> Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a recent observational study from Harvard University, for example, found that whereas some upfs, such as sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. Dr Astrup warns that the current classification risks “demonising” a lot of healthy food. Insights from Dr Hall’s work could therefore help refine the understanding of upfs, paving the way for more balanced and useful guidelines.
This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless. I look forward to the study noted in the article comparing high-density vs. hyper-palatable. I strongly suspect the study will show its a combinatorial effect... but we'll see.
I agree it leaves a lot to be desired but i wouldn't say it's totally worthless. It's clearly identifying something and even a poorly understood adherence to avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier. Overall though we obviously need to come up with better terms for this
Adherence to avoiding UPFs, by the current Nova classification, would lead to most people having to radically change their diets, assuming you actually follow the Nova classification of UPFs to a tee. And assuming they're already reasonably healthy, there would be no meaningful health benefits I suspect.
> sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.
I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.
> I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health.
You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout.
Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've gone much too far in demonizing it.
Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it.
Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it.
Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.
That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Emphasis on refined sugar.
Most food products, even meat in trace amounts, has some level of some form of sugar in it.
Added sugars are not needed in mass amounts for sure.
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful.
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol,
Alcohol is a literal poison that you should not consume at all. Sugar is a basic dietary requirement. Of course, all nutrients should be consumed in moderation, but that's not unique to sugar in any way.
Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?
Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.
Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.
But yes, I'd rather have a classification that clearly separates Coke and Cheez Doodles from actual foods. There are some multi-billion dollar lobbies to prevent that happening, though.
Can you please give your reference for that definitive statement. And what are 'nutritional studies'? Why wouldn't they include the research that led to the list of nutrient recommendations issued by USDA and similar publications in the UK, Norway, France, Australia and many other countries. No conclusions from them? I think there are. There is a truly vast literature on subjects nutritional so it's vital to be very specific.
Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.
The RDA and nutrient recommendations are the bare minimum so you do not die. Vast literature is ad populum fallacy.
Also consider that genetic background matters in nutritional matters and well...
The populations under study have changed, and that's assuming you have a fairly similar background to a population and not very mixed.
And we are not even getting into how these things go down in practice, with heavy industry lobbying and what not...
TLDR, you are on your own in terms of optimal nutrition but as another commenter said "eat food, not too much, mostly plants"
The avoidance of factory food is part of the point. GP is invoking Michael Pollan from the Omnivore's Dillema, among others. By 'Food', Pollan specifically means to exclude the sorts of chemical-engineered vague nutrient simacrula you're talking about.
> others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.
This surprises me. A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy, and I would have assumed are heavy contributors to poor health.
Strong agree. The Nova classification is extremist and heavily useless. Yes if you come up with two classifications and one includes McDonalds burgers and the other doesn't you'll be able to show a health effect. Doesn't mean your categorisation is useful.
Do you really think it's not useful at all to know you can protect your health proactively with one classification system of UPFs, that is deemed a bit extreme?
Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, they're just not known to be healthy within one of many frameworks.
Instead of tearing down what we know works because it doesn't include the foods you deem healthy, why not advocate for more research into the foods in question specifically?
The history of nutritional advice studies is extremely noisy and full of questionable, later reversed discoveries that have been p-hacked into existence. I think people are right to be very, very wary of rejecting the null hypothesis about anything without extremely solid clear evidence.
I don't disagree at all, but is there anything ambiguous about the health benefits of avoiding UPFs as defined by the Nova classification system? It seems the criticism I was responding to was more about the classification system being too strict, rather than lacking clear evidence of health benefits.
Nova does not make any judgment on the healthiness of foods, to my knowledge. The problem is that people take the extremely broad classification of UPFs by Nova, infer health detriments, and then cast judgment on the overly broad UPF classification as if everything in that category is equally as bad.
Here's a reminder of the Nova UPF classification:
> Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.
A few items that stick out like a sore thumb to me regarding healthiness:
* How could sophisicated packaging, usually with synthetic materials impact health?
* How does making something highly profitably necessarily impact health?
* Nova's definition of something with 'no culinary use' is extremely biased in my view. How do specific sugars (each with specific properties that are useful) have no culinary use? How are protein mixes not culinarily useful?
* Nova's definition of 'cosmetic function' is also just.. stupid in my view. Flavors are cosmetic? Emulsifiers are cosmetic? By this definition, adding MSG to a food makes it UPF.
While I can't speak to all of your questions / criticisms, food packaging is responsible for releasing a wide range of chemicals that are either known or suspected to be harmful to some (men, pregnant women, etc) or all humans, including BPA, phthalates, xenoestrogens, per- and poly-fluorinated substances, and microplastics. I'm sure there are many others, those are just the ones that come to top of mind for me.
Brit here: the idea that "ultra-processed foods" are really bad for you is definitely something that's entered the general consciousness here, but I don't think I know anybody who has any kind of meaningful answer to what "ultra-processed foods" actually are.
Looking at the amount of processed food available in Japan, it is hard to think it is just the processed food that is to blame.
I think it is a cheap observation, such that I expect people to push back on me, but it is hard to ignore portion sizes. Will try and take a dive on some of the data around that. But a personal level, it is hard to grapple with the fact that I just got less food per place that I went.
And it is frustrating, as getting the food, I would want a large burger/sandwhich/whatever. But waiting a small amount of time after a small snack/meal works.
I mean, that is the headline. The thrust of the article was that a lot of the common things people offer for why don't have any real evidence. All we seem to have is that people eat more calories when doing processed foods.
Specifically, the RCT showing that people eating ultra processed foods eat an average of 500 more calories per day is what I was looking at. Seems to basically align far more heavily with it being the volume of food than it is other qualities. Though, my memory was stronger in what that paragraph claimed.
In the US, portion size, calorie density, frequency of eating high calorie foods are contributing to people getting a lot fatter a lot faster than before. We now have instant gratification in food delivery services. Get anything you want without leaving home.
In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.
It is amazing to see how much more obese people have gotten in the last decade, and the % of fat people has gone up a lot, too.
Restaurants of all types serve massive portions, and people eat it without thinking or realizing they are eating a day's worth of calories in one meal, and I haven't touched on the amount of fat, sugar, and sodium they are packing away.
The fact that people today have shorter lifespans than their parents should be sounding alarms everywhere, but there is nothing but silence.
I honestly think stress and work obsession along with sedentary lifestyles has a lot more to do with anything health related than ultra processed foods.
Very true, someone that has time to make a meal from scratch is clearly not stressed, has money and time. Maybe not all, but from a category view, there are so many factors on those two different worlds that affect health, that focusing on just food is crazy.
Japan isn't special IMHO, but overweight rate is on the low side.
