> The non-UPF and UPF test meals were closely matched on meal weight, energy, energy density, macronutrients, available carbohydrate, glycaemic index and load, total dietary fibre, sodium and water (all ≤1.6% deviation between meals; Fig. 1b).
So they did match glycemic index, which the article omits.
Another option is that it's affected by the order of consumption.
I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.
Looking at the two meals in the study: if I sat down to eat the processed one, I'd probably start with the veggie straws. If I saw down to eat the unprocessed one, I'd almost certainly start with the egg or the cheese.
edit: and here are some other options: I notice that the unprocessed one is grain-free, vegetarian and has significantly less sucrose. I don't know if any of that makes it more or less healthy, but they're significant differences nutritionally.
If you look up how to calculate the glycemic index of a meal, the formula treats each meal component's glycemic index as a proportion of the total meal's glycemic index.
But the above example shows that the body doesn't treat food in that manner - the relatively low carb, higher fat cheese didn't smooth out the higher proportion carb count of the toast.
In the paper, the largest carbs for the ultraprocessed meal was instant mashed potatoes, while the non-processed meal had bananas as the largest carb source followed by craisins/cranberries.
The high carb foods in the unprocessed meal are paired with fiber.
The high carb foods in the ultraprocessed meal are NOT paired with fiber.
The fiber slows the rate of carb intake.
Same thing occurs with protein - same amount of ground beef and steak, ground beef meal will result in faster amino acid ingestion than the steak meal. No idea if there are any pros/cons of the faster ground beef ingestion, but there is a difference in how the digestive system processes the two meals.
> I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.
This is what I read in a book about glucose. So I went ahead and measured. I found it not true, at least in my case. The recommendations of eating salad before your meal do nothing measureable for my glucose spikes.
Not only psychology, but training. If your body gets a load of sugar every time it tastes UPF additives, it learns to release insulin on taste to protect itself.
I was about to comment that the physical structure of the food and the fiber content also make a difference. For instance, rolled oats are available in different thicknesses, and the thicker ones don’t digest as easily. Brown vs white rice is another example.
But these examples have different glycemic indexes, which the study matched for.
This is a good question but not an invalidation of the study. People underestimate the cost of doing large scale surveys, first year researchers become painfully aware of it. There are lots of research were you try to get a quantitative result cheap. But most costs a lot of money (the big studies are usually very well spent money imho)
They matched water content between the meals, so I guess only the ultra processed one required additional water to match the natural water content of the less processed one.
Before we come to a final conclusion on this, we need to reexamine the NOVA food classification system. It holds some rather baffling contradictions. For instance, if you buy a deep fryer and a mandolin slicer to make your own potato chips at home, they're classified as processed foods. But if you buy a bag of plain potato chips (ingredients: potatoes, oil, salt) they're classified as ultra-processed.
This whole concept just doesn't make sense to me - this study included peanut butter and jelly as part of the "highly processed" meal and cheese as part of the "minimally processed" meal. I don't think that either peanut butter or jelly is more processed than cheese.
I suppose it's partly because it's the whole meal that is being represented and they match it for nutrients.
I'd guess they wanted to include store purchased bread, hence the pb&j.
The other thought i had was that most peanut butter includes (at least) palm oil (ultra processed) and sometimes other emulsifiers to prevent separation. Though you can buy pb that is just peanut and salt.
The jelly would contain quite a bit more in the way of preservatives, regulators and flavour enhancers etc than the jelly i'd make at home (if i did such a thing)
I'd guess it's just regular cheese which does require quite some processing to make but unless it's got extra additives to extend shelf life, change texture or taste it's just processed.
Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates. To get that permanent creaminess you get from the store it's going to have various sorts of chemical additives - emulsifiers, stabilizers, etc. You also generally want to add some sort of a sweetener. I use honey, but with store bought stuff you're looking at all sorts of stuff including e.g. high fructose corn syrup.
