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> “About 60% of the calories in Americans’ diets are from ultra-processed foods,” says Schmidt, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event in May. “In the mid-’80s, when

by tptacek 1mo ago

> “About 60% of the calories in Americans’ diets are from ultra-processed foods,” says Schmidt, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event in May. “In the mid-’80s, when we see ultra-processed foods starting to scale up in the American food supply, we also see obesity starting to really rise. That is the moment when some of the largest food companies are owned by tobacco companies.” A reminder here that while there's an important directional claim behind stuff like this, "ultra-processed food" is an extremely silly category that does violence to the argument. UPFs include: * Whole wheat bread (most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health) * Almost all yogurt products, flavored or otherwise * Literally all baby formula * Any kind of plant-based meat replacement * Many supermarket hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers) You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite). You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering. Hyperpalatable foods are almost always UPFs, but the other direction doesn't hold at all.

derefr 1mo ago
> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite). I would point out that many whole foods are generally shelf-stable (over at least weeks, if not months) without requiring the introduction of chemical stabilizers that don't otherwise "belong." Chemical stabilizers are generally needed for shelf stability in ultra-processed foods, because of one of the other defining characteristics of ultra-processed foods: their matrix has been disrupted (or constructed anew) such that the food is now highly labile (biochemical term: "labile organic matter"), i.e. very easy to break down into nutrients. Which applies not only to you breaking such foods down in your gut, but also to bacteria and fungi breaking these foods down on the shelf. And as it so happens, because these foods are labile, any such nutrients that do come from breaking down the food, come very quickly. Labile carbohydrates are high-glycemic-index insulin-spiking carbohydrates. Labile fats are atherosclerosis-inducing fats. Etc. Your body evolved to process (metabolize, remove from circulation, etc.) metabolic inputs in an environment where most available foods were the opposite of labile (a.k.a. recalcitrant organic matter). So most meals would give a slow/gentle level of metabolic throughput; with rare spikes of higher throughput from the rare natural labile food, and then plenty of low-throughput time to recover from such events. Your body didn't evolve to be able to deal with getting high-throughput metabolic input spikes from every meal. And this is why the the presence of chemical stabilizers in a food is actually a very helpful criterion in the definition of "ultra-processed food"! The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis. (Unless it's milk and you're a baby.) But note that the stabilizer isn't itself the problem. Bread is ultra-processed even without a stabilizer, because bread is a labile food with weak matrix integrity. The bread you bake at home is ultra-processed; you're the one who ultra-processed it! The "rules" for UPFs don't assert home-baked bread as a UPF, but that's because the point of the UPF designation is to label commercial foods, and more specifically, to draw a hard-line boundary based on objectively-measurable characteristics that industry players can't argue with or lie about. And lability / matrix integrity, while quantifiable, isn't something with a clear objective way to reduce it to a single number†; so any definition of UPF based on lability would result in endless arguments/pushback from industry players insisting the FDA is "calculating it wrong." But in your own personal life, the definition of "ultra-processed" you should be carrying around in your head and evaluating foods by, should be one that includes lability. † (Instead, lability is a high-dimensional measurement of how efficiently any single digestive enzyme, and/or any specific combination of enzymes, and/or any enzyme paired with a cofactor [e.g. a bile salt], will break apart the given food's matrix to release bio-accessible nutrients.)
- Ifkaluva 1mo ago
  By this definition, a cooked egg is ultra processed, but a raw egg isn’t?
  - derefr 1mo ago
    That depends! A boiled or fried egg is processed, but not ultra-processed. (The ovalbumin matrix in egg is denatured but not destroyed by just heating it up. Just like the protein matrix in a steak is denatured-but-not-destroyed by just heating it up.) It's still a whole food, per se. But scrambled eggs, or an omelette, are closer to being ultra-processed; simply because you've mechanically emulsified the egg together, and in the process, have broken down that matrix. (Same reason that ground beef is ultra-processed.) At that point, very small further additions can push what you might still think of as "just cooked eggs" into being ultra-processed. For example, just adding a sufficient amount of salt while cooking scrambled eggs could produce an ultra-processed result, since the disrupted matrix allows the salt to get in and break down cells and tissues, and then cooking those lysed cells and chemically-denatured tissues results in higher resulting lability / bio-accessibility of nutrients than cooking would have on its own. But also, on a separate point: raw egg, like milk, is already one of those rare naturally-labile foods. (That's why developing embryos can make use of the nutrients therein. It's also why salmonella loves raw eggs.) Raw egg is not necessarily especially easily digested by humans (none of our gut enzymes are particularly good at taking apart a non-denatured ovalbumin matrix), but many species have evolved into obligate ovivory for a reason.
    - hgomersall 1mo ago
      The Nova classification is generally how people interpret this stuff. Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
      - derefr 1mo ago
        > Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen I don't think that's a useful distinction. Many people make pasta noodles or sausage in their own kitchens, for example, and both of those are ultra-processed by every definition. Also, IMHO, it's a mistake to think of UPFs as only finished food products you get from the grocery store or from restaurants. Many ingredients people use in what they would very much insist is "home cooking", are themselves UPFs, and so cause the resulting "home-cooked" food to be a UPF. The FDA's recent categorization of sandwiches as generally being UPFs, for example, is due in part to people using UPF breads like Wonderbread for sandwiches; and in part due to people using reconstituted/preserved deli meats in sandwiches; but it's also due to even people who think they're being healthy, smearing a UPF "sandwich spread" onto their sandwich bread at the end. (A grilled cheese grilled in butter is a highly-processed food. A grilled cheese grilled in mayo is a UPF, because shelf-stable grocery-store mayo is a UPF.)
