This study made me question the Ultra Processed Food narrative: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/
>Subjects were instructed to consume as much or as little as desired. Energy intake was greater during the ultra-processed diet (508 ± 106 kcal/day; p = 0.0001), with increased consumption of carbohydrate (280 ± 54 kcal/day; p < 0.0001) and fat (230 ± 53 kcal/day; p = 0.0004), but not protein (-2 ± 12 kcal/day; p = 0.85).
>Weight changes were highly correlated with energy intake (r = 0.8, p < 0.0001), with participants gaining 0.9 ± 0.3 kg (p = 0.009) during the ultra-processed diet and losing 0.9 ± 0.3 kg (p = 0.007) during the unprocessed diet.
Maybe the issue isn't the 'ultra processing' but protein amount? Less protein = people eat more = weight gain = health issues.
I’ve long advocated for nutrition labels to include what I call “antinutrition” information.
Things like high oxalate content that, without hydration, can put you at risk of kidney stones.
As a ~vegan I once contracted gout!
What that taught me (via internet knowledge shares, the doctors were completely stumped) was an excess of nutritional yeast.
The daily recommended amount was 3-4 tablespoons per day. I was easily eating 15.
Apparently nutritional yeast has a thing called purines, also found in red meat, and is a cause for gout.
Cut it down to normal consumption levels, and the problem went away.
https://multimedia.efsa.europa.eu/drvs/index.htm
Some of the entries in this public nutrition database have daily maximum values.
That information needs to be more readily available.
Apart from ethical or environmental concerns, one of the best decisions you can make nutrition wise is to vary your intake a lot and one of the worst is to try and subsist on a limited range of foodstuffs.
The paradox is that by restricting my diet, with an ethically, morally, environmentally and health conscious move to ~veganism, it expanded the variety of food I eat.
When you are unable to rely on old faithfuls, especially meat and dairy, you have to explore other possibilities and really dip into the weird.
I have zero intention to comment on vegetarianism or veganism with this observation, I am solely talking about seeking variation in whatever dietary spectrum you may choose to follow...
I absolutely agree.
One quick and easy trick is to eat “colorful food”.
Eating a meal that has lots of different colors increases your odds of getting a broader variety of nutritional content.
That is good advice, but I'd like to clarify that I meant variation over diversity. Eating the same 15 things every week is better than eating the same 5 things, no doubt. But changing it up over the week, month, is even better because is diminishes the chances you're getting too much of something that might be bad in great quantities and works with the adaptability of the body.
Fasting seems to be good for you, for example, because it stimulates the body to consume malformed proteins. Changing intake up from one day to the next also should help the diversity of the gut biome and the activation of several metabolic pathways without 'overheating' any of them.
Double that, restricting my food leaded me to explore new beans, roots and fungus.
Real world phenomena can never be cut by clean lines. This isn't math definitions. That said, there are fairly comprehensive definitions of these things. The UN's FAO defines ultra processed food as:
> Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive
industrial use, made by a series of industrial
processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment
and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes
used to make ultra-processed foods include the
fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical
modifications of these substances, assembly of
unmodified and modified food substances using
industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding
and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of
manufacture whose functions include making the
final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and
sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and
other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar,
oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and
substances that are sources of energy and nutrients
that are of no or rare culinary use such as high
fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified
oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose
function is to make the final product palatable or
more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers,
colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners,
and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming,
gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that
prolong product duration, protect original
properties or prevent proliferation of
microorganisms.
This definition makes most sense when compared with the definitions of the other three categories [1]. I am pretty sure, that any two people trained on these definitions will only disagree less than 5% of the time.
[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...
You’re missing the point. It’s not defining what constitutes ultra processed — it’s that no one really knows if it’s bad for you.
Because when you study people who eat a certain thing, they also all tend to eat another thing.
I religiously read nutrition labels and a lot of vegan ultra-processed foods are not particularly healthy, but not necessarily because they are ultra processed but because they mimic non-vegan foods which themselves are unhealthy.
Even if you cook all your meals, it doesn’t mean that you are eating healthy because it still depends on your ingredients.
And as the article hinted to, a lot of people who initially start eating vegan foods tend to buy non-vegan analogues which are not healthy. The better analogues tend to be ultra processed. Are these people at higher risk of certain diseases because they are eating ultra processed foods or because they’ve limited themselves to unhealthy vegan substitutes? Hard to say.
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The world is complex. There are thousands of basic foods that are combined, processed and cooked in countless ways. You can't figure out which of these are good or bad individually. You have to make categories to simplify the problem.
There are dozens of categorizations that are studied in literature. Vegan/Veg/Carnivore is one. Each diet becomes its own category to be studied, such as keto.
Level of processing is another such categorization. It won't give you the final answer on what is good or bad, only a partial answer, that will indeed have to be combined with results of other categorizations to get a final answer.
Please understand that nutritional science is a few decades old at this point. Demanding physics (a 500 year+ academic discipline) level of clarity from a discipline which is many times more complex is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The only thing we are going to get are bad partial answers; just like you point out. Everyone knows they are partial answers, but they are partial answers because of complexity, not because of malice.
