Agreed. UPF-ness is a useful and now-trendy heuristic to determine whether and how to more qualitatively analyze the health properties of a given food, but it's not the final answer. Sugar isn't a UPF (it's in Nova group 2), but I think most people would choose to eat a plant-based burger before a bowl of sugar.

Some protein powders, e.g. many of the plant protein powders, require complex processing, which is reflected in their price, which is many times greater than the price of meat (per protein content).

However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.

For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)

To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.

This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.

If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".

It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.

In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".

Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.

So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.

Their intentions sort of don't matter. The food company and the grocery store are businesses, and the idea that a business should exist for anything except profit has become less fashionable. In any case, there are enough business owners/executives who believe this, and are not punished for it, that they will outcompete you if you don't.

The way to make a good profit in the food industry is to sell a lot of a product that you can sell for a good price, but have it be very cheap to manufacture. If you take really cheap input material that historically was used mostly for animal feed, like corn or oats, and can do a bunch of food science magic to it to make it very tasty and addictive, you can charge a good price and people will buy lots of it.

The problem with ultraprocessed foods is simply that the manufacturer has been given too many free parameters, and if they get enough they can find something addictive and unhealthy. Since shelf space on grocery store shelves is allocated based on sales, the shelves will be filled with addictive food. This is even true of the produce section. Fruits and vegetables are bred to increase their sugar content, reduce bitterness, etc. Luckily breeding fruit trees is more time consuming and less controllable than all of the chemistry that can happen in a potato chip factory. We will see how this holds up as genetic engineering becomes more predictable.

Anyhow the only solution we've really come up with to this social problem is to change our brains with Glucagon Like Peptides to be less susceptible to these tricks. We will see how long that is able to keep ahead of the food companies.

That's an interesting question. Based on Grok's analysis, the answer isn't that tofu is UPF, but that your particular proposed method of creating a protein powder would not be UPF. Unless you followed that process with "additional steps like centrifugation, pH adjustment, spray-drying, and stabilizers", as would typically be involved in production of commercial powders, it would remain in Nova group 3 like tofu. (Whether it would be a particularly palatable or mixable protein powder is obviously another matter entirely.)

Of course I agree with the rest of your point, which is similar to what I was saying. (I also chuckled at your choice of analogy, as a founder of an encryption startup.) I have a lot of thoughts on the incentive structure[1], which I would dramatically overhaul given the option.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808168

The use of the word "processing" is ambiguous.

There are 3 kinds of processing, with very different effects. One kind is separating a product into its components. Another is mixing various ingredients. The third is applying some treatment to the product that modifies its structure, heating being the most frequent method.

I consider only mixing ingredients and applying various treatments as belonging to "ultraprocessing", because these processing methods remove the control of the end consumer about what is being eaten, as they are normally irreversible.

On the other hand, any separation method cannot have a harmful effect by itself and separation of the edible components is absolutely necessarily for human food, because we have reduced digestive systems, which are unable to extract as efficiently the nutrients from food as those of most other non-carnivorous mammals.

The only harmful effects of well-separated food ingredients, like seed flour, oils or protein powders, happen when the end consumers choose to mix them in unhealthy proportions, like when adding too much sugar or too much fat to some dish, but then they can blame only themselves for this.

With food that has passed through the other kinds of processing, nothing that the end consumers do with it can make it healthy, when it has not originally been so, which happens frequently because for its producers it is more beneficial to try to make it addictive instead of healthy.

It looks like the protein powders were a bad example — I'd understood that they were comparable to flour, which GPT had at one point corroborated, but Grok is giving me more detailed and better referenced information which contradicts that. The powders are definitely UPF under the Nova classification system[1], which I would argue (per my "heuristic" reasoning) invites justified skepticism and need for long-term studies, but doesn't inherently make them unhealthy. The system is based more on the number of steps and/or ingredients involved in preparation than a deep qualitative analysis of what those steps are.

That being said, the same system would categorize Meati, tofu, and cheese as merely processed (Nova group 3), not ultra-processed (group 4), at least according to Grok (which provided detailed reasoning that sounded credible). For comparison, Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat were deemed to be firmly in group 4.

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

You can easily make tofu at home

> Moreover the ingredients in meat alternatives are known quantities and they lack the specific compounds like heme iron, nitrosamines, and saturated animal fats that are mechanistically linked to cancer and heart disease in red and processed meat.

Beyond doesn't contain heme iron, but Impossible does.

> As I said, they measurably improve health outcomes relative to the meats they're replacing

They imitate meats, but is there any evidence that, in practice, they replace them? In menus, and I suspect in actual human eating behavior, they seem to replace earlier vegetarian options like old-school TVP, not meat.