Discussions I’ve seen for why they are bad always basically boil down to “it’s the ingredients” without wanting to say this.
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.
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.
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.
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
Linnaeus did this, and allowed himself to be wrong, and I argue his organization alone was necessary to talk about theory.
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.
They certainly meet the ultra processed foods criterion.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
They are speaking in generalities, about a general category.
The top of the carcinogen scales is alcohol, tobacco, and red meat. Almost everything else falls into categories that 'might' cause cancer.
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.
Because you really can interpret any of these in a lot of the situations where someone is asking “why”.
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
If 'the science' is so conclusive, then maybe a single link to a single study would be an appropriate response.
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.
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
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.
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?
Its pure meat, meat is food. What do you mean?
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.
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.
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.
As an aggregate, the category of foods appears to be bad for us.
And we aren't sure why yet.
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.
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.
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).
Ground beef its not the same thing
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Guardian couldn't even be jazzed to research their own story.
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