This all has very big "uncured bacon" energy to me (if you didn't already know: there's no such thing; vendors of uncured bacon performatively drive the same chemical nitrite reaction using vegetable extracts). For example: yogurt becomes a UPF simply by dint of adding carrageenan, which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu.
It's not that there isn't a very legitimate issue underneath all this: packaged, hyperpalatable, low-nutritional-density low-satiety foods are probably a major driver of health problems. It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods, and with the wrong metrics you end up in a similar place as California does with the Prop 65 warnings.
We went through a similar thing with "pink slime" (transglutaminase preservation techniques).
>which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu
when you use a comparison like this, you choose an example that people will understand so they can then, by analogy, extend that understanding to the point you are trying to make...
like the kombu in the dashi, you say? dash-it-all, that's a combunation I hadn't considered!
> It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods
I've heard this criticism a fair bit, and I sort of agree. The only thing is, what is the right metric? And if we don't have one, and know these foods are causing harm, should we just use UPF as a term anyway?
There is perhaps some rough correlation but as soon as you define an objective metric then consumer packaged foods companies will figure out a way to game the metric by engineering foods to get good scores and be highly palatable while still not being very healthy. Another way of thinking about it might be ultra-formulated versus ultra-processed: what matters is the contents rather than how you got there.
The thing is that, although the list used (the "Nova classification") is obviously somewhat arbitrary, the fact that everybody uses it makes research results comparable to each other.
Comparable how? If I compare one meaningless number to another meaningless number on the same scale then I can see which one is larger, but I won't learn anything scientifically valuable or practically useful.
Correlation != causation. Your correlation can identify a hugely important effect without pinpointing its mechanism. In this case: I think it's very likely that ultraprocessing has not-very-much to do with food health, but UPF foods tend to be hyperpalatable and low-satiety, which almost certainly does. The ultraprocessing isn't what's making the foot hyperpalatable or low-satiety (the macronutrient mix and sweetening is).
The previous comment was pointing out that there's an agreed-on definition of what "ultra-processing" means. There is. But there is no such agreement on mechanistic effects of ultra-processing.
One thing I would like to see is a clear categorization of to the concept of chemically reduce ingredients into unreconizeable components, and then recombine them into the original product while presenting it as nothing has happened. If you take milk and reduce it down to fat-free milk powder, then introduce additional fat and rehydrate it with additional cream aroma, it doesn't turn back into fresh cream. Similar, if you take fruit and reduce it down into pure fructose, then reintroduce water and aroma extracted from the same kind of fruit, it may be similar but not quite like freshly squeezed fruit juice.
Canned Jalapeño often deploy a similar (but much less noticeable) trick in that the manufacturer grows Jalapeño without capsaicin, and then reintroduce chemically created capsaicin into the can in order to control for spiciness.
I don't know, it's a hard problem, but I think there's good public policy evidence that when you do these things wrong (as with Prop 65 cancer warnings and nitrates) you lose all the benefits the labeling tries to provide.
Not sure of the formula, but it would be a metric that ignores "processing" or "unnatural" ingredients and somehow scores for high calories in absence of fiber or protein.
Examples:
Apple juice: sugar calories without fiber or protein = bad
Apples: sugar calories, but has fiber = OK
Potato chips: fat and carb calories without fiber or protein = bad
Baked potato with butter: fat and carb calories, but has fiber = OK
Saturated fat is not processed food and is not unhealthy. It is the most common kind of natural fat in the human diet for most people through most of history.
Different human populations had quite different diets in the past. A huge error that the paleo diet promoters make is claiming that there is a single diet shared across all humanity for most of human history.
The book Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken really opened my eyes about UPF. I highly recommend it. Here is a video of him delivering a lecture at the royal institution about the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1oOoYnCfJs
I don't think adding kombu to dashi would count as UPF according to the book's definition.
I don't know that it does, but I do know that carrageenan does, and they're both just seaweed extracts.
Later
This video is really frustrating. The first half of it is making relatively banal arguments about the importance of food to health. He's setting up an argument that I think basically everybody agrees with (hyperpalatable packaged food are a major driver of illness). But then he gets to UPFs, says the definition is totally agreed on, and then says they're all made by investor-driven large corporations.
That's just straightforwardly false. I made a mac & cheese out of some stored roasted cauliflower (never put a raw cauliflower in your fridge). To melt the aged cheddar I used, I added a half teaspoon of sodium citrate (a miracle ingredient). My cauli-mac is now a UPF. No giant corporation made it.
