need the picture of the person speaking in front of you to "calibrate their opinions" very often?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_personam

Just on this topic, it's a great filter to know whose opinion you can discard without consideration

edit: also posting a link to a logical fallacy on wikipedia really makes you look like a dork would recommend avoiding it

I think the rub is actually here:

"The participants received either ultra-processed or minimally processed foods for two weeks before swapping diet for the next fortnight. Participants in both diets had access to the same amount of calories and nutrients like sugars, fibre and fat. People were free to eat as much or as little as they wanted. The results were striking. People on the ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories per day than those on the unprocessed one"

My understanding is that caloric intake is king.

Weight loss/gain is specifically tied to calories consumed vs calories burned, yes.

But that is not the purpose of the study.

2 groups of people, 2 diets, and the 1 group given an unlimited amount of relatively healthier food, chose to eat less of it and lost weight. The other ate more junk food and gained weight.

That implies that there are non-conscious factors at play and that diets may be more naturally successful if they are comprised of healthier less-processed food even without restriction.

Additionally, this implies that there must be an X factor that takes place in the processing of foods that causes overweight people to keep eating when they have met their caloric requirements.

For context, look at the data regarding nutrient density in vegetables over the last 60 years and see that the nutrients aside from fat/carbs/protein have been on a steady decline year over year.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/

When I put these things into perspective, my hypothesis is this:

Being overweight, commonly viewed as a weakness of character or a sickness of the mind or body, is more likely a symptom of some larger issue.

Evidence of this can be found piecemeal from studies on human diets the world over.

The foods that are readily available to people are making them sick, my guess is that this is from some form of malnutrition. This may be a nutrient malnutrition or some compounding effect that the overprocessing of foods has on the human body that isn't trivial to differentiate from its non-processed counterparts.

I feel it is reasonable to assume that in general overweight and obese people on an ultra-processed diet are overeating in a non-conscious attempt to compensate for a lack of fundamental nutrition in the foods that are available to them.

Therefore, to test the hypothesis, the underlying nutritional issues should first be addressed by eliminating ultra-processed foods from the diet and replacing them with minimally processed foods, the higher in "quality" the better.

Theory: An overweight person will naturally reduce their caloric intake when their diet meets or exceeds their nutritional requirements.

The results, listed in the article above, seem to suggest that this theory is correct.

"processed foods" are just tastier is also consistent with the data, no?

So even beyond the factors in the article (calorie density and hyper-palatability) there's other contributing factors in processed food. First of all, the processing itself introduces several factors: mechanical and heat energy changing the structure (but not composition) of the food, usually into smaller particle sizes; and the potential introduction of new contaminants - one that has been discussed before is lithium grease[1].

The other thing that processed food does, partially discussed in the article, is sit on shelves much longer. I wonder whether we've detected the acute effects of spoilage (e.g. food-borne illness) but missed some chronic effect.

[1]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2024/07/27/lithium-hypothesis-...

This is a great point and one that I think would change many minds.

If you say "more calories" or "hyperpalatable", many people will think "I can control that with portion control - I just won't binge them."

But if you say "it changes the physical form of the food" or "it has contaminants in it," it's clear that no amount of portion control can fix that.

Well that depends on what the form change does. Most form changes are just fine.

And whether portion control can fix contamination depends on what the contaminant is. A lot of things are only potentially harmful above a certain level.

> Well that depends on what the form change does. Most form changes are just fine.

Agreed, I just think that e.g. mastication probably has more subtle effects than just breaking up food, so I wonder about peanut butter vs peanuts kind of effects on the human body.

> A lot of things are only potentially harmful above a certain level.

I question this. I think the more we see trace effects, the more we realize that there are things in the built environment that are problematic in parts per billions and parts per millions that we wouldn't have ever thought that from acute exposure testing. I think a lot of our current understanding of GRAS and friends is pretty badly flawed - obviously a lot of substances aren't doing massive harm, but there's a lot that's suspect still.