forgotmypw17 1mo ago
Most of the things you listed are highly processed foods that are not good for you and will contribute to obesity.
- terribleperson 1mo ago
  They're not 'highly processed' in a way that makes them contribute to obesity any more than the same thing made at home.
  - lithocarpus 1mo ago
    Maybe true as long as you make it the same way at home as the ultra processed version from the store. But you usually can't since you don't have the machinery. Homemade wheat bread made of just wheat/water/salt is an entirely different thing from most "whole wheat bread" in the food industry. Same for yogurt etc.
    - bryanlarsen 1mo ago
      That's the point. Homemade white bread and store bought have the same nutritional profile. They're both hyper-palatable. The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty and enables the body to convert it into glucose super quick. A whole-grain bread made with stone milled flour is going to be far healthier for you than steel ground white bread even if the brown bread is technically UPF and the white bread is home made. The true "natural" alternative would be a cracked-wheat porridge. That's about as far as you can get from hyper-palatable.
      - pessimizer 1mo ago
        > The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty I disagree on this. Speaking only about homemade, white bread is tasteless and wheat bran and germ adds taste. White bread pretty much tastes exactly like the sugar you pour into it, and wheat is the sort of mix of sour and sweet that makes an addictive taste - why Kool-Aid and soda are largely citric acid(sour) + sugar(sweet) + [random other stuff]. You can drink a larger volume of sugar in a shorter time through drinking Kool-Aid than you can eat in marshmallows. Wheat bread as some sort of health food is a scam, though. You get a few more micronutrients, but the problem is that its a ton of carbs. Brown foods being associated with health was just some weird advertising heuristic that got hammered into us our entire lives. Wheat bread simply tastes better. All of the seeds and gritty parts that they add to some of them are honestly just more marketing to people who think that things that are more difficult to eat are intrinsically better for you. There are plenty of other places to get your fiber than your bread.
KurSix 1mo ago
Shelf-stable hummus and Doritos can both be "ultra-processed", but that doesn't tell you much about why one might encourage overconsumption. Hyperpalatability seems much closer to the actual claim the article is trying to make.
- tptacek 1mo ago
  I think it literally is the claim the article is trying to make, but "UPF" is the on-trend term, despite the fact that most UPFs aren't engineered for hyperpalatability. It's a problem!
timschmidt 1mo ago
> most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health That's a large assertion to make without evidence. Personally, I'm suspicious of all antimicrobial agents' effects on gut microbiota and the knock-on effects on health.
- tekla 1mo ago
  So you dislike vinegar, salt, and any fermented foods that suppress microbial agents?
  - timschmidt 1mo ago
    > So you dislike You said dislike. I said suspicious. One's an opinion, the other an invitation for science. > vinegar, salt, and any fermented foods that suppress microbial agents? In the gut microbiota broad system sequencing experiments I've consumed reports from, even altering diet from one primary food source to another can result in complete restructuring of the gut ecosystem as quickly as within 24 hours. And switching back to the original food source didn't return to an identical gut ecosystem. Many studies show direct connections between gut microbiota and specific and broad health impacts. So I think suspicious is right. There is much yet to be learned.
- rpdillon 1mo ago
  I mean, he's not presenting the evidence here in a hacker news comment, but that doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. There are a bunch of different categories of stabilizers, and only some of them have antimicrobial properties -- most are about maintaining moisture and loaf volume over time. There are three substances that are predominantly used to inhibit mold growth, though: calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, and sodium benzoate. The first two are extremely well understood and considered safe globally. The third is still considered safe, but might have some interactions with vitamin C that lead to benzene formation to the tune of several parts per billion. The FDA considers this safe, and has for some time.
- pessimizer 1mo ago
  > I'm suspicious of all antimicrobial agents' effects on gut microbiota Boy do I wish people would talk like this, instead of the "ultra-processed foods" bullshit. The Atlantic had a stupid as hell article a few days ago with a title that really boils the entire op down: Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is" https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/kennedy-ultraprocessed-food-definition/688246/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/kennedy-ultraproc... "Ultra-Processed Food" is a phrase. It is not a thing. If you want to use it for its media traction, and "nobody knows what it is," define it before you use it. Instead, everybody has gone for "it is so mysterious," then goes on to cite a bunch of studies about "ultra-processed foods," treating it as a category that categorical statements can be made about. Name the chemicals, name the processes. They don't because these chemicals and processes are endorsed by massive conglomerates who can pull advertising and lobbying money. When you're vague as hell about everything, it's a case-by-case basis that only affects people who can't bribe as well as others. And about the people talking about sugars, salt and fats crammed into everything, I'm convinced they never cook. That's taste, and you can pour it in yourself just as well as a corporation. The reason people love it is because it tastes good. Salt isn't even bad for you, it's in fact very, very good for you because it makes micronutrient-rich foods palatable. Arguing that standard manufactured foods and foods marketed to children are too rich is a different argument, and most importantly for this conversation has nothing to do with the ultraprocessed foods question. Massive food companies are perfectly happy to remove all the fats and sugars from your food and replace them with some weird alcohol sugar or a new form of teflon they just invented a week ago, and to charge you a premium for the privilege of eating it. They literally did that throughout the 80s and 90s. The narrative intentionally confusing what the above refers to as "hyperpalatability" (a term which is as good as any) with "ultra-processed" (a propaganda term) is a gift to the food industry. It in fact even favors monopolies who can afford to put in the bizarre chemical constructions they'll use as alternatives, and to pay regulators to look the other way. "Ultra-processed foods" is a phrase meant for advertising - even the prefix "ultra-" reminds me of a cigarette ad, describing the filter. The filter was a device which ostensibly makes cigarettes healthier, but instead allows you to smoke far more than you would otherwise, and leads to worse health outcomes. Isn't smoking bad? Smoke our ultra-filtered cigarettes and breathe easy!