Now, trying to understand why is can of worm (social pressure and bullying probably plays a role for instance, which have other adverse effects possibly worse than just being overweight)
I went to Japan recently and one of the most striking things to me was how easy it was to walk to places. Their infrastructure astounded me because it was set up with people in mind and not car companies.
Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor.
But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they would stop making them. But their snack cakes are designed to make you want to eat the whole package and sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix, making the consumer's choice almost a moot point since consumers tend to trade their own best interests for convenience and "saving" money.
And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.
But I do hate it. I have to put a stupid amount of effort into eating healthy because I don't have room for a garden and healthier alternatives are often more expensive. I can see why most people just reach for the snack cakes and call it done.
This game theory problem, where consumers are buying unhealthier options because they're cheaper, and companies are producing unhealthier options because they're more profitable, is exactly what regulation is for. I don't understand why we've all collectively forgotten why regulation exists and become so cynical that it can actually work! Actually I do understand: it's industry interests spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intentional misinformation and government capture for a half century.
A reasonable counter-argument is "but the science is extremely muddy here, so effective regulation is especially difficult", which is unfortunately true, but I'd point out that the science is extremely muddy largely because of industry efforts to intentionally poison our understanding of nutrition.
So even beyond the factors in the article (calorie density and hyper-palatability) there's other contributing factors in processed food. First of all, the processing itself introduces several factors: mechanical and heat energy changing the structure (but not composition) of the food, usually into smaller particle sizes; and the potential introduction of new contaminants - one that has been discussed before is lithium grease[1].
The other thing that processed food does, partially discussed in the article, is sit on shelves much longer. I wonder whether we've detected the acute effects of spoilage (e.g. food-borne illness) but missed some chronic effect.
The Slime Mold Time Mold article is maybe an interesting starting point, but really not great analysis... see this thorough rebuttal around the Lithium stuff that has not been responded to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...
TBH a lot of the discourse around this annoys me because it ignores sort of fundamental obvious stuff like food/snacks got way tastier, access to unhealthier food is higher, we live a way more sedentary lifestyle, takeout got more affordable, studies show that people overall consume more calories from unhealthier sources, you can go to the grocery store and see you should basically avoid much of the food there, food spikes your glucose higher, more artificial ingredients, switch from fat to sugar, more processed ingredients, etc. and yet everyone says "well it can't just be that" because XYZ specific study of some quality and timeframe took one of those axis in some degree of isolation and showed that _maybe_ it's not that specific thing only. Kind of a missing the forest for the common sense trees aspect. Obviously we don't understand the whole picture of obesity, but there's a degree of denial around common sense health stuff that's really weird in the kind of "rationalists try to figure out obesity" writing. I really think we should work more from a place of "you don't see people who do moderately intense exercise regularly and eat healthily being overweight/obese" as a baseline...
According to the BBC Inside Health podcast I recently listened to they are often bad for you because the processing removes fibre and vitamins and also makes sugars more available. And that to make them int4eresting enough to eat excess salt is added.
My personal feeling is that I can eat like a king every day of the week. If I only had access to one kind of dessert, I'd be fine. I'd get tired of it. Oh, vanilla ice cream again.
But we have access to a wide variety of highly palatable foods, each with distinct flavor profiles; and advertisements reminds us how much better we'll feel after a snack!
I always take "Nobody knows!" "Nobody could have predicted!" as a warning for either something really dumb, biased, or uneducated take is about to follow.
The article name is "Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you", the opposite of this thread's title.
Everyone's ignoring the elephant in the room: fiber.
Fiber locks up calories and makes the body miss a lot of them, or absorb them later in the digestion process. If we reduce the word "processed" to a single action, it's removing fiber. It's turning wheat berries into flour. It's ripping off rice husks to make white rice. It's crushing nutritious apples and oranges into sugar water.
Western countries use calories as a metric, and it's a very hackable metric. If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body. If I turn those whole oats into oatmeal, fewer are. If I'm McDonald's I'll pulverize them to get all 1000 calories into my health-conscious deluded customer's bloodstream, so they buy more food from me.
Of course you can add 100g of Metamucil fiber to a processed meal, but the original fiber's function was to lock in the sugar, which the new stuff can no longer do. So it doesn't help.
Why are processed foods bad for you? Follow the fiber.
Agree completely. "Processing" is mainly the act of removing fiber so more food can be eaten faster and more often. Fiber satiates, which is not a good thing for companies that are trying to sell as much product as possible.
The jump from a Brazilian doctor classifiying food to a British study tracking consumption under that classification, to end on a US study with 20 adults, waiting for another one with 36 members ending next year, kinda illustrate how hard it is to come with relevant data.
And now that we've more and more ultra-processed diet food, we'll need a few more decades to have an idea of their actual effect at any scale.
Evolution has selected animals that, when they have access to foods with high caloric density, will gorge on them. This has been advantageous to their survival, because the history of life has been characterized by famine feast cycles for most species. Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today. The rest is probably additives that affect our hormones that control hunger/satiety signals in the body.
In my opinion, effective regulation would control the caloric density as food as well as ban any additives that can affect hormonal hunger/satiety.
was going to reference ultra-processed people. i walked away with some of the same general sentiments that are here -
1. nova classification is imperfect, but is better than what we had before it and i hope that we can iteratively find something more refined
2. so many nutrition studies are so woefully biased because of sponsorship (and antipathy) that it's laborious to extract meaning from them because much of the effort is tracing the money and potential bias.
Generalization is the real issue here. You can't just say "processed" food is bad. There are tons of definitions and different forms of processing. It would be much better to look at individual ingredients. A good start would be to change the GRAS process. There's no real investigation being done on many food additives and the evidence many use for GRAS is flimsy at best.
>...people in Brazil were buying less sugar and oil than in the past. Yet rates of obesity and metabolic diseases were still rising. This coincided with the growing popularity of packaged snacks and ready-made meals, which were loaded with sugar, fats and other additives.
What. So they were buying less sugar and fat. But they were actually buying more sugar and fat?
They were buying less sugar and oil as ingredients to cook at home with. They were substituting home cooking by buying more ready-made foods and snacks that contained fat and sugar as components.
I find two principles work best. First, grandma's wisdom is mostly correct so prefer home-cooked culturally aligned food.
Second moderation, you can have one can of drink and one meal outside power week of anything. So burger and coke or Indian sugary desserts all are good if you can control frequency.
I sometimes wonder if there are lessons from British period of WWII rationing.
Huge numbers of people were enabled to have for free the right amount of nutrients instead of the malnourishment of the 1920s/30s. And millions more found it hard to get the excess sugars and fats.
If we created a new rationing, with no processed foods, feeding the whole population what would happen tomorrow and in ten years?
Imagine how unpopular the Prime Minister who started this would be.
Then imagine ten years later when he would be the guy that got millions of people thinner, fitter and having more sex (I am told that’s what thinner fitter people do!)