The Slime Mold Time Mold article is maybe an interesting starting point, but really not great analysis... see this thorough rebuttal around the Lithium stuff that has not been responded to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...

TBH a lot of the discourse around this annoys me because it ignores sort of fundamental obvious stuff like food/snacks got way tastier, access to unhealthier food is higher, we live a way more sedentary lifestyle, takeout got more affordable, studies show that people overall consume more calories from unhealthier sources, you can go to the grocery store and see you should basically avoid much of the food there, food spikes your glucose higher, more artificial ingredients, switch from fat to sugar, more processed ingredients, etc. and yet everyone says "well it can't just be that" because XYZ specific study of some quality and timeframe took one of those axis in some degree of isolation and showed that _maybe_ it's not that specific thing only. Kind of a missing the forest for the common sense trees aspect. Obviously we don't understand the whole picture of obesity, but there's a degree of denial around common sense health stuff that's really weird in the kind of "rationalists try to figure out obesity" writing. I really think we should work more from a place of "you don't see people who do moderately intense exercise regularly and eat healthily being overweight/obese" as a baseline...

Nobody knows = there is wide disagreement

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/

My personal feeling is that I can eat like a king every day of the week. If I only had access to one kind of dessert, I'd be fine. I'd get tired of it. Oh, vanilla ice cream again.

But we have access to a wide variety of highly palatable foods, each with distinct flavor profiles; and advertisements reminds us how much better we'll feel after a snack!

Big recommend for Guyenet's "The Hungry Brain"

(randomly chosen podcast interview)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1g8l-MdZk

I always take "Nobody knows!" "Nobody could have predicted!" as a warning for either something really dumb, biased, or uneducated take is about to follow.

Seems like the cited studies confirm things we already know: when humans are given tasty high caloric-density foods, they consume more calories than when not given those foods.

I didn't see a cited study showing that these ultra-processed foods led to worse outcomes when caloric intake was held constant. Did I miss something?

No you didn’t miss anything. Everyone is freaking out about “processed” and “chemicals” and ignoring the obvious answer: high calories and low nutrition.

The processed and chemicals may be a proxy for high calories low nutrition, but generally they are used to create hyper palatable foods that are low nutrition. In general, it's quite hard and expensive to produce high palatable foods using real ingredients; food engineering changes that and makes it easy for cheap food to mess with our senses. As far as I can tell, this is the generally accepted argument for the problems with UPFs - they make people want to eat more cheap crap food.

I haven't read the article, but research has identified several components of processed foods that are detrimental to health beyond their caloric content. *Trans fats*, often found in hydrogenated oils, raise bad cholesterol levels and are linked to heart disease and diabetes[3]. *Added sugars* and high fructose corn syrup, prevalent in many processed foods, increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease[1][3]. *Sodium* is another common additive that can lead to hypertension and cardiovascular issues[1][3]. Additionally, *refined carbohydrates* cause rapid blood sugar spikes, contributing to metabolic disorders[3]. These components collectively contribute to chronic health conditions and increased mortality risk[2][4].

Citations: [1] https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/processed-foods/ [2] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-... [3] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318630 [4] https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f... [5] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6146358/ [6] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3781462... [7] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260459/ [8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/27/ultra-pro...

Excessively editorialized headline for the post to the point of trying to make the opposite point as the original.

The article name is "Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you", the opposite of this thread's title.

Everyone's ignoring the elephant in the room: fiber.

Fiber locks up calories and makes the body miss a lot of them, or absorb them later in the digestion process. If we reduce the word "processed" to a single action, it's removing fiber. It's turning wheat berries into flour. It's ripping off rice husks to make white rice. It's crushing nutritious apples and oranges into sugar water.

Western countries use calories as a metric, and it's a very hackable metric. If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body. If I turn those whole oats into oatmeal, fewer are. If I'm McDonald's I'll pulverize them to get all 1000 calories into my health-conscious deluded customer's bloodstream, so they buy more food from me.

