Hacker News Reader

Is Huel ultra processed food too? They promote themselves as healthy meals and I am long time subscriber. I keep telling myself that even if it is not like cooking from raw ingredients, it is still far from a greasy junk food at kebab shops and McDonalds.

View on HN

Hyper-ultra-processed, yes. But, as others point out in these comments, a food's degree of processing doesn't determine its health value, although those two things are correlated.

Personally, my instincts would favor Huel over fast food, too. I'd be very interested in any study that tested this rigorously. Huel is far from anything "raw," but so long as all the nutritional components are still in there, one has to wonder if it's just as healthy.

This is kind of the point. We simply don't have a sufficiently good understanding of food and nutrition to be able to say "smoosh these nutrients ands other food derivatives together and you get a healthy food".

UPFs is exactly the smooshing, and is generally done to maintain palatability whilst saving money, not even in an attempt to make a healthy food. Sure, Huel has a different goal, but I'm not sure the end result is any different. Just because it's not hyper palatable, it doesn't mean it's healthy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com