TLDR: According to the article, people eat more calories when they eat ultra-processed foods. The reason is unknown, one possibility is more calories per bite as manufacturers remove water and some other ingredients during processing.
Overall, a pretty underwhelming article. Not surprising, unfortunately -- I have been subscribing to the Economist for over 15 years since late 1990s until the slow erosion of quality made me drop it.
ultra-processed people by chris van tulleken hypothesizes that it's because the food is less nutritionally dense through extraction and reconstitution to more palatable and economically expedient forms. additionally, these forms require less effort to process by chewing so we're able to ingest more calories more quickly before our biochemistry can catch up and signal that we've consumed what we need. finally, the processing of food breaks down the original nutrient "matrix" in the way that our metabolism evolved to process it. we evolved to metabolize an apple, i believe was his example, by eating it raw and in its original form, together with all that constitutes an "apple" and not simply the composite of nutrients that we can extract from an apple. the hypothesis is that the whole apple influences our biochemical response differently than the extracted nutrients that have been reconstituted in a different form.
Yes, I agree with you, the Economist from the 90s was a different animal. If you ask me the above article is just paid shilling for Ozempic et. al. Not directly obviously, but in the mindset and viewpoint it wants to develop in readers
There's currently a lot of DHMO in all of those foods, which can be quite dangerous for humans and has been a cause for numerous deaths in the World, including young children.
I mean, look at the ingredients list on most processed foods. Much higher quantities of various sugars and starches. More processed foods are rarely 1:1 ingredients compared to less processed foods...
don't we though? they're known to contain very little nutritional value, to be stuffed with salt, fat, sugar, to feature next to no vitamins and natural fibers, which naturally corral sugar to the stomach instead of letting it go through the intestinal barrier freely
so basically it's food that promotes poor variety in gut bacteria and inflammation
that we pretend like we don't know is very surprising to me, it's not exactly shocking that the american diet is bad after some 50 years of it running amok across the world
The end of the article gets the point. The problem isn't that food is processed; the problem is that extremely processed foods are much harder to moderate yourself on and present a much, much more appealing food to overeat on, which in turn causes health problems and is why so many people are so fat, along with other factors like people being lonely and depressed, and food being a quick and cheap way to make yourself happy, the broad availability of unhealthy food and the sometimes restricted availability of healthy food, the fact that people are too damn busy to find time in their schedules to prepare their own food, etc. etc.
Which itself ties into other systemic incentives. Processed food is shelf stable, fresh often is not, so it's friendlier to logistical systems that deliver everything we eat, which means less of it gets wasted, which means the prices are lower and availability is virtually guaranteed. Put simply: it is far easier and more profitable to ship, stock, and sell potato chips than it is to sell potatoes, and because everything in our system is profit driven, the better things map onto that, the more they occur. Ergo we're drowning in potato chips and still starving.
In that case we can just take Ozempic or whatever guys!
Just kidding, no that's not the problem. The problem is processing destroys/alter many molecules we do not even know about or know it's full "purpose"/role in nutrition and digestion. The commonly talked about vitamins and RDA and such are just the bare minimum so a broad population does not get sick, but does not mean optimum health for a given individual.
Cf. eating 10mg of iron in a steak, readily bioavailable vs eating 10mg of iron from cereal. One is bound in easily digestible compounds, the other is iron shavings or rust.
e.g The British Navy discovering that scurvy is fixed by eating fresh food; ensuring to add citrus to sailors diets, then forgetting about how it worked. Then retrying citrus, but cooking it one using copper vessels, which destroy much of the vitamin C content.
Dukeofdoom's original comment:
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Don't they add food coloring from ground bugs sometimes. In case of sausage they add preservatives to make it last longer. Actual poison if you were just to eat a lot of it. Generally companies are liable if they make you sick right after eating their product. So they do everything they can to prevent that. Nobody is going to held liable if they give you cancer 10 years down the line. Super hard to prove. So not a worry for them. Backlash after the failed covid vaccine makes some reform more likely now.
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My response:
Several food colorings (e.g. Red 40, Yellow 10) are synthetic dyes derived from crude oil and other petrochemicals.
At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.
Reality is complex. We are basically one step removed from cavemen still, and need to remain humble, curious, and intellectually honest about the sheer extent of that which we do not know. That's missing in so many people these days. I think more (but not all) people would benefit from undergoing an ego death and reintegration experience that so many others have found in psychedelics, which are nonaddictive and generally safer than legal drugs like alcohol and various combinations of amphetamines (ADHD medication).
>At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.
That's not actually how it works in the US. The standard is "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS)[0], which requires the manufacturer to "confirm" that an additive is "safe."
At least that's been the requirement since 1958, although some 700 existing additives were declared exempt from the potentially biased/unconfirmed testing of the manufacturer.
If, as you suggest, "...many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe", those folks are woefully misinformed.
Surely not that mysterious - the adulterants added processed foods in order preserve it longer for the shelf, disguise the looks, mask the taste or simply bulk it out for max profit generally do not provide additional nutritional value
Simply not providing nutritional value would be neutral from health perspective. We are looking for something that provides negative effects, either direct (something toxic) or indirect (like causing us to eat more which causes obesity...).
Why do we need these kinds of sensationalist names for things? Why is it so important that they be "ultra-processed" foods? Can't they just be "overprocessed" or perhaps use some other more neutral term?
It's like the 90s when everything had to be "EXTREME!!"
I think it's partly due to the people (this site is full of them) that would read any other term and go "what is processing? Cooking and cutting is processing hurr durr"
It absolutely does if you're able to take off the pedantry glasses for like 5 seconds. Why are you nitpicking this? is it because you actually think articles like this are about chopping carrots?
"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it."
The findings in the article basically came down to - people eat more calories when it tastes good. Even the article itself admits there are a multitude of other factors that could account for the results other than UPF.
It's still a misleading term, so it would be good to talk about what the actual harm is, as to not confuse people. And it does confuse, since I vividly remember as a kid being confused by it, and it's important to have healthy habits from a young age. It always sounded a bit weird that food being "processed" means it's bad, so I didn't understand it really. And if you don't focus on the harm, but use terms like this, it's hard to say what is pseudoscience and what is actual science.
Well, it's only _over_-processed if we assume it is _bad_. A consensus does seem to be emerging that it _is_ bad, but building that right into the name seems unhelpful. And as alluded to in the article, what the point is after which something is 'over'-processed is not particularly clear.
Just as a side note/for info, there’s a specific definition (I think by the FAO?) used for them. The tldr is that when you’re extracting/reacting something to use as an ingredient (eg hydrogenated oil), it becomes ultra processed.
There’s a woman on YouTube that I watch sometimes who recreates popular sweets/snacks/desserts but using fresh ingredients and home friendly (usually) cooking techniques. What always blows me away is just how long is takes to make something like a Little Debbie Oatmeal cream pie from scratch.