Of course you can add 100g of Metamucil fiber to a processed meal, but the original fiber's function was to lock in the sugar, which the new stuff can no longer do. So it doesn't help.

Why are processed foods bad for you? Follow the fiber.

Agree completely. "Processing" is mainly the act of removing fiber so more food can be eaten faster and more often. Fiber satiates, which is not a good thing for companies that are trying to sell as much product as possible.

Using a blender is also processing, but it doesn’t remove the fiber. It does, however, break open the cells and makes the nutrients and sugars more easily available separately from the fiber.

Eating healthy is just as much about the shape/structure of the items being consumed as it is about the nutritional stats it has.

This is something not talked about enough. I think it's one of those things where people really struggling with weight should be told CICO (calories in calories out) just to get their head in the right place but it's not strictly true for all the reasons you mentioned and others

FWIW, this sort of thing is constantly being talked about on the Zoe blog: https://zoe.com/blog

Another way to say this: Eat foods with low glycemic index. Avoid foods that spike blood-sugar levels.

That's a completely different thing.

Honey, for instance, has a high glycemic index. Watermelon has a high glycemic index. They will not get you fat the same way cane sugar and watermelon juice will.

A juice made of celery, kale, and spinach, will still have a low glycemic index. But it's still nowhere near as good for you as unprocessed celery, kale, and spinach.

>Honey, for instance, has a high glycemic index. Watermelon has a high glycemic index. They will not get you fat the same way cane sugar and watermelon juice will.

Aside from not being evidenced, this is irrelevant to your hypothesis. Watermelon contains little fiber even on a per-calorie basis (https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrition-facts/167765/wt1) and honey (https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Honey_nutritional_value.html) contains almost none.

Of course if you add water it will lower it the index. All food that is not diluted in water will trigger an insulin response. That is how digestion works. Otherwise you'd have type 1 diabetes.

How is possible for people to crave steak and eat lots of steak despite having no sugar if the theory is that sugar causes a huge reaction and people to crave more sugar after eating it?

Blaming sugar ignores that all food triggers a spike of dopamine and insulin reaction, unless it's diluted in a lot of water. This is why vegetables are safe for diabetics, due to being so diluted. Jason Fung, Taubes and other fitness/health influencers keep spreading this carbs-insulin nonsense.

> If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body.

Humans are extremely efficient at extracting energy from food, regardless of the fiber content. We owe our survival as a species to it, as food was much less plentiful in the ancestral environment.

I've heard of fiber meaningfully affecting insulin response to food, satiety, and some other things - perhaps even gut microbiomes - but not metabolic efficiency.

Yeah he's posting nonsense. If it were true you'd be passing huge chunks of undigested food and be sick. Very little of the calorie content of oats and other so-called fiber rich food is actually undigestible. Sorry...beating obesity is not as easy as eating cereal and oats all day. wish it were.

Your reading is overly simplistic. You're also feeding a huge diversity of disparate microbes when you eat, all of which produce a huge array of different chemicals during their normal life processes, all within our digestive tract. The question then is the interaction of all these different microbes and chemicals with the food and the human and the other microbes.

Yeah this is wrong. Very little of oats and other grains is indigestible fiber. Otherwise you'd be shitting it out undigested.

According to the BBC Inside Health podcast I recently listened to they are often bad for you because the processing removes fibre and vitamins and also makes sugars more available. And that to make them int4eresting enough to eat excess salt is added.

WHO says "eat 30 grams of fibre every day". Which is a lot, unless you use whole grains without sweeteners, fat or meat on top (which reduces fibre per calorie). Or eat lots of roots or cabbage, and salads. Especially since you have to think of eating until 30 grams of pure fibre content is reached every. Single. Day. Of. A. Year.

This strikes at a problem with the definition of "processing" foods. Nixtamalization is "processing," but is mandatory to ensure one does not develop a vitamin deficiency on a maize diet.

