Skapi's Porch

I wonder whether the report defines "ultra-processed" in a manner that is (a) intelligible to lay readers or (b) remotely sensible. I currently understand "ultra-processed" to generally mean "different from the healthy (sic) fast food and supplements sold by our provider".

I don't feel a need to check the news article the headline came from, to determine whether it includes such a definition - I'd be absolutely shocked if it did. Though it does have a link to the cdc report.

It appears that the report uses "the Nova classification system that categorizes foods by processing, from unprocessed to ultra-processed foods". That's footnoted to "Steele E, O’Connor L, Juul F, Khandpur N, Galastri Baraldi L, Monteiro CA, et al. Identifying and estimating ul-traprocessed food intake in the US NHANES according to the Nova classification system of food processing. J Nutr. 2023 Jan;153(1):225–241" - no URL given, and the title suggests that even if I could follow the link, there'd be no definition. There's also a footnote to "Monteiro CA, Cannon G, Levy RB, Moubarac JC, Louzada ML, Rauber F, et al. Ultra-processed foods: What they are and how to identify them. Public Health Nutr. 2019 Apr;22(5):936–41."

I get it. If you like it, it's probably "ultra-processed". If you don't, or if Big Food advertises it as "healthy", like the various fake meat products increasingly labelled as if they were real meat, it's not. (Personally, I can't imagine how to make even a halfway plausible fake meat without an awful lot of processing to disguise the actual ingredients - and a lot more if you also try to give the product a nutritional profile similar to the meat it imitates. But what would I know; surely Big Food (TM) has my best interests at heart (sic).

And yes, I have a chip on my shoulder about "healthy, plant-based chicken", "chick'n", and similar. Call it what it is - "plant-based imitation chicken". Don't put it in the meat section beside the real thing, and don't package it similarly enough that it could be accidentally purchased.

But this point also applies to just about every "healthy" extract and supplement - it takes a lot of processing to produce them. On the other hand, some traditional foods also take a fair amount of processing. Taro (not traditional where I grew up) comes to mind. But also baked goods, sausages, and similar. Should I be buying wheat seeds and a flour mill, as the only way my bread can be healthy? Reductio ad bloody absurdum - give me some definitions already, before trying to scare me with the latest boogey-man. Perhaps it's "ultra-processed" only if it wasn't available at grocery stores in some arbitrarily chosen decade?

I googled "nova food classification system". The wiki article gives actual definitions, far enough into the article that I started composing this paragraph believing it did not. But I'm not at all sure I could distinguish members of their "processed" and "ultra-processed" categories based on their description of ultra-processed, quoted from "the most recent overview of Nova published with Monteiro".

There's clearly something a bit more solid behind the click bait. You just have to do an awful lot of digging to find it.

I wonder whether any sodas qualify as other than ultra-processed, since I suspect them of being a major source of Americans' calorie intake, and having been so for many decades.