It's not meaningless.

"Processed" means that ingredients had to be manipulated to produce the food (e.g. most recipes). Most of what you make at home is "processed".

"Ultra-processed" means food produced using industrial processing, using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc. That's a clear distinction.

Whether or not that means anything for the nutritional value and health outcomes from consumption of the food is a different question, but it can clearly be studied.

> Ultra-processed is a meaningless word used to get media attention.

Yes, and cigarettes cure cancer amirite ?

We all know what they mean by ultra processed food, it's 75% of your supermarkets. 45% of the US is obese, the rest is overweight, food is one of the main factor in the top 2 leading causes of death in the US, if you can't see the problem you're blind

There is a very good definition on wikipedia btw, and yes not all ultra processed things are bad, but the vast majority of them are

It isn't a meaningless word, and like my sibling poster I do wonder if that sentence is astroturfed by the junk food corpos.

The [NOVA classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification) has definitions for various levels of food processing.

No it isn’t. The advice on nutrition is abundantly clear and has been for a long time: eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

That science has pushed GRAS as “food” is abysmal. Lots of you have just been punked.

This is akin to pitbulls and porn: You know it when you see it, despite the existence of ambiguous cases. I bring this up because your call to specifics is useuful in general. In this case: There are gray areas, but in most cases, it's a useful heuristic. If your food comes in a bright-colored box, advertises as containing "Real [cheese|fruit|etc]" and or is branded with the word "flavor", "Ultra-processed" is a useful categorization.

If your food is something like "Chicken breast", "whole wheat flour" or "Green onions", it's not.

You will be able to find many ambiguous cases, at which point the categorization ceases to become useful. I do not believe this means categorization isn't useful in general.

I've heard people say that even bread is ultra processed... I guess we're supposed to go back to eating twigs and berries.

I've heard this objection a lot, even from folks I respect. Its ubiquity makes me wonder it is astroturfed.

The definition I have heard is "food made with ingredients or processes not commonly used in ghome Unfortunately, when I looked to leading scientific orgs, they are dithering on releasing formal definitions, but all say something like what I'd heard.

Conflicting information doesn't mean an abysmal situation. I'd argue the opposite. Everyone "knew" the sun orbited Earth.

the one is a result of the other; but thats because nutrition seems like it should have objective measures but ultimately has a lot of sources and sinks that only on the fringes is it obvious when things are bad.

but then theres RFK nuttery, so its not that stupid.

but yeah, ultra processes has no functional science behind it even though we still know cheap food is typically unhealthy and addictive

In the space age, its x-processed.

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