The jump from a Brazilian doctor classifiying food to a British study tracking consumption under that classification, to end on a US study with 20 adults, waiting for another one with 36 members ending next year, kinda illustrate how hard it is to come with relevant data.

And now that we've more and more ultra-processed diet food, we'll need a few more decades to have an idea of their actual effect at any scale.

Evolution has selected animals that, when they have access to foods with high caloric density, will gorge on them. This has been advantageous to their survival, because the history of life has been characterized by famine feast cycles for most species. Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today. The rest is probably additives that affect our hormones that control hunger/satiety signals in the body.

In my opinion, effective regulation would control the caloric density as food as well as ban any additives that can affect hormonal hunger/satiety.

Why the insistence that these foods are only unhealthy because of the calories?

Have you heard of poison? 0 calories. Can kill you in the right doses.

Food factories contain dozens of these toxins in the form of plastics, lubricants, agents, flavorings, colorings, etc.

Calories are important. But the insistence that it's simply calories feels almost conspiratorial to me.

>Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today.

It's been possible to buy prepared pure sugar (even granulated) and pure oils and fats for centuries, and eat them straight out of the container if one wished. Yet the obesity epidemic is much newer than that, and hardly anyone gorges themselves in that particular manner even today. There is clearly far more to it than "had most of their non-caloric content removed".

Ultra processed people by Dr Chris van tulliken and for for life by Dr Tim Spector are good reading on this. The first is more focused on this issue.

was going to reference ultra-processed people. i walked away with some of the same general sentiments that are here -

1. nova classification is imperfect, but is better than what we had before it and i hope that we can iteratively find something more refined

2. so many nutrition studies are so woefully biased because of sponsorship (and antipathy) that it's laborious to extract meaning from them because much of the effort is tracing the money and potential bias.

Is there even a proven causal link? It could just be another case of "poor people do thing X, and poor people have higher mortality".

The highlight of this article is the Randomized controlled trial:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/

So yes, causal for obesity.

>...people in Brazil were buying less sugar and oil than in the past. Yet rates of obesity and metabolic diseases were still rising. This coincided with the growing popularity of packaged snacks and ready-made meals, which were loaded with sugar, fats and other additives.

What. So they were buying less sugar and fat. But they were actually buying more sugar and fat?

They were buying less sugar and oil as ingredients to cook at home with. They were substituting home cooking by buying more ready-made foods and snacks that contained fat and sugar as components.

Who made up this word? Before 2022 it more or less doesn't exist (per Google Trends.)

The phrase as originally coined is from the Nova classification system, proposed in 2009 by researchers at the University of São Paulo, Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

Do I read this correctly in that the only thing they found for now is that those eating UPFs ate 500 more calories per day, thus indicating the negative health effects could just be attributed to the weight gains?

The children were served some bizarre meat substitute chicken nuggets today during lunch. Tastes one once. Literally just matter. Flavorless.

If they want to do meatless days they should serve well seasoned lentils or something.

I'm surprised the article and nobody here is mentioning the popular the usage or the abuse of Boric Acid and Borax in processed foods mainly for preservation purposes [1].

In most countries they are banned but process food manufacturers have been using since forever.

[1] Abuse of Boric Acid and Borax in Foods:

https://www.cfs.gov.hk/english/multimedia/multimedia_pub/mul...

So when I mix whey protein isolate into pineapple juice with plain Greek yogurt, is that considered an ultra-processed food? It seems like it would be, but I doubt the criticisms of UPFs really apply here. My understanding is that these are healthy ingredients, in a blend that's fairly optimal for strength training, despite one of them being highly processed.

Is there actually anything wrong with whey protein? Or can we find a better definition of the problematic UPFs?

This touches on, and then completely ignores, one of the most probable areas of concern - additives. Emulsifiers that disrupt your intestinal lining, artificial dyes/flavors/sweeteners, fillers, consistency changers, and all the other tools in a food chemist's toolbox. Those should be individually investigated and problem ingredients eliminated (e.g brominated vegetable oil).

