>Japan has ultra processed foods and they don't seem to have an obesity epidemic.
Most of that's from a much stronger national guidance on weight control + societal expectations, but IIRC they also are gaining weight. Their ultra processed foods (in the salt and preservative sense) are also why they have one of the highest rates of stomach cancer.
> They also don't have a marijuana epidemic.
Not sure if I'd categorize the US as in a marijuana epidemic (and this is coming from someone who doesn't consume it and dislikes being around it) but even if we were, the states with the highest marijuana usage (west coast and NE) and the states with the highest obesity rates (deep south) are almost non-overlapping circles. If we're tying a drug to be obesity rates I'd be much more willing to believe it's the American propensity to chug large amounts of cheap 100-120 calories a pop beer.
Japan is probably evidence that the surrounding food culture matters at least as much as the existence of UPFs. You can sell plenty of processed food without getting the same outcome if portion sizes, eating habits, school meals, and daily activity are different. The marijuana comparison feels like a non sequitur, though.
I don't think marijuana use is unrelated. From the NIH in 2024:
> Among adults 19 to 30 years old, approximately 42% reported cannabis use in the past year, 29% in the past month, and 10% daily use (use on 20 or more occasions in the past 30 days). Among adults 35 to 50, reports of use reached 29%, 19%, and 8%, respectively.
Those numbers are huge, in absolute terms. Marijuana provably results in higher rates of obesity by simulating appetite in multiple different ways.
In my own experience, marijuana use directly correlated with bodyweight. Even relatively little marijuana resulted in serious cravings, often late in the evening. I don't think you need a study to validate this, it's an extremely widely understood effect.
When you have millions of people consuming an appetite enhancer, it's almost crazy to suggest that it doesn't play a significant role in UPF consumption or health in general.
I don't see this mentioned in the transcript. What is the basis for you mentioning it? Seems like a weird thing to throw in without explanation. I say this as someone that does not consume cannabis, btw, so this is not a defense of cannabis usage.
Japan may come up a lot in discussions about longevity, but doesn't Japan have a drinking culture that is very unhealthy? It's pretty well established that alcohol has a serious impact on health in numerous ways. There is even a condition called alcohol-related dementia.
The concept of 'ultra-processed foods' in Japan has some significant differences from the rest of the world. The food safety regulations are actually quite strict. What follows is a list of some synthetic materials found in US foods which are PROHIBITED in Japanese consumables. So the statement 'Japan has ultra processed foods and they don't seem to have an obesity epidemic.' is a misunderstanding of what food might look like American Ultra-Processed food and is missing any of these toxic ingredients.
Azodicarbonamide (ADA) : Dough-conditioning/bleaching agent; oxidizes flour proteins to improve elasticity and whiteness. Currently found in some supermarket sandwich breads and hamburger/hot dog buns.
Potassium Bromate (KBrO₃) : Oxidizing agent that strengthens gluten structure and increases dough rise/volume. Classified a possible human carcinogen (IARC 2B); banned in the EU, Canada, and UK; California has banned it starting 2027. Still federally permitted in the US in trace residual amounts. Regional and bulk/wholesale bakery bread products.
Chlorine Gas / Chlorine Dioxide : Bleaching and maturing agents for wheat flour. Currently used in "bleached flour," a listed ingredient in many cake-mix and biscuit-mix products.
Ammonium Chloride (synthetic) : Yeast nutrient/dough conditioner that accelerates fermentation. Used in some commercial bread and cracker doughs as a processing aid.
2. Synthetic Antioxidants & Preservatives
Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) / Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT) ; Synthetic antioxidants preventing fat/oil rancidity. NTP lists BHA as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen." Some current chewing gum and packaged-snacks.
Tert-Butylated Hydroquinone (TBHQ) : Synthetic antioxidant preservative used at very low levels to extend shelf life of oils and fried/processed foods. Pop-Tarts (Kellanova) and Little Debbie snack cakes.
Propylparaben : Antifungal preservative. EU treats it as effectively banned over endocrine-disruption concerns; California has banned it in food starting 2027; it remains FDA-permitted and is under an active FDA chemical-safety review opened in 2024. Advocacy groups (EWG) have specifically petitioned makers like Entenmann's and Sara Lee to remove it.
Thiodipropionic Acid & Dilauryl Thiodipropionate : Synergist antioxidants used alongside BHA/BHT in fats and shortening.
Stearyl Citrate : Antioxidant/chelating agent in margarines and oil-based dressings.
Ethoxyquin : Antioxidant/color stabilizer, originally developed as a pesticide; used to preserve color in ground spices. Bulk and store-brand ground paprika and chili powder spice blends.
Stannous Chloride : Antioxidant/color-retention agent for canned foods. Canned white asparagus.
3. Emulsifiers, Stabilizers & Texturizers
Polysorbate 60 & Polysorbate 80 : Emulsifiers for oil/water blending in baked goods, ice cream, and creamers. Cool Whip (Kraft) and Coffee-Mate liquid/powdered creamers.
Synthetic Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC / Cellulose Gum) : Thickener/stabilizer preventing ice-crystal formation. Common ingredient in many mainstream ice creams (store-brand and name-brand alike — check the specific carton) and low-fat salad dressings.
Sucrose Acetate Isobutyrate (SAIB) : Weighting agent keeping citrus flavor oils suspended. Used in some citrus-flavored sports drinks and sodas currently on the market.
Dioctyl Sodium Sulfosuccinate (DSS / Docusate Sodium) : Wetting agent improving dispersibility of powders. Used in instant cocoa/hot chocolate mix formulations.
Oxystearin Anti-crystallizing agent keeping liquid vegetable oils clear under refrigeration. Used in some refrigerated bottled vegetable/salad oils, typically store-brand.
4. Synthetic Colorants
Titanium Dioxide : White opacifying/color additive. Banned as a food additive in th...
Ultra processed food is about 50-60% of American calories, versus 38% in Japan [1]. Also try visiting a Japanese 7-11, there's tons of fresh-made food options with vegetables and such.
They walk everywhere. That is, they have a transit system that allows them to walk (and bike) everywhere. That combines with smaller portions and strong social pressure to remain trim.
Couple caveats:
1) There is a tradeoff in lower average body size/height, which doesn't seem to bother them as a whole, but which any individual athlete/model/actor/businessman might curse.
2) I know of several Japanese men in the 240-400 pound range. Many of them seem to enjoy being larger, but for those who don't, being Japanese in Japan wasn't a silver bullet.
> Buying into the food industry also facilitated the tobacco companies in applying the knowledge, skills, and strategies developed from their tobacco businesses to another business domain in ultraprocessed foods and beverages. For example, Philip Morris applied its aggressive marketing tactics developed from its tobacco businesses to market ultraprocessed foods to the US public. Furthermore, US tobacco companies and their food companies were systematically involved with developing hyper-palatable foods, which have elevated addictive properties.
>Tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be classified as fat and sodium hyper-palatable foods (HPF) and 80% more likely to be classified as carbohydrate and sodium HPF than foods that were not tobacco-owned between 1988 and 2001 (P-values = 0.005–0.009).
> Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds led the transition to sweetened beverages in 1963 when it purchased Hawaiian Punch from Pacific Hawaiian Products Company, according to the documents. The beverage previously had been promoted to adults as a cocktail mixer, but R.J. Reynolds sought to beef up the drink’s “Punchy” mascot – a counterpart to the “Joe Camel” cartoon character the company used to promote cigarettes – and featured it on toys, schoolbook covers, comics, tumblers, clothing and TV commercials. Punchy became the “best salesman the beverage ever had,” according to tobacco industry documents.
> In the ’60s and ’70s, the company conducted taste tests with children and mothers to evaluate sweetness, colors and flavors for Hawaiian Punch product line extensions. The children’s preferences were prioritized, the authors noted.
> By 1983, R.J. Reynolds introduced the nation’s first juice box, marketed as a “handy little carton that comes with its very own straw.” This innovation was largely responsible for a 34 percent jump in sales, according to industry documents.
