"Not all ultra-processed foods are bad" — true, and a trap

There’s a reasonable-sounding pushback you’ll hear whenever ultra-processed foods (UPFs) make the news: “The NOVA classification is too blunt. It lumps wholegrain bread and baked beans in with cola and crisps. Not all UPFs are bad.”

This is true. It’s also, increasingly, a trap.

The nuance is real

NOVA — the classification that defines “ultra-processed” — sorts by how a food is made, not what’s in it. By that rule a tin of baked beans, a shop wholemeal loaf and a fortified plant-milk land in the same bucket as a neon energy drink. Nutritionally that’s obviously daft: the beans bring fibre and protein, the drink brings nothing. Researchers openly acknowledge classification is one of the messiest problems in the field, and that within “UPF” there’s a spectrum from broadly fine to clearly harmful.

So yes — a blanket “UPFs cause X” hides a lot of variation.

Why it’s also a trap

Here’s the move to watch for. “It’s complicated” is factually correct and is also exactly the argument used to delay every food-policy shift in living memory — sugar, trans fats, salt, tobacco before them. If the science has to be perfect and the categories flawless before anyone acts, nothing ever happens, and the party that benefits from inaction is never the person eating the food.

Two things are true: the category is imperfect, and the direction is not in serious doubt. Diets dominated by UPFs track with worse outcomes across obesity, metabolic disease, gut dysbiosis and more. You don’t need a perfect definition to know which way to lean.

Our take

Don’t wait for the perfect classification. Use a rule that sidesteps the whole debate: judge foods by how close they are to a plant, not by which processing tier a committee assigned them.

Baked beans are close to a plant — legumes, fibre, a bit of sauce. Fine, and they count toward your diversity. A luminous drink is close to nothing. You didn’t need NOVA to tell them apart, and you don’t need to win the classification argument to eat well.

That’s the philosophy behind Biome Buddy: we don’t grade your food on a processing scale, we count the different whole plants you eat. It’s a positive target that happens to route around the entire “is this technically ultra-processed?” argument — because the answer that matters is simpler. Eat more real plants, more often, in more variety. The rest is footnotes.