It’s terribly broken, which is unsurprising since it was never designed to do what it does, and ends up placing healthy, non addictive foods under the ultra processed category 4, while including hyper palatable foods that are not healthy at all in categories 1-3.
Hyper palatability, which is much better defined and is designed to capture what the NOVA system is actually used for, is likely a better categorization.
My favorite nonsensical category 4 classification is anything with achiote in it. It's not part of a traditional European diet, and it's often used to add color so it makes the list, despite saffron having a similar role in European food and booth being a traditional and completely unprocessed ingredient.
Speaking of Mesoamerican ingredients, nixtamal is pretty heavily processed, and is a staple in many areas, but it's much healthier than unprocessed corn which can cause pellagra when used as a staple food.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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?
> 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.
why not use a classification of food that actually aligns with what is bad? it seems like we don't actually know. Nova combines a bunch of different attributes some of which we don't actually think are causally linked to bad health.
It's could be OK to have informal system with plenty of inconsistent cases for informal conversations, but once we start talking of regulation, it's time to switch to something that does not have quite as few loopholes.
Because for example grape juice has more sugar per cup than coca-cola, and almost no nutrients (if filtered.) And yet it's firmly the best type of food according to NOVA system (minimal processing, no artificial additives). You can be sure that if any sort of government adopts NOVA system, it's that kind of food that would be pushed to consumer, not the actual healthy stuff.
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.
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.
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.
> "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?)
I think of “UPF” the way I think of “BMI.” Useful insofar as it provides an intial signal for further investigation. The term UPF provides a way to group certain foods according to their likelihood of helping me reach my health goals.
I think people's intuition is generally reliable, though. What food has the term "UPF" helped you learn is 'unhealthy', which you otherwise would have thought of as healthy?
For losing fat, "fried chicken", "chocolate cake", and "sugary drinks" are intuitively unhelpful, and "vegetables", "lean meat", "water" is more "healthy".
>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).
Most of the things on sale at “Whole Foods” are ultra-processed these days. Anything that requires effort to make gluten free or vegan for example. Like impossible burger. Extreme ultra-processed. Or gluten free bread.
Please don’t tell me impossible burger patties are like cigarettes.
Perhaps more obviously, a multi-vitamin is considered "ultra processed" under Nova. A fiber supplement is considered "ultra processed". Lab grade creatine is "ultra processed".
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.
They certainly have such offerings, but I'm perplexed at how you get to 'most of the things on sale'. The most processed things I get from there on a regular basis are bread, cookies, or alcoholic drinks. It's very rare that I find myself looking at the label of anything I can purchase there wondering how it was made.
I'd ask the people saying "there's no definition for UPF" or that the NOVA system is terrible, try and come up with your own improvement. As they're attempts to help classify these foods.
Not everyone has a good nutritional understanding of their foods, so these are short form efforts to try and help.
Rather than knocking what's out there, how about also trying to determine an alternative and see how challenging it is.
I read a lot of people poking holes, but not a lot of suggestions of how to improve things.
No one has managed to come up for an improvement for the zodiac system used in astrology. There's countless studies on it, all inconclusive at best, once subject to reproduction and meta analyses. Should we keep using, despite a lack of evidence, because there's nothing better? Why not just discount it completely? If discounting astrology completely is the right move, than so is discounting the NOVA system.
There is no distinction between ultra proccessed, or hyper palatable, or most anything with a long list of ingredients.
None of it is good for you, and if you never eat sugar, will smell and taste horrible once your pallet recovers.
I never touch anything with sugar, or ingedients simmilar to those found in cleaning products, just food, I do just fine, it takes a bit more time, but I never
end up feeling off, which was common when I ate regular grocerie store products.
Quiting sugar completly, not just eliminating added sugar was the key, sugar bieng a white crystaline substance is the very deffinition of ultra proccessed, as it is absolutly concentrated and can not be refined further, and is found nowhere in nature.
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.