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Comment by breezybottom | Hacker News Reader

Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention. The state of nutrition science is abysmal.

It's not meaningless.

"Processed" means that ingredients had to be manipulated to produce the food (e.g. most recipes). Most of what you make at home is "processed".

"Ultra-processed" means food produced using industrial processing, using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc. That's a clear distinction.

Whether or not that means anything for the nutritional value and health outcomes from consumption of the food is a different question, but it can clearly be studied.

That's not a clear distinction at all, since now you have to define "industrial". Why would mixing with an industrial blender lead to unhealthier food than a kitchen blender? Why would flour made with a gristmill be less healthy than a mortar and pestle? There's no theoretical basis.

You're just playing the semantics game for the sake of being contrarian.

If you really think Oreos, Pringles, and Lunchables aren't ultra-processed and extremely unhealthy, there's no point in having a discussion.

Immediately backing off to "I know it when I see it" really doesn't help your case that UPF is the right way to categorize unhealthy foods

It’s basically a wildcard, “ultra processed food” is a classification of nothing and everything. There’s nothing inherently bad about processing food, lots of food is terrible for you but that’s unrelated entirely.

There is 2 ways to have that discussion:

1. Ultra processed food is a media hype -> totally dismiss it

2. Ultra processed food is often used without proper classification and would be more useful to have well defined sub categories

These are both absolutely the wrong ways to look at it.

> 1. Ultra processed food is a media hype -> totally dismiss it

Don't let the media decide what you think, whether you want to go against them or you want to support them. Your faith or distrust in some media organization or segment has no effect on the truth value of some statement being made. They are adding commentary.

> 2. Ultra processed food is often used without proper classification and would be more useful to have well defined sub categories

Don't come up with words and then struggle to define them, or worse, argue with people about their definitions. Language is a tool. Discuss actual things, and use words to label those actual things. If they do not offer a definition for "ulta-processed food," do not help them. It is not up to you to come up with categories of food to fit the case they are making about "ultra-processed food." It is up to them to associate their health theories with the food they are trying to classify within them, both statistically and with guesses about the mechanisms.

Don't feel like because one can have a discussion that it makes sense to have one. If I make up a word, you shouldn't waste time debating its meaning, you should just ask me to give you a clear definition of how I'm using it.

If you have a clear definition, one that an informed reader could apply to some random product on their grocery store shelf to distinguish between "processed" (almost everything) and "ultra processed" (?), then you should post that definition.

Otherwise you're just playing the same game of Humpty Dumpty.

Are Pringles in a can really that much more unhealthy for me than if I make the potato paste at home, fry them in oil at home, and toss them in lots of salts and seasonings at home?

Any good faith reply would take, as clear, that the issue is not with using a big mixer and that that is not what anyone, on earth, means when they talk about "industrial processing" or "using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc.".

Parsing words seems super intellectual when you're 12 years old arguing with your mom about bed time, but it gets pretty boring pretty quickly after that. Something to consider.

I didn't say industrial processing led to unhealthier food. In fact I explicitly said that the health question is distinct from the definition, and can be studied.

The idea that you could buy any food that doesn’t fit that definition is silly, all foods have additives that’s why you can buy them and they last for more than 60 seconds on a shelf, all foods are processed because we don’t eat raw seeds as the majority of our staple diet. You have to come up with a definition of what “process” is good and bad, and what about them is “bad” before making statements like that.

It isn't a meaningless word, and like my sibling poster I do wonder if that sentence is astroturfed by the junk food corpos.

The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.

From the wikipedia page:

> The Nova definition of ultra-processed food does not comment on the nutritional content of food and is not intended to be used for nutrient profiling.

> Nutrient profiling: also nutritional profiling, is the science of classifying or ranking foods by their nutritional composition in order to promote health and prevent disease.

So it looks like this classification doesn't mean what you think it means.

Do you genuinely not understand the difference between "tends to be unhealthy" and "is always 100% unhealthy"? Do you not understand how the classification is useful even if it contains exceptions?

I understand the difference.

Do you understand that the classification is not based on healthy/unhealthy but based on how much “processing” was done to the food?

You're so close.

All you're missing is "and quantity of processing is correlated with being unhealthy, making it a useful metric".

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. What it sounds like you're saying is that it is possible for processing to make a product unhealthy, and unlikely for processing to make a product more healthy.