einpoklum 1mo ago
> UPFs include: > * Ultra-processed whole wheat bread > * Ultra-processed yogurt products > * Literally all baby formula > * Ultra-processed plant-based meat replacement > * Ultra-processed hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers) There, fixed that for you. (I don't know about baby formula, but granting you that one.)
- JadeNB 1mo ago
  > * Ultra-processed plant-based meat replacement There, fixed that for you. I think that it's also literally all plant-based meat replacers (meaning products intended to mimic meat, rather than just replacing meat with plants).
  - hgomersall 1mo ago
    Tofu is often used as a meat replacement and is Nova classification 3 at most.
    - JadeNB 1mo ago
      I agree, it is used in place of meat, but I think that it is not usually intended to mimic meat. For example, I think that few people would claim you could use tofu as a drop-in recipe replacement without affecting flavor, whereas meat replacers like Impossible are intended to be able to do exactly that.
      - hgomersall 1mo ago
        TBF, the original post used the precise phrasing "plant based meat replacement", which IMO covers this like tofu as well as impossible burgers.
sandcat_ 1mo ago
With the exception, maybe, of whole wheat bread (it seems they sometimes add extra wheat gluten, technically an additive but yes, silly), these all seem right to me? Especially meat replacements, they're often incredibly highly processed. Yoghurt is one you seem to be mistaken on. Yoghurt can be considered group 1, it just often contains thickeners, sweeteners, flavourings, etc. Especially if low-fat. You're right of course that hyperpalatability is a bigger problem. And you don't have to agree that UPFs are something you need to avoid. But I don't think that makes it a silly category.
- preg_match 1mo ago
  It’s a silly category to relate to health because, for example, meat replacements are UPF but are also typically much healthier than meat. Obviously that’s not always true, but most of the time it is. Basically all Americans can benefit from eating less meat, especially red meat. Ultra-processing is not just used to make more calorie-dense palatable food. It’s also used to make less calorie-dense food and enrich food with vitamins and macros you need for healthy living, like fiber. I mean, compare the ultra-processed high fiber tortillas to the natural tortillas. The high fiber ones have less calories, less carbs, are more satiating, and are overall healthier. They also taste worse, I.e. are less palatable. Ultra-processing and palatability are really orthogonal IMO. You can use processing to make palatable food, but you don’t have to. Look at traditional fast food - burgers, fries, fried chicken. You can trivially make any of that with no processing. It’s still unhealthy and ultra palatable. Cutting up a chicken at home and deep-frying it doesn’t magically make it healthy. Or go one step further, and look at the frying itself. We have access to processed refined oils. But if you don’t use them and go the old fashioned way, with lard frying, is it healthier or less palatable? No, actually, it’s tastier and much less healthy. You get 10x the saturated fat and way more calories. And I’ll get ahead of the anti-science anti-seed-oil people who just read that. We know, for a fact, that eating more saturated fat increases your risk of heart disease and cancer. Just because something is naturally or minimally processed does not make it healthy, health is much more complex than that.
b0rtb0rt 1mo ago
my wife describes ultra processed food as food that is basically pre digested for you before you eat it, which seems like a pretty good definition to me
- Footkerchief 1mo ago
  Seems like that would include all fermented foods.
- bcatanzaro 1mo ago
  That’s why we cook food. Cooked grain is way more nutritious than raw grain. The kitchen is an external stomach.
  - b0rtb0rt 1mo ago
    theres a difference between cooked rice and ritz crackers ritz crackers are basically already digested before you eat them
makingstuffs 1mo ago
I think someone has really mislead you on yoghurt. If you get plain, natural yoghurt it’s not ultra processed.
- sellmesoap 1mo ago
  Flavored yoghurt is often candy adjacent, but sneeks under the radar as a health food "It's probiotic!"
- rpdillon 1mo ago
  Yeah, this is totally true. A Greek yogurt is considered minimally processed, not ultra processed. The problem is, far and away, the majority of yogurt sold is fruit-flavored yogurt, which is considered ultra-processed. Icelandic yogurt and Greek yogurt are premium niche yogurts. I guess all I'm saying is that for the majority of people eating yogurt, it's an ultra-processed food.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 1mo ago
    The majority of people in which part of the world? Certainly not e.g. in the Eastern Med and the Balkans, I can assure you of that.
    - rpdillon 1mo ago
      I just looked up global consumption.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 1mo ago
        Sharing is caring.
- maxerickson 1mo ago
  It sort of illustrates the uselessness of the terms. Yogurt is made by sterilizing (likely homogenized) milk and introducing microorganisms that carry out some desired chemical reactions. They produce lactic acid, which is a stabilizer. Everyone apparently knows that those are good things, so they don't count.
protonbob 1mo ago
Yes and pretty much all baby formula is bad. Vegetable oil is often the #1 ingredient and is not even close to having the same density as breast milk. It can be life saving, but it’s not an example of UPF being generally good. Also supermarket whole wheat bread is very different than real bread if you look at the ingredients. It’s more like bread adjacent.
- n4r9 1mo ago
  > Vegetable oil is often the #1 ingredient and is not even close to having the same density as breast milk Density of what?
  - protonbob 1mo ago
    Sorry density of nutrients.
    - n4r9 1mo ago
