It always feels weird to me when an argument starts out, "This new science was not immediately accepted by the bulk of the community, therefore arguments against it must be a conspiracy to...
It always feels weird to me when an argument starts out, "This new science was not immediately accepted by the bulk of the community, therefore arguments against it must be a conspiracy to discredit the truth."
The point of Science is that it tests new information instead of accepting it because the person pushing for it says so. That's why Andrew Wakefield lost his license after he publicly cried wolf about the MMR vaccines being dangerous; because he had a competing vaccine regimen that he was financing and he faked research.
It's not encouraging that they're struggling to come up with a definition of the thing they're trying to regulate. This kind of feels like GMOs all over again in that they're not sure they trust it and are trying to find justification. The Nova classification system definition seems incredibly subjective. Like I get what they're going for, "pop-tarts are bad". But I'm pretty sure it would also count out most homemade pizza dough and banana bread if strictly applied.
[...] Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') [...]
Sounds impressive, but would include honey. Which in fairness, is one of the few foods processed by multiple species, so it's probably correct to count it as one of the most processed foods on the planet. Saying fructose has no culinary use just tells me they've never had an apple pie.
Yes, keep studying how food and the human body interact. But trying to be antagonistic by doing things like pointing out the food and beverage industry have double the lobbying budget of the "tobacco and alcohol" industry, without pointing out food and beverage is at least an order of magnitude larger.... comes off as disingenuous.
I believe it would not, though that doesn't make homemade food using highly processed white flour healthy It's true that "ultra processed" is a broad category, and imperfectly defined. But some...
But I'm pretty sure it would also count out most homemade pizza dough and banana bread if strictly applied.
I believe it would not, though that doesn't make homemade food using highly processed white flour healthy
It's true that "ultra processed" is a broad category, and imperfectly defined. But some umbrella term needs to exist for the public health nightmare that is industrialized food.
The science showing the negative health impacts of components of ultra processed food (refined sugar, refined flour, modified oils, modified proteins and so on) is copious and undisputed. It's not quite on the level of the industry manufactured climate change "debate", but it's not far off. There are no serious scientists saying that these things aren't (very) bad for people. And the impact is bigger than individual health, it's extremely expensive for public health systems.
Your post seems to be calling conclusions into question that are based on good science. Do you have anything to support that?
Is the science really copious and undisputed? I went and found a meta-analysis that was popular in the news recently, and to me it seems like the evidence is pretty limited. link to the study Of...
Is the science really copious and undisputed? I went and found a meta-analysis that was popular in the news recently, and to me it seems like the evidence is pretty limited.
Based on the visual abstract, it seems like aside from type 2 diabetes, the evidence for everything else is both low in quality and merely suggestive in credibility.
Also, it seems like these are mostly correlation studies. I'm not aware of significant evidence that it's about the level of processing and not just that eating a lot of carbs is bad for you, but if you have some links I'd love to educate myself.
I suppose from a public health standpoint you have to consider whether processing exacerbates trends in carb consumption. It's my understanding that there's a lot more evidence that suggests over-consumption of carbohydrates is bad for you, with seemingly less evidence that it's the processing that's bad. It's not easy to enact policies to reduce consumption of food staples like flour, sugar, or what they're processed into like breakfast cereal and cookies though, since it disproportionately affects the poor.
Well, for example, whole grain flour versus white flour. In the case of the latter much of the fiber and nutrition has been stripped, leaving a more concentrated and higher glycemic carbohydrate....
seemingly less evidence that it's the processing that's bad
Well, for example, whole grain flour versus white flour. In the case of the latter much of the fiber and nutrition has been stripped, leaving a more concentrated and higher glycemic carbohydrate. That's the processing bit.
Same goes for sugar cane versus table sugar, or fruit versus isolated fructose. The processing is definitely making it worse.
When you refine whole grain flour, you get both white flour and bran. They are both equally processed because they are created simultaneously through the same process. White flour is less healthy...
When you refine whole grain flour, you get both white flour and bran. They are both equally processed because they are created simultaneously through the same process. White flour is less healthy than whole grain flour, but bran is more healthy than whole grain flour.