> At the end of 1988, Philip Morris Companies purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion. In 1989, Kraft merged with Philip Morris's General Foods unit—makers of Oscar Mayer meats, Maxwell House coffee, Jell-O gelatin, Budget Gourmet frozen dinners, Entenmann's baked goods, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light and Tang powdered beverage mixes, Post Cereals, Shake 'n Bake flavored coatings and numerous other packaged foods—as Kraft General Foods. Its aggressive product development was reversed after the merger, as it became slow in addressing issues on its product lines due to its size, and also company politics.[4]
> In 2000, Philip Morris (renamed Altria in 2003) acquired Nabisco Holdings for $18.9 billion and merged the company with Kraft Foods the same year.[212][4] Also in 2000, the company acquired Balance Bar.[213] In 2001, Philip Morris sold 280 million Kraft shares via the third-largest IPO of all time, retaining an 88.1% stake in the company.
Okay... Pop Tarts are also Kellogg's, not a tobacco company. But let me pick some other examples.
Eggo waffles predate RJ Reynolds getting into this by 10 years.
Twinkies were introduced in the 1930s.
I'm not defending ultra-processed foods nor tobacco companies. I'm just saying the authors have a major blind spot if they think the concept or popularity of ultra-processed foods started in the 1960s.
The Twinkie of 1940 is very different from the Twinkie of 2000. Lots of old and sort of OK things got corrupted when pulled into the corporate-Zerg-slime
I recently discovered just how much food engineering goes into products like potato chips and similar items, not only in the flavor, but also in the texture and even the sound it makes.
There's someone at the factory who basically spends their time eating samples from new batches to ensure they're exactly as expected.
> “About 60% of the calories in Americans’ diets are from ultra-processed foods,” says Schmidt, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event in May. “In the mid-’80s, when we see ultra-processed foods starting to scale up in the American food supply, we also see obesity starting to really rise. That is the moment when some of the largest food companies are owned by tobacco companies.”
A reminder here that while there's an important directional claim behind stuff like this, "ultra-processed food" is an extremely silly category that does violence to the argument.
UPFs include:
* Whole wheat bread (most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health)
* Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
* Literally all baby formula
* Any kind of plant-based meat replacement
* Many supermarket hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers)
You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite).
You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering. Hyperpalatable foods are almost always UPFs, but the other direction doesn't hold at all.
Shelf-stable hummus and Doritos can both be "ultra-processed", but that doesn't tell you much about why one might encourage overconsumption. Hyperpalatability seems much closer to the actual claim the article is trying to make.
I think it literally is the claim the article is trying to make, but "UPF" is the on-trend term, despite the fact that most UPFs aren't engineered for hyperpalatability. It's a problem!
> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite).
I would point out that many whole foods are generally shelf-stable (over at least weeks, if not months) without requiring the introduction of chemical stabilizers that don't otherwise "belong."
Chemical stabilizers are generally needed for shelf stability in ultra-processed foods, because of one of the other defining characteristics of ultra-processed foods: their matrix has been disrupted (or constructed anew) such that the food is now highly labile (biochemical term: "labile organic matter"), i.e. very easy to break down into nutrients. Which applies not only to you breaking such foods down in your gut, but also to bacteria and fungi breaking these foods down on the shelf.
And as it so happens, because these foods are labile, any such nutrients that do come from breaking down the food, come very quickly. Labile carbohydrates are insulin-spiking carbohydrates. Labile fats are atherosclerosis-inducing fats. Etc.
Your body evolved to process (metabolize, remove from circulation, etc.) metabolic inputs in an environment where most available foods were the opposite of labile (a.k.a. recalcitrant organic matter). So most meals would give a slow/gentle level of metabolic throughput; with rare spikes of higher throughput from the rare natural labile food, and then plenty of low-throughput time to recover from such events. Your body didn't evolve to be able to process high-throughput metabolic inputs every meal.
And this is why the the presence of chemical stabilizers in a food is actually a very helpful criterion in the definition of "ultra-processed food"! The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis.
A boiled or fried egg is processed, but not ultra-processed. (The ovalbumin matrix in egg isn't destroyed by just heating it up. Just like the protein matrix in a steak isn't destroyed by just heating it up.) It's still a whole food, per se.
But scrambled eggs, or an omelette, are closer to being ultra-processed; simply because you've mechanically emulsified the egg together, and in the process, have broken down that matrix. (Same reason that ground beef is ultra-processed.)
But also: raw egg, like milk, is already one of those rare naturally-labile foods. (That's why developing embryos can make use of the nutrients therein. It's also why salmonella loves raw eggs.) Not necessarily for humans (none of our gut enzymes are particularly good at taking apart ovalbumin), but many species have evolved into obligate ovivory for a reason.
The Nova classification is generally how people interpret this stuff. Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
> Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen
I don't think that's a useful distinction. Many people make pasta noodles or sausage in their own kitchens, for example, and both of those are ultra-processed by every definition.
Also, IMHO, it's a mistake to think of UPFs as only finished food products you get from the grocery store or from restaurants. Many ingredients people use in what they would very much insist is "home cooking", are themselves UPFs, and so cause the resulting "home-cooked" food to be a UPF.
The FDA's recent categorization of sandwiches as generally being UPFs, for example, is due in part to people using UPF breads like Wonderbread for sandwiches; and in part due to people using reconstituted/preserved deli meats in sandwiches; but it's also due to even people who think they're being healthy, smearing a UPF "sandwich spread" onto their sandwich bread at the end. (A grilled cheese grilled in butter is a highly-processed food. A grilled cheese grilled in mayo is a UPF, because shelf-stable grocery-store mayo is a UPF.)
I wore a glucose monitor for a few months and tested my blood sugar response to different foods. The worst spike I ever got was American Chinese food: rice+sugary sauce. Brown rice vs white rice makes no difference.
Ice cream didn’t make much of a spike - all that fat. Waffle with maple syrup and peanut butter is completely different profile than waffle without peanut butter.
Most important thing for my blood sugar was portion size. Eat a lot, get a big spike.
Frustrating to me that people argue so much about “processed” vs “unprocessed” food. The real issue I believe is portion sizes.
> The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis. (Unless it's milk and you're a baby.)
You're completely lost me here. You're asserting that because food goes bad, it shouldn't be consumed on a regular basis. That just doesn't track, even a little bit.
Maybe your assertion hinges on the definition of "continuous basis"? I don't know what that means, but, taking it face value, it sounds like nothing should be consumed on a continuous basis other than air.
> The bread you bake at home is ultra-processed; you're the one who ultra-processed it!
This doesn't track either. The common Nova classification for ultra processing leans heavily on the kinds of processes that happen in factories. It's the flour itself that makes bread ultra-processed, since the flour is ultra-processed. When I realized that the four-ingredient bread I make at home for my family is considered ultra-processed, I started paying a lot less attention to the entire discussion.
> The common Nova classification for ultra processing leans heavily on the kinds of processes that happen in factories. [...] I started paying a lot less attention to the entire discussion.
Yes, and that's my point: the Nova UPF label is silly, but you shouldn't let a bad definition get in the way of a good conceptual tool.
"Ultra-processed as any lay person would intuitively understand the concept from the name and a series of examples", and "Ultra-Processed Food as defined by the Nova classification", are two distinct — but not conflicting — concepts. Even if you don't care about the UPF label as Nova defines it, you should still care about whether or not things are "lower-case-u ultra-processed." The Nova definition might be silly, but the concept itself isn't.
If you prefer, I could use a different term, like "highly-processed" or "hyper-processed" here, to distinguish what I'm talking about from the Nova label. But personally, I think it makes sense to actually continue to use the term "ultra-processed", and to just think of Nova as defining the term in a way that overlaps with a useful definition, but which both includes and excludes things that a more-useful and intuitive definition of the term wouldn't. After all, all of Nova's other definitions on the same "spectrum" (unprocessed/minimally-processed, processed ingredients, and processed foods) are perfectly good and useful ones. It makes sense to take that series-of-terms and then extrapolate what moving further in the same direction would take you. And where it lands you is a place that is close to, but not equivalent to, Nova's definition of UPF. Which is the place I'm calling "lower-case-u ultra-processed."
I think it's worth thinking this way, rather than ignoring the Nova classifications altogether, because 1. you still get useful information from knowing that a food is in one of the other Nova categories; and 2. a food being a Nova-labelled UPF still tells you something; and that something may, in combination with what else you know about the food, be enough to tell you that the food is in fact a "lower-case-u ultra-processed" food.
> You're asserting that because food goes bad, it shouldn't be consumed on a regular basis. That just doesn't track, even a little bit.
Because food goes bad quickly for the kind of food it is, yes.
Also, it's not a direct correlation. Lability (or its inverse, recalcitrance) is the denominator; but nutrient "load" is the numerator. A thing can be highly nutritively bio-accessible and be fine, if it's not nutrient-dense in the first place. Cucumber is liable but nutrient-sparse, so its high bio-accessibility does nothing to you.
