Dana Bash on CNN calling the BS out
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2026
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It's kinda true... But less than you'd think. I get that it can be a convenient shorthand, but even the scientific field of nutrition can't agree on a good definition of processed foods, let alone ultra processed foods. As soon as you break it down to "you should eat a lot of vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, and not too much sugar, meat, salt, or saturated fats" you actually remove any predictive power that the "ultra processed" label has, so we can understand this concept much better in terms of the basic nutritional guidelines which have changed very little over the last 50 years except for some better understanding of the role of unsaturated fats. Meanwhile, on the contrary, totally unprocessed raw milk, minimally processed beef fat etc., which are favourites of the MAHA crowd, are extremely unhealthy. So even there his advice is quite dangerous if you actually look in to it.
"Processed foods" has the same energy to me as when people say food is bad because it has "chemicals" in it.
I start with ingredients and I end up with a prepared meal that I processed. We need to identify and specify the processes that causes problems in food instead of giving that food a label that could be applied to any meal you create.
Imma remove the "toxins" through my feet with this sticker for whatever the fuck reason.
It changed color, that's how you know it's working!
I feel the same way when someone says a certain food is 'organic'... well, yeah, pretty much everything we eat is organic. Even the main ingredient in Roundup is organic.
I get the need to be able to market 'clean' food in a way to differentiate it from everything else, but using a term that is scientifically incorrect is poor marketing.
Preservatives and high sodium is probably the better term(s), because that's what people usually mean when they say processed foods. Like have a butcher cut instead of Oscar Maier salami slice
You're being overly literal. That you made it yourself with real ingredients is a good rule of thumb for not ultra-processed. You're unlikely to have partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids or high fructose corn syrup lying around, and you won't test your recipe repeatedly until humans want more of it than any of the competing products on the supermarket shelves.
Yeah, everything's a chemical, but that's not what people mean when they say there's chemicals in the food. They mean there are edible non-food ingredients whose only purpose is to cheaply make it last longer on the shelf or be more moreish or reduce costs.
There's a significant correlation between proportion of ultra-processed foods in diet and all-causes mortality. Don't pretend there isn't.
No, sweetie, they're not being "overly literal", they're just telling the truth.
We don't even have a consistent definition of what "ultra-processed" should mean.
People using words like chemicals wrong is a problem with them.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, and we still need to agree on a definition for "ultra-processed" to conduct any meaningful science.
It's also very difficult statistically to remove the co-morbidity factors:
populations that eat more "processed" foods !especially in the US! are poor, in toxic environs, stressed, over-policed, incarcerated, discriminated, unstable housing healthcare employment, using "coping" mechanisms, in a food desert, multigenerational defecit of various "health skills", no "free" time for cooking and exercise, etc etc etc
If they had healthcare, housing and union jobs ... stats wouldn't be near so bad for them
No, this is crap.
"Scientists can't agree therefore it's not true" has been bogus through smoking and lung cancer, fossil fuels and climate change, and now ultra-processed food (UPF) and all-causes mortality and obesity.
A good rule of thumb is that if you made it in your home from real ingredients it's probably much healthier than if some company did food science on it until it human testers said "yeah I'd love more of that one". It's not a coincidence, it's not even malice, it's just they're selecting for overeating.
The malice is when the food industry tries to get you to believe that their products are healthy, that there's nothing to see or be concerned about with UPF, and the malice is also when they're lobbying and suing governments the world over that tell you to avoid UPF.
Yeah, unpasteurised milk and other crap is bonkers anti-science nonsense, but so is dismissing the correlation between larger quantities of ultra-processed food and all-causes mortality. It's real. Don't spread their lies that it's not.
That's right, and exactly what I said. It's a good rule of thumb. It's not, however, a well defined scientific category. The reason the rule of thumb works is that if you cook something yourself from ingredients it's probably got more fiber, more vitamins, less sugar, and less fat, than the commercial alternative. Not because it has fewer processing steps done to it.
It's not the processing, it's the preservatives and other edible non-food junk they put in to make it last longer and keep customers coming back for more and more and more.
It's called food science, and it works. It works very well indeed. Way too well for our health. You test for moreishness and you manufacture the ones the panel loves and wants more of. Result? Food that people really want more of. Its not magic and it's not deliberately bad, it's just that the inevitable result is the obesity epidemic.
You know that food science shows that there isn't nearly as much of a problem as you claim, right, sparky?
I don't think you know what food science is.
Food science is about testing and developing new products. It's not longitudinal or population health and disease studies. It doesn't show anything about the correlation between ultra processed foods and all causes mortality because it simply doesn't study mortality in any way whatsoever.
I'm sorry you don't understand science, kiddo. Scientists not agreeing just means that there isn't an answer yet, no matter how emotionally charged the issue makes you.
Claiming that the science is contentious is a standard industry tactic for dismissing it. Its what vaccine skeptics and climate change deniers do, and it's what the tobacco industry did over lung cancer.
