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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!!"
Nutrient dense/high calorie is probably more accurate.
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 r…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"if it couldn't be made outside of a factory, don't eat it."
from someone else in the comments is pretty clear
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 r…
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 lithiu…
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.