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.
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).
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
> 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.
Also being a broad or nebulous category doesn’t make it not science… much of what science studies starts broad and nebulous or even theoretical.
>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.
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.
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.
This seems shocking a bit. If bread is a UPF, there will be a lot more items we never even think about.
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."
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.
And coffee? Does it matter whether you buy beans and grind them yourself, or offload that grinding to a processor person?
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.
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.
TheAceOfHearts•2mo ago
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
_aavaa_•2mo ago
Discussions I’ve seen for why they are bad always basically boil down to “it’s the ingredients” without wanting to say this.
kragen•2mo ago
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.
_aavaa_•2mo ago
I, and other people argue that it has nothing to do with the processing and it’s all about the ingredients. So the whole differentiation by “processing” amount is useless. We are talking about ingredients without wanting to say so.
sophacles•2mo ago
conductr•2mo ago
jjk166•2mo ago
Likewise the categorization of processing is useful for exactly the same reason the category of poisoned is useful. I'd rather not consume poisoned food of any variety even if I'm uncertain which poison has been added to it.
bryanlarsen•2mo ago
P.S. That being said, I still hate the term ultra-processed. "Junk food" implies the non-specificity better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45979589
sigwinch•2mo ago
Linnaeus did this, and allowed himself to be wrong, and I argue his organization alone was necessary to talk about theory.
croon•2mo ago
Yes, the UPF classification used here likely flags some false positives and perhaps misses others, but if the methodology is otherwise sound and the link is there, even if fuzzy, I don't think it's as easy as you claim either. And even if if fuzzy, it's still useful as I would be healthier avoiding UPF (assuming accurate study), even if I would also avoid some perfectly healthy foods.
mc32•2mo ago
They certainly meet the ultra processed foods criterion.
sigwinch•2mo ago
kragen•2mo ago
Nitrates in meat cause stomach cancer (another thing we can't undo by legislative fiat) but probably don't cause the global pandemic of metabolic disease.
mc32•2mo ago
array_key_first•2mo ago
And, since I know it's inevitably coming, 'humans have been eating meat forever!' - no they absolutely have not:
1. Processed meats are a new thing. There is a difference between eating a cow, and taking cow meat and chemically changing it forever.
2. Farmed meat is a new thing. Prehistoric humans ate meat that is nothing like the meat we eat.
3. Eating meat is a new thing. For almost all of human history, until maybe ~50 years ago, humans ate very little meat. Even today, only the West eats high amounts of meat. We also only see metabolic syndrome in obesity in the West/the developed world. Do with that information what you will.
kragen•2mo ago
> Metabolic syndrome is a clustering of at least three of the following five medical conditions: abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high serum triglycerides, and low serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL).
The pandemic of obesity and metabolic syndrome started about 50 years ago, and is not limited to "the West" or "the developed world". Mass consumption of meats processed with nitrites (producing nitrates as a byproduct) goes back at least several centuries, maybe a millennium.
"Farmed meat", if by that you mean factory-farmed meat, is facially plausible as a cause, in that it fits the timeframe. However, people with metabolic syndrome who switch to an all-meat diet, even if the meat is factory-farmed, tend to improve rather than worsening.
array_key_first•2mo ago
> Mass consumption of meats processed with nitrites (producing nitrates as a byproduct) goes back at least several centuries, maybe a millennium.
Incorrect, at least in what you mean by 'mass'. We eat significantly more meat now than 50 years ago.
> However, people with metabolic syndrome who switch to an all-meat diet, even if the meat is factory-farmed, tend to improve rather than worsening.
There's a few huge, glaring problems here:
1. You made this up, this isn't actually the conclusion of any study anywhere.
2. Any restrictive diet, yes ANY, can and will cause you to lose weight and therefore work against 'metabolic syndrome' (which, again, is not a disease, it's a syndrome). Yes, eating less calories WILL cause you to lose weight. You can achieve the same thing by eating only sugar, or only bread, or only cheese.
3. We know, for a fact, that diets with high meat consumption are correlated with obesity, heart disease, etc. We know diets LOW in meat consumption, particularly red meat or meat high in saturated fats, are correlated with lower CVD risk and longer longevity. Do with that what you will.
And, if you still don't buy many decades of studies on this, you can also just use your intuition.
Look around the world at where we see obesity and where we don't. We see it in the UK, Canada, the US. We don't see it in Japan, parts of Asia, and the Mediterranean. What's the difference?
Those places have a culture of eating significantly less meat, especially red meat. They also have a culture of eating smaller portions. Many of them have a culture of walking. Many of them still eat processed foods.
And, none of this even touches on the carcinogenic factors of red meat. We know, for sure, red meat is carcinogenic - it's classified the same as alcohol and tobacco.
Really what's going on is people are trading off stuff they think might be bad for stuff we know is bad.
There's a lot of people who won't drink a diet coke because it's 'poison' but will happily eat bacon. When we know bacon causes cancer, but we don't know if aspartame does, despite us studying it to death.