What other people are saying is that this communicates almost nothing. What it does is allow people who are doing very bizarre things to food to hide among people who are doing pretty well known, well-tested, and ancient things to food. It's literally an argument to ignore the specifics, it's an argument for ignorance.

Certainly your first sentence is true. And you're right; what you said you think I said, communicates almost nothing. If it were what I were saying, it would be an argument for ignorance.

Where am I missing that from? The linked Wikipedia article explicitly states that it’s not designed for this.

How is the food unhealthy? By having lots of fats? Or high salt? Or high sugar? Is it perhaps the ingredients that make it unhealthy?

You're missing that from the conversation, where myself and others have stated it repeatedly, not from the wikipedia page.

> How is the food unhealthy? By having lots of fats?

Yes.

> Or high salt?

Yes, that too.

> Or high sugar?

Yes, very much this.

> Is it perhaps the ingredients that make it unhealthy?

Also true. For example: while preservatives like sodium benzoate are not used in unhealthy quantities in any individual item of food, a diet high in ultraprocessed foods can consume unsafe levels.

Sure my point is that what we’re actually talking about is the ingredients themselves, not how they’re processed. Except it’s through this roundabout way; if your worry is sodium benzoate, it doesn’t matter if the food was extruded, deep fried, or emulsified, all that matters is if it has sodium benzoate.

And we don’t need a proxy for that. We need proper labelling of ingredients.

> if your worry is sodium benzoate, it doesn’t matter if the food was extruded, deep fried, or emulsified, all that matters is if it has sodium benzoate.

Sure, but my worry isn't just sodium benzoate. It's also deep frying, or lots of sugar, or just being vacuously caloric while not providing saiety.

There are a lot of different things done to foods that tend to make them variously unhealthy to consume in quantity, a problem not shared by, say, cucumber or carrots. "Ultra-processed" is a useful linguistic catch all for these.

Some people lack the language skills to deal with terms that are not rigorously defined from a scientific sense, which honestly speaks to a failure of the education system rather than the term being a problem.

"health" as quantity of nutrients doesn't really make sense. pretty much everything we eat is good in some quantities, and bad in others. so there's no nutrient that you can name that makes food unhealthy (there are some like trans fats i guess, but mostly). then what makes some food "healthy" and other food "unhealthy"? there is actually a simple answer to this question: foods which lead you to overeat them are unhealthy, foods which don't aren't. so then the relation between ultra processing and health become obvious. processing is expensive. the reason companies do so much of it is to get people to eat more of their food. food that has been ultra processed is pretty much guaranteed to cause over eating and hence be unhealthy. food that has not been processed usually will only lead you to eat a healthy amount. so "ultraprocessed" is pretty much the same as "unhealthy". furthermore, as above, defining "unhealthy" directly is tricky, because it doesn't directly map to the nutrient content of food. so a good proxy metric, like "ultraproccessed", is useful.

But your definition of processed foods has now shifted to being one of hyperpalitability and likelihood of overeating.

Those are two completely different categories. The first is, ostensibly, about the processing done to the ingredients to make the final product. The second is about the outcome that the product has on those consuming it.

If you remove the overconsumption angle, what is left of processed foods? And if processed is used as a proxy for overconsumption, why have this proxy at all, just talk about overconsumption (and the negative impacts of that) directly.

> But your definition of processed foods has now shifted to being one of hyperpalitability and likelihood of overeating.

that's a very small shift. the two are very closely linked

> why have this proxy at all

very simple reason: if i am in the supermarket i can tell immediately looking at a food how highly processed it is.

we have spent many decades telling people "just don't overeat" and it hasn't worked at all. we have also spent many decades telling people that "unhealthy" can be established by looking for a particular ingredient, say sugar, or fat, and it again hasn't helped.

the heart of the advice we would like to give people is that a healthy diet isn't one that has the exact right nutrient balance, but rather one that causes your body to naturally pick the amounts it needs. and we would like to communicate this advice in a way that makes it easy for people to make purchasing decisions.

> Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention.

Yes, and cigarettes cure cancer amirite ?

