What's ultra-processed vs processed? If I make my own sausage by grinding the meat by hand, mixing it with salt and spices, then filling natural casings, I would consider that processed food. What makes it ultra-processed? When Hormel does it instead?
This was my gut response too, I reluctantly read "Ultra-Processed People" after it was mentioned by so many people, expecting to find it annoying for this exact reason.
I was actually massively surprised by how helpful a label ultra-processed can be, even if there are edge cases.
Hormel are probably adding a huge number of lab-based emulsifiers, flavour enhancers and colouring, that you definitely won't have at home. It's a pretty open and shut case about whether or not its ultra-processed.
There's of course edge cases were something we think of as healthy might be ultra-processed, and something obviously unhealthy might not be considered ultra-processed. But it's a really helpful category for identifying a whole bunch of foods that are linked with a range of negative health conditions.
There's an issue here with classification and harm. You can only say that UFPs are harmful if the definition used when measuring harm matches the definition used elsewhere. It seems all to easy to attach the harm to the label then switch out the contents while keeping the label.
Even then a group classification is useless if it includes a single element with a undue influence.
Consider an arbitrary SuperGiant classification that says that SuperGiant foods are harmful. SuperGiant foods are defined as any food you can buy in a supermarket plus also Polonium. You can easily produce a wide range of statistics to show harms caused by things classed as SuperGiant foods.
> Consider an arbitrary SuperGiant classification that says that SuperGiant foods are harmful. SuperGiant foods are defined as any food you can buy in a supermarket plus also Polonium. You can easily produce a wide range of statistics to show harms caused by things classed as SuperGiant foods.
That's very true, but you've intentionally made SuperGiant foods to have two distinct categories. Scientists only considering SuperGiant foods might show harm, but quite quickly a study could be done to show that specifically, Polonium is the relevant item.
If that couldn't be shown, then avoiding SuperGiant foods would be a sensible precaution, even if you suspect there's something specific causing harm that isn't in all SuperGiant foods - with the obvious caveat that you've defined SuperGiant foods to more or less impossible to actually avoid.
Currently UPF is not similar to this, in that nobody has yet shown that UPFs are a category containing something else which is bad for you. That probably is the case, but until the parallel of Polonium is found, being cautious around UPFs seems like a sensible idea.
Well I cannot address the accuracy of your statement on UPFs unless I assume the term UPF is synonymous with the Nova Classification, which is much of the problem. If it is synonymous then the term is bound to a classification system and that system can dictate what is meant by UPFs leading to the inability for others to refine the term for more accuracy. This is where we are headed with UPF being an evocative term that does not represent the scientific opinion of what is good for you.
The Siga Index seems to be better suited to aiming for positive outcomes but associating it with the term UPF then enables people to conflate findings regarding Nova results with Siga results.
>Currently UPF is not similar to this, in that nobody has yet shown that UPFs are a category containing something else which is bad for you.
There are two aspect to this, firstly it is not that there is containing something 'else'. By definition if it meets the criteria of the definition it is not an 'else' but a part of the criteria.
To phrase that a different way is to say it all fits within in the criteria but the criteria itself is not homogenous.
And that's the second problem with your statement. The Nova classification _is_ similar to this.
From Wikipedia
A number of studies show that although UPFs in general are associated with higher health risks, there exists a large heterogeneity among UPF subgroups. For example, although bread and cereals are classified as UPFs, a large 2023 study published in The Lancet finds them inversely associated with cancer and cardiometabolic diseases in the European population (hazard ratio 0.97). The study found that animal-based products (HR = 1.09) and artificially and sugar-sweetened beverages (HR = 1.09) are most strongly associated with diseases among UPFs.
They did find a parallel of Polonium, sweeteners (and another one with animal products)
The specific exclusion is: Minimally processed prepared food as defined in paragraph (4) of subdivision (a) of Section 49015 of the Food and Agricultural Code, which may include foods in a variety of forms, including, but not limited to, whole, cut, sliced, diced, canned, pureed, dried, and pasteurized.
and that bit of Section 49015 says:
(4) “Minimally processed prepared food” may include any food prepared using either of the following processes:
(A) Traditional processes used to make food edible or to preserve it or to make it safe for human consumption, for example, smoking, roasting, freezing, drying, and fermenting.
(B) Physical processes that do not fundamentally alter the raw product or that only separate a whole, intact food into component parts, for example, grinding meat, separating eggs into albumen and yolk, and pressing fruits to produce juices.
