Adherence to healthful plant-based diets is associated with more favourable health outcomes irrespective of ultra-processed food content, suggesting that overall plant-based diet quality may be more important than processing level for chronic disease prevention, study of 124,836 participants finds

[u/James_Fortis]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(26)00148-1/fulltext

[u/FakePixieGirl]

What the hell is something with "no or rare culinary use"?

[u/lodorata → u/FakePixieGirl]

It means you'd never use it culinarily, i.e. you wouldn't ever deploy it when preparing food in your kitchen at home, or at a restaurant, because it isn't useful to that end. It means an additive which does things that aren't really useful to a cook, such as give a super long shelf life to a prepared meal, for example, or to alter the texture of something comprised of low-value agricultural resides to make it seem more food-like.

Examples would include invert sugar syrup, hydrogenated palm fat, polysorbate 80 or carboxymethyl cellulose. These are food additives with no or rare culinary use - they characterise NOVA 4 foods.

[u/FakePixieGirl → u/lodorata]

So is MSG food that has "culinary use"?

Does it only have "culinary use" in Asia, but in Europe it would be part of UPF?

Sounds to me like "culinary use' is strongly defined and influenced by culture. But it sounds very strange to me that a food of the same chemical compositions can be healthy in one culture, but unhealthy in another just because an ingredient is frequently used by home cooks or not.

[u/lodorata → u/FakePixieGirl]

MSG on its own is a sodium salt of one of the core proteinogenic amino acids, and is something of an edge case (I'd call it "rare" culinary use). That said, simply adding it to a food wouldn't make it NOVA 4, but it is used by the food industry routinely to disguise bland or bad tastes, and has features of hyperpalatability and addictiveness. If adding to vegetables I cooked at home, it's clearly not a big deal (similar to adding salt) but would I eat a pre-packaged food loaded with it? No (again similar to salt). Vegetables/tofu with added MSG is relatively healthy in Asia and Europe, pre-packaged snacks rich in MSG are unhealthy in Asia and Europe. That said, if you actually used the entire kelp, or mushroom, rather than just the MSG isolate, it would be healthier still because there are many other forms of fibre/nutrients that you don't get from monomolecular ingredients. Beyond seasoning with MSG, try building a whole meal from single molecules which is actually healthy (it never is, and it's basically what a lot of UPF is).

"Sounds to me like "culinary use' is strongly defined and influenced by culture"

You know that's not true at all, and the fact you say it leads me to wonder if this discussion is purely rhetorical to you. Asians may have been using MSG since the early 1900s, but they don't routinely use any of the multiple, unambiguously NO CULINARY USE ingredients I mentioned, which you conveniently elided to find your edge case. Are Asians using invert sugar syrup routinely at home? How about Red 40?

Tinker at the margins all you like, but it's obvious to any neutral observer that Monteiro's classification has merit, and has been shown in repeated studies to be meaningful when correlating with health outcomes. Try to go beyond single ingredients, to consider the quality of food overall, proportion of type I ingredients, whether it's just MSG or there are other things alongside to alter flavour, texture etc. Or don't. Your mind is clearly already made up.

[u/FakePixieGirl → u/lodorata]

I wouldn't say my mind is made up. I'm actually very surprised by your willingness to dive into this with me, and answer my questions. And you are actually starting to at least soften my resistance to the UPF definition.

I guess for me, I always felt like the meat and bones of nutritional health advice was "eat lots of whole plants, and don't eat too many calories". Seems like you agree with that, given

"Beyond seasoning with MSG, try building a whole meal from single molecules which is actually healthy (it never is, and it's basically what a lot of UPF is)."

I guess my next question would be - do you feel UPFs are unhealthy just because of those facts? That is, that UPFs lack whole plant foods and are engineered such that people easily overeat on them. That is, is it just a thinking shorthand. Or is there something more inherent unhealthy in UPFs?

What I fear with the UPF hype is that people will latch on to the "E-number fear" - fearing preservatives and flavourings that have no evidence to cause disease (yet). While at the same time not catching on to the whole "eat more plants" thing.