By contrast cheese is completely natural outside of a few exceptions like American cheese. You take milk, add something to curdle it like an acid (e.g. vinegar) or rennet - an enzyme obtained from the stomach of young calves, separate the coagulated stuff, salt it, dry it, age it - you now have cheese. Ricotta can even be made straight from raw milk with no additives. Cheese's long shelf life is natural.
Well the peanut butter I get from the store is just peanuts and salt and there is plenty of brands available. It does have to be stirred because it separates. But yes the Jiffy and Skippy that most people refer to as peanut butter is really just peanut flavored palm oil.
I think you mean peanuts, salt, and oil, because otherwise there's nothing to separate. The oil is already usually going to leave it something as either high or ultra high processing.
> Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates.
False, peanuts contain their own oil. Nothing needs to be added, not even salt.
Anything containing more than peanuts and salt should be referred to as something else, like peanut spread.
Yeah the other response to you is right. As someone who’s gone down the UPF (ultra processed foods) rabbit hole, it’s based on the additive ingredients.
And at least in America, most commonly-bought peanut butter has additives, and most store-bought bread has 40 different UPF ingredients. Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
It’s possible to have a non-UPF peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I might have one today! It’s just that the default options for most Americans contain a ton of crazy ingredients.
Depending on the cheese you buy, many are very simple, and rarely have weird additives. But if you buy a block of cheese or even usually the sandwich-sized slices, it’s not ultra-processed.
>As someone who’s gone down the UPF (ultra processed foods) rabbit hole, it’s based on the additive ingredients.
So if you add enzymes that completely change the characteristics of the food (aka "industrial reformulation") that's perfectly fine but you add an emulsifier to improve the mouthfeel and texture now it's suddenly a "ultra processed" food and is pure evil and should be regulated like cigarettes? Now it has "crazy ingredients" and "weird additives"? I'm sorry but this stance is totally and completely illogical. You aren't going to convince me that this makes any sense.
>Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
For fucks sake, jelly requires pectin to be jelly. Sure, you can rely on the naturally occuring pectin in fruit, but adding additional pectin makes it so you have a consistent product and can add less sugar and don't have to cook it as long - aka healthier and less processed.
I don't really have a horse in this race, I found the picture of the "highly processed meal" gross on a visceral level, I just hate the illogically of it all. This is a religious belief.
I guess i can see how packaging makes a difference to the desirability / convenience of the food.
I guess i'm less likely to eat chips if i have to make them myself compared to grabbing a bag and more likely to over eat them if it's super convenient.
American cheese slices, Velveeta, Cheese Whiz, cheese spreads, nacho cheese are all NOVA group 4 ultra processed because they are industrial reformulations with added ingredients (like emulsifiers). Your average cheddar isn't.
And? For an "average cheddar" you still have to heat the milk, add enzymes, and age it and at the end you get something entirely different. Sounds like "processing" to me, or to use your words, "industrial reformulation."
So if cheese is a group three Nova classification "processed foods" then why did this study include cheese as literally the main component of the the "minimally processed meal?" Sounds like the authors very much consider cheese "minimally processed." Or at least less processed than peanut butter (literally just ground peanuts), which they put in the "highly processed meal."
You say "lines between get blurry" but I'm going to call it straight up meaningless bullshit since nobody agrees on anything or is talking about the same thing even when using the same framework. Once I read from an authoritative source that quesadillas are always ultra processed, like, by definition I realized that this whole concept is stupid.
Then you have weirdos coming in here talking about how "ultra processed food" is like tobacco and fraud, fucking hell, we've lost the plot.
group 4 ultra processed is basically food fraud in my opinion. There is so much complex industrial scale chemistry going into it that it's mind boggling that it's actually legal. On the other hand, the process for making real cheese is simple and relies on a natural process.
> “The two meals are matched within 1 percent of carbs, fat, proteins, calories, water, and salt,” said Zach Hutelin, a researcher at the institute and the study’s first author.