We all know what they mean by ultra processed food, it's 75% of your supermarkets. 45% of the US is obese, the rest is overweight, food is one of the main factor in the top 2 leading causes of death in the US, if you can't see the problem you're blind

There is a very good definition on wikipedia btw, and yes not all ultra processed things are bad, but the vast majority of them are

Weight gain has basically happened across the whole developed world because cost per calorie has gotten so low that people just eat more calories on average. This is why semi-glutides are the first thing ever to reduce weight gain and actually make people lose weight because they encourage reduced consumption.

Don't need ultra-processed food to be unhealthy. Rich guys in the 1800s would get fat and get gout and all these issues from overconsumption. It's just they were the only ones who could back then.

Yeah right... so obesity, diabetes, etc. skyrocketed in the US from the mid 80s because before the 80s americans were calorie constrained ? Really ?

We're talking 1980s, not 1880s by the way

Yes not gonna pull it but there's data that shows calories got meaningfully cheaper and easier to access in the United States and more plentiful from the 1980s to the 2020s.

Oh yeah, the same exact period during which ultra processed food was introduced to the mass... interesting...

That shift might have been plausible if it happened in the 40s or 50s when the economy switched from war to consumption - but in the 80s? What kind of massive breakthrough in food production happened there that we mysteriously never heard of?

Aspartame

Food as a % of income declined dramatically. This chart has it at 18% in 1960 declining to ~10% today.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

There were a ton of programs after WWII to improve the nutrition of the country. This largely meant raising calories to prevent malnutrition. And the 80s are as good a point as any other to where that succeeded.

> Weight gain has basically happened across the whole developed world

Could it be that maybe, maybe, there is a link to this and the subject of the paper being discussed?

>We all know what they mean by ultra processed food

Very scientific!

Open wikipedia, or literally any study on the topic... we're on a tech related shit posting forum, not in a peer reviewed paper lmao

This may shock you, but Hacker News isn't a scientific journal. The focus is on communicating useful information and being understood, not necessarily scientific rigorous terminology.

People are pissed because they don't want to accept that a) most of supermarkets food is bad and b) you need to cook yourself in order to eat properly.

We call it shopping around the outside of the supermarket, and it's how you find the food that won't kill you I'm 46. I'm obese, but in otherwise perfect health by every biological marker and test that they can run. Blood pressure is normal. Cholesterol is great. Glucose is great. A1c test is fine. Liver and kidney functions are fine. Everything's fine.

The key is, eat things from the outside ring of the store, not the middle cookie sections.

I haven't gotten that "not too much" part down yet.

That's an interesting POV. I'd have to check if my local supermarkets also have an inner circle.

For me it's mostly avoiding supermarkets alltogether except for specific (fresh) things and buy everything else online, from the producer or farmer whenever I can.

The scientifically measurable problem is the amount of calories people are eating, with low exercise, not that there are toxic ingredients or “bad foods”.

This is primarily a marketing distinction which appeals to natural sensibilities.

No it isn’t. The advice on nutrition is abundantly clear and has been for a long time: eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.

> eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

If the state of physics was "stuff falls, heat sticks around, light goes fast" I think it'd be fair to describe that as "abysmal".

Something being simple doesn't mean it's incomplete or wrong.

Health/nutrition is a spectrum but no one will tell you to eat a bag of chips a day and rinse your mouth with coke

Of course it's incomplete. Any explanation of nutrition that doesn't include mention of at least calories, macronutrients and micronutrients isn't useful for understanding what's actually going on or being able to make an effective nutrition plan.

There are hundreds and hundreds of studies linking ultra processed food to all kind of health issues, and not a single one linking ultra processed food to any kind of benefits, not a single one praising their nutritious values.

The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience, better margins for the producers, etc.

> praising their nutritious values [...] The only benefits ever listed are shelf life, convenience

Availability is the most important value of nutrition, above all else. I expect your comment was made having more nuance, but that just highlights the importance of a clear definition. Without it we are left to guess at what it is you mean.

Sustenance is a health benefit. Shelf life is a health benefit. Convenience is a health benefit.

If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.

> Shelf life is a health benefit.

Then why don't we pickle or ferment things anymore ? Ah right because it's not as profitable.

Listening to you guys it seems like Americans in the 80s were starving and we should praise microwave meals for saving us from extinction.

Microwave meals go back to the 1950s. If anything the standard American diet was worse in the 1980s. The idea of "health food" was only starting to go mainstream.

Funny, you left out "curing" from that list.

