I also liked the plate diagram, more than any of the pyramids. The pyramids are about what’s better and worse. The plate emphasizes the value of variety.
None of them are particularly good at emphasizing less processed food, despite the words that came with the new pyramid.
I do understand that. It’s just that at this point if I want ice cream, I want ice cream.
I was talking gibberish. I’ve learned I should have said inverted sugar. see my post 89.
Emerging studies would disagree. Nothing close to definitive yet, so take it with real grains of salt and all that.
The hypothesis is the that the actual industrial processing is causing weight gain and poor health issues. Same nutrients, calories, sugar, sodium, etc., the only difference is one is real and the other is ultra-processed using industrial ingredients. Astonishingly, some studies show in a meaningful way that difference alone leads to worse health outcomes. With that said, there is not enough quality studies done, yet. It’s all to new still.
To be clear, I don’t think there is anything specifically about ice cream/fake ice cream. Just generally a diet of Cat 1-3 ingredients/foods versus Cat 4/UPF ingredients/foods.
Again, the written guidelines influence some on various government funded program decisions, and probably influence kids even less than it influences adults.
The return to the pyramid over the plate graphic makes that even greater: the plate is a reasonable actionable communication tool; a pyramid is not.
I highly doubt there will be a significant increase in beef tallow use resulting from its promotion as a “healthy fat” in this new graphic.
Re (ultra) processed foods - the rise of ultraprocessed foods, basically the foundation of the Standard American Diet, correlates well with the rise of obesity wherever it goes across the world. Less highly processed foods have higher satiety and are not engineered to promote eating beyond fullness signaling.
Right off NOVA 3 is not the big ultraprocessed concern: NOVA 4 is. But some bread is real food and some is more food like product.
There is a big difference between a pumpernickel made of whole kernel rye and Wonder Bread. In what is and is not in each of them, in the delivery matrix of each, but also in how much the typical person will eat of each of them as a result. (Most of us would understand that the pumpernickel is more of a “real food” than the Wonder bread is.)
And that is true for many comparisons between less processed and more highly processed foods. The matrix matters to how the body processes the components and the impacts they have.
Many who are concerned about “chemicals” added to foods actually understand that protein is made of chemicals - it is generally understood by anyone operating in good faith that they are talking about the chemicals added by the food industry, which are not typically in the food that inspired these products of their form. Many emulsifiers widely added to more highly processed foods are associated with gut dysbiosis (review in this article), as one example.
The correlation of added sweetener foods with neurodegenerative disease mortality rate increases, and in particular processed meats with respiratory mortality rate increases is significant. Cautions about correlation and causation definitely to be noted.
Few short communication tools will be perfect fits. But limiting (ultra) processed foods is a reasonable general guideline and Pollan’s mantra of “eat real food, not too much, mostly plants” is still a far better guide than most other pithy attempts.
But sadly I cant eat popcorn without too much butter and salt.
But you are right about taters. Wendys advertised it’s potato bar as diet food, and people laughed, but actually a baked potato is very healthful food- fiber, vitamins, minerals and a very high satiety rating so that you dont feel hungry afterwards. Of course, if you load it up with everything, it fails
Yeah, your basic bakery bread is not what any sane person calls 'processed food"- Wheat, salt, leavening. But then take pre-packaged grocery store bread- loaded with all sorts of “stuff”.
Refined sugar is real sugar.
Not in the way we are talking about here- “processed food”. Just like “organic” food doesnt mean food with a carbon molecule.
Michael Pollan did it best-
I have a feeling that it’s not “chemicals” or NOVA category 4 foods that are the problem in and of themselves, but rather that some of them have bad effects on our microbiomes, which is something that’s not nearly as well understood as a lot of other nutrition related subjects.
I’m not trying to argue that ultraprocessed foods are good. What I’m saying is that the current hype about “real food” and “ultraprocessed food” is about one step from “chemicals” and the idiocy involved in the organic food movement.
Where I get crossways with the concept is when you take something like say… oatmeal. Cook it the long way, add a shitload of stuff to it, and it’s peachy. NOVA class 2 or 3. But roll it between some heated rollers and add the same stuff, and it suddenly and mysteriously becomes the dreaded NOVA Class 4 and “ultraprocessed”.
Here’s the ingredient list:
Whole grain oats (rolled oats)
Sugar
Raisins
Dates
Walnuts
Salt
Cinnamon
Hardly a murderers row of emulsifiers and unusual food additives. And the “ultra” processing step is absurdly simple- it’s basically precooking the oat groats and flattening them out to make them rehydrate easier.
Same thing with jarred spaghetti sauce.