My argument isn't that packaged food isn't exactly as much of a problem as the UPF people say it is. My argument is that "UPF" is not the right axis on which to determine which foods are and aren't healthy.
I think it’s misleading to suggest a substance is okay because it’s “just” an extract. Normal foods contain lots of substances that when extracted, are obviously bad if concentrated and consumed in larger quantities than would be had during normal consumption of whatever the source is.
Additionally, even if that substance is perfectly safe, the extraction process may effectively increase (as a %) the amount of byproducts. For example - and this is totally made up - suppose ice cream normally contained 1ppm microplastics, but adding carrageenan increased that to 10ppm because of the microplastics in seawater and the failure of the extraction process to remove them. Or even things that are “good” in their normal dosages might be “bad” at higher doses found in extracts.
In general, I would suggest it’s a good heuristic to avoid foods containing ingredients added for stability, preservation, or color. Maybe it’s fine but the benefit vs just eating fresh food that doesn’t need it is basically nil even in that case. Carrageenan would fall into this category. (It seems like there is some research suggesting carrageenan is not great for you but I’m not an expert: I’d not heard that and avoid it simply because it’s not anything I would add to a food I made.)
At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle and the naturalist fallacy. I'm fine with people being squicked out by food additives that are products of petroleum chemistry, like benzaldehyde. You can get carrageenan simply by rehydrating and simmering seaweed and then filtering it through cheesecloth.
Whatever else is going on with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt, the carrageenan itself isn't doing anything to drive the health problems this speaker is talking about.
This is actually I think a really good illustration of the problem. There is absolutely a (primarily message-board-driven) literature of concerns about specific variants of carrageenan. But those concerns --- which I don't think are well-founded --- have nothing to do with the wave of concern about "UPFs" generally. The UPF thing isn't about IBD (some think kappa carrageenan exacerbates intestinal inflammation with susceptible people) --- it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
> At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle
Is there something wrong with the precautionary principle? It would be one thing if the supposed benefit was something really incredible, like extending lifespan or curing cancer. Then maybe we should be less cautious. But we're talking about adding something to your ice cream to make it look nice for longer.
> it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
I'm not advocating anyone eat tons of sugar, but sugar consumption and the obesity epidemic are not very well correlated. I would agree that we should eliminate "hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food", but if you were to hypothetically ban basically all non-salt/sugar preservatives, stability agents, flavor enhancers, colors etc. then you almost eliminate this entire product category, because it's no longer practical to produce and sell, easy to consume, or as marketable. Even banning corn syrup in packaged food (as a UPF ingredient) would be a positive move because forcing its replacement by cane sugar (regardless of whatever alleged health problem HFCS s may or may not have) would mean that such products become less economically viable, because its more expensive and less stable.
> the naturalist fallacy.
The naturalistic "fallacy" is approximately true for diets. We are animals that evolved in a way that optimized for the consumption of various foods in our environments. We're some of the most wildly complex chemical systems in the world, and we have remarkably broadly adapted digestive systems with a pretty good tolerance, so you can get away with throwing a lot of stuff down the pipe without anything bad happening. But that's exactly why "eat the same foods people always have and not bizarre lab concoctions" is a useful heuristic for health. It's entirely possible that various additives are perfectly fine or even pro-health, but it's not the way to bet as a general principle, and it's impractical to conduct meaningful long-term nutritional studies to find out with any real assurance.
If you believe that about the naturalistic fallacy, you should be fine with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt; the carrageenan is arguably more "natural" than the yogurt.
But all this just shows to go you: this whole "UPF" thing is a sort of motte and bailey deal. We all broadly agree that packaged hyperpalatable low-satiety foods (along with liquid calories) are a danger to human health; that's the motte. The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
The right food classification scheme wouldn't have this problem, and wouldn't be a way for people to smuggle in proscriptions against sodium citrate or transglutaminase while coming up with "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
> The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
In my case, I'm arguing that doing away with these things, regardless of any health effects they may have, has the effect of eliminating the entire class of foods you have a problem with.
> "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
I'm not arguing that people should drink coke (which is full of all kinds of stuff besides HFCS I doubt people should be consuming), but the obesity epidemic is not well-correlated to soft drink consumption. The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
My point is that you're arguing for something far outside of the mainstream, but the "UPF" framing makes it hard to tell; it sounds at first like you're saying we should stop subsidizing Takis (fair enough!) but in reality you're also saying all the yogurt needs to be reformulated (not gonna happen). I'm not trying to engage with your theory of health; I'm trying to establish that the UPF thing has Prop 65 vibes.