      It may be less nutrient-dense than breast milk, but that doesn't make it "bad"
      - protonbob 1mo ago
        It’s also just worse for the baby in pretty much every metric. And yes it does make it bad. That means they have to get more liquids than they normally would and get gas. Why would you put bad in quotes? Do you know understand how a food can be good or bad?
        n4r9 1mo ago
        I put bad in quotes because you're claiming something is absolutely bad, but all your points are about how it is relatively worse than breast milk (which is a pretty high bar). Studies on the long-term health impacts of breast vs formula milk are difficult to take anything away from. They're often observational rather than interventional, and it's hard to separate the type of milk from the feeding method. For example, a baby may benefit from the "skin to skin" aspect of breast feeding, but you could replicate this with a niche formula feeding method. I don't think we really know how much worse formula is for babies than breast milk. It's probably that there's an increased risk in early infections. But in developed countries with good maternity guidance, the actual absolute risks of infections and SIDS are very low with either breast or formula.
rpdillon 1mo ago
Thanks for articulating this. I've had a problem over the past 20 years with terms like "screen time" and "ultra-processed foods" because there's a kernel of something that really matters somewhere in the argument, but the use of overly broad terms sort of kills things. I appreciate you calling out the nuance, and I agree with you that hyperpalatability is the main issue -- like applying the principles of TikTok to food.
- pessimizer 1mo ago
  > hyperpalatability is the main issue Hyperpalatability is a different issue. The main issue is that our foods are chemical factories. Turning it into a "food is too good" problem is just a trick to blame the consumer for not being mature enough to forgo pleasure. Food being good is not a crisis. Xylitol giving people heart attacks might be. Ingredients concocted in a lab never being studied at all until someone sues is a problem. Shifting the argument to "cheeseburgers are bad because they're good" is a really obvious distraction. There is literally no profit in making foods "hyperpalatable." Food companies would be just as happy selling you food that tastes like shit. If anything, in actuality commercial food has become worse and less palatable over time due to substitutions of cheaper ingredients. The argument is being shifted from an important one about power to a dumb moral panic. The people who love this are orthorexics who love telling people how their health is their own fault because they are self-indulgent. There is nothing more self-indulgent and self-praising than this discourse. That argument is hyperpalatable to orthorexics.
  - tptacek 1mo ago
    This is like the Mexican coke argument all over again. Everybody wants there to be an industrial bogeyman to blame for American nutritional health problems. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could fix problems for people simply by replacing industrial corn syrup with wholesome cane sugar? Of course, there is literally no difference healthwise between the two products. But that's hard to hear. It means you have to accept that sweetened soft drinks are just bad for you, full stop, and you have to treat them the same way you'd treat alcohol (I said, as an enthusiastic social drinker). So it goes with UPFs writ large. Wouldn't it be great if we could just make our foods wholesome and pure and not "chemical factories"? In fact: it would make essentially no difference to our health; in fact it would be a health problem if it led people to believe that bakery outputs were healthful and stabilized unsweetened skyr was dangerous. The entire problem here is that we've gotten incredibly good at engineering food for hyperpalatability, which leads people to make truly bad choices about what to eat habitually. You could reasonably regulate that practice! But you'd want to find a way to do it without doing Mercola science and taking healthful, affordable shelf-stable products off the shelves for no reason. Your "no profit in hyperpalatable foods" thing, I don't get at all. Maybe if you tried to explain it again. Sounds like the opposite of the truth.
tancop 1mo ago
> You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering I don't think even that is problematic by itself. You need to apply hyper palatable techniques to high calorie nutrient poor food for it to be a problem. Getting people addicted to something that's mostly protein or fiber or water packed with important micro nutrients would not be a bad thing at all. That's not what the food companies are doing (because empty calories are cheaper) but it's a perfectly good strategy we need more of.
- 0gs 1mo ago
  every once in a while i wonder why miracle berries can't be leveraged at scale to make ultranutritious food taste great. but it always feels like a thought with an obvious answer i am too stupid to deduce.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
juliusdavies 1mo ago
I’m a huge tptacek Stan but this is like arguing that all food is organic. Okay, you’re absolutely correct, but it doesn’t matter, because for most people UPF is like that infamous definition for “porn”: I know it when I see it. Tilting at windmills and I love you for it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
xnx 1mo ago
> Hyperpalatable Fiber removal is possibly the worst sin of food processing. It reduces satiety that would normally be present in the foods and prevent eating in excess.
bch 1mo ago
> Literally all baby formula Not sure attracting attention to baby formula will have a positive outcome[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
throw0101a 1mo ago
> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite). Twenty years ago Michael Polan made a bit of a splash with his The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008). In the latter he summarized things with the advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And the way to accomplish this was, when you go grocery shopping, stick to the edges of the grocery store and to try to avoid the centre aisles. The aisles is where all the "shelf-stable" stuff is. If the food remains 'good' for weeks or months and you don't have to refrigerate it then you should question how much of it you want to consume.
- tptacek 1mo ago
  That's the claim. It's true to the extent that the stuff in the middle of the store tends to be engineered for hyperpalatability by jacking up sugars/carbs and fats. But it's not true in the sense that ultra-processing for shelf stability is somehow bad for you. That's the naturalist fallacy. You can easily compose a straightforwardly unhealthy diet by sticking to the outside of the store!

