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In case anyone wants a proper definition: ultra-processed food is defined using the Nova classification system [0]. I still find the definition a bit confusing though.
This is the outcome of having researchers dedicating multiple lifetimes towards optimizing food to be as palatable and optimized as possible, such that people are forced to have a self-control battle each meal. Maybe GLP-1 drug proliferation will force companies towards other optimization goals. We ultimately end up paying for the negative externalities of UPF through higher healthcare costs and overall worse long-term quality of life.
It's difficult to change and maintain healthy eating habits when so much of your environment is designed to push you towards foods with questionable health properties. Even if it's technically possible to eat healthy, the cognitive overhead is enough that individualistic solutions are always going to be limited in effectiveness. The ideal is living in an environment where the healthy options are the default choice, so you don't have to waste time, energy, and willpower on maintenance-level tasks. I imagine that a healthier population would also be more productive, for the number-go-up optimizers.
My problem with it is that it’s a circular definition without a mechanism for why they are bad for health.
Discussions I’ve seen for why they are bad always basically boil down to “it’s the ingredients” without wanting to say this.
The evidence that UPFs are bad for health is much, much stronger than the evidence for any candidate mechanism. There are lots of candidate mechanisms.
So I don't think anybody knows why they're bad. Surely the UPF classification includes lots of foods that are harmless. We just don't know which ones because we don't understand the mechanism.
I'd guess it's twofold:
1.) Lack of fiber in the ultra processed foods
2.) shelf-stability additives so the food can sit on shelves for months and not go bad.
There are plenty of mechanisms. Eg artificial emulsifiers damage the lining in the gut
Why would a definition of a food category include a mechanism for why they are bad for health?
My guess is that there is no single mechanism, it's just degrees of freedom + capitalism.
If you have a relatively unprocessed food, there's definitionally not that much you can do to it.
Market forces dictate that food companies produce the cheapest possible food with the best taste. Evolutionarily, food that tasted good was good for you. Food science has developed, in the service of the market, to make good tasting food, especially food that tastes so good that you get addicted to it, that's made from cheap ingredients. Good for you is neutral unless the customer can detect that the food is not good for them. Generally, cheap ingredients are not as good for you. The ingredients are cheap because they don't taste good, and they don't taste good because they're not very nutritious.
If you give food science and the market some rope, they have a bajillion ways to make cheap things that taste good.
Yeah the whole definition is bogus. i.e. "mechanically separated meat" is considered ultraprocessed food? Why? By this logic putting apples into mixer and creating pyre is ultraprocessed food too.
First, I think you're misreading it. The Wikipedia article lists "mechanically separated meat" as one of the ingredients that are used in ultra-processed foods.
The other point is already covered by other replies. "Mechanically separated meat" is not a term for your mother's chicken salad remake of last Sunday's roast chicken.
Seems like a reasonable definition? It's not referring to tissue you put through a grinder yourself.
From wikipedia:
Mechanically separated meat (MSM), mechanically recovered/reclaimed meat (MRM), or mechanically deboned meat (MDM) is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing pureed or ground beef, pork, mutton, turkey or chicken under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. When poultry is used, it is sometimes called white slime as an analog to meat-additive pink slime and to meat extracted by advanced meat recovery systems, both of which are different processes. The process entails pureeing or grinding the carcass left after the manual removal of meat from the bones and then forcing the slurry through a sieve under pressure.
The resulting product is a blend primarily consisting of tissues not generally considered meat, along with a much smaller amount of actual meat (muscle tissue).
Does anybody eat mechanically separated meat as-is? I imagine it’s basically only available to end users as a final product like chicken nuggets or hot dogs, mixed with many additives.
And even if you want to define it as such, why is that bad for health?
I'm not sure you are replying knowing what "mechanically separated meat is", as it isn't just cutting / separating pieces of regular meat using machinery. It's the sieving of a ground up bone/flesh mix into a meat paste. The result product is not something you would normally call meat, and called 'white slime' by some.
Apples are actually a great example.
Think of eating an apple vs drinking apple juice. The amount of entire apples you can drink is immense compared to eating the apple whole. So the mechanical process does affect how we consume the food.
Frustratingly, I note that the clip art used to illustrate the article (showing a bunch of junk-ish food like chips, donuts, pizza and burgers) contains not a single example of a UPF that I can see.
The Guardian couldn't even be jazzed to research their own story.