If we as a species could no longer rely on industrialization to create junk foods and instead had to make them from scratch, we’d spend 100x as long making them as we do shoving them down our throats and therefore savor the few that we do make and likely eat less.
The subconscious power of availability and plenty on the human psyche is enormously underestimated.
Avoiding manufactured food is absurd to a level I didn't think needed explanation.
Even from a logistics POV we're 8 billion on this planet, concentrated in cities. Everyone following that philosophy would bring a food chain collapse.
Assuming your point isn't that you used the "factory" terminology instead of calling it "unnatural", so it's not an appeal to nature.
I'd actually be pleased to dig on the deeper part you were pointing to.
PS: the "we are not adapted" to part of your post is the crux of it in my eyes: we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic. We're not adapted to receiving MRIs, wearing glasses or looking at imaginary landscapes in VR, and that's totally fine in my book .
If I wanted to say unnatural I would have said unnatural. I said factory.
Factories come with a mountain of lubricants, plastics, metals, agents, colorings, flavorings, etc that are poisonous. They are poisonous because we were not evolved to consume them. That's just 1 of many reasons factory made foods are bad.
> we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic
These things would be good for you in spite of the fact that you're not adapted to it.
There are far more many things that you are not adapted to that would kill you. Your list is hilariously arguable (VR might actually be bad for you lol). My list would consist of basic inarguable things like, fish can breathe underwater naked, humans cannot, and my list would be inexhaustibly long.
"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it." i follow this as well it's a great rule. I have no idea on the internet, but in real life nobody who's ever been the smarty pants saying "aren't cooked carrots processed?" has health or a body i'm envious of
From the article:
> Even if the results show conclusively that processing, and not just nutrients, leads to poor health, policymakers will face another difficulty: the definition of upfs remains woolly. The Nova classification has no tolerance at all for artificial ingredients. The mere presence of a chemical additive classifies a food as a upf, regardless of the amount. This can lead to confusing health outcomes—a recent observational study from Harvard University, for example, found that whereas some upfs, such as sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease. Dr Astrup warns that the current classification risks “demonising” a lot of healthy food. Insights from Dr Hall’s work could therefore help refine the understanding of upfs, paving the way for more balanced and useful guidelines.
This to me is the most damning evidence against the current classification of 'ultra-processed foods' being absolutely, totally worthless. I look forward to the study noted in the article comparing high-density vs. hyper-palatable. I strongly suspect the study will show its a combinatorial effect... but we'll see.
I agree it leaves a lot to be desired but i wouldn't say it's totally worthless. It's clearly identifying something and even a poorly understood adherence to avoiding UPFs would likely make the average person healthier. Overall though we obviously need to come up with better terms for this
Adherence to avoiding UPFs, by the current Nova classification, would lead to most people having to radically change their diets, assuming you actually follow the Nova classification of UPFs to a tee. And assuming they're already reasonably healthy, there would be no meaningful health benefits I suspect.
> sweetened drinks and processed meats, were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.
I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health. So perhaps they should be more specific when it comes to mentioning breakfast cereals.
Likewise breakfast yogurt could be either yoplait “yogurt” or plain unsweetened actual yogurt, or anything in between.
One is basically gelatinized sugar and the other is pretty healthy. If one’s classification doesn’t easily distinguish those two, that’s absurd.
> I highly doubt these extra sweetened breakfast cereals are a net positive for health.
You can't really evaluate this outside of a metabolic context. That goes for a lot of things, but you're a lot more likely to burn the sugar more or less immediately early in the morning, particularly before a workout.
Sugar is a necessary nutrient (i.e. healthy by any sane meaning of the word, if such a meaning exists) and we've gone much too far in demonizing it.
Sugar is absolutely not "a necessary nutrient" and we haven't gone far enough in demonizing it.
Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
While I generally agree with the sentiment that we should be cutting added sugar. I have to point out that sugar is naturally occurring in most whole foods. Nearly everything will have at least a little sucrose, glucose, or fructose in it.
Most of the body's natural way of generating energy involves turning macronutrients into glucose and later into ATP. sucrose and fructose just so happen to have very short and very fast routes to conversion.
That fast path is what I think makes sugar particularly problematic (as well as honey and a whole lot of other "natural" sweeteners that are just repackaged *oses). That big jolt of energy which the body ends up converting to fat since it has nothing to do with it is (probably) where most of the problem lay.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful. Modern Americans eat unprecedented amounts of refined sugar compared to any point in history.
Emphasis on refined sugar.
Most food products, even meat in trace amounts, has some level of some form of sugar in it.
Added sugars are not needed in mass amounts for sure.
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol, not pumped into every product at every meal.
Sugar is naturally occurring in basically all the food we consume. Good luck ripping it out. Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
> Literally every study, from rats to humans and from obesity to cancer to gut microbiome to mood to oral health to chronic inflammation shows that dietary sugar is harmful.
The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
> Sugar should be consumed in moderation akin to alcohol,
Alcohol is a literal poison that you should not consume at all. Sugar is a basic dietary requirement. Of course, all nutrients should be consumed in moderation, but that's not unique to sugar in any way.
> Good luck getting a functioning body without consuming carbohydrates, either.
The body doesn't need carbohydrates to function.
> The body also requires dietary sugar to function :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate
Again, the body does not :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet
Sure, if you like being constantly fatigued and stupid and have a constantly decaying body, you can strip all carbs from your diet. I'm not sure you can survive this; is there any evidence to the contrary?
Ketogenic diet doesn't mean stripping all carbs from your diet (which is, again, effectively impossible). It just means burning fat. It's also wildly unhealthy if you don't have fat to burn. Only obese people should engage in that sort of diet.
Most bread and yogurt in the average grocery store is pretty bad stuff, full of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and hydrolyzed proteins.
But yes, I'd rather have a classification that clearly separates Coke and Cheez Doodles from actual foods. There are some multi-billion dollar lobbies to prevent that happening, though.
40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated.
You can't reliably draw any conclusions from them. You have to use common sense and rules of thumb.
Can you please give your reference for that definitive statement. And what are 'nutritional studies'? Why wouldn't they include the research that led to the list of nutrient recommendations issued by USDA and similar publications in the UK, Norway, France, Australia and many other countries. No conclusions from them? I think there are. There is a truly vast literature on subjects nutritional so it's vital to be very specific.
Separately, when using the term 'ultraprocessed' we should be precise about the processes used. There are many different ones with undoubtedly different effects to different degrees on the nutrients therein.
The RDA and nutrient recommendations are the bare minimum so you do not die. Vast literature is ad populum fallacy.
Also consider that genetic background matters in nutritional matters and well... The populations under study have changed, and that's assuming you have a fairly similar background to a population and not very mixed.