Note that fiber is not part of that list. Stripping out fiber essentially means that our gut microbiome is starved. Not coincidentally, it also means that these foods are much less prone to spoilage.
What does fiber has to do with spoilage? Is this a significant motivation for processed foods to strip out fiber?
Also, from the study:
> The non-UPF and UPF test meals were closely matched on meal weight, energy, energy density, macronutrients, available carbohydrate, glycaemic index and load, total dietary fibre, sodium and water (all ≤1.6% deviation between meals; Fig. 1b).
The study itself (linked at the bottom) does mention fiber (though they spell it "fibre", if you go looking for it). What I do notice is that they use "total dietary fibre", so there could be a difference between soluble and insoluble fiber content.
I hope the ultra processed food industry will come to be viewed similarly to the tobacco industry over time.
The human body is evidently not able to safely consume these products over the course of a lifetime and the ultimate toll on society and healthcare is already evident.
They are addictive and harmful to the body’s mechanisms.
It’s time to control the promotion, labelling and taxation of these products the same way we do cigarettes.
It was the tobacco industry! Big tobacco began buying food companies in the 1960s. Companies like Kraft and Del Monte where bought by tobacco companies R.J Reynolds and Philip Morris. These buyouts continued through the 90s. They applied their science of addiction engineering to food. And in cooperation with the USDA and farmers, they pushed a low-fat, high-carb diet, creating a market built on dirt-cheap grains.
For the purposes of this conversation - let’s think of it as pre chewed food.
The body evolved to eat foods that take a lot of chewing and digesting. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest problems with food that is “too” processed is that it’s absorbed far too quickly and early in the tract.
Food that makes it all the way through has a slower and more even absorption rate so we don’t get hungry again as fast.
That doesn't help define a useful understanding at all.
There will likely never be a satisfactory definition, and doesn't need to be. Instead we define what foods are causing health problems and which aren't.
Look in this study, cheese is on the unprocessed side. That is an absurdity of language.
In the end they may figure out that the key difference here isn't processing at all, but fiber, or some particular ingredient added to floud based products on the processing side.
Good rule of thumb: If you’re eating things you couldn’t make in your own kitchen using ingredients that were available 200 years ago… they might not be great for you.
Look into “the food matrix” and you’ll see what I mean.
Many ultra processed ingredients have been so pulverised that there’s no structure left to help regulate the speed at which your body can break it down and absorb it.
So it absorbs nutrients too quickly, blood sugar spike, blood sugar crash, hunger pang, and you end up eating more than you would have otherwise during your waking hours.
Multiply that by years and you get metabolic issues.
In Taiwan, many people eat out because it is quite cheap and convenient to do so (and for other cultural and social factors). Most homes have very small kitchens and refrigerators. Yet the rate of obesity is quite low for a high income country (Japan even lower) [0]
But something that is different is how much of the food is prepared at the vendor from whole ingredients. Ingredients often acquired whole day-of from nearby markets. Ingredients that have a shorter supply chain and higher freshness due to the smaller geography.
Reading this study, I wonder how much cheap ease of access to less processed foods contributes to the lower level of obesity and higher lifespans.
Do Taiwanese get as fat on average as African Americans on average when they eat an average American diet?
>In 2017–March 2020, non-Hispanic Black adults had the highest obesity prevalence (49.9%) followed by Hispanic (45.6%), non-Hispanic White (41.4%), and non-Hispanic Asian (16.1%) adults.
When comparing ant asian country to the US we should always keep physical activity and portion size in mind. A single cookie here in the US is massive and you always drive around just to get that cookie in the first place
Exactly. If you are eating chips it’s very hard to stop until the pack is over.
There are 3 options in order of effort: eat the next snack from a pack in your hand, decide and stop eating the cookie that is in the pack; get another pack to continue eating.
It requires more effort to get another pack and that biases towards the “stop eating” outcome.
If packages are large the the easiest action is continue eating.
