Yes, I've begun translating "ultra-processed foods" to "junk food". It's roughly the same meaning and roughly the same amount of scientific rigor. UPF sounds scientific and specific but it's neither.

OTOH everybody intuitively understands junk food is bad for you, has a rough idea of what it is and that the definition is circular.

Agreed. I hope these terms go away. I think what people tend to mean is "calorie dense, low in nutrients, low in fiber", or something along those lines, and the term "processed" makes it far more confusing.

"Processed" ends up meaning anything from "high in sugar" to "long shelf life" or "one of a dozen kinds of artificial sweetener" etc. It does more harm than good.

I can have an extremely high fiber, high protein, nutritionally well rounded meal that's also "ultra processed".

Someone mentioned Nova. Nova is a PERFECT example of how god awful the term is. When asked to classify foods into Nova categories there is almost no agreement amongst nutritionists.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8181985/

Time after time, Nova is shown to be more confusing than helpful, with worse than random results. Nova itself doesn't even attempt to correlate with "healthy".

Here’s a scientific paper written by scientists that defines UPFs:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066

Which variables are conflated?

Ever notice how you semantic junkies always end up defending entrenched financial interests?

Redirect your energy toward something useful.

The Nova framework for classifying processed foods was created in 2009 by a Brazilian epidemiologist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

Presumably, since the first citation in the paper is said epidemiologist (Monteiro), this is the framework they rely on.

Unless you’re intent on scientific gatekeeping, in which case having actually read the reported study (it’s linked in the article fyi) would have offered much more effective methods of rebuttal than semantic quibbles.

> "Ultra-processed foods" isn't a scientific concept

This is like arguing astronomy isn’t real because colloquial definitions of space are ambiguous.

The study [1] uses a definition that finds a significant effect. We should investigate that further. If it pans out and the term ultra-processed food triggers people, we can rebrand it. (Did the cigarette lobby ever try muddying the water on what cigarettes are?)

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.70066