Edit: Found it. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... (thanks to @crummy for the correction). Seems like a reasonable start. Amusing to see that alcoholic drinks are specifically not considered ultra-processed foods for the purposes of school meals!
> In July 2025, the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 32.7 percent of children and youth between 12 and 19 years old are prediabetic.
Wow.
- Unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fresh or frozen products, yoghurts, etc)
- Processed culinary ingredients (oil, vinegar)
- Processed foods (foods created from combining elements of the first 2 groups using typical cooking processes, like bread, pasta, some meats, canned vegetables)
- Ultra-processed foods (foods requiring industrial processing).
Flour is minimally processed, Nova Group 1, if it’s simply milled and separated. If it’s prepared with industrial solvents, or bleached, it goes straight to Group 4.
Nova doesn’t distinguish between ingredients and food [1]. (It needs to be able to do this. UPFs are defined, in part, by almost lacking low-Nova inputs.)
Bread is made from dough, which is mainly made from flour (the "minimally processed" food), which is made from grains (the unprocessed food)
“Traditional methods to puff or pop rice include frying in oil or salt. Commercial puffed rice is usually made by heating rice kernels under high pressure in the presence of steam, though the method of manufacture varies widely” [1].
If I had to guess, the commercial stuff is more thoroughly and homogeneously gelatinized. That, in turn, probably raises its glycemic index.
No. Processed culinary ingredient (Group 2) and minimally processed (Group 1). (Obviously, both can be turned into a UPF through fuckery.)
These are unprocessed foods [1].
From them you get processed culinary ingredients, like olive oil, vinegar, honey and butter. As long as you’re minimally vigilant with these, you should be fine, though some production methods may still add preservatives or use solvents in their manufacture.
After that one has processed foods, which may still have a good amount of Group 1 and 2 ingredients, before we get to Group 4, UPFs, what California is banning in school lunches.
For me, processed food might include something like unsweetened peanut butter where while the only ingredient is peanuts, it's still been through a process of grinding so that it's no longer in its natural form.
At the other end of the spectrum an example of ultra processed food would be a factory packaged item with a long list of ingredients which includes ones you don't recognise e.g. chemical names or E numbers.
Depends on if they’re ultra processed or not.
If they won’t stale for weeks, they’re ultra processed with preservatives and/or solvents. If they go stale and have a simple ingredients list, they probably aren’t.
(And kids don’t need to be habituated to having either with every lunch.)
So no, it’s a lot more arbitrary than that.
When a grandma bakes some cookies for their grandchildren she uses only some basic ingredients - eggs, flour, butter, sugar.
For the product that food industries calls as cookies however, the list of ingredients looks like a git SHA.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
> (3) (A) High amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as defined respectively as follows:
> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat
I feel like the saturated fat limit would be the most impactful restrictions.
However right after it's entirely opened up again:
> (b) “Ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” does not include any of the following:
> (1) Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.
> (2) A raw agricultural commodity as defined in Section 110020.
> (3) An unprocessed locally grown or locally raised agricultural product as defined in paragraph
Excess sugar and simple starches tend to get absorbed more completely than excess fat, I'm not sure added fat is the biggest issue.
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3)).
or
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3)), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
or
“ultraprocessed food” or “UPF” means (any food or beverage that contains a substance described in paragraph (2)) and either high amounts of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugar, as described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (3), or a nonnutritive sweetener or other substance described in subparagraph (B) of paragraph (3).
wonder who'll be the first to argue that HFCS isn't sugar.
That aside, I think the law is a great step in the right direction for the US.
Hopefully it can be expanded across the US.
Also as quoted elsewhere: Deep frying is ultra-processing?
If the thing that is bad for us is the processing and preservatives then we can pursue that... but if you want to count things like potato chips then we need to be honest about what the label actually means. The UPF label adds a veneer of scientific precision that isn't actually present in any guidelines surrounding it.
"NoScript detected a potential Cross-Site Scripting attack
from [...] to http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov."
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...
> “Stabilizers and thickeners: Substances used to produce viscous solutions or dispersions, to impart body, improve consistency, or stabilize emulsions, including suspending and bodying agents, setting agents, jellying agents, and bulking agents, etc.”
So ... flour? Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
> Commodity food specifically made available by the United States Department of Agriculture.
Which I'd guess includes flour.
