12
votes
The science of “ultra-processed” foods is misleading
Link information
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- Title
- You're being lied to about "ultra-processed" foods
- Authors
- Marina Bolotnikova
- Published
- Dec 19 2024
- Word count
- 1762 words
I think this line cuts right to the core of the matter. 'UPF' is just not a useful term in any scientific or health context. However, it has been finding plenty of use in the hands of politicians and marketers.
At the heart of it, this definition of "ultra processed foods" is just absurdly broad to the point of being useless
Lumping everything from TOFU to hot pockets together is just pointless. And that's the highest categorization of "processed"!
The vox article posted is garbage in so many ways, but saying the Nova classification system is useless is also wrong.
Nutritional studies, and these types of information classification schemes are not meant to be used by lay people. The Nova classification system is a very broad, and simplified, classification system to roughly group similar food stuffs together, so that you can later on stratify data.
Studying nutrition is extremely hard, Nova helps a lot with analyzing diets of a very large cohort, or analyzing e.g. the assortment of foodstuffs between grocery stores (lets say your comparing Aldi stores most sold products per zipcode, or something). If you look at an individual foodstuff you'll end up sometimes with something that feels weird, but overall these errors get drowned out.
BMI serves a similar purpose, it gets it mostly right, but there is a possibility on an individual level that you can be obese, but still (mostly) healthy.
This article begins with complaints about bad reporting on UPFs. And then it continues with more bad reporting about UPFs. I know I talk about bad titles all the time, but this one is particularly egregious. The title at this moment is You’re being lied to about “ultra-processed” foods, and the irony of the fact is that the title is a blatant lie - there is no lies being reported, just criticism on bad reporting.
The main problem with this article is that they are misrepresenting what scientists and dieticians are saying about UPFs. The NOVA scale is not supposed to be an end-all and be-all for health advice like they claim it is. They aren't even saying they know the reasons why they're bad for you. Yes, there are many different tests we need to do to in-depth studies on multiple factors on an insane number of ingredients, but that's not realistic. Nobody's going to pay for even a portion of the work that needs to happen. And that's why the UPF category is useful to health researchers and dieticians. Even in that context, it's not meant as an absolute marker for health. Heck, practically everything the creators have written about the system talks about how it's not designed to comment on the nutritional or even safety of the given food it classifies.
The articles that it bring up at the beginning are absolutely bad journalism. But this is too, because it attempts to undermine the entire current state of our understanding on how UPFs impact our health. Honestly, I shouldn't be upset about this because it honestly seems that this is just what health journalism is now. It's a bunch of reporters looking to misrepresent scientific research in order to produce the most sensational articles possible. Nutrition is such a complicated topic that no one study will ever tell you the whole story. Our bodies are ecosystems, and that's why dietician is a specially trained field and general physicians don't get a lot of training on nutrition beyond what they need to recognize potential malnutrition.