Yes, and this is a really important point about ingredients as proxies for (mostly invisible) food processes. It took me a while to understand this, and unsurprisingly, this point isn't commonly understood at all. They invented a food classification scheme that makes it impossible to apply unless you're a food technologist who works in the factory making the stuff. So then they say "use the ingredients as clues" which makes the whole thing vague, and also inevitably leads to the false conclusion that the ingredients themselves are what *make* things UPF. This then leads to further questionable assumptions that these ingredients have negative health impacts. In a few cases, there may be evidence to show this - but in the majority of cases, there is no such evidence, yet it remains "common knowledge" that emulsifiers, flavourings, colours etc are "bad for you". It's having a dangerous impact on people's approach to food.shpalman wrote: Mon Jun 02, 2025 2:42 pmThe ingredients themselves aren't necessarily what makes a food item a UPF, but they're taken as a proxy for it, because the label doesn't tend to indicate the actual industrial processing/manufacturing procedures.hakwright wrote: Mon Jun 02, 2025 11:36 am... the ingredients I mentioned - flavouring, dextrose, glucose, colouring - will all make a food item UPF. And most of the jerky I checked, along with quite a lot of the hams, contained one or more of these.
The bottom line for me is that the UPF definitions are crap. They are vague, inconsistent, subjective and not based on evidence. They are a set of guidelines that try to define a food category based on somebody's personal whims. So as most people find, getting any understanding of which food items are UPF is a confusing minefield.
One thing I see very often in articles on UPF is the claim that UPFs are often high in salt, sugar and saturated fat. I've never seen any evidence to back this up, but the claim keeps getting repeated as if it's based on solid evidence. If anybody has any evidence or studies that support this claim I'd be really interested in links.
I've just had raw fruit and nut bar for lunch. Ingredients are dates, cashews, raisins, natural flavouring. By most people's application of NOVA guidelines, this is UPF ("because flavouring bad"). Yet I assume it's basically mashed up fruits/nuts with a few drops of flavouring. So by the *intent* of the NOVA scheme, it's almost certainly not UPF because it's almost entirely group 1 raw ingredients mushed up together.
My point about the salt/sugar/fat was that I don't know of any studies that systematically measured salt/sugar/fat for UPF and non-UPF foods and then compared them. I somehow doubt there's a significant difference, yet the myth of UPF foods being high in salt/sugar/fat persists. And this supports the creators of the NOVA scheme because it links "UPF" with "negative health impacts", which suits them fine because people naturally care about health - and so because of this, they start to care about UPF foods (which in my view is a mistake). The NOVA scheme was not devised based on any evidence of health impacts or nutritional qualities, it was based on a political/cultural/social viewpoint.shpalman wrote: Mon Jun 02, 2025 2:42 pm As for the salt, sugar, and saturated fat content, that nutritional information is on the label.
But there can't be a rigid definition of a UPF. There isn't really a rigid definition of "healthy" or "unhealthy" food either, is there?
The scope of UPF foods is enormous, so I highly doubt there will ever be any meaningful causal relationships established between consumption of UPF items and negative health impacts. Research on individual additives is potentially more valuable.