But given two foods with the same density of a given nutrient, the easier your gut and/or bacteria breaks them down (and/or the more they've already been broken down), the more you should avoid them / more rarely you should consume them.
This is the generalization of the logic of "eat oranges, not orange juice", but taken past the trivial point of "because orange juice contains far more oranges than you'd normally eat" to the more interesting point of "even if you drank only the amount of orange juice that was in one orange, it'd still be worse for you than eating one orange, because no amount of chewing is going to break the orange down as thoroughly as a blender or juicer will, and so no orange will ever be digested and absorbed as quickly as orange juice will."
I would note that while many foods go bad (and this can give you a weak intuition about lability), ultra-processed foods would go bad really quickly if not for the chemical stabilizers in them, because all the processing has made them more labile than any whole food has ever naturally b...
I understand your individual points and I appreciate the response. Unfortunately, I don't find your arguments compelling because you've shifted your statements as you've explained more, and the absolutes you opened with are becoming a lot softer as you're adding more factors and citing additional variables and nuance.
I think it all boils down to "if microbes can eat it super easily then you should avoid it because it's too easy to digest." There's probably something valid there, as I, for example, made my kids oatmeal pancakes yesterday because I wanted something that burned a little slower than the typical flour pancakes.
> most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health
That's a large assertion to make without evidence. Personally, I'm suspicious of all antimicrobial agents' effects on gut microbiota and the knock-on effects on health.
I mean, he's not presenting the evidence here in a hacker news comment, but that doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. There are a bunch of different categories of stabilizers, and only some of them have antimicrobial properties -- most are about maintaining moisture and loaf volume over time.
There are three substances that are predominantly used to inhibit mold growth, though: calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, and sodium benzoate.
The first two are extremely well understood and considered safe globally. The third is still considered safe, but might have some interactions with vitamin C that lead to benzene formation to the tune of several parts per billion. The FDA considers this safe, and has for some time.
"Ultra-Processed Food" is a phrase. It is not a thing. If you want to use it for its media traction, and "nobody knows what it is," define it before you use it.
Instead, everybody has gone for "it is so mysterious," then goes on to cite a bunch of studies about "ultra-processed foods," treating it as a category that categorical statements can be made about.
Name the chemicals, name the processes. They don't because these chemicals and processes are endorsed by massive conglomerates who can pull advertising and lobbying money. When you're vague as hell about everything, it's a case-by-case basis that only affects people who can't bribe as well as others.
And about the people talking about sugars, salt and fats crammed into everything, I'm convinced they never cook. That's taste, and you can pour it in yourself just as well as a corporation. The reason people love it is because it is good. Salt isn't bad for you, it's in fact very, very good for you because it makes micronutrient-rich foods palatable.
Arguing that standard manufactured foods and foods marketed to children are too rich is a different argument, and most importantly for this conversation has nothing to do with the ultraprocessed foods question. Massive food companies are perfectly happy to remove all the fats and sugars from your food and replace them with some weird alcohol sugar or a new form of teflon they just invented a week ago, and to charge you a premium for the privilege of eating it. They literally did that throughout the 80s and 90s.
The narrative intentionally confusing what the above refers to as "hyperpalatability" (a term which is as good as any) with "ultra-processed" (a propaganda term) is a gift to the food industry. It in fact even favors monopolies who can afford to put the bizarre chemical constructions they'll use as alternatives, and to pay regulators to look the other way.
"Ultra-processed foods" is a phrase meant for advertising - even the prefix "ultra-" reminds me of a cigarette ad, describing the filter. The filter was a device which ostensibly makes cigarettes healthier, but instead allows you to smoke far more than you would otherwise, and leads to worse health outcomes. Isn't smoking bad? Smoke our ultra-filtered cigarettes and breathe easy!
The featured article/podcast has the person presenting define "ultra-processed foods" as industrial hyper-palatable foods.
However, it focuses more about how the foods were marketed, and in particular, that the same marketing playbook developed by tobacco companies to market Marlboro and Camel cigarettes was then used to sell Kool-Aid and Miller beer.
Basically, the execs at Phillip Morris and R. J. Reynolds realized that beer, Kool-Aid/sugar drinks, Oreos and cigarettes were more or less all the same type of products - affordable, habit-forming small luxury goods people enjoyed putting in their mouths, and applied the expertise they'd developed on one type of this market (cigarettes) to the rest of it.
You said dislike. I said suspicious. One's an opinion, the other an invitation for science.
> vinegar, salt, and any fermented foods that suppress microbial agents?
In the gut microbiota broad system sequencing experiments I've consumed reports from, even altering diet from one primary food source to another can result in complete restructuring of the gut ecosystem as quickly as within 24 hours. And switching back to the original food source didn't return to an identical gut ecosystem. Many studies show direct connections between gut microbiota and specific and broad health impacts.
So I think suspicious is right. There is much yet to be learned.
There have been so many (serious) tv-documentaries about this. Our bodies are the mass-experiments. I remember something from about 20 years ago in Germany, mostly about buns, the stuff that is called 'sandwich', and more 'normal' bread.
It began with (then new) biotechnically produced enzymes, who's into that, and where.
Turned out Denmark is big into it, with corporations most of us have never heard of.
So that stuff goes in all the bread to give it desirable properties, texture, taste and longer shelf-life, not even in big amounts. And that's the crux. Because it can be so little, it isn't even mandatory to declare on the label. Nobody knows what that does to our bodies and their metabolisms longterm.
Aroma came from France mostly.
So they retraced to enzy- and aromatic stuff to Denmark and France, popped up in front of a big Polish bakery, and traced how the half/pre baken stuff moves frozen from there into our supermarkets, to be baken up in store, or being bagged, and brought home.
How will attribution to negative side-effects ever be possible? Instead of pointing to other stuff like black carbon, so2, countless VOCs, PFAs, PFOAs, PTFEs, whatever?
I think that it's also literally all plant-based meat replacers (meaning products intended to mimic meat, rather than just replacing meat with plants).
With the exception, maybe, of whole wheat bread (it seems they sometimes add extra wheat gluten, technically an additive but yes, silly), these all seem right to me? Especially meat replacements, they're often incredibly highly processed.
Yoghurt is one you seem to be mistaken on. Yoghurt can be considered group 1, it just often contains thickeners, sweeteners, flavourings, etc. Especially if low-fat.
You're right of course that hyperpalatability is a bigger problem. And you don't have to agree that UPFs are something you need to avoid. But I don't think that makes it a silly category.
It’s a silly category to relate to health because, for example, meat replacements are UPF but are also typically much healthier than meat. Obviously that’s not always true, but most of the time it is. Basically all Americans can benefit from eating less meat, especially red meat.
Ultra-processing is not just used to make more calorie-dense palatable food. It’s also used to make less calorie-dense food and enrich food with vitamins and macros you need for healthy living, like fiber.
I mean, compare the ultra-processed high fiber tortillas to the natural tortillas. The high fiber ones have less calories, less carbs, are more satiating, and are overall healthier. They also taste worse, I.e. are less palatable.
Ultra-processing and palatability are really orthogonal IMO. You can use processing to make palatable food, but you don’t have to. Look at traditional fast food - burgers, fries, fried chicken. You can trivially make any of that with no processing. It’s still unhealthy and ultra palatable. Cutting up a chicken at home and deep-frying it doesn’t magically make it healthy.
Or go one step further, and look at the frying itself. We have access to processed refined oils. But if you don’t use them and go the old fashioned way, with lard frying, is it healthier or less palatable?
No, actually, it’s tastier and much less healthy. You get 10x the saturated fat and way more calories.
And I’ll get ahead of the anti-science anti-seed-oil people who just read that. We know, for a fact, that eating more saturated fat increases your risk of heart disease and cancer. Just because something is naturally or minimally processed does not make it healthy, health is much more complex than that.
my wife describes ultra processed food as food that is basically pre digested for you before you eat it, which seems like a pretty good definition to me
Yeah, this is totally true. A Greek yogurt is considered minimally processed, not ultra processed. The problem is, far and away, the majority of yogurt sold is fruit-flavored yogurt, which is considered ultra-processed. Icelandic yogurt and Greek yogurt are premium niche yogurts.
I guess all I'm saying is that for the majority of people eating yogurt, it's an ultra-processed food.