by tptacek 1mo ago

derefr 1mo ago

> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite). I would point out that many whole foods are generally shelf-stable (over at least weeks, if not months) without requiring the introduction of chemical stabilizers that don't otherwise "belong." Chemical stabilizers are generally needed for shelf stability in ultra-processed foods, because of one of the other defining characteristics of ultra-processed foods: their matrix has been disrupted (or constructed anew) such that the food is now highly labile (biochemical term: "labile organic matter"), i.e. very easy to break down into nutrients. Which applies not only to you breaking such foods down in your gut, but also to bacteria and fungi breaking these foods down on the shelf. And as it so happens, because these foods are labile, any such nutrients that do come from breaking down the food, come very quickly. Labile carbohydrates are high-glycemic-index insulin-spiking carbohydrates. Labile fats are atherosclerosis-inducing fats. Etc. Your body evolved to process (metabolize, remove from circulation, etc.) metabolic inputs in an environment where most available foods were the opposite of labile (a.k.a. recalcitrant organic matter). So most meals would give a slow/gentle level of metabolic throughput; with rare spikes of higher throughput from the rare natural labile food, and then plenty of low-throughput time to recover from such events. Your body didn't evolve to be able to deal with getting high-throughput metabolic input spikes from every meal. And this is why the the presence of chemical stabilizers in a food is actually a very helpful criterion in the definition of "ultra-processed food"! The necessity of stabilization tells you that the food is likely labile (as otherwise, why would they have needed to stabilize it?) — and therefore is unhealthy to be consumed on a continuous basis. (Unless it's milk and you're a baby.) But note that the stabilizer isn't itself the problem. Bread is ultra-processed even without a stabilizer, because bread is a labile food with weak matrix integrity. The bread you bake at home is ultra-processed; you're the one who ultra-processed it! The "rules" for UPFs don't assert home-baked bread as a UPF, but that's because the point of the UPF designation is to label commercial foods, and more specifically, to draw a hard-line boundary based on objectively-measurable characteristics that industry players can't argue with or lie about. And lability / matrix integrity, while quantifiable, isn't something with a clear objective way to reduce it to a single number†; so any definition of UPF based on lability would result in endless arguments/pushback from industry players insisting the FDA is "calculating it wrong." But in your own personal life, the definition of "ultra-processed" you should be carrying around in your head and evaluating foods by, should be one that includes lability. † (Instead, lability is a high-dimensional measurement of how efficiently any single digestive enzyme, and/or any specific combination of enzymes, and/or any enzyme paired with a cofactor [e.g. a bile salt], will break apart the given food's matrix to release bio-accessible nutrients.)

Ifkaluva 1mo ago
By this definition, a cooked egg is ultra processed, but a raw egg isn’t?
- derefr 1mo ago
  That depends! A boiled or fried egg is processed, but not ultra-processed. (The ovalbumin matrix in egg is denatured but not destroyed by just heating it up. Just like the protein matrix in a steak is denatured-but-not-destroyed by just heating it up.) It's still a whole food, per se. But scrambled eggs, or an omelette, are closer to being ultra-processed; simply because you've mechanically emulsified the egg together, and in the process, have broken down that matrix. (Same reason that ground beef is ultra-processed.) At that point, very small further additions can push what you might still think of as "just cooked eggs" into being ultra-processed. For example, just adding a sufficient amount of salt while cooking scrambled eggs could produce an ultra-processed result, since the disrupted matrix allows the salt to get in and break down cells and tissues, and then cooking those lysed cells and chemically-denatured tissues results in higher resulting lability / bio-accessibility of nutrients than cooking would have on its own. But also, on a separate point: raw egg, like milk, is already one of those rare naturally-labile foods. (That's why developing embryos can make use of the nutrients therein. It's also why salmonella loves raw eggs.) Raw egg is not necessarily especially easily digested by humans (none of our gut enzymes are particularly good at taking apart a non-denatured ovalbumin matrix), but many species have evolved into obligate ovivory for a reason.
  - hgomersall 1mo ago
    The Nova classification is generally how people interpret this stuff. Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
    - derefr 1mo ago
      > Generally speaking ultra processing isn't something you do in your own kitchen I don't think that's a useful distinction. Many people make pasta noodles or sausage in their own kitchens, for example, and both of those are ultra-processed by every definition. Also, IMHO, it's a mistake to think of UPFs as only finished food products you get from the grocery store or from restaurants. Many ingredients people use in what they would very much insist is "home cooking", are themselves UPFs, and so cause the resulting "home-cooked" food to be a UPF. The FDA's recent categorization of sandwiches as generally being UPFs, for example, is due in part to people using UPF breads like Wonderbread for sandwiches; and in part due to people using reconstituted/preserved deli meats in sandwiches; but it's also due to even people who think they're being healthy, smearing a UPF "sandwich spread" onto their sandwich bread at the end. (A grilled cheese grilled in butter is a highly-processed food. A grilled cheese grilled in mayo is a UPF, because shelf-stable grocery-store mayo is a UPF.)

forgotmypw17 1mo ago

Most of the things you listed are highly processed foods that are not good for you and will contribute to obesity.