And we are not even getting into how these things go down in practice, with heavy industry lobbying and what not...
TLDR, you are on your own in terms of optimal nutrition but as another commenter said "eat food, not too much, mostly plants"
Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
That's pretty good. Though it should be balanced with avoiding factory made food.
I personally think non processed meat is good for you, but that's a minor point compared to ultra processed vs not really processed foods.
I once argued with med students that Oreos (which are vegan) are not healthier than a steak.
Absolutely crazy and tbh frightening that anyone (let alone med students!) would think Oreos are healthier than a steak.
The reasoning of course is that processing and sugar content don't matter as much as any level of saturated fat.
The avoidance of factory food is part of the point. GP is invoking Michael Pollan from the Omnivore's Dillema, among others. By 'Food', Pollan specifically means to exclude the sorts of chemical-engineered vague nutrient simacrula you're talking about.
My favorite plant is wheat, deep friend in peanut oil, covered in corn(syrup).
is the last one even widely accepted anymore
What's not widely accepted?
https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-plat...
> others, like breakfast cereals, bread and yogurt, were instead linked to lower risks for cardiovascular disease.
This surprises me. A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy, and I would have assumed are heavy contributors to poor health.
> A lot of breakfast cereals and sweetened yogurts are basically candy
Apparently "basically candy" is not the same thing as candy. That is a great find, lets us eat basically candy without the health consequences.
Strong agree. The Nova classification is extremist and heavily useless. Yes if you come up with two classifications and one includes McDonalds burgers and the other doesn't you'll be able to show a health effect. Doesn't mean your categorisation is useful.
Do you really think it's not useful at all to know you can protect your health proactively with one classification system of UPFs, that is deemed a bit extreme?
Or is it possible you're coming from a place of motivated reasoning? If you've got a worldview that deems your own food choices "healthy", but they're not on the Nova classification list, that doesn't automatically mean your own food choices aren't healthy, they're just not known to be healthy within one of many frameworks.
Instead of tearing down what we know works because it doesn't include the foods you deem healthy, why not advocate for more research into the foods in question specifically?
The history of nutritional advice studies is extremely noisy and full of questionable, later reversed discoveries that have been p-hacked into existence. I think people are right to be very, very wary of rejecting the null hypothesis about anything without extremely solid clear evidence.
I don't disagree at all, but is there anything ambiguous about the health benefits of avoiding UPFs as defined by the Nova classification system? It seems the criticism I was responding to was more about the classification system being too strict, rather than lacking clear evidence of health benefits.
Nova does not make any judgment on the healthiness of foods, to my knowledge. The problem is that people take the extremely broad classification of UPFs by Nova, infer health detriments, and then cast judgment on the overly broad UPF classification as if everything in that category is equally as bad.
Here's a reminder of the Nova UPF classification:
> Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.
A few items that stick out like a sore thumb to me regarding healthiness:
* How could sophisicated packaging, usually with synthetic materials impact health?
* How does making something highly profitably necessarily impact health?
* Nova's definition of something with 'no culinary use' is extremely biased in my view. How do specific sugars (each with specific properties that are useful) have no culinary use? How are protein mixes not culinarily useful?
* Nova's definition of 'cosmetic function' is also just.. stupid in my view. Flavors are cosmetic? Emulsifiers are cosmetic? By this definition, adding MSG to a food makes it UPF.
While I can't speak to all of your questions / criticisms, food packaging is responsible for releasing a wide range of chemicals that are either known or suspected to be harmful to some (men, pregnant women, etc) or all humans, including BPA, phthalates, xenoestrogens, per- and poly-fluorinated substances, and microplastics. I'm sure there are many others, those are just the ones that come to top of mind for me.
I agree. Classification of UPFs seems more to be a "religious purity" discussion than actuall classification of good/bad
Univariable classifications are usually not helpful, and this seems to just confirm it. In the same way "sugar free" or "fat free" make little sense
Brit here: the idea that "ultra-processed foods" are really bad for you is definitely something that's entered the general consciousness here, but I don't think I know anybody who has any kind of meaningful answer to what "ultra-processed foods" actually are.
If it couldn't be made outside a factory, it's ultra processed.
Looking at the amount of processed food available in Japan, it is hard to think it is just the processed food that is to blame.
I think it is a cheap observation, such that I expect people to push back on me, but it is hard to ignore portion sizes. Will try and take a dive on some of the data around that. But a personal level, it is hard to grapple with the fact that I just got less food per place that I went.
And it is frustrating, as getting the food, I would want a large burger/sandwhich/whatever. But waiting a small amount of time after a small snack/meal works.
There have been experiments that control for portion size, processed food still spikes glucose more, etc.
Isn't that some of what this article was challenging?
I don't believe so, I felt it was we know it does just not why yet.
I mean, that is the headline. The thrust of the article was that a lot of the common things people offer for why don't have any real evidence. All we seem to have is that people eat more calories when doing processed foods.
Specifically, the RCT showing that people eating ultra processed foods eat an average of 500 more calories per day is what I was looking at. Seems to basically align far more heavily with it being the volume of food than it is other qualities. Though, my memory was stronger in what that paragraph claimed.
In the US, portion size, calorie density, frequency of eating high calorie foods are contributing to people getting a lot fatter a lot faster than before. We now have instant gratification in food delivery services. Get anything you want without leaving home.
In fast food, people are eating a day's worth of food in one sitting. Triple burger, large fries, large drink. People are doing this once a day every day of the week.Then they go home and order more high calorie food with high calorie drinks and constant snacking.
It is amazing to see how much more obese people have gotten in the last decade, and the % of fat people has gone up a lot, too.
Restaurants of all types serve massive portions, and people eat it without thinking or realizing they are eating a day's worth of calories in one meal, and I haven't touched on the amount of fat, sugar, and sodium they are packing away.
The fact that people today have shorter lifespans than their parents should be sounding alarms everywhere, but there is nothing but silence.
I honestly think stress and work obsession along with sedentary lifestyles has a lot more to do with anything health related than ultra processed foods.
Very true, someone that has time to make a meal from scratch is clearly not stressed, has money and time. Maybe not all, but from a category view, there are so many factors on those two different worlds that affect health, that focusing on just food is crazy.
What’s special about Japan in this context?
They do have a particularly high life expectancy.
https://data.who.int/countries/392
And don't have the obesity problem we have
Japan isn't special IMHO, but overweight rate is on the low side.
Now, trying to understand why is can of worm (social pressure and bullying probably plays a role for instance, which have other adverse effects possibly worse than just being overweight)
I went to Japan recently and one of the most striking things to me was how easy it was to walk to places. Their infrastructure astounded me because it was set up with people in mind and not car companies.
Possibly nothing. Was just recently able to observe it directly.
Good health outcomes compared to other first world countries?
