The whole UPF concept is an artificial distinction and very unhelpful

[Interestingnamesuggestion]

I understand that it's healthier to eat foods that are more natural/made with natural ingredients. I have no issue with that.

My issue is that putting so much food that people eat regularly (especially people on lower incomes) into one category and labelling it all as if it were all equally bad just removes all nuance and can make healthy choices feel unachievable to people who have less money or less time to spend in the kitchen.

Literally, cheap sliced wholemeal bread is a UPF in the same category as cheap white sliced bread. Same category as a bag of Quavers or gummy bears.

Wouldn't it be better to have one or two more categories to reflect the benefits of eating food that is higher in fibre (e.g. wholegrains, not that weird stuff they add to "healthy" processed snacks) and lower in fat and sugar? Or food that has some additives but is made with a higher proportion of whole foods?

Where have you come across anyone saying high salt makes food UPF?
That’s very much not the usual definition. Many traditionally processed foods are very high salt indeed as that’s what was used to preserve it before ultra processing existed.
UPFs often do have high levels of hidden salt but it’s not part of the definition, which is more to do with novel ingredients and how they are designed.

Well summed up.

You could, but that’s not the point the poster was making- she’s saying that the binary all or nothing categorising of UPF/not UPF means that sometimes mainly wholesome foods with a tiny amount of preservative can end up being caught up in the definition.

You're not wrong though anyway. People dont make their own bread because it is cheaper.

Personally I think a lot of people actually deliberately confuse what upf actually is. A non organic onion is not upf. A lidle ready meal with palm oil, rapeseed oil appearing 5 times in the list of ingredients plus yogurt powder (lidl chicken jalfrezi with pilau rice) isn't that bad.
However lidl garlic bread..calcium carbonate, niacin, iron, folic acid, thiamine, calcium proprionate, ascorbic acid, enzymes, palm oil, rapeseed oil. Mono and diglycerides of fatty acids, carotenes...sounds horrendous

Clearly I have picked out the "strange" things in each.

But its clear that a lot of foods contain strange ingredients. Garlic bread should read, water, salt, flour, yeast. Milk as butter, garlic, parsley.

Tesco "strong bread flour" is £1.40 for 1.5KG (similar flour is cheaper in Aldi and Lidl), Asda wholemeal bread floutr is £1.45 for 1.5KG. Both make perfectly good bread, either in a bread machine or by using the "no knead method". The main consideration about supermarket packaged sliced bread is that if I buy a loaf on Friday morning, presumably made on Thursday or possibly Wednesday, it is still "fresh" and hasn't gone green (it does still have the texture of cotton wool) the following Friday. My home made bread (flour, water,yeast and a small amount of salt) is only fit for toast on day 3, so I slice the loaf and freeze it, taking out the quantity I need each day. My question is what is in the supermarket bread, that isn't in mine or in bread from my local craft bakery and why does it have no taste and a horrible texture.

I think most people know gummy bears are less healthy than brown bread without being told.

Cheap brown isn’t usually actual wholemeal.
If it’s labelled wholemeal it has to be, but brown bread is a blend or is even just white flour with caramel or malt to make it look brown.

Wheat flour sold in the UK (despite RHM's dislike) is fortified and has been since 1941, in various forms so will always have calcium carbonate, iron, thiamine (vitamin B1) and Niacin (vitamin B3), by the end of this year Folic acid will be a mandatory additive. All added for sound health reasons rather than commercial profit.

Many people don’t engage their brains. I often see people on here saying “But beans are UPF”, or “ketchup is UPF”, totally disregarding that a spoonful of ketchup on the side of a healthy meal doesn’t relegate the meal to the same category as a 99p frozen pizza. Not all UPFs are equal in unhealthiness and lumping them all in the same category is unhelpful.

I think UPF is just an umbrella term and it's not helpful to see it as purely healthy/unhealthy.

If I am buying a product - whether it's bread or crisps or yoghurt - and there is a choice between the less processed version or the ultra processed version, I'm going to buy the less processed version.

But I'm still going to buy the crisps, and I don't think crisps are healthy, but I'd rather buy the bag of veg crisps over the pringles.

And how accessible are those systems, would you say, to your average economically-deprived and under-educated parent?

NEVER underestimate the levels of illiteracy in some sectors of society.