It's the nutritional value of the ingredients that we should focus on, not the degree of processing. Processing is a red herring; yes, it can be used to make extra unhealthy ingredients, but it can equally be used to make extra healthy ingredients.
It's not difficult to assess how healthy or unhealthy a given food product is, so why don't we just do that instead of focusing on hard-to-define proxy that does not even correlate that well?
But it is hard to assess how healthy or unhealthy something is. Labels that tell you the macronutrients are woefully inadequate. They cannot tell you how full they will make you, how long they...
But it is hard to assess how healthy or unhealthy something is. Labels that tell you the macronutrients are woefully inadequate. They cannot tell you how full they will make you, how long they will keep you satisfied, how addictive they are, what degree they are carcinogenic, and what degree they contribute to diabetes or cardiovascular disease. Practically everything in the grocery store has labels that tell you how healthy they supposedly are, regardless of how good they may or may not be for your health. You see breakfast cerials telling you they're part of a healthy breakfast when they're 1/3rd sugar by weight.
There is no such thing as "healthy" when it comes to nutrition. Nutrition is extremely complex. Bran may be great in terms of fiber and vitamins, but in real life nobody is eating it. The majority of it goes into animal feed. It's basically inedible because it's so unpalatable; it's almost exclusively seen in foodstuff where it is combined with large amounts of sugar and fats, like bran muffins or raisin bran, where it is a lot worse for you than if you just decided to eat it as a whole wheat bread. Even if we can theoretically make things "extra healthy", how often does it happen? What is the marketshare of supernaturally healthy foods? It's practically zero.
There's some missing context I think. There are a lot of reasons why it's useful to have a simple way to refer to the issue. A big part of the problem is the food industry itself. They have been...
There's some missing context I think. There are a lot of reasons why it's useful to have a simple way to refer to the issue.
A big part of the problem is the food industry itself. They have been working for a long time to get people addicted to cheap, unhealthy food by co-opting well documented biological processes. Having done that, they fight to keep the most addictive ingredients available.
Or in other words, they are actively lobbying against any attempt to make their food healthier that would impact sales. They're also paying firms to help them modify public opinion, and they're really good at it.
So it's a hard problem. The kind politicians don't want to spend political capital on and regulators are pressured to avoid. But politicians and regulators are more likely to care if they think voters care, so public awareness is important.
And you're not going to foster a public conversation by trying to educate the public about 20 different ways processed food is bad for you. No one has the bandwidth for that and a lot of people really don't want to change the way they eat.
Instead you need a simple umbrella term under which you can have an ongoing conversation about the problem with a lot of participants.
Ultra processed seems like fine term to me. Sure you can argue semantics, but why?
To me this seems like a case of letting perfect get in the way of good. Labeling and identifying ultra processed rounds up a good majority of bad foods, and there might be some other good foods...
To me this seems like a case of letting perfect get in the way of good. Labeling and identifying ultra processed rounds up a good majority of bad foods, and there might be some other good foods included. It's easier once the ball gets going to add exceptions than to wait for the scientific process to conclude what is the impact that these foods have for us.
Our consumption habits have far surpassed what AHA recommends for healthy daily values for humans. A single cookie can contain an entire day's worth of sugar, let alone a pack of two cookies. Our nutrition facts labels are awful at divulging information for the average consumer. That pack of two cookies might show the facts for one cookie and leave it up to the consumer to know that they need to double everything. Just the nutrition facts alone are terribly big agro friendly. The fact that we even allow single person cups at the sizes that we do (Big Gulp, movie theater cups, etc.) without additional taxes and regulations is insane. We are so far behind where we should be given what we already know, we don't have the luxury of waiting even longer for the perfect scientific study to neatly give us all the answers.
I think that if the labels incidentally started labeling bran or something as completely unhealthy they'd be roundly mocked in the media and completely ignored. More so than the CA labels because...
I think that if the labels incidentally started labeling bran or something as completely unhealthy they'd be roundly mocked in the media and completely ignored. More so than the CA labels because some people aren't aware of those somehow.
Maybe we could label all junk food as "junk food," sort of like the Far Side cartoon :-) I don't think people would stop eating it though. We would get used to the label, sort of like California...