It's a form of self destruction. People think to be healthy you must deprive yourself, you must suffer. It's just not true.
kragen•2mo ago
UncleMeat•2mo ago
We have this (reasonably) rigid definition that grants the appearance of specificity. But there are almost surely UPFs that are fine and there are probably non-UPFs that cause the same problems as UPFs. Potato chips are hyper palatable, but are not UPFs.
So what is the benefit of saying "avoid UPFs" over "avoid junk food?" At least saying "avoid junk food" makes the fuzziness apparent. But by focusing on this UPF definition (which is almost surely not the actual thing that is causing negative health outcomes) we end up in weird scenarios where potato chips and bean-to-bar chocolate are fine but wheat bread with preservatives are not even if it turns out that the preservatives aren't the source of any problem.
sigwinch•2mo ago
UncleMeat•2mo ago
It is the case that several of the prominent voices against UPFs have said some ridiculous things in this direction. Like that a packaged lasagna that is made entirely from ingredients and processes that a home cook would use to make lasagna is bad because it comes from the same corporations and market forces that also produce the frozen lasagnas that are loaded with stabilizers and added sugar.
sigwinch•2mo ago
_aavaa_•2mo ago
kragen•2mo ago
Potato-chip bags are probably the most sophisticated packaging used for any food you see routinely.
That does not, of course, mean that they are bad for you.
kragen•2mo ago
mmooss•2mo ago
Not "almost" or "probably"; both are certain: Any description of reality fails on those standards. Always, there are exceptions and edge cases: 'We have this (reasonably) rigid definition that grants the appearance of specificity. But there are almost surely X that are fine and there are probably non-X that cause the same problems as X.'
To meet your standards, we would need a list of every food and its status - and that couldn't be created without impossibly extensive research.
That's why humans use imperfect models and categories - reality is too complex. The most specific, usable category seems to be 'ultra-processed foods'.
> So what is the benefit of saying "avoid UPFs" over "avoid junk food?"
Good question. Both categorizations will be flawed, but maybe UPF is a better fit or easier for people to understand.
randycupertino•2mo ago
bryanlarsen•2mo ago
IAmBroom•2mo ago
They are speaking in generalities, about a general category.
UncleMeat•2mo ago
4d4m•2mo ago
array_key_first•2mo ago
randycupertino•2mo ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC242073/
array_key_first•2mo ago
The top of the carcinogen scales is alcohol, tobacco, and red meat. Almost everything else falls into categories that 'might' cause cancer.
IAmBroom•2mo ago
cameldrv•2mo ago
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.
unparagoned•2mo ago
general1465•2mo ago
_aavaa_•2mo ago
zug_zug•2mo ago
You’re welcome to do your own years of research to learn more (everything, cooking, freezing, drying, blending, adding acids affects amino acids and certainly bacteria in the food) but until then stick with what the studies prove
JoeAltmaier•2mo ago
If 'the science' is so conclusive, then maybe a single link to a single study would be an appropriate response.
zug_zug•2mo ago
IAmBroom•2mo ago
UncleMeat•2mo ago
The UPF definition includes a ton of very distinct things. It is unlikely that emulsifiers, preservatives, food dyes, added sugar, and removed fiber all produce the same health responses. Science showing correlations between UPF consumption and health outcomes also don't tend to show a dose response, which is odd. We'd expect lots of UPF consumption to be very bad and for some UPF consumption to be kind of bad, but we don't tend to see this in the data.
Nutritional research is also enormously difficult to perform. Any sort of controlled study is necessarily over short periods of time. Long term studies come with all of the messy confounds that make it remarkably difficult to determine causation.
zug_zug•2mo ago
And I really don’t understand your point at all. All science starts with observing a correlation and deducing a cause years to centuries later.
But you don’t wait for newton to start believing in gravity
UncleMeat•2mo ago
Existing published research has not consistently found a dose response.
The authors are also not just saying "hey here is some science." They are advocating for policies that say that plain potato chips can be in schools but sour cream and onion potato chips cannot.
Lord-Jobo•2mo ago
Because you really can interpret any of these in a lot of the situations where someone is asking “why”.
metalman•2mo ago
it is a food substitute. food is composed of recognisable ingedients. what comes from factorys has no connection or relation to that. the unspoken premise is that pre prepared stuff with a label is somehow part of a continuity. , pared= to cut/divided
prepared=cut/divided~for you
pre prepared= wtf?
_aavaa_•2mo ago
Jensson•2mo ago
Its pure meat, meat is food. What do you mean?
stephen_g•2mo ago
Needing to chew less processed food may help just by being kind of rate-limiting (slowing down how fast you can get the food in), but also the enzymes in your saliva have time to start working on the food before you swallow it.