Living in the US, my takeaway is this:
Food manufacturers do not care if we stay healthy, but they're also not interested in harming us on purpose. Their goal is to maximize profit, which usually means cheapest ingredients with addictive properties produced as quickly as possible by low-cost labor.
But they also know this only works if the market allows it. If nobody bought their snack cakes (random example), they would stop making them. But their snack cakes are designed to make you want to eat the whole package and sold cheaper than an alternative like a healthy fruit and nut mix, making the consumer's choice almost a moot point since consumers tend to trade their own best interests for convenience and "saving" money.
And so, they give the market what it buys. Simple as.
But I do hate it. I have to put a stupid amount of effort into eating healthy because I don't have room for a garden and healthier alternatives are often more expensive. I can see why most people just reach for the snack cakes and call it done.
This game theory problem, where consumers are buying unhealthier options because they're cheaper, and companies are producing unhealthier options because they're more profitable, is exactly what regulation is for. I don't understand why we've all collectively forgotten why regulation exists and become so cynical that it can actually work! Actually I do understand: it's industry interests spending hundreds of billions of dollars on intentional misinformation and government capture for a half century.
A reasonable counter-argument is "but the science is extremely muddy here, so effective regulation is especially difficult", which is unfortunately true, but I'd point out that the science is extremely muddy largely because of industry efforts to intentionally poison our understanding of nutrition.
In retrospect, I realize the food industry probably took a page out of the cigarette industry's playbook. Or was it the other way around?
There is a clear link between the two industries: https://neurosciencenews.com/hyperpalatable-foods-big-tobacc...
https://archive.is/EfaFI
[flagged]
Both articles are the same. Right? Why is it silly?
Can you say more? Why?
So even beyond the factors in the article (calorie density and hyper-palatability) there's other contributing factors in processed food. First of all, the processing itself introduces several factors: mechanical and heat energy changing the structure (but not composition) of the food, usually into smaller particle sizes; and the potential introduction of new contaminants - one that has been discussed before is lithium grease[1].
The other thing that processed food does, partially discussed in the article, is sit on shelves much longer. I wonder whether we've detected the acute effects of spoilage (e.g. food-borne illness) but missed some chronic effect.
[1]: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2024/07/27/lithium-hypothesis-...
The Slime Mold Time Mold article is maybe an interesting starting point, but really not great analysis... see this thorough rebuttal around the Lithium stuff that has not been responded to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-proba...
TBH a lot of the discourse around this annoys me because it ignores sort of fundamental obvious stuff like food/snacks got way tastier, access to unhealthier food is higher, we live a way more sedentary lifestyle, takeout got more affordable, studies show that people overall consume more calories from unhealthier sources, you can go to the grocery store and see you should basically avoid much of the food there, food spikes your glucose higher, more artificial ingredients, switch from fat to sugar, more processed ingredients, etc. and yet everyone says "well it can't just be that" because XYZ specific study of some quality and timeframe took one of those axis in some degree of isolation and showed that _maybe_ it's not that specific thing only. Kind of a missing the forest for the common sense trees aspect. Obviously we don't understand the whole picture of obesity, but there's a degree of denial around common sense health stuff that's really weird in the kind of "rationalists try to figure out obesity" writing. I really think we should work more from a place of "you don't see people who do moderately intense exercise regularly and eat healthily being overweight/obese" as a baseline...
This is a great point and one that I think would change many minds.
If you say "more calories" or "hyperpalatable", many people will think "I can control that with portion control - I just won't binge them."
But if you say "it changes the physical form of the food" or "it has contaminants in it," it's clear that no amount of portion control can fix that.
According to the BBC Inside Health podcast I recently listened to they are often bad for you because the processing removes fibre and vitamins and also makes sugars more available. And that to make them int4eresting enough to eat excess salt is added.
Nobody knows = there is wide disagreement
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33309818/
My personal feeling is that I can eat like a king every day of the week. If I only had access to one kind of dessert, I'd be fine. I'd get tired of it. Oh, vanilla ice cream again.
But we have access to a wide variety of highly palatable foods, each with distinct flavor profiles; and advertisements reminds us how much better we'll feel after a snack!
Big recommend for Guyenet's "The Hungry Brain"
(randomly chosen podcast interview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1g8l-MdZk
I always take "Nobody knows!" "Nobody could have predicted!" as a warning for either something really dumb, biased, or uneducated take is about to follow.
The article name is "Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you", the opposite of this thread's title.
Everyone's ignoring the elephant in the room: fiber.
Fiber locks up calories and makes the body miss a lot of them, or absorb them later in the digestion process. If we reduce the word "processed" to a single action, it's removing fiber. It's turning wheat berries into flour. It's ripping off rice husks to make white rice. It's crushing nutritious apples and oranges into sugar water.
Western countries use calories as a metric, and it's a very hackable metric. If I eat 1000 calories of whole oats, a lot of those calories are passing through my body. If I turn those whole oats into oatmeal, fewer are. If I'm McDonald's I'll pulverize them to get all 1000 calories into my health-conscious deluded customer's bloodstream, so they buy more food from me.
Of course you can add 100g of Metamucil fiber to a processed meal, but the original fiber's function was to lock in the sugar, which the new stuff can no longer do. So it doesn't help.
Why are processed foods bad for you? Follow the fiber.
Agree completely. "Processing" is mainly the act of removing fiber so more food can be eaten faster and more often. Fiber satiates, which is not a good thing for companies that are trying to sell as much product as possible.
Excessively editorialized headline for the post to the point of trying to make the opposite point as the original.
The jump from a Brazilian doctor classifiying food to a British study tracking consumption under that classification, to end on a US study with 20 adults, waiting for another one with 36 members ending next year, kinda illustrate how hard it is to come with relevant data.
And now that we've more and more ultra-processed diet food, we'll need a few more decades to have an idea of their actual effect at any scale.
Is there even a proven causal link? It could just be another case of "poor people do thing X, and poor people have higher mortality".
Evolution has selected animals that, when they have access to foods with high caloric density, will gorge on them. This has been advantageous to their survival, because the history of life has been characterized by famine feast cycles for most species. Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today. The rest is probably additives that affect our hormones that control hunger/satiety signals in the body.
In my opinion, effective regulation would control the caloric density as food as well as ban any additives that can affect hormonal hunger/satiety.
Why the insistence that these foods are only unhealthy because of the calories?
Have you heard of poison? 0 calories. Can kill you in the right doses.
Food factories contain dozens of these toxins in the form of plastics, lubricants, agents, flavorings, colorings, etc.
Calories are important. But the insistence that it's simply calories feels almost conspiratorial to me.