terribleperson 1mo ago
They're not 'highly processed' in a way that makes them contribute to obesity any more than the same thing made at home.
- lithocarpus 1mo ago
  Maybe true as long as you make it the same way at home as the ultra processed version from the store. But you usually can't since you don't have the machinery. Homemade wheat bread made of just wheat/water/salt is an entirely different thing from most "whole wheat bread" in the food industry. Same for yogurt etc.
  - bryanlarsen 1mo ago
    That's the point. Homemade white bread and store bought have the same nutritional profile. They're both hyper-palatable. The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty and enables the body to convert it into glucose super quick. A whole-grain bread made with stone milled flour is going to be far healthier for you than steel ground white bread even if the brown bread is technically UPF and the white bread is home made. The true "natural" alternative would be a cracked-wheat porridge. That's about as far as you can get from hyper-palatable.
    - pessimizer 1mo ago
      > The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty I disagree on this. Speaking only about homemade, white bread is tasteless and wheat bran and germ adds taste. White bread pretty much tastes exactly like the sugar you pour into it, and wheat is the sort of mix of sour and sweet that makes an addictive taste - why Kool-Aid and soda are largely citric acid(sour) + sugar(sweet) + [random other stuff]. You can drink a larger volume of sugar in a shorter time through drinking Kool-Aid than you can eat in marshmallows. Wheat bread as some sort of health food is a scam, though. You get a few more micronutrients, but the problem is that its a ton of carbs. Brown foods being associated with health was just some weird advertising heuristic that got hammered into us our entire lives. Wheat bread simply tastes better. All of the seeds and gritty parts that they add to some of them are honestly just more marketing to people who think that things that are more difficult to eat are intrinsically better for you. There are plenty of other places to get your fiber than your bread.

KurSix 1mo ago

Shelf-stable hummus and Doritos can both be "ultra-processed", but that doesn't tell you much about why one might encourage overconsumption. Hyperpalatability seems much closer to the actual claim the article is trying to make.

tptacek 1mo ago
I think it literally is the claim the article is trying to make, but "UPF" is the on-trend term, despite the fact that most UPFs aren't engineered for hyperpalatability. It's a problem!

timschmidt 1mo ago

> most supermarket bread is stabilized, which you might not like aesthetically, but it isn't doing anything to your health That's a large assertion to make without evidence. Personally, I'm suspicious of all antimicrobial agents' effects on gut microbiota and the knock-on effects on health.

tekla 1mo ago
So you dislike vinegar, salt, and any fermented foods that suppress microbial agents?
- timschmidt 1mo ago
  > So you dislike You said dislike. I said suspicious. One's an opinion, the other an invitation for science. > vinegar, salt, and any fermented foods that suppress microbial agents? In the gut microbiota broad system sequencing experiments I've consumed reports from, even altering diet from one primary food source to another can result in complete restructuring of the gut ecosystem as quickly as within 24 hours. And switching back to the original food source didn't return to an identical gut ecosystem. Many studies show direct connections between gut microbiota and specific and broad health impacts. So I think suspicious is right. There is much yet to be learned.
rpdillon 1mo ago
I mean, he's not presenting the evidence here in a hacker news comment, but that doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. There are a bunch of different categories of stabilizers, and only some of them have antimicrobial properties -- most are about maintaining moisture and loaf volume over time. There are three substances that are predominantly used to inhibit mold growth, though: calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, and sodium benzoate. The first two are extremely well understood and considered safe globally. The third is still considered safe, but might have some interactions with vitamin C that lead to benzene formation to the tune of several parts per billion. The FDA considers this safe, and has for some time.
pessimizer 1mo ago
> I'm suspicious of all antimicrobial agents' effects on gut microbiota Boy do I wish people would talk like this, instead of the "ultra-processed foods" bullshit. The Atlantic had a stupid as hell article a few days ago with a title that really boils the entire op down: Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is" https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/kennedy-ultraprocessed-food-definition/688246/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/08/kennedy-ultraproc... "Ultra-Processed Food" is a phrase. It is not a thing. If you want to use it for its media traction, and "nobody knows what it is," define it before you use it. Instead, everybody has gone for "it is so mysterious," then goes on to cite a bunch of studies about "ultra-processed foods," treating it as a category that categorical statements can be made about. Name the chemicals, name the processes. They don't because these chemicals and processes are endorsed by massive conglomerates who can pull advertising and lobbying money. When you're vague as hell about everything, it's a case-by-case basis that only affects people who can't bribe as well as others. And about the people talking about sugars, salt and fats crammed into everything, I'm convinced they never cook. That's taste, and you can pour it in yourself just as well as a corporation. The reason people love it is because it tastes good. Salt isn't even bad for you, it's in fact very, very good for you because it makes micronutrient-rich foods palatable. Arguing that standard manufactured foods and foods marketed to children are too rich is a different argument, and most importantly for this conversation has nothing to do with the ultraprocessed foods question. Massive food companies are perfectly happy to remove all the fats and sugars from your food and replace them with some weird alcohol sugar or a new form of teflon they just invented a week ago, and to charge you a premium for the privilege of eating it. They literally did that throughout the 80s and 90s. The narrative intentionally confusing what the above refers to as "hyperpalatability" (a term which is as good as any) with "ultra-processed" (a propaganda term) is a gift to the food industry. It in fact even favors monopolies who can afford to put in the bizarre chemical constructions they'll use as alternatives, and to pay regulators to look the other way. "Ultra-processed foods" is a phrase meant for advertising - even the prefix "ultra-" reminds me of a cigarette ad, describing the filter. The filter was a device which ostensibly makes cigarettes healthier, but instead allows you to smoke far more than you would otherwise, and leads to worse health outcomes. Isn't smoking bad? Smoke our ultra-filtered cigarettes and breathe easy!

einpoklum 1mo ago

> UPFs include: > * Ultra-processed whole wheat bread > * Ultra-processed yogurt products > * Literally all baby formula > * Ultra-processed plant-based meat replacement > * Ultra-processed hummus brands (again: stabilizers and emulsifiers) There, fixed that for you. (I don't know about baby formula, but granting you that one.)