The Prop 65 people make a lot of the same arguments you are --- most especially that we should more formally adopt the precautionary principle. Which is why you get cancer warning labels on bags of organic sweet potato sticks. And so nobody takes those labels seriously anymore.
But bans on UPF wouldn't actually do that. Potato chips aren't ultraprocessed, but they sure seem like hyperpalatable low-satiety foods. Pastrami is ultraprocessed but doesn't seem like it is any more hyperpalatable or low-satiety than roast beef.
Almost all potato chips are UPF. Even the ones that aren’t so bad would be much more expensive if they had to be fried in olive oil or lard instead of UPF ingredients like canola oil.
100% of potato chips are bad for you. 0% of unsweetened yogurts are bad for you. You're defending a scheme that labels some of those yogurts as unhealthy, and some of the potato chips as healthy. Extremely simple issue.
I’m skeptical that thinly sliced potatoes crisped in olive oil are bad for you.
I don’t believe unsweetened yogurt is bad either, although some people would say so because of the saturated fat content. Certainly very few people are going to eat any real amount of unsweetened yogurt, except perhaps as a dip.
I mean, at the point where you're arguing that fried potato chips are healthy, I think we've kind of established the poles of the argument and can leave it there.
I think if you don’t feel the need to explain, then you’re probably right.
Is it better if I drizzled the same amount of olive oil, on a baked potato instead? Is this about the potential problems of heating oils or something else? Are you just one of the people who believe carbohydrates are the cause of the obesity epidemic? And therefore chips are bad because of the carb content while unsweetened yogurt would be fine?
> Is it better if I drizzled the same amount of olive oil, on a baked potato instead?
"Drizzled" might be a bit difficult to do for the amount of olive oil you'd need. For example, the USDA FNDDS database says 100g of plain potato chips has ~34g of fat and ~54g of carbs [0]. 100g of a plain baked potato (with presumably nothing added), on the other hand, has approximately no fat and ~21g of carbs [1], though to be fair 100g is probably not what you're eating; the database lists a medium baked potato as 285g and a large at 400g.
Yes, there's a large difference in water weight. That database says 100g of potato chips has 1.86g of water, while 100g of baked potatoes has ~75g of water.
- is made from a plant historically considered inedible
- has a very high input:output ratio
- often has extensive processing steps that include industrial solvents like hexane and deodorization steps to make the end product tolerable
If that’s not a UPF then I would not regard that definition as useful.
Personally I don’t hold to any particular “seed oil” claims, but vegetable oils are a major ingredient in almost all UPFs, are very calorie dense, and canola/soybean oil have risen from near-zero to be one of if not the largest calorie source for Westerners in just the past few decades; canola oil was not even consumed before the 1970s. They would certainly be one of my main suspects in the obesity epidemic.
It’s certainly true to talk about how bad chips are we’re talking about what makes them so high calorie is the oil.
You can take that up with the nova classification I guess. And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.
In another comment you say that chips fried in olive oil would be healthy. But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.
> And... you are absolutely repeating seed oil panic claims in your comment.
Maybe we have different definitions of "seed oils" or "panic claims". Nothing I said is controversial: canola oil as food did not exist before the 1970s, the standard method of creating canola oil involves crushing a massive amount of canola and then using a solvent like hexane to maximize extraction, vegetable oils are one of the primary sources for 21st century calories and are hugely present in UPFs.
I would consider a "panic claim" to be something like "seed oils cause cancer", "seed oils cause heart attacks", "seed oils cause inflammation", "the hexane in canola is poisoning people", or even "seed oils are definitely responsible for the obesity epidemic", etc. I am sure there is (limited) evidence for these claims, and that's fine: it's nearly impossible to get high-quality nutritional research showing long-term dietary impacts because of the nature of the problem. What do you do? Interviews are unreliable, you can't feed people controlled diets for a lifetime, population/consumption studies are beset by thousands of confounders. Thus, I don't have any reason to place a lot of belief in any study saying "seed oils bad!"; some other study explaining how they're great is just as likely to be true, in my mind.
All I can go by is the simple heuristic I explained earlier.
> But that wouldn't change the calorie content of the final product compared to chips fried in canola or sunflower oil.