Maybe we could label all junk food as "junk food," sort of like the Far Side cartoon :-)
I don't think people would stop eating it though. We would get used to the label, sort of like California Prop. 65 warnings.
Nutrition seems to be the poster child for the problems with the way science is done and how it effects society. Food is almost infinitely complex compared to scientific mainstays like physics and...
Nutrition seems to be the poster child for the problems with the way science is done and how it effects society. Food is almost infinitely complex compared to scientific mainstays like physics and chemistry. When you eat something, you are not eating a collection of nutrients; you are eating the results of a ridiculously complex set of systems that bring those nutrients together.
It is counterproductive to demand an exact understanding of how something works at a micron level before taking action on or against it, especially in cases like this where there is measurable harm caused by inaction. It's unnecessary to have that level of understanding. Doctors have been prescribing aspirin for over a hundred years, but it's only in the last few decades that we began to understand the mechanism by which it works. Should people have been left in pain instead?
The fact of the matter is that the work on UPF is not "the new science"; it's been studied for quite a while at this point and there is a good amount of peer-reviewed research being published by a number of different researchers from different institutions. I do not see how you think that the Nova classification system is subjective, but it seems like you don't understand exactly what it's trying to do or what it entails. Honey is nowhere to be found in that quote; to my knowledge there is no negative effects associated with honey that is not also associated with sugar. The first paragraph in that Wikipedia overview tells you that the classification system is weighted more towards the processing than it is it's contents. Fructose in an apple is not a problem to the same scale as fructose separated from everything else and added as a sweetener.
And in regards to the comparison of lobbying between the food industry and the tobacco and drug industries, it's not only completely fair, it's apt. Big food processing companies like Kraft and General Foods were previously owned by tobacco companies, and their business strategies are basically copy-pasted from their playbooks. Just because they have more money to spend than the tobacco and drug industries doesn't excuse the fact that they are spending huge sums to influence policy.
The reason why you find UPF to be such a nebulous thing is because it's an umbrella term that includes multiple different factors. One of them is the use of additives. Another is the balancing of sugars, fats, and salt. The biggest one is processing ingredients in unnatural ways, like separating fructose from fruits or hydrogenating fats. Note that Nova is a classification system that determines what kind of processing is done to a food rather than the intensity of the health effect.
Please note that I don't mean to defend the Nova classification system; Today was literally the first time I have heard of it. But what I am trying to say is that the stuff that this article talks about is absolutely real, it is as bad as they are saying it is, and unless you're eating a rather specialized diet it does affect you.
Honey has a higher fructose/glucose ratio than High Fructose Corn Syrup, the thing that makes HFCS concerning is that it's cheap enough to be added to everything, not that it's processed. (there's...
Honey has a higher fructose/glucose ratio than High Fructose Corn Syrup, the thing that makes HFCS concerning is that it's cheap enough to be added to everything, not that it's processed. (there's layers there, higher glucose honey crystalizes faster so it's 'selected against' but that's a tangent)
I just think this system and the article in particular are falling uncomfortably close to the replication crisis. Why is one of their prime quotes from a Director of Philosophy that "works with food science people" for example? There's a lot of focus on whether the diet contains process vs unprocessed food instead of the actual content of the diet. It's notoriously hard to do research on sociological issues like this, but the whole push to the Nova system puts a huge emphasis on how the food someone was eating was made instead of the content of their diet. It's important to "not be sneaky" about the contents of food, but it shouldn't be at the expense of ignoring actual total 'intake'.
The tobacco+alcohol/food conflation is fine because yes, industry lobbying is suspect, but they don't do that. They say the 'food industry' spends twice as much. What they're not saying is that the food industry is therefore spending a far lower percentage of their budget. The framing is weird. Absolute dollar amounts don't mean that much comparing entire industries. All they're really doing is saying "these industries that people find morally questionable spend money, but this other, far more widespread, far bigger industry, spends more money!"
I don't know, maybe it's mostly the tone of the article that I find off-putting.
I was trying to convey an idea in my earlier comment that I failed really badly. The problem I had with science in this topic is that people focus on extremely fine details at the expense of the...
