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.
BirAdam 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
bcatanzaro 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
46493168 19 minutes ago [-]
Right, it's not that all ultraprocessed foods are bad, it's that most bad foods are ultraprocessed.
bcatanzaro 7 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. Which makes the statement “ultraprocessed foods should be treated more like cigarettes” seem wrong.
I guess “bad foods should be treated more like cigarettes” is too obvious.
anigbrowl 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
bcatanzaro 5 minutes ago [-]
As I said - anything surprisingly gluten free or surprisingly vegan is going to be UPF.
Sometimes I wonder if the gluten free trend is a ploy by food processing companies to whitewash expensive proprietary processed foods as “whole”.
staticassertion 53 minutes ago [-]
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".
anigbrowl 32 minutes ago [-]
As a creatine user I thought of this, but I don't recall seeing creatine as an ingredient in most foods. I still prefer to get my protein via meat, eggs, or other basic foods rather than in the form of a highly engineered shake, not least for cost reasons.
IcyWindows 1 hours ago [-]
"Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept.
It's like "organic".
Too many variables are conflated to make any of this reasonable.
staticassertion 57 minutes ago [-]
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".
JumpCrisscross 52 minutes ago [-]
> there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists
Neither is there for speciation. Doesn’t make the term or concept useless. And doesn’t mean we can’t make useful statements about one species versus another, even if it gets blurry at the edges.
staticassertion 51 minutes ago [-]
What is helpful about Nova? What are the useful statements we can make? I would argue that Nova makes it more difficult to make useful statements. For example, someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed" and if they equate "ultra processed" with bad... well, they'd skip those. Meanwhile, they could eat raw mean morning to night, or drink their own urine, and they'd be on a totally unprocessed diet.
What framework has Nova helped develop for eating healthier?
kelseyfrog 28 minutes ago [-]
> someone who follows Nova would believe that taking a fiber supplement, or a multivitamin, is "ultra processed"
No one believes that. We're all adults and not looking for loopholes or edge cases to exploit. A system can be generally good even if it has inconsistent edge cases, which is basically all systems that have ever existed.
bryanlarsen 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 54 minutes ago [-]
> "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.
staticassertion 55 minutes ago [-]
It's not gatekeeping to point out that multiple studies have shown that Nova is a perfect example of "no one agrees on what processed foods are". Even when given Nova criteria, nutritionists repeatedly, across studies, fail to agree on categorization.
Nova also does not even attempt to categorize in terms of health because "processed" has nothing to do with "healthy" despite being used in conversations about public health. Absolutely perfect example of how bad the term "processed" is.
fhdjfjkafk 16 minutes ago [-]
Ever notice how you semantic junkies always end up defending entrenched financial interests?
Redirect your energy toward something useful.
46493168 56 minutes ago [-]
Here’s a scientific paper written by scientists that defines UPFs:
That's a perfect example of the problem. It's overgeneralized to the point of meaninglessness.
It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?
Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.
46493168 42 minutes ago [-]
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 don’t need a term to be perfect to be useful.
rgoulter 38 minutes ago [-]
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".
46493168 21 minutes ago [-]
>What food has the term "UPF" helped you learn is 'unhealthy', which you otherwise would have thought of as healthy?
It's not that I didn't know that certain foods were unhealthy. The term UPF (understood to mean foods that are manufactured specifically to be hyper-palatable while otherwise lacking in nutrients) taught me the reasons why I find certain foods harder to resist than others, and consequently what foods I should focus on instead (higher protein / high fiber).
Rendered at 02:27:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Please don’t tell me impossible burger patties are like cigarettes.
I guess “bad foods should be treated more like cigarettes” is too obvious.
Sometimes I wonder if the gluten free trend is a ploy by food processing companies to whitewash expensive proprietary processed foods as “whole”.
It's like "organic".
Too many variables are conflated to make any of this reasonable.
"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".
Neither is there for speciation. Doesn’t make the term or concept useless. And doesn’t mean we can’t make useful statements about one species versus another, even if it gets blurry at the edges.
What framework has Nova helped develop for eating healthier?
No one believes that. We're all adults and not looking for loopholes or edge cases to exploit. A system can be generally good even if it has inconsistent edge cases, which is basically all systems that have ever existed.
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 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
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.
Nova also does not even attempt to categorize in terms of health because "processed" has nothing to do with "healthy" despite being used in conversations about public health. Absolutely perfect example of how bad the term "processed" is.
Redirect your energy toward something useful.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066
Which variables are conflated?
It asserts that UPF is bad because they tend to result in quicker absorption, amongst many other things. So why not say quick absorbing food is bad for you, and why use a definition that also includes food that is processed to absorb slower?
Then repeat across several other characteristics. Few UPF foods will bingo on all characteristics and a lot of non-UPF foods will bingo on many of the same characteristics.
I don’t need a term to be perfect to be useful.
For losing fat, "fried chicken", "chocolate cake", and "sugary drinks" are intuitively unhelpful, and "vegetables", "lean meat", "water" is more "healthy".
It's not that I didn't know that certain foods were unhealthy. The term UPF (understood to mean foods that are manufactured specifically to be hyper-palatable while otherwise lacking in nutrients) taught me the reasons why I find certain foods harder to resist than others, and consequently what foods I should focus on instead (higher protein / high fiber).