Also, fiber. The standard american diet is lacking fiber and protein.

My guess is water. Natural foods have a lot of water compared to processed foods.

Consider dried fruit. Quite minimally process wouldn't you say? Yet as snackable as candy.

There's currently a lot of DHMO in all of those foods, which can be quite dangerous for humans and has been a cause for numerous deaths in the World, including young children.

Robert Lustig has been preaching this for years:

https://www.amazon.com/Metabolical-Processed-Nutrition-Moder...

A good rule of thumb if you care about avoiding UPFs but don't want to overly limit your diet is to only buy foods with 5 ingredients in them (plus or minus 2 :).

Generalization is the real issue here. You can't just say "processed" food is bad. There are tons of definitions and different forms of processing. It would be much better to look at individual ingredients. A good start would be to change the GRAS process. There's no real investigation being done on many food additives and the evidence many use for GRAS is flimsy at best.

The end of the article gets the point. The problem isn't that food is processed; the problem is that extremely processed foods are much harder to moderate yourself on and present a much, much more appealing food to overeat on, which in turn causes health problems and is why so many people are so fat, along with other factors like people being lonely and depressed, and food being a quick and cheap way to make yourself happy, the broad availability of unhealthy food and the sometimes restricted availability of healthy food, the fact that people are too damn busy to find time in their schedules to prepare their own food, etc. etc.

Which itself ties into other systemic incentives. Processed food is shelf stable, fresh often is not, so it's friendlier to logistical systems that deliver everything we eat, which means less of it gets wasted, which means the prices are lower and availability is virtually guaranteed. Put simply: it is far easier and more profitable to ship, stock, and sell potato chips than it is to sell potatoes, and because everything in our system is profit driven, the better things map onto that, the more they occur. Ergo we're drowning in potato chips and still starving.

In that case we can just take Ozempic or whatever guys!

Just kidding, no that's not the problem. The problem is processing destroys/alter many molecules we do not even know about or know it's full "purpose"/role in nutrition and digestion. The commonly talked about vitamins and RDA and such are just the bare minimum so a broad population does not get sick, but does not mean optimum health for a given individual.

Cf. eating 10mg of iron in a steak, readily bioavailable vs eating 10mg of iron from cereal. One is bound in easily digestible compounds, the other is iron shavings or rust.

e.g The British Navy discovering that scurvy is fixed by eating fresh food; ensuring to add citrus to sailors diets, then forgetting about how it worked. Then retrying citrus, but cooking it one using copper vessels, which destroy much of the vitamin C content.

don't we though? they're known to contain very little nutritional value, to be stuffed with salt, fat, sugar, to feature next to no vitamins and natural fibers, which naturally corral sugar to the stomach instead of letting it go through the intestinal barrier freely

so basically it's food that promotes poor variety in gut bacteria and inflammation

that we pretend like we don't know is very surprising to me, it's not exactly shocking that the american diet is bad after some 50 years of it running amok across the world

Summary: we still don’t know why, but definitely don’t eat UPFs.

A Ctrl + F for “healthy” into this thread returns numerous results. I’ve never found a convincing definition for such a common word.

To me it looks like it could be something of a plucebo effect. Like they are bad for us because we expect them to be bad. Minucebo effect?

Some part of it must be how small all the parts get when processed so you take in everything really quickly.

Indeed, you need scientists to simply pronounce the ingredients that are processed into, and into, food.

Given standard home kitchen equipment and techniques, could you prepare this item? Yes -> not UPF; No, requires a factory -> UPF.

This is kind of like the Jeff Foxworthy jokes.

If you remove so many of the nutrients that you have to try to spray vitamins back on... you might make a UPF.

If your product has ingredients where there is no evidence that those ingredients can actually be digested by the human body... you might make a UPF.

If you have to add dyes so your product doesn't look like sawdust or poop, you might make a UPF.