Ultra processed people by Dr Chris van tulliken and for for life by Dr Tim Spector are good reading on this. The first is more focused on this issue.
was going to reference ultra-processed people. i walked away with some of the same general sentiments that are here -
1. nova classification is imperfect, but is better than what we had before it and i hope that we can iteratively find something more refined
2. so many nutrition studies are so woefully biased because of sponsorship (and antipathy) that it's laborious to extract meaning from them because much of the effort is tracing the money and potential bias.
Generalization is the real issue here. You can't just say "processed" food is bad. There are tons of definitions and different forms of processing. It would be much better to look at individual ingredients. A good start would be to change the GRAS process. There's no real investigation being done on many food additives and the evidence many use for GRAS is flimsy at best.
>...people in Brazil were buying less sugar and oil than in the past. Yet rates of obesity and metabolic diseases were still rising. This coincided with the growing popularity of packaged snacks and ready-made meals, which were loaded with sugar, fats and other additives.
What. So they were buying less sugar and fat. But they were actually buying more sugar and fat?
They were buying less sugar and oil as ingredients to cook at home with. They were substituting home cooking by buying more ready-made foods and snacks that contained fat and sugar as components.
I find two principles work best. First, grandma's wisdom is mostly correct so prefer home-cooked culturally aligned food.
Second moderation, you can have one can of drink and one meal outside power week of anything. So burger and coke or Indian sugary desserts all are good if you can control frequency.
Who made up this word? Before 2022 it more or less doesn't exist (per Google Trends.)
Some part of it must be how small all the parts get when processed so you take in everything really quickly.
Given standard home kitchen equipment and techniques, could you prepare this item? Yes -> not UPF; No, requires a factory -> UPF.
This is kind of like the Jeff Foxworthy jokes.
If you remove so many of the nutrients that you have to try to spray vitamins back on... you might make a UPF.
If your product has ingredients where there is no evidence that those ingredients can actually be digested by the human body... you might make a UPF.
If you have to add dyes so your product doesn't look like sawdust or poop, you might make a UPF.
...
To me it looks like it could be something of a plucebo effect. Like they are bad for us because we expect them to be bad. Minucebo effect?
I sometimes wonder if there are lessons from British period of WWII rationing. Huge numbers of people were enabled to have for free the right amount of nutrients instead of the malnourishment of the 1920s/30s. And millions more found it hard to get the excess sugars and fats.
If we created a new rationing, with no processed foods, feeding the whole population what would happen tomorrow and in ten years?
Imagine how unpopular the Prime Minister who started this would be. Then imagine ten years later when he would be the guy that got millions of people thinner, fitter and having more sex (I am told that’s what thinner fitter people do!)
Imagine that election :-)
TLDR: According to the article, people eat more calories when they eat ultra-processed foods. The reason is unknown, one possibility is more calories per bite as manufacturers remove water and some other ingredients during processing.
Overall, a pretty underwhelming article. Not surprising, unfortunately -- I have been subscribing to the Economist for over 15 years since late 1990s until the slow erosion of quality made me drop it.
ultra-processed people by chris van tulleken hypothesizes that it's because the food is less nutritionally dense through extraction and reconstitution to more palatable and economically expedient forms. additionally, these forms require less effort to process by chewing so we're able to ingest more calories more quickly before our biochemistry can catch up and signal that we've consumed what we need. finally, the processing of food breaks down the original nutrient "matrix" in the way that our metabolism evolved to process it. we evolved to metabolize an apple, i believe was his example, by eating it raw and in its original form, together with all that constitutes an "apple" and not simply the composite of nutrients that we can extract from an apple. the hypothesis is that the whole apple influences our biochemical response differently than the extracted nutrients that have been reconstituted in a different form.
Yes, I agree with you, the Economist from the 90s was a different animal. If you ask me the above article is just paid shilling for Ozempic et. al. Not directly obviously, but in the mindset and viewpoint it wants to develop in readers
My guess is water. Natural foods have a lot of water compared to processed foods.
Consider dried fruit. Quite minimally process wouldn't you say? Yet as snackable as candy.
There's currently a lot of DHMO in all of those foods, which can be quite dangerous for humans and has been a cause for numerous deaths in the World, including young children.
I mean, look at the ingredients list on most processed foods. Much higher quantities of various sugars and starches. More processed foods are rarely 1:1 ingredients compared to less processed foods...
don't we though? they're known to contain very little nutritional value, to be stuffed with salt, fat, sugar, to feature next to no vitamins and natural fibers, which naturally corral sugar to the stomach instead of letting it go through the intestinal barrier freely
so basically it's food that promotes poor variety in gut bacteria and inflammation
that we pretend like we don't know is very surprising to me, it's not exactly shocking that the american diet is bad after some 50 years of it running amok across the world
The end of the article gets the point. The problem isn't that food is processed; the problem is that extremely processed foods are much harder to moderate yourself on and present a much, much more appealing food to overeat on, which in turn causes health problems and is why so many people are so fat, along with other factors like people being lonely and depressed, and food being a quick and cheap way to make yourself happy, the broad availability of unhealthy food and the sometimes restricted availability of healthy food, the fact that people are too damn busy to find time in their schedules to prepare their own food, etc. etc.
Which itself ties into other systemic incentives. Processed food is shelf stable, fresh often is not, so it's friendlier to logistical systems that deliver everything we eat, which means less of it gets wasted, which means the prices are lower and availability is virtually guaranteed. Put simply: it is far easier and more profitable to ship, stock, and sell potato chips than it is to sell potatoes, and because everything in our system is profit driven, the better things map onto that, the more they occur. Ergo we're drowning in potato chips and still starving.
In that case we can just take Ozempic or whatever guys!
Just kidding, no that's not the problem. The problem is processing destroys/alter many molecules we do not even know about or know it's full "purpose"/role in nutrition and digestion. The commonly talked about vitamins and RDA and such are just the bare minimum so a broad population does not get sick, but does not mean optimum health for a given individual.
Cf. eating 10mg of iron in a steak, readily bioavailable vs eating 10mg of iron from cereal. One is bound in easily digestible compounds, the other is iron shavings or rust.
e.g The British Navy discovering that scurvy is fixed by eating fresh food; ensuring to add citrus to sailors diets, then forgetting about how it worked. Then retrying citrus, but cooking it one using copper vessels, which destroy much of the vitamin C content.
Dukeofdoom's original comment: ``` Don't they add food coloring from ground bugs sometimes. In case of sausage they add preservatives to make it last longer. Actual poison if you were just to eat a lot of it. Generally companies are liable if they make you sick right after eating their product. So they do everything they can to prevent that. Nobody is going to held liable if they give you cancer 10 years down the line. Super hard to prove. So not a worry for them. Backlash after the failed covid vaccine makes some reform more likely now. ```
My response:
Several food colorings (e.g. Red 40, Yellow 10) are synthetic dyes derived from crude oil and other petrochemicals.
At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.