[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/csfp/commodity-supplemental-food-pr...
Does this count if they supply it from a vending machine on their premises :-)
If used as a thickener, perhaps.
> Actually healthier things with scarier names like xanthan gum?
This would almost certainly fall afoul of these rules. And with good reason. Xantham gum is fine per se, but it tends to help unhealthy food stay together. I don’t see why a school kitchen needs to serve anything thickened with it.
I would gander you have little to no experience in the kitchen. Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup? Do you eat soup?
Keep ganderin’.
> Literally ANY sauce? Basically any Asian cuisine. Soup?
None of these need to be thickened with xantham gum…
I think one could make xantham gum as a processed culinary ingredient (Nova group 2) ingredient, so long as it isn’t packaged with preservatives.
The bill itself calls out using USDA databases for various ingredients and various sections of federal regulations, so I can't comment too much about how they'd feel about xanthum gum without diving deep. Not to go off on a tangent, but just from the bill's text, I can say for sure they don't like nonnutritive sweeteners, which I think really hurts diabetics choices at reducing their reliance on insulin while still enjoying nice treats. Although not too important for a school meal, it's definitely part of the ultra processed conversation and why it's not a simple thing to categorize food into groups.
For reference: xanthan gum specifically would fall afoul of the rules, as... a (ii) stabilizer or thickener, (iv) coloring or coloring adjunct, and (v) emulsifier.
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
It's quite silly that it's classified as a coloring agent and an emulsifier, when it's neither of those things.
Common culprits include chemicals added during the bleaching process and addition of "enzyme" / other ingredients that help improve baking consistency. Some examples:
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
https://www.hfpappexternal.fda.gov/scripts/fdcc/index.cfm?se...
I'm sure they extensively deliberated the health effect of Luo Han Fruit Concentrate and Maltitol
There is plenty of data showing diet has a big impact on health and other outcomes, yet far less data on specifics.
Since science doesn't give specific things to ban, legislation is pretty much headed towards "let's have everyone eat what they eat in the south of France where people are really healthy".
The problem isn't the MSG. It's providing a well balanced diet. We have a relatively clear idea of what constitutes "well balanced". You can quibble about the specifics but this bill is fundamentally off on a crazy unscientific tangents.
There are just three lines that actually address nutrition:
(i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.
(ii) The food or beverage contains a ratio of milligrams of sodium to calories that is equal to or greater than 1:1.
(iii) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from added sugars.
Instead of paragraphs of banning the "scary chemicals", why not work on making sure kids get the vitamins, vegetables and fiber they need in each meal. I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated
> I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.
I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.
If someone is habitually consuming sugar sweetened beverages, replacing those with ASBs will, the evidence strongly suggests, reduce your risk of obesity and various chronic diseases.
We can say "just don't consume either" but we have decades of attempting such policies that shows people don't work that way. Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478
It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.)
And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.
- every meal is served with white rice ("empty calories")
- every meal is served with Kimchi (high sodium)
- most dishes are flavored with soy sauce, gochutan, rice syrup... they are extremely high in sodium + msg
- people love fried chicken with syrupy sauces
- korean barbeque is popular, with very fatty cuts (pork belly etc.)
Pretty much all of those foods would be considered unhealthy, but somehow Koreans don't seem to suffer from obesity like US + Europe do, I have no idea why.
Not sure if there is any truth in that.
Every meal must contain more empty calories than everything else combined, but not in an excessive amount.
I do not know about Korea, but I have been in Japan, where also every meal is served with excellent white rice. However, there was never too much of it and in general the quantities of all ingredients were right for a balanced diet, much more so than I have seen in most other countries.
Second, I do not know whether there are some Korean diets that are more correlated with obesity. In Thailand, people eat much the same, and they are more often obese on the global scale. Less kimchi, though, and probably more coconut milk and sugar.
Simple diet composition is probably not the main factor in obesity. I do notice that "normal" portion sizes are pretty small in Korea, based on what I see in their media. Even feasts are shown to have reasonable portion sizes. In the US, portion sizes tend to maximally fill the stomach, and have grown considerably over the years.
Highly processed foods are generally designed to add addictive properties and cause overconsumption. I am not sure that's the goal of the Korean dishes you have tried. If we understand what the new weight loss drugs are telling us, we can see that increasing satiety faster with fewer calories should be the goal of our foods. (no citation, just my interpretation of what's going on).