We need to know what is actually causing the problems, not just wring our hands and say “ultraprocessed!” like those other dumbasses talk about “chemicals” in their soaps or foods or whatever.
As long as it’s in moderation, some frozen dairy dessert, hot dogs, ham, fruit spread, processed cheese food, or whatever isn’t going to do anyone any harm. But you’re an idiot if you eat that stuff for every meal and it’s a large part of your diet. I’m not trying to dispute that. I just have a problem with the way the categorizations are made, and the way they’re thrown around as if they’re actually meaningful. It’s a piss-poor categorization that throws the instant oatmeal above or something like simple almond milk in with something like say… Little Debbie snacks. There’s a world of difference between them IMO.
This! And my fear is great as to how this is going to effect both school lunches and SNAP.
‘You must purchase beef for every meal, no we are not increasing your budget/benefit.’
What?
I am certainly not advocating for the NOVA guideline as a perfect system (although I think it does place rolled oats as relatively unprocessed in contrast to instant oats, which do have emulsifiers and more, and most jarred spaghetti sauces have lots of sodium and sugar …). More as a slightly less broad brush stroke than Pollan’s “real food”.
Well first - a major point is that those foods are engineered precisely to make them less likely to eat in moderation.
Second, I am not so sure you are right, at least for what “moderation” of some of these foods are for many in the modern world. Again, particularly for the processed meats and added sweeteners groups, including artificial sweeteners.
Third of course is the trade off. Unless one is just eating lots more overall (and of course that does happen frequently with these foods) then eating moderate amounts of frozen dairy dessert, hot dogs, ham, fruit spread, processed cheese food, or whatever, is eating moderate amounts less of less processed vegetable, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fish, and so on. Eating moderate amounts of crap is, even if it itself was neutral, creates an opportunity cost of that not eaten. With all the good stuff in it.
I argue that we don’t. I know that dietary patterns high in less highly processed food (“real food”) tend to be more likely to be eaten in reasonable amounts due to higher satiety and not being excessively targeting of the eat more of me centers (“not too much”), and contain broad diverse substances that help reduce risks of many diseases from cancers to dementia, photochemicals (“mostly plants”). The science of why is a work in progress, hosts of micronutrients, the nature of the matrix, so on.
I mean by the standards of the Trump administration, or even by the standards of RFK, it’s pretty damn good. Though the bar for that is pretty low. Literally it’s the first pronouncement he’s made that hasn’t made me scream WTF at the top of my lungs, and wonder how we when ended up with a HHS secretary that’s actively trying to kill a good chunk of America.
Its perfectly reasonable, definitely an improvement on the old school food pyramid, though not as good as Michelle Obama’s (which makes clear most of what you eat should be fruit and veg) but not awful or blatantly gonna lead to a whole bunch of dead Americans (which, again, is the norm for RFK health policies without a hint of hyperbole)
That was meant to say:
I think the two “highly processed” foods that really have been definitely linked to worse health outcomes are soft drinks and cured meat.
I disagree, as a public health term its pretty good policy to recommend avoiding processed food. Sure “heavily processed food" is not a super exact definition, but it’s a lot more useful than more exact but more confusing definitions of how much sugar or sodium food should have per portion.
Your.avarage consume can identify what processed food is. If it comes in a bright colored plastic wrapper and can sit on a shelf for weeks then it’s heavily processed food, and it probably has huge amounts of sugar,.salt, highly refined carbohydrates, preservatives, etc. (and zero fresh fruit or vegetables) in it.
That may be more technically precise on the pathway, but the only reason to care about bad effects on our microbiome is because that might have bad effects on us. If you could totally fry your microbiome and it had no effect, I don’t know that anyone would much care. It’s because that comes back on us that it’s an issue.
And then, the question would be what it is about Cat 4 foods that are affecting our microbiome? Probably some ingredients (like added sugars) and processing methods (like removing fibrous components).
A quick overview might be helpful to explain what Nova is trying to figure out.
Nova Classifications:
1 = Whole foods. Apples. Chicken. etc.
2 = Ingredients. Salt. Sugar. Oil. etc.
3 = Processed Food (1 + 2). Take the chicken, add some salt and oil and flour, fry it to make the processed food of breaded chicken.
1 + 2 = 3. That’s healthy Nova foods. Almost by definition, if you can do it at home, it’s in these categories. It matters very little what types of food you consume, you’ll generally be healthy eating foods in Cat 1 or using Cat 2 ingredients to make Cat 3 processed foods. It’s also difficult to overeat these foods, certainly not passively.