I wonder how they managed to put in same amount of salt in the low processed meal. That cheese must be super salty.
I'd also wonder what would happen if they didint use heat treated carbs in the ultraptocessed one. If I were to guess I think they might be main offenders.
good study with, entirely expected results? Variances in bioavailability are well known no? A block of wood has calories but you can't live off it. As for processing there's been papers describing "roasting meat and veggies" as a gateway to our larger brains because cooking makes calories in food more available.
Does a cooked steak and a raw steak actually show different values when measured with a calorimeter?
their chosen dishes also seem to conflate a lot of factors, like processing, vs flavor. it's known that artificial sweeteners can elicit insulin responses despite not being a digestible sugar, I've heard studies showing that "Tasting" in the gut can perceive the sweetness.
esperent | 14 hours ago
> The non-UPF and UPF test meals were closely matched on meal weight, energy, energy density, macronutrients, available carbohydrate, glycaemic index and load, total dietary fibre, sodium and water (all ≤1.6% deviation between meals; Fig. 1b).
So they did match glycemic index, which the article omits.
tancop | 14 hours ago
I bet a lot of this is psychosomatic, you expect some food will give you fast energy so your body thinks that means you need it and releases insulin.
eudkfkriEir | 13 hours ago
plus all of the options that are complete unknowns which, in biology, is probably close to 99.999%
nrclark | 13 hours ago
I know somebody who got really into blood glucose monitoring, and she tells me that the order in which she eats a meal affects how much it spikes her glucose. So if she eats a piece of toast followed by a piece of cheese, it causes her a bigger glucose spike than she'd get if she eats the cheese first and then the toast.
Looking at the two meals in the study: if I sat down to eat the processed one, I'd probably start with the veggie straws. If I saw down to eat the unprocessed one, I'd almost certainly start with the egg or the cheese.
edit: and here are some other options: I notice that the unprocessed one is grain-free, vegetarian and has significantly less sucrose. I don't know if any of that makes it more or less healthy, but they're significant differences nutritionally.
canucker2016 | 12 hours ago
But the above example shows that the body doesn't treat food in that manner - the relatively low carb, higher fat cheese didn't smooth out the higher proportion carb count of the toast.
In the paper, the largest carbs for the ultraprocessed meal was instant mashed potatoes, while the non-processed meal had bananas as the largest carb source followed by craisins/cranberries.
The high carb foods in the unprocessed meal are paired with fiber.
The high carb foods in the ultraprocessed meal are NOT paired with fiber.
The fiber slows the rate of carb intake.
Same thing occurs with protein - same amount of ground beef and steak, ground beef meal will result in faster amino acid ingestion than the steak meal. No idea if there are any pros/cons of the faster ground beef ingestion, but there is a difference in how the digestive system processes the two meals.
jwr | 12 hours ago
This is what I read in a book about glucose. So I went ahead and measured. I found it not true, at least in my case. The recommendations of eating salad before your meal do nothing measureable for my glucose spikes.
bilsbie | 11 hours ago
On the flip side I seem to gain the same amount of weight regardless of what my blood sugar does.
djmips | 9 hours ago
gniv | 12 hours ago
PowerElectronix | 13 hours ago
esperent | 12 hours ago
irthomasthomas | 8 hours ago
Ostrogoth | 2 hours ago
andor | 12 hours ago
But these examples have different glycemic indexes, which the study matched for.
mpalczewski | 11 hours ago
simpsond | 9 hours ago
niek_pas | 14 hours ago
esperent | 14 hours ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-026-01619-4
TheChaplain | 14 hours ago
esperent | 14 hours ago
emj | 13 hours ago
Example: five years, 10000 participants, $170 million https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-awards-170...
arrrg | 13 hours ago
parasti | 12 hours ago
astura | 12 hours ago
pythonRon | 12 hours ago
astura | 11 hours ago
virtual_void | 11 hours ago
I'd guess they wanted to include store purchased bread, hence the pb&j.
