There’s a lot of fear around UPFs, I’m not sure it’s justified.

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Of late, the hysterical aunt that is the world’s media has been having all sorts of conniptions about ultra-processed food.

Clutching at its pearls the media serves up headlines like “Just one small serving of ultra-processed food a day linked to higher disease risk, major study finds” or “Ultra-processed foods should be treated more like cigarettes than food – study“.

Expecting the media to act responsibly is a game for fools, but it’s still annoying. This click-baiting is exploiting some fundamental fear. We all want to eat well and, more importantly, make sure our children are eating well.

Now we’re being told we’re poisoning our children by serving them some very common supermarket products.

So, what’s the real story? Is the media right? Are ultra-processed foods going to be the end of us all? Are we all headed for an early death unless we start living like 15th century farmers and making all out food ourselves?

Spoiler alert: I don’t think so. And in this post I’ll try to explain why I think that.

What Are Ultra-Processed Foods?

An ultra-processed food (I’m going to call them a UPF from now on) is exactly what it says on the package. A food that has experienced significant processing during it’s manufacture.

The term comes from a Brazilian researcher who, in 2009, published the Nova classification scheme that classified food into four groups based on the amount of processing needed to manufacture them: unprocessed, processed ingredients, processed foods and ultra-processed foods.

The final category of this scheme is the one that we’re all terrified of now, the UPFs.

The Full Nova Classification Scheme

The Nova classification has four categories that attempt to classify the amount of processing that a food has undergone:

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods that may have been,
for example, cleaned, fermented, ground, pasteurised or in general
have had things removed but no oils, fats or sugars have been
added. Examples: fresh or frozen vegetables, nuts, grains, pasta,
couscous, eggs, lentils, tea and coffee.

Processed Culinary Ingredients are products that are extracted from natural foods by pressing, grinding, crushing, pulverising and refining. Examples: oils, lard, butter, honey, molasses, starches and sugar.

Processed foods are foods that are a combination of groups 1 and 2. Examples: Salt or vinegar preserved vegetables, tomato paste, beef jerky, bacon, sugared nuts, canned fish, fresh bread (not packaged), beer, cider and wine.

Ultra-processed foods are made entirely from substances extracted from other foods, food constituents (hydrogenated fats, modified starches) or things entirely synthesised in a laboratory. Examples: ice cream, biscuits, cookies, confectionery, potato crisps, sweetened and flavoured yoghurts, packaged bread, prepared burgers and sausages, breakfast cereals, ‘ready-to-eat’ meals, chicken nuggets, infant formulas, cakes, cake mixtures, distilled alcoholic beverages (rum, whisky etc).

Using the Nova Classification

Nutrition scientists found the Nova classification pretty useful. It gave them a convenient way to classify people’s diets when they were trying to correlate diet with things like mortality, diabetes and obesity.

They could go through someone’s diet, classify it by the Nova scheme and correlate health outcomes with the types of food eaten.

When they started doing this, they began to see that UPFs could be detrimental to our health. Detrimental in a pretty serious way. Cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity serious.

This was certainly a cause for concern, but there were still questions. As I’ve pointed out previously, most nutrition studies are based on observational studies, that can only show correlation, not causation.

Also the UPF category encompasses a lot of different foods, are all UPFs killers? If not, I’d like to know which are which, thank you very much.

A Food Controversy Is Born or The Madness Begins

What was really needed was more study to sort out the details.

But, there is no phrase in the human language disregarded more than “needs further study” and before you could say “please not another food controversy” another food controversy was born.

UPFs become the new public enemy number one. Books were published, TikToks were posted, the food industry, scared of losing those sweet profit margins that comes from using high fructose corn syrup, started sponsoring research and lobbying governments insisting UPFs aren’t that bad and influencers, aware of the engagement potential in any controversy, started sticking their beaks in.

You know, all the usual stuff.

Now, while eating our morning yoghurt, we read things like “… that risk increase translates to just a few extra bites of ultra-processed foods daily“.

And guess what, yoghurt is a UPF. If I’ve just shortened my life with a few mouthfuls of yoghurt, why not have whisky for breakfast instead?

The Problem With Only Focusing on Processing

The Nova classification was created with the express intent of getting people away from thinking about single ingredients, like sugar or fat, and to focus on the potential harm of industrial processing.

Which is fine, we should be thinking about processing. But there’s processing and then there’s processing.

Some foods are considered UPFs despite our common sense telling us that they seem okay. Things like canned baked beans, some cereals, fish fingers, hummus, plant milks, yoghurt (plain yoghurt anyway), whole grain bread and dried apricots are all UPFs that may actually be good for you, or at least not bad.

Intuitively I would say that a wholemeal bread roll should not be in the same category as KFC but that’s exactly what happens when an observational study uses the Nova system.

The problem is that by focusing on processing we’ve conflated two issues. One is the nutritional content of our food, how much salt, fat and sugar we’re eating. The other is the act of processing itself. Is processed food harmful because it is processed?

Food Item	Nova Status	Fiber & Nutrients	Satiety Level	Health Impact
Store-Bought Wholemeal Bread	Ultra-Processed (UPF)	High Fiber & B-Vitamins	High	Beneficial / Moderate
Plain Sweetened Yogurt	Ultra-Processed (UPF)	High Protein & Calcium	Moderate	Neutral / Beneficial
Fried Chicken / Fast Food	Ultra-Processed (UPF)	Low Fiber, High Trans-Fat	Low (Hyper-palatable)	High Risk when frequent
Soda / Potato Chips	Ultra-Processed (UPF)	Zero Fiber, High Sugar/Salt	Very Low	High Risk when frequent

The UPF Nutrition Problem

Without touching a UPF you can condemn yourself to stroke or cardiovascular disease simply by eating a diet rich in sugar, saturated fats and salt. If you avoided fibre as well all the better, or worse, I suppose.

