One way to think of this is that a food which is refined moves further and further away from the original 'real food' as it naturally occurs. ~80% of a wheat 'corn' is the white part, ~20% of a soy bean is oil, and 15-20% of a beet is sugar.
Similarly, one apple yields about 1/3c of juice. Drinking 2c worth of juice (in an hour?) is fairly common but nobody ever eats 6 apples in an hour
I'm not disagreeing at all about refinement or the health. I'm just saying these refined substances are absolutely found in our kitchen, and used in quantity. They're nothing special or unique to processed foods.
If you bake bread or cake or brownies, for basic recipes it's nutritionally virtually identical to processed crackers, cookies, and bars.
And those sentences were likely in a larger context but chosen by the author as a way to say something the reader could relate to.
There is clearly a meaningful distinction between unprocessed and processed foods, as indicated by your example of apple juice, but by various definitions, apple juice is just a processed food, not an ultraprocessed food.
I don't want to claim that the popular concept of "ultra-processed foods" is super coherent, because I do agree there's not much sense in which a Twinkie is more processed than tofu or cheese. But there is a real problem that it seems like the researcher here is pointing at.
My impression is that they don't actually need to list "flavors" or anything special on the label when they do this, because they are just adding additional orange juice back, and it is highly unlikely that the result is nutritionally any different from fresh-squeezed juice.
The other argument for distinguishing ultra-processed foods is that even if the additives that wouldn't be found in normal processed foods aren't nutritionally significant in themselves, the resulting food is more palatable, so people consume more of it, but I don't think most people would say that bottled orange juice is more palatable than fresh-squeezed orange juice.
Anyway, it is theoretically possible that bottled "ultra-processed" orange juice is somehow less healthy than normal "processed" fresh-squeezed orange juice, but the point the parent comment was trying to make was that juice may be in itself unhealthy because the amount you consume is so much more than you would consume from eating fruit directly, and I was just trying to clarify that although true, this argument about juice in general is somewhat separate from the distinction between processed and ultraprocessed foods because fresh juice has that issue and can already be considered processed.
The meta point is that looking at ingredients alone doesn't really help much from a nutrition and health perspective. But also that nutritional science is a very inaccurate science as it's hard to get humans to actually obey studies and the digestive and energy systems of the body are "complex" systems, not just complicated. Any nutritional science is inherently flawed (or inaccurate) so the fall back of "eat like your 10k year old ancestors would" is safest from an evolutionary perspective.
This is my understanding as well. I believe it has more to do with creating consistency with the product because different fruit (and even the same fruit from different lots or seasons) will vary in qualities like acidity, brix, color etc. and consumers expect consistency. It actually becomes a fairly interesting operations research problem on how to blend various lots to arrive at a consistent product.
I'm guessing these quotes are taken so far out of context that they've become meaningless. It's possible the speaker was referring to something specific with "these substances", but we'll never know by reading the article.
This series of blog posts does an excellent job of summarizing the evidence:
I know Catherine Shanahan has written about this link and talks about how easily seed oils cause inflammation through free radicals. But how do we get from inflammation to obesity?
However, if you do assume the existence of metabolic syndrome, you can pretty much justify a link between anything that could potentially be its cause and obesity. For example, if seed oils cause some sort of metabolic dysfunction resulting in metabolic syndrome, then that would then result in obesity.
Obviously, if you assume that obesity is just caused by excess consumption of calories, and that obesity is then the cause of diabetes, and that there is no separate metabolic syndrome it becomes harder to justify this kind of theory.
That link doesn't explicitly use the terms "metabolic syndrome" or "syndrome x" but it seems like it is probably implicitly assuming its existence.
No one really knows. There are some theories.
One thing is linoleic acid converts into endocannabinoids, which stimulate appetite. Too much n6, too much appetite, obesity, is the theory.
If you google around on e.g. pubmeb you can find various papers proposing this.
But there's probably more to it than that; there are pig and mouse studies where the animals are fed isocaloric diets, but the animals eating high LA get fat. So that strongly suggests that it's not just a appetite-based overeating thing.
The blog hyperlipid proposed a theory involving ROS signaling at a cellular level; my knowledge of biology and metabolism is sadly minimal, but at a very high level I think the theory is something like, "having too much linoleic acid in the diet signals cells to remain unnaturally insulin-sensitive and accumulate fat".
See also: the blog Fire in a Bottle, which tries to summarize the hyperlipid theory at a less low-level, technical level.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27350414/
https://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2013/08/protons-so-f...
It's quite hard to eat 3500 calories of steak.
It's really easy to eat 3500 calories of snack chips.
But probably the biggest problem for westerners like me is that we know so little about nutrition, despite studying it for decades. Turns out living organisms are extremely complicated.
In our intellectual tradition we take that little knowledge and use it as if it were a solid and complete set of facts.
Truly: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/what_is_ultra-processed_...
or https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986467/
From the linked article above:
The most commonly eaten ultra-processed foods in the UK are:
Industrialised bread (11 per cent)
Pre-packaged meals (7.7 per cent)
Breakfast cereals (4.4 per cent)
Sausages and other reconstituted meat products (3.8 per cent)
All of the "ultra-processed" examples you give are exactly what I'm talking about -- industrialized bread and breakfast cereals are made of precisely the flour, sugar and oil I'm referring to.
It's rather like me saying gun control is an issue and you pointing out that iron ore seldom kills anyone.
I wouldn't say so, sugar and the oils don't exist in nature on their own, and primates can't really eat wheat, corn and other grains.
Same goes for the sugars.
The hydrogenated fats.
Those "flours", sugars, and fats make up the bulk of that food.
The hippies were right: Eat food, mostly plants, mostly raw, and make it taste nice.
This is ridiculous. Processed (or "ultra-processed") foods are mainly flour (wheat, corn, etc.), sugar (sugarcane, sugar beet), and refined oils (soy, canola). All of these are found in the kitchen and are very much "real foods".
Yes, processed foods include small amounts of ingredients like emulsifiers and natural flavors, but by weight they're a tiny proportion. The idea that they make up most or all of a product by weight is utterly ludicrous.
It's fine and good to be aware that processed food doesn't contain the "antioxidants and phytochemicals" found in unprocessed foods, and they may be calorie-dense and low in fiber. But it's unhelpful and utterly dishonest when nutritionists or scientists make absurd claims about processed foods being made mostly out of ingredients not found in our own kitchens.