It sort of illustrates the uselessness of the terms. Yogurt is made by sterilizing (likely homogenized) milk and introducing microorganisms that carry out some desired chemical reactions. They produce lactic acid, which is a stabilizer.
Everyone apparently knows that those are good things, so they don't count.
That's right. Kefir is essentially a mesophilic yogurt. I don't pretend to understand why but it seems the difference in texture has to do with the different organisms that produce one vs. the other (although the thermophilic bacteria used in yogurt-making -Lactobacilus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus I think- have also been found in kefir; but I don't know if they are very active given the lower temperature).
To be fair, back when I used to make kefir it often came out quite firm to the point that I could lift it out of a bowl with a perforated laddle and eat it with a spoon. What seemed to make the difference was using non-homogenized milk rather than homogenized. Using unhomogenized milk from Jersey cows also seemed to do the trick but the result was a bit too fatty.
No. And the way you're wrong about this is important. Any plain whole milk yogurt thickened or stabilized with starches or pectin is a UPF; Kroger's Plain Whole Milk, for instance, is a UPF and it isn't sweetened.
(For what it's worth, I really dislike yogurt and would not in 1000 years consume a sweetened yogurt product, though I do work skyr into every other meal these days for protein-maxxing reasons).
Nobody seems to have noticed the "product" next to "yogurt":
>> * Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
If we weren't on HN I'd say that's a subtle engagement hack calculated to generate maximum confusion and irate debate in the comments below. But we're on HN and good faith etc.
So, yes, "yogurt products" are all going to be ultra-processed not least because they will have to destroy the gel matrix of yogurt to incorporate whatever other ingredients they must like fruit juice or sugar, stabilisers, emulsifiers etc. Actually I guess they must include the stabilisers and emulsifiers because they mix in flavours and therefore destroy the yogurt gel matrix, which would otherwise result in an unpleasant gloopy mess.
Speaking of course in all this from the privilege of a summer in Greece where I've start every morning since June with a tub of 150g of fresh (not strained) goat's milk yogurt with the skin on and with a (European) teaspoonfull of honey.
Not healthy, you understand. Not with all the saturated fats and sugars. But, boy, is it palatable.
Yes and pretty much all baby formula is bad. Vegetable oil is often the #1 ingredient and is not even close to having the same density as breast milk. It can be life saving, but it’s not an example of UPF being generally good.
Also supermarket whole wheat bread is very different than real bread if you look at the ingredients. It’s more like bread adjacent.
It’s also just worse for the baby in pretty much every metric. And yes it does make it bad. That means they have to get more liquids than they normally would and get gas. Why would you put bad in quotes? Do you know understand how a food can be good or bad?
I put bad in quotes because you're claiming something is absolutely bad, but all your points are about how it is relatively worse than breast milk (which is a pretty high bar).
Studies on the long-term health impacts of breast vs formula milk are difficult to take anything away from. They're often observational rather than interventional, and it's hard to separate the type of milk from the feeding method. For example, a baby may benefit from the "skin to skin" aspect of breast feeding, but you could replicate this with a niche formula feeding method.
I don't think we really know how much worse formula is for babies than breast milk. It's probably that there's an increased risk in early infections. But in developed countries with good maternity guidance, the actual absolute risks of infections and SIDS are very low with either breast or formula.
The nutritional content is absolutely worse. I am sure that long term, many children can recover from it at least physically and cognitively.
As far as making an absolute claim, colloquially, people say something is bad when they mean worse than the alternative. To make an extreme example, smoking is much worse for you than caffeine but they are similar in many aspects. I do not feel the need to say that smoking is relatively worse. I say "Smoking is bad".
Smoking does have a physical upside. It's a wonderful nootropic. Sparkling water has the exact same chemical makeup as regular water. Formula is trying to replace something that evolution has come up with that is purpose made to feed and develop the brains of infants and young children. That is not a good comparison at all.
Fine it has some cognitive benefits, but in terms of physical health it's absurdly net negative. Long term smokers have a huge likelihood of dying from a smoking-related illness. That's what people mean when they say it's bad... They're not internally comparing it to caffeine.
Sparkling water has a significantly lower ph than still water.
> Formula is trying to replace something that evolution has come up with...
Sure but the vast majority of what people use and consume is a replacement for what "evolution has come up with". That doesn't inherently make it "bad".
> Sure but the vast majority of what people use and consume is a replacement for what "evolution has come up with". That doesn't inherently make it "bad".
This is not true at all. What are you talking about? In general most people eat regular foods that come from the ground not ultraprocessed foods.
I don't know why you are nitpicking so much about the smoking example. I said it was an extreme example of something that is relatively worse but some people are comfortable calling categorically bad.
Thanks for articulating this. I've had a problem over the past 20 years with terms like "screen time" and "ultra-processed foods" because there's a kernel of something that really matters somewhere in the argument, but the use of overly broad terms sort of kills things. I appreciate you calling out the nuance, and I agree with you that hyperpalatability is the main issue -- like applying the principles of TikTok to food.
Hyperpalatability is a different issue. The main issue is that our foods are chemical factories. Turning it into a "food is too good" problem is just a trick to blame the consumer for not being mature enough to forgo pleasure.
Food being good is not a crisis. Xylitol giving people heart attacks might be. Ingredients concocted in a lab never being studied at all until someone sues is a problem. Shifting the argument to "cheeseburgers are bad because they're good" is a really obvious distraction.
There is literally no profit in making foods "hyperpalatable." Food companies would be just as happy selling you food that tastes like shit. If anything, in actuality food has become worse and less palatable due to substitutions of cheaper ingredients. The argument is being shifted from an important one about power to a dumb moral panic. The people who love this are orthorexics who love telling people how their health is their own fault because they are self-indulgent. There is nothing more self-indulgent and self-praising than that discourse.
This is like the Mexican coke argument all over again. Everybody wants there to be an industrial bogeyman to blame for American nutritional health problems. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could fix problems for people simply by replacing industrial corn syrup with wholesome cane sugar?
Of course, there is literally no difference healthwise between the two products. But that's hard to hear. It means you have to accept that sweetened soft drinks are just bad for you, full stop, and you have to treat them the same way you'd treat alcohol (I said, as an enthusiastic social drinker).
So it goes with UPFs writ large. Wouldn't it be great if we could just make our foods wholesome and pure and not "chemical factories"? In fact: it would make essentially no difference to our health; in fact it would be a health problem if it led people to believe that bakery outputs were healthful and stabilized unsweetened skyr was dangerous.
The entire problem here is that we've gotten incredibly good at engineering food for hyperpalatability, which leads people to make truly bad choices about what to eat habitually. You could reasonably regulate that practice! But you'd want to find a way to do it without doing Mercola science and taking healthful, affordable shelf-stable products off the shelves for no reason.
Your "no profit in hyperpalatable foods" thing, I don't get at all. Maybe if you tried to explain it again. Sounds like the opposite of the truth.
> You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering
I don't think even that is problematic by itself. You need to apply hyper palatable techniques to high calorie nutrient poor food for it to be a problem.
Getting people addicted to something that's mostly protein or fiber or water packed with important micro nutrients would not be a bad thing at all. That's not what the food companies are doing (because empty calories are cheaper) but it's a perfectly good strategy we need more of.
every once in a while i wonder why miracle berries can't be leveraged at scale to make ultranutritious food taste great. but it always feels like a thought with an obvious answer i am too stupid to deduce.
I’m a huge tptacek Stan but this is like arguing that all food is organic. Okay, you’re absolutely correct, but it doesn’t matter, because for most people UPF is like that infamous definition for “porn”: I know it when I see it. Tilting at windmills and I love you for it!
Fiber removal is possibly the worst sin of food processing. It reduces satiety that would normally be present in the foods and prevent eating in excess.
> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite).
Twenty years ago Michael Polan made a bit of a splash with his The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008). In the latter he summarized things with the advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
And the way to accomplish this was, when you go grocery shopping, stick to the edges of the grocery store and to try to avoid the centre aisles. The aisles is where all the "shelf-stable" stuff is. If the food remains 'good' for weeks or months and you don't have to refrigerate it then you should question how much of it you want to consume.
That's the claim. It's true to the extent that the stuff in the middle of the store tends to be engineered for hyperpalatability by jacking up sugars/carbs and fats. But it's not true in the sense that ultra-processing for shelf stability is somehow bad for you. That's the naturalist fallacy.