...

My fast rule is to only eat food that’s been around for 1000 years or so.

Oooohhh... not so sure. Bound to be a little moldy by now

Dukeofdoom's original comment: ``` Don't they add food coloring from ground bugs sometimes. In case of sausage they add preservatives to make it last longer. Actual poison if you were just to eat a lot of it. Generally companies are liable if they make you sick right after eating their product. So they do everything they can to prevent that. Nobody is going to held liable if they give you cancer 10 years down the line. Super hard to prove. So not a worry for them. Backlash after the failed covid vaccine makes some reform more likely now. ```

My response:

Several food colorings (e.g. Red 40, Yellow 10) are synthetic dyes derived from crude oil and other petrochemicals.

At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.

Reality is complex. We are basically one step removed from cavemen still, and need to remain humble, curious, and intellectually honest about the sheer extent of that which we do not know. That's missing in so many people these days. I think more (but not all) people would benefit from undergoing an ego death and reintegration experience that so many others have found in psychedelics, which are nonaddictive and generally safer than legal drugs like alcohol and various combinations of amphetamines (ADHD medication).

>At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.

That's not actually how it works in the US. The standard is "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS)[0], which requires the manufacturer to "confirm" that an additive is "safe."

At least that's been the requirement since 1958, although some 700 existing additives were declared exempt from the potentially biased/unconfirmed testing of the manufacturer.

If, as you suggest, "...many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe", those folks are woefully misinformed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe

I sometimes wonder if there are lessons from British period of WWII rationing. Huge numbers of people were enabled to have for free the right amount of nutrients instead of the malnourishment of the 1920s/30s. And millions more found it hard to get the excess sugars and fats.

If we created a new rationing, with no processed foods, feeding the whole population what would happen tomorrow and in ten years?

Imagine how unpopular the Prime Minister who started this would be. Then imagine ten years later when he would be the guy that got millions of people thinner, fitter and having more sex (I am told that’s what thinner fitter people do!)

Imagine that election :-)

Until they come up with a term that actually means something definitive, I pretty much ignore anyone going on about ultra-processed foods. Ultra-processed is meaningless.

TLDR: According to the article, people eat more calories when they eat ultra-processed foods. The reason is unknown, one possibility is more calories per bite as manufacturers remove water and some other ingredients during processing.

Overall, a pretty underwhelming article. Not surprising, unfortunately -- I have been subscribing to the Economist for over 15 years since late 1990s until the slow erosion of quality made me drop it.

Yes, I agree with you, the Economist from the 90s was a different animal. If you ask me the above article is just paid shilling for Ozempic et. al. Not directly obviously, but in the mindset and viewpoint it wants to develop in readers

ultra-processed people by chris van tulleken hypothesizes that it's because the food is less nutritionally dense through extraction and reconstitution to more palatable and economically expedient forms. additionally, these forms require less effort to process by chewing so we're able to ingest more calories more quickly before our biochemistry can catch up and signal that we've consumed what we need. finally, the processing of food breaks down the original nutrient "matrix" in the way that our metabolism evolved to process it. we evolved to metabolize an apple, i believe was his example, by eating it raw and in its original form, together with all that constitutes an "apple" and not simply the composite of nutrients that we can extract from an apple. the hypothesis is that the whole apple influences our biochemical response differently than the extracted nutrients that have been reconstituted in a different form.

lots of people know but they don’t advertise on the economist

I mean, look at the ingredients list on most processed foods. Much higher quantities of various sugars and starches. More processed foods are rarely 1:1 ingredients compared to less processed foods...

"Robert F. Kennedy junior, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health, has likened processed food to 'poison'"

Wow, a bright spot.

tl;dr is that "ultra-processed foods" are engineered to be more palatable and that tends to result in more caloric density.

tldr hint: the last 5 paragraphs get to the point, and are worth reading.