All three preservation techniques are practiced today as they have been since antiquity. It is not clear to me where food so preserved are likely to fall on the processed / ultra-processed spectrum...

The state of physics for most human bodies is "avoid things that are too hot/cold, electricity and heavy things requiere more energy to move, things fall when thrown up"

With those kind of basic ideas you can mostly survive and figure your way around. No one needs to check spin on electrons when living their day to day. Or the mass of a neutron star versus a blackhole

Similarly, nutrition science can be extremely specific about gut microbiome compositions and its effect in regulating specific hormones and so on. But most humans just need the guidelines of dont over eat, have mostly fish/legumes and veggies and be active (strength training and regular walks) to have a healthy life.

no one needs to know the exact frequency and voltage of your plug to be taught to not stick your giners on the wall, and no one needs to know the exact victamin C and iron content of spinach to know its healthier than ultraprocessed chips

that's a quote from a journalist so it really drives home the point

Why plants?

I've heard people say that even bread is ultra processed... I guess we're supposed to go back to eating twigs and berries.

Most of the packaged pre-sliced bread in the bread aisle (as opposed to the bakery area) of American supermarkets is full of ingredients not traditionally used in bread, or used in food at all until recent decades. Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.

> Bread made with flour, water, salt, and yeast (plus maybe olive oil, butter, eggs, sugar, herbs etc) is not considered ultra processed.

Cake and cookies are bread and made with the same ingredients: flour, eggs, butter, sugar, salt, herbs.

Most US made bread contains hundred additives and a good dose of sugar on top of them. Just check the list of ingredients on your supermarket bread, you'll think again about eating twigs. For comparison, my bread I get in my village (but also in the local supermarket) has exactly three ingredients (usually, unless it's some specialty).

You could make your own bread so you know what is in it, and how much should be in it, and that way you’d know the difference, and probably be better off knowing you don’t have to forage twigs and berries, or be so dramatic…

Supermarket breads are trash, the first thing I found in wallmart's website:

> Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Yeast, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Soybean Oil, Dough Conditioners (Contains One or More of the Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- and Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, DATEM, Ethoxylated Mono- and Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Monocalcium Phosphate, Soy Lecithin, Calcium Propionate (to Retard Spoilage).

A good rule of thumb is that if your grandpa would have needed a PhD in chemistry to identify 80% of the ingredients it probably is ultra processed.

The same type of bread in France:

> Wheat flour 63%, water, sugar, rapeseed oil, salt, vinegar, yeast, broad bean flour, WHEAT gluten, flavouring (contains alcohol), acerola extract.

https://preview.redd.it/yodjulpnhclf1.jpeg?width=1240&format...

this is the chemical composition of a strawberry

my phd-less grandfather will have to now avoid his favourite dessert :(

> ackchyually everything is made of things, checkmate

ok, well continue eating dog shit products designed by megacorps for the sole purpose of profit maximisation then, what do you want me to tell you? We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem but 4 decades of processed food skyrocketed all of our lifestyle related health issues.

>We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem

That's impressive considering humans have existed for about 300,000 years. Also famine and starvation was a fact of life for much of the population until recently, but I guess that's not a real problem.

> That's impressive considering humans have existed for about 300,000 years.

Right, I guess before that we simply did not evolve from anything at all, we just popped into existence a monday afternoon 300k years ago. I can't believe how dense this forum became, the energy spent in bad faith arguing that ultra processed food actually is good for us, are you paid for it at least ?

  > We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem

Whatever people were eating even 200 years ago have literally nothing to do with fruits and veggies we have now after selection and artificial evolution usually via radioactive exposure because GM is baaad.

Also people wasn't all that much healthier and neither they lived so long.

  > but 4 decades of processed food skyrocketed all of our lifestyle related health issues.

Chemical composition have nothing to do with it. Too much of sugar or salt or some other things is the problem though.

But you can as well get the same health problems from eating too much fruits. E.g grapes and mangoes have more sugar than coca cola.

> Whatever people were eating even 200 years ago have literally nothing to do with fruits and veggies we have now after selection and artificial evolution usually via radioactive exposure because GM is baaad.

You sure about that?

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

> In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops.

> Chemical composition have nothing to do with it. Too much of sugar or salt or some other things is the problem though.