The evidence for a diet like this being harmful for your health is pretty well-established, regardless of whether UPFs are involved or not.

UPFs, though, make it ridiculously easy to have a diet high in fats, sugars and salt and low in fibre.

This is a problem because some people in developed countries can get at least half their energy from UPFs.

Salt, Saturated Fats and Sugar

Food companies don’t want to be our friends. They have plenty of friends already, called shareholders.

They are interested in money and they know that if they add the secret sauce of salt, saturated fats and sugar they will have a product that appeals to the very basest desires of our biology.

This results in UPFs that are very salty and energy dense. They provide more calories per gram then less processed foods because of all the added fats and sugars.

When combined with a lack of fibre, this means that for every gram of UPF you get more calories than if you had an equal amount of unprocessed food.

And because they are so appealing to our bodies we eat want to eat more of them. Has anyone ever eaten just one potato chip?

UPFs and Fibre

Many UPFs are very low in fibre. This is a problem not only because fibre is good for us but also because fibre can increase satiety. That is, it makes us feel full.

The classic example of this is a glass of pulp-free pure orange juice. It takes, roughly, three to four oranges to get 250 ml of juice so in a glass of orange juice you are getting the sugar from four oranges and little or none of the fibre.

Would you normally eat four oranges in one sitting? If you substituted an orange, or even two, for the orange juice you would be eating far less sugar and much more fibre.

It’s probably worse than this. Our household glasses often hold much more than 250 ml but I’ll leave you to do that maths.

How Do We Protect Ourselves From The Nutritional Problems of UPFs

This is easy, just don’t eat UPFs that are high in fats, sugars and salt.

These are often easy to identify; doughnuts, ice-cream, soft drinks and chicken nuggets are bad. Wholemeal bread, and the like, are less bad, even good.

It’s things like pre-prepared meals, protein bars, flavoured yoghurt and breakfast cereals that can be problematic.

Many of these products may look wholesome, and can be marketed as such, but can have large amounts of added salt, sugar and fat. This is where the nutritional informational, usually hidden on the back in small type, is your friend. Check it carefully.

Despite the scare campaigns, if you are careful about the nutritional quality of your UPFs it’s likely that you will avoid many of the risks.

For example, a recent study in the Lancet found that when you examined different types of UPFs the association with cardiovascular disease and stroke disappeared for many types of UPFs.

The Processing Problem with UPFs

Most of the fear generated by UPFs is a result of their nutritional content, which is, as I’ve said above, is old news really.

But there is evidence building that processing itself is the problem. This science, while not quite as well-established as the nutritional science, does suggest that processing is bad for our health.

Most of this research focuses on how processing destroys fibre and on the additives that are used during processing.

Fibre and Softness

In the process of being processed foods will be milled, juiced, sliced, pureed, fractionated, extruded, subjected to high heat and refined. All of this does terrible things to the fibre in our food.

Just like when you boil the life out of a vegetable, the standard cooking method when I was a child, all this processing has the effect of making food softer. Some would say mushier.

I’ve already talked about how fibre helps make us feel full, but softness can also contribute to over-eating.

Making food softer means we eat quicker. We need less time to chew and we can cram down more food before we start feeling full. This was first noticed way back in the 1970s.

UPFs may also have a detrimental effect on out microbiome, the microbial constituents of our gut.

Evidence suggests that UPFs, particularly those low in fibre and high in fat, can change the composition of the microbiota in such a way that causes low grade, systemic inflammation and oxidative stress.

This is normally considered a bad thing.

Artificial Sweeteners, Emulsifiers and Other Additives

If you want to start making some UPFs you soon run into problems. One of the first ones is that too much fat makes things greasy. So, if you want to add lots of fat you also need to add lots of emulsifiers to keep the fat in microscopic droplets.

Likewise, if you want to advertise that your product is low in sugar, without relinquishing your steely-grip on your customer’s sweet tooth, you’ll need to add artificial sweeteners.

You don’t want your product going off too soon, so in go some preservatives. The food looks a little off colour-wise, in go some colourings. The same if the flavour need some adjusting.

In short, a lot of stuff goes into UPFs. Some of that stuff may not be great for us.

There is some evidence that saccharin, and potentially other artificial sweeteners, can cause insulin resistance, as can carrageenan, a common thickening agent and emulsifier often found in dairy products (see here and here).

Some other emulsifiers may induce metabolic perturbations and low-grade inflammation in mice.

We already know that trans-fats are bad for us and are often found in UPFs and even the best of the UPFs may still be no good because the packaging can introduce a range of chemicals that may have deleterious effects on our health.

These things can affect you regardless of the nutritional content of the food.

This is where the wholemeal bread and the doughnut are on a level playing field. Because of additives and packaging wholemeal bread could be just as bad for you as doughnut.

Conclusion

The safest thing to do is not eat UPFs at all. They’re not great foods, often with terrible nutritional value and always with emulsifiers, sweeteners, preservatives and other additives.

But lets face it, we’re all busy and sometimes we are going to buy UPFs, if only because they are convenient. They’re also a guilty pleasure, a treat that helps you get through the day, and never underestimate the power of a nagging child who wants that particular brand of breakfast cereal.

Should we be feeling guilty though? Is every bite of a UPF shortening our and our children’s lives? I don’t think so. At the moment studies of UPFs are conflating nutritional and processing effects and that needs to be sorted out before we can make any judgements on the effects of processing.

We know that loads of salt, sugar and fats are really bad for you so keep an eye on your intake of those, from UPFs and other sources, and don’t worry too much about the UPFs that do have nutritional value like wholegrain bread and baked beans.

And you know, eat lots of vegetables, they’re really good for you.