I was trying to convey an idea in my earlier comment that I failed really badly. The problem I had with science in this topic is that people focus on extremely fine details at the expense of the whole; it leads to people focusing too much on those details and having their overall nutrition suffer as a result. Take your honey example for instance; yes, it does have a high amount of fructose, but focusing on that means you miss the point that it's extremely difficult to overconsume honey. The flavors become overwhelming really quickly, to the point that many products on grocery store shelves that are honey-flavored can often have more sugar than honey.
To make things worse, the focus on these specifics can have really bad effects on public health. Just look at how bad things got with the low-sugar and low-fat craves in the 90s.
The actual dollar amounts of money spent on lobbying absolutely makes a big difference. The industry may be bigger, but the important thing to realize is that the actual people being lobbied is the same. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be a politician dealing with lobbyists. The most annoying gnat is the one that gets swatted first.
I feel that the thing you are missing out on is that the studies on processing are directly linked to intake. From the article:
In 2019, American metabolic scientist Kevin Hall carried out a randomised study comparing people who ate an unprocessed diet with those who followed a UPF diet over two weeks. Hall found that the subjects who ate the ultra-processed diet consumed around 500 more calories per day, more fat and carbohydrates, less protein — and gained weight.
But once again, intake is just one part of the equation of health. UPF has been linked to a number of health issues that reduce lifespan, and consumption doesn't provide a complete picture. I wish things could be that simple. But they aren't. And pretending that they are will just let the problems fester.
From the article: From the Wikipedia article about Nova: … It seems that from the start, this classification system was meant for educating the public about nutrition. Compare with the “four food...
From the article:
Monteiro’s food classification system, “Nova”, assessed not only the nutritional content of foods but also the processes they undergo before reaching our plates.
The classification's attention to social aspects of food give it an intuitive character. This makes it an effective communication tool in public health promotion, since it builds on consumers' established perceptions. At the same time, this characteristic has led some scientists to question whether Nova is suitable for scientific control. By contrast, researchers have successfully developed a quantitative definition for hyperpalatable food.
It seems that from the start, this classification system was meant for educating the public about nutrition. Compare with the “four food groups,” which was replaced by the “food pyramid” in the US. These food classification systems are artificial and politically contested cultural artifacts, but nonetheless, public education about nutrition has to be based on something. I expect that they work somewhat for their intended purpose, if people actually follow them.
The part I don’t like is the assumption that industrial foods are always bad. For example, I occasionally will have a bottle of Solyent as a snack. I’d like to know whether it’s as nutritious as they claim. (That is, going beyond reading the nutrition label.) I don’t think saying “it’s ultra-processed, therefore it must be bad for you” is a good way of evaluating industrial foods that are intended to be healthy.
It would be sort of like making “organic” or “kosher” or “vegan” a food group, except that instead of being positive, it’s a label that nobody wants.
And this is important: The food pyramid was heavily influenced by lobbiests over the science at the time. The G Word with Adam Conover covered this in the Food epsiode (about 20 minutes in). The...
It seems that from the start, this classification system was meant for educating the public about nutrition. Compare with the “four food groups,” which was replaced by the “food pyramid” in the US. These food classification systems are artificial and politically contested cultural artifacts, but nonetheless, public education about nutrition has to be based on something. I expect that they work somewhat for their intended purpose, if people actually follow them.
The latest battle in a long war. For example, during the 90's the processed food industry famously responded to growing evidence that refined sugar was a major contributor to obesity by running a...
The latest battle in a long war. For example, during the 90's the processed food industry famously responded to growing evidence that refined sugar was a major contributor to obesity by running a multifaceted and wildly successful campaign to demonize fat as an alternative culprit. Thereby changing the eating habits of a generation.
This is (another) industry that is very good at fighting regulation and science and manipulating public perception in order to maintain their profits.
It always feels weird to me when an argument starts out, "This new science was not immediately accepted by the bulk of the community, therefore arguments against it must be a conspiracy to discredit the truth."
The point of Science is that it tests new information instead of accepting it because the person pushing for it says so. That's why Andrew Wakefield lost his license after he publicly cried wolf about the MMR vaccines being dangerous; because he had a competing vaccine regimen that he was financing and he faked research.