1. https://general.kosso.or.kr/html/user/core/view/reaction/mai... 2. https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9059/13/2/373
Exactly. Science can’t give us actionable information, so appeal to established practice it is.
They fuck up your microbiome and the insulin response. There is absolutely no reason to use them ever. Grow up and embrace the bitterness.
Subjectively, a few months of wearing a monitor appeared to show no perceptible effect on my own.
Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.
For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.
What impact would pouring a bunch of refined sugar on animal feed have on feed conversion efficiency?
What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
If you permit me to be a bit glib, if we outlawed everything that people think tastes good, almost no one would overeat, and we would have solved obesity. Without going to that extreme, surely there are other interventions that can help limit the problem of overeating, and isn’t there evidence that artificial sweeteners are actually helpful in doing that? Remember that the starting point for humans isn’t hay and the slop we feed to pigs, it’s ice cream and McDonald’s.
No, not at all.
Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.
This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.
> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?
When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478
When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.
Someone who wants to drink a can of coke will drink a can of coke, why would we ban the healthier option?
That’s not really the case when discussing school meals though, when kids will generally be eating what is put in front of them.
The countries that consume the most processed foods are also the longest lived, obviously such a correlation does not imply processed foods lead to longevity, just that any accusation of cause and effect is more easily explained by abundance and affluenza (sic).
How long before the UPF cult proclaims vaccines are poison, I note than some of their number already do.
Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.
Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes". If that results in some hypothetical healthy food being banned, so be it, but really this is about a loss of trust.
What’s “processing”?
> The food industry has demonstrated that it doesn't give a crap about producing healthy food if that impacts the bottom line, so they pull every trick they can to increase profits whilst hiding the changes from consumers' ability to detect them
Ok? What’s that got to do with which forms of processing are unhealthy? This whole statement doesn’t really add anything.
> Not unsurprisingly, most of those changes use fancy processes and ingredients to mimick other ingredients and processes.
So it’s the “fancy” part you don’t like? What does fancy mean? You can quantify it, I’m sure?
> Legislation like this is saying "enough, you can only use the following set of processes".
Right, and as GP pointed out, the following set doesn’t seem to be particularly healthy.
Wholemeal bread with soya lecithins? Evil UPF, ban it.
Artisinally produced sourdough using refined flour with tons of salt but no lecithins? Delightful, fill your boots.
We've let nutrition policy become controlled by fad diet book authors and the results aren't pretty...
Outside of causing an imbalance (which would require a LOT of salt), there’s nothing bad about a lot of salt. People have been eating tons of salt for centuries.
> refined flower
Not sure what definition you’re using here so this might not be ideal, but probably fine. People have been milling for centuries.
> soya lecithins
Made in a lab about 100 years ago, and its primary use is to increase profits via long shelf life (increasing shelf life could be a noble goal, ie freezers are great). We have billionaires flying private jets around. Redo some resource allocation and we don’t need soya lecithins.
Much modernity has 0 respect for Chestetons fence. On top of that, nutrition science is basically a social science in terms of accuracy (not a dig, it’s very hard). Many “advances” today are purely profit motivated and don’t pay enough respect to the people’s wellbeing. We should be skeptical of changes done to make the rich richer.
Depends on
a) How well it's believed science is able to keep up with the "creativity" and dollars of the food industry.
b) The health costs to the individual and society of any subsequent problem.
c) How well the society in question is likely to do in overcoming the vested interests to fix any subsequent problem.
YMMV.
What? Are you talking about trans fats?
Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats.
Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad.
This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.
> Wow.
Sadly, I'm not too surprised. My state also has free breakfast and lunch in public schools and it is possible for them to get served over 100g of added sugar between the two meals and classroom provided snacks. Then add to it whatever the kids are eating at home.
It also creates added difficulty for kids to concentrate on lessons when their blood sugar is spiking and crashing repeatedly throughout the day.
A popular meme variation in the chef community is as follows:
"Wait, it's all just Sysco?" "Always has been"
Sport won't fix that, food will.
Whenever I travel outside the USA I am always astounded at how little effort I need to put into getting my daily steps vs when I am at home. At home it is a concentrated effort
(And by bread I mean non-American bread that does not contain sugar, or relatively little (mostly low-end commercial stuff for shelf-life).)
In Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Malta, Ireland obesity ranges from 38%–31% and it’s rising. On an individual level the solution is food and exercise. On a societal level there is no know solution and it’s rapidly getting worse.
One good thing in my opinion is that is much easier in EU to at least choose. I was amazed in USA how badly marked are the components (in EU you have at least on each thing sugar/100g, fat, salt, etc.) and how unavailable are fresher things (even if they would be expensive). So while in EU I would say "repeat more to people to eat varied and not abuse salt/fat/sugar", that would not work as well in the USA (or, you need to teach them math and unit conversion as well :-p)
This would be a Nova Group 3 food.
Processed. But not ultra-processed.
If you buy a fresh hamburger at the butcher, made by him with salt and pepper, it's processed food.
But if you add sodium nitrite/nitrate, monosodium glutamate, phosphates, high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, sodium erythorbate, carrageenan, bha/bht, propyl gallate, tbhq, soy protein isolate, modified food starch, dextrose, caramel color, red 40, yellow 5, etc... it's ultra-processed food.
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.
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.
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.
Come to me with scientific evidence and not fear mongering, and then we can talk on an equal field.
Depending on production method, I believe MSG can be a Nova Group 2 (processed culinary ingredient) product.
The name comes from the additional step of converting some portion of the glucose to fructose after converting starch to glucose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
UPFs usually have ingredients you've never seen for sale.
Like that definition doesn't seem to work when there's foods where the commercial variant is made differently to the normal version.
Spoiler: The science and definitions are... depressingly bad.
Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.
Kids don’t pay for school lunch in California.
Not for a few years now [1].
Think of ordinary tomatoes for example. In its raw form a tomato goes bad after a few weeks (depending on how it's stored), as a store you got to discard a bunch of them before that time because the tomato develops blemishes from handling/storage, and the tomatoes have to be handled more sensitively and with more effort.
Now, take that tomato and can it straight after harvest, together with a bunch of preservatives. It now has a far longer expiration time in the order of years, it doesn't need cooling, and tomatoes that come from the field with blemishes can now be used as well, just cut them up, remove the unsightly pieces and sell it as cut-up canned tomatoes.
From here on, the calculation is the same for both kitchens and low income populations... both need tomatoes to cook a meal. So what do they prefer? Fresh tomatoes where one now also needs to take care of leftover tomatoes and do another meal before they expire, or canned tomatoes that are cheaper to source and easier to match with actual demand?
What preservatives are we talking about, citric acid? I checked the ingredient lists of Mutti and Heinz canned tomatoes (EU resident). Mutti contains exactly 2 ingredients: whole tomatoes and tomato juice, Heinz 3: whole tomatoes, tomato juice and citric acid.
The highest quality marinara almost universally starts with something like an ordinary can of San Marzano tomatoes. This isn't some exotic find at Whole Foods. This will be collecting dust on the shelves at Kroger and Brookshires.
Buying fresh produce 100% of the time is theatrics. There are a lot of things it's a good idea for, but you are genuinely wasting your time in other areas.
I have drastically reduced the amount of ultra processed food in my diet, now eating clean food only, and I cannot describe in words how my energy level climbed to levels I have never seen in the past years. My blood glucose is stable, my mood as well, and I have no cravings. Also my body weight dropped significantly. Although I eat full plates with vegetables, fish, poultry.
Yum!
Not only is the study itself very interesting, but it does a great job going over the evidence landscape on UPFs and food at the current point in time.
Dr Dicken is very clear that at the moment, in his view, they have insufficient evidence to make policy decisions like this, a view that has been echoed by pretty much all academic institutions when they’ve helped inform recent dietary guidelines.
Making big sweeping moves based on flimsy evidence is a good way to make people wary of following dietary guidance at all. After all, what’s the point of listening to “the science” if they turn around in 5 years and say “whoops, turns out we were wrong”?
This is a misstep IMO.
if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
I’m not sure how this interacts with the point I’m making.
> if there's any misstep here, it's not focused enough on sugar (which is a hard drug for kids) .
Sure, free sugars are associated with risk (which is reflected in dietary guidelines). Plenty of UPFs are not (which is why they generally aren’t flagged as a concern in dietary guidelines).
hu3•2h ago
"Brazil limits ultra-processed foods in school meals to 15%"
https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/politica/noticia/2025-02...