alt Hacker NewsThe idea is that you could ban any set of "unhealthy" inputs and give the big food companies some time and they'll come out with something just as unhealthy that complies with your rules.
The underlying issue is some mix of what industrial processes make possible combined with food scientist working with taste test panels to hyper optimize food. When you spend all this time and effort trying to create a snack where people are always left craving just a bit more you end up with the kinds of junk food that we have.
We want there to be some simple answer of "it's these ingredients, or this specific combination" but the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.
Food health science has always had difficulties with just how complicated the actual processing of food in our bodies is and the more we look the more complex it gets. But the "ultra-processed foods" test seems to be working out as a successful heuristic to identify especially unhealthy foods. Given the issues health science has had with coming up with exact answers a heuristic that's pretty reliable (even if imperfect) is a pretty big win!
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>the actual answer seems to be that when you use industrial processes and science to min-max cost and palatabillity you always end up with junk. Whereas when you cook food with typical home methods and ingredients you don't.
That's not an answer at all. You need to explain why an industrial mixer would create less healthy food than a kitchen mixer. The scale shouldn't matter.
If the goal is to regulate unhealthy foods then it does kind of have to be perfect (very low false-positives). UPFs as they are defined include baby formula, many frozen meals regardless of macros, soy/almond milk, instant oatmeal, pasta sauce, flavored yogurt, etc.
Invariably when someone says something like "UPF is a pretty reliable heuristic" its because they are massively underestimating what counts as UPF and using a "I know it when I see it" approach, which, yeah of course it seems reliable if you start with the precondition that UPFs are unhealthy.
If it's just guidance and not for regulation, well, you have similar problems in the opposite direction. prepackaged whole grain bread is UPF the same as Wonder Bread w/ 2.5g added sugar per slice. It's easy to say "just buy fresh bread" but when that collides with the reality of a busy schedule then UPF designations become next to useless. The undeniable value that preservatives have for healthy and unhealthy products alike mean that anyone using actual UPF as their heuristic will be completely rudderless.