JadeNB 1mo ago
> * Ultra-processed plant-based meat replacement There, fixed that for you. I think that it's also literally all plant-based meat replacers (meaning products intended to mimic meat, rather than just replacing meat with plants).
- hgomersall 1mo ago
  Tofu is often used as a meat replacement and is Nova classification 3 at most.
  - JadeNB 1mo ago
    I agree, it is used in place of meat, but I think that it is not usually intended to mimic meat. For example, I think that few people would claim you could use tofu as a drop-in recipe replacement without affecting flavor, whereas meat replacers like Impossible are intended to be able to do exactly that.
    - hgomersall 1mo ago
      TBF, the original post used the precise phrasing "plant based meat replacement", which IMO covers this like tofu as well as impossible burgers.

sandcat_ 1mo ago

With the exception, maybe, of whole wheat bread (it seems they sometimes add extra wheat gluten, technically an additive but yes, silly), these all seem right to me? Especially meat replacements, they're often incredibly highly processed. Yoghurt is one you seem to be mistaken on. Yoghurt can be considered group 1, it just often contains thickeners, sweeteners, flavourings, etc. Especially if low-fat. You're right of course that hyperpalatability is a bigger problem. And you don't have to agree that UPFs are something you need to avoid. But I don't think that makes it a silly category.

preg_match 1mo ago
It’s a silly category to relate to health because, for example, meat replacements are UPF but are also typically much healthier than meat. Obviously that’s not always true, but most of the time it is. Basically all Americans can benefit from eating less meat, especially red meat. Ultra-processing is not just used to make more calorie-dense palatable food. It’s also used to make less calorie-dense food and enrich food with vitamins and macros you need for healthy living, like fiber. I mean, compare the ultra-processed high fiber tortillas to the natural tortillas. The high fiber ones have less calories, less carbs, are more satiating, and are overall healthier. They also taste worse, I.e. are less palatable. Ultra-processing and palatability are really orthogonal IMO. You can use processing to make palatable food, but you don’t have to. Look at traditional fast food - burgers, fries, fried chicken. You can trivially make any of that with no processing. It’s still unhealthy and ultra palatable. Cutting up a chicken at home and deep-frying it doesn’t magically make it healthy. Or go one step further, and look at the frying itself. We have access to processed refined oils. But if you don’t use them and go the old fashioned way, with lard frying, is it healthier or less palatable? No, actually, it’s tastier and much less healthy. You get 10x the saturated fat and way more calories. And I’ll get ahead of the anti-science anti-seed-oil people who just read that. We know, for a fact, that eating more saturated fat increases your risk of heart disease and cancer. Just because something is naturally or minimally processed does not make it healthy, health is much more complex than that.

b0rtb0rt 1mo ago

my wife describes ultra processed food as food that is basically pre digested for you before you eat it, which seems like a pretty good definition to me

Footkerchief 1mo ago
Seems like that would include all fermented foods.
bcatanzaro 1mo ago
That’s why we cook food. Cooked grain is way more nutritious than raw grain. The kitchen is an external stomach.
- b0rtb0rt 1mo ago
  theres a difference between cooked rice and ritz crackers ritz crackers are basically already digested before you eat them

makingstuffs 1mo ago

I think someone has really mislead you on yoghurt. If you get plain, natural yoghurt it’s not ultra processed.

sellmesoap 1mo ago
Flavored yoghurt is often candy adjacent, but sneeks under the radar as a health food "It's probiotic!"
rpdillon 1mo ago
Yeah, this is totally true. A Greek yogurt is considered minimally processed, not ultra processed. The problem is, far and away, the majority of yogurt sold is fruit-flavored yogurt, which is considered ultra-processed. Icelandic yogurt and Greek yogurt are premium niche yogurts. I guess all I'm saying is that for the majority of people eating yogurt, it's an ultra-processed food.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1mo ago
  The majority of people in which part of the world? Certainly not e.g. in the Eastern Med and the Balkans, I can assure you of that.
  - rpdillon 1mo ago
    I just looked up global consumption.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 1mo ago
      Sharing is caring.
maxerickson 1mo ago
It sort of illustrates the uselessness of the terms. Yogurt is made by sterilizing (likely homogenized) milk and introducing microorganisms that carry out some desired chemical reactions. They produce lactic acid, which is a stabilizer. Everyone apparently knows that those are good things, so they don't count.

protonbob 1mo ago

Yes and pretty much all baby formula is bad. Vegetable oil is often the #1 ingredient and is not even close to having the same density as breast milk. It can be life saving, but it’s not an example of UPF being generally good. Also supermarket whole wheat bread is very different than real bread if you look at the ingredients. It’s more like bread adjacent.

