It’s terribly broken, which is unsurprising since it was never designed to do what it does, and ends up placing healthy, non addictive foods under the ultra processed category 4, while including hyper palatable foods that are not healthy at all in categories 1-3.
Hyper palatability, which is much better defined and is designed to capture what the NOVA system is actually used for, is likely a better categorization.
My favorite nonsensical category 4 classification is anything with achiote in it. It's not part of a traditional European diet, and it's often used to add color so it makes the list, despite saffron having a similar role in European food and booth being a traditional and completely unprocessed ingredient.
Speaking of Mesoamerican ingredients, nixtamal is pretty heavily processed, and is a staple in many areas, but it's much healthier than unprocessed corn which can cause pellagra when used as a staple food.
I mostly agree but wouldn't swap "Ultra" for "Hyper": those are great to sell iPhones but their maximalism tends to push our understanding in emotional zone, which is good for marketing but dommageable for decision making.
The NOVA definition is meant to classify ultra processed foods, correct?
You seem to want the NOVA definition to classify between “healthy, non addictive foods” vs “hyper palatable foods”.
What these studies are doing is finding correlations between ultra processed foods and bad health. While the definition you seem to want would cause all sorts of circular definitions.
Yes, I've begun translating "ultra-processed foods" to "junk food". It's roughly the same meaning and roughly the same amount of scientific rigor. UPF sounds scientific and specific but it's neither.
OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.
This is giving the "ultra-processed" term too much credit. Organic is at least pretty explicitly specified by the USDA (even if that definition is perhaps not what most people think or expect when they read the term).
Ultra-processed doesn't even have a single, consistent definition.
Agreed. I hope these terms go away. I think what people tend to mean is "calorie dense, low in nutrients, low in fiber", or something along those lines, and the term "processed" makes it far more confusing.
"Processed" ends up meaning anything from "high in sugar" to "long shelf life" or "one of a dozen kinds of artificial sweetener" etc. It does more harm than good.
I can have an extremely high fiber, high protein, nutritionally well rounded meal that's also "ultra processed".
Someone mentioned Nova. Nova is a PERFECT example of how god awful the term is. When asked to classify foods into Nova categories there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists.
Time after time, Nova is shown to be more confusing than helpful, with worse than random results. Nova itself doesn't even attempt to correlate with "healthy".
I was thinking of the example of crisps which are basically potatoes with oil and salt, baked. If you are going to call baking ultra processing then it would include rather a lot of things.
> "Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept
This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.
The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)
Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.
Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.
When companies have engineers sitting around figuring out the precise amounts of salt, sugar, and crunch required to force a person to eat 4 servings of something in one sitting… yeah, at least put a warning label on it. I don’t know that I agree with outright bans or anything, but people should be properly warned about the risks.
Most of the things on sale at “Whole Foods” are ultra-processed these days. Anything that requires effort to make gluten free or vegan for example. Like impossible burger. Extreme ultra-processed. Or gluten free bread.
Please don’t tell me impossible burger patties are like cigarettes.
Perhaps more obviously, a multi-vitamin is considered "ultra processed" under Nova. A fiber supplement is considered "ultra processed". Lab grade creatine is "ultra processed".
They certainly have such offerings, but I'm perplexed at how you get to 'most of the things on sale'. The most processed things I get from there on a regular basis are bread, cookies, or alcoholic drinks. It's very rare that I find myself looking at the label of anything I can purchase there wondering how it was made.
I think of “UPF” the way I think of “BMI.” Useful insofar as it provides an intial signal for further investigation. The term UPF provides a way to group certain foods according to their likelihood of helping me reach my health goals.
I think people's intuition is generally reliable, though. What food has the term "UPF" helped you learn is 'unhealthy', which you otherwise would have thought of as healthy?
For losing fat, "fried chicken", "chocolate cake", and "sugary drinks" are intuitively unhelpful, and "vegetables", "lean meat", "water" is more "healthy".
There is no distinction between ultra proccessed, or hyper palatable, or most anything with a long list of ingredients.
None of it is good for you, and if you never eat sugar, will smell and taste horrible once your pallet recovers.
I never touch anything with sugar, or ingedients simmilar to those found in cleaning products, just food, I do just fine, it takes a bit more time, but I never
end up feeling off, which was common when I ate regular grocerie store products.
Quiting sugar completly, not just eliminating added sugar was the key, sugar bieng a white crystaline substance is the very deffinition of ultra proccessed, as it is absolutly concentrated and can not be refined further, and is found nowhere in nature.