Tangent.
This is why I hate when people feel they have to call themselves 'Socialists' in political arguments. Instead of dealing with the actual issues, you end up talking about what Trotsky had for lunch at the Fist International.
That sandwich was a sign of problems to come dammit!
You see? According to the Third Volume of the Soviet Approved autobiography of Rosa Luxembourg it wasn't a sandwich at all, but a knish!
Now we must debate the point, or be accused of revisionism
First we must define the limits of various traits to firmly understand exactly what counts as a knish. I will take the anarchic position as I had to look up what a knish is and now I'd like to engage in some conquest for that bread
The really sad thing is that I've heard worse unironically
Yeah, unfortunately I've dealt with both the extremes of leftists, and I really don't know who I find more insufferable, the overly academic navel gazers or the "only get intoxicated and smash, no read or unionize" rabblerousers
Fortunately I've also known plenty of folks who know Proudhon from Trotsky and recognize that the eternal struggle for justice is both intellectual and physical, that we can and should continue striving for a better society and discussing what went wrong and how to improve things as well as trying new things and doing what we can to make the world suck a little less
Uh... It's pretty well defined.
If you alter natural food, it's processed. Dairy products other than raw milk, bread, etc, are processed foods.
Ultra processed foods are foods made with industrial chemical ingredients either extracted from food or synthesized.
When you actually look in to the details of papers on this topic you'll find that it's actually not defined consistently across the literature.
What are industrial chemical ingredients? For example, is sodium hydrogen carbonate one? It's a chemical, produced industrially. Is food made with it in a shop different to food made with baking soda at home? Why?
When you dig into the reason why any specific "ultra processed" food is bad it boils down to:
And if you control for those things (which we have known for a long time and are standard nutritional guidelines) then the effects of food processing on health outcomes basically disappear.
So Diet Coke is the same as water in terms of health? No calories, no fat, no sugar. I still count it as processed crap in my diet and don't drink it instead of water.
This is such anti-science crap, and it's exactly what various industries said all along about climate change and lung cancer studies.
No, no when you dig into the reason why ultra processed food is bad, it boils down to all-cause mortality. As in earlier death and shorter healthy lifespan.
Here is a good, scientifically informed overview of one popular ultra processed food categorization system and why it excludes good foods and includes poor ones: https://www.eatrightpro.org/news-center/practice-trends/examining-the-nova-food-classification-system-and-healthfulness-of-ultra-processed-foods
The same kind of thing applies to the other popular systems for defining it. It's just not a good scientific category, we already know about all the components it's a mediocre shorthand for.
They concede that the actual scientists found that
And dismissed it all because there's not a randomised controlled trail for ultra processed vs home cooked from ingredients foods, but their counterpoint to that, their main gotcha from that article, is it a randomised controlled trial? Does it measure obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes? No! Let's see what it tests:
So if you use one set of guidelines to make a diet plan (no one actually eats it) and you deliberately pick foods that are processed but reasonably healthy according to those very same guidelines, you achieve a great score on what basis? Long term health outcomes? No. Short term health outcomes? No. What basis? Oh, the very same guidelines you used to cherry pick the foods? Why isn't it 100%?! What an absurdly vacuous claim.
In their enlightenment and dismissing all the science, they've replaced it by calculating some points of disagreement with some older healthy eating advice? That's IT!?!
You have swallowed a bunch of pseudoscience. You're as bad as RFK.
It's a fucking industry funded pseudoscience pseudoprogessional pseudoeducation body. Did you even think about where they're coming from?
https://www.eatrightpro.org/about-us/who-we-are/advertising-and-sponsorship/meet-our-sponsors
Some highlights for you:
Danone North America
Eli Lilly and Company (weight loss drugs)
Gatorade Sports Science Institute
National Confectioners Association
National Dairy Council
National Honey Board
National Cattlemen's Beef Association
Nestle Health Sciences
Quebec Maple Syrup Producers
Sodexo
Splenda®
Wonderful Pistachios
No wonder they're dismissing all the science associating ultra processed food with all-causes mortality with a single diet plan!
Why on earth do you fall for this crap?
You have it backwards, sweaty. The garbage you're spewing is anti-science crap.
It's nowhere near as well defined as you claim, buttercup. You don't even understand that bread is literally a processed food.
Your definition of ultra processed is also faulty because it assumes that being synthesized or extracted is bad from the start.
I literally mentioned bread being a processed food in my comment, "sweaty."
I also am not saying or even implying it's good or bad. I just stated how the phrases are fucking defined. 🙄
Yes, that's part of the problem, sunshine. You give bread a pass because you decided that it's something you like.
You're ignoring that people aren't entitled to this own definitions for words, kiddo.
You also need to learn your place and stop talking about issues you clearly don't understand. You're no better than RFK Jr.
My god, how fucking illiterate are you? You need to go back to primary school and learn how to read and write, for real.