No shit sherlock, the very exact things ultra processed food are riddled with, I'm truly shocked

This thread is full of people listing all the arguments against ultra processed food while failing to connect the dots to the conclusion, it's very perplexing

> No shit sherlock, the very exact things ultra processed food are riddled with, I'm truly shocked

My whole point is that foods don't have to be ultra processed to be shit to your health. You can make shitty unhealthy food either way.

You can just eat too much of dried mangos or raisins and it's gonna be more unhealthy than McDonald's burger with cola.

> what do you want me to tell you?

That you will try and educate yourself in the nuances of a complicated topic like nutrition and wont advocate for anti intellectual and anti scientific shorthand doomerism that makes people less educated and capable of distinguishing healthy habits?

> We've been eating veggies and fruits for hundred millions of years without any problem but 4 decades of processed food skyrocketed all of our lifestyle related health issues.

None of this is true. We have been dying of starvation, food borne illnesses and nutricional deficits for millenia, industrilisation and post war economies have replaced that with hyper caloric ultra processed food that hand in hand with more sedentary lifestyles have skyrocketed a limited amount of health issues like cardiovascular problems.

We dont die of iodine deficiencies because we added it to salt, we dont die of scurvy because citric acid is common and citrus fruits plentiful, varied diets and better agriculture means locusts, bad weather, insects and specific harvest destroying pathogens happen less often and dont kill all our crops.

Btw in our modern world places like italy, the basque country, japan still have incredibly healthy populations. They mostly eat veggies, fish, fatty oils and walk alot. Their portions are also smaller than in places like america. And its not like ultra processed food doesnt exist there, or that they dont use chemicals in their food production.

Btw, related video that I always send when someone worrying about chemical composition of foods.

NileRed - Turning paint thinner into cherry soda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIVkBs7oWDI

> I've heard people say

These terms have actual definitions.

Bread can be ultra-processed depending on how it’s prepared.

Better question is why you don’t think a packaged bread product with HFCS and preservatives designed for a long shelf life would be considered ultra-processed.

Some bread is! Check the ingredient list. When I bake at home, I use whole wheat flour, water, yeast, a tiny bit of salt and oil.

Things I do not include when I bake at home, which I found from the first hit I got by searching for "bread" in a local Norwegian store's web site: E 472e emulgator, E 471 emulgator, margarine, dextrose, E 300 flour treatment, amylase enzymes, xylanase enzymes.

And that's a fairly short list compared to Walmart bread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411980

Shorter ingredient lists can be a good rule of thumb, but things like E-XXXX can just be regulator names for regular things.

E-330 is citric acid which is lemon juice

E-621 is MSG which is just more meaty tasting salt from seaweed sources instead of rock.

The E classification is for regulation testing, not a label of how processed something is.

Another rule of thumb other than ingredient list is who made it. Your local baker will probably have a less processed method than a mega factory like Bimbo Hovis or any other macro manufacturer that can put 1000 loaves in every supermarket in the country every day

It's horrifying to see the state of bread in some nations.

I really don't get why/how one of the simplest processes known to civilization needs a stock ticker and a Hogwarts-worth of chemicals thrown into it. It's really quite baffling.

The state of some of the processed packs of 'bread' I've seen/tasted shouldn't be allowed to trade using the name, tbh.

Is it really that baffling? People expect their bread to last more than two days, and it has to stay on the supermarket shelves longer than that. Of course you can cook your own bread and eat it quickly, but it's not very practical for a lot of people.

Bakeries are solved tech and work pretty well. The lazy even have a legion of delivery drivers to deliver it fresh now, too!

Is it really lazy to not be able to go the the store every couple of days? Seems like a lot of work and fuel consumption to avoid some preservatives, especially considering that there's no evidence of them being harmful.

Some bread stays good for 2 weeks, some is moldy after 2 days. There's a reason why.

This is akin to pitbulls and porn: You know it when you see it, despite the existence of ambiguous cases. I bring this up because your call to specifics is useuful in general. In this case: There are gray areas, but in most cases, it's a useful heuristic. If your food comes in a bright-colored box, advertises as containing "Real [cheese|fruit|etc]" and or is branded with the word "flavor", "Ultra-processed" is a useful categorization.

If your food is something like "Chicken breast", "whole wheat flour" or "Green onions", it's not.