Surely not that mysterious - the adulterants added processed foods in order preserve it longer for the shelf, disguise the looks, mask the taste or simply bulk it out for max profit generally do not provide additional nutritional value

Simply not providing nutritional value would be neutral from health perspective. We are looking for something that provides negative effects, either direct (something toxic) or indirect (like causing us to eat more which causes obesity...).

I find two principles work best. First, grandma's wisdom is mostly correct so prefer home-cooked culturally aligned food.

Second moderation, you can have one can of drink and one meal outside power week of anything. So burger and coke or Indian sugary desserts all are good if you can control frequency.

Why do we need these kinds of sensationalist names for things? Why is it so important that they be "ultra-processed" foods? Can't they just be "overprocessed" or perhaps use some other more neutral term?

It's like the 90s when everything had to be "EXTREME!!"

I think it's partly due to the people (this site is full of them) that would read any other term and go "what is processing? Cooking and cutting is processing hurr durr"

I have had this exact argument on HN at least a half dozen times.

yeah people still do it but at least adding the "ultra" indicates is not something a person cooking for their family would be doing to food

Until you add ketchup.

It's just as dumb though because the act of processing doesn't really mean anything.

If it didn't mean anything then why the findings in the article?

The findings in the article basically came down to - people eat more calories when it tastes good. Even the article itself admits there are a multitude of other factors that could account for the results other than UPF.

It absolutely does if you're able to take off the pedantry glasses for like 5 seconds. Why are you nitpicking this? is it because you actually think articles like this are about chopping carrots?

"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it."

from someone else in the comments is pretty clear

Why jump from one weird statement to another? Maybe even a worse one?

Here we go again...

It's still a misleading term, so it would be good to talk about what the actual harm is, as to not confuse people. And it does confuse, since I vividly remember as a kid being confused by it, and it's important to have healthy habits from a young age. It always sounded a bit weird that food being "processed" means it's bad, so I didn't understand it really. And if you don't focus on the harm, but use terms like this, it's hard to say what is pseudoscience and what is actual science.

Someone will have to explain to me why so many people claim that honey is not a "refined sugar." If bees do the refining than it doesn't count?

Olive oil, steel cut oats, and dried beans, are processed. It's to differentiate from things like Coca-Cola or TV dinners.

It's funny that it's only the high IQ types that have difficulty distinguishing beans from coca cola.

It's what I like to call being so smart they're stupid. Everyone strives to be the smartest most pedantic one in the room around here.

Just as a side note/for info, there’s a specific definition (I think by the FAO?) used for them. The tldr is that when you’re extracting/reacting something to use as an ingredient (eg hydrogenated oil), it becomes ultra processed.

Well, it's only _over_-processed if we assume it is _bad_. A consensus does seem to be emerging that it _is_ bad, but building that right into the name seems unhelpful. And as alluded to in the article, what the point is after which something is 'over'-processed is not particularly clear.

Proce-X'ed foods

> some other more neutral term

Nutrient dense/high calorie is probably more accurate.

This would encompass eggs and is leaving out what might be key components (engineered by food scientists and produced in factory)

Ultra-processed foods are broadly speaking foods that cannot be produced in a normal domestic or restaurant kitchen.

Seems pretty obvious to me. Humans didn't have factories until a couple hundred years ago.

This means we are not adapted to factory made food.

This entire debate is hilariously overcomplicated by smarty pants "show me the study" or "aren't cooked carrots processed?" types.

40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated. It's called the "replication crisis". Google it.

Rules of thumb are greatly underrated on HN. Here's one: if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it.

"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it." i follow this as well it's a great rule. I have no idea on the internet, but in real life nobody who's ever been the smarty pants saying "aren't cooked carrots processed?" has health or a body i'm envious of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

Good thing I didn't make that argument :)

I'm not sure what argument you were making then.

Assuming your point isn't that you used the "factory" terminology instead of calling it "unnatural", so it's not an appeal to nature.

I'd actually be pleased to dig on the deeper part you were pointing to.