My question might he stupid: is cottage cheese (kirkland) ultra processed food? I cook most of my stuff, but I use egg whites and cottage cheese from Kirkland for the high amount of proteins
I always assumed ultra-processed means that the food is loaded with preservatives like phosphates or BHT. I guess that's part of it, but maybe the efficiency of digestion should be considered. I remember Ben Krasnow (Applied Science) measured the calories in poop, humans are not very efficient at extracting all calories leading to very likely large efficiency variance between foods. But extending this further, the calories lost during preparation should be accounted for...
So how about: calories * digestion-efficiency - calories you personally need to expend to prepare or acquire it. The higher this number, the more processed is the food. So cane sugar is very bad, unless you personally harvested it.
Bad news for highly paid programmers.. basically all food should be considered ultra-processed since no physical labor was needed to acquire it.
A better example is astronauts. Their diet (on the job) is 100% ultra-processed food. They perform highly and have limited access to normal physical activity. But they’re hard to study because radiation and gravity differ so much that categorization of food might not be influential at all.
Discussion about this tends to get hung up on the relative harm of a particular food, let’s say a donut. But the article is really about a diet that is dominated by food like donuts.
>Evidence reviewed by 43 of the world’s leading experts suggests that diets high in UPF are linked to overeating, poor nutritional quality and higher exposure to harmful chemicals and additives.
>This category is made up of products that have been industrially manufactured, often using artificial flavours, emulsifiers and colouring. They include soft drinks and packaged snacks, and tend to be extremely palatable and high in calories but low in nutrients.
>They are also designed and marketed to displace fresh food and traditional meals, while maximising corporate profits, Monteiro said.
An issue is that a meal of donuts and doritos is equally as ultraprocessed as a diet of bleached pasta and jarred tomato sauce with some preservatives.
I don't have access to the paper, but it'd be interesting to see from the food surveys if the UPF domination is coming from stuff we'd traditionally call "junk food" or from foods that are similar to whole foods made from scratch but with some preservatives added.
The main point is: the category is correlated with poor health.
That you can narrowly choose items in the category that (you believe) don't correlate with poor health doesn't refute the finding.
IOW: you just made the mistake that the comment you are replying to warns you against.
I have always found it so weird to go to a supermarket when you have a (somewhat) "clean" diet. I go from veggies and fruits to meat and dairy and then I'm out again. 95% of the shelves I don't even look at.
Also, the definition of (ultra) processed food isn't so hard: just buy original food, not extrapolations of that. Buy veggies and potatoes, not chips. Buy meat, not sausages or burgers. Buy an apple and yoghurt, not the yoghurt you can buy off the shelf. Just basic ingredients.
Buy wheat berries, and not whole wheat bread?
The UPF category isn't helpful to the person at the grocery store trying to decide what's to buy because it significantly overlaps with very healthy foods.
Loose terms like junk food and whole foods are more helpful because they don't come with the patina of scientific rigor, you can use personal judgement about what fits in those categories.
I can only repeat myself: you guys are trying to pick me apart while you know exactly what I mean. Sometimes hard definitions won't cut it and you have to use common sense. 80-90% clean is sufficient.
Some things need to be processed to be edible. Wheat is one of those. And wheat is typically trash. It's cheap carbohydrates.
Also: I don't buy bread typically. Sometimes, rarely, wholegrain sourdough bread. But I'm also german and have access to "healthy" bread.
Life is really simple:
veggies, fruits, raw meat (no sausages and not that much red meat), dairy (you can buy UHT milk obv.) but not much cheese, wholegrain carbs if you must (pasta is ok, rice also). Some processed foods are ok: cocoa, coffee beans, see salt, yoghurt, kimchi (check label), tofu (occasionally), olive oil etc. etc.
As basic as possible with pre-checked exceptions. This isn't something you can define in a clear cut manner. And it also depends on the country.
The thing is that if you only skip junk food you'll still eat sooo much junk.
Aren't you breaking your rule in one of your examples? Don't buy yoghurt, buy dairy. Just basic ingredients.
I mean raw yoghurt. Not flavored yoghurt. Not sure if there's an extra name for that in english, I'm not a native speaker. There's skyr and greek yoghurt without any additions and then there's the rest of the isle that's just yoghurt with flavours and sugar.
What about cocoa powder (which is fermented and dried and separated at least)?
