The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.
> 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 understand that the classification is not based on healthy/unhealthy but based on how much “processing” was done to the food?
All you're missing is "and quantity of processing is correlated with being unhealthy, making it a useful metric".
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.
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?
> 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.
And we don’t need a proxy for that. We need proper labelling of ingredients.
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.
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.
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.