Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

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abdullahkhalids

Real world phenomena can never be cut by clean lines. This isn't math definitions. That said, there are fairly comprehensive definitions of these things. The UN's FAO defines ultra processed food as:

> Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring sophisticated equipment and technology (hence ‘ultra-processed’). Processes used to make ultra-processed foods include the fractioning of whole foods into substances, chemical modifications of these substances, assembly of unmodified and modified food substances using industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; use of additives at various stages of manufacture whose functions include making the final product palatable or hyper-palatable; and sophisticated packaging, usually with plastic and other synthetic materials. Ingredients include sugar, oils or fats, or salt, generally in combination, and substances that are sources of energy and nutrients that are of no or rare culinary use such as high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and protein isolates; classes of additives whose function is to make the final product palatable or more appealing such as flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, thickeners, and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling, and glazing agents; and additives that prolong product duration, protect original properties or prevent proliferation of microorganisms.

This definition makes most sense when compared with the definitions of the other three categories [1]. I am pretty sure, that any two people trained on these definitions will only disagree less than 5% of the time.

[1] https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/527...

You’re missing the point. It’s not defining what constitutes ultra processed — it’s that no one really knows if it’s bad for you.

Because when you study people who eat a certain thing, they also all tend to eat another thing.

I religiously read nutrition labels and a lot of vegan ultra-processed foods are not particularly healthy, but not necessarily because they are ultra processed but because they mimic non-vegan foods which themselves are unhealthy.

Even if you cook all your meals, it doesn’t mean that you are eating healthy because it still depends on your ingredients.

And as the article hinted to, a lot of people who initially start eating vegan foods tend to buy non-vegan analogues which are not healthy. The better analogues tend to be ultra processed. Are these people at higher risk of certain diseases because they are eating ultra processed foods or because they’ve limited themselves to unhealthy vegan substitutes? Hard to say.

The world is complex. There are thousands of basic foods that are combined, processed and cooked in countless ways. You can't figure out which of these are good or bad individually. You have to make categories to simplify the problem.

There are dozens of categorizations that are studied in literature. Vegan/Veg/Carnivore is one. Each diet becomes its own category to be studied, such as keto.

Level of processing is another such categorization. It won't give you the final answer on what is good or bad, only a partial answer, that will indeed have to be combined with results of other categorizations to get a final answer.

Please understand that nutritional science is a few decades old at this point. Demanding physics (a 500 year+ academic discipline) level of clarity from a discipline which is many times more complex is not going to happen in our lifetimes. The only thing we are going to get are bad partial answers; just like you point out. Everyone knows they are partial answers, but they are partial answers because of complexity, not because of malice.

My problem with picking ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value. And where we decide the starting line is for that processing is also arbitrary, as far as the result goes.

I mean we could say that beef is ultra-processed grass. And lettuce, ultra-processed sunlight.

Our biological ancestors evolved over 10s-100s of millions of years to consume raw plant matter and raw meat. Only in the last 100k years or so did we start consuming cooked food, which gives some time for evolution to adjust our genes. Our bodies are wet chemical machines that we are confident can consume such food.

These are the unprocessed and moderately unprocessed foods in the NOVA categorization. Processed foods is something that began to be consumed a few thousand years ago (eg. Tofu is 2k+ years old in China), and ultra-processed foods, as defined above, became largely consumed a few decades ago. So there are very good reasons to define these categories as they are. The lines dividing them are fuzzy but that is how all non-physics sciences work.

> ultra-processed as a food category is that it has very little to do with the nutritional value.

Now, if you have a complex system like the human body, it's reasonable to say that the more you drive it outside the domain that it was designed and tested in, the more risk you are taking on the something bad will happen. So a priori you would be mindful of consuming ultra-processed foods. It is a testament to biological evolution that nothing radically bad happens when we consume ultra-processed foods. But it seems very reasonable to investigate such foods more carefully for smaller but long term impacts on health.

> little to do with the nutritional value.

The digestive system doesn't just care about raw nutrition - the number of proteins/fats/carbs - of the incoming food. There are a number of physical and chemical processes occur during digestion, and these processes can be sensitive to what combination of things go in and in what physical form, etc.

It's based on fear of change -- that something bad might be in newer foods. Taking this advice to heart would mean limiting what we eat to just a few well-known, well-tested foods.

And yet the common best-practice nutritional advice is to eat a wide variety of foods. At the same time we know of plenty of natural raw foods, and even some simple cooking processes, that are harmful.

I'd actually advocate for both practices. It's how animals survive best: some members of a species are risk takers and others are cautious, so that one or the other is likely to survive any change in environment.

> It’s not defining what constitutes ultra processed — it’s that no one really knows if it’s bad for you.

If I remember correctly, the book on the subject[1] makes a compelling case for the source of that classification, Monteireo[2], to have pretty solid data on just that

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Processed_People

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Augusto_Monteiro

Mmm... I love my food with proliferation of microorganisms!

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