The other thought i had was that most peanut butter includes (at least) palm oil (ultra processed) and sometimes other emulsifiers to prevent separation. Though you can buy pb that is just peanut and salt.
The jelly would contain quite a bit more in the way of preservatives, regulators and flavour enhancers etc than the jelly i'd make at home (if i did such a thing)
I'd guess it's just regular cheese which does require quite some processing to make but unless it's got extra additives to extend shelf life, change texture or taste it's just processed.
irthomasthomas | 10 hours ago
somenameforme | 10 hours ago
By contrast cheese is completely natural outside of a few exceptions like American cheese. You take milk, add something to curdle it like an acid (e.g. vinegar) or rennet - an enzyme obtained from the stomach of young calves, separate the coagulated stuff, salt it, dry it, age it - you now have cheese. Ricotta can even be made straight from raw milk with no additives. Cheese's long shelf life is natural.
burpingtree | 9 hours ago
somenameforme | 8 hours ago
thinkmassive | 8 hours ago
Peanut oil is commonly used for all kinds of frying. It's hilarious that you're trying to lecture people without knowing this basic fact.
thinkmassive | 8 hours ago
False, peanuts contain their own oil. Nothing needs to be added, not even salt.
Anything containing more than peanuts and salt should be referred to as something else, like peanut spread.
californical | 6 hours ago
And at least in America, most commonly-bought peanut butter has additives, and most store-bought bread has 40 different UPF ingredients. Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
It’s possible to have a non-UPF peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I might have one today! It’s just that the default options for most Americans contain a ton of crazy ingredients.
Depending on the cheese you buy, many are very simple, and rarely have weird additives. But if you buy a block of cheese or even usually the sandwich-sized slices, it’s not ultra-processed.
astura | an hour ago
So if you add enzymes that completely change the characteristics of the food (aka "industrial reformulation") that's perfectly fine but you add an emulsifier to improve the mouthfeel and texture now it's suddenly a "ultra processed" food and is pure evil and should be regulated like cigarettes? Now it has "crazy ingredients" and "weird additives"? I'm sorry but this stance is totally and completely illogical. You aren't going to convince me that this makes any sense.
>Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
For fucks sake, jelly requires pectin to be jelly. Sure, you can rely on the naturally occuring pectin in fruit, but adding additional pectin makes it so you have a consistent product and can add less sugar and don't have to cook it as long - aka healthier and less processed.
I don't really have a horse in this race, I found the picture of the "highly processed meal" gross on a visceral level, I just hate the illogically of it all. This is a religious belief.
virtual_void | 11 hours ago
*assuming the same ingredients as your home cooked example, which i think is your point, right?
astura | 11 hours ago
virtual_void | 11 hours ago
I guess i can see how packaging makes a difference to the desirability / convenience of the food.
I guess i'm less likely to eat chips if i have to make them myself compared to grabbing a bag and more likely to over eat them if it's super convenient.
Though I admit to being a bit lazy like that.
bigbaguette | 12 hours ago
It's very likely you're not going to finish your plate.
scns | 11 hours ago
astura | 12 hours ago
delichon | 11 hours ago
astura | 11 hours ago
delichon | 11 hours ago
astura | 9 hours ago
You say "lines between get blurry" but I'm going to call it straight up meaningless bullshit since nobody agrees on anything or is talking about the same thing even when using the same framework. Once I read from an authoritative source that quesadillas are always ultra processed, like, by definition I realized that this whole concept is stupid.