You will be able to find many ambiguous cases, at which point the categorization ceases to become useful. I do not believe this means categorization isn't useful in general.

It may be useful to you as a consumer as a way of avoiding sugar, fat, or whatever it is you think is unhealthy. Even that is dubious. But it's completely useless scientifically. There's no theoretical link between brightly colored boxes and weight gain. As you just admitted, that's only a proxy for something else you care about.

You'd love my new food category. It's called Ultra-Priced Foods, and it argues that the more expensive something is, the better it is for you. Sure, there might be some exceptions, but overall price is a quite effective proxy for high quality ingredients.

Oh, you don't have unlimited money? Some people don't have unlimited time or capability to prepare home-cooked meals constantly. It would behoove anti-UPF advocates to design a system that more accurately describes nutritional value of "UPFs" so people can make informed decisions within the constraints of their life.

I don't buy it. If there are time-available constraints, do grocery delivery instead of takeaway, or buy good stuff instead of bottom-feeder stuff at the store. There are so many low/no-prep food options. I think the "Most people are too poor to eat things other than fast foot and flavor-blast Syrup chips" is a lie.

I'm glad we are finally getting some good, solid guidance around UPFs. Hey everyone, just buy "good stuff"!

while it is quite funny how you turned around my "just spend way more money" advice as an actual suggestion, it really isn't particularly helpful because UPFs are a much, much broader category than "flavor-blasted" type products. A huge number of low/no-prep options are UPF, you just don't think so because they don't scan as unhealthy. It gets us back to the main problem that it's all basically just vibes, which is why you don't see the issue that your honest-to-god advice was to just buy good stuff instead of buying bad stuff. Why not just cut to the chase and have an Ultra-Bad Foods categorization?

You cast doubt on using categorization because it has ambiguity. I think this is misleading and dishonest, which is why I am being direct. It is FUD.

Ambiguity is inevitable in something as complicated as nutrition. I'm casting doubt on this specific categorization for being a poor proxy for healthiness and for completely ignoring salient factors that drive nutrition choices. Many single parents would love the opportunity to buy and cook raw ingredients for their kids every night, but cost and time makes that not an option for many. A good categorization system would accommodate this by e.g. distinguishing between whole grain bread with preservatives and wonder bread. UPF is an all or nothing categorization that is only helpful if you already have a conception of whats healthy and filter your choices through that while calling it UPF.

> I think this is misleading and dishonest, which is why I am being direct.

Good save, everyone reading this totally thinks that's what you were doing and not just showing your whole ass while making my point for me.

You can buy rice, beans and soy granulate in bulk and cook a chili in an hour that feeds a family for two days for the price of like a happy meal at McDonalds.

the one is a result of the other; but thats because nutrition seems like it should have objective measures but ultimately has a lot of sources and sinks that only on the fringes is it obvious when things are bad.

but then theres RFK nuttery, so its not that stupid.

but yeah, ultra processes has no functional science behind it even though we still know cheap food is typically unhealthy and addictive

I've heard this objection a lot, even from folks I respect. Its ubiquity makes me wonder it is astroturfed.

The definition I have heard is "food made with ingredients or processes not commonly used in ghome Unfortunately, when I looked to leading scientific orgs, they are dithering on releasing formal definitions, but all say something like what I'd heard.

Conflicting information doesn't mean an abysmal situation. I'd argue the opposite. Everyone "knew" the sun orbited Earth.

How should using processes not used at home make something harmful? If we make the same processes commonly available to use at home, will these foods become less harmful?

I know there is science around it, but the very concept looks very unscientific, it's almost like talking about "unnatural food"

>How should using processes not used at home make something harmful?

Well, for starters - the refined sugars, carbohydrates and oils that seem to be the main culprits behind the obesity epidemic are mostly things that wouldn't be efficient (or in some cases, even possible) to create in a home cooking environment.

Sure, you could order some grain milling or oil extraction equipment on Alibaba and DIY it, but 99.999% of households aren't going to do that.

So the actual content of the food then? Why not say that?

The idea is that you could ban any set of "unhealthy" inputs and give the big food companies some time and they'll come out with something just as unhealthy that complies with your rules.

The underlying issue is some mix of what industrial processes make possible combined with food scientist working with taste test panels to hyper optimize food. When you spend all this time and effort trying to create a snack where people are always left craving just a bit more you end up with the kinds of junk food that we have.