What you described would be processed. Ultra processed foods are very difficult to make outside of an industrial setting. Pringles and dinosaur chicken nuggets are a perfect example. They make an almost recognizable paste and shape it.
Are you straw-manning or genuinely want to know the difference between your home made 4 ingredient sausage vs. 15-20 ingredient sausage by Hormel, including additives, emulsifiers, flavor enhancers, colorings, and other ingredients not typically used or readily available for home cooking?
How do we define what food is ultra processed though? Do we need "cake (commercial)" and "cake (home baked)" as I can bake a cake with all the standard stuff I have at home, but commercial cakes are usually chock full of E numbers. Another example would be like a jar of pasta sauce and a pasta sauce I've made, I don't think it's arguable that a pasta sauce I've made is ultra processed.
Like that definition doesn't seem to work when there's foods where the commercial variant is made differently to the normal version.
A homemade cake is minimally processed. The flour and sugar are processed but nothing that heavily alters it.
A commercial cake on the other hand has stabilizers, ph balancers, etc.
You're over thinking it. Almost nothing made at home is ultra processed unless you're doing some weird sausage making. If you can name the ingredients easily, it probably isn't ultra processed.
I think the GP's point is there is no meaningful nutritional difference between a from-scratch cake and a box cake. Both are pretty unhealthy and should be eaten only as special treats. "Ultra-processed" is not a useful way of separating healthy from unhealthy foods.
That is precisely the point that should be discussed because, from what I've read, UPFs are much worse than plain fatty or sugary food cooked by human hands.
The extra stuff in UPFs interacts with your body in ways that you are not prepared for and some of them are designed to make you consume more. The first example that comes to mind is the sodium added to make you tolerate more sugar.
They may not differ much in terms of calories or nutrients, but there absolutely is a difference - the ultra processed cake has preservatives and additives that are way harder on your gut microbiome, which affects your body's ability to process other food.
Except you can buy soybean oil, bleached refined wheat flour, and refined sugar at the store. That's all you need to have ultra processed food. The really weird ingredients are probably also bad but are not necessary for something to be ultra processed.
1. sodium nitrite/nitrate salts have been used in Europe at the very least from the 19th century to cure meat, the earliest regulations in (of course) Germany date back to 1916 [1].
2. MSG has been a part of traditional Japanese dishes, it naturally occurs in soy and fermented fish sauce.
So for these two substances, I'd say their presence in food doesn't make it "ultra processed" all on its own - they and their usage in cuisine date back to times when there was no food industry to speak of.
Are all of these ingredients equally harmful? If not, why not just ban or restrict the ones that are harmful and keep using the rest of them? It's sort of weird to bundle a lot of very different types of chemicals under the same term.
These novel ingredients keep getting banned for negative health issues like causing cancer, new variants keep getting introduced to the public, the new variants keep getting banned doe being harmful, repeat ad infinitum.
The public are not lab rats to be experimented on using these artificial ingredients so that companies can make money.
So things with scientific names are "ultra processed", and things with common names are not? That's just childish fear mongering.
Everything is a chemical. Salt is sodium chloride. Ingredients should be assessed individually and scientifically for their safety. Not just scary name equals unsafe. That's childish.
The war on monosodium glutamate is based racism and not science. It's as safe as table salt. There is no real science showing that it's anything but delicious.
Dextrose is just a simple sugar. It's essentially glucose chemically. Nothing to worry about. Your body produces glucose itself. You are not ultra processed because of that fact.
High fructose corn syrup is just fructose, another simple sugar [1], and there's no real science to back up all the fear mongering around it. It's no worse for you than any other sugar. All things in moderation.
Their idea is to point out curing agents, flavor enhancers and similar stuff you would not need if using fresh food made from high quality ingredients - basically if you see food with these ingredients, chances are high that corners were cut along the path for whatever reason.
And colorants/"food dyes" are even worse. A bunch of them are under strong suspicion of being carcinogenic, and often are used to mask the ingredients being cured for longer shelf lives or being of sub-par quality.
sure, it's all nature. and then wonder why you get 50% of the population morbidly obese...
you are being skeptical in a very silly way, sorry to say. if you don't see the industry incentives to use trash in your food instead of normal ingredients, you are missing the point in a very unproductive way.
The population is obese because they eat too many calories and they will not stop. Arbitrarily banning foods because they are not "normal" doesn't prevent this. Butter is OK, cream is OK, sugar is OK. When sugar takes a slightly different form it's "not normal" so banning it will make everyone thin again.
Is it any more evidence for ultra processing being the problem than the last N food panics? Obesity was high when the story was "high fat foods are the problem" too.