You can easily compose a straightforwardly unhealthy diet by sticking to the outside of the store!
Reading through this and thinking about the problem in a blame-free way leads me to see the tobacco companies as a through-line for product packaging optimization that transcends any specific use. "The first patented cigarette-making machine was invented by Juan Nepomuceno Adorno of Mexico in 1847." [0] This puts high volume manufacture of cigarettes right at the cusp of the second industrial revolution with improvements in "steel-making processes, mass production, assembly lines, electrical grid systems, large-scale manufacture of machine tools, and use of advanced machinery in steam-powered factories." [1]
Blame free works with humans where you assume good intent.
It's harmful and dangerous with corporations with a proven history of lying and disregard for human lives and well being. Especially ones with a record of developing and optimizing addictive products.
any more "ethical" tobacco company got out competed. result: blame tobacco companies that survived.
People still smoke. any lies the tobacco companies sold to the public were either so old that few alive heard them, or believed them when they were told.
I think I mis-spoke when I wrote "blame-free" because while I come from a psychological-safety inquiry perspective, the term isn't quite descriptive. The purpose of dropping "blame" is that stopping inquiry there without understanding what lead to the "bad thing" leaves a lot of valuable knowledge on the table.
This is a interesting point. I gave some thought to the nature of what was being processed. In some ways another New World agricultural product gone industrial, cocoa, brought about some companies that at a minimum rival the tobacco companies for contributions to ultra-processed foods, examples Nestle and Coca-Cola.
Like tobacco, cocoa is not an essential food and also has psychoactive components. Thus companies formed around industrializing the material must develop methods of persuasion and navigate oppositional socio-political pressure. Like the sibling comment's observation that "any more "ethical" tobacco company got out competed," the most successful were especially suited for adopting other food production lines both from an industrial-technical and a socio-political perspective.
Is Huel ultra processed food too? They promote themselves as healthy meals and I am long time subscriber. I keep telling myself that even if it is not like cooking from raw ingredients, it is still far from a greasy junk food at kebab shops and McDonalds.
Hyper-ultra-processed, yes. But, as others point out in these comments, a food's degree of processing doesn't determine its health value, although those two things are correlated.
Personally, my instincts would favor Huel over fast food, too. I'd be very interested in any study that tested this rigorously. Huel is far from anything "raw," but so long as all the nutritional components are still in there, one has to wonder if it's just as healthy.
This is kind of the point. We simply don't have a sufficiently good understanding of food and nutrition to be able to say "smoosh these nutrients ands other food derivatives together and you get a healthy food".
UPFs is exactly the smooshing, and is generally done to maintain palatability whilst saving money, not even in an attempt to make a healthy food. Sure, Huel has a different goal, but I'm not sure the end result is any different. Just because it's not hyper palatable, it doesn't mean it's healthy.
Interesting, but I wouldn't oversimplify this to one cause. Home cooking of meals and making of lemonade/fruit punch used to be a norm. Society chose to move towards taking a lazy way out with microwave dinners and takeouts. On the other hand, Asian countries have healthier fresh made bento boxes in convenience stores so it's not time saving alone. At the end of the day, companies deliver what consumers want and try to discern demand, what else are they supposed to do?
Not sure why this comment by KurSix is marked dead:
>What stands out to me is that the real transfer wasn't a specific ingredient or recipe, it was institutional knowledge: how to engineer repeat consumption and then market the hell out of it
But this really is the gist of it. The execs from the Tobacco industry saw the writing on the wall, and moved over to the food industry where the knowledge of making things addictive to consume was applied to food.
agreed. the comments in here feel reactionary, not taking into account the sheer amount of influence marketing has on society. beyond just hyperpalatability, the tobacco companies also leveraged all they learned from their extremely successful advertising campaigns and applied it to foods
that meme image of Garfield saying 'you are not immune to propaganda' comes to mind. it's always the people who are the most confident that they aren't influenced by marketing that also have some of the most irrationally strong brand loyalties
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] threadThey do have a strong education system that teaches cooking and food budgeting and related.
They also don't have a marijuana epidemic.
Most of that's from a much stronger national guidance on weight control + societal expectations, but IIRC they also are gaining weight. Their ultra processed foods (in the salt and preservative sense) are also why they have one of the highest rates of stomach cancer.
> They also don't have a marijuana epidemic.
Not sure if I'd categorize the US as in a marijuana epidemic (and this is coming from someone who doesn't consume it and dislikes being around it) but even if we were, the states with the highest marijuana usage (west coast and NE) and the states with the highest obesity rates (deep south) are almost non-overlapping circles. If we're tying a drug to be obesity rates I'd be much more willing to believe it's the American propensity to chug large amounts of cheap 100-120 calories a pop beer.
> Among adults 19 to 30 years old, approximately 42% reported cannabis use in the past year, 29% in the past month, and 10% daily use (use on 20 or more occasions in the past 30 days). Among adults 35 to 50, reports of use reached 29%, 19%, and 8%, respectively.
https://nida.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/2024/08/canna...
Those numbers are huge, in absolute terms. Marijuana provably results in higher rates of obesity by simulating appetite in multiple different ways.
In my own experience, marijuana use directly correlated with bodyweight. Even relatively little marijuana resulted in serious cravings, often late in the evening. I don't think you need a study to validate this, it's an extremely widely understood effect.
When you have millions of people consuming an appetite enhancer, it's almost crazy to suggest that it doesn't play a significant role in UPF consumption or health in general.
I don't see this mentioned in the transcript. What is the basis for you mentioning it? Seems like a weird thing to throw in without explanation. I say this as someone that does not consume cannabis, btw, so this is not a defense of cannabis usage.
Japan may come up a lot in discussions about longevity, but doesn't Japan have a drinking culture that is very unhealthy? It's pretty well established that alcohol has a serious impact on health in numerous ways. There is even a condition called alcohol-related dementia.
1. Flour/Dough Treatment Agents (Bleaching, Maturing, Conditioning)
Azodicarbonamide (ADA) : Dough-conditioning/bleaching agent; oxidizes flour proteins to improve elasticity and whiteness. Currently found in some supermarket sandwich breads and hamburger/hot dog buns.
Potassium Bromate (KBrO₃) : Oxidizing agent that strengthens gluten structure and increases dough rise/volume. Classified a possible human carcinogen (IARC 2B); banned in the EU, Canada, and UK; California has banned it starting 2027. Still federally permitted in the US in trace residual amounts. Regional and bulk/wholesale bakery bread products.
Chlorine Gas / Chlorine Dioxide : Bleaching and maturing agents for wheat flour. Currently used in "bleached flour," a listed ingredient in many cake-mix and biscuit-mix products.
Ammonium Chloride (synthetic) : Yeast nutrient/dough conditioner that accelerates fermentation. Used in some commercial bread and cracker doughs as a processing aid.
2. Synthetic Antioxidants & Preservatives
Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA) / Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT) ; Synthetic antioxidants preventing fat/oil rancidity. NTP lists BHA as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen." Some current chewing gum and packaged-snacks.
Tert-Butylated Hydroquinone (TBHQ) : Synthetic antioxidant preservative used at very low levels to extend shelf life of oils and fried/processed foods. Pop-Tarts (Kellanova) and Little Debbie snack cakes.
Propylparaben : Antifungal preservative. EU treats it as effectively banned over endocrine-disruption concerns; California has banned it in food starting 2027; it remains FDA-permitted and is under an active FDA chemical-safety review opened in 2024. Advocacy groups (EWG) have specifically petitioned makers like Entenmann's and Sara Lee to remove it.
Thiodipropionic Acid & Dilauryl Thiodipropionate : Synergist antioxidants used alongside BHA/BHT in fats and shortening.
Stearyl Citrate : Antioxidant/chelating agent in margarines and oil-based dressings.
Ethoxyquin : Antioxidant/color stabilizer, originally developed as a pesticide; used to preserve color in ground spices. Bulk and store-brand ground paprika and chili powder spice blends.
Stannous Chloride : Antioxidant/color-retention agent for canned foods. Canned white asparagus.
3. Emulsifiers, Stabilizers & Texturizers
Polysorbate 60 & Polysorbate 80 : Emulsifiers for oil/water blending in baked goods, ice cream, and creamers. Cool Whip (Kraft) and Coffee-Mate liquid/powdered creamers.
Synthetic Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC / Cellulose Gum) : Thickener/stabilizer preventing ice-crystal formation. Common ingredient in many mainstream ice creams (store-brand and name-brand alike — check the specific carton) and low-fat salad dressings.