Reality is complex. We are basically one step removed from cavemen still, and need to remain humble, curious, and intellectually honest about the sheer extent of that which we do not know. That's missing in so many people these days. I think more (but not all) people would benefit from undergoing an ego death and reintegration experience that so many others have found in psychedelics, which are nonaddictive and generally safer than legal drugs like alcohol and various combinations of amphetamines (ADHD medication).
>At least here in the US, it seems many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe, neglecting to consider that what a government agency declares safe may not actually be safe. This happens routinely for a variety of reasons - corporate capture (big business teaming up with big government to screw over human beings), gross incompetence of government employees (who in turn, are nearly impossible to fire, even with cause), complex modes of unsafety (per- and poly-fluorinated substances are bioaccumulative and persistent, and the relationship they have with our health remains ambiguous), complete lack of awareness of the risk (in the last week or so, we just discovered chloronitramide anion exists in the water supply of about 1/3 of the USA, little is known about the health effects it has on mammals in general, let alone humans), etc.
That's not actually how it works in the US. The standard is "Generally Recognized as Safe" (GRAS)[0], which requires the manufacturer to "confirm" that an additive is "safe."
At least that's been the requirement since 1958, although some 700 existing additives were declared exempt from the potentially biased/unconfirmed testing of the manufacturer.
If, as you suggest, "...many people believe that if it's available for sale, that means a government agency deemed it safe", those folks are woefully misinformed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generally_recognized_as_safe
tl;dr is that "ultra-processed foods" are engineered to be more palatable and that tends to result in more caloric density.
tldr hint: the last 5 paragraphs get to the point, and are worth reading.
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Surely not that mysterious - the adulterants added processed foods in order preserve it longer for the shelf, disguise the looks, mask the taste or simply bulk it out for max profit generally do not provide additional nutritional value
Simply not providing nutritional value would be neutral from health perspective. We are looking for something that provides negative effects, either direct (something toxic) or indirect (like causing us to eat more which causes obesity...).
Why do we need these kinds of sensationalist names for things? Why is it so important that they be "ultra-processed" foods? Can't they just be "overprocessed" or perhaps use some other more neutral term?
It's like the 90s when everything had to be "EXTREME!!"
I think it's partly due to the people (this site is full of them) that would read any other term and go "what is processing? Cooking and cutting is processing hurr durr"
I have had this exact argument on HN at least a half dozen times.
yeah people still do it but at least adding the "ultra" indicates is not something a person cooking for their family would be doing to food
It's just as dumb though because the act of processing doesn't really mean anything.
It absolutely does if you're able to take off the pedantry glasses for like 5 seconds. Why are you nitpicking this? is it because you actually think articles like this are about chopping carrots?
"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it."
from someone else in the comments is pretty clear
Why jump from one weird statement to another? Maybe even a worse one?
If it didn't mean anything then why the findings in the article?
The findings in the article basically came down to - people eat more calories when it tastes good. Even the article itself admits there are a multitude of other factors that could account for the results other than UPF.
Here we go again...
It's still a misleading term, so it would be good to talk about what the actual harm is, as to not confuse people. And it does confuse, since I vividly remember as a kid being confused by it, and it's important to have healthy habits from a young age. It always sounded a bit weird that food being "processed" means it's bad, so I didn't understand it really. And if you don't focus on the harm, but use terms like this, it's hard to say what is pseudoscience and what is actual science.
Until you add ketchup.
Well, it's only _over_-processed if we assume it is _bad_. A consensus does seem to be emerging that it _is_ bad, but building that right into the name seems unhelpful. And as alluded to in the article, what the point is after which something is 'over'-processed is not particularly clear.
Ultra-processed foods are broadly speaking foods that cannot be produced in a normal domestic or restaurant kitchen.
Proce-X'ed foods
Just as a side note/for info, there’s a specific definition (I think by the FAO?) used for them. The tldr is that when you’re extracting/reacting something to use as an ingredient (eg hydrogenated oil), it becomes ultra processed.
> some other more neutral term
Nutrient dense/high calorie is probably more accurate.
This would encompass eggs and is leaving out what might be key components (engineered by food scientists and produced in factory)
Olive oil, steel cut oats, and dried beans, are processed. It's to differentiate from things like Coca-Cola or TV dinners.
It's funny that it's only the high IQ types that have difficulty distinguishing beans from coca cola.
It's what I like to call being so smart they're stupid. Everyone strives to be the smartest most pedantic one in the room around here.
Seems pretty obvious to me. Humans didn't have factories until a couple hundred years ago.
This means we are not adapted to factory made food.
This entire debate is hilariously overcomplicated by smarty pants "show me the study" or "aren't cooked carrots processed?" types.
40-60% of nutritional studies cannot be replicated. It's called the "replication crisis". Google it.
Rules of thumb are greatly underrated on HN. Here's one: if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it.
There’s a woman on YouTube that I watch sometimes who recreates popular sweets/snacks/desserts but using fresh ingredients and home friendly (usually) cooking techniques. What always blows me away is just how long is takes to make something like a Little Debbie Oatmeal cream pie from scratch.
If we as a species could no longer rely on industrialization to create junk foods and instead had to make them from scratch, we’d spend 100x as long making them as we do shoving them down our throats and therefore savor the few that we do make and likely eat less.
The subconscious power of availability and plenty on the human psyche is enormously underestimated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Avoiding manufactured food is absurd to a level I didn't think needed explanation.
Even from a logistics POV we're 8 billion on this planet, concentrated in cities. Everyone following that philosophy would bring a food chain collapse.
Good thing you don't need to follow what everyone else does :)
Good thing I didn't make that argument :)
I'm not sure what argument you were making then.
Assuming your point isn't that you used the "factory" terminology instead of calling it "unnatural", so it's not an appeal to nature.
I'd actually be pleased to dig on the deeper part you were pointing to.
PS: the "we are not adapted" to part of your post is the crux of it in my eyes: we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic. We're not adapted to receiving MRIs, wearing glasses or looking at imaginary landscapes in VR, and that's totally fine in my book .
If I wanted to say unnatural I would have said unnatural. I said factory.
Factories come with a mountain of lubricants, plastics, metals, agents, colorings, flavorings, etc that are poisonous. They are poisonous because we were not evolved to consume them. That's just 1 of many reasons factory made foods are bad.
> we're not adapted to a lot of things but that doesn't make it good or bad or problematic
These things would be good for you in spite of the fact that you're not adapted to it.
There are far more many things that you are not adapted to that would kill you. Your list is hilariously arguable (VR might actually be bad for you lol). My list would consist of basic inarguable things like, fish can breathe underwater naked, humans cannot, and my list would be inexhaustibly long.
"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it." i follow this as well it's a great rule. I have no idea on the internet, but in real life nobody who's ever been the smarty pants saying "aren't cooked carrots processed?" has health or a body i'm envious of