Because I don't think calories are likely to be the real explanation behind the public health problems. Every food item, even 100% unprocessed, has all sorts of pharmacological side effects besides turning into cellular fuel. Most of them are very subtle, have different effects in different populations, etc. Most people have had access to plentiful high-calorie low-satiety foods for a long time and this didn't happen. Perhaps the "hyperpalatable" part is involved, but lots of sugary and high-fat treats fall into this category and we still didn't have this problem. What we didn't have was modern UPFs or vegetable oils. So if the cause is dietary, it seems reasonable to look in askance at these, and it's obvious that we don't "need" flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and the various preservatives we now have except to enhance the profitability of Kraft and General Mills. My second point was that this would have the side effect of rendering uneconomical or unpalatable whole categories of products that presumably tptacek does have a problem with, even if he doesn't align with the reason for doing so. So if he thinks chips are a public health menace, this makes them rarer and more expensive.
We did not consume canola oil prior to the 70s. I do not understand why this should carry nutritional information.
Hexane is used to extract oil from rapeseeds. This sounds spooky but is pretty deeply studied. It does not appear to make its way into our bodies at measurable levels.
"Well it must be something so why not canola oil" is not the right way to approach this problem, in my opinion. The swap to include "flavor enhancers, stabilizers, and preservatives" (none of which are are canola oil) is also odd here. Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?
Right, I didn’t make any argument that the hexane used in rapeseed processing is dangerous. Just that those factors are obviously indications it’s a highly processed food.
> Why would we expect there to be a shared pharmacological cause across these different things?
We wouldn’t, and nowhere did I suggest that. Just that it’s probably a good idea to eliminate all these highly processed food items. Maybe they’re fine but the main thing they’re fine for is big food manufacturer conglomerates. If you don’t think UPFs are themselves the problem, that’s fine: getting rid of them gets rid of all these low-satiety calorie dense foods, including potato chips, unless you make them much more expensive because you’re cooking them with lard or something. Which in turn still reduces consumption.
>The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
I'm curious about this. Do you have a reference for this? What is in decline specifically? Number of people drinking sugary soda? Number of sugary sodas consumed per person (on average)? Amount of sugar consumed by drinking sugary soda? I'm curious because it seems the amount of sugar per can of soda has drastically increased since the 90's. If my memory serves me well, a can of soda 20 years ago was like 26g of sugar, today they're like 53 g per soda. At least in the United States.
I don't think your memory is serving you very well. A 12oz can of Coca-Cola contains 39g of sugar, which hasn't changed in a long time. (Some people claim that switching the sugar from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup had harmful effects but there's little evidence for that.) Other brands have a little more or less sugar but that's probably the one most commonly consumed.
Sugar consumption per capita has been trending up slightly in the last few years. But ironically it was actually higher back in the 1970s when the population was less obese.
Because roasted cauliflower is so much better and more versatile and it keeps. Roast the cauliflower off on your toaster oven, stick it in a ziploc, and then put it in your fridge.
You can go to any Asian grocer and get thin-sliced pork belly and cook it up yourself to see the difference. It is not subtle. For American bacon flavor, you need nitrites (nitrates are a slow-release source of nitrites).
If you're talking about American-style bacon, and it tastes like bacon, there's no such thing. They're just exploiting labeling rules by selecting very specific nitrite sources. Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.
<strike>This is before we get to the whole premise of avoiding nitrates. Would you eat a beet? That's a serving of industrial bacon's worth of nitrates right there.</strike>
Later
(Actually, super bad example, since the concern is nitrosamines which are formed in the presence of proteins. The point about the illegitimacy of nitrite-free bacon stands!)
> Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.
Are you sure about that?
Because it's the first time ever I stumbled upon this argument.
The explanation I heard is that there are legit bacterial food safety concerns (salmonella and listeria, IIRC) that justify using nitrites even if they are by themself harmful, the benefit/risk ratio is simply favorable to nitrites.
Pretty sure. I make bacon and dabble with salumi. It's definitely not strictly a food safety issue. I sometimes put a pinch of pink salt in with my duck confit cure, and it comes out distinctively hammier. Nitric oxide interacts with myoglobin in ways that alter your taste perception; sort of the way I understand miracleberries make things taste sweeter (by cutting off your perception of bitterness), nitrites do to the metallic flavor compounds in meat.