Sucrose Acetate Isobutyrate (SAIB) : Weighting agent keeping citrus flavor oils suspended. Used in some citrus-flavored sports drinks and sodas currently on the market.
Dioctyl Sodium Sulfosuccinate (DSS / Docusate Sodium) : Wetting agent improving dispersibility of powders. Used in instant cocoa/hot chocolate mix formulations.
Oxystearin Anti-crystallizing agent keeping liquid vegetable oils clear under refrigeration. Used in some refrigerated bottled vegetable/salad oils, typically store-brand.
4. Synthetic Colorants
Titanium Dioxide : White opacifying/color additive. Banned as a food additive in th...
Still Japan is developing a weight problem too.
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10260628/
Couple caveats:
1) There is a tradeoff in lower average body size/height, which doesn't seem to bother them as a whole, but which any individual athlete/model/actor/businessman might curse.
2) I know of several Japanese men in the 240-400 pound range. Many of them seem to enjoy being larger, but for those who don't, being Japanese in Japan wasn't a silver bullet.
some other light reading on this topic:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2026.3085...
> Buying into the food industry also facilitated the tobacco companies in applying the knowledge, skills, and strategies developed from their tobacco businesses to another business domain in ultraprocessed foods and beverages. For example, Philip Morris applied its aggressive marketing tactics developed from its tobacco businesses to market ultraprocessed foods to the US public. Furthermore, US tobacco companies and their food companies were systematically involved with developing hyper-palatable foods, which have elevated addictive properties.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332
>Tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be classified as fat and sodium hyper-palatable foods (HPF) and 80% more likely to be classified as carbohydrate and sodium HPF than foods that were not tobacco-owned between 1988 and 2001 (P-values = 0.005–0.009).
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/cigarette-giants-bought-food-compan...
> Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds led the transition to sweetened beverages in 1963 when it purchased Hawaiian Punch from Pacific Hawaiian Products Company, according to the documents. The beverage previously had been promoted to adults as a cocktail mixer, but R.J. Reynolds sought to beef up the drink’s “Punchy” mascot – a counterpart to the “Joe Camel” cartoon character the company used to promote cigarettes – and featured it on toys, schoolbook covers, comics, tumblers, clothing and TV commercials. Punchy became the “best salesman the beverage ever had,” according to tobacco industry documents.
> In the ’60s and ’70s, the company conducted taste tests with children and mothers to evaluate sweetness, colors and flavors for Hawaiian Punch product line extensions. The children’s preferences were prioritized, the authors noted.
> By 1983, R.J. Reynolds introduced the nation’s first juice box, marketed as a “handy little carton that comes with its very own straw.” This innovation was largely responsible for a 34 percent jump in sales, according to industry documents.
other fun things might include just reading the Wikpedia pages on major food companies like Kraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Foods_Inc.#Financial_exp...
> At the end of 1988, Philip Morris Companies purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion. In 1989, Kraft merged with Philip Morris's General Foods unit—makers of Oscar Mayer meats, Maxwell House coffee, Jell-O gelatin, Budget Gourmet frozen dinners, Entenmann's baked goods, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light and Tang powdered beverage mixes, Post Cereals, Shake 'n Bake flavored coatings and numerous other packaged foods—as Kraft General Foods. Its aggressive product development was reversed after the merger, as it became slow in addressing issues on its product lines due to its size, and also company politics.[4]
> In 2000, Philip Morris (renamed Altria in 2003) acquired Nabisco Holdings for $18.9 billion and merged the company with Kraft Foods the same year.[212][4] Also in 2000, the company acquired Balance Bar.[213] In 2001, Philip Morris sold 280 million Kraft shares via the third-largest IPO of all time, retaining an 88.1% stake in the company.
Huh? Ultra processed foods got very popular long before the 1960s. Wonder Bread came out in 1921. Kellogg came out with corn flakes in the 1900s. Etc.
Very different from some basic corn flakes or bread being mass produced.
Eggo waffles predate RJ Reynolds getting into this by 10 years.
Twinkies were introduced in the 1930s.
I'm not defending ultra-processed foods nor tobacco companies. I'm just saying the authors have a major blind spot if they think the concept or popularity of ultra-processed foods started in the 1960s.
There's someone at the factory who basically spends their time eating samples from new batches to ensure they're exactly as expected.
A reminder here that while there's an important directional claim behind stuff like this, "ultra-processed food" is an extremely silly category that does violence to the argument.
UPFs include:
* Whole wheat bread (most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health)
* Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
* Literally all baby formula
* Any kind of plant-based meat replacement
* Many supermarket hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers)
You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite).
You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering. Hyperpalatable foods are almost always UPFs, but the other direction doesn't hold at all.
I would point out that many whole foods are generally shelf-stable (over at least weeks, if not months) without requiring the introduction of chemical stabilizers that don't otherwise "belong."
Chemical stabilizers are generally needed for shelf stability in ultra-processed foods, because of one of the other defining characteristics of ultra-processed foods: their matrix has been disrupted (or constructed anew) such that the food is now highly labile (biochemical term: "labile organic matter"), i.e. very easy to break down into nutrients. Which applies not only to you breaking such foods down in your gut, but also to bacteria and fungi breaking these foods down on the shelf.
And as it so happens, because these foods are labile, any such nutrients that do come from breaking down the food, come very quickly. Labile carbohydrates are insulin-spiking carbohydrates. Labile fats are atherosclerosis-inducing fats. Etc.
Your body evolved to process (metabolize, remove from circulation, etc.) metabolic inputs in an environment where most available foods were the opposite of labile (a.k.a. recalcitrant organic matter). So most meals would give a slow/gentle level of metabolic throughput; with rare spikes of higher throughput from the rare natural labile food, and then plenty of low-throughput time to recover from such events. Your body didn't evolve to be able to process high-throughput metabolic inputs every meal.
And this is why the the presence of chemical stabilizers in a food is actually a very helpful criterion in the definition of "ultra-processed food"! The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis.
A boiled or fried egg is processed, but not ultra-processed. (The ovalbumin matrix in egg isn't destroyed by just heating it up. Just like the protein matrix in a steak isn't destroyed by just heating it up.) It's still a whole food, per se.
But scrambled eggs, or an omelette, are closer to being ultra-processed; simply because you've mechanically emulsified the egg together, and in the process, have broken down that matrix. (Same reason that ground beef is ultra-processed.)
But also: raw egg, like milk, is already one of those rare naturally-labile foods. (That's why developing embryos can make use of the nutrients therein. It's also why salmonella loves raw eggs.) Not necessarily for humans (none of our gut enzymes are particularly good at taking apart ovalbumin), but many species have evolved into obligate ovivory for a reason.
I don't think that's a useful distinction. Many people make pasta noodles or sausage in their own kitchens, for example, and both of those are ultra-processed by every definition.
Also, IMHO, it's a mistake to think of UPFs as only finished food products you get from the grocery store or from restaurants. Many ingredients people use in what they would very much insist is "home cooking", are themselves UPFs, and so cause the resulting "home-cooked" food to be a UPF.
The FDA's recent categorization of sandwiches as generally being UPFs, for example, is due in part to people using UPF breads like Wonderbread for sandwiches; and in part due to people using reconstituted/preserved deli meats in sandwiches; but it's also due to even people who think they're being healthy, smearing a UPF "sandwich spread" onto their sandwich bread at the end. (A grilled cheese grilled in butter is a highly-processed food. A grilled cheese grilled in mayo is a UPF, because shelf-stable grocery-store mayo is a UPF.)
Ice cream didn’t make much of a spike - all that fat. Waffle with maple syrup and peanut butter is completely different profile than waffle without peanut butter.
Most important thing for my blood sugar was portion size. Eat a lot, get a big spike.
Frustrating to me that people argue so much about “processed” vs “unprocessed” food. The real issue I believe is portion sizes.
You're completely lost me here. You're asserting that because food goes bad, it shouldn't be consumed on a regular basis. That just doesn't track, even a little bit.
Maybe your assertion hinges on the definition of "continuous basis"? I don't know what that means, but, taking it face value, it sounds like nothing should be consumed on a continuous basis other than air.
> The bread you bake at home is ultra-processed; you're the one who ultra-processed it!
