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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

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".

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> 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.

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