It's not encouraging that they're struggling to come up with a definition of the thing they're trying to regulate. This kind of feels like GMOs all over again in that they're not sure they trust it and are trying to find justification. The Nova classification system definition seems incredibly subjective. Like I get what they're going for, "pop-tarts are bad". But I'm pretty sure it would also count out most homemade pizza dough and banana bread if strictly applied.
Sounds impressive, but would include honey. Which in fairness, is one of the few foods processed by multiple species, so it's probably correct to count it as one of the most processed foods on the planet. Saying fructose has no culinary use just tells me they've never had an apple pie.
Yes, keep studying how food and the human body interact. But trying to be antagonistic by doing things like pointing out the food and beverage industry have double the lobbying budget of the "tobacco and alcohol" industry, without pointing out food and beverage is at least an order of magnitude larger.... comes off as disingenuous.
I believe it would not, though that doesn't make homemade food using highly processed white flour healthy
It's true that "ultra processed" is a broad category, and imperfectly defined. But some umbrella term needs to exist for the public health nightmare that is industrialized food.
The science showing the negative health impacts of components of ultra processed food (refined sugar, refined flour, modified oils, modified proteins and so on) is copious and undisputed. It's not quite on the level of the industry manufactured climate change "debate", but it's not far off. There are no serious scientists saying that these things aren't (very) bad for people. And the impact is bigger than individual health, it's extremely expensive for public health systems.
Your post seems to be calling conclusions into question that are based on good science. Do you have anything to support that?
Is the science really copious and undisputed? I went and found a meta-analysis that was popular in the news recently, and to me it seems like the evidence is pretty limited.
link to the study
Of particular interest, link to the visual abstract
Based on the visual abstract, it seems like aside from type 2 diabetes, the evidence for everything else is both low in quality and merely suggestive in credibility.
Also, it seems like these are mostly correlation studies. I'm not aware of significant evidence that it's about the level of processing and not just that eating a lot of carbs is bad for you, but if you have some links I'd love to educate myself.
I suppose from a public health standpoint you have to consider whether processing exacerbates trends in carb consumption. It's my understanding that there's a lot more evidence that suggests over-consumption of carbohydrates is bad for you, with seemingly less evidence that it's the processing that's bad. It's not easy to enact policies to reduce consumption of food staples like flour, sugar, or what they're processed into like breakfast cereal and cookies though, since it disproportionately affects the poor.
Well, for example, whole grain flour versus white flour. In the case of the latter much of the fiber and nutrition has been stripped, leaving a more concentrated and higher glycemic carbohydrate. That's the processing bit.
Same goes for sugar cane versus table sugar, or fruit versus isolated fructose. The processing is definitely making it worse.
When you refine whole grain flour, you get both white flour and bran. They are both equally processed because they are created simultaneously through the same process. White flour is less healthy than whole grain flour, but bran is more healthy than whole grain flour.
It's the nutritional value of the ingredients that we should focus on, not the degree of processing. Processing is a red herring; yes, it can be used to make extra unhealthy ingredients, but it can equally be used to make extra healthy ingredients.
It's not difficult to assess how healthy or unhealthy a given food product is, so why don't we just do that instead of focusing on hard-to-define proxy that does not even correlate that well?
But it is hard to assess how healthy or unhealthy something is. Labels that tell you the macronutrients are woefully inadequate. They cannot tell you how full they will make you, how long they will keep you satisfied, how addictive they are, what degree they are carcinogenic, and what degree they contribute to diabetes or cardiovascular disease. Practically everything in the grocery store has labels that tell you how healthy they supposedly are, regardless of how good they may or may not be for your health. You see breakfast cerials telling you they're part of a healthy breakfast when they're 1/3rd sugar by weight.
There is no such thing as "healthy" when it comes to nutrition. Nutrition is extremely complex. Bran may be great in terms of fiber and vitamins, but in real life nobody is eating it. The majority of it goes into animal feed. It's basically inedible because it's so unpalatable; it's almost exclusively seen in foodstuff where it is combined with large amounts of sugar and fats, like bran muffins or raisin bran, where it is a lot worse for you than if you just decided to eat it as a whole wheat bread. Even if we can theoretically make things "extra healthy", how often does it happen? What is the marketshare of supernaturally healthy foods? It's practically zero.