This doesn't track either. The common Nova classification for ultra processing leans heavily on the kinds of processes that happen in factories. It's the flour itself that makes bread ultra-processed, since the flour is ultra-processed. When I realized that the four-ingredient bread I make at home for my family is considered ultra-processed, I started paying a lot less attention to the entire discussion.
Yes, and that's my point: the Nova UPF label is silly, but you shouldn't let a bad definition get in the way of a good conceptual tool.
"Ultra-processed as any lay person would intuitively understand the concept from the name and a series of examples", and "Ultra-Processed Food as defined by the Nova classification", are two distinct — but not conflicting — concepts. Even if you don't care about the UPF label as Nova defines it, you should still care about whether or not things are "lower-case-u ultra-processed." The Nova definition might be silly, but the concept itself isn't.
If you prefer, I could use a different term, like "highly-processed" or "hyper-processed" here, to distinguish what I'm talking about from the Nova label. But personally, I think it makes sense to actually continue to use the term "ultra-processed", and to just think of Nova as defining the term in a way that overlaps with a useful definition, but which both includes and excludes things that a more-useful and intuitive definition of the term wouldn't. After all, all of Nova's other definitions on the same "spectrum" (unprocessed/minimally-processed, processed ingredients, and processed foods) are perfectly good and useful ones. It makes sense to take that series-of-terms and then extrapolate what moving further in the same direction would take you. And where it lands you is a place that is close to, but not equivalent to, Nova's definition of UPF. Which is the place I'm calling "lower-case-u ultra-processed."
I think it's worth thinking this way, rather than ignoring the Nova classifications altogether, because 1. you still get useful information from knowing that a food is in one of the other Nova categories; and 2. a food being a Nova-labelled UPF still tells you something; and that something may, in combination with what else you know about the food, be enough to tell you that the food is in fact a "lower-case-u ultra-processed" food.
> You're asserting that because food goes bad, it shouldn't be consumed on a regular basis. That just doesn't track, even a little bit.
Because food goes bad quickly for the kind of food it is, yes.
Also, it's not a direct correlation. Lability (or its inverse, recalcitrance) is the denominator; but nutrient "load" is the numerator. A thing can be highly nutritively bio-accessible and be fine, if it's not nutrient-dense in the first place. Cucumber is liable but nutrient-sparse, so its high bio-accessibility does nothing to you.
But given two foods with the same density of a given nutrient, the easier your gut and/or bacteria breaks them down (and/or the more they've already been broken down), the more you should avoid them / more rarely you should consume them.
This is the generalization of the logic of "eat oranges, not orange juice", but taken past the trivial point of "because orange juice contains far more oranges than you'd normally eat" to the more interesting point of "even if you drank only the amount of orange juice that was in one orange, it'd still be worse for you than eating one orange, because no amount of chewing is going to break the orange down as thoroughly as a blender or juicer will, and so no orange will ever be digested and absorbed as quickly as orange juice will."
I would note that while many foods go bad (and this can give you a weak intuition about lability), ultra-processed foods would go bad really quickly if not for the chemical stabilizers in them, because all the processing has made them more labile than any whole food has ever naturally b...
I think it all boils down to "if microbes can eat it super easily then you should avoid it because it's too easy to digest." There's probably something valid there, as I, for example, made my kids oatmeal pancakes yesterday because I wanted something that burned a little slower than the typical flour pancakes.
That's a large assertion to make without evidence. Personally, I'm suspicious of all antimicrobial agents' effects on gut microbiota and the knock-on effects on health.
There are three substances that are predominantly used to inhibit mold growth, though: calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, and sodium benzoate.
The first two are extremely well understood and considered safe globally. The third is still considered safe, but might have some interactions with vitamin C that lead to benzene formation to the tune of several parts per billion. The FDA considers this safe, and has for some time.
Boy do I wish people would talk like this, instead of the "ultra-processed foods" bullshit.
The Atlantic had a stupid as hell article a few days ago with a title that really boils the entire op down: Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is"
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/kennedy-ultraproc...
"Ultra-Processed Food" is a phrase. It is not a thing. If you want to use it for its media traction, and "nobody knows what it is," define it before you use it.
Instead, everybody has gone for "it is so mysterious," then goes on to cite a bunch of studies about "ultra-processed foods," treating it as a category that categorical statements can be made about.
Name the chemicals, name the processes. They don't because these chemicals and processes are endorsed by massive conglomerates who can pull advertising and lobbying money. When you're vague as hell about everything, it's a case-by-case basis that only affects people who can't bribe as well as others.
And about the people talking about sugars, salt and fats crammed into everything, I'm convinced they never cook. That's taste, and you can pour it in yourself just as well as a corporation. The reason people love it is because it is good. Salt isn't bad for you, it's in fact very, very good for you because it makes micronutrient-rich foods palatable.
Arguing that standard manufactured foods and foods marketed to children are too rich is a different argument, and most importantly for this conversation has nothing to do with the ultraprocessed foods question. Massive food companies are perfectly happy to remove all the fats and sugars from your food and replace them with some weird alcohol sugar or a new form of teflon they just invented a week ago, and to charge you a premium for the privilege of eating it. They literally did that throughout the 80s and 90s.
The narrative intentionally confusing what the above refers to as "hyperpalatability" (a term which is as good as any) with "ultra-processed" (a propaganda term) is a gift to the food industry. It in fact even favors monopolies who can afford to put the bizarre chemical constructions they'll use as alternatives, and to pay regulators to look the other way.
"Ultra-processed foods" is a phrase meant for advertising - even the prefix "ultra-" reminds me of a cigarette ad, describing the filter. The filter was a device which ostensibly makes cigarettes healthier, but instead allows you to smoke far more than you would otherwise, and leads to worse health outcomes. Isn't smoking bad? Smoke our ultra-filtered cigarettes and breathe easy!
However, it focuses more about how the foods were marketed, and in particular, that the same marketing playbook developed by tobacco companies to market Marlboro and Camel cigarettes was then used to sell Kool-Aid and Miller beer.
Basically, the execs at Phillip Morris and R. J. Reynolds realized that beer, Kool-Aid/sugar drinks, Oreos and cigarettes were more or less all the same type of products - affordable, habit-forming small luxury goods people enjoyed putting in their mouths, and applied the expertise they'd developed on one type of this market (cigarettes) to the rest of it.
You said dislike. I said suspicious. One's an opinion, the other an invitation for science.
> vinegar, salt, and any fermented foods that suppress microbial agents?
In the gut microbiota broad system sequencing experiments I've consumed reports from, even altering diet from one primary food source to another can result in complete restructuring of the gut ecosystem as quickly as within 24 hours. And switching back to the original food source didn't return to an identical gut ecosystem. Many studies show direct connections between gut microbiota and specific and broad health impacts.
So I think suspicious is right. There is much yet to be learned.
It began with (then new) biotechnically produced enzymes, who's into that, and where.
Turned out Denmark is big into it, with corporations most of us have never heard of.
So that stuff goes in all the bread to give it desirable properties, texture, taste and longer shelf-life, not even in big amounts. And that's the crux. Because it can be so little, it isn't even mandatory to declare on the label. Nobody knows what that does to our bodies and their metabolisms longterm.
Aroma came from France mostly.
So they retraced to enzy- and aromatic stuff to Denmark and France, popped up in front of a big Polish bakery, and traced how the half/pre baken stuff moves frozen from there into our supermarkets, to be baken up in store, or being bagged, and brought home.
How will attribution to negative side-effects ever be possible? Instead of pointing to other stuff like black carbon, so2, countless VOCs, PFAs, PFOAs, PTFEs, whatever?
> * Ultra-processed whole wheat bread
> * Ultra-processed yogurt products
> * Literally all baby formula
> * Ultra-processed plant-based meat replacement
> * Ultra-processed hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers)
There, fixed that for you.
(I don't know about baby formula, but granting you that one.)
There, fixed that for you.
I think that it's also literally all plant-based meat replacers (meaning products intended to mimic meat, rather than just replacing meat with plants).
Yoghurt is one you seem to be mistaken on. Yoghurt can be considered group 1, it just often contains thickeners, sweeteners, flavourings, etc. Especially if low-fat.
You're right of course that hyperpalatability is a bigger problem. And you don't have to agree that UPFs are something you need to avoid. But I don't think that makes it a silly category.
Ultra-processing is not just used to make more calorie-dense palatable food. It’s also used to make less calorie-dense food and enrich food with vitamins and macros you need for healthy living, like fiber.