It's both. Curing is a preservative technique and it gives bacon and ham the flavor people enjoy. Like a lot of food preservation techniques (jam, etc) curing was most likely developed for preservation first, and then people came to enjoy the flavor it gave.
The Coleman bacon doesn't list ingredients. But the Applegate bacon lists celery powder because that is a source of nitrates. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_powder
I don't know much about either brand but there are good reasons to buy fancy bacon instead of Smithfield and Hormel, just because of the quality and ethics of the livestock inputs. But nitrites aren't one of those reasons.
A burger with the lot here in Australia will have beets and bacon. And an egg, probably pineapple too. Lettuce, tomato, cheese. hmm.. I know what I want for lunch today.
I could understand the beetroot when I was Down Under, but the pineapple just had me go "?" similarly to when I was served eggs, pasta, and mushrooms for breakfast.
This is partially true. The use celery extract or whatever they can get away with legally. Smoking is what gives bacon the flavor. Buy your cut of meat, season, and smoke it with a very low temp for long time, you have bacon. No nitrates.
No you won't. You'll have smoked pork. Nitrite curing is the difference between ham and pork, and is part of the source of American bacon's flavor. You can make or buy unsmoked bacon; it will still taste like bacon.
It is weird to me that people try to make an issue out of this, because it's not like the flavor change in cured meat is hard to miss. Just buy some pink salt! Corned beef tastes like corn beef because of nitrites.
If there is a thing a reasonable person can do with pork belly, I have done it. I think you have the higher evidentiary burden here, regardless of our respective experience. You can check Ruhlman's Charcuterie and Salumi books, you can check AskCulinary, you can check the food Stack Exchange, you can just notice that literally every packaged bacon product, whether or not it claims to be cured, is in fact cured (usually with celery powder), or, of course, you can just take some sliced pork belly and make a 5% pink salt/salt mix and throw it in a zip in your fridge overnight and see.
I get that you like smoked pork belly. I do too. I don't even object to you calling it "bacon". All sorts of things that aren't American bacon are called bacon. But nitrites are absolutely part of the distinctive flavor of American bacon.
The whole thing is silly, because we can just point to ham and corned beef, two products where the debate doesn't even make sense; we only see it with bacon, and we only see it because vendors lie about whether their products are cured.
You're still getting the industrial levels of nitrates/nitrites. They just stuff it in as an extract from celery.
The problem isn't the curing, per se. In old school hand curing, almost all the nitrate/nitrite has reacted and is gone by the time you buy the meat.
The problem is the industrialization of the process. In order to not have to inspect the cured meat (as that would take people--the horror!), industry injects a massive amount of curing agents such that even when the meat is "fully cured" there is still a ton of it left in the meat itself.
Everything you had to shake or stir in the past now contains carageen. Milk based drinks, cream, cream salads, even ice cream contains it usually and often undeclared
Do you have a source for transglutiminase used to put the pink slime back together? This is the first I'm hearing it. I thought they just stirred it into the ground beef.
That article is very confused. They're saying that transglutaminase, street name meat glue, extracted from bacteria is literally the same thing as pink slime. Lean finely textured beef, street name pink slime, comes from cows. However processed, it's still beef. You can't squeeze it out of bacteria.
Reading the Wikipedia articles it's pretty clear these are different things, even if both are added to beef in some way.
Of course it's confused. I barely read it. I just remember, as a meat glue enthusiast (glue two skirt steaks together sometime! amazing!) that TG was at the heart of a "pink slime" controversy, as one of the ways manufacturers made salable products out of mechanically separated meat.
I don't, like, agree that it's a real issue! That's my point. TG is more than enough to make a food product "UPF", but a lot of TG meat products are probably a whole hell of a let better for you than non-UPF "olive-oil fried potato chips".
European yogurts are also stabilized with carrageenan. Also: you irradiate your dairy to the point where it's shelf stable, so you're nobody to talk. At least our milk doesn't glow in the dark.
> European yogurts are also stabilized with carrageenan.
Not in my part of Europe! There are only two ingredients in plain yoghurt here in Norway: milk and a bacterial culture. Flavoured yoghurts typically add fruit puree and sugar.
It's not that there isn't a very legitimate issue underneath all this: packaged, hyperpalatable, low-nutritional-density low-satiety foods are probably a major driver of health problems. It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods, and with the wrong metrics you end up in a similar place as California does with the Prop 65 warnings.
We went through a similar thing with "pink slime" (transglutaminase preservation techniques).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-a9VDIbZCU