There's some missing context I think. There are a lot of reasons why it's useful to have a simple way to refer to the issue.
A big part of the problem is the food industry itself. They have been working for a long time to get people addicted to cheap, unhealthy food by co-opting well documented biological processes. Having done that, they fight to keep the most addictive ingredients available.
Or in other words, they are actively lobbying against any attempt to make their food healthier that would impact sales. They're also paying firms to help them modify public opinion, and they're really good at it.
So it's a hard problem. The kind politicians don't want to spend political capital on and regulators are pressured to avoid. But politicians and regulators are more likely to care if they think voters care, so public awareness is important.
And you're not going to foster a public conversation by trying to educate the public about 20 different ways processed food is bad for you. No one has the bandwidth for that and a lot of people really don't want to change the way they eat.
Instead you need a simple umbrella term under which you can have an ongoing conversation about the problem with a lot of participants.
Ultra processed seems like fine term to me. Sure you can argue semantics, but why?
To me this seems like a case of letting perfect get in the way of good. Labeling and identifying ultra processed rounds up a good majority of bad foods, and there might be some other good foods included. It's easier once the ball gets going to add exceptions than to wait for the scientific process to conclude what is the impact that these foods have for us.
Our consumption habits have far surpassed what AHA recommends for healthy daily values for humans. A single cookie can contain an entire day's worth of sugar, let alone a pack of two cookies. Our nutrition facts labels are awful at divulging information for the average consumer. That pack of two cookies might show the facts for one cookie and leave it up to the consumer to know that they need to double everything. Just the nutrition facts alone are terribly big agro friendly. The fact that we even allow single person cups at the sizes that we do (Big Gulp, movie theater cups, etc.) without additional taxes and regulations is insane. We are so far behind where we should be given what we already know, we don't have the luxury of waiting even longer for the perfect scientific study to neatly give us all the answers.
I think that if the labels incidentally started labeling bran or something as completely unhealthy they'd be roundly mocked in the media and completely ignored. More so than the CA labels because some people aren't aware of those somehow.
Maybe we could label all junk food as "junk food," sort of like the Far Side cartoon :-)
I don't think people would stop eating it though. We would get used to the label, sort of like California Prop. 65 warnings.
Nutrition seems to be the poster child for the problems with the way science is done and how it effects society. Food is almost infinitely complex compared to scientific mainstays like physics and chemistry. When you eat something, you are not eating a collection of nutrients; you are eating the results of a ridiculously complex set of systems that bring those nutrients together.
It is counterproductive to demand an exact understanding of how something works at a micron level before taking action on or against it, especially in cases like this where there is measurable harm caused by inaction. It's unnecessary to have that level of understanding. Doctors have been prescribing aspirin for over a hundred years, but it's only in the last few decades that we began to understand the mechanism by which it works. Should people have been left in pain instead?
The fact of the matter is that the work on UPF is not "the new science"; it's been studied for quite a while at this point and there is a good amount of peer-reviewed research being published by a number of different researchers from different institutions. I do not see how you think that the Nova classification system is subjective, but it seems like you don't understand exactly what it's trying to do or what it entails. Honey is nowhere to be found in that quote; to my knowledge there is no negative effects associated with honey that is not also associated with sugar. The first paragraph in that Wikipedia overview tells you that the classification system is weighted more towards the processing than it is it's contents. Fructose in an apple is not a problem to the same scale as fructose separated from everything else and added as a sweetener.
And in regards to the comparison of lobbying between the food industry and the tobacco and drug industries, it's not only completely fair, it's apt. Big food processing companies like Kraft and General Foods were previously owned by tobacco companies, and their business strategies are basically copy-pasted from their playbooks. Just because they have more money to spend than the tobacco and drug industries doesn't excuse the fact that they are spending huge sums to influence policy.
The reason why you find UPF to be such a nebulous thing is because it's an umbrella term that includes multiple different factors. One of them is the use of additives. Another is the balancing of sugars, fats, and salt. The biggest one is processing ingredients in unnatural ways, like separating fructose from fruits or hydrogenating fats. Note that Nova is a classification system that determines what kind of processing is done to a food rather than the intensity of the health effect.