I mean, compare the ultra-processed high fiber tortillas to the natural tortillas. The high fiber ones have less calories, less carbs, are more satiating, and are overall healthier. They also taste worse, I.e. are less palatable.
Ultra-processing and palatability are really orthogonal IMO. You can use processing to make palatable food, but you don’t have to. Look at traditional fast food - burgers, fries, fried chicken. You can trivially make any of that with no processing. It’s still unhealthy and ultra palatable. Cutting up a chicken at home and deep-frying it doesn’t magically make it healthy.
Or go one step further, and look at the frying itself. We have access to processed refined oils. But if you don’t use them and go the old fashioned way, with lard frying, is it healthier or less palatable?
No, actually, it’s tastier and much less healthy. You get 10x the saturated fat and way more calories.
And I’ll get ahead of the anti-science anti-seed-oil people who just read that. We know, for a fact, that eating more saturated fat increases your risk of heart disease and cancer. Just because something is naturally or minimally processed does not make it healthy, health is much more complex than that.
ritz crackers are basically already digested before you eat them
I guess all I'm saying is that for the majority of people eating yogurt, it's an ultra-processed food.
Everyone apparently knows that those are good things, so they don't count.
Is it? The role of lactic acid in yogurt is to hydrolyze milk proteins and turn them into solids, so you can eat it with a spoon.
These things exist on a spectrum: kefir has many of similar properties as yogurt but is more 'drinkable'.
To be fair, back when I used to make kefir it often came out quite firm to the point that I could lift it out of a bowl with a perforated laddle and eat it with a spoon. What seemed to make the difference was using non-homogenized milk rather than homogenized. Using unhomogenized milk from Jersey cows also seemed to do the trick but the result was a bit too fatty.
(For what it's worth, I really dislike yogurt and would not in 1000 years consume a sweetened yogurt product, though I do work skyr into every other meal these days for protein-maxxing reasons).
>> * Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise
If we weren't on HN I'd say that's a subtle engagement hack calculated to generate maximum confusion and irate debate in the comments below. But we're on HN and good faith etc.
So, yes, "yogurt products" are all going to be ultra-processed not least because they will have to destroy the gel matrix of yogurt to incorporate whatever other ingredients they must like fruit juice or sugar, stabilisers, emulsifiers etc. Actually I guess they must include the stabilisers and emulsifiers because they mix in flavours and therefore destroy the yogurt gel matrix, which would otherwise result in an unpleasant gloopy mess.
Speaking of course in all this from the privilege of a summer in Greece where I've start every morning since June with a tub of 150g of fresh (not strained) goat's milk yogurt with the skin on and with a (European) teaspoonfull of honey.
Not healthy, you understand. Not with all the saturated fats and sugars. But, boy, is it palatable.
Also supermarket whole wheat bread is very different than real bread if you look at the ingredients. It’s more like bread adjacent.
Density of what?
Studies on the long-term health impacts of breast vs formula milk are difficult to take anything away from. They're often observational rather than interventional, and it's hard to separate the type of milk from the feeding method. For example, a baby may benefit from the "skin to skin" aspect of breast feeding, but you could replicate this with a niche formula feeding method.
I don't think we really know how much worse formula is for babies than breast milk. It's probably that there's an increased risk in early infections. But in developed countries with good maternity guidance, the actual absolute risks of infections and SIDS are very low with either breast or formula.
As far as making an absolute claim, colloquially, people say something is bad when they mean worse than the alternative. To make an extreme example, smoking is much worse for you than caffeine but they are similar in many aspects. I do not feel the need to say that smoking is relatively worse. I say "Smoking is bad".
Sparkling water has a significantly lower ph than still water.
> Formula is trying to replace something that evolution has come up with...
Sure but the vast majority of what people use and consume is a replacement for what "evolution has come up with". That doesn't inherently make it "bad".
This is not true at all. What are you talking about? In general most people eat regular foods that come from the ground not ultraprocessed foods.
I don't know why you are nitpicking so much about the smoking example. I said it was an extreme example of something that is relatively worse but some people are comfortable calling categorically bad.
> colloquially, people say something is bad when they mean worse than the alternative [as opposed to absolutely bad]
I don't think it does support that claim, for the reasons I've given.
Hyperpalatability is a different issue. The main issue is that our foods are chemical factories. Turning it into a "food is too good" problem is just a trick to blame the consumer for not being mature enough to forgo pleasure.
Food being good is not a crisis. Xylitol giving people heart attacks might be. Ingredients concocted in a lab never being studied at all until someone sues is a problem. Shifting the argument to "cheeseburgers are bad because they're good" is a really obvious distraction.
There is literally no profit in making foods "hyperpalatable." Food companies would be just as happy selling you food that tastes like shit. If anything, in actuality food has become worse and less palatable due to substitutions of cheaper ingredients. The argument is being shifted from an important one about power to a dumb moral panic. The people who love this are orthorexics who love telling people how their health is their own fault because they are self-indulgent. There is nothing more self-indulgent and self-praising than that discourse.
That argument is hyperpalatable to orthorexics.
Of course, there is literally no difference healthwise between the two products. But that's hard to hear. It means you have to accept that sweetened soft drinks are just bad for you, full stop, and you have to treat them the same way you'd treat alcohol (I said, as an enthusiastic social drinker).
So it goes with UPFs writ large. Wouldn't it be great if we could just make our foods wholesome and pure and not "chemical factories"? In fact: it would make essentially no difference to our health; in fact it would be a health problem if it led people to believe that bakery outputs were healthful and stabilized unsweetened skyr was dangerous.
The entire problem here is that we've gotten incredibly good at engineering food for hyperpalatability, which leads people to make truly bad choices about what to eat habitually. You could reasonably regulate that practice! But you'd want to find a way to do it without doing Mercola science and taking healthful, affordable shelf-stable products off the shelves for no reason.
Your "no profit in hyperpalatable foods" thing, I don't get at all. Maybe if you tried to explain it again. Sounds like the opposite of the truth.
I don't think even that is problematic by itself. You need to apply hyper palatable techniques to high calorie nutrient poor food for it to be a problem.
Getting people addicted to something that's mostly protein or fiber or water packed with important micro nutrients would not be a bad thing at all. That's not what the food companies are doing (because empty calories are cheaper) but it's a perfectly good strategy we need more of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
Fiber removal is possibly the worst sin of food processing. It reduces satiety that would normally be present in the foods and prevent eating in excess.
Not sure attracting attention to baby formula will have a positive outcome[0].
[0} https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
Twenty years ago Michael Polan made a bit of a splash with his The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008). In the latter he summarized things with the advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
And the way to accomplish this was, when you go grocery shopping, stick to the edges of the grocery store and to try to avoid the centre aisles. The aisles is where all the "shelf-stable" stuff is. If the food remains 'good' for weeks or months and you don't have to refrigerate it then you should question how much of it you want to consume.
You can easily compose a straightforwardly unhealthy diet by sticking to the outside of the store!
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
It's harmful and dangerous with corporations with a proven history of lying and disregard for human lives and well being. Especially ones with a record of developing and optimizing addictive products.
People still smoke. any lies the tobacco companies sold to the public were either so old that few alive heard them, or believed them when they were told.
Like tobacco, cocoa is not an essential food and also has psychoactive components. Thus companies formed around industrializing the material must develop methods of persuasion and navigate oppositional socio-political pressure. Like the sibling comment's observation that "any more "ethical" tobacco company got out competed," the most successful were especially suited for adopting other food production lines both from an industrial-technical and a socio-political perspective.
Personally, my instincts would favor Huel over fast food, too. I'd be very interested in any study that tested this rigorously. Huel is far from anything "raw," but so long as all the nutritional components are still in there, one has to wonder if it's just as healthy.
UPFs is exactly the smooshing, and is generally done to maintain palatability whilst saving money, not even in an attempt to make a healthy food. Sure, Huel has a different goal, but I'm not sure the end result is any different. Just because it's not hyper palatable, it doesn't mean it's healthy.
>What stands out to me is that the real transfer wasn't a specific ingredient or recipe, it was institutional knowledge: how to engineer repeat consumption and then market the hell out of it
But this really is the gist of it. The execs from the Tobacco industry saw the writing on the wall, and moved over to the food industry where the knowledge of making things addictive to consume was applied to food.
that meme image of Garfield saying 'you are not immune to propaganda' comes to mind. it's always the people who are the most confident that they aren't influenced by marketing that also have some of the most irrationally strong brand loyalties