If I recall correctly I have also read (perhaps the same article, but maybe somewhere else) that some processes related to digestion might be triggered when you start eating (chewing), so the fact that you can eat so many calories so quickly before those processes get going might make a big difference too.
lentil_soup•2mo ago
UncleMeat•2mo ago
Some people say that it is lack of fiber. Some people say that it is inflammation caused by preservatives and/or stabilizers. Some people say it is the hyperpaletability, which encourages people to overconsume calories. Some people say it is just the high amounts of sugar and salt. And it is unlikely that all of these things contribute equally such that they should all be regulated the same.
macNchz•2mo ago
glitchc•2mo ago
macNchz•2mo ago
glitchc•2mo ago
IAmBroom•2mo ago
As an aggregate, the category of foods appears to be bad for us.
And we aren't sure why yet.
hexaga•2mo ago
No. I can look at a picture of gross food, or imagine it, and be nauseated. Restricting potential causes this tightly is wrong. UPFs have a huge causal surface--how one ingredient breaks down into nutrients is basically not optimized at all compared to all the other stuff. Why only look at the unoptimized part as causal origin, when the optimization is the common factor making it bad?
To put it another way, we know all the stuff that has had a ton of work put into making it something lots of people will buy, is just generally bad for unclear reasons. Examining the aspect which has had very little work put into it is clearly not the way to go.
It could be something as weird as people's built-in heuristics for which food to eat (cravings) being actually kinda important to hit specific nutrient breakpoints at different times. By subsuming those cravings using UPF technology, that stops working and general health suffers.
It could be that the baseline palatability of the output of the mechanical process is low, and so the product is universally combined with an additive that recovers palatability, but has some health drawback.
The overarching pattern here is that optimization geared toward overcoming people's heuristics of what to consume makes these kinds of decisions all the time. Doing one thing to make it cheaper to produce makes it worse at getting people to buy it, but we can just cheat back the ability to get people to buy it by turning the dial on another thing that reliably makes people want to buy it, at the cost of being horrible for them.
4d4m•2mo ago
Jensson•2mo ago
macNchz•2mo ago
general1465•2mo ago
Peel some potatoes, cook them and you have a dinner in said 40 minutes.
And I have no idea why this would be classified as ultraprocessed food.
SPICLK2•2mo ago
macNchz•2mo ago
macNchz•2mo ago
sigwinch•2mo ago
htek•2mo ago
sigwinch•2mo ago
4d4m•2mo ago
throwaway89201•2mo ago
lentil_soup•2mo ago
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.
mr_mitm•2mo ago
sigwinch•2mo ago
lentil_soup•2mo ago
Concrete3286•2mo ago
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).
UncleMeat•2mo ago
alkyon•2mo ago
Ground beef its not the same thing
UncleMeat•2mo ago
When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?
mrguyorama•2mo ago
Because the fat fraction matters.
Reclaimed chicken has lots of connective tissue and skin, which are fatty and has different makeup than say, the breast.
>When I make stock with a chicken carcass a lot of the stuff I consume came from the bones, ligaments, and tendons in the chicken rather than from lean meat. What makes extracting that into water different than extracting that into a paste?
In a stew, one or two chicken carcasses will leach lots of oil and fat into a large stew that fills ten bowls. Specific recipes will also explicitly call for you to remove that fat, and most consumers want soups that are fairly not fatty.
In reclaimed meats, one carcass gets you a couple nuggets. It's up to 30% fat, and unlike say 85% ground beef, will be mixed with thickeners and flour that will soak up that fat during cooking and not let it escape consumption.
Personally, I think mechanically separated meat and other sausage and "use the whole animal" systems are good and delicious. But I'm a fatty. And even I know not to eat baloney every day after one week where I ate a baloney sandwich every day and had rather negative bathroom experiences.
Fat isn't "unhealthy" like the 90s sugar industry wanted you to believe, but it is calorie dense and delicious, which drives you to eat more of it, and means eating the same volume of food will give you more calories.
One pound of skinned chicken breast is like 500 calories. One pound of nuggets is like 1000.
We aren't going to find a set of additives or preservatives or ingredients as the culprit because it's not about the chemistry. It's psychology and biology. The root of the problem is that PepsiCo makes more money if you eat chips and soda every day than if you don't. As long as PepsiCo makes more money from you eating yourself to death, that's going to be the outcome.
Plenty of you get angry about the "military industrial complex" but PepsiCo did significantly more revenue than Raytheon last year: $91 billion, and takes about a 10% profit margin.
The closest you can come in the "ingredient" dimension is things like regulating added sugar and added salt and added colors and added fats, but that's easy to bypass. Your soda wont have added sugar, it will have something like "Apple juice" as an ingredient that is almost itself entirely sugar and water.
emchammer•2mo ago
UncleMeat•2mo ago
IAmBroom•2mo ago
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.
jhallenworld•2mo ago
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.
sigwinch•2mo ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL•2mo ago
ajross•2mo ago
The Guardian couldn't even be jazzed to research their own story.