Please note that I don't mean to defend the Nova classification system; Today was literally the first time I have heard of it. But what I am trying to say is that the stuff that this article talks about is absolutely real, it is as bad as they are saying it is, and unless you're eating a rather specialized diet it does affect you.
Honey has a higher fructose/glucose ratio than High Fructose Corn Syrup, the thing that makes HFCS concerning is that it's cheap enough to be added to everything, not that it's processed. (there's layers there, higher glucose honey crystalizes faster so it's 'selected against' but that's a tangent)
I just think this system and the article in particular are falling uncomfortably close to the replication crisis. Why is one of their prime quotes from a Director of Philosophy that "works with food science people" for example? There's a lot of focus on whether the diet contains process vs unprocessed food instead of the actual content of the diet. It's notoriously hard to do research on sociological issues like this, but the whole push to the Nova system puts a huge emphasis on how the food someone was eating was made instead of the content of their diet. It's important to "not be sneaky" about the contents of food, but it shouldn't be at the expense of ignoring actual total 'intake'.
The tobacco+alcohol/food conflation is fine because yes, industry lobbying is suspect, but they don't do that. They say the 'food industry' spends twice as much. What they're not saying is that the food industry is therefore spending a far lower percentage of their budget. The framing is weird. Absolute dollar amounts don't mean that much comparing entire industries. All they're really doing is saying "these industries that people find morally questionable spend money, but this other, far more widespread, far bigger industry, spends more money!"
I don't know, maybe it's mostly the tone of the article that I find off-putting.
I was trying to convey an idea in my earlier comment that I failed really badly. The problem I had with science in this topic is that people focus on extremely fine details at the expense of the whole; it leads to people focusing too much on those details and having their overall nutrition suffer as a result. Take your honey example for instance; yes, it does have a high amount of fructose, but focusing on that means you miss the point that it's extremely difficult to overconsume honey. The flavors become overwhelming really quickly, to the point that many products on grocery store shelves that are honey-flavored can often have more sugar than honey.
To make things worse, the focus on these specifics can have really bad effects on public health. Just look at how bad things got with the low-sugar and low-fat craves in the 90s.
The actual dollar amounts of money spent on lobbying absolutely makes a big difference. The industry may be bigger, but the important thing to realize is that the actual people being lobbied is the same. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be a politician dealing with lobbyists. The most annoying gnat is the one that gets swatted first.
I feel that the thing you are missing out on is that the studies on processing are directly linked to intake. From the article:
But once again, intake is just one part of the equation of health. UPF has been linked to a number of health issues that reduce lifespan, and consumption doesn't provide a complete picture. I wish things could be that simple. But they aren't. And pretending that they are will just let the problems fester.
From the article:
From the Wikipedia article about Nova:
…
It seems that from the start, this classification system was meant for educating the public about nutrition. Compare with the “four food groups,” which was replaced by the “food pyramid” in the US. These food classification systems are artificial and politically contested cultural artifacts, but nonetheless, public education about nutrition has to be based on something. I expect that they work somewhat for their intended purpose, if people actually follow them.
The part I don’t like is the assumption that industrial foods are always bad. For example, I occasionally will have a bottle of Solyent as a snack. I’d like to know whether it’s as nutritious as they claim. (That is, going beyond reading the nutrition label.) I don’t think saying “it’s ultra-processed, therefore it must be bad for you” is a good way of evaluating industrial foods that are intended to be healthy.
It would be sort of like making “organic” or “kosher” or “vegan” a food group, except that instead of being positive, it’s a label that nobody wants.
And this is important: The food pyramid was heavily influenced by lobbiests over the science at the time. The G Word with Adam Conover covered this in the Food epsiode (about 20 minutes in). The "fruits and vegetables" segments got heavily reduced, with the meats, cheeses, and grains getting gigantic expansions.
The latest battle in a long war. For example, during the 90's the processed food industry famously responded to growing evidence that refined sugar was a major contributor to obesity by running a multifaceted and wildly successful campaign to demonize fat as an alternative culprit. Thereby changing the eating habits of a generation.
This is (another) industry that is very good at fighting regulation and science and manipulating public perception in order to maintain their profits.
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