any thoughts on the obsession with "hyperprocessed foods"? is there even such a thing and if so how much of the stuff around it is fake?

such a flawed useless categorisation lmao; this phrase comes from the nova scale, according to which an "ultra-processed food" is identified by a lack of sufficient "intact" food and the presence of "sources of energy and nutrients not normally used in culinary preparations" and additives specifically "used to initate or enhance the sensory qualities of food or to disguise unplatable aspects of the final product" (other additives, such as preservatives, antioxidants, and stabilisers, only qualify a food as group 3, "processed"). ultra-processing is defined as "a multitude of sequences of processing [...] includ[ing] several with no domestic equivalents," and ultra-processed foods are "usually packaged attractively and marketed intensely."

......so ok, first of all, this is very obviously reliant on a lot of assumptions about what 'normal' cooking and cooking equipment means, lmao. i do all kinds of shit in the kitchen that would have been inaccessible to someone in the mid nineteenth century; has the food become 'less processed' because i can make it at home now? if i obtained the equipment to hydrogenate oils myself would they magically not be ultra-processed simply because they came from my kitchen and not from an industrial setting?

this is just quasi-scientific language to express a fundamental distrust of food produced in ways that currently can't be replicated in [researchers' definitions of] a [normal] home kitchen. it's barely more sophisticated than platitudes like michael pollan's command to "eat only foods your grandmother would recognise". using the nova classifications to make assumptions about the healthfulness or danger of a food is just silly; the presumption is that the dietary and medical effects are not due to the food itself but to how it's produced, an idea that has led researchers to conclude that "the NOVA system suffers from a lack of biological plausibility so the assertion that ultra-processed foods are intrinsically unhealthful is largely unproven."

fundamentally the only evidence that nutritional scientists have been able to produce is observational studies showing a correlation between certain ill health outcomes and consumption of 'ultra-processed food'.

But the observational studies also have limitations, said Lauren O’Connor, a nutrition scientist and epidemiologist who formerly worked at the Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health. It’s true that there is a correlation between these foods and chronic diseases, she said, but that doesn’t mean that UPFs directly cause poor health.

Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category.

[...]

Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, she said.

ie, when evaluating the healthfulness of foods you have to actually look at what they are and what the human body does with them, and not just make a bunch of wild assumptions based on fears about their lack of proximity to 'naturalness' or propensity to be advertised (unlike, i guess, other more intact foods, which are not commodities. who knew!)

and there are like a million trillion other reasons why this correlation might hold: off the top of my head, for instance, people who rely more on the convenience of ready-made foods likely to be categorised as 'ultra-processed' are likely to be people who can't cook because they don't have time because they're working. so as usual nutrition and health science does a dogshit job distinguishing between the health effects of socioeconomic status and those of whatever some dickwad wants to publish a splashy study about.

there are certainly 'ultra-processed' foods that we can be extremely confident are harmful to human health---for example, trans fats. but the categorisation as a whole is so conceptually flawed as to be useless for any purpose besides as a term that 'scientises' culturally held beliefs about the wholesomeness and healthfulness of home food preparation, and the corresponding danger and artificiality of industrial production and methods.