We want there to be some simple answer of "it's these ingredients, or this specific combination" but the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.

Food health science has always had difficulties with just how complicated the actual processing of food in our bodies is and the more we look the more complex it gets. But the "ultra-processed foods" test seems to be working out as a successful heuristic to identify especially unhealthy foods. Given the issues health science has had with coming up with exact answers a heuristic that's pretty reliable (even if imperfect) is a pretty big win!

>the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.

That's not an answer at all. You need to explain why an industrial mixer would create less healthy food than a kitchen mixer. The scale shouldn't matter.

If the goal is to regulate unhealthy foods then it does kind of have to be perfect (very low false-positives). UPFs as they are defined include baby formula, many frozen meals regardless of macros, soy/almond milk, instant oatmeal, pasta sauce, flavored yogurt, etc.

Invariably when someone says something like "UPF is a pretty reliable heuristic" its because they are massively underestimating what counts as UPF and using a "I know it when I see it" approach, which, yeah of course it seems reliable if you start with the precondition that UPFs are unhealthy.

If it's just guidance and not for regulation, well, you have similar problems in the opposite direction. prepackaged whole grain bread is UPF the same as Wonder Bread w/ 2.5g added sugar per slice. It's easy to say "just buy fresh bread" but when that collides with the reality of a busy schedule then UPF designations become next to useless. The undeniable value that preservatives have for healthy and unhealthy products alike mean that anyone using actual UPF as their heuristic will be completely rudderless.

Yes, you got me, I get paid $50 Soros bucks for every snarky post. It couldn't possibly be that "not commonly used in the home" is a vague and unhelpful definition, which varies across time and cultures. Or that these researchers still haven't explained the theoretical basis linking all these wildly different "UPF"s to the negative health consequences they're supposed to explain.

Soros bucks? You're spouting a right wing position, not a progressive one.

I didn't know right-wing means rejecting bad science and progressive means accepting it.

It doesn't, so there's something you're correct about!

But certainly pro-processed-foods stuff gets pushed by the right, and Soros is on the left, so there's the contradiction.

Huh? You're on the side of RFK Jr and the MAHA nutjobs. This is the kind of "science" they believe in.

Sometimes among large groups of people there are varying opinions, you'll see this more as you grow up. The american right wing is one such group.

So it's not as simple as "questioning bad science makes you a conservative". Glad we agree.

Absolutely we agree. Being able to recognize and intelligently question bad science does not appear to have much overlap with conservatives, at least in America.

The only point I'm making is that it's nonsensical for you to claim to be receiving "Soros bucks" for shilling ultra-processed food as healthy. That's not a stance the Soros foundation takes.

I didn't say ultra processed foods are healthy. I said the entire idea of ultra-processed is vague and incoherent.

It's true, some people do lack the language skills to understand vague or ambiguous terms, even in context. Ultra-processed is certainly a vague term. "Incoherent" is a trait on the recipient's end rather than a trait of the term though.

The solution is to improve our education system so these people can understand ambiguous language. Not only will this resolve arguments around the colloquial use of "ultra-processed" but it will improve society overall by increasing the communication ability of some of its currently less skilled memebers.

No, the label itself is incoherent. If we had a better education system, we probably wouldn't have quack science like this being accepted.

I'm sure the label seems incoherent to you. It must be frustrating seeing others discuss things that you can't make sense of.

The insight I offer, is that for many, a term may be both vague and lack a rigorous scientific definition, while still being meaningful and useful. This is a foundational concept and if you manage to internalize it I suspect that "ultra-processed" will be only one among many things that will begin to appear coherent to you.

I don't care if it's useful to you, you're obviously not a scientist. I am, and such sloppiness would never be accepted in my field.

We've already established liguistics is not your field. You would benefit from gaining even a layman's understanding of it though.

I do work as a scientist, but it's not so core to my identity that I throw tantrums over internet comments failing to adhere to the same professional rigor.

> I don't care if it's useful to you

> such sloppiness would never be accepted in my field.

Braden dismissing useful tools and willful blindness to things beyond your exact field, I daresay you are a bad scientist.

No. I didn't think you were an astroturfer. I wonder where you derived this objection.

Also, good luck with your bottom. Perhaps look into your consumption of UPFs. ;-)

In the space age, its x-processed.

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