n4r9 1mo ago
> Vegetable oil is often the #1 ingredient and is not even close to having the same density as breast milk Density of what?
- protonbob 1mo ago
  Sorry density of nutrients.
  - n4r9 1mo ago
    It may be less nutrient-dense than breast milk, but that doesn't make it "bad"
    - protonbob 1mo ago
      It’s also just worse for the baby in pretty much every metric. And yes it does make it bad. That means they have to get more liquids than they normally would and get gas. Why would you put bad in quotes? Do you know understand how a food can be good or bad?
      - n4r9 1mo ago
        I put bad in quotes because you're claiming something is absolutely bad, but all your points are about how it is relatively worse than breast milk (which is a pretty high bar). Studies on the long-term health impacts of breast vs formula milk are difficult to take anything away from. They're often observational rather than interventional, and it's hard to separate the type of milk from the feeding method. For example, a baby may benefit from the "skin to skin" aspect of breast feeding, but you could replicate this with a niche formula feeding method. I don't think we really know how much worse formula is for babies than breast milk. It's probably that there's an increased risk in early infections. But in developed countries with good maternity guidance, the actual absolute risks of infections and SIDS are very low with either breast or formula.

rpdillon 1mo ago

Thanks for articulating this. I've had a problem over the past 20 years with terms like "screen time" and "ultra-processed foods" because there's a kernel of something that really matters somewhere in the argument, but the use of overly broad terms sort of kills things. I appreciate you calling out the nuance, and I agree with you that hyperpalatability is the main issue -- like applying the principles of TikTok to food.

pessimizer 1mo ago
> hyperpalatability is the main issue Hyperpalatability is a different issue. The main issue is that our foods are chemical factories. Turning it into a "food is too good" problem is just a trick to blame the consumer for not being mature enough to forgo pleasure. Food being good is not a crisis. Xylitol giving people heart attacks might be. Ingredients concocted in a lab never being studied at all until someone sues is a problem. Shifting the argument to "cheeseburgers are bad because they're good" is a really obvious distraction. There is literally no profit in making foods "hyperpalatable." Food companies would be just as happy selling you food that tastes like shit. If anything, in actuality commercial food has become worse and less palatable over time due to substitutions of cheaper ingredients. The argument is being shifted from an important one about power to a dumb moral panic. The people who love this are orthorexics who love telling people how their health is their own fault because they are self-indulgent. There is nothing more self-indulgent and self-praising than this discourse. That argument is hyperpalatable to orthorexics.
- tptacek 1mo ago
  This is like the Mexican coke argument all over again. Everybody wants there to be an industrial bogeyman to blame for American nutritional health problems. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could fix problems for people simply by replacing industrial corn syrup with wholesome cane sugar? Of course, there is literally no difference healthwise between the two products. But that's hard to hear. It means you have to accept that sweetened soft drinks are just bad for you, full stop, and you have to treat them the same way you'd treat alcohol (I said, as an enthusiastic social drinker). So it goes with UPFs writ large. Wouldn't it be great if we could just make our foods wholesome and pure and not "chemical factories"? In fact: it would make essentially no difference to our health; in fact it would be a health problem if it led people to believe that bakery outputs were healthful and stabilized unsweetened skyr was dangerous. The entire problem here is that we've gotten incredibly good at engineering food for hyperpalatability, which leads people to make truly bad choices about what to eat habitually. You could reasonably regulate that practice! But you'd want to find a way to do it without doing Mercola science and taking healthful, affordable shelf-stable products off the shelves for no reason. Your "no profit in hyperpalatable foods" thing, I don't get at all. Maybe if you tried to explain it again. Sounds like the opposite of the truth.

tancop 1mo ago

> You get to problematic through hyperpalatability, which is another, different target of modern food engineering I don't think even that is problematic by itself. You need to apply hyper palatable techniques to high calorie nutrient poor food for it to be a problem. Getting people addicted to something that's mostly protein or fiber or water packed with important micro nutrients would not be a bad thing at all. That's not what the food companies are doing (because empty calories are cheaper) but it's a perfectly good strategy we need more of.

0gs 1mo ago
every once in a while i wonder why miracle berries can't be leveraged at scale to make ultranutritious food taste great. but it always feels like a thought with an obvious answer i am too stupid to deduce.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]

juliusdavies 1mo ago

I’m a huge tptacek Stan but this is like arguing that all food is organic. Okay, you’re absolutely correct, but it doesn’t matter, because for most people UPF is like that infamous definition for “porn”: I know it when I see it. Tilting at windmills and I love you for it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

xnx 1mo ago

> Hyperpalatable Fiber removal is possibly the worst sin of food processing. It reduces satiety that would normally be present in the foods and prevent eating in excess.

bch 1mo ago

> Literally all baby formula Not sure attracting attention to baby formula will have a positive outcome[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

throw0101a 1mo ago

> You get to "ultra-processed" simply by making things shelf-stable, and shelf-stability isn't an actual health problem (kind of the opposite). Twenty years ago Michael Polan made a bit of a splash with his The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008). In the latter he summarized things with the advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." And the way to accomplish this was, when you go grocery shopping, stick to the edges of the grocery store and to try to avoid the centre aisles. The aisles is where all the "shelf-stable" stuff is. If the food remains 'good' for weeks or months and you don't have to refrigerate it then you should question how much of it you want to consume.

tptacek 1mo ago
That's the claim. It's true to the extent that the stuff in the middle of the store tends to be engineered for hyperpalatability by jacking up sugars/carbs and fats. But it's not true in the sense that ultra-processing for shelf stability is somehow bad for you. That's the naturalist fallacy. You can easily compose a straightforwardly unhealthy diet by sticking to the outside of the store!