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Comment by IcyWindows | Hacker News Reader

"Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept.

It's like "organic".

Too many variables are conflated to make any of this reasonable.

Yes, I've begun translating "ultra-processed foods" to "junk food". It's roughly the same meaning and roughly the same amount of scientific rigor. UPF sounds scientific and specific but it's neither.

OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.

Anything this terribly defined, makes a poor candidate for "being treated like cigarettes"

This is giving the "ultra-processed" term too much credit. Organic is at least pretty explicitly specified by the USDA (even if that definition is perhaps not what most people think or expect when they read the term).

Ultra-processed doesn't even have a single, consistent definition.

Agreed. I hope these terms go away. I think what people tend to mean is "calorie dense, low in nutrients, low in fiber", or something along those lines, and the term "processed" makes it far more confusing.

"Processed" ends up meaning anything from "high in sugar" to "long shelf life" or "one of a dozen kinds of artificial sweetener" etc. It does more harm than good.

I can have an extremely high fiber, high protein, nutritionally well rounded meal that's also "ultra processed".

Someone mentioned Nova. Nova is a PERFECT example of how god awful the term is. When asked to classify foods into Nova categories there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8181985/

Time after time, Nova is shown to be more confusing than helpful, with worse than random results. Nova itself doesn't even attempt to correlate with "healthy".

> there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists

Neither is there for speciation. Doesn’t make the term or concept useless. And doesn’t mean we can’t make useful statements about one species versus another, even if it gets blurry at the edges.

What is helpful about Nova? What are the useful statements we can make? I would argue that Nova makes it more difficult to make useful statements. For example, someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed" and if they equate "ultra processed" with bad... well, they'd skip those. Meanwhile, they could eat raw mean morning to night, or drink their own urine, and they'd be on a totally unprocessed diet.

What framework has Nova helped develop for eating healthier?

> someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed"

No one believes that. We're all adults and not looking for loopholes or edge cases to exploit. A system can be generally good even if it has inconsistent edge cases, which is basically all systems that have ever existed.

why not use a classification of food that actually aligns with what is bad? it seems like we don't actually know. Nova combines a bunch of different attributes some of which we don't actually think are causally linked to bad health.

Feel free to publish one?

People do this, and the good ones don't have anything to do with processed food, or if they do, it's entirely superfluous. The Mayo Clinic publishes on this topic and, as I recall, strongly recommends the Mediterranean diet - high in fiber and protein, nutritionally diverse, inclusive of fats and carbohydrates.

I know multiple people that are drinking litres of olive oil daily because of the Mediterranean diet. Because of this critical oversight, I am forced to conclude it's bogus. A real recommendation would address this.

I don't understand anything you're saying. A diet can not compel you to do anything, let alone drink liters of olive oil. I assume this is attempting to parody something about Nova but I frankly can't unpack whatever it's supposed to be.

Sure they do, I know multiple people like that.

It's could be OK to have informal system with plenty of inconsistent cases for informal conversations, but once we start talking of regulation, it's time to switch to something that does not have quite as few loopholes.

Because for example grape juice has more sugar per cup than coca-cola, and almost no nutrients (if filtered.) And yet it's firmly the best type of food according to NOVA system (minimal processing, no artificial additives). You can be sure that if any sort of government adopts NOVA system, it's that kind of food that would be pushed to consumer, not the actual healthy stuff.

If a framework leads to obviously absurd conclusions, I think that's a very valid criticism of that framework. You have not demonstrated or in any way supported that this framework can be "generally good".

And yes, people absolutely believe things. I have had people criticize food/drinks I've eaten as unhealthy because they are "processed" even though being "processed" means I know exactly what's in them.

Ever notice how you semantic junkies always end up defending entrenched financial interests?

Redirect your energy toward something useful.

Here’s a scientific paper written by scientists that defines UPFs:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066

Which variables are conflated?

That's a perfect example of the problem. It's overgeneralized to the point of meaninglessness.

It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?

Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.

How do you show that a certain food is quickly absorbing or slowly absorbing? Would you require that every food item is evaluated on each individual characteristic?

You measure and report the glycemic index.

I was thinking of the example of crisps which are basically potatoes with oil and salt, baked. If you are going to call baking ultra processing then it would include rather a lot of things.

> "Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept

This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.

The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066

“Healthy”, “non addictive”, “hyper palatable” are much more unscientific concepts than for example the NOVA definitions for ultra processed foods.

And yet you would have little trouble distinguishing between those two categories if a range of food was put on a table in front of you

The Nova framework for classifying processed foods was created in 2009 by a Brazilian epidemiologist

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

Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.

Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.

It's not gatekeeping to point out that multiple studies have shown that Nova is a perfect example of "no one agrees on what processed foods are". Even when given Nova criteria, nutritionists repeatedly, across studies, fail to agree on categorization.

Nova also does not even attempt to categorize in terms of health because "processed" has nothing to do with "healthy" despite being used in conversations about public health. Absolutely perfect example of how bad the term "processed" is.

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