Then there is Cat 4 = Ultra-Processed Foods. You cannot make these at home. They require industrial processing methods to make engineered foods. For example, instead of breaded chicken, UPF would take a soy isolate + corn starch + altered seed oil + flavoring systems + colorants + etc. etc. to make a chicken nugget. It’s more of a food shaped product. It strips everything down to it’s fractional components and then builds them back up into food. There is something about this ultra-processing using industrial ingredients that leads to poor health outcomes. How it exactly causes poor health outcomes is less certain. It may or may not be creating foods that are: destroying the fiber/food structure, destroying our microbiome, intentionally bypassing our sensation of fullness, intentionally addictive (“once you pop you can’t stop”), etc.
The line between Cat 3 & 4 is murky and where people like to debate what is or isn’t. It’s why sometimes you’ll hear about the makers “intent” in making the food (ie, addictive food product or actual nourishment). I think these kind of debates generally miss the forest for the trees. However, it is an actual problem that Nova needs to clear up as the current definition is really broad and hard to control precisely. I mean, the Nova definition of UPF is 40 words long.
It is a radical new way to look at food, though. Shockingly, for me at least, there is science to back up its claims in both observational and controlled studies.
It’s important to remember that the unhealthy part of some foods is not what’s added, but what is taken away. For example a simple white bread versus a simple whole wheat bread.
Physical processing of food can also make a difference. I do not know if this is true, it is just an example if rolling oats makes the sugars in the oats more available for digestion then rolled oats might cause an unhealthy sugar spike in a way that steal cut oats don’t.
With the preserved meats there is a good possibility that nitrites are the problem.
None of this is simple. Nutrition, digestions, and health are incredibly complex and can work in non-intuitive and illogical ways. More research is going to change our understanding, and contradict things we think we know now. We don’t know which things will be upturned, though. About all we can do is make recommendations based on the industry that lobbies most effectively the best information available today.
Thank you for explaining this. I was getting confused.
Yes, and they are starting to narrow in on specifics. Plausibly, we could identify a set of risks and correct them during the manufacturing process.
For example, after we determined - in the early 20th century - that manufacturing was causing vitamin deficiencies, we started “fortifying” the food:
We’re probably hitting stage 2 of the same general sort of problem. Our ability to mine data and identify patterns has allowed us to isolate patterns of concern that merit adjustment. Previously, it was causing illnesses and deaths that hit fairly quickly and had widely apparent impact. We investigated that, identified “vitamins”, and put them back into the food. Now, we’re dealing with illnesses that hit only after several decades and that can sometimes be dealt with through medicine and other treatments.
We’re possibly on the verge of “what comes after vitamins”, which might include things like particular subtypes of fiber, certain subcategories of fatty acids, certain compounds like phosphatidylserine that are hard to get if you don’t eat organs and brains, etc. These are things that, in deficiency, don’t necessarily kill you like a vitamin deficiency will do, but that leave you in poorer health and maybe more likely to have a shorter lifespan.
Plausibly, there’s some particular preservatives and additives that have negative impacts. Maybe we need to remove those.
So far, my read is that we’ve got a variety of things going on, with different effects.
Then that says that the NOVA categorization isn’t very useful. Why have a four-category system, when the first three categories are all fine, and it’s only the fourth that’s a problem?
Definitions of how much sugar or sodium food should have are the exact opposite of confusing. A definition that’s based on “it has scary-sounding ingredients” is pure, unadulterated confusion.
You know what can sit on a shelf for weeks? Cabbage. All root vegetables. Eggs. Any sort of flour. Most pastas. Anything canned, where “canned” means “put it in a sealed container and heat it”. Plenty of “real foods” can take that treatment. And really, we’re going to judge foods based on the color of their packaging!?
Please provide these very non confusing definitions.
Because my understanding is the sugar definition that is clear is to avoid added sugar, (the same amount of sugar in a real food, like a bowl of berries, is different than if that sugar is added to something) and that the guidance for sodium is for total daily intake but individual food items may vary. Funny enough a key behavior to keeping total daily sodium intake in the recommended range is to avoid ultraprocessed foodstuffs, many of which are chock full of sodium (and added sweeteners).
FWIW I agree that the NOVA system would communicate better if it used a green/yellow/red, or go/slow/whoa system; the category method gives impressions of brighter lines than the exist - but as rough rules of thumb go it is … okay.
How is that clear? Now you’re trying to define “real food” by the amount of added sugar, and defining “added sugar” by comparing to the “real food”. And a lot of added sugar is “real food”: Fruit juice is real, and a very common way to add sugar to drinks.
What would be clear would be for dieticians to come to a consensus on how much sugar (total sugar, whether “real” or “added”) is bad, publish that number, and check labels to see how they compare to that number.