Do you have anything to report in terms of mental or physical health after making this change, both short and long term? I quit sugar a long time ago I was just interested to read your experience compared to my own. I certainly had withdrawal and intense cravings to begin with and I wasn't particularly overeating or enjoying a poorly balanced diet at the time. I caught myself eating cookies and spitting them into the trash without swallowing so it "didnt count" before I decided I was going to ditch the stuff forever.
I'd ask the people saying "there's no definition for UPF" or that the NOVA system is terrible, try and come up with your own improvement. As they're attempts to help classify these foods.
Not everyone has a good nutritional understanding of their foods, so these are short form efforts to try and help.
Rather than knocking what's out there, how about also trying to determine an alternative and see how challenging it is.
I read a lot of people poking holes, but not a lot of suggestions of how to improve things.
Im not one, but for me I just have ingredients that write the food off for me. Sugar, maltodextrin, aspartame etc. is a no. Rapeseed oil, palm oil etc.
Its a lot easier than trying to decide if something is part of a category based on multiple factors, it either contains DO NOT EATs or it doesnt. I'm already going to read the ingredients on everything I buy so therrs no extra work. I can pick the word "sugar" out of any jumble of words immediately now.
No one has managed to come up for an improvement for the zodiac system used in astrology. There's countless studies on it, all inconclusive at best, once subject to reproduction and meta analyses. Should we keep using, despite a lack of evidence, because there's nothing better? Why not just discount it completely? If discounting astrology completely is the right move, than so is discounting the NOVA system.
Agreed. Government should receive its mandate through consent and if people don't want to make these choices, it's not the privilege of experts to enforce their preferences without out that concent. The state should only inform.
drecked|26 days ago
It’s terribly broken, which is unsurprising since it was never designed to do what it does, and ends up placing healthy, non addictive foods under the ultra processed category 4, while including hyper palatable foods that are not healthy at all in categories 1-3.
Hyper palatability, which is much better defined and is designed to capture what the NOVA system is actually used for, is likely a better categorization.
dlcarrier|26 days ago
Speaking of Mesoamerican ingredients, nixtamal is pretty heavily processed, and is a staple in many areas, but it's much healthier than unprocessed corn which can cause pellagra when used as a staple food.
aziaziazi|25 days ago
kelipso|26 days ago
You seem to want the NOVA definition to classify between “healthy, non addictive foods” vs “hyper palatable foods”.
What these studies are doing is finding correlations between ultra processed foods and bad health. While the definition you seem to want would cause all sorts of circular definitions.
IcyWindows|26 days ago
It's like "organic".
Too many variables are conflated to make any of this reasonable.
bryanlarsen|26 days ago
OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.
rsanek|26 days ago
Ultra-processed doesn't even have a single, consistent definition.
staticassertion|26 days ago
"Processed" ends up meaning anything from "high in sugar" to "long shelf life" or "one of a dozen kinds of artificial sweetener" etc. It does more harm than good.
I can have an extremely high fiber, high protein, nutritionally well rounded meal that's also "ultra processed".
Someone mentioned Nova. Nova is a PERFECT example of how god awful the term is. When asked to classify foods into Nova categories there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8181985/
Time after time, Nova is shown to be more confusing than helpful, with worse than random results. Nova itself doesn't even attempt to correlate with "healthy".
fhdjfjkafk|26 days ago
Redirect your energy toward something useful.
46493168|26 days ago
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
Which variables are conflated?
tim333|25 days ago
JumpCrisscross|26 days ago
This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.
The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
kelipso|26 days ago
michaelhoney|25 days ago
wryoak|26 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.
Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.
BirAdam|26 days ago
zeech|26 days ago
Besides, 'ultraprocessed food' itself is and has always been a useless buzzword (buzzphrase?).
bcatanzaro|26 days ago
Please don’t tell me impossible burger patties are like cigarettes.
46493168|26 days ago
staticassertion|26 days ago
anigbrowl|26 days ago
46493168|26 days ago
I don’t need a term to be perfect to be useful.
rgoulter|26 days ago
For losing fat, "fried chicken", "chocolate cake", and "sugary drinks" are intuitively unhelpful, and "vegetables", "lean meat", "water" is more "healthy".
metalman|26 days ago
HK-NC|26 days ago
NoPicklez|26 days ago
Not everyone has a good nutritional understanding of their foods, so these are short form efforts to try and help.
Rather than knocking what's out there, how about also trying to determine an alternative and see how challenging it is.
I read a lot of people poking holes, but not a lot of suggestions of how to improve things.
HK-NC|26 days ago
dlcarrier|26 days ago
techblueberry|26 days ago
ottah|25 days ago
ChrisArchitect|26 days ago
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868287