PS: the "we are not adapted" to part of your post is the crux of it in my eyes: we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic. We're not adapted to receiving MRIs, wearing glasses or looking at imaginary landscapes in VR, and that's totally fine in my book .

If I wanted to say unnatural I would have said unnatural. I said factory.

Factories come with a mountain of lubricants, plastics, metals, agents, colorings, flavorings, etc that are poisonous. They are poisonous because we were not evolved to consume them. That's just 1 of many reasons factory made foods are bad.

> we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic

These things would be good for you in spite of the fact that you're not adapted to it.

There are far more many things that you are not adapted to that would kill you. Your list is hilariously arguable (VR might actually be bad for you lol). My list would consist of basic inarguable things like, fish can breathe underwater naked, humans cannot, and my list would be inexhaustibly long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Avoiding manufactured food is absurd to a level I didn't think needed explanation.

Even from a logistics POV we're 8 billion on this planet, concentrated in cities. Everyone following that philosophy would bring a food chain collapse.

Good thing you don't need to follow what everyone else does :)

If we were on less censored forums would just ask you to "post body". Since that's not considered a valid argument here instead i'll just gesture to the countless innovations that have been developed by humans that turn out to have massive negative health consequences. What gives you the confidence that our current food manufacturing techniques won't turn out to be one of those things? Would you have made this argument about cigarettes in the 20s?

People are forgetting we had famines a few centuries ago in the west, and still have famines in many places. Sure, they are also usually associated with governing issues and other complicating factors, but still. The number of peoole being alive is my answer to whether food manufacturing is a net negative or not.

While the pendulum has swung way past the equilibrium for us, rejecting whole categories of food that tend to be nutrious, easily preserved is just not realistic.

To me there are dozens of other levers we can pull to deal with health improvement. As pointed out in the other threads, not all OECD countries are facing what the US are facing.

PS: do I get all my points accepted as truth if I can prove a BMI that satisfies you ? Would 22 do it ?

Not necessarily since BMI doesn't take into account muscle mass. But, 22 does mean that we can't just discard your opinion out of hand

Always using the appeal to nature is a fallacy, but a more refined heuristic is to simply consider that the burden of proof for a processed meal is much greater than that for an unprocessed one.

I remember a movie from the 1950s, where a character was arguing that "margarine is just like butter", and the response was that "butter needs no explanation".

When industrial food producers decided their priorities are making stuff extremely cheap that appeals to our more addictive side so they can make as much money as possible, without any regard for our health, this is quite obviously going to create a problem.

There’s a woman on YouTube that I watch sometimes who recreates popular sweets/snacks/desserts but using fresh ingredients and home friendly (usually) cooking techniques. What always blows me away is just how long is takes to make something like a Little Debbie Oatmeal cream pie from scratch.

If we as a species could no longer rely on industrialization to create junk foods and instead had to make them from scratch, we’d spend 100x as long making them as we do shoving them down our throats and therefore savor the few that we do make and likely eat less.

The subconscious power of availability and plenty on the human psyche is enormously underestimated.

And yet science doesn't have an clear answer here. Just conjecture and theories like the ones you stated.

> Here's one: if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it.

I'm not sure I understand. Every food made in a factory was first made outside one.

Margarine? Fruit loops? Canola oil? Snickers?

I dare you to make actual snickers with the same ingredients outside a factory. Refining the sugar alone is a huge industrial process.

Even the US's entire grain supply is sprayed with folic acid. So pretty much all wheat and rice that you find at the grocery store is also disqualified.

Don't they add food coloring from ground bugs sometimes. In case of sausage they add preservatives to make it last longer. Actual poison if you were just to eat a lot of it. Generally companies are liable if they make you sick right after eating their product. So they do everything they can to prevent that. Nobody is going to held liable if they give you cancer 10 years down the line. Super hard to prove. So not a worry for them. Backlash after the failed covid vaccine makes some reform more likely now.

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