And coffee? Does it matter whether you buy beans and grind them yourself, or offload that grinding to a processor person?
Honestly, you all are just trying to pick me apart when we all know what to buy and what not to buy. Of course cocoa powder (raw) and coffee is ok. You can look up the research on these ingredients beforehand. Some foods need processing to become edible. Salt is also somewhat processed. But there's industrial salt with additional ingredients and then there's sea salt. Do your own research and apply common sense. Easy
I just found that the bread is also considered ultra processed food (and hence not healthy?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food
This seems shocking a bit. If bread is a UPF, there will be a lot more items we never even think about.
Also from this wiki page[0], identifying UPF (paraphrased by me):
Long ingredient list: Foods that contain many ingredients, especially those that could not be found in a kitchen, are likely to be ultra-processed.
Claims on the packaging: Ultra-processed foods often come in packaging with nutrition claims like "low-fat," "sugar-free," or "fortified with vitamins."
Some bread. The stuff you buy from Wonder contains stuff no breadmaking book on Earth lists in their recipes.
Weird choice of the image by TheGuardian: there's some obviously highly processed foods such as doughnuts and candy, but you also have french fries, popcorn and even some nuts there. The text itself doesn't elaborate on this much either.
What is it exactly that I am supposed to avoid?
The easy answer that encompasses 99% of the target foods is:
Avoid any foods that involve multiple rounds of processing, a term that includes baking, frying, adding preservatives,sugars or oils. Generally, if it has a lot of sugar or oil and has a weirdly long shelf life, be suspicious.
Drift towards: easily washable (smooth/peelable) fruits and vegetables, 100% whole wheat bread products, simple meat products like whole animal parts or deboned animal parts.
Dairy lives in the middle ground. If you have zero lactose problem, most dairy is mostly okay, just watch for sugar levels and recognize that most dairy products are calorie dense. Nuts are in this group too for the same reason but oil instead of sugar.
Bonus points for consuming real pro and pre biotics when you can. In the United States this is pretty limited to live culture yogurts, refrigerated kimchi, and refrigerated sourkraut.
Hang on. Pickling and fermentation are multi-step processes to transform food into their final state. Moreover, pickling is expressly used for preservation and long shelf life. Why are they not considered "ultra-processed" according to this definition? As you point out, they are an integral part of a healthy diet in multiple cultures.
Popcorn is just 1 round of cooking though, you can fry them yourself at home, its less processing than bread.
What's wrong with baking?
> but you also have french fries, popcorn and even some nuts there
For popcorn at least, I'd assume it's the prepackaged microwavable popcorn that gets flagged as UPF, where it's encased in hydrogenated oils, salt, and preservatives. It's hard to think that popcorn you make at home could be considered UPF, considering that it's literally one ingredient with heat applied to it (and oil I guess if you're popping it on the stovetop rather than an air fryer).
Microwave Popcorn containers are also coated with PFAs.
Yeah ever heard of popcorn lung? Crazy stuff
Is there some clear boundary where a food stops being just processed and starts to be ultraprocessed?
No. Read the wikipedia article on the Nova classification. You can rules-lawyer it for days, or accept that it's a general categorization.
why was this flagged?
imagine just buying normal food that wasnt done on the cheap. nobody could afford to live. even in usa, richest country in the world, people are eating cheap crap, living in wooden houses... of course you can be the richest country in the world if you just lower your living standards perpetually
dafuq is "normal" food? if by normal you mean usual or typical for a supermarket, then that would be mostly highly processed foods full of sugars and fats. Now that I think about it, what one actually wants is the not-normal foods, the raw unprocessed minority
Probably because "ultra-processed" is a bogus definition that doesn't prove what exactly is unsafe or why, which the authors of the study even acknowledge directly in the article:
> Critics argue UPF is an ill-defined category and existing health policies, such as those aimed at reducing sugar and salt consumption, are sufficient to deal with the threat.
> Monteiro and his co-authors acknowledged valid scientific critiques of Nova and UPF – such as lack of long-term clinical and community trials, an emerging understanding of mechanisms, and the existence of subgroups with different nutritional values.
It's not "processing" in itself that is causing problems, there is something specific (possibly a set of common ingredients used in many such foods) that we just haven't identified yet as what the actual harm is, so people lump all processed food into the harmful category and tell people to just stay away from all of it, which is not a realistic solution given current food production practices.
I buy normal food and it’s plenty cheap tbh