My problem with picking ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value. And where we decide the starting line is for that processing is also arbitrary, as far as the result goes.
I mean we could say that beef is ultra-processed grass. And lettuce, ultra-processed sunlight.
Our biological ancestors evolved over 10s-100s of millions of years to consume raw plant matter and raw meat. Only in the last 100k years or so did we start consuming cooked food, which gives some time for evolution to adjust our genes. Our bodies are wet chemical machines that we are confident can consume such food.
These are the unprocessed and moderately unprocessed foods in the NOVA categorization. Processed foods is something that began to be consumed a few thousand years ago (eg. Tofu is 2k+ years old in China), and ultra-processed foods, as defined above, became largely consumed a few decades ago. So there are very good reasons to define these categories as they are. The lines dividing them are fuzzy but that is how all non-physics sciences work.
> ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value.
Now, if you have a complex system like the human body, it's reasonable to say that the more you drive it outside the domain that it was designed and tested in, the more risk you are taking on the something bad will happen. So a priori you would be mindful of consuming ultra-processed foods. It is a testament to biological evolution that nothing radically bad happens when we consume ultra-processed foods. But it seems very reasonable to investigate such foods more carefully for smaller but long term impacts on health.
> little to do with the nutritional value.
The digestive system doesn't just care about raw nutrition - the number of proteins/fats/carbs - of the incoming food. There are a number of physical and chemical processes occur during digestion, and these processes can be sensitive to what combination of things go in and in what physical form, etc.
Mmm... I love my food with proliferation of microorganisms!
The article links to a definition of ultra-processed foods.
Everytime there is a post about upf, there is always someone trying some pedantic " but what exactly is processing"
Article acknowleges the issue with definition and there a section titled 'Identifying ultra-processed foods'. Why not just run with it .
Because the definition given is useless. Additives I wouldn't use as a home-cook, thickener or emulsifier make it ultra-processed.
So anything with a thickener or emulsifier is ultra-processed? So now my potato-soup is ultra-processed because potato-starch acts as both (same with any kind of beans/lentils/starchy things)? What about that sauce where I intentionally add starch or flour? That pasta, where the cooking water emulsifies the sauce? That mayonaise where mustard and egg yolk act as an emulsifier? Risotto, where the rice starch thickens? What about roux? Reductions? Blood? Thickening with paprika powder?
By definition practically everything home-cooked is also ultra-processed. Anything containing any kind of starch is ultra-processed. This is either a completely useless definition, or the actual message is "don't cook food, ever".
You do list things that are not that good. As someone pointed out when you limit yourself to one thing it is usually not good. Potato starch is great but not if you only use that, and there is a problem of eating processed potatoes instead of unpeeled.
More greens and more fibers is a good thing, but also takes more work to cook well. The definition is not useless if you just use it as one part of understanding your ingredients, not the only way.
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The UN FAO definition cited above still at the very least sounds like a slightly dressed up version of "industrialized food production bad" (nevermind that it is responsible for all of the wins against malnutrition in the world). "a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology" - like literally any industry? "fractioning of whole foods into substances" - like milling flour or extracting corn or potato starch from said plants? "assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion" - like extruding pasta? "use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable" adding stuff to make taste more godder describes literally any kind of food preparation? "sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials"?
Hello, are you describing oreos or dried pasta from 1950 here?
The definition given there is pretty useless, imo:
> In the Nova system, a food product is considered ultra-processed if at least one of its ingredients is a substance that home cooks generally don't use (such as high-fructose corn syrup or hydrolysed protein), or is an additive designed to increase the product's appeal (such as a thickener or emulsifier).
Whether or not home cooks use an ingredient has little to do with the health of that ingredient. And, at least from the abstract of the linked article, the additional details don’t inspire confidence that this is a meaningful category.
“Processed foods” is yet another example of the trend of giving something vague a name, attaching an emotional valence to the name and then using that anti-scientific emotional valence to influence public policy. (See also the politics of nuclear power)
The scientific thing to do would be to only use novel food additives when they have been proven to be safe, when they've been tested for toxicity, effects on the microbiome and the digestive tract specifically.
Many of the additives people complain about aren’t particularly novel.
Such a dogshit definition makes it impossible to target any specific chemical or process. With that definition and a meal, I can't tell you whether that meal is "ultra-processed" or not. Just tell me the processes, and show me the studies on them. If there aren't studies on them, do studies on them. But talking about "processed" foods actually seems to use generalization as a smokescreen that somehow still allows deceptive labeling, an enormous number of chemicals, and no specific criticism of the industry.
Food preservation is important, Fortifying foods with vitamins can be awesome. It's good when foods are cheap, food "preparation" and food "processing" are the exact same thing in English. There's always going to be processing. Finding out which processes can cause disease or ill-health is reasonably straightforward, if you want to do it rather than throw around political and marketing rhetoric.
72% less processed!
> Why not just run with it .
Because it is a waste of time at best, and disinformation at worst.