They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.
They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.
Although I'd also add that UPF avoidance is more of a useful heuristic than an inherently reliable indicator of something's healthfulness. It's not like it's physically impossible to use complex industrial processes to create a product with high-quality nutrition that aligns with a given consumer's desired macros.
I don't personally believe that plant-based meats as we know them are as healthy as meat, but that doesn't mean they couldn't theoretically be, and it doesn't mean lab-grown meat can't be (although I'll let other people be the guinea pigs on immortalized cells and check back in next century).
Edit: 1: Except the powders. Turns out that they're on the low end of "ultra-processed" based on the Nova classification system, whereas Beyond/Impossible Meat is more firmly in that category. See comment below.
However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.
For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)
To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.
This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.
If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".
It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.
In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".
Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.
So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.
The definitions are indeed fucked.
That being said, the same system would categorize Meati, tofu, and cheese as merely processed (Nova group 3), not ultra-processed (group 4), at least according to Grok (which provided detailed reasoning that sounded credible). For comparison, Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat were deemed to be firmly in group 4.
There are 3 kinds of processing, with very different effects. One kind is separating a product into its components. Another is mixing various ingredients. The third is applying some treatment to the product that modifies its structure, heating being the most frequent method.
I consider only mixing ingredients and applying various treatments as belonging to "ultraprocessing", because these processing methods remove the control of the end consumer about what is being eaten, as they are normally irreversible.
On the other hand, any separation method cannot have a harmful effect by itself and separation of the edible components is absolutely necessarily for human food, because we have reduced digestive systems, which are unable to extract as efficiently the nutrients from food as those of most other non-carnivorous mammals.
The only harmful effects of well-separated food ingredients, like seed flour, oils or protein powders, happen when the end consumers choose to mix them in unhealthy proportions, like when adding too much sugar or too much fat to some dish, but then they can blame only themselves for this.
With food that has passed through the other kinds of processing, nothing that the end consumers do with it can make it healthy, when it has not originally been so, which happens frequently because for its producers it is more beneficial to try to make it addictive instead of healthy.
It's not a question of whether or not they fit that definition, it's that the definition itself is so expansive that it allows equivocation between food products that are meaningfully different in their ingredients, health outcomes and environmental outcomes.
"Ultra-processed" may be a little fuzzy at the boundaries, but at least it's a specific enough term that we all know and mostly agree on what we're talking about when we use the term. UPF-ness is a heuristic that can help determine whether or not a certain food is junk, but once you've categorized something as "junk food" you've already decided it's unhealthy. No one has to study or debate whether or not junk food is unhealthy.
And the value judgement is the only part that has an especially meaningful connection to health. It is admittedly really difficult to do rigorous research on the health impacts of diet, but the connection between "ultra-processed-ness" and health outcomes is super messy. And even when we can get data that suggests negative health outcomes, what's the actual cause? Preservatives? Lack of fiber? Hyperpalatability? Nobody has been able to clearly articulate a cause and if we could then we could just focus on that thing rather than the "ultra-processed-ness."
The most pressing question here: is tofu ultra-processed? It's a protein isolate prepared by a solution-precipitation process. If you replace the tofu salts (calcium sulfate and similar) with ethanol (an anti-solvent for proteins) you get protein powder. This is not the most efficient way make protein powder, but the point is that on the one hand you have a traditional centuries-old process, and on the other you have what seems to be a sine qua non of ultraprocessed food, and the difference is... ethanol.
Beyond Meat, which contains... dietary fiber... is part of a particular subset of highly processed foods that are trying to be healthy. If you see "chicory root extract" on a food's ingredients label, it's probably in this club. This is a telltale sign of spiking the dietary fiber content. (Beyond Meat does not contain chicory; its fiber is from peas.)
Most ultra-processed foods are not trying to be healthy. They are designed to be addictive. It's a little bit like the old kerfuffle over "weapons-grade" encryption being restricted for export. The technology can be useful for military purposes, but encryption is not a weapon per se.
The critical diversion is not from meat to processed foods, but from the practice of deliberately engineering addictive foods to the techniques that facilitate it. The food product companies would like you to look anywhere other than their intentions, because they can always change the how and what in pursuit of them. They will always be happy to ostentatiously move away from the old way of making a bag of chips you can't put down, to the new way of making a bag of chips you can't put down. The root of the problem is the incentive structure.
Of course I agree with the rest of your point, which is similar to what I was saying. (I also chuckled at your choice of analogy, as a founder of an encryption startup.) I have a lot of thoughts on the incentive structure[1], which I would dramatically overhaul given the option.
The way to make a good profit in the food industry is to sell a lot of a product that you can sell for a good price, but have it be very cheap to manufacture. If you take really cheap input material that historically was used mostly for animal feed, like corn or oats, and can do a bunch of food science magic to it to make it very tasty and addictive, you can charge a good price and people will buy lots of it.
The problem with ultraprocessed foods is simply that the manufacturer has been given too many free parameters, and if they get enough they can find something addictive and unhealthy. Since shelf space on grocery store shelves is allocated based on sales, the shelves will be filled with addictive food. This is even true of the produce section. Fruits and vegetables are bred to increase their sugar content, reduce bitterness, etc. Luckily breeding fruit trees is more time consuming and less controllable than all of the chemistry that can happen in a potato chip factory. We will see how this holds up as genetic engineering becomes more predictable.
Anyhow the only solution we've really come up with to this social problem is to change our brains with Glucagon Like Peptides to be less susceptible to these tricks. We will see how long that is able to keep ahead of the food companies.
"Ultra processed foods are killing us"
Meaning: stop eating sugar cereals, doritos, frappuccinos, sweet granola bars, cheesy crackers, candy, and salted, processed deli meats
Popular interpretation: stop eating vegetarian meat alternatives
Beyond meat type meat alternative products have simply not been around enough, and not consumed by enough people to enable any sort of studies that show they are better. It takes many years, sometimes decades of tracking tens of thousands of people through their lifetimes to establish any reasonable certainty that something is better than the other.
Moreover the ingredients in meat alternatives are known quantities and they lack the specific compounds like heme iron, nitrosamines, and saturated animal fats that are mechanistically linked to cancer and heart disease in red and processed meat.
Beyond doesn't contain heme iron, but Impossible does.
But it could be a legit issue in terms of sharing rather than improving on a health outcomes associated with meat.
Frankly I think the bigger reason these don't seem to be working out is that they aren't having the actual impact desired. The price isn't coming down. And if the price remains at higher-than-meat levels the ecological impact (which is what I personally care more about) is probably not where it needs to be either.
I mean, let's be blunt: all this dithering about health effects and environmental externalities isn't actually going to change anything. Make a burger for the price of a bean dip, however, and the market will beat your door down even if they claim not to care about the hippy nonsense.
As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing in important areas.
My understanding of the studies on UPF health outcomes is that their data is drawn overwhelmingly from traditional categories like junk food and processed starch and sugar. Which is all the more reason to avoid the equivocation between the two categories, lest someone get the mistaken impression that the Twinkie data is about the burgers.
They imitate meats, but is there any evidence that, in practice, they replace them? In menus, and I suspect in actual human eating behavior, they seem to replace earlier vegetarian options like old-school TVP, not meat.
I’m all for all tastes and textures.
Cheese production may be the definition of “chemically mangled milk” but I’m all for it.