Then you have weirdos coming in here talking about how "ultra processed food" is like tobacco and fraud, fucking hell, we've lost the plot.
bouncycastle | 10 hours ago
bentt | 11 hours ago
Note that fiber is not part of that list. Stripping out fiber essentially means that our gut microbiome is starved. Not coincidentally, it also means that these foods are much less prone to spoilage.
ssivark | 11 hours ago
Also, from the study:
> The non-UPF and UPF test meals were closely matched on meal weight, energy, energy density, macronutrients, available carbohydrate, glycaemic index and load, total dietary fibre, sodium and water (all ≤1.6% deviation between meals; Fig. 1b).
gkdr | 10 hours ago
bilsbie | 11 hours ago
anonym29 | 11 hours ago
breezybottom | 10 hours ago
InsideOutSanta | 9 hours ago
jswelker | 29 minutes ago
seanhandley | 11 hours ago
The human body is evidently not able to safely consume these products over the course of a lifetime and the ultimate toll on society and healthcare is already evident.
They are addictive and harmful to the body’s mechanisms.
It’s time to control the promotion, labelling and taxation of these products the same way we do cigarettes.
irthomasthomas | 10 hours ago
edit: see: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332 "US tobacco companies selectively disseminated hyper-palatable foods into the US food system: Empirical evidence and current implications"
rrr_oh_man | 9 hours ago
breezybottom | 10 hours ago
seanhandley | 9 hours ago
The body evolved to eat foods that take a lot of chewing and digesting. As far as I can tell, one of the biggest problems with food that is “too” processed is that it’s absorbed far too quickly and early in the tract.
Food that makes it all the way through has a slower and more even absorption rate so we don’t get hungry again as fast.
JMKH42 | 8 hours ago
There will likely never be a satisfactory definition, and doesn't need to be. Instead we define what foods are causing health problems and which aren't.
Look in this study, cheese is on the unprocessed side. That is an absurdity of language.
In the end they may figure out that the key difference here isn't processing at all, but fiber, or some particular ingredient added to floud based products on the processing side.
masfuerte | 8 hours ago
seanhandley | 8 hours ago
breezybottom | an hour ago
seanhandley | 8 hours ago
Many ultra processed ingredients have been so pulverised that there’s no structure left to help regulate the speed at which your body can break it down and absorb it.
So it absorbs nutrients too quickly, blood sugar spike, blood sugar crash, hunger pang, and you end up eating more than you would have otherwise during your waking hours.
Multiply that by years and you get metabolic issues.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
CharlieDigital | 10 hours ago
But something that is different is how much of the food is prepared at the vendor from whole ingredients. Ingredients often acquired whole day-of from nearby markets. Ingredients that have a shorter supply chain and higher freshness due to the smaller geography.
Reading this study, I wonder how much cheap ease of access to less processed foods contributes to the lower level of obesity and higher lifespans.
[0] https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/
nonethewiser | 10 hours ago
>In 2017–March 2020, non-Hispanic Black adults had the highest obesity prevalence (49.9%) followed by Hispanic (45.6%), non-Hispanic White (41.4%), and non-Hispanic Asian (16.1%) adults.
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult-obesity-facts/
rrr_oh_man | 9 hours ago
That site does control for diet. E.g., my Korean-born wife has always had home-cooked Korean food growing up in North America.
KellyCriterion | 4 hours ago
Which is the second argument of OP, regional/fresh/not long distances etc.
CharlieDigital | 9 hours ago
juiceland | 8 hours ago
rdedev | 10 hours ago
ptsneves | 9 hours ago
There are 3 options in order of effort: eat the next snack from a pack in your hand, decide and stop eating the cookie that is in the pack; get another pack to continue eating.
It requires more effort to get another pack and that biases towards the “stop eating” outcome. If packages are large the the easiest action is continue eating.
c22 | 6 hours ago
scotty79 | 10 hours ago
I'd also wonder what would happen if they didint use heat treated carbs in the ultraptocessed one. If I were to guess I think they might be main offenders.
rramon | 8 hours ago
ticulatedspline | 5 hours ago
Does a cooked steak and a raw steak actually show different values when measured with a calorimeter?
their chosen dishes also seem to conflate a lot of factors, like processing, vs flavor. it's known that artificial sweeteners can elicit insulin responses despite not being a digestible sugar, I've heard studies showing that "Tasting" in the gut can perceive the sweetness.