Surley the real issue is that so much rubbish is added to food and then pushed on people who may not have the income level to eat anything else. The rise in both obesity bowel cancer is linked to something to do with modern lifestyles and it seems likely that food is the culprit somehow. It is also true that higher income people have lower rates of both.

The food industry cannot be trusted to have our best interests at heart.

You seem confused re salt. Salt doesn’t make something a upf. Salt in moderation is essential for life. Aspartame, msg, emulsifiers, potassium nitrate are not.

Prawn cocktail crisps are upf - 20 ingredients plus salt
salted nuts are not upf - nuts plus salt

theres lots of info out there if you look

Not if you shove them in the night before when cooking something else. Then the next day you just scoop out the potato mash it with cheese, chard, kale or whatever you have, put it back in and bake for 25 minutes.

Or nuke them for 10 mins in the microwave.

Upf isn’t cheaper. For a family of 4…

Sainsbury’s
750g shepherds pie for 2 = £4.50 x 2 =£9.00
500g steak mince = £5
2kg pots = £2
total home made =£7
plus you will have spuds left for jackets tomorrow

Why don’t you buy Crosta flatbreads. They are UPF free, more dense and filling than skinny UPF flatbreads and kids only need some yogurt and fruit to go with a good filling. The money you save on over priced crap filled packed lunch crap will cover the extra cost. I buy Crosta, Jason, or Alison’s The Champion bread.

@Interestingnamesuggestion if in doubt, go by the 5-7 ingredients or nothing that I don't know what it is rule.
Much better than trying to put bread and crisps into the same category.

If you want a simple way of deciding what to eat, then the concept of "long gobbledegook ingredients list" versus "no or short ingredients list" isn't a bad one.

No advice is ever going to be perfect in our current problematic food environment.

I'm not even saying the UPF idea is the best way of choosing food, but I think it's no worse than some other approaches. It probably works as a rule of thumb for some people.

If you're aware of that and chose to reply to me referring to "brown bread" when my original post said "wholemeal" that's a bit disingenuous. I know the difference and I buy wholemeal. My whole point about bread was that wholemeal is better than white and you replied to say "no brown and white are just as bad as each other". What was the point of that?

Why are you assuming that I buy "over priced crap filled packed lunch crap"? You're just being rude now.

I'm a "UPF zealot" as someone upthread called us. I've actively avoided UPFs for over 20 years (we didn't call them that back then). It's incredibly simple. I just read packets and avoid any ingredient whose name I don't recognise. Literally that's it.

The benefits have been huge. I'm convinced it's the single most impactful thing I've done for my health and I'm so grateful I started early. Apart from UPF I don't restrict my diet or portion sizes at all. I can eat however much I want and I've never had issues with being even slightly overweight, unlike everyone else in my family. I've had very few health issues and I'm slim, fit and strong without doing much exercise. I have close to zero visceral fat, lots of muscle, and excellent metabolic health.

Putting together homemade meals has saved lots of money, and especially because I'm not craving pre-prepared cakes, desserts, sweets, fizzy drinks, wotsits, etc.

Don't complicate and overthink it. If you avoid the chemically named ingredients and you will benefit. There's tons of science backing this up now.

No I’m just heading off the but they’re more expensive reply.

The concept of UPF comes from research done across large populations, originally in Brazil. It was conducted linking shopping habits to obesity. Very simply put, households consuming the most minimally processed foods were less likely to be obese. This is despite the inclusion of 'unhealthy' ingredients like cooking oil and sugar in the category of minimally processed foods. Households consuming more from the highly processed category of food were more likely to be obese. The research is very robust and has been replicated both in controlled small group situations and in large populations.

It's information we can use to try and give ourselves and our kids a lower risk of being obese, and therefore reducing our risk of heart disease, diabetes, dementia etc. in later life.
The evidence is very strong, but you don't have to follow it. It just gives us the information to make better choices if we want to. I'm willing to bet there was probably upf in all of those shopping baskets in Brazil. It's not about trying to eliminate it because that would be impossible. It just tells us that the less of it we eat, the better that is for our health. It's giving us the information to make a choice when shopping and eating.
Mass produced sliced bread in this country (white brown and wholemeal) is highly processed and contains artificial additives to keep it softer and fresher for longer. That truth may be unpalatable but it's just information we can use. You can ignore it, reduce your consumption, switch to more expensive less processed